City of Saints and Madmen

IT WAS DAMP AND UNPLEASANT THAT morning, a methodical drizzle drifting down out of a dull gray sky. An ephemeral rain he might have thought, and yet the buildings, discolored and blackened in their sooty ranks, steeped in the smell of gasoline and hay mixed with dung, seemed to have been contoured and worn down by it, or at least resigned to it. The few passersby on the street, shivering against the cold, were subdued, anonymous, sickly; their shoes made wet splacking noises in the puddles. The sound, startling in the silence, depressed him and he was glad to reach his destination, glad when the glass doors closed behind him, shutting out the smell of the rain.

Inside, the ironic smell of mold and a sickly sweet sterility. He sneezed and put down his briefcase. He took off his galoshes, placed them by the door. Removed his raincoat, which looked as if the rain had worn grooves into it, and hooked it on the absurdly sinister coat rack with its seething gargoyle heads. He shook himself, stray water drops spraying in all directions, straightened his tie, and smoothed back his hair. Bemoaned the lack of coffee. Took a slip of paper from his jacket pocket. Room 54. Downstairs.

Down many stairs.

He stared across the empty hall. White and gray tile. Anonymous doors. Sheets of dull lighting from above, most of it aflicker with abnormalities. And clocks — clocks created for bureaucrats so that they formed innocuous gray circles every few yards, their dull hands clucking quietly. He could only hear them because most of the staff was away for the holidays. The emptiness lent a certain ease to his task. He meant to take his time.

He picked up his briefcase and walked up the hall, shoes squeaking against the shiny tile floor; amazingly enough, the janitorial staff had recently waxed it.

He passed a trio of coat racks, all three banal in their repetition of gargoyles, and not at all in keeping with the dream of a modern facility dreamt by his superiors. Ahead, a lone security guard stood at attention in a doorway. The man, gaunt to the point of starvation, looked neither right nor left. He nodded as he passed but the guard did not even blink. Was the guard dead? The man smelled of old leather and tar. Would he smell of old leather and tar if he was dead? Somehow the thought amused him.

He turned left onto another colorless, musty corridor, this time lit reluctantly by oval light bulbs in ancient fixtures that might once have been brass-colored but were now a gunky black.

As he walked, he made a note of the water dripping from the ceiling; better that the janitors fix leaks than wax floors. Before you knew it, mold would be clotting the walls and mushrooms sprouting from the most un expected places.

He approached a length of corridor where so much mud had been tracked in by way of footprints that a detective (which, strictly speaking, he was not) would have assumed a scuffle had broken out among a large group of untidy, rather frenzied and determined, individuals. Perhaps it had; patients often did not like being labeled patients.

The mud smell thickened the air, but entwined around it, rooted within it, another smell called to him: a fragrance both fresh and unexpected. He stopped, frowned, and sniffed once, twice. He turned to his left and looked down. In the crack between the wall and the floor, amid a patch of what could only be dirt, a tiny rose blossomed, defiantly blood-red.

He bent over the flower. How rare. How lovely. He blinked, took a quick look down the corridor to his right and left. No one.

Deftly, he plucked the rose, avoiding the thorns on the stem. Straightening up, he stuck the flower through the second buttonhole of his jacket, patted his jacket back into place, and continued down the corridor.

Soon he came to a junction, with three corridors radiating out to left, right, and center. Without hesitation, he chose the left, which slanted downward. The air quickly became colder, mustier, and overlaid with the faint scent of… trout? (Were cats hoarding fish down here?) The light grew correspondingly dimmer. He had hoped to review the files on “X” before reaching Room 54, but found it an impossible task in the gloom. (Another note to the janitors? Perhaps not. They were an unruly lot, unaccustomed to reprimand, and they might make it difficult for him. No mat ter: the words of his colleagues still reverberated in his head: “X is trapped between the hemispheres of his own brain”; “X is a tough nut to crack”; “X will make an excellent thesis on guilt.”) No matter. And although he appreciated the position of those who believed the building should be renovated to modern standards, he did enjoy the walk, for it created a sense of mystery, an atmosphere conducive to exploration and discovery. He had always thought that, in a sense, he shed irrelevant parts of himself on the long walk, that he became very much functional in his splendid efficiency.

