From Here to Paternity

professor who had assigned as the class’s term-paper subject, “Imagination.“ The students were to come up with a concrete theory that explained imagination, especially in regard to the writers they’d studied that semester. Jane had invented “The Warehouse with the Madman in the Back Room,“ and hadn’t thought about it again for years.
    The theory went like this: your brain is a great warehouse where every fact, experience, and sensation is stored. There are acres and acres of shelving. All fairly neatly organized and labeled. At least at first. A child has only a relatively few, but very big, important things stored, and the warehouse manager keeps all that big, important stuff on low shelves near the front where it’s easily accessible. The madman— Imagination—can romp around freely, putting a gadget from this fact on that sensation, substituting a gizmo from one bit of information for a thingamabob holding together another two facts. This is why young children are so creative and uninhibited with their imaginations: the madman has free run of the place.
    But as time goes on, the warehouse manager, and the outside world, conspire against the madman. The shelves get fuller and fuller. Parents and teachers start requiring the warehouse manager to get his act together and be able to find and supply things more efficiently when they’re required. Of necessity, stuff starts getting put on higher shelves, and the warehouse manager can’t have the madman capering about recklessly while the manager is climbing ladders to find things.
    So the madman gets put away in the back room during the day. He’s only free at night, while the manager is sleeping. At night, the madman rules the warehouse, making dreams and nightmares. And sometimes he plays with the shiny new stuff—the nine times tables or the geography of South America. Other stuff he ignores, or actually dislikes enough to destroy—like the seven times tables and the necessity of writing thank-you notes for birthday presents.
    And still life goes on. New things keep coming in. The warehouse manager starts running out of easily accessible room, so he begins shoving old stuff farther back on the shelves and putting the new stuff in front. And he’s getting older, too. His enthusiasm for doing a perfect job is waning. His organizational skills start slipping. And that damned curious, capering madman is driving him crazy. So eventually he locks the madman up entirely. Only on rare occasions does the manager forget to lock up the madman’s room at night, and he gets out and bats around, creating wild dreams.
    In Jane’s theory, a writer could make use of the madman, but not with any reliability. When the writer needed something, the warehouse manager would tear up one aisle and down another, tossing random bits of this and that, old movies, new sensations, mislabeled facts, dusty old memories into a basket, which he’d then toss in the back room to the madman. The madman, thrilled with these toys, would reassemble the bits into something barely recognizable and toss it back out for the writer to use. It was all supplies from the writer’s own mental warehouse, but in a form nobody had ever imagined before.
    Jane hadn’t thought about the madman for a long time, but now she sensed that the light was on in his little cell at the back of the warehouse. She’d been here for only two full days, but she’d dumped a lot of new material on the doorstep of the warehouse and she had the belief—or was it only the longing to believe?—that she knew nearly everything she needed to know to make sense of the seemingly senseless deaths. If only the warehouse manager would toss the right facts, impressions, and sensations to the madman. Maybe she could figure out why Bill Smith and Doris Schmidtheiser had been killed. Then she could close off the “Colorado Vacation“ shelf and get on with her life without having to keep on wondering.
    But forty-eight hours from now she’d be on her way home—provided the sheriff didn’t detain her! No, she couldn’t even contemplate that. Even getting away from here was going to be awful. They had an eight o’clock flight, which meant that they’d all have to be up and moving pretty briskly by five at the latest to get everything, including Willard, packed up, down the mountain, through rush-hour Denver traffic, and to the airport. They’d have to return the rental car, check Willard and the baggage through, and