“You’ve been there?”

“Many times. I can read my way across, or at least I could before the accident. My mentor was Miss Havisham, who was terrific so long as you didn’t mention the wedding, and Emperor Zhark, who is a barrel of laughs when he’s not subjugating entire star systems in his tyrannical and inadequately explained quest for galactic domination.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Remember how two weeks went missing out of Samuel Pepys’s diary a few years back? That was me having an off day.”

I continued in this vein for a while, outlining various adventures I’d had in the BookWorld. I talked about the ongoing metaphor shortage, Speedy Muffler, the witheringly tiresome internal politics at the Council of Genres, about imaginotransference engines, UltraWord, Commander Bradshaw’s gorilla wife, Melanie, and the first time I was attacked by grammasites. I ended with an account of the reason for my current physical state during an assassination attempt in a quiet corner of the Thriller genre and how Red Herring had been responsible.

“Was Red Herring a red herring?” asked Chumley in some confusion.

“No,” I replied reflectively, “but his name was. By calling Red Herring Red Herring, it made people think that he couldn’t be a red herring as it was too obvious, so his name—Red Herring— then became the red herring when we found out he wasn’t a red herring. Simple, yes?”

“No.”

“I agree it’s complicated,” I said with a shrug. “Working in fiction does gives one a somewhat tenuous hold on reality, but it’s not the hold that’s tenuous—it’s the reality: Which reality? Whose reality? Does it matter anyway? And will there be cake?” “And was there?”

“Was there what?”

“Cake.”

“Generally speaking, yes.”

Dr. Chumley rubbed his temples. “I think I preferred Spike’s sharpened spade earlier. At least that had a sort of uncomplicated creeping menace about it. The BookWorld? It’s all very confusing.”

“I’ve spent most of my life confused,” I replied. “You get used to it after a while. There’s a lot to be said about merely having a hazy idea of what’s going on but generally reaching the right outcome by following broad policy outlines. In fact, I’ve a sneaky suspicion that it’s the only way of getting things done. Once the horror and unpredictability of unintended consequences gets a hold, even the best-intentioned and noblest of plans generally descend to mayhem, confusion and despair.”

“I see,” said Dr. Chumley, tearing off another certificate and scrunching it up. “I’m going to lower you to a NUT-3: ‘mildly aberrant behavior with occasional long stretches of lucidity.’”

It still wasn’t enough.

“So the whole BookWorld thing doesn’t make me nuts?” I asked, semisarcastically.

“We do try to avoid that particular word when making a diagnosis in our profession,” said Dr. Chumley with a sigh, “but sometimes I wonder if the human race isn’t collectively as mad as a sack of doorknobs. Where does that put me and my profession? Trying to sort out the real nutjobs from the partial nutjobs? Or just in a state of muddled damage limitation?”