Timbuktu

Paul Auster

MR. BONES KNEW THAT WILLY WASN’T long for this world. The cough
had been inside him for over six months, and by now there wasn’t a chance in hell
that he would ever get rid of it. Slowly and inexorably, without once taking a turn
for the better, the thing had assumed a life of its own, advancing from a faint,
phlegm-filled rattle in the lungs on February third to the wheezy sputum-jigs and
gobby convulsions of high summer. All that was bad enough, but in the past two
weeks a new tonality had crept into the bronchial music—something tight and flinty
and percussive—and the attacks came so often now as to be almost constant. Every
time one of them started, Mr. Bones half expected Willy’s body to explode from the
rockets of pressure bursting against his rib cage.