“Wally,” Endsley says simply, extending the phone so it’s in front of me. “He was something of a legend for a few weeks in New York. He was living in Central Park but would periodically run into the street to try and cross to the food vendors on the other side. He kept evading animal control. The car I was riding in was the one that finally hit him. I took him to the vet—don’t ask me why—and he’s been with me ever since. Valerie figures that’s why he throws himself at things when he’s hungry. His pea-sized brain probably affiliates physical distress with positive outcomes.”

This is beyond bizarre. The mighty N. E. Endsley is showing me phone pictures? A fever dream, that’s what this is. I’m dying, and this is apparently all my brain can manage to give me in my final moments.

Jenna, I think. Give me Jenna instead. But Endsley takes the phone and clicks a few more times. He shows me another image, this one of a gnarled tree.

“This is a tree from the backyard where I grew up. I used to climb up to the little V, see? I would sit there with a legal pad and write story after story. Repetitive, formulaic things, but I liked them. I hated being inside. Sometimes my father would bring me a sandwich so I could picnic in the tree, but that wasn’t often.”

Click, click.

“This one doesn’t really have a story behind it, but I liked this footstool. It was in an antique store and I wondered who carved it and painted the design on top and how it ended up in that forgotten shop. It’s stupid,” he says.

The whales are dissipating, replaced by the oddest turn of events. The photos are taking over my thought process, and the great N. E. Endsley has shrunk down to the size of a normal human boy, only a year older than me, a couple of inches taller, sitting on the floor of a room designed for his own fiction. The questioning in my brain is numbing to a quiet roar and I’m just trying to take in every moment of this encounter. I’m sure it will be the last, on account of my immediate, hallucinatory death.

I scoot the slightest bit closer to him, not brave enough to let my arm touch his, even though I suspect one or both of us is incorporeal.

He glances at me but says nothing, until another image pops up on the screen.

“This is Alex in Times Square. He came to visit me … when I lived there, in New York.”