“No. It’s a statement on beauty. I really did see them— the hummingbirds.”
“Is beauty important to you?”
“Yes. Very important.”
“Do you think you entered another world when you saw those hummingbirds?”
“Only figuratively. I’m very balanced, you know, between my logical father and my illogical mother. I know what’s real and what’s not.”
“That is not for you to determine. And what do your parents do? No one seems to have asked that question.”
“My dad’s an entomologist — studies bugs, not words. My mom’s an artist. And an author. She’s done a book on graveyard art.”
“Ah!” I took out two items that had been on his person when he had been brought here: a book entitled City of Saints and Madmen and a page of cartoon images. “So you are a writer. You take after your mother.”
“No. Yes. Maybe.”
“I guess that would explain why we gave you a typewriter: you’re a writer. I’m being funny. Have the decency to laugh. Now, what have you been writing?”
“‘I will not believe in hallucinations’ one thousand times.”
“It’s my turn to be rude and not laugh.” I held up City of Saints and Madmen. “You wrote this book.”
“Yes. It’s sold over one million copies worldwide.”
“Funny. I’d never heard of it until I saw this copy.”
“Lucky you. I wish I’d never heard of it.”
“But then, I rarely read modern authors, and when I do it is always thrillers. A straight diet of thrillers.
None of the poetics for me, although I do dabble in writing myself… I did read this one, though, when I was assigned to your case. Don’t you want to hear what I thought about it?”
X snorted. “No. I get — got — over a hundred fan letters a day. After awhile, you just want to retire to a deserted island.”
“Which is exactly what you have done, I suppose. Metaphorically.” Only the island had turned out to be inhabited. All the worse for him.
He ignored my probing, said, “Do you think I wanted to write that stuff? When the book came out, all anyone wanted were more Ambergris stories. I couldn’t sell anything not set in Ambergris. And then, after the initial clamor died down, I couldn’t write anything else. It was horrible. I’d spend ten hours a day at the typewriter just making this world I’d created more and more real in this world. I felt like a sorcerer summoning up a demon.”
“And this? What is this?” I held up the sheet of cartoons:
“Sample drawings from Disney — no doubt destined to become a collector’s item — for the animated movie of my novella ‘Dradin, In Love.’ It should be coming out next month. Surely you’ve heard of it?”
“I don’t go to the movies.”
“What do you do then?”
“Question sick people about their sicknesses. It would be good to think of me as a blank slate, that I know nothing. This will make it easier for you to avoid leaving out important elements in your answers.
I take it your books are grossly popular then?”
“Yes,” he said, with obvious pride. “There are Dwarf & Missionary role-playing games, Giant Squid screen savers, a ‘greatest hits’ CD of Voss Bender arias sung by the Three Tenors, plastic action figures of the mushroom dwellers, even Ambergris conventions. All pretty silly.”
“You made a lot of money in a relatively condensed period of time.”
“I went from an income of $15,000 a year to something close to $500,000 a year, after taxes.”
“And you were continually surrounded by the products of your imagination, often given physical form by other people?”
“Yes.”
Razor-sharp interrogator’s talons at the ready, I zeroed in, no longer anything but a series of questions in human guise, as elegant as a logarithm. I’d tear the truth right out of him, be it bright or bloody.
INTERROGATOR: When did you begin to sense something was amiss?
X: The day I was born. A bit of fetal tissue didn’t form right and, presto! a cyst, which I had to have removed from the base of my spine twenty-four years later.
I: Let me remind you that if I leave this room prematurely, you may never leave this room.
X: Don’t threaten me. I don’t respond well to threats.
I: Who does? Begin again, but please leave out the sarcasm.
X:… It started on a day when I was thinking out a plot line — the story for what would become
“The Transformation ofMartinLake.” I was walking in downtownTallahassee, where I used to live, past some old brick buildings. The streets are all narrow and claustrophobic, and I was trying to imagine what it might be like to live in Ambergris. This was a year after theU.S. publication of City ofSaints and Madmen, and they wanted more stories to flesh out a second book. I was pretty deep into my own thoughts. So I turn a corner and I look up, and there, for about six seconds — too long for a mirage, too short for me to be certain — I saw, clotted with passersby — the Borges Bookstore, the Aqueduct, and, in the distance, the masts of ships at the docks: all elements from my book. I could smell the briny silt of the river and the people were so close I could have reached out and touched them. But when I started to walk forward, it all snapped back into reality. It just snapped…
I: So you thought it was real.
X: I could smell the street — piss and spice and horse. I could smell the savory aroma of chicken cooking in the outdoor stoves of the sidewalk vendors. I could feel the breeze off the river against my face. The light — the light was different.
I: How so?
X: Just different. Better. Cleaner. Different. I found myself saying, “I cannot capture the quality of this light in paint,” and I knew I had the central problem, the central question, of my character’s — MartinLake’s — life.
I: Your character, you will pardon me, does not interest me. I want to know why you started to walk forward. In at least three transcripts, you say you walked forward.
X: I don’t know why.
I: How did you feel after you saw this… image?
X: Confused, obviously. And then horrified because I realized I must have some kind of illness — a brain tumor or something.
I stared at him and frowned until he could not meet my gaze.
“You know where we are headed,” I said. “You know where we are going. You may not like it, but you must face it.” I gestured to the transcripts. “There are things you have not said here. I will indulge you by teasing around the edges for awhile longer, but you must prepare yourself for a more blunt approach.”
X picked up my copy of City ofSaints and Madmen, began to flip through it. “You know,” he said, “I am so thoroughly sick of this book. I kept waiting for the inevitable backlash from the critics, the trickling off of interest from readers. I really wanted that. I didn’t see how such success could come so…
effortlessly. Imagine my distress to find this world I had grown sick of, waiting for me around the corner.”
“Liar!” I shouted, rising and bending forward, so my face was inches from his face. “Liar! You walked toward that vision because it fascinated you! Because you found it irresistible. Because you saw something of the real world there! And afterwards, you weren’t sorry. You weren’t sorry you’d taken those steps. Those steps seemed like the only sane thing to do. You didn’t even tell your wife… your wife”—he looked at me like I’d become a living embodiment of the coat rack gargoyles while I rummaged through the papers—“your wife Hannah that you had had a vision, that you were worried about having a brain tumor. You told us that already. Didn’t I tell you not to lie to me?”