“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 the Fiji Islands.”
“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 now, at this moment. I would ask him the requisite questions about that past, for such inquiries seemed to calm most patients, but let him tell or not tell. It was all the same to me.
“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 City of Saints and Madmen and a page of cartoon images. “So you are a writer. You take after your mother.”
“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 City of Saints and Madmen. “You wrote this book.”
“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 a while, 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 wanted to write that stuff? When the book came out, all anyone wanted were more Ambergris stories. I couldn’t sell anything not set in Ambergris. And then, after the initial clamor died down, I couldn’t write anything else. It was horrible. I’d spend ten hours a day at the typewriter just making this world I’d created more and more real in this world. I felt like a sorcerer summoning up a demon.”
“And this? What is this?” I held up the sheet of cartoons:
“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 plotline—the story for what would become “The Transformation of Martin Lake.” I was walking in downtown Tallahassee, 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 the U.S. publication of City of Saints 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 …