“‘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 a while, 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.