Ode to Paul Auster

First came Teacher. Then came Student. Then Book. Text was before the beginning. Teacher came to Student and introduced him to Text at a cocktail party. But let's give them names, to make this easier to read. The teacher was Emmanuel, the student Owen. It's hard to tell what exactly what the title of the book was, but it might have been The Picture of Dorian Gray. Who knows?

This happened in Paris, in August 1997 give or take a few months. On a Tuesday evening, Owen walked to the Metro station, bought a ticket for 6,50 francs, and got to the Opera station. He walked through several darkly-lit streets lined with tall buildings, noticing the lamps flicker as they turned themselves on automatically. He had the address for the cocktail party before he left, but couldn't remember where he'd put it. He searched his pockets and swore in French. Then, after finding the card, he found the correct street number. It was a tall door with wrought iron frame and a thick glass panel, with a vast open hallway and a red carpet inside. He rang the buzzer, and prepared to announce himself into the buzzer. The door just clicked open. As he pushed the heavy door and stepped into the hallway, he noticed to sets of staircases. Which was the correct one?

The stairs on the right had wide alabaster steps, and looked slippery like soap. The elevator was made of wood, and could hardly contain more than two people. The carpet was neatly tucked into each step with a golden bar, and was covered in intertwining colours curling about one another. The pattern looked Arabic. The staircase on the left was smaller and spiralled sharply upwards. It was also stone, but it somehow looked more square, more pragmatic and functional. The metal elevator which sat inside the snaking staircase had an accordeon-shaped iron door. Colourful but wrinkled miniature posters of Chagall paintings dangled off the walls all the way up, flapping in the gusts of air. Owen went for the staircase on the right.

Owen enjoyed the conversation. As soon as he had a couple of glasses of rose wine, and had listened to a few of the bawdy stories Emmanuel was telling, he warmed up to him. He was amused and drunkenly thrilled. He chuckled at the anecdotes and irreverant jokes Emmanuel made about his evidently effeminate appearance, and lost track of time that evening.

The next day he decided to meet him again, but he had lost the slip of paper where he had written his telephone number. It was a receipt from a bookshop. The number started with 3 and finished with 3, but for all his efforts, Owen couldn't remember the numbers in the middle. He rushed to his 3pm lecture irritated by his own forgetfulness, and bumped into Dave, a fellow student on the way. Dave told him to check if it had been returned to the bookshop. An unlikely shot in the dark, he thought, but worth a try. That evening after the lecture, he took bus 13 from his apartment to the bookshop, paying attention to the details on the way. His eyes scoured the pavement, in the unlikely event his receipt would be lying about. Any piece of paper with a number on it could have looked like it, so it felt completely futile. Still, Owen couldn't help but look.

He noticed all sorts of trash littering the streets. Bus tickets, scraps of newspaper, torn envelopes swam all over the slabs of concrete coated with city grime. They contained names, numbers, dates, some of them had pictures. Insignificant, superfluous information. So many symbols. The streets seemed strewn with information; laden with facts which were trodden into the sodden pavement or caught in the grids of drains everywhere. Owen mused at the thought of other wanderers sitting in buses, searching for a lost phone number or winning lottery ticket they had carelessly tossed on the ground he was now looking at.

His scouring eye led him to the pile of papers on the seat in front of him. A copy of the Sunday paper, with all its different sections, lay within the debris of a greasy kebab. Inside the messy pile was a blue notebook. It was small and perfectly square, about the size of a hand. It had spiral binding on the left, and the letter D on the front. Owen picked it up.