City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

  As he walked, he made a note of the water dripping from the ceiling; better that the janitors fix leaks than wax floors. Before you knew it, mold would be clotting the walls and mushrooms sprouting from the most unexpected places.

  He approached a length of corridor where so much mud had been tracked in by way of footprints that a detective (which, strictly speaking, he was not) would have assumed a scuffle had broken out among a large group of untidy, rather frenzied and determined, individuals. Perhaps it had; patients often did not like being labeled patients.

  The mud smell thickened the air, but entwined around it, rooted within it, another smell called to him: a fragrance both fresh and unexpected. He stopped, frowned, and sniffed once, twice. He turned to his left and looked down. In the crack between the wall and the floor, amid a patch of what could only be dirt, a tiny rose blossomed, defiantly blood-red.

  He bent over the flower. How rare. How lovely. He blinked, took a quick look down the corridor to his right and left. No one.

  Deftly, he plucked the rose, avoiding the thorns on the stem. Straightening up, he stuck the flower through the second buttonhole of his jacket, patted his jacket back into place, and continued down the corridor.

  Soon he came to a junction, with three corridors radiating out to left, right, and center. Without hesitation, he chose the left, which slanted downward. The air quickly became colder, mustier, and overlaid with the faint scent of . . . trout? (Were cats hoarding fish down here?) The light grew correspondingly dimmer. He had hoped to review the files on “X” before reaching Room 54, but found it an impossible task in the gloom. (Another note to the janitors? Perhaps not. They were an unruly lot, unaccustomed to reprimand, and they might make it difficult for him. No matter: the words of his colleagues still reverberated in his head: “X is trapped between the hemispheres of his own brain”; “X is a tough nut to crack”; “X will make an excellent thesis on guilt.”)

  No matter. And although he appreciated the position of those who believed the building should be renovated to modern standards, he did enjoy the walk, for it created a sense of mystery, an atmosphere conducive to exploration and discovery. He had always thought that, in a sense, he shed irrelevant parts of himself on the long walk, that he became very much functional in his splendid efficiency.

  He turned left, then right, always descending. He had the sensation of things flitting through the air, just on the verge of brushing his skin. A coppery taste suffused the air, as if he were licking doorknobs or bed posts. The bulbs became irregular, three burnt out for each buttery round glow. His shoes scraped against unlikely things in the darkness that lay beneath his feet.

  Finally, he reached the black spiral staircase that led to Room 54. A true baroque monstrosity, in the spirit of the gargoyle coat racks, it twisted and turned crankily, almost spitefully, into a well of darkness dispelled only by the occasional glimmer of railing as it caught the light of the single, dull bulb hanging above it. Of all the building’s eccentricities, he found the staircase the most delightful. He descended slowly, savoring the feel of the wrought-iron railings, the roughness of the black paint where it had chipped and weathered to form lichen-shaped patterns. The staircase smelled of history, of ancestors, of another world.

  By the time he had reached the bottom, he had shed the last of his delight, his self-interest, his selfishness, his petty irritations, his past. All that remained were curiosity, compassion, instinct, and the rose: a bit of color; a bit of misdirection.

  He fumbled for the light switch, found it, and flooded the small space beneath the stairs with stale yellow. He took out his keys. Opened the door. Entered. Closed it behind him.

  Inside, he blinked and shaded his eyes against the brightness of superior lighting. Smell of sour clothes. Faint musk of urine. Had X been marking his territory?

  When his eyes adjusted, he saw a desk, a typewriter, a bed, a small provision of canned goods, and a separate room for the toilet. Windows—square, of a thick, syrupy glass—lined the walls at eyelevel, but all that lay beyond them was the blankness of dirt, of mortar, of cement.

  The writer sat behind the desk, on a rickety chair. But he wasn’t writing. He was staring at me.

  I smiled, put down my briefcase. I took off my jacket, careful not to disturb the rose, and laid it over the arm of the nearest chair.

