[RADIOLAB INTRO]

PRODUCER: Could you—could you introduce yourself?

ROBERT KRULWICH: Yeah. Say who you are.

PAUL AUSTER: Oh, my name is Paul Auster.

PRODUCER: And what do you do?

PAUL AUSTER: What do I do? I sit here and talk to people like you.

ROBERT: No, he doesn't. And he's a—he's—Paul Auster is one of the most prolific writers we have.

PAUL AUSTER: I do the best I can.

ROBERT: But I went to see him because anytime you open a Paul Auster book, you notice that he is noticing that in the world there are lots of strange repeats. He calls them rhymes.

PAUL AUSTER: Rhyming events.

ROBERT: What is a rhyming event?

PAUL AUSTER: Well, a rhyming event would be something, for example, the girlfriend I had when I was very young—college freshman, sophomore, had a piano in her apartment, and the F above middle C was broken. It was the only note that didn't work on the piano. That summer, we got together and we went out to Maine. Way, way out in the wilds of Maine, near Eastport. And we were walking through a pretty much abandoned town. And we walked into what looked like an old Elk's lodge or Moose lodge. And we walked up to the piano that was sitting in the room and my girlfriend could play very well. And she tested out the piano. One key was broken! F above middle C. So that to me is a rhyming event.

JAD ABUMRAD: Rhyming. Pfft. The Fs always break.

ROBERT: But ... [laughs]

JAD: I don't know.

ROBERT: If that doesn't impress you. And I—you know, I'm gonna give you another one. This is a—this is a true story, by the way, the one you're about to hear, and it—it's a whopper.

ROBERT: This is too weird.

PAUL AUSTER: Well, it is. The room, just five pages in. "During the war M's father had hidden out from the Nazis for several months in a Paris 'chambre de bonne.' Eventually he managed to escape ..."

ROBERT: What's a 'chambre de bonne?'

PAUL AUSTER: A maid's room. It's a small room on the top floor of a Paris apartment building. Chambre de bonne. "Eventually, he managed to escape, made his way to America and began a new life. Years passed, more than 20 years. M had been born, had grown up and was now going off to study in Paris. Once there, he spent several difficult weeks looking for a place to live. Just when he was about to give up and despair he found a small 'chambre de bonne.' Immediately upon moving in, he wrote a letter to his father to tell him the good news a week or so later he received the reply. 'Your address,' wrote M's father, 'that is the same building I hid out in during the war.' He then went on to describe the details of the room. It turned out to be the same room his son had rented."

JAD: Wait a second.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: So the father flees the Nazis, stays in this room in Paris. Leaves. 20 years go by. The son happens to be in Paris, needs a room.

ROBERT: He finds a little ...

JAD: Finds the—so you're saying the same ...

ROBERT: It turns out ...

JAD: ... the same room?

ROBERT: The same exact ...

JAD: Exact same room?

ROBERT: Yes. Where his dad ...

JAD: And this really happened? You're not just ...

ROBERT: This really hap—it didn't happen to Paul. It happened to a friend of Paul's. Yes.

JAD: Wow! That is weird!

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: And what do you make of that?

ROBERT: Well, I–I'm not sure what to make of it, except that it gives you a funny sense that sometimes in your life, when something happens and then weirdly it happens again, that maybe that's intentional, or maybe ...

JAD: Like the script has already been written somehow.

ROBERT: Exactly.

PAUL AUSTER: Right. But, you know, it's interesting. You see people—there are people, it seems to me, who attract bad luck. We know these people. We've all known them.

ROBERT: Absolutely.

PAUL AUSTER: And there are people who are accident prone also. They're always breaking their toe or breaking their leg.

JAD: Well, speaking of which, let me get our producer Pat Walters in here.

ROBERT: Maybe before you do that, you should just mention that this is Radiolab. We haven't done that yet.

JAD: Oh, right.

ROBERT: This is Radiolab, the podcast.

JAD: Right. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And ...

ROBERT: Our subject is fate.

JAD: Really.

ROBERT: We always seem to talk about things.

