This speech, too, I had given many times, in many different forms. X looked shaken to the core by it.
X: Haven’t you ever… Wouldn’t you like to live in a place with more mystery, with more color, with more life? Here we know everything, we can do everything. Me, I worked for five years as a technical editor putting together city ordinances in book form. I didn’t even have a window in my office. Sometimes, as I was codifying my fiftieth, my seventy-fifth, my one hundredth wastewater ordinance, I just wanted to get up, smash my computer, set my office on fire, and burn the whole rotten, horrible place down… The world is so small. Don’t you ever want — need — more mystery in your life?
I: Not at the expense of my sanity. When did you begin to realize that, as you put it, “I had not created Ambergris, but was merely describing a place that already existed, that was real”?
X: You’re a bastard, you know that?
I: It’s my function. Tell me what happened next.
X: For six months, everything was normal. The second book came out and was a bigger success than the first. I was flying high. I’d almost forgotten those six seconds inTallahassee… Then we took a vacation toNew Orleans, my wife and me — partly to visit our friend and writer Nathan Rogers, and partly for a writers’ convention. We usually go to as many bookstores as we can when we visit other cities — there are so many out-of-print books I want to get hold of, and Hannah, of course, likes to see how many of the new bookstores carry her magazine, and if they don’t, get them to carry it. So I was in an old bookstore with Hannah — in the French Quarter, a real maze to get there. A real maze, which is half the fun. And once there, I was anxious to buy something, to make the effort worth while. But I couldn’t find anything to buy, which was killing me, because sometimes I just have a compulsion to buy books. I guess it’s a security blanket of sorts. But when I rummaged through the guy’s discard cart — the owner was a timid old man without any eyebrows — I found a paperback of Frederick Prokosch’s The Seven Who Fled so I bought that.
I: And it included a description of Ambergris?
X: No, but the newspaper he had wrapped it in was a weathered broadsheet published by Hoegbotton & Sons, the exporter/importer in my novel.
I: They do travel guides, too?
X: Yes. You have a good memory… We didn’t even notice the broadsheet until we got back to the hotel. Hannah was the one who noticed it.
I: Hannah noticed it.
X: Yeah. She thought it was a prank I was playing on her, that I’d put it together for her. I’ll admit I’ve done that sort of thing before, but not this time.
I: You must have been ecstatic that she found it.
X: Wildly so. It meant I had physical proof, and an independent witness. It meant I wasn’t crazy.
I: Alas, you never found that particular bookstore again.
X: More accurately, it never found us.
I: But Hannah believed you.
X: She at least knew something odd had happened.
I: You no longer possess the broadsheet, however.
X: It burned up with the house later on.
I: Yes, the much alluded to fire, which also conveniently devoured all of the other evidence. What was the other evidence?
X: Useless to discuss it — it doesn’t exist anymore.
I: Discuss it briefly anyway — for my sake.
X: Okay. For example, later we visited theBritishMuseum inLondon. There was an ancient, very small, almost miniature altar in a glass case in a forgotten corner of the Egyptian exhibits. Behind a sarcophagus. The piece wasn’t labeled, but it certainly didn’t look Egyptian. Mushroom designs were carved into it. I saw a symbol that I’d written about in a story. In short, I thought it was a mushroom dweller religious object. You remember the mushroom dwellers from City ofSaints and Madmen?
I: I am familiar with them.
X: There were two tiny red flags rising from what would normally be considered incense holders.
It was encrusted with gems showing a scene that could only be a mushroom dweller blood sacrifice. I took pictures. I asked an attendant what it was. He didn’t know. And when we came back the next day, it was gone. Couldn’t find the attendant, either. That’s a pretty typical example.
I: You wanted to believe in Ambergris.
X: Perhaps. At the time.
I: Let us return to the question of the broadsheet. Did you believe it was real?
X: Yes.
I: What was the subject of the broadsheet?
X: Purportedly, it was put out by Hoegbotton on behalf of a group called the “Greens,”
denouncing the “Reds” for having somehow caused the death of the composer Voss Bender.
I: You had already written about Voss Bender in your book, correct?
X: Yes, but I’d never heard of the Greens and the Reds. That was the lucky thing — I’d put my story “The Transformation ofMartinLake ” aside because I was stuck, and that broadsheet unstuck me. The Reds and Greens became an integral part of the story.
I: Nothing about the broadsheet, on first glance, struck you as familiar?
X: I’m not sure I follow you. What do you mean by “familiar”?
I: Nothing inside you, a voice perhaps, told you that you had seen it before?
X: You think I created the broadsheet and then blocked the memory of having done so? That I somehow then planted it in that bookstore?
I: No. I mean simply that sometimes one part of the brain will send a message to another part of the brain — a warning, a sign, a symbol. Sometimes there is a… division.
X: I don’t even know how to respond to such a suggestion.
I sighed, got up from my chair, walked to the opposite end of the room, and stared back at the writer.
He had his head in his hands. His breathing made his head bob slowly up and down. Was he weeping?
“Of course this process is stressful,” I said, “but I must have definitive answers to reach the correct decision. I cannot spare your feelings.”
“I haven’t seen my wife in over a week, you know,” he said in a small voice. “Isn’t it against the law to deny me visitors?”
“You’ll see whomever chooses to see you after we finish, no matter the outcome. That I can promise you.”
“I want to see Hannah.”
“Yes, you talk a great deal about Hannah in the transcripts. It seems to reassure you to think of her.”
“If she’s not real, I’m not real,” he muttered. “And I know she’s real.”