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 plotline—the story for what would become “The Transformation of Martin Lake.” I was walking in downtown Tallahassee, 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 the U.S. publication of City of Saints 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—Martin Lake’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.