X: That was then.
I: You seem inordinately proud that, as you say, the first jury came back hung. That it took two juries to convict. Indecently proud, I’d say.
X: That’s just a writer’s pride at the beautiful trickery of my fabrication.
I: “That’s just a writer’s pride at the beautiful trickery of my fabrication.” Listen to yourself.
Your pride is ghastly. A human being had been murdered. You were on trial for that murder. Or did you think that Janice Shriek led a more real existence in Ambergris? That you had, in essence, killed only an echo of her true self?
X: No! I didn’t think Ambergris was more real. Nothing was real to me at that point. The arrogance, the pride, was a wall — a way for me to cope. A way for me not to think.
I: How did you get certain members of the jury to believe in Ambergris?
X: It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t even easy to get my attorney to pursue the case in the rather insane way I suggested. He went along with it because he believed the jury would find me crazy and remand me to the psychiatric care I’m sure he thought I needed. There seemed no question that I would be convicted — my own wife was a witness.
I: But you convinced some of the jurors.
X: Perhaps. Maybe they just didn’t like the prosecuting attorney. It helped that nearly everyone had read the books or heard about them. And, yes, it proves my imagination is magnificent. The world was so complete, so fully-realized, that I’m sure it became as real to the jurors as that squalid, musty backroom they did all their deliberations in.
I: So you convinced them by the totality of your vision. And by your sincerity — that you believed Ambergris was real.
X: Don’t do that. As I told you before we began, I don’t believe in Ambergris anymore.
I: Can you describe the jurors at the first trial for me?
X: What?
I: I said, describe the jurors. What did they look like? Use your famous imagination if you need to.
X: They were jurors. A group of my peers. They looked like… People.
I: So you cannot remember their faces.
X: No, not really.
I: If you made them believe in Ambergris so strongly that they would not convict you, why can’t you believe in it?
X: Because it doesn’t exist! It doesn’t exist,Alice! I made it up. Or, more properly, it made me up.
It does not exist.
X was breathing heavily. He had brought his left fist down hard on the desk.
“Let us sum up, for there are two crucial points that have been uncovered by this interrogation. At least two. The first concerns the manta ray. The second concerns the jury. I am going to ask you again: Did you never think that the manta ray might be a positive influence, a saving impulse? ”
“Never.”
“I see it as a manifestation of your sanity — perhaps a manifestation of your subconscious, come to lead you into the light.”
“It led me into the darkness. It led me into never never land.”
“Second, there was no trial, except in your head as you ran from the scene of the crime. Your jurors who believed in Ambergris — they represented the part of you that still clung to the idea that Ambergris was real. No matter how you fought them, they — faceless, anonymous — continued to tell you Ambergris was real!”
“Now you are trying to trick me,” X said. He was trembling. His right hand had closed around his left wrist in a vice-like grip.
“Do you remember how you got here?” I asked.
“No. Probably through the front door, don’t you think?”
“Don’t you find it odd that you don’t remember?”
“In comparison to what?” He laughed bitterly.
I stared at him. I said nothing. I think it was my silence, in which I hoped for some last minute redemption, that forced him to the conclusion my decision would not be favorable.
“I don’t believe in Ambergris. How many times do I have to say it?” He was sweating now. He was shaking.
When I did not reply, he said, “Are there any more questions?”
I shook my head. I put the transcripts back in my briefcase and locked it. I pushed the chair back and got up.
“Then I am free to go. My wife is probably waiting in—”
“No,” I said, putting on my jacket. “You are not free to go.”
He rose quickly, again pounded his fist against the desk. “But I’ve told you, I’ve told you — I don’t believe in my fantasy! I’m rational! I’m logi cal! I’m over it!”
“But you see,” I said, with as much kindness as I could muster as I opened the door, “that’s precisely the problem. This is Ambergris. You are in Ambergris.”
The expression on X’s face was quite indescribable.
As he locked the door behind him and ascended the staircase, he realized that it was all a horrible shame. Clearly, the writer had lost contact with reality, no matter how desperately that reality had struggled to get his attention. And that poor woman, still unidentified, that X had pushed into the path of a motored vehicle (he hadn’t quite had it in him to tell X just how faulty his memory was) — she was proof enough of his illness. In the end, the fantasy had been too strong. And what a fantasy it was! A place where people flew and “made movies.” Disney, tee-vee,New York City,New Orleans,Chicago. It was all very convincing and, within limits, it made sense — to X. But as he well knew, writers were a shifty lot — not to be trusted— and there were far too many lunatics on the streets already. How would X have coped with freedom anyhow? With his twin fantasy of literary success and a happy marriage revealed as a lie? (And there were X’s last words as the door had closed: “All writers write. All writers edit. All writers have a little darkness in them.”)
They had found no record of him in the city upon his arrest, so he had probably come from abroad — from the Southern Isles, perhaps — carrying his pathetic book, no doubt self-published by “Spectra,” a vanity operation by the sound of it. He knew those sounds himself from his modest dabbling in the written arts. In fact, he reflected, the only real benefit of the session, between the previous transcripts and the conversation itself, had been to his fiction; he now had some very interesting elements with which to compose a fantasy of his own. Why, he could already see that the report on this session would be a kind of fiction itself, as he had long since concluded that no delusion could ever truly be understood. He might even tell the story in first and third person, to both personalize and distance the events.
When he reached the place where he had plucked the rose, he took it from his buttonhole and stuck its stem back in the crack. He regretted having picked it. But even if he had not, it would have been doomed to a short, brutish life in the darkness.
Out on the street the rain had stopped, although the moist rain smell lingered, and the noontime calls to prayer from the Religious Quarter echoed through the narrow streets. He could almost taste the wonderful savoriness of the hot sausage sold by the sidewalk vendors. After lunch, he would take in some entertainment. The Manzikert Opera Theater had decided to do a Voss Bender revival this season, and with any luck he could still catch the matinee and be home to the wife before dinner. With this thought uppermost in his mind, he stepped out onto the street and was soon lost to view amongst the lunchtime crowds.