He turned left, then right, always descending. He had the sensation of things flitting through the air, just on the verge of brushing his skin. A cop pery taste suffused the air, as if he were licking doorknobs or bed posts. The bulbs became irregular, three burnt out for each buttery round glow. His shoes scraped against unlikely things in the darkness that lay beneath his feet.

Finally, he reached the black spiral staircase that led to Room 54. A true baroque monstrosity, in the spirit of the gargoyle coat racks, it twisted and turned crankily, almost spitefully, into a well of darkness dispelled only by the occasional glimmer of railing as it caught the light of the single, dull bulb hanging above it. Of all the building’s eccentricities, he found the staircase the most delightful. He descended slowly, savoring the feel of the wrought-iron railings, the roughness of the black paint where it had chipped and weathered to form lichen-shaped patterns. The staircase smelled of history, of ancestors, of another world.

By the time he had reached the bottom, he had shed the last of his delight, his self-interest, his selfishness, his petty irritations, his past. All that remained were curiosity, compassion, instinct, and the rose: a bit of color; a bit of misdirection.

He fumbled for the light switch, found it, and flooded the small space beneath the stairs with stale yellow.

He took out his keys. Opened the door. Entered. Closed it behind him.

Inside, he blinked and shaded his eyes against the brightness of superior lighting. Smell of sour clothes.

Faint musk of urine. Had X been marking his territory?

When his eyes adjusted, he saw a desk, a typewriter, a bed, a small pro vision of canned goods, and a separate room for the toilet. Windows — square, of a thick, syrupy glass — lined the walls at eye level, but all that lay beyond them was the blankness of dirt, of mortar, of cement.

The writer sat behind the desk, on a rickety chair. But he wasn’t writing. He was staring at me.

I smiled, put down my briefcase. I took off my jacket, careful not to disturb the rose, and laid it over the arm of the nearest chair.

“Good morning,” I said, still smiling.

He continued to observe me. Very well, then, I would observe him back. We circled each other with our eyes.

From the looseness of his skin, I deduced that he had once been fat, but no longer; he had attained the only thinness possible for him: a condition which suggests thinness, which alludes to thinness, but is only a pale facsimile at best. He had too much skin, and broad shoulders with a barrel chest. His mouth had fixed itself half-way between a laconic grin and a melancholy frown. A new beard had sprouted upon his chin (it was not unkind to him) while above a slight, almost feminine, nose, his blue eyes pierced the light from behind the golden frames of his glasses. He wore what we had given him: a nondescript pair of slacks, a white shirt, and a brown sweater over the shirt.

What did he smell of? A strangeness I could not identify. A hint of lilacs in the spring. The waft of rain-soaked air on a fishing boat, out on the river. The draft from a door opening onto a room full of old books.

Finally, he spoke: “You are here to question me. Again. I’ve already answered all the questions.

Numerous times.” A quaver in the voice. Frustration barely held in check.

“You must answer them one more time,” I said. Briefcase again in hand, I walked forward until I stood in front of his desk.

He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head. “What will that accomplish?”

I did not like his ease. I did not like his comfort. I decided to break him of it.

“I’ll not mislead you: I am here to decide your final disposition. Should we lock you away for five or ten years, or should we find some other solution? But do not think you can lie your way into my good graces.

You have, after all, answered these questions several times. We must reach an understanding, you and I, based solely on your current state of mind. I can smell lies, you know. They may look like treacle, but they smell like poison.”

I had given this speech, or a variant of it, so many times that it came all too easily to me.