  “Good morning,” I said, still smiling.

  He continued to observe me. Very well, then, I would observe him back. We circled each other with our eyes.

  From the looseness of his skin, I deduced that he had once been fat, but no longer; he had attained the only thinness possible for him: a condition which suggests thinness, which alludes to thinness, but is only a pale facsimile at best. He had too much skin, and broad shoulders with a barrel chest. His mouth had fixed itself half-way between a laconic grin and a melancholy frown. A new beard had sprouted upon his chin (it was not unkind to him) while above a slight, almost feminine, nose, his blue eyes pierced the light from behind the golden frames of his glasses. He wore what we had given him: a nondescript pair of slacks, a white shirt, and a brown sweater over the shirt.

  What did he smell of? A strangeness I could not identify. A hint of lilacs in the spring. The waft of rain-soaked air on a fishing boat, out on the river. The draft from a door opening onto a room full of old books.

  Finally, he spoke: “You are here to question me. Again. I’ve already answered all the questions. Numerous times.” A quaver in the voice. Frustration barely held in check.

  “You must answer them one more time,” I said. Briefcase again in hand, I walked forward until I stood in front of his desk.

  He leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head. “What will that accomplish?”

  I did not like his ease. I did not like his comfort. I decided to break him of it.

  “I’ll not mislead you: I am here to decide your final disposition. Should we lock you away for five or ten years, or should we find some other solution? But do not think you can lie your way into my good graces. You have, after all, answered these questions several times. We must reach an understanding, you and I, based solely on your current state of mind. I can smell lies, you know. They may look like treacle, but they smell like poison.”

  I had given this speech, or a variant of it, so many times that it came all too easily to me.

  “Let me not mislead you,” he replied, no longer leaning back in his chair, “I am now firmly of the belief that Ambergris, and all that is associated with Ambergris, is a figment of my imagination. I no longer believe it exists.”

  “I see. This information does not in any way mean I will now pack up my briefcase and set you free. I must question you.”

  He looked as if he were about to argue with me. Instead, he said, “Then let me clear the desk. Would you like me to give you a statement first?”

  “No. My questions shall provide you with the means to make a statement.” I smiled as I said it, for although he need not hope too much, neither did I wish to drive him to despair.

  X was not a strong man and I had to help him lift the typewriter off the desk; it was an old, clunky model and its keys made a metallic protest when we set it on the floor.

  When we had sat down, I took out a pen and pad of paper. “Now, then, do you know where you are and why?”

  “I am in a Chicago psychiatric ward because I have been hallucinating that a world of my creation is actually real.”

  “When and where were you born?”

  “Belfont, Pennsylvania. In 1968.”

  “Where did you grow up?”

  “My parents were in the Peace Corps—are you going to write all of this down again? The scribbling irritates me. It sounds like cockroaches scuttling.”

  “You don’t like cockroaches?”

  He scowled at me.

  “As you like.”

  I pulled his file out of my briefcase. I arranged the transcripts in front of me. A few words flashed out at me: fire. . . Trial. . .
of course I loved her. . . control. . . the reality . . . It was in the room with me . . .

  “I shall simply check off on these previous interrogatories duplications of answers. I shall only write down your answers when they are new or stray from the previous truths you have been so kind as to provide us with. Now: Where did you grow up?”

  “In the Fiji Islands.”

  “Where is that?”

  “In the South Pacific.”

  “Ah . . . What was your family like? Any brothers or sisters?”

  “Extremely dysfunctional. My parents fought a lot. One sister— Vanessa.”

  “Did you get along with your sister? How dysfunctional?”

  “I got along with my sister better than Mom and Dad. Very dysfunctional. I’d rather not talk about that—it’s all in the transcripts. Besides, it only helps explain why I write, not why I’m delusional.”

