“The important thing,” Lacond said to me once, “is that we get the truth out in some form, that we document what is happening. So that at the very least, there will be a record that someone knew about it.”

This struck me as an absurd statement. “Why?” I replied. “So that when the abyss opens up you can stand on the edge and shout down, ‘I told you so!’?”

Lacond looked at me as if I hadn’t understood anything he’d said.

When I told Bonmot about this exchange, he said, “Yes, but without Lacond, how much more mischief would Duncan get into?”

A good point, I had to admit. Because Lacond spent much of his time in those years after the war making Duncan his second-in-command. Without Lacond, the loss of Mary might have hit Duncan harder than it did. (How much harder could it have hit me? I hardly left my apartment for months. Lacond had to drag me out of my bed to get me to work for him. For years afterward, I would feel this hollow space in my stomach, in my lungs. Sometimes, I would think of her and I couldn’t breathe.)

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.