“Let me not mislead you,” he replied, no longer leaning back in his chair, “I am now firmly of the belief that Ambergris, and all that is associated with Ambergris, is a figment of my imagination. I no longer believe it exists.”

“I see. This information does not in any way mean I will now pack up my briefcase and set you free. I must question you.”

He looked as if he were about to argue with me. Instead, he said, “Then let me clear the desk. Would you like me to give you a statement first?”

“No. My questions shall provide you with the means to make a statement.” I smiled as I said it, for although he need not hope too much, nei ther did I wish to drive him to despair.

X was not a strong man and I had to help him lift the typewriter off the desk; it was an old, clunky model and its keys made a metallic protest when we set it on the floor.

When we had sat down, I took out a pen and pad of paper. “Now, then, do you know where you are and why?”

“I am in aChicago psychiatric ward because I have been hallucinating that a world of my creation is actually real.”

“When and where were you born?”

“Belfont,Pennsylvania. In 1968.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“My parents were in the Peace Corps — are you going to write all of this down again? The scribbling irritates me. It sounds like cockroaches scuttling.”

“You don’t like cockroaches?”

He scowled at me.

“As you like.”

I pulled his file out of my briefcase. I arranged the transcripts in front of me. A few words flashed out at me: fire… Trial… of course I loved her… control… the reality… It was in the room with me

…

“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 theFijiIslands.”

“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 awhile, 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 plot line — the story for what would become

“The Transformation ofMartinLake.” I was walking in downtownTallahassee, 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 theU.S. publication of City ofSaints 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…

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 — 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 ofSaints 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 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 inTallahassee… Then we took a vacation toNew 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 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.

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 aboutNew 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 inNew York?

X: I flew back toTallahassee 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 toCorfu 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 fromNew 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 hard-boiled 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 theUniversityofFlorida, I had a class-mate 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 mentionsAlbumuth 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.

I: The manta ray is mentioned in the transcripts, but never described. What is a manta ray?

X: You’ve never heard of a manta ray?

I: Perhaps under another name. What is it, please?

X: A big, black, saltwater… fish, I guess, but wide, with flaps like huge, graceful wings. Sleek.

Smooth. Like a very large skate or flounder.

I: Ah! A flounder! You’ll forgive my ignorance.

X: Clearly you devote too much time to your job.

I: You may be right, but to return to our topic: you were given this fish by the apparition of the dwarf. It is important that we get the symbolism correct.

X: No. The “fish” was the dwarf all along, leading me astray. The dwarf became the manta ray.

I: How did this happen?

X: I wish I could say Hannah saw it too, but she had fallen asleep. It was a cold night and I was wide awake, every muscle in my body tense. Suddenly, as before,Wilson stood at the foot of my bed. He just watched me for a long time, a smile upon his face… and then, as I watched him, he became like a pen-and-ink drawing of himself— only lines, with the rest of him translucent. And then this drawing began to fill up with cloudy black ink — like from a squid; do you know what a squid is?

I: Yes.

X: And when he was completely black with ink, the blackness oozed out from his body, until his body was eclipsed by the creature that looked exactly like a manta ray. It had tiny red eyes and it swam through the air. It terrified me. It horrified me. For the creature was Ambergris, come to reclaim me. The blackness of it was diffused by flashes of light through which I could see scenes of the city, of Ambergris, tattooed into its flesh — and they were moving. I hid under the covers, and when I looked again, in the morning, it was gone.

I: Did you tell your wife?

X: No! I should have, but I didn’t. I felt as if I were going mad. I couldn’t sleep. I could hardly eat.

I: This is when you lost all the weight?

X: Yes.

I: What, specifically, did you think this black creature was? Surely not “Ambergris,” as you say?

X: I thought I’d brought it back with me from Ambergris — that it was a physical manifestation of my psychosis.

I: You thought it was a part of you. I know you were terrified by it, but did you ever, for a moment, consider that it might have been benevolent?

X: No!

