Several miles, passing few vehicles. She wasn’t seeing detour signs. Yet the landscape seemed familiar. And there, abruptly, was North Ridge Road.

And there, again—the barricade and the jarring yellow sign: DETOUR.

Again, no one in sight. No road crew repairing the road, no impediment that she could see, beyond the barricade itself.

This time Abigail drove around the barricade, boldly, with no difficulty, onto the grassy roadside and back up again onto the pavement, and continued on North Ridge toward her home, which she calculated was less than two miles away.

The sun was still unnaturally bright, luminous. Budding leaves were just perceptibly greener than the previous day. Her heart was suffused with hope, within minutes she would be home.

CURIOUS

1.

Q. Many of us, your admirers, have long been curious—where do you get your ideas, Mr. N__?

A. Ah! This too has long baffled me. We are all mysteries to ourselves, enigmas …

Truth is, my friend, I’ve never had the slightest curiosity about where my “ideas” come from—my own or anyone else’s.

In fact, you may be surprised to learn that despite my reputation as the most erudite and cerebral of twenty-first-century writers, I have very little curiosity about anything.

Indeed, I am not even curious about my lack of curiosity. It might be said that I resemble an individual with a neurological deficit that prevents him from identifying faces—“prosopagnosia,” or “face blindness.” In the most extreme cases the afflicted cannot recognize even their own faces in a photograph or a mirror, let alone the faces of relatives or friends.

No. I’m not curious why. Who cares why?

Face blindness, color blindness, tone deafness—these are not personal choices, but deficits in the brain. It is said that sociopaths have no care for morality, psychopaths have no care for another’s pain, the autistic have no “theory of mind”—no ability to imagine the interior lives of others. To be lacking in curiosity is to inhabit a small but distinctive category.

I am not even curious about the curiosity of others, as a scientist might be. No more than I would be curious about a dog sniffing excitedly in a pile of rotted leaves. Whatever the dog might unearth in the next several seconds, whatever the excitement of the dog, who cares?

But now that you have asked me the (inevitable) question, the (unanswerable) question, indeed the (stupid) question, I am provoked to speculate. As, feeling a sudden itch on my skin, I am provoked to scratch recklessly enough to draw blood.

Where do the ideas informing the bizarre and seeming inexhaustible fictions of N__ come from?

2.