Inou-Battle wa Nichijou-kei no Naka de - Volume 11 - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: Sagamicizm of the Colorful Bow

At the time Takanashi’s phone call came in, I was making my way through town, idly considering stopping by my usual arcade.

I’d blocked out the entire afternoon for unveiling the deepest mysteries of the female body, and with that option having been tragically and abruptly swept off the table, I’d more or less ended up with nothing to do. So, following my meetup with Saitou and my chat with Akutagawa, I’d ended up wandering my way into town with no particular objective in mind—and that’s when Takanashi made contact. I picked up her call and quickly learned that not only was she out and about as well, she was actually surprisingly nearby. I suggested that we might as well chat in person, so we made the arrangements to do just that.

“A hot oolong tea for me, thank you. What will you have, Sagami?”

“Oh, I’m good. I’m stuffed to bursting right now, thanks.”

“I believe it would be rather gauche for two people to claim seats in a restaurant like this with only one of them bothering to place an order.”

“Hmm. Well, why not embrace the gauche for once? They say that customers are the gods of the restaurant, after all.”

“That expression is only valid when invoked by a business’s staff. It’s not a customer’s place to use it.”

Our little debate carried on for some time, and in the end, Takanashi simply ordered two drinks unilaterally, telling me she’d have both of them. She was the sort of person who just wouldn’t compromise when it came to manners and etiquette, apparently.

Anyway, that’s how I ended up going to a chain restaurant for the second time that day. Not just any chain restaurant either—it was the exact same one that Saitou had called me over to. This particular location had a seat way in the back that was nicely separated from all the other tables, which made it the perfect venue for surreptitious conversation. The drawback, of course, was that the place’s staff were probably starting to think that I was a scummy player who’d scheduled meetups with one girl after another on the same day, but I decided to just turn a blind eye to that possibility. They weren’t entirely wrong, after all.

“So, Sagami,” Takanashi said after her oolong tea and cup of coffee arrived. “You know where Andou is at the moment?”

“Hmm,” I grunted indistinctly as I prepared to twist the truth. “Why? Did something happen?”

“No... I don’t believe this has reached the level of an incident just yet,” Takanashi replied vaguely. Her words carried a distinct lack of confidence. “He just vanished abruptly, without any sort of contact or warning. I’ve tried calling him several times, but I’ve never gotten through to him. The rest of the literary club, Kudou, and I are all searching for him at the moment...”

Sounds like Andou’s kidnapping was a bit sloppy, then. He hadn’t been carefully and cleanly sealed away in a closed space when no one was watching. No, he’d been yanked out of his slice-of-life reality, and it had been unnatural enough for his friends to catch on that something was amiss.

That said, the fact that Takanashi felt she had the time to sit down and drink a cup of tea with me hinted that she wasn’t taking her search all that seriously. Starting a whole search party for a seventeen-year-old guy who’d dropped out of contact for an afternoon was already something of an overreaction, by most standards. None of them, clearly, had come to realize just how dire of a situation Andou was actually in. They couldn’t have—convenient excuses to just know that something was wrong, like a gut instinct or a sixth sense, couldn’t possibly apply as things stood.

“Unfortunately, I haven’t the foggiest,” I said, lying with a perfectly composed smile. Of course, when I say “perfectly composed,” I mean “as perfectly composed as I could make it.” I thought I was keeping a fantastically straight face, but for all I knew, there was something unnatural about it that could have tipped her off...if it weren’t for the fact that Lost Regalia was acting upon her subconscious at that very moment, ensuring that any such hints would slip right by her.

“I see,” said Takanashi. Just as expected, she’d accepted my claim without betraying any hint of suspicion.

“So, all it takes is Andou vanishing for a minute to make everyone this worried about him? He’s one popular guy. I’m actually jealous,” I said.

“I seriously doubt that,” replied Takanashi.

“How cruel! Believe me, I really am jealous—it’s just that being jealous doesn’t necessarily mean I want to be in that position myself. I would probably pass on that, if given the choice.”

I looked up to fictional heroes, and I was jealous of them, but at the same time, I wanted no part in the disasters and anguish that those heroes were subjected to. That was simply the reader’s way.

“No need to worry,” said Takanashi. “I assure you that you could never be like Andou, even if you did aspire to it.”

“True enough,” I agreed. “How could I ever be like a man who has what it takes to make you fall for him?”

Takanashi fell silent.

“Speaking of which, how did professing your love turn out in the end?” I asked.

Takanashi turned away without a word. The look on her face was not that of a girl who had just started a new relationship. So she got turned down...but, no, that’s not quite the right expression for that. She doesn’t look sad or frustrated so much as she looks...a little unsatisfied, or confused, almost? Does that mean...she hasn’t actually opened up to him yet? But that doesn’t make sense—if that’s the case, then why did the changes that Route of Origin made to the world go away already?

“I...didn’t finish,” Takanashi somewhat sadly replied. She went on to explain that partway through her big moment, Route of Origin’s effects had been undone, forcibly returning the world to its previous state. Her confession hadn’t been a success or a failure, as it had ended before it had had the chance to succeed or fail.

