“I’ll not mislead you: I am here to decide your final disposition. Should we lock you away for five or ten years, or should we find some other solution? But do not think you can lie your way into my good graces.
You have, after all, answered these questions several times. We must reach an understanding, you and I, based solely on your current state of mind. I can smell lies, you know. They may look like treacle, but they smell like poison.”
I had given this speech, or a variant of it, so many times that it came all too easily to me.
“Let me not mislead you,” he replied, no longer leaning back in his chair, “I am now firmly of the belief that Ambergris, and all that is associated with Ambergris, is a figment of my imagination. I no longer believe it exists.”
“I see. This information does not in any way mean I will now pack up my briefcase and set you free. I must question you.”
He looked as if he were about to argue with me. Instead, he said, “Then let me clear the desk. Would you like me to give you a statement first?”
“No. My questions shall provide you with the means to make a statement.” I smiled as I said it, for although he need not hope too much, nei ther did I wish to drive him to despair.
X was not a strong man and I had to help him lift the typewriter off the desk; it was an old, clunky model and its keys made a metallic protest when we set it on the floor.
When we had sat down, I took out a pen and pad of paper. “Now, then, do you know where you are and why?”
“I am in aChicago psychiatric ward because I have been hallucinating that a world of my creation is actually real.”
“When and where were you born?”
“Belfont,Pennsylvania. In 1968.”
“Where did you grow up?”
“My parents were in the Peace Corps — are you going to write all of this down again? The scribbling irritates me. It sounds like cockroaches scuttling.”
“You don’t like cockroaches?”
He scowled at me.
“As you like.”
I pulled his file out of my briefcase. I arranged the transcripts in front of me. A few words flashed out at me: fire…
“I shall simply check off on these previous interrogatories duplications of answers. I shall only write down your answers when they are new or stray from the previous truths you have been so kind as to provide us with. Now: Where did you grow up?”
“In theFijiIslands.”
“Where is that?”
“In the South Pacific.”
“Ah… What was your family like? Any brothers or sisters?”
“Extremely dysfunctional. My parents fought a lot. One sister — Vanessa.”
“Did you get along with your sister? How dysfunctional?”
“I got along with my sister better than Mom and Dad. Very dysfunctional. I’d rather not talk about that — it’s all in the transcripts. Besides, it only helps explain why I write, not why I’m delusional.”
In the transcripts he’d called it the “ten year divorce.” Constant fighting. Verbal and some physical abuse. Nasty, but not all that unusual. It is popular to analyze a patient’s childhood these days to discover that one trauma, that one unforgivable incident, which has shaped or ruined the life. But I did not care if his childhood had been a bedsore of misery, a canker of sadness. I was here to determine what he believed
“Any visions or hallucinations as a child?”
“No.”
“None?”
“None.”
“In the transcripts, you mention a hallucination you had, when you thought you saw two hummingbirds mating on the wing from a hotel room window. You were sick, and you said, rather melodramatically, ‘I thought if I could only hold them, suspended, with my stare, I could forever feast upon their beauty. But finally I had to call to my sister and parents, took my eyes from the window, and even as I turned back, the light had changed again, the world had changed, and I knew they were gone. There I lay, at altitude, on oxygen—’”
“—But that’s not a hallucination—”
“—Please don’t interrupt. I’m not finished: ‘on oxygen and, suddenly, at my most vulnerable, the world had revealed the very extremity of its grace. For me, the moment had been Divine, as fantastical as if those hummingbirds had flown out of my mouth, my eyes, my thoughts.’ That is not a hallucination?”
“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
“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
“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
“And this? What is this?” I held up the sheet of cartoons:
