“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?”
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.