  In the transcripts he’d called it the “ten year divorce.” Constant fighting. Verbal and some physical abuse. Nasty, but not all that unusual. It is popular to analyze a patient’s childhood these days to discover that one trauma, that one unforgivable incident, which has shaped or ruined the life. But I did not care if his childhood had been a bedsore of misery, a canker of sadness. I was here to determine what he believed now, at this moment. I would ask him the requisite questions about that past, for such inquiries seemed to calm most patients, but let him tell or not tell. It was all the same to me.

  “Any visions or hallucinations as a child?”

  “No.”

  “None?”

  “None.”

  “In the transcripts, you mention a hallucination you had, when you thought you saw two hummingbirds mating on the wing from a hotel room window. You were sick, and you said, rather melodramatically, ‘I thought if I could only hold them, suspended, with my stare, I could forever feast upon their beauty. But finally I had to call to my sister and parents, took my eyes from the window, and even as I turned back, the light had changed again, the world had changed, and I knew they were gone. There I lay, at altitude, on oxygen—’”

  “—But that’s not a hallucination—”

  “—Please don’t interrupt. I’m not finished: ‘on oxygen and, suddenly, at my most vulnerable, the world had revealed the very extremity of its grace. For me, the moment had been Divine, as fantastical as if those hummingbirds had flown out of my mouth, my eyes, my thoughts.’ That is not a hallucination?”

  “No. It’s a statement on beauty. I really did see them—the hummingbirds.”

  “Is beauty important to you?”

  “Yes. Very important.”

  “Do you think you entered another world when you saw those hummingbirds?”

  “Only figuratively. I’m very balanced, you know, between my logical father and my illogical mother. I know what’s real and what’s not.”

  “That is not for you to determine. And what do your parents do? No one seems to have asked that question.”

  “My dad’s an entomologist—studies bugs, not words. My mom’s an artist. And an author. She’s done a book on graveyard art.”

  “Ah!” I took out two items that had been on his person when he had been brought here: a book entitled City of Saints and Madmen and a page of cartoon images. “So you are a writer. You take after your mother.”

  “No. Yes. Maybe.”

  “I guess that would explain why we gave you a typewriter: you’re a writer. I’m being funny. Have the decency to laugh. Now, what have you been writing?”

  “‘I will not believe in hallucinations’ one thousand times.”

  “It’s my turn to be rude and not laugh.” I held up City of Saints and Madmen. “You wrote this book.”

  “Yes. It’s sold over one million copies worldwide.”

  “Funny. I’d never heard of it until I saw this copy.”

  “Lucky you. I wish I’d never heard of it.”

  “But then, I rarely read modern authors, and when I do it is always thrillers. A straight diet of thrillers. None of the poetics for me, although I do dabble in writing myself . . . I did read this one, though, when I was assigned to your case. Don’t you want to hear what I thought about it?”

  X snorted. “No. I get—got—over a hundred fan letters a day. After awhile, you just want to retire to a deserted island.”

  “Which is exactly what you have done, I suppose. Metaphorically.” Only the island had turned out to be inhabited. All the worse for him.

  He ignored my probing, said, “Do you think I wanted to write that stuff? When the book came out, all anyone wanted were more Ambergris stories. I couldn’t sell anything not set in Ambergris. And then, after the initial clamor died down, I couldn’t write anything else. It was horrible. I’d spend ten hours a day at the typewriter just making this world I’d created more and more real in this world. I felt like a sorcerer summoning up a demon.”

  “And this? What is this?” I held up the sheet of cartoons:

  “Sample drawings from Disney—no doubt destined to become a collector’s item—for the animated movie of my novella ‘Dradin, In Love.’ It should be coming out next month. Surely you’ve heard of it?”

  “I don’t go to the movies.”

  “What do you do then?”

  “Question sick people about their sicknesses. It would be good to think of me as a blank slate, that I know nothing. This will make it easier for you to avoid leaving out important elements in your answers . . . I take it your books are grossly popular then?”