I: I see. It has been my experience — and my experience is substantial — that some men learn to master their madness, so that even if all manner of horrific hallucinations surround them, they do not react. They live in a world where they cannot trust their senses, and yet no one would guess this from their outward composure.

X: I am not one of those men. It terrified me to my soul.

I: And yet such men find such hallucinations a blessing, for they give warning of a skewed reality.

How much worse to slip — to just slip, as if slouching in your chair, as if blinking — into madness with no immediate sign that you had done so. So I call your visitation a helper, not a destroyer.

X: You may call it what you will. I did not think to call it anything.

I: What did you do to reestablish your equilibrium after this incident?

X: I began to write again. I spent eight to ten hours in my work room, scribbling away. Now I felt my only salvation was to write — and I wrote children’s stories. “Sarah and the Land of Sighs”

was the first one, and it went well. My agent liked it. It sold. Eventually, it won an honorable mention for the Caldecott. So I wrote more stories, except that at some point — and I still can’t recall when exactly— the manta ray reappeared.

I: What was your reaction?

X: Fear. Pure, unadulterated fear.

I: Tell me what happened.

X: I will not discuss what happened. But I have written about it — a story fragment you could call it.

X reached under the desk and handed me a thin sheaf of papers. I took them with barely disguised reluctance.

“Fiction lies.”

X snorted. “So do people.”

“I will read with reservations.”

“Yes, and if you’ll excuse me… ” He trotted off to use the bathroom.

Leaving me with the manuscript. The title was “The Strange Case of X.”

I began to read.

After I had finished reading, I turned to the writer and I said gently, “This is an interesting allegory in its way, although the ending seems a little… melodramatic? And a most valuable document as well. I can see how people would like your writing.”

The writer again sat behind the desk. “It’s not an allegory. It’s my life.” He seemed defeated, as if he had reread the tale over my shoulder.

“Don’t you think it is time to discuss the fire?” I asked him. “Isn’t this all leading to the fire?”

He turned his head to one side, as if he were a horse resisting a bit. “Maybe. Maybe it is. When can I see my wife?”

“Not until we’re done,” I said. Who knew when he would see his wife? It has been my experience that I must lie, or half-lie, in order to preserve a certain equilibrium in the patient. I do not enjoy it. I do not relish it. But I do it.

“You have to understand,” X said, “that I don’t fully understand what happened. I can only guess.”

“I will gladly accept your best guess.”

But, despite my control, a grim smile played across my lips. I could smell his desperation: it smelled like yellow grass, like stale biscuits, like sour milk.

X: Gradually, the manta ray grew in size until it covered more than ten feet of the wall. As it grew, it began to change the room. Not visual changes, at first, but I began to smell the jungle, and then auto exhaust, and then to hear noises as of a bustling but far away city. Gradually, the manta ray fit itself into its corner and shaped itself to the wall like a second skin. It also began to smell — not a pleasant smell: like fruit rotting, I guess.

I: And this continued until…?

X: Until one day I woke up early from a terrible nightmare: I was being stabbed in the palm by a man with no face, and I didn’t even try to pull away while he was doing it… I walked into my work room and there was an intense light coming from the corner where the creature had been — just a creature-shaped hole through which Ambergris peeked through. It was the Religious Quarter — endless calls to prayer and lots of icons and pilgrims.

I: What did you feel?

X: Anger. I wanted to tear Ambergris apart stone by stone. I wanted to lead a great army and batter down its gates and kill its people and raze the city. Anger would be too weak a word.

I: And do you believe this was the manta ray’s purpose when it gave you the gift of returning to Ambergris?

X: “Gift”? It was not a gift, unless you consider madness a gift.

I: Forgive me. I did not mean to upset you. Do you believe the curse visited upon you by the manta ray was given so you could destroy Ambergris?

X: No. I was always, deep down, at cross purposes with the creature. It destroyed my life.

