City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

  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 of Martin Lake.”

  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 from Syria. 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 Ambergris ?

  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 create 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 down Albumuth 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 near Trillian 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 eyebrows. 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 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 Amber
gris 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 logical! 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 “Toruk,” 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.

  Voss Bender Memorial Mental Institute

  1314 Albumuth Boulevard

  Ambergris I13-24

  Doctor William Simpkin

  Central Records Office

  Psychiatric Studies Division

  c/o Trillian Memorial Hospital

  8181 Sallowskull Avenue

  Ambergris M14-518

  Dear Doctor Simpkin:

  As requested, enclosed please find all personal effects left behind by X, save for his pen, a blank notebook, and that tattered paperback copy of City of Saints & Madmen he insisted on clasping to his bosom like a talisman. I have kept these items for my personal collection. (You may recall that I have an extensive selection of souvenirs from my many years here. If you should ever again visit our humble outpost of insanity, I will be happy to give you a guided tour as I have recently begun to catalogue my collection in anticipation of the day when we will receive funding for its proper display. Each item comes complete with an exhibit card explaining the history of the item. If I may say so, the organization and presentation are exquisite. I am lacking only a display case and monies for maintenance.)

  Most of X’s possessions consisted of various writings, which either originated with him or which he acquired during that brief period when he walked the streets of Ambergris a free man. As you requested, I have carefully read through all of these writings, despite the time it has taken away from those other of my patients who have had the courtesy to remain in my care. I now present my findings to you:

  (1) X’s Notes. The notes typed up on the following pages came from crumpled sheets of paper found in the wastepaper basket. They consist of a series of reminders, observations, word sketches, drawings (X has had a lot of free time to perfect his doodling), and a short account of one of X’s dreams that I like to call “The Machine.” The notes seem self-explanatory. “The Machine,” on the other hand, demonstrates an extreme paranoia directed toward the gray caps. One must learn not to read too much into nightmares-- my own nightmares usually concern having to close down vital services due to lack of funds--but I would hazard the guess that X suffers from anxiety about his studies. This would be consistent with his case history.

  (2) The Release of Belacqua. Although an attached note attributed this manuscript to Sirin, a secretary at his office assured us via telephone (ours being broken, I walked five blocks to a colleague’s house to use his) that Sirin did not write it. Therefore, we must conclude that X wrote it himself. Nothing in the story sheds light on X’s whereabouts, however. If anything, the protagonist is as puzzled about X as we are. The cold little reference to Janice Shriek puts the lie to X’s protestations that he felt remorse for his actions. Throughout the story, X communicates to the reader “between the lines” in a rather pathetic manner. Such self-consciousness has clearly corrupted his writing. (Consulting my abridged version of Bender’s Trillian, I find no mention of a “Belac
qua,” although this is a point of curiosity only.)

  (3) King Squid by Frederick Madnok. At first, I assumed that this slim pamphlet had been privately printed by X under a pseudonym. However, further inquiries revealed that Madnok does indeed exist and that for a few months he hawked this pamphlet, among other self-published oddities, on the corner of Albumuth Boulevard and Beak Drive. His present whereabouts are unknown. Although our records could be incorrect, it appears he was never a patient here. (You may wish to use the impressive resources at your disposal to verify this fact, as many of our records have been damaged by water seepage. In many cases, your copies should now be considered the originals.) Given that King Squid did not originate with X and there are no margin notes from him, I cannot extrapolate much about X from it. On a surface level, however, one might assume that X envied the transformative qualities of Madnok’s prose. Perhaps he saw Madnok as a kindred spirit. Again, we lack the personnel to perform the kind of analysis necessary to make such a third-party document “speak” to us about X’s condition.

  (4) The Hoegbotton Family History. This document, although fascinating to me personally, seems at best something X may have read as background for enjoyment of item (5), below. It was found stuffed between his mattress and bed frame. There is a possibility it belonged to the former occupant of the cell, a Mr. M. Kodfan.

  (5) The Cage. I also checked with Sirin’s secretary about this manuscript, given X’s scrawled note of attribution. (I wish I had discovered said attribution before having returned to the asylum; as it was, I had to turn right back around to use my colleague’s telephone.) This time, she confirmed that Sirin had indeed written the story. She found it remarkable that X had galleys, given that the story is due to be released next month as part of Sirin’s new collection. She was most anxious that we return the manuscript to Sirin. I told her this was impossible until I had secured your approval. As for any connection between Sirin and X, it hardly seems credible--more the case of an “admirer and an admiral,” as they say. While X’s possession of the story confirms his obsession with the gray caps, I’m not sure that The Cage is otherwise of much use to us. Sirin’s characterization of Hoegbotton struck me as perverse. But, then, I am not a fan of Sirin’s fiction, although I did much admire his book of verse, “The Metamorphosis of Butterflies.”