“I don’t know how this came about...but by the time the world had finished returning to normal, Andou was nowhere to be seen,” Takanashi concluded.

Hmm. I think I see now. The most plausible explanation that came to mind was that Route of Origin’s forcible deactivation had been Hinoemata Tamaki’s doing. The world going through a sudden and inexplicable transformation caused by a heroine who had seemed to be just another victim was a very conventional plot twist, and Hinoemata had rejected it. That logic felt a little strained, by my mark, but I had a feeling that her power’s effects and limitations were based on her perceptions and judgment in much the same way that Route of Origin’s were based on Takanashi’s. In other words, if she thought that a development was conventional, her power treated it that way as well.

Presumably, Hinoemata had picked the moment when the world’s alterations were undone to spirit Andou away into the closed-off space she’d had prepared...and I had to say, from Takanashi’s perspective, she couldn’t have picked a more unlucky or inconvenient time to do so. What were the odds that Takanashi’s once-in-a-lifetime, do-or-die moment would happen to overlap with Hinoemata’s ambush? Was it a coincidence? Or was it exactly what Hinoemata had been aiming for? Had she deliberately chosen to obstruct Takanashi’s confession?

I paused to ponder the matter. Tell me, Tamaki—could you just not swallow it? Was the thought of Andou dating someone impossible for you to accept? I know how much of a cheat and a flirt you are, and I always had the sense you were a little into him too. You led him on with that attitude of yours, and he was hurt so deeply by your self-justifying lies that the wounds in his heart still haven’t healed...and you still have the gall to think that you were the victim after all that? You can’t stand the thought that Andou would take another girl’s hand after he refused to take yours?

All of that was pure speculation on my part, of course...but if I was right, it was quite the food for thought. It would have been truly selfish and egotistical—and amusing as all get out. She was long since finished as a heroine in my mind, but as a plain old character, she was starting to seem rather appealing. My interest was piqued, at least a little.

“You look like you’re enjoying this,” Takanashi said out of the blue, her tone exasperated and full of distaste.

“Ah! Excuse me. I didn’t mean to let that show on my face.”

“So...you’re not going to bother denying that you were enjoying it. How very typical of you. Is playing the spectator to others’ misfortune really that pleasant?”

“Oh, please, Takanashi. You’re making me out to be some sort of inhuman monster! It’s not like I specifically delight in watching people suffer—I’m no sadist, for the record. I just enjoy watching things that are enjoyable, that’s all.”

As long as a manga is enjoyable, that’s all that matters. As long as a book is enjoyable, that’s all that matters. As long as a light novel is enjoyable, that’s all that matters. As long as an anime is enjoyable, that’s all that matters. Sometimes seeing the characters smile with joy and cry out with delight brings you happiness, and sometimes seeing them fall into seemingly unsolvable dilemmas thrills and excites you. Whether the circumstances are fortunate or unfortunate, as long as the readers enjoy them, then nothing else bears any significance—and by the same logic, if the fortune or misfortune of others wasn’t enjoyable to me, then as far as I was concerned, it had no value whatsoever.

“Then again, calling me ‘inhuman’ might actually be rather apt,” I mused.

“How do you mean?” asked Takanashi.

“I mean it in the sense that I really might not be human.”

“What else would you be?”

“A god,” I said, probing to see how she would react. The answer, it turned out, was “with an entirely unconcealed cringe.”

“I’m perfectly content having Andou be the only chuunibyou sufferer in my life, thank you very much,” said Takanashi.

“Ha ha ha! Rest assured, I’m not saying that I’m a literal god. I just mean... How to put this...? Well, I mean it in the sense of that expression I brought up earlier—‘a restaurant’s customers are its gods’—in the same way, a story’s readers are its gods.”

“Readers as gods...?” Takanashi said thoughtfully. “That’s certainly a novel perspective, I suppose. I’d sooner think that authors would be the gods of their stories.”

Most people probably would have agreed with her. Authors do seem godlike, at a glance—after all, they’re the creator entities who generate stories in their minds and grant them form in reality. I, however, saw it precisely the opposite way around. The readers, in my mind, were the true gods.

If the Old Testament is to be believed, God created humanity—but whenever humanity diverged even slightly from God’s will, divine punishment was instant and brutal. Take Noah’s great flood, or the Tower of Babel. In both of those cases, God spectated humanity’s actions in minute detail and flew into a rage when people stepped away from the beaten path. God never paid any mind to the circumstances of the humans who, by all rights, were just doing their best to live, instead choosing to flatly and unapologetically deny their choices. It was that pride—that arrogance—that I saw in readers, and that led me to believe they were far more godlike than your typical author.

“Why do people enjoy stories? Why do they enjoy fiction? Stories themselves have been a part of our civilizations since time immemorial. The oldest story in history was, umm...The Tale of Genji, dating back to the Heian Era, I think?”

“Strictly speaking, The Tale of Genji is the world’s oldest full-length novel. A great number of poems and works of short-form fiction date back further than that,” said Takanashi.