I: What did you do when confronted by the sight of Ambergris? Or what do you think you did?

X: I climbed up the wall and over into the other world.

I: And this, according to the transcripts, is where your memory grows uncertain. Would it still be accurate to say your memory is “hazy”?

X: Yes.

I: Then I will redirect my questioning and come back to that later. Tell me about Janice Shriek.

X: I’ve already — never mind. She was a fan of my work, and Hannah and I both liked her, so we had let her stay with us — she was on sabbatical. She painted, but made her living as an art historian. Her brother Duncan was a famous historian — had made his fortune writing about the Byzantine Em pire. Duncan was in Istanbul doing research at the time, or he would have come to see us too. He didn’t get to see his sister much.

I: And you wrote them into your stories?

X: Yes, I’d given them both “parts” in stories of mine, and they’d been delighted. Janice even helped me to smooth out the art history portions of “The Transformation ofMartinLake.”

I: Did you feel any animosity toward Janice Shriek or her brother?

X: No. Why would I?

I: Describe Janice Shriek for me.

X: She was a small woman, not as small as, for example, the actress Linda Hunt, but getting there. She was a bit stooped. A comfortable weight. About fifty-four years old. Her forehead had many, many worry wrinkles. She liked to wear women’s business suits and she smoked these horrible cigars she got fromSyria. She had a presence about her, and a wit. She was a polyglot, too.

I: You said in an earlier interrogation that “sometimes I had the feeling she existed in two places at once, and I wondered if one of those worlds wasn’t Ambergris.” What did you mean?

X: I wondered if I hadn’t so much written her into Ambergris as she’d already had a life in Ambergris. What it came down to was this: Were my stories verbatim truths about the city, including its inhabitants, or were only the settings true, and the characters out of my head?

I: I ask you again: Did you feel any animosity toward Janice Shriek?

X: No!

I: You did not resent her teasing you about the reality of Am bergris?

X: Yes, but that’s no motive for…

I: You did not feel envy that, if she indeed existed in both worlds, she seemed so self-possessed, so in control. You wanted that kind of control, didn’t you?

X: Envy is not animosity. And, again, not a motive for… for what you are suggesting.

I: Had you any empirical evidence — such as it might be — that she existed in both worlds?

X: She hinted at it through jokes — you’re right about that. She’d read all of my books, of course, and she would make references to Ambergris as if it were real. She said to me once that the reason she’d wanted to meet me was because I’d written about the real world. And once she gave me a peculiar birthday gift.

I: Which was?

X: The Hoegbotton Travel Guide to Ambergris. She said it was real. That she’d just ducked into the Borges Bookstore in Ambergris and bought it, and here it was. I got quite pissed off, but she wouldn’t say it was a lie. Hannah said the woman was a fanatic. That of course she had created it, and that I’d better either take it as a compliment or start asking lawyers about copyright infringement.

I: Why did you doubt your wife?

X: The guidebook was so complete, so perfect. So detailed. How could it be a fake?

I: Surely a polyglot art historian like Janice Shriek could cre ate such a work?

X: I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway, that’s where I got the idea about her.

I: Let us return to your foray into Ambergris. The manta ray had become an opening to that world. I know your memory is confused, but what do you recall finding there?

X: I was walking downAlbumuth Boulevard. It was very chilly. The street was crowded with pedestrians and motor vehicles. I wasn’t nude this time, of course, for which I was very appreciative, and I just… I just lost myself in the crowds. I didn’t think. I didn’t analyze. I just walked. I walked down to the docks to see the ships. Took in a parade nearTrillian Square. Then I explored the food markets and, after awhile, I went into the Bureaucratic District.

I: Where exactly did it happen?

X: I don’t… I can’t…

I: I’ll spare you the recall. It’s all down here in the transcripts anyway. You say you saw a woman crossing the street. A vehicle bore down on her at a great speed, and you say you pushed her out of harm’s way. Would that be accurate?

