“You loved her, didn’t you?”
“I still love my wife.”
“And yet you persisted in following your delusions?”
“Do you think I wanted it to be real?” he said, looking up at me. His eyes were red. I could smell the salt of his tears. “I thought I’d dug it all out of my imagination, and so I have, but at the time… I’ve lost the thread of what I wanted to say… ”
Somehow, his confusion, his distress, touched me. I could tell that a part of him was sane, that he truly struggled with two separate versions of reality, but just as I could see this, I could also see that he would probably always remain in this limbo where, in someone else, the madness would have won out long ago
… or the sanity.
But, unfortunately, it is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet to rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born? And thus, he was trapped, condemned by his nature, those gifts and talents he had honed and perfected in pursuit of his craft. Was he a good writer? The answer meant nothing: even the worst writer sometimes sees the world in this light.
“Do you need an intermission?” I asked him. “Do you want me to come back in half an hour?”
“No,” he said, suddenly stubborn and composed. “No break.”
I: After the broadsheet incident, you began to see Ambergris quite often.
X: Yes. I was inNew York City three weeks afterNew Orleans, on business — this is before we actually moved north — and I stayed at my agent’s house.
I took a shower one morning and as I was washing my hair, I closed my eyes. When I opened them, rain was coming down and I was naked in a dirty side alley in the Religious Quarter.
I: OfNew York?
X: No — of Ambergris, of course. The rain was fresh and cold on my skin. A group of boys stared at me and giggled. The cob blestones were rough against my feet. My hair was still thick with shampoo… I spent five minutes huddled in that alley while the boys called to passersby beyond the alley mouth. I was an exhibit. A curiosity. They thought I was a Living Saint, you see, who had escaped from a church, and they kept asking me which church I belonged to. They threw coins and books — books! — at me as payment for my blessings while I shouted at them to go away.
Finally, I ran out of the alley and hid at a public altar. I was crowded together with a thousand mendicants, many wearing only a loin cloth, who were all chanting what sounded like obscure obscenities as loudly as they could. At some point, I closed my eyes again, wondering if I could possibly be dreaming, and when I opened them, I was back in the shower.
I: Was there any evidence that you’d been “away,” as it were?
X: My feet were muddy. I could swear my feet were muddy.
I: You took something with you out of Ambergris?
X: Not that I knew of at the time. Later, I realized something had come with me…
I: You sound as if you were terrified.
X: I was terrified! It was one thing to see Ambergris from afar, to glean information from book wrappings, totally different to be deposited naked into that world.
I: You found it more frightening thanNew York?
X: What do you mean by that?
I: A joke, I guess. Tell me more aboutNew York. I’ve never been there.
X: What’s to tell? It’s dirty and gray and yet more alive than any city except—
I: Ambergris?
X: I didn’t say that. I may have thought it, but then a city out of one’s imagination would have to be more alive, wouldn’t it?
I: Not necessarily. I would have liked to have heard more aboutNew York from your unique perspective, but you seem agitated and—
X: And it’s completely irrelevant.
I: No doubt. What did you do after the incident inNew York?
X: I flew back toTallahassee without finishing my business… what did I say? You look startled.
I: Nothing. It’s nothing. Continue. You flew back without finishing your business.
X: And I told Hannah we were going on vacation right now for two weeks. We flew toCorfu and had a great time with my Greek publisher — no one recognized me there, see? Hannah’s daughter Sarah loved the snorkeling. The water was incredible. This clear blue. You could see to the bottom.
I: What did Sarah think of Ambergris?
X: She never read the books. She was really too young, and she always made a great show of being unimpressed by my success. I can’t blame her for that — she did the same thing to Hannah with her magazine.
I: Did the vacation make a difference?
X: It seemed to. No more visions for a long time. Besides, I’d reached a decision — I wasn’t going to write about Ambergris ever again.
I: Did Hannah agree with your decision?
X: Without a doubt. She saw how shaken I’d been after getting back fromNew York. She just wanted whatever I thought was best.
I: Did it work out?
X: Obviously not. I’m sitting here talking to you, aren’t I? But at first, it did work. I really thought that Ambergris would cease to exist if I just stopped writing about it. But my sickness went deeper than that.
I: I’m afraid we have reached a point where I must probe deeper. Tell me about the fire.
X: I don’t want to.
I: Then tell me about the thing in your work room first.
X: Can’t it wait? For a little while?
The dripping of water had become a constant irritation for me. If it had become an irritation, then I had failed to concentrate hard enough. I had not left enough of myself outside the room. I wondered how long the session would last — more specifically, how long my patience would last. If we are to be honest, the members of my profession, then we must recognize that our judgments are based on our own endurance.
How long can we go on before we simply cannot stand to hear more and leave the room? Often the subject, the patient, has nothing to do with the decision.
“I hear music down here sometimes,” X said, staring at the ceiling. “It comes from above. It sounds like some infernal opera. Is there an opera house nearby, or does someone in this building play opera?”
I stared at him. This part was always difficult. How could it fail to be?
“You are avoiding the matter at hand.”
“What did you think of my book?” X asked. “One writer to another,” he added, not quite able to banish the condescension from his voice.
Oddly enough, the first novella in the book, ‘Dradin, In Love,’ had struck me, on a very primitive level, as evidence of an underlying sanity, for X clearly had conceptualized Dradin as a madman. No delusions there, for Dradin was a madman. I had even theorized that X saw Dradin as his alter ego, but dismissed the idea on the basis that it is unwise to match events in a work of fiction with events in the writer’s life.
Of course, I did not think it useful to share any of these thoughts with X, so I shrugged and said, “It was fanciful in its way and yet some of its aspects were as realistic as any hard-boiled thriller. I thought
‘Dradin, In Love’ moved slowly. You devote an entire chapter to Dradin’s walk back to his hostel.”