JAD: Yeah, it's funny, we'll have sometimes scientists on the show, and we talk to them about whatever it is that they study, but it always ends up being the case that the real topic of conversation is destiny. Like, is it there?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: If it is, can you beat it?

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: We could be talking about flowers and somehow this would come up.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: So we thought today we would attack it a little more playfully. And Pat, our producer, got kind of obsessed with something to do with fate and bad luck, and I don't really know. Pat, do you want to just roll the tape?

PAT WALTERS: Yeah, just one second here.

MIKE BARRIER: That's correct. Yeah. Yeah.

PAT: I don't think you have road runners down there, do you?

MIKE BARRIER: No, the road runner—I think—I don't—I think they've—maybe gotten into the far western part of the state.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Road Runner: "Meep Meep."]

PAT: You know what that is, Jad?

JAD: I hate that freaking bird.

PAT: Yeah, exactly!

JAD: It's the Road Runner. And who is this—this dude?

PAT: This is Mike Barrier.

MIKE BARRIER: I'm the author of a book called Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation and its Golden Age.

PAT: He's basically the guy you call if you have, like, a big profound question about Looney Tunes.

JAD: [laughs] Looney Tunes.

PAT: Yeah. A few months ago, Lulu and I started wondering like ...

JAD: Lulu Miller, our former producer.

LULU MILLER: Why is the Road Runner so good? Because I am at least in the camp ...

ROBERT: That's her question?

PAT: Yeah, but before we get to the answer, I just wanna give you a little background on the cartoon.

JAD: All right. Go for it.

PAT: It's 1949, and you're at the movies with your wife. You go in and you take a seat. And when the movie starts, one of the very first things you see is a cartoon. And in the '40s and '50s, most of these cartoons were ...

MIKE BARRIER: Chase cartoons. Tom and Jerry being the prime example.

PAT: Problem was, this chase thing was a formula. It was rigid. And it got a lot of cartoonists kind of bored.

JAD: Yeah.

PAT: So one day this kind of famous cartoonist named Chuck Jones was sitting around with his buddy, Mike Maltese.

MIKE BARRIER: Just talking about what oddball combinations of characters that could be chasing each other. I think Maltese thought about having an aardvark chasing a gnu or something like that.

PAT: What's like a gnu? I don't even know what a gnu is. But just cut to the chase. Eventually they decided, "Let's make a cartoon about ..."

MIKE BARRIER: Coyote chasing a road runner.

PAT: And when this cartoon came out, it was huge. It was a hit.

JAD: What does it mean for a cartoon to be a hit?

PAT: Like, in those days, cartoons usually only ran one time.

JAD: Huh.

PAT: But this one was different.

MIKE BARRIER: Six months after it came out, they started making another one.

PAT: Which was almost completely unheard of. Which brings us back to Lulu's question.

LULU: Why is road runner so good? Because I am at least in the camp that it's way better than Tom and Jerry.

PAT: And Mike says it's actually all about ...

MIKE BARRIER: The coyote. He's an extraordinarily human animal.

PAT: And not just like in the facial expressions that he made and the ways that he looks at the camera a lot.

JAD: Yeah.

PAT: But actually it kind of was about the predicaments that he found himself in.

JAD: Meaning?

PAT: Take, for example, this one really famous cartoon. Like always, Coyote has got a plan. He has made a painting of the road.

MIKE BARRIER: Showing the road continuing over a chasm.

PAT: Like, he's put this painting right at the edge of the cliff.

MIKE BARRIER: Had you thinking the Road Runner would run through the painting, gravity would take hold of him, and he would plunge into the chasm.

PAT: Road Runner comes flying down the highway and he gets to the painting ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Road Runner: "Meep Meep"]

PAT: ... but he doesn't fall.

MIKE BARRIER: Instead, the Road Runner runs into the painting as if it were—the road were actually continuing. But then when the coyote tries to follow the Road Runner into the painting, he runs through the painting and falls.

LULU: [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP: long whistle and then a loud "bang" when Coyote lands.]

