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—Martin Lake’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 a while longer, but you must prepare yourself for a more blunt approach.”
X picked up my copy of City of Saints 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 afterward, 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 in Tallahassee … Then we took a vacation to New 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 worthwhile. 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.
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 the British Museum in London. 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 of Saints 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 of Martin Lake” aside because I was stuck, and that broadsheet unstuck me. The Reds and Greens became an integral part of the story.