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 writer’s 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.
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 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 cobblestones 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 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 Tallahassee 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.
I: Then tell me about the thing in your work room first.
X: Can’t it wait? For a little while?
The dripping of water had become a constant irritation for me. If it had become an irritation, then I had failed to concentrate hard enough. I had not left enough of myself outside the room. I wondered how long the session would last—more specifically, how long my patience would last. If we are to be honest, the members of my profession, then we must recognize that our judgments are based on our own endurance. How long can we go on before we simply cannot stand to hear more and leave the room? Often the subject, the patient, has nothing to do with the decision.
“I hear music down here sometimes,” X said, staring at the ceiling. “It comes from above. It sounds like some infernal opera. Is there an opera house nearby, or does someone in this building play opera?”
I stared at him. This part was always difficult. How could it fail to be?
“You are avoiding the matter at hand.”
“What did you think of my book?” X asked. “One writer to another,” he added, not quite able to banish the condescension from his voice.
Oddly enough, the first novella in the book, ‘Dradin, In Love,’ had struck me, on a very primitive level, as evidence of an underlying sanity, for X clearly had conceptualized Dradin as a madman. No delusions there, for Dradin was a madman. I had even theorized that X saw Dradin as his alter ego, but dismissed the idea on the basis that it is unwise to match events in a work of fiction with events in the writer’s life.
Of course, I did not think it useful to share any of these thoughts with X, so I shrugged and said, “It was fanciful in its way and yet some of its aspects were as realistic as any hardboiled thriller. I thought ‘Dradin, In Love’ moved slowly. You devote an entire chapter to Dradin’s walk back to his hostel.”
“No, no, no! That’s foreshadowing. That’s symbolism. That’s showing you the beginning of the carnage, in the form of the sleeping mushroom dwellers.”
“Well, perhaps it did not speak to me as forcefully as you wanted it to. But you must remember, I was reading it for clues.”
“As to my mental state? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Of course. To both questions. And I must also determine whether you most identify with Dradin, or the dwarf Dvorak, or the priest Cadimon, or even the Living Saint.”
“A dead end. I identify with none of them. And all of them contain a part of me.”
I shrugged. “I must gather clues where I can.”
“You mean if I don’t give you enough information.”
“Some give me information without meaning to.”
“I am not sure I can give you what you want.”
“Actually,” I said, picking up City of Saints and Madmen, “there was a passage in here that I found quite interesting. Not from ‘Dradin, In Love,’ but from this other story, ‘Learning to Leave the Flesh.’ You make a distinction in the introduction to that tale—you call it a forerunner to the Ambergris stories, and yet in your response to the other interrogatories, you say the story was written quite recently.”
“Surely you know that a writer can create a precursor tale after he has written the tales which come after, just as he can write the final tale in a series before he has finished writing the others.”
The agitation had returned to X’s features, almost as if he knew I was steering the conversation back toward my original objective.
“True, true,” I said as I turned pages, “but there is one passage—about the dwarf, Davy Jones, that interests me most. Ah, here it is—where Jones haunts the main character. Why don’t you read it for me?” I handed it to him and he took it with a certain eagerness. He had a good reading voice, neither too shrill nor too professional.
“Then he stands at the foot of my bed, staring at me. A cold blue tint dyes his flesh, as if the TV’s glow has burnt him. The marble cast of his face is as perfect as the most perfect sentence I have ever written. His eyes are so sad that I cannot meet his gaze; his face holds so many years of pain, of wanting to leave the flesh. He speaks to me and although I cannot hear him, I know what he is saying. I am crying again, but softly, softly. The voices on the street are louder and the tinkling of bells so very light.”
/> I: A very nice passage from a rather eccentric story. Whence came the dwarf? Did he walk out of your imagination or out of your life?
X: From life, at first. When I was going to college at the University of Florida, I had a classmate named David Wilson who was a dwarf. We took statistics together. He tutored me past the rough bits. He was poor but couldn’t get enough financial aid and his overall grades weren’t good enough for scholarships, so he rented himself out for dwarf-tossing contests at local bars. He had a talent for math, but here he was renting himself out to bars, and sometimes to the county fair when it came by. One day, he stopped coming to class and the next week I learned from a rather lurid article in the local paper that he had drunk himself to death.
I: Did he visit you at the foot of your bed?
X: You will remember I had resolved not to write about Ambergris ever again, but at first I resolved not to write at all. So I didn’t. For five months I quit writing. It was hell. I had to turn a part of myself off. It was like a relentless itching in my brain. I had to unlearn taking notes on little pieces of paper. I had to unlearn making observations. Or, rather, I had to ignore these urges. And I was thinking about David Wilson because I had always wanted to write about him and couldn’t. I guess I figured that if I thought about a story I couldn’t write, I’d scratch the itch in a harmless way . . . And it was then that the dwarf—or what I thought was the dwarf—began to haunt me. He’d stand at the foot of the bed and . . . well, you read the story. To stop him from haunting me, I relented and sat down to write what became “Learning to Leave the Flesh.”
I: But he was already Dvorak.
X: No. Dvorak was just a dwarf. He had nothing of David Wilson in him. David Wilson was a kind and gentle soul.
I: The story mentions Albumuth Boulevard.
X: Yes, it does. I had not only broken my vow not to write, but Ambergris had, in somewhat distorted form, crept back into my work.
I: Did you see the dwarf again?
X: One last time. When he became the manta ray. That was when I realized that I had brought something back from Ambergris with me. It scared the shit out of me.