As far as I can remember, our father had never had anything to say about the Festival. (Not true. In his essay “The Question of Ambergris,” he wrote [I paraphrase from memory]: “At the heart of the city lies not a courtyard or a building or a statue, but an event: the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. It is an overlay of this event that populates the city with an alternative history, one that, if we could only understand its ebb and flow, the necessity of violence to it, would also allow us to understand Ambergris.” Statements like this led me to my explorations of Ambergris. I remember trying to read my father’s essays at an early age, and only understanding them in fragments and glimpses. I loved the mystery of that, and the sense of adventure, of the questions implied by what I could understand.) However, he did say one or two things about the gray caps. I recall that at the dinner table he would ramble on about his current studies. He had no gift for providing context. He would sit at the table, looking down at his mashed potatoes as he scratched the back of his head with one hand and pushed his fork through his food with the other. There was always about him at these times a faraway look, as if he were figuring something out in his head even as he talked to us. Sometimes, it would be a kind of muttering chant under his breath. At other times he was genuinely talking to us but was really elsewhere. He smelled of limes back then, our mother having insisted he wear some cologne to combat the smell of old books brought back from the rare book room of the Stockton Library. But since he hated cologne, he would cut up a lime instead and anoint himself with its juice. (I enjoyed that smell of books, though, missed it when it was gone—it was a comfortable, old-fashioned smell, usually mixed with the dry spice of cigar smoke. I came to feel that it was the smell of learning, which provoked the sweat not of physical exertion, but of mental exertion. To me, book must and cigar smoke were the product of working brains.)

At one such dinner, he looked up at us and he said, “The gray caps are quite simple, really. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. So long as what you’re doing doesn’t interfere with their plans, they don’t care what you do—even if you cause one of them physical harm. But if somehow you step across the tripwire of one of their ‘activities,’ why, then, there is nothing that can save you.”