X: Yes.

I: What did the woman look like?

X: I only saw her from behind. She was shortish. Older than middle aged. Kind of shuffled as she walked. I think she was carrying a briefcase or portfolio or something…

I: What color was the vehicle?

X: Red.

I: And after you pushed the woman, what happened?

X: The van passed between me and the woman, and I was back in the real world. I felt a great heat on my face, searing my eye brows. I had collapsed outside of my writing room, which I had set on fire. Soon the whole house would be on fire. Hannah had already taken Sarah outside and now she was trying to drag me away from it when I “woke up.” She was screaming in my ear,

“Why did you do it? Why did you do it?”

I: And what had you done?

X: I had pushed Janice Shriek into the flames of the fire I had set.

I: You had murdered her.

X: I had pushed her into the fire.

We faced each other across the desk in that small, barren room and I could see from his expression that he still did not understand the crux of the matter, that he did not understand what had truly happened to Janice Shriek. How much would I tell him? Very little. For his sake. Merciless, I continued with my questioning, aware that he now saw me as the darkness, as his betrayer.

I: How happy do you feel having saved the life of the woman in Ambergris in relation to the sadness you feel for having killed Janice Shriek?

X: It’s not that simple.

I: But it is that simple. Do you feel guilt, remorse, for having murdered Janice Shriek?

X: Of course!

I: Did you feel responsible for your actions?

X: No, not at first.

I: But now?

X: Yes.

I: Did you feel responsible for saving the woman in Ambergris?

X: No. How could I? Ambergris isn’t real.

I: And yet, you say in these transcripts that in the trial that resulted from Shriek’s death, you claimed Ambergris was real! Which is it? Is Ambergris real or isn’t it?

X: That was then.

I: You seem inordinately proud that, as you say, the first jury came back hung. That it took two juries to convict. Indecently proud, I’d say.

X: That’s just a writer’s pride at the beautiful trickery of my fabrication.

I: “That’s just a writer’s pride at the beautiful trickery of my fabrication.” Listen to yourself.

Your pride is ghastly. A human being had been murdered. You were on trial for that murder. Or did you think that Janice Shriek led a more real existence in Ambergris? That you had, in essence, killed only an echo of her true self?

X: No! I didn’t think Ambergris was more real. Nothing was real to me at that point. The arrogance, the pride, was a wall — a way for me to cope. A way for me not to think.

I: How did you get certain members of the jury to believe in Ambergris?

X: It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t even easy to get my attorney to pursue the case in the rather insane way I suggested. He went along with it because he believed the jury would find me crazy and remand me to the psychiatric care I’m sure he thought I needed. There seemed no question that I would be convicted — my own wife was a witness.

I: But you convinced some of the jurors.

X: Perhaps. Maybe they just didn’t like the prosecuting attorney. It helped that nearly everyone had read the books or heard about them. And, yes, it proves my imagination is magnificent. The world was so complete, so fully-realized, that I’m sure it became as real to the jurors as that squalid, musty backroom they did all their deliberations in.

I: So you convinced them by the totality of your vision. And by your sincerity — that you believed Ambergris was real.

X: Don’t do that. As I told you before we began, I don’t believe in Ambergris anymore.

I: Can you describe the jurors at the first trial for me?

X: What?

I: I said, describe the jurors. What did they look like? Use your famous imagination if you need to.

X: They were jurors. A group of my peers. They looked like… People.

I: So you cannot remember their faces.

X: No, not really.

I: If you made them believe in Ambergris so strongly that they would not convict you, why can’t you believe in it?

X: Because it doesn’t exist! It doesn’t exist,Alice! I made it up. Or, more properly, it made me up.

It does not exist.

X was breathing heavily. He had brought his left fist down hard on the desk.

“Let us sum up, for there are two crucial points that have been uncovered by this interrogation. At least two. The first concerns the manta ray. The second concerns the jury. I am going to ask you again: Did you never think that the manta ray might be a positive influence, a saving impulse? ”

“Never.”