PAT: And he looked up at the camera and he shrugged, and he’s like, "Why did the bird get to run into the painting and not me?"

MIKE BARRIER: Gravity isn't this uniform indifferent force.

LULU: Mmm.

MIKE BARRIER: It's a malignant force that actually—that comes in and outta play, according to how inconvenient it can be for the coyote.

LULU: But that's interesting. The—the Road Runner isn't his real opponent at all. It's—it's the universe.

MIKE BARRIER: Right. Oh, yeah. No, he—he's chasing the roadrunner, but the universe is his opponent. Absolutely.

PAT: And that's kinda what makes the Coyote seem so human. He's in that situation that all of us feel like we're in sometimes: like the very laws of physics are against us.

MIKE BARRIER: Yeah. Yeah. It's almost—almost a primitive way of thinking, but you—but I think all of us lapse into this, you know, how can this happen?

LULU: Right. The universe is out to get me, like ...

MIKE BARRIER: Yeah, yeah. You can't be human and not feel that way.

PAT: On the other hand, even though the universe is screwing you, at least it's noticing you.

MIKE BARRIER: It's kind of flattering in a way. [laughs]

PAT: It's totally flattering, yeah.

PAT: And this, Mike says, is why the cartoon works. Like, on the one hand, it confirms our paranoias, and on the other, it kind of plays to our vanity.

JAD: Flattering. Is that really—I mean, when you said flattering a second ago, is that—is that really what it is?

PAT: You don't see it that way?

JAD: I don't know. I've never liked this cartoon because he never wins. It's like, what's more flattering to live in a world that actively screws you at every turn or one that just doesn't care about you? Like a Nietzschean void.

PAT: I don't really know. That's kind of tough.

JAD: I go with the void.

ROBERT: No!

JAD: What do you mean "No?"

ROBERT: Totally ignored by the universe?

JAD: Yes!

ROBERT: That's the worst!

JAD: As opposed to being actively, actively screwed by the universe? Yeah, sure. Ignore me.

ROBERT: You don't know—what you don't know—let me tell you a story.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: I went to ABC News and I did a story. It went very well. And then the next week I did a story which went very badly. And the head of the place, Roone Arledge called me into his office. And this was Roone Arledge, a legend in broadcasting. And then he put his face right in front of my face. His nose almost touching my nose, and said to me, "I hated this! I hated that! What's wrong with you?" And instead of being sad and upset, inside my head, like Wile E. Coyote himself, I thought, "Wow, he knows my name!"

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: "He watched my story!"

JAD: But if Roone Arledge had said that to you every single day.

ROBERT: He didn't do it every single day.

JAD: I know, but in cartoon form, that's essentially what's happening here.

ROBERT: Yes. But, but ...

JAD: The universe ...

ROBERT: ... cartoons ...

JAD: ... is yelling at you.

ROBERT: But the reason I like Wile E. Coyote ...

JAD: No. No. No.

ROBERT: ... is because I—I admire the guy. He has no evidence at all that anything good will ever happen to him, and yet he wakes up every day with hope.

JAD: Hmm.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Road Runner: "Meep Meep."]

PAUL AUSTER: But some people really are what we call losers. And it's fascinating to try to understand why that person is always getting fired from his job, or is unlucky in love all the time, or just can't seem to make a go of it.

ROBERT: But now let's suppose that unlike Mr. Coyote, you can't really be sure whether the script that's been written for you—if indeed there is one—is gonna get you deeper and deeper into doo doo, or whether it's going to make you a star or what?

JAD: Yeah. And when those moments come along, you know, when you feel like you're getting a peek at the script maybe, and then you think well, A) Is this real? And if it is ...

ROBERT: What do you do?

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: In fact, Paul got to one more story which ...

ROBERT: You want to read it or you want to just ...

PAUL AUSTER: Yeah, why don't I read it? Because I know where it is. Yeah, it's the last one in the red notebook. It is a very strange story.

