City of Saints and Madmen Part 13

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 of MartinLake." I was walking in downtown Tallaha.s.see, 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 pa.s.sersby-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-p.i.s.s 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 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 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 Tallaha.s.see . . . 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 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.

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 BritishMuseum in London. There was an ancient, very small, almost miniature altar in a gla.s.s 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 MartinLake" 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 rea.s.sure 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 in New York City three weeks after New 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: Of New 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 pa.s.sersby 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 than New York?

X: What do you mean by that?

I: A joke, I guess. Tell me more about New York. I've never been there.

X: What's to tell? It's dirty and gray and yet more alive than any city except- I: Ambergris?

X: I didn't say that. I may have thought it, but then a city out of one's imagination would have to be more alive, wouldn't it?

I: Not necessarily. I would have liked to have heard more about New York from your unique perspective, but you seem agitated and- X: And it's completely irrelevant.

I: No doubt. What did you do after the incident in New York?

X: I flew back to Tallaha.s.see without finishing my business . . . what did I say? You look startled.

I: Nothing. It's nothing. Continue. You flew back without finishing your business.

X: And I told Hannah we were going on vacation right now for two weeks. We flew to Corfu and had a great time with my Greek publisher-no one recognized me there, see? Hannah's daughter Sarah loved the snorkeling. The water was incredible. This clear blue. You could see to the bottom.

I: What did Sarah think of Ambergris?

X: She never read the books. She was really too young, and she always made a great show of being unimpressed by my success. I can't blame her for that-she did the same thing to Hannah with her magazine.

I: Did the vacation make a difference?

X: It seemed to. No more visions for a long time. Besides, I'd reached a decision-I wasn't going to write about Ambergris ever again.

I: Did Hannah agree with your decision?

X: Without a doubt. She saw how shaken I'd been after getting back from New York. She just wanted whatever I thought was best.

I: Did it work out?

X: Obviously not. I'm sitting here talking to you, aren't I? But at first, it did work. I really thought that Ambergris would cease to exist if I just stopped writing about it. But my sickness went deeper than that.

I: I'm afraid we have reached a point where I must probe deeper. Tell me about the fire.

X: I don't want to.