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.”
“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.