“I see it as a manifestation of your sanity — perhaps a manifestation of your subconscious, come to lead you into the light.”

“It led me into the darkness. It led me into never never land.”

“Second, there was no trial, except in your head as you ran from the scene of the crime. Your jurors who believed in Ambergris — they represented the part of you that still clung to the idea that Ambergris was real. No matter how you fought them, they — faceless, anonymous — continued to tell you Ambergris was real!”

“Now you are trying to trick me,” X said. He was trembling. His right hand had closed around his left wrist in a vice-like grip.

“Do you remember how you got here?” I asked.

“No. Probably through the front door, don’t you think?”

“Don’t you find it odd that you don’t remember?”

“In comparison to what?” He laughed bitterly.

I stared at him. I said nothing. I think it was my silence, in which I hoped for some last minute redemption, that forced him to the conclusion my decision would not be favorable.

“I don’t believe in Ambergris. How many times do I have to say it?” He was sweating now. He was shaking.

When I did not reply, he said, “Are there any more questions?”

I shook my head. I put the transcripts back in my briefcase and locked it. I pushed the chair back and got up.

“Then I am free to go. My wife is probably waiting in—”

“No,” I said, putting on my jacket. “You are not free to go.”

He rose quickly, again pounded his fist against the desk. “But I’ve told you, I’ve told you — I don’t believe in my fantasy! I’m rational! I’m logi cal! I’m over it!”

“But you see,” I said, with as much kindness as I could muster as I opened the door, “that’s precisely the problem. This is Ambergris. You are in Ambergris.”

The expression on X’s face was quite indescribable.

As he locked the door behind him and ascended the staircase, he realized that it was all a horrible shame. Clearly, the writer had lost contact with reality, no matter how desperately that reality had struggled to get his attention. And that poor woman, still unidentified, that X had pushed into the path of a motored vehicle (he hadn’t quite had it in him to tell X just how faulty his memory was) — she was proof enough of his illness. In the end, the fantasy had been too strong. And what a fantasy it was! A place where people flew and “made movies.” Disney, tee-vee,New York City,New Orleans,Chicago. It was all very convincing and, within limits, it made sense — to X. But as he well knew, writers were a shifty lot — not to be trusted— and there were far too many lunatics on the streets already. How would X have coped with freedom anyhow? With his twin fantasy of literary success and a happy marriage revealed as a lie? (And there were X’s last words as the door had closed: “All writers write. All writers edit. All writers have a little darkness in them.”)

They had found no record of him in the city upon his arrest, so he had probably come from abroad — from the Southern Isles, perhaps — carrying his pathetic book, no doubt self-published by “Spectra,” a vanity operation by the sound of it. He knew those sounds himself from his modest dabbling in the written arts. In fact, he reflected, the only real benefit of the session, between the previous transcripts and the conversation itself, had been to his fiction; he now had some very interesting elements with which to compose a fantasy of his own. Why, he could already see that the report on this session would be a kind of fiction itself, as he had long since concluded that no delusion could ever truly be understood. He might even tell the story in first and third person, to both personalize and distance the events.

When he reached the place where he had plucked the rose, he took it from his buttonhole and stuck its stem back in the crack. He regretted having picked it. But even if he had not, it would have been doomed to a short, brutish life in the darkness.

Out on the street the rain had stopped, although the moist rain smell lingered, and the noontime calls to prayer from the Religious Quarter echoed through the narrow streets. He could almost taste the wonderful savoriness of the hot sausage sold by the sidewalk vendors. After lunch, he would take in some entertainment. The Manzikert Opera Theater had decided to do a Voss Bender revival this season, and with any luck he could still catch the matinee and be home to the wife before dinner. With this thought uppermost in his mind, he stepped out onto the street and was soon lost to view amongst the lunchtime crowds.