The Book of Air and Shadows

have been true? Who could I ask? Not my siblings. Miriam would not know the truth if it bit her on her liposuctioned ass and Paul…I suppose Paul thinks he has a professional commitment with the truth but he is also in service to a Higher Truth, and people in such service are often inclined to lie like bastards when defending same. What if everything I thought about my past was wrong? What if I am a kind of fictional character, fed with lies for the purposes of others, or maybe for no purpose at all, or for sadistic amusement? Being alone, having no social function just now, aggravates this feeling of unreality, or incipient madness. Perhaps I will start to hallucinate, whatever hallucinations are. Although feeling one is going mad is supposedly a sign one is not. If you really go crazy, everything makes perfect sense.
    What is the ground of reality then, once you admit mnemonic forgery? When I consider this question I have to think of Amalie. As far as I know, Amalie has never told a serious lie in her life. I mean, I believe she would lie to save someone, like to the Gestapo about a hidden fugitive, otherwise not. But it turns out that if you consistently lie
to
someone like that, they sort of have to
withdraw
their function as the foundation of your reality, like a little snail pulling in its horns, leaving you adrift in a dense and opaque gas of fiction. It’s not intentional on their part, it’s an aspect of the underlying physics of the moral universe. And so, thus adrift, I naturally produce nothing but more fiction. I am a lawyer and what is a lawyer but someone hired to produce a work of fiction, which, in court, will be compared with opposing counsel’s work of fiction by a judge or jury, and they will decide which fiction most closely resembles the fictional picture of the world in their respective brains and decide for one or another side and thus is justice done. And in private life, I will continue to dream up people to play in the continuing tedious novel of my existence, Miranda, for example, as the Ultimately Satisfying Mate (and by God I am still thinking about her, wanting her, that phantasm) and Mickey Haas as the Best Friend.

    Well, in the midst of this sorry maundering, my sister just called. Reception is quite good here, for there is a tower right on the property, artfully painted to resemble the trunk of a pine. Here is how plans break down. My father had stashed her and my children in an apartment known only to himself, and what did she do but journey from that apartment to her own apartment on Sutton Place to get some clothes and other things, her Botox perhaps, and she took the kids along with her because they were getting so bored with being cooped up and needless to say some of Shvanov’s people were waiting for her there and they took the kids. So the quasi-fictional kidnapping is now a real one. This occurred early this morning and they tied her up, and it was only the cleaning person’s arrival that released her. My sister is not really that stupid, but she does like to look her best.
    I did not expect this part of it. But I did and do expect the imminent arrival of various parties to
l’affaire
Bracegirdle. Mickey will come, because he wants to complete the last part of his marvelous scam, but he will not come alone. I am trying, for the record, to recall when I first understood that Mickey was himself the tertium quid we had discussed, the link between Bulstrode and Shvanov. The mind assembles bits of information in its own time and then the revelation. I can’t imagine why I did not immediately see this. Who else could it be? Maybe it was when Oliver March told us the story about how Mickey had treated poor Bulstrode or maybe it was when I learned that Shvanov was a loan shark who had done well out of the market crash, lending money to rich assholes suddenly illiquid. And is not Mickey a rich asshole with money problems? And did I imagine that his wives, in the midst of the sort of arguments Mickey always got into with his wives, would not have, as a sort of marital nuclear strike, confront him with the fact that I had screwed them all, and would that not make him hate me and plan some terrible revenge? Why didn’t I think of all this? Because I had dreamed him up as the Best Friend, of course. The Confidant.
    I also must have known at some deep level after our meeting with the forger Pascoe that there was only one person in my ambit who could have come up with the scam he