  “Yes,” he said, with obvious pride. “There are Dwarf & Missionary role-playing games, Giant Squid screen savers, a ‘greatest hits’ CD of Voss Bender arias sung by the Three Tenors, plastic action figures of the mushroom dwellers, even Ambergris conventions. All pretty silly.”

  “You made a lot of money in a relatively condensed period of time.”

  “I went from an income of $15,000 a year to something close to $500,000 a year, after taxes.”

  “And you were continually surrounded by the products of your imagination, often given physical form by other people?”

  “Yes.”

  Razor-sharp interrogator’s talons at the ready, I zeroed in, no longer anything but a series of questions in human guise, as elegant as a logarithm. I’d tear the truth right out of him, be it bright or bloody.

  INTERROGATOR: When did you begin to sense something was amiss?

  X: The day I was born. A bit of fetal tissue didn’t form right and, presto!, a cyst, which I had to have removed from the base of my spine twenty-four years later.

  I: Let me remind you that if I leave this room prematurely, you may never leave this room.

  X: Don’t threaten me. I don’t respond well to threats.

  I: Who does? Begin again, but please leave out the sarcasm.

  X: . . . It started on a day when I was thinking out a plot line—the story for what would become “The Transformation of Martin Lake.” I was walking in downtown Tallahassee, where I used to live, past some old brick buildings. The streets are all narrow and claustrophobic, and I was trying to imagine what it might be like to live in Ambergris. This was a year after the U.S. publication of City of Saints and Madmen, and they wanted more stories to flesh out a second book. I was pretty deep into my own thoughts. So I turn a corner and I look up, and there, for about six seconds—too long for a mirage, too short for me to be certain—I saw, clotted with passersby—the Borges Bookstore, the Aqueduct, and, in the distance, the masts of ships at the docks: all elements from my book. I could smell the briny silt of the river and the people were so close I could have reached out and touched them. But when I started to walk forward, it all snapped back into reality. It just snapped . . .

  I: So you thought it was real.

  X: I could smell the street—piss and spice and horse. I could smell the savory aroma of chicken cooking in the outdoor stoves of the sidewalk vendors. I could feel the breeze off the river against my face. The light—the light was different.

 
I: How so?

  X: Just different. Better. Cleaner. Different. I found myself saying, “I cannot capture the quality of this light in paint,” and I knew I had the central problem, the central question, of my character’s—Martin Lake’s—life.

  I: Your character, you will pardon me, does not interest me. I want to know why you started to walk forward. In at least three transcripts, you say you walked forward.

  X: I don’t know why.

  I: How did you feel after you saw this . . . image?

  X: Confused, obviously. And then horrified because I realized I must have some kind of illness—a brain tumor or something.

  I stared at him and frowned until he could not meet my gaze.

  “You know where we are headed,” I said. “You know where we are going. You may not like it, but you must face it.” I gestured to the transcripts. “There are things you have not said here. I will indulge you by teasing around the edges for awhile longer, but you must prepare yourself for a more blunt approach.”

  X picked up my copy of City of Saints and Madmen, began to flip through it. “You know,” he said, “I am so thoroughly sick of this book. I kept waiting for the inevitable backlash from the critics, the trickling off of interest from readers. I really wanted that. I didn’t see how such success could come so . . . effortlessly. Imagine my distress to find this world I had grown sick of, waiting for me around the corner.”

  “Liar!” I shouted, rising and bending forward, so my face was inches from his face. “Liar! You walked toward that vision because it fascinated you! Because you found it irresistible. Because you saw something of the real world there! And afterwards, you weren’t sorry. You weren’t sorry you’d taken those steps. Those steps seemed like the only sane thing to do. You didn’t even tell your wife . . . your wife”—he looked at me like I’d become a living embodiment of the coat rack gargoyles while I rummaged through the papers—“your wife Hannah that you had had a vision, that you were worried about having a brain tumor. You told us that already. Didn’t I tell you not to lie to me?”