Sunset Park

of illegal trespassers, squatters, freeloading bums.
    You don’t want to spend the rest of your life runningfrom the police, do you? You’ve already done enough running. Time to stand up and face the music, Miles. And I’ll stand up there with you.
    You can’t. You have a good heart, Dad, but I’m in this thing alone.
    No, you’re not. You’ll have a lawyer. And I know some damned good ones. Everything is going to be all right, believe me.
    I’m so sorry. So fucking, terribly sorry.
    Listen to me, Miles. Talking on the phone is no good. We have to hash it out in person, face to face. The minute I hang up, I’ll go straight home. Get yourself into a taxi and meet me there as soon as you can. All right?
    All right.
    You promise?
    Yes, I promise.
    Half an hour later, he is sitting in the backseat of a car-service Dodge, on his way to Downing Street in Manhattan. Ellen has gone to the bank for him with his ATM card and returned with a thousand dollars in cash, they have kissed and said good-bye, and as the car moves through the heavy traffic toward the Brooklyn Bridge, he wonders how long it will be before he sees Ellen Brice again. He wishes he could go to the hospital to see Alice, but he knows he can’t. He wishes he could go to the jail where Bing is locked up, but he knows he can’t. He presses the ice against his swollen hand, and as he looks at the hand, he thinks about the soldier with the missing hands in the movie hesaw with Alice and Pilar last winter, the young soldier home from the war, unable to undress himself and go to bed without his father’s help, and he feels he has become that boy now, who can do nothing without his father’s help, a boy without hands, a boy who should be without hands, a boy whose hands have brought him nothing but trouble in his life, his angry punching hands, his angry pushing hands, and then the name of the soldier in the movie comes back to him, Homer, Homer Something, Homer as in the poet Homer, who wrote the scene about Odysseus and Telemachus, father and son reunited after so many years, in the same way he and his father have been reunited, and the name Homer makes him think of home, as in the word homeless, they are all homeless now, he said that to his father on the phone, Alice and Bing are homeless, he is homeless, the people in Florida who lived in the houses he trashed out are homeless, only Pilar is not homeless, he is her home now, and with one punch he has destroyed everything, they will never have their life together in New York, there is no future for them anymore, no hope for them anymore, and even if he runs away to Florida to be with her now, there will be no hope for them, and even if he stays in New York to fight it out in court, there will be no hope for them, he has let his father down, let Pilar down, let everyone down, and as the car travels across the Brooklyn Bridge and he looks at the immense buildings on the other side of the East River, he thinks about the missing buildings, the collapsed andburning buildings that no longer exist, the missing buildings and the missing hands, and he wonders if it is worth hoping for a future when there is no future, and from now on, he tells himself, he will stop hoping for anything and live only for now, this moment, this passing moment, the now that is here and then not here, the now that is gone forever.

Also by Paul Auster
    Novels
    The New York Trilogy (City of Glass, Ghosts, The Locked Room)
    In the Country of Last Things
    Moon Palace
    The Music of Chance
    Leviathan
    Mr. Vertigo
    Timbuktu
    The Book of Illusions
    Oracle Night
    The Brooklyn Follies
    Travels in the Scriptorium
    Man in the Dark
    Invisible
    Nonfiction
    The Invention of Solitude
    The Art of Hunger
    Why Write?
    Hand to Mouth
    The Red Notebook
    Collected Prose
    Screenplays
    Three Films: Smoke, Blue in the Face, Lulu on the Bridge
    The Inner Life of Martin Frost
    Poetry
    Collected Poems
    Illustrated Books
    The Story of My Typewriter (with Sam Messer)
    Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story (with Isol) City of Glass (adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli)
    Editor
    The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century French Poetry
    I Thought My Father Was God and Other True Tales from NPR’s National Story Project
    Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition

Acknowledgments
    Warm thanks to the following:
    Charles Bernstein, Susan Bee, and their son, Felix.
    Mark Costello.
    Larry Siems and Sarah Hoffman of the PEN American Center.
    My daughter, Sophie