I mention this because History and my reincarnation as a tour guide continued to intersect in a number of ways, against my wishes. For example, evincing a cruel kindness, Sirin managed to finagle me a nonpaying position on the toothless horror that is the Ambergris Tourism Board, in a nod to my past status as an “iconic figure in society in general, etc., etc.,” as one of the other board members greeted me before slumping back into a kind of half-drool, half-reverie that looked quite pleasant.

I joined the board at the perfect time: it seemed to be trying to make itself obsolete. The first day I reported for service, the board decided to mount a rather muddled campaign to discourage tourism in the city because, as one gout-ridden veteran of many a real or imaginary war put it, “These fools. Must protect them. Too many deaths. At Festival time. Darlings deserve better.” I almost pointed out that fewer tourists meant more of a chance, statistically, that local residents would be the targets of violence or “odd events,” as the broadsheets now sometimes termed encounters involving gray caps. But I kept my mouth shut. After all, it was only my first day on the job, and I wasn’t yet sure I wanted to burn any bridges. (If you’d taken your duties more seriously, perhaps some of AFTOIS’s positions would have received a sympathetic hearing from those old bastards. As it was, I can’t recall you doing anything at the public meetings of the board but taking up space.)

As a result, for two years, in the months leading up to the Festival, the board paid for posters to be put up that depicted dead dogs in a variety of unkind and teeth-grimacing positions, complete with titles such as DEAD DOGS. DEAD TOURISTS. IT’S ALL THE SAME TO US. STAY OUT OF AMBERGRIS AROUND FESTIVAL TIME.

The posters appeared to result in insulted—but not fatally insulted—tourists, if the large number of people letting me lead them around the city and babble about dead people and old buildings was any indication. I certainly didn’t mind this change, but posters or no, a more profound and negative transformation had begun to change Ambergris. The invisible yet necessary buffer between the professional and the personal slowly eroded, and for this I blame Nativism.

I’m sure that blaming Nativism for anything will be seen as blasphemy by many readers, but then, you’ve made it this far—you can’t give up now. So, if you haven’t become irrevocably jaded, perhaps even revolted (or revolting), by the preceding pages, I dare say you’ll hardly even twitch when I say: I blame Nativism. Not the specific form of insanity displayed by Sabon’s father—not that brand of Nativism. No, I refer to the form that Duncan called “the final outcome of the war”: an attempt to become blind, deaf, and dumb as a most peculiar and pathetic method of semi-survival. (It allowed people to function in their day-to-day lives, rather than boarded up, gibbering in fear, in their homes. I’ll give it that much.)