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 back room 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.