Ferguson took a pause. He stood up from the desk, pulled out a cigarette from his shirt pocket, and walked around and back and forth between the two rooms of the small flat, and once he felt his mind was clear enough to start again, he returned to the desk, sat down in the chair, and wrote the final paragraphs of the book:
If Ferguson-1 had lived through the night, he would have woken the next morning and traveled to Attica with Gianelli, and for the next five days he would have written articles about the uprising at the prison, the mass takeover by more than a thousand men that shut down the facility as the strikers took thirty-nine guards hostage in order to press their demands for reform. There was little doubt that Ferguson-1 would have been heartened by the solidarity among the inmates. Nearly everyone in the racially divided prison stood together in backing the demands, and for the first time anyone could remember, black prisoners, white prisoners, and Latino prisoners were all on the same side. The other side budged a little, but not enough to offer any hope. They rejected the demand for amnesty, they rejected the demand to replace the prison superintendent, and they rejected the admittedly impossible demand to give the rebels safe passage out of the country, even after the Algerian government promised to accept them all. Four days of grinding, unsuccessful negotiations between the inmates and Department of Correctional Services commissioner Russell Oswald, and for four straight days Governor Rockefeller refused to come to the prison to help the two sides reach a settlement. Then, on September thirteenth, Rockefeller’s mystifying command to take back the prison by force. At 9:46 A.M., the battalion of corrections officers and New York State troopers poised on top of the prison’s outer walls opened fire on the men down in the yard, killing ten of the hostages and twenty-nine prisoners, among them Sam Melville, who was hunted down and executed at point-blank range minutes after the barrage of rifle fire had stopped. In addition to those thirty-nine deaths, three hostages and eighty-five inmates were wounded. The yard was awash in blood.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, word spread that the inmates had slit the throats of the ten murdered captives, but the following day in Rochester, when the Monroe County medical examiner looked over the bodies of the ten dead guards, he affirmed that not one of them had been killed by knife wounds. They had all been shot by their fellow officers. In a New York Times story written by Joseph Lelyveld on the fifteenth, a relative of one of the slain guards, Carl Valone, viewed the body and later said: “There was no slashing. Carl was not even touched. He was killed by a bullet that had the name Rockefeller on it.”
Nelson Rockefeller represented the liberal wing of the Republican Party, and until the Attica massacre he had always been seen as a man of moderation and good sense, but in May 1973 he again confounded the world when he pushed a series of laws through the New York State legislature that stipulated minimum penalties of fifteen years to life in prison for selling two ounces or more of heroin, morphine, opium, cocaine, or cannabis or for possessing four ounces or more of those same substances. The so-called Rockefeller Drug Laws were the most punitive ever imposed by any state in the country.
Perhaps he was still dreaming of becoming president and wanted to show how tough he was to the tough, law-and-order camp of the American public, but much as he had always wanted to become the leader of the Free World, he had failed to win his party’s nomination after running for president in 1960, 1964, and 1968, losing out to Nixon, Goldwater, and again to Nixon, but when the disgraced Nixon resigned from office in 1974, his vice president, Gerald Ford, who himself had been appointed after the resignation of the disgraced Spiro Agnew, took over as the new president and appointed Nelson Rockefeller to become his vice president, making them the only two men in American history to hold their offices without being elected by the American people, and so it was, on December 19, 1974, after a 287-to-128 vote in the House of Representatives and a 90-to-7 vote in the Senate, that Nelson Rockefeller was sworn in as the forty-first vice president of the United States.
He was married to a woman named Happy.
ALSO BY PAUL AUSTER
NOVELS
The New York Trilogy
(City of Glass, Ghosts, and 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
Day/Night
(Travels in the Scriptorium and Man in the Dark)
Invisible
Sunset Park
NONFICTION
The Invention of Solitude
Hand to Mouth
The Red Notebook
Collected Prose
Winter Journal
Here and Now
(with J. M. Coetzee)
Report from the Interior
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
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL AUSTER is the bestselling author of Sunset Park, Invisible, The Book of Illusions, and The New York Trilogy, among many other works. In 2006 he was awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature. Among his other honors are the Prix Médicis étranger for Leviathan, the Independent Spirit Award for the screenplay of Smoke, and the Premio Napoli for Sunset Park. In 2012 he was the first recipient of the NYC Literary Honors in the category of fiction. He has also been a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (The Book of Illusions), the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction (The Music of Chance), and the Edgar Award (City of Glass). He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. You can sign up for email updates here.