Mr. Vertigo by Paul Auster

for a while.”
    “No need to worry about the rain, Walt.”
    “You a weatherman or something? Maybe you haven’t noticed, but conditions change around here about every fifteen minutes. When it comes to weather, this Kansas place is as fickle as it gets.”
    “True enough. The skies in these parts can’t be counted on. But I’m not saying it won’t rain. Just that you don’t have to worry if it does.”
    “Sure, give me a cover, or one of them canvas thingamajigs—a tarp. That’s good thinking. You can’t go wrong if you plan for the worst.”
    “I’m not putting you down there for fun and frolic. You’ll have a breath-hole, of course, a long tube to keep in your mouth for purposes of respiration, but otherwise it’s going to be fairly dank and uncomfortable. A closed-in, wormy kind of discomfort, if you forgive my saying so. I doubt you’ll forget the experience as long as you live.”
    “I know I’m dumb, but if you don’t stop talking in riddles, we’ll be out here all day before I glom onto your drift.”
    “I’m going to bury you, son.”
    “Say what?”
    “I’m going to put you down in that hole, cover you up with dirt, and bury you alive.”
    “And you expect me to agree to that?”
    “You don’t have any choice. Either you go down there of your own volition or I strangle you with my two bare hands. One way, you get to live a long, prosperous life; the other way, your life ends in thirty seconds.”
    So I let him bury me alive—an experience I would not recommend to anyone. Distasteful as the idea sounds, the actual incarceration is far worse, and once you’ve spent some time in the bowels of netherness as I did that day, the world can never look the same to you again. It becomes inexpressibly more beautiful, and yet that beauty is drenched in a light so transient, so unreal, that it never takes on any substance, and even though you can see it and touch it as you always did, a part of you understands that it is no more than a mirage. Feeling the dirt on top of you is one thing, the pressure and coldness of it, the panic of deathlike immobility, but the true terror doesn’t begin until later, until after you’ve been unburied and can stand up and walk again. From then on, everything that happens to you on the surface is connected to those hours you spent underground. A little seed of craziness has been planted in your head, and even though you’ve won the struggle to survive, nearly everything else has been lost. Death lives inside you, eating away at your innocence and your hope, and in the end you’re left with nothing but the dirt, the solidity of the dirt, the everlasting power and triumph of the dirt.
    That was how my initiation began. Over the weeks and months that followed, I lived through more of the same, an unremitting avalanche of wrongs. Each test was more terrible than the one before it, and if I managed not to back down, it was only from sheer reptilian stubbornness, a brainless passivity that lurked somewhere in the core of my soul. It had nothing to do with will or determination or courage. I had none of those qualities, andthe farther I was pushed, the less pride I felt in my accomplishments. I was flogged with a bullwhip; I was thrown from a galloping horse; I was lashed to the roof of the barn for two days without food or water; I had my skin smeared with honey and then stood naked in the August heat as a thousand flies and wasps swarmed over me; I sat in a circle of fire for one whole night as my body became scorched with blisters; I was dunked repeatedly for six straight hours in a tubfull of vinegar; I was struck by lightning; I drank cow, piss and ate horseshit; I took a knife and cut off the upper joint of my left pinky; I dangled for three days and three nights in a cocoon of ropes from the rafters in the attic. I did these things because Master Yehudi told me to do them, and if I could not bring myself to love him, neither did I hate him or resent him for the