PAUL AUSTER: "My first novel was inspired by a wrong number. I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn one afternoon, sitting at my desk and trying to work when the telephone rang. If I am not mistaken, it was the spring of 1980. I picked up the receiver, and the man on the other end asked if he was talking to the Pinkerton Agency. I told him no, he had dialed the wrong number and hung up. Then I went back to work and promptly forgot about the call. The next afternoon, the telephone rang again. It turned out to be the same person asking the same question I had been asked the day before. Is this the Pinkerton Agency? Again I said no, and again I hung up."

PAUL AUSTER: This time, however, I started thinking about what would have happened if I had said yes. What if I had pretended to be a detective from the Pinkerton Agency, I wondered. What if I had actually taken on the case? To tell the truth, I felt that I had squandered a rare opportunity. If the man ever called again, I told myself, I would at least talk to him a little bit and try to find out what was going on. I waited for the telephone to ring again, but the third call never came."

PAUL AUSTER: "After that, wheels started turning in my head, and little by little, an entire world of possibilities opened up to me. When I sat down to write City of Glass a year later, the wrong number had been transformed into the crucial event of the book, the mistake that sets the whole story in motion. A man named Quinn receives a phone call from someone who wants to talk to Paul Auster, the private detective. Just as I did, Quinn tells the caller he has dialed the wrong number. That happens again on the next night, and again Quinn hangs up. Unlike me, however, Quinn is given another chance. When the phone rings again on the third night, he plays along with the caller and takes on the case. 'Yes,' he says, 'I'm Paul Auster.' And at that moment, the madness begins."

ROBERT: And not just for the character in the story, but for Paul Auster himself. Because when he wrote this book, the City of Glass, it became a enormous success.

PAUL AUSTER: And this is now. I'm writing in 1992 here. "I finished the book 10 years ago, and since then I've gone on to occupy myself with other projects, other ideas, other books. Less than two months ago, however, I learned that books are never finished, that it is possible for stories to go on writing themselves without an author. I was alone in my apartment in Brooklyn that afternoon, sitting at my desk and trying to work, when the telephone rang. This was a different apartment from the one I had in 1980, a different apartment with a different telephone number. I picked up the receiver, and the man on the other end asked if he could speak. Mr. Quinn."

ROBERT: Quinn, remember, is the name of the man in the story who got the call.

PAUL AUSTER: "He had a Spanish accent, and I did not recognize the voice. For a moment I thought it might be one of my friends trying to pull my leg. 'Mr. Quinn?' I said. 'Is this some kind of joke or what?' No, it wasn't a joke. The man was in dead earnest. He had to talk to Mr. Quinn. Would I please put him on the line? Just to make sure, I asked him to spell out the name. The caller's accent was quite thick, and I was hoping that he wanted to talk to Mr. Queen, but no such luck. 'Q-U-I-N-N,' the man answered. I suddenly grew scared, and for a moment or two I couldn't get any words out of my mouth. 'I'm sorry,' I said at last. 'There's no Mr. Quinn here. You've dialed the wrong number.' The man apologized for disturbing me, and then we both hung up. This really happened. Like everything else I have set down in this red notebook it is a true story."

ROBERT: So it really did.

PAUL AUSTER: It really did. I guarantee it.

ROBERT: Did you—did you—at the moment when he said—when you could have said, "Well, this is Mr. Quinn," you could have said that.

PAUL AUSTER: I was shaken, I have to say. I was not in full possession of myself. It really disturbed me.

ROBERT: And did it take a while to settle down in you because it's such a weird ...

PAUL AUSTER: Yes. It's inexplicable, but interesting because of that.

ROBERT: Paul Auster is the author of the Red Notebook, which these readings are from. The New York Trilogy, of course, which contains the City of Glass. Also Man in the Dark, Invisible, Sunset Park. He writes book after book after book.

JAD: Well, we should be off. Thanks for listening. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: We'll see you later.

[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]

[LISTENER: My name is Alvaro Lozano Roberto. I'm originally from Spain, but live in Hopkinson, Massachusetts, and I am a Radiolab listener. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Adios y gracias.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

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