Leviathan by Paul Auster

nothingness all around, the great void of heaven. The boys scampered up into the torch by themselves, but by the time I was two-thirds of the way up, I realized I wasn’t going to make it. I’d always thought of myself as a pretty tough cookie. I wasn’t one of those hysterical women who screamed when she saw a mouse. I was a hefty, down-to-earth broad who’d been around the block a few times, but standing on those stairs that day, I got all weak inside, I had the cold sweats, I thought I was going to throw up. By then, Doris wasn’t in such good shape herself, and so we each sat down on one of the steps, hoping that might steady our nerves. It helped a little, but not much, and even with my backside planted on something solid, I still felt I was about tofall, that any second I’d find myself hurtling head-first to the bottom. It was the worst panic I ever felt in my life. I was completely rearranged. My heart was in my throat, my head was in my hands, my stomach was in my feet. I got so scared thinking about Benjamin that I started screaming for him to come down. It was hideous. My voice echoing through the Statue of Liberty like the howls of some tormented spirit. The boys finally left the torch, and then we all went down the stairs sitting, one step at a time. Doris and I tried to make a game out of it for the boys, pretending that this was the fun way to travel. But nothing was going to make me stand up on those stairs again. I’d have sooner jumped off than allow myself to do that. It must have taken us half an hour to get to the bottom again, and by then I was a wreck, a blob of flesh and bone. Benjy and I stayed with the Sapersteins on the Grand Concourse that night, and since then I’ve had a mortal fear of high places. I’d rather be dead than set foot in an airplane, and once I get above the third or fourth story of a building, I turn to jello inside. How do you like that? And it all started that day when Benjamin was a little boy, climbing into the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”
    “It was my first lesson in political theory,” Sachs said, turning his eyes away from his mother to look at Fanny and me. “I learned that freedom can be dangerous. If you don’t watch out, it can kill you.”
    I don’t want to make too much of this story, but at the same time I don’t think it should be entirely neglected. In itself, it was no more than a trivial episode, a bit of family folklore, and Mrs. Sachs told it with enough humor and self-mockery to sweep aside its rather terrifying implications. We all laughed when she was finished, and then the conversation moved on to something else. If not for Sachs’s novel (the same book he carried through the snow to our aborted reading in 1975), I might have forgotten all about it. Butsince that book is filled with references to the Statue of Liberty, it’s hard to ignore the possibility of a connection—as if the childhood experience of witnessing his mother’s panic somehow lay at the heart of what he wrote as a grown man twenty years later. I asked him about it as we were driving back to the city that night, but Sachs only laughed at my question. He hadn’t even remembered that part of the story, he said. Then, dismissing the subject once and for all, he launched into a comic diatribe against the pitfalls of psychoanalysis. In the end, none of that matters. Just because Sachs denied the connection doesn’t mean that it didn’t exist. No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.

    The New Colossus
was the one novel Sachs ever published. It was also the first piece of writing I read by him, and there’s no doubt that it played a significant role in getting our friendship off the ground. It was one thing to have liked Sachs in person, but when I learned that I could admire his work as well, I