Oracle Night by Paul Auster Page A

on a telephone answering machine, and a full week will go by before she knows anything about it.
    In another part of New York on that same Wednesday afternoon, Nick’s wife, Eva, has also turned her thoughts toward Rosa Leightman. Nick has been missing for roughly forty hours. With no word from the police concerning accidents or crimes that involve a man who matches her husband’s description, with no ransom notes or telephone calls from would-be kidnappers, she begins to consider the possibility that Nick has absconded, that he walked out on her under his own steam. Until this moment, she has never suspected him of having an affair, but when she thinks back to what he said about Rosa in the restaurant on Monday night, and when she remembers how taken he was with her – even going so far as to confess his attraction out loud – she starts to wonder if he isn’t off on some adulterous escapade, shacked up in the arms of the thin girl with the spiky blond hair.
    She looks up Rosa’s number in the phone book and calls her apartment. There’s no answer, of course, since Rosa is already on the plane. Eva leaves a short message and hangs up. When Rosa fails to return the call, Eva dials again that night and leaves another message. This pattern is repeated for several days – a call in the morning and a call at night – and the longer Rosa’s silence continues, the more enraged Eva becomes. Finally, she goes to Rosa’s building in Chelsea, climbs three flights of stairs, and knocks on her apartment door. Nothing happens. She knocks again, pounding with her fist and rattling the door on its hinges, and still no one answers. Eva takes this as definitive proof that Rosa is with Nick – an irrational assumption, but by now Eva is beyond the pull of logic, frantically stitching together a story to explain her husband’s absence that draws on her darkest anxieties, her worst fears about her marriage and herself. She scribbles a note on a scrap of paper and slips it under Rosa’s door. I need to talk to you about Nick, it says. Call me at once. Eva Bowen .
    By now, Nick is long gone from the hotel. He has found Ed Victory, who lives in a tiny room on the top floor of a boardinghouse in one of the worst parts of town, a fringe neighborhood of crumbling, abandoned warehouses and burned-out buildings. The few people wandering the streets are black, but this is a zone of horror and devastation, and it bears little resemblance to the enclaves of black poverty that Nick has seen in other American cities. He has not entered an urban ghetto so much as a sliver of hell, a no-man’s-land strewn with empty wine bottles, spent needles, and the hulks of stripped-down, rusted cars. The boardinghouse is the one intact structure on the block, no doubt the last remnant of what the neighborhood used to be, eighty or a hundred years ago. On any other street, it would have passed for a condemned building, but in this context it looks almost inviting: a three-story house with flaking yellow paint, sagging steps and roof, and plywood planks hammered across every one of the nine front windows.
    Nick raps on the door, but no one answers. He raps again, and a few moments later an old woman in a green terry-cloth robe and a cheap auburn wig is standing before him – disconcerted, mistrustful, asking what he wants. Ed, Bowen replies, Ed Victory. I talked to him on the phone about an hour ago. He’s expecting me. For the longest time, the woman says nothing. She looks Nick up and down, dead eyes studying him as though he were some form of unclassifiable being, glancing down at the leather briefcase in his hand and then back up at his face, trying to figure out what a white man is doing in her house. Nick reaches into his pocket and produces Ed’s business card, hoping to convince her he’s there on a legitimate errand, but the woman is half blind, and as she leans forward to look at the card, Nick understands that she can’t make out the words. He