Lacond had a perverse effect on Duncan. Lacond made Duncan want something he thought he had given up on long ago: the restoration of a measure of legitimacy. (I might have reconciled myself to living without respect, but that didn’t mean I didn’t fight hard against it. Years would pass between a chance at even the most minor legitimate publication opportunity, but I never gave up.) Lacond kept telling Duncan that if he published enough essays in the AFTOIS newsletter, he would eventually get noticed again.

“Enough essays in a marginal journal read by a couple thousand fellow crackpots?” I said to Duncan when he told me. “A path to greater glory? I don’t think so, Duncan. I really don’t. You should attempt another book—you might find a publisher.”

Duncan shook his head. “Not now, not yet. I can’t even think about a book—my thoughts are too fragmented. But essays—yes, I could do essays. And Lacond might be right, you never know.”

Ridiculous! Yet Duncan believed it. As he wrote in his journal:

Sometimes I read through the letters I kept from my glory days, when readers could acquire my books easily and in quantity. There were people back then who understood me, who realized I told the truth. I can’t imagine that all of them have died in the twenty years since, or that there aren’t new readers who might appreciate my books. I just need to find a way to reach them again. And if I can’t reach them, perhaps I can reach Mary again. It’s easy for Mary to dismiss Lacond, or AFTOIS, but it might alter her perception of me if … but it is too much to hope for, to think about.

(I did believe this then, perhaps naively, but over time my emphasis would shift. I no longer thought books would be my salvation. I no longer thought in terms of publication, really, but more in terms of accumulating knowledge and making as much of it public as the public could stand.)

Didn’t Duncan see that Lacond had been trying for years—decades—with less success than my brother? Not any more than he saw that, for all the time he spent in the shadow of the huge oak tree outside her parents’ house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, Mary was traveling along a very different path. How could someone so smart be so foolish? But Duncan persisted. (I had no choice. I thought Mary and I could eventually be friends. I justified my hauntings of her by telling myself that I was watching over her, protecting her. The truth? My heart, caught between hope and pain, could not bear never seeing her, even if seeing her meant only the slightest glimpse of her through a window—a silhouette that, for many months, could still transfix me.)