Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster Page B

mirror before you got used to it, before you could begin to feel comfortable with yourself again. Day after day, I would lock myself in my room, stretch out on the floor, and wish my body into the air. I practiced so much that it wasn’t long before I could levitate at will, “lifting myself off the ground in a matter of seconds. After a couple of weeks, I learned that it wasn’t necessary to lie down on the floor. If I put myself in the proper trance, I was able to do it standing up, to float a good six inches into the air from a vertical position. Three days after that, I learned that I could begin the ascent with my eyes open.I could actually look down and see my feet rising off the floor, and still the spell would not be broken.
    Meanwhile, the life of the others swirled around me. Aesop’s bandages came off, Mother Sioux was fitted with a cane and began to hobble around again, the master and Mrs. Witherspoon shook the bedsprings every night, filling the house with their groans. With so much hubbub to contend with, it wasn’t always easy to come up with an excuse for shutting myself in my room, A couple of times, I felt certain that the master saw straight through me, that he understood my duplicity and was lenient only because he wanted me out of his hair. At any other moment, I would have been consumed with jealousy to be shunned like that, to know that he preferred the company of a woman to my own sterling, inimitable presence. Now that I was airborne, however, Master Yehudi was beginning to lose his godlike properties for me, and I no longer felt under the sway of his influence. I saw him as a man, a man no better or worse than other men, and if he wanted to spend his time cavorting with a skinny wench from Wichita, that was his affair. He had his affairs and I had mine, and that’s how it was going to be from now on. I had taught myself how to fly, after all, or at least something that resembled flying, and I assumed that meant I was my own man now, that I was beholden to no one but myself. As it turned out, I had merely advanced to the next stage of my development. Devious and cunning as ever, the master was still far ahead of me, and I had a long road to travel before I became the hotshot I thought I was.
    Aesop drooped in his nine-fingered state, a listless shadow of his former self, and though I spent as much time with him as I could, I was too busy with my experiments to give him the kind of attention he needed. He kept asking me why I spent so many hours alone in my room, and one morning (it must have been thefifteenth or sixteenth of December) I let forth with a small lie to help assuage his doubts about me. I didn’t want him to think I’d stopped caring about him, and under the circumstances it seemed better to fib than to say nothing.
    “It’s in the nature of a surprise,” I said. “If you promise not to breathe a word about it, I’ll give you a hint.”
    Aesop eyed me with suspicion. “You’re up to another one of your tricks, aren’t you?”
    “No tricks, I swear. What I’m telling you is on the level, the whole gob straight from the horse’s mouth.”
    “You don’t have to hem and haw. If you have something to say, just come out and say it.”
    “I will. But first you’ve got to promise.”
    “This had better be good. I don’t like giving my word for no reason, you know.”
    “Oh, it’s good all right, you can trust me on that.”
    “Well,” he said, beginning to lose patience. “What’s the pitch, little brother?”
    “Raise your right hand and swear you’ll never tell. Swear on your mother’s grave. Swear on the whites of your eyeballs. Swear on the pussy of every whore in Niggertown.”
    Aesop sighed, grabbed hold of his balls with his left hand—which was how the two of us swore to sacred oaths—and lifted his right hand into the air. “I promise,” he said, and then he repeated the things I’d told him to say.
    “Well,” I said, improvising as I went along,