Daniel James
Through lies every novelist attempts to tell the truth about the world.247
It took another writer to help me realise how lost I was. He taught me why living inside a book is so dangerous. You can never see the whole story when you’re a part of it. The system is only visible from the outside. Only then can you begin to understand its true meaning. I was losing myself in a fiction Maas had created, and I could no longer tell where the world ended and his art began. The stories I was being told about Maas’s life were haunting my dreams. They were powerfully vivid, hyperreal. I couldn’t sleep without losing myself. I couldn’t see a way out.248
I was in the back of a cab on my way to an address in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, to see a writer who didn’t want to be interviewed and who I wouldn’t be allowed to name even if he did turn out to be part of the story. As a result I’d had to invent a cover just to get this far. The author, let’s call him Quinn, lived in a tall brownstone on a beautiful residential street that was lined with trees. He saw me coming from the window and opened the door to greet me as I climbed the steps. I followed him into a large living room, minimally decorated and spotlessly clean, with Scandinavian furnishings and modern art on the walls.
‘You’re not here to interview me about my new book, are you?’ he said as I sat down.
Quinn was in his late sixties, handsome, with a crumpled, heavily-lined face, silvery-grey hair, receding and swept back, above a set of dark, piercing eyes like a bird of prey. He wore faded chinos, sneakers, and a blue denim shirt.
‘I’m sorry,’ I replied. ‘I may have misled your publisher somewhat.’
Quinn looked neither surprised nor worried. He simply took out a packet of petit cigarillos, struck a match, and began to smoke.
‘You’re not here to kill me either, I hope?’ he said after a moment. ‘I try to restrict that kind of thing to my books.’
‘I’m here about Ezra Maas,’ I said.
‘Even worse,’ he replied with a half-smile. ‘And what makes you think I know anything about him?’
‘Because of his absence from your books.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m not following your logic.’
‘I know for a fact that you met Ezra Maas several times between 1970 and 1985, first in Paris then later in Bruges. And yet there’s no mention of those meetings in your autobiography or any of your novels, which are otherwise filled with autobiographical fragments from your life.’
‘And you’re here to find out why?’
‘I just want the truth,’ I said.
‘The truth is an elusive quarry,’ Quinn replied. ‘I suppose you have proof that I knew Maas?’
I took out the faded photograph I had obtained from the restaurant in Bruges and held it up for him to see.
‘That’s you, isn’t it?’ I asked.
Quinn responded by taking a seat in a brown leather armchair. He gestured for me to sit opposite.249
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‘I wish I could tell you more about him, but I can’t,’ Quinn said. ‘Maas and I crossed paths, maybe four times in total, but I could have spent a hundred years with the man and I wouldn’t have felt any closer to him. It was like he wasn’t there.’
after what happened in Paris, but something obviously stopped you from taking it any further. What was it?’
‘I’ve told you. Maas is a black hole. His presence draws everything in, warps, destroys, changes and rewrites it. No one you’ve spoken to and nothing you’ve heard can be trusted. The people he’s manipulated don’t even know they’re lying for him and if they don’t know anything out in Europe, it’s because he has wanted you to. Maybe some of it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but you’ll never know one way or another and that uncertainty will erode everything you were so certain about, all that you hold dear, eating away at the book, at you, until it all falls apart. ‘I’ve told you. Maas is a black hole. His presence draws everything in, warps, destroys, changes and rewrites it. No one you’ve spoken to and nothing you’ve heard can be trusted. The people he’s manipulated don’t even know they’re lying for him and if they don’t know you can never know. Every word of your manuscript could be a lie. He has distorted the lines between art and reality to such an extent that they have become indistinguishable. If you’ve found anything out in Europe, it’s because he has wanted you to. Maybe some of it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but you’ll never know one way or another and that uncertainty will erode everything you were so certain about, all that you hold dear, eating away at the book, at you,you can never know. Every word of your manuscript could be a lie. He has distorted the lines between art and reality to such an extent that they have become indistinguishable. If you’ve found anything out in Europe, it’s because he has wanted you to. Maybe some of it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but you’ll never know one way or another and that uncertainty will erode everything you were so certain about, all that you hold dear, eating away at the book, at you, until it all falls apart. ‘I’ve told you. Maas is a black hole. His presence draws everything in, warps, destroys, changes and rewrites it. No one you’ve spoken to and nothing you’ve heard can be trusted. The people he’s manipulated don’t even know they’re lying for him and if they don’t know you can never know. Every word of your manuscript could be a lie. He has distorted the lines between art and reality to such an extent that they have become indistinguishable. If you’ve found anything out in Europe, it’s because he has wanted you to. Maybe some of it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but you’ll never know one way or another and anything out in Europe, it’s because he has wanted you to. Maybe some of it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but you’ll never know one way or another and that uncertainty will erode everything you were so certain about, all that you hold dear, eating away at the book, at you, until it all falls apart. ‘I’ve told you. Maas is a black hole. His presence draws everything in, warps, destroys, changes and rewrites it. No one you’ve spoken to and nothing you’ve heard can be trusted. The people he’s manipulated don’t even know they’re lying for him and if they don’t know you can never know. Every word of your manuscript could be a lie. He has distorted the lines between art and reality to such an extent that they have become indistinguishable. If you’ve found anything out in Europe, it’s because he has wanted you to. Maybe some of it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but you’ll never know one way or another and
‘I don’t understand…how is that possible?’ I said.
‘I don’t understand…
‘You’ve given me more than you realise. I just don’t understand why you didn’t write a biography yourself. You’ve told me how much you wanted to find out the truth about him after what happened in Paris, but something obviously stopped you from taking it any further. What was it?’
I sat in silence for a moment, thinking carefully about everything he had just told me and what it meant. It was hard to believe. The light coming through the bay window had the faded quality of late afternoon, as if hours had passed while we had been talking, but it had been morning when I arrived.
‘I’m sorry I can’t be of more help,’ Quinn said finally.
‘You’ve given me more than you realise,’ I replied. ‘I just don’t understand why you didn’t write a biography yourself. You’ve told me how much you wanted to find out the truth about him after what happened in Paris, but something obviously stopped you from taking it any further. What was it?’
‘I realised it couldn’t be done,’ he said. ‘There is no truth when it comes to Ezra Maas and that’s what you need to come to terms with. You’ve travelled across Europe and now you’re here in the United States, you’ve probably interviewed dozens of people, and spent countless hours doing research. You’ll have no doubt written tens of thousands of words. When you’re finished here you’ll head off to San Francisco, Los Angeles, or somewhere else he’s lived and worked, there will be more interviews, more research and, in a few months, you will land back in London to write your book, but what you can’t see is that every piece of information you’ve gathered, every testimony, every word, is false.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve told you. Maas is a black hole. His presence draws everything in, warps, destroys, changes, and rewrites it. No one you’ve spoken to and nothing you’ve heard can be trusted. The people he has manipulated don’t even know they’re lying for him, and if they don’t know then you never will, either. It’s like Orwell wrote, if you control the human mind, you control reality.250 Every word of your manuscript could be a lie. He has distorted the lines between art and reality to such an extent that they have become indistinguishable. If you’ve found anything out, in Europe, it’s because he wanted you to. Maybe some of it was true, maybe it wasn’t, but you’ll never know one way or another and that uncertainty will erode everything. It will destroy you.’
‘Is that what happened to you? Did you start down this road and turn back?’
‘I looked into Maas’s eyes and I saw the price of the questions I was asking. I weighed it up and decided I would be far happier, and much safer, pretending he didn’t exist.’
‘So if everything I’ve discovered so far, all my research, all my notes, everything I’ve written, is all worthless, if no one I’ve spoken to can be trusted, if they’re all telling me what Maas wants me to hear, then why should I believe you? Maas could be pulling your strings right now just like all the others, whether you know it or not.’
‘You’re right of course, but if you look in the mirror I think you’ll see the truth. Take a long, hard, look at yourself and tell me that I’m lying. Maybe then you’ll see what I see; what I noticed the minute you stepped out of that cab this morning.’
‘And what’s that?’ I asked.
‘You’re not really here.’
I stood up to leave. Quinn stood and placed his hand on my forearm.
‘Walk away from this while you still can,’ he added. ‘Let it go.’
‘I can’t…’ I pulled my arm away. ‘I’m not saying you were wrong to give up. You obviously have a good life, the kind I wanted once. It’s worked out for you, but I have a different path ahead of me. I know the risks now. Maybe I didn’t fully understand them when I took this job, but I do now and I’m more determined than ever to find the truth.’
Quinn shook his head, his eyes weary.
‘Your pride will be your undoing.’
‘No, it’ll be his. You were right about one thing, Quinn. This book will destroy someone, but it won’t be me.’
END
Notes
247. Paul Auster, The Art of Fiction No. 178, The Paris Review.
248. Note to reader: I was normally a fast reader, but the manuscript seemed to demand that I read it at a slow, deliberate, pace and an intensity I had never experienced before. Before the end of the first week my eyesight seemed to deteriorate and I began to suffer from crippling headaches. At 150 pages, I developed a fever and spent the second week in bed. And yet, I continued reading and re-reading. I couldn’t stop. I wept, I laughed, I threw the book down in anger more than once, only to pick it up again. Its hold on me was relentless and unforgiving. When I slept I dreamt of the world inside the book. The lives of even the most one-note characters, who walked in and out of the story never to be seen again, became of immense importance to me. They lived-on outside of the book. In these dreams Daniel was never there but, like Maas before him, his absence could be felt everywhere; in every room and every building; in every street and every city he had created and abandoned; in the face of every character he had authored, only to leave orphaned. In the intervals, between readings, I began to see my own life through the lens of the narrative’s multi-layered spirals; its unrelenting atmosphere of paranoia. Every time the phone rang I found myself paralysed, convinced it was either the unnamed client with further instructions, one of Maas’s crazed and disturbed followers, or perhaps a representative from the ominous Maas Foundation. I was so convinced that I was being watched that I didn’t leave the house for two days after a black, unmarked van, with tinted windows, parked in the street opposite my property. It didn’t end there. Whenever I resumed reading the book the text appeared to have changed. I could never quite find the exact last line I remembered reading. Instead, a similar but subtly different sentence was in its place. I found myself going back over the same pages again and again, looking for words, sentences, paragraphs, sometimes whole chapters, that I believed I had read, but which now appeared to have shifted position, or had disappeared altogether. Was the book a physical puzzle as well as a textual? A literary labyrinth that changed shape when you dared to take your eyes from its pages? I recalled the ‘cut-up’ technique employed by Burroughs and Ginsberg while assembling The Naked Lunch in a Paris hotel room and an idea occurred to me. To make sense of the text by reordering the chapters, I physically carved the manuscript into three with a kitchen knife. It was only when I caught a glimpse of myself, hunched over the book with the blade held high, my hands smudged with ink, that I realised how absurd and disturbing my behaviour had become. I found myself asking the question: if this was the cost of reading the book, what was the cost of writing it? – Anonymous.
249. Note to reader: The conversation that followed became the subject of a long-running legal dispute between Daniel’s publisher and the author referred to as ‘Quinn’ in this chapter. As a result it is not possible to publish the full conversation here. Daniel included more than he should have in his original manuscript and I have been forced to redact several passages, after consulting with the book’s new publisher and their legal team – Anonymous.
250. Loosely paraphrased from George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four – Anonymous.