“Hmm. Well, anyway, from over a thousand years ago all the way up until today, humankind has enjoyed stories. Not just plain prose—we’ve enjoyed stories, depicting characters and the fictional worlds those characters live their oh-so-interesting lives in. Why is that, do you think?”

Takanashi seemed to be at a loss for words and didn’t reply.

“It’s simple, really: because stories are entertaining,” I said.

“I...believe that’s a rather unfair answer for you to present,” Takanashi said as she shot me a pointed glare.

She had a point, honestly. What I’d just done was the equivalent of having someone ask you “Hey, why do you think that series was such a hit?” and you answering “Because it was entertaining” with a pretentious smirk. It was a completely unenlightening and unproductive answer that literally anyone could come up with, yet the fact that it was very hard to say it was strictly wrong made it unfair indeed.

“Okay, then let’s try grappling with the question on a slightly deeper level. Why do people like stories? What is it about stories that we find interesting?” I asked rhetorically. There was no one clearly correct answer, of course. Any number of people would give you any number of different replies, I’d think. But in my mind, there was just one answer... “The way I see it, it’s because the times when people experience a story are the only times they can become gods.”

“Reading stories...makes us into gods...?”

“That’s what makes them entertaining. That’s what makes people seek them out. After all, wanting to be a god is just human nature.”

Once again, Takanashi lapsed into silence.

“Of course, I’m talking about gods in the metaphorical sense again. It might be better to say that when we read stories, we have a godlike level of omnipotence,” I added.

Imagine a being who looks down upon humanity from an outside, third-person perspective, viewing our struggles and arrogantly, patronizingly critiquing them as being interesting or boring—a being who sees even matters of life and death as entertainment, who’s allowed to sum up their feelings on those matters with inhumane dispassion, saying things like “That was funny” or “I cried, for real.” A reader’s arrogance knows no bounds, and if that doesn’t make them gods, then what else could they possibly be? When we read stories—when we become readers—we come as close as we ever can to the illusion of genuine godhood.

“The sense of omnipotence granted to readers is brain-meltingly, addictively pleasurable. That’s exactly why people have needed stories since long, long ago, and why they continue to be created up to this very day. Don’t you think that makes sense?”

“I don’t think that’s all there is to it, and it’s a rather difficult theory to bring myself to approve of...but at the very least, I understand what you’re trying to say. Thus, readers are gods...” muttered Takanashi.

“I’m glad to see we’ve reached an understanding.”

“In that case, Sagami—when you claim to be a reader and treat even real, living humans as if they’re characters in a work of fiction, do you do so because you want to indulge in the godlike sense of omnipotence that you’re describing?”

“Maybe I do,” I said, muddying the waters with a vague half affirmation...or maybe “muddying the waters” isn’t the right expression. I was, after all, being completely sincere in my ambiguity. I myself didn’t fully understand it. “Maybe” was the greatest level of certainty on which I could engage with the topic. I considered myself someone who was very good at looking at things from an objective viewpoint, but on the flip side, looking at myself subjectively—viewing myself from my own internal perspective—wasn’t my strong suit. I loved watching others more than anything, but when I tried watching myself, I suddenly understood nothing at all.

Ahh, if only I were a character in a story. It’d be so easy for me to understand my own inner workings if I were. If I were in a manga, I could just read my own speech bubbles, and if I were in a novel, I could read the descriptive text about me. I’m sure there’d be something written about my inner feelings when I came onto the scene, and if I just read those lines, I could understand it all in an instant. I’d be able to read my own inner voice in plain, simple words, without any lies or pretenses in the way. If I were a character in a work of fiction...

“...Hm,” I grunted as a thought suddenly struck me. “I get the distinct impression that you view my nature—the way I treat real human beings as if they’re fictional characters—as unsettling...but in all practicality, are you really sure your perspective is correct to begin with?”

“In what sense?”

“Are you absolutely certain that we are, in fact, real human beings?”

Takanashi gave me a blank stare.

“What if, for instance, all of us are just characters in some novel?” I said, pressing onward in spite of her bemusement. “For all we know, Sagami Shizumu, Takanashi Sayumi, Andou Jurai, Kanzaki Tomoyo, Himeki Chifuyu, Kudou Mirei, and on and on—everyone we know—could all just be works of fiction, right? Maybe all the events and drama that the literary club has been through so far were just flights of fancy, dreamed up and put down upon a page...the fabricated work of some unknown author.”

I, Sagami Shizumu, was a character who viewed all humans in all their humanity as if they were nothing more than characters in a manga or a novel, enjoying and criticizing their actions as my whims drove me. That led me to a theory: somewhere out there, someone else could be observing me in much the same way. They could be assessing my character, deciding if they liked me or hated me, if I was obnoxious or fundamentally repulsive, looking down on me and smugly critiquing me from some other dimension.

Just look at the Spirit War. The spirits, beings that existed in a realm above humanity’s, made Players fight one another and gambled on the outcome. They observed and appreciated humans as a spectacle. Learning about their existence might have been what prompted a thought in me: what if it wasn’t just the Spirit War that that applied to? What if our daily lives were all being observed and appreciated as well? Observed—read—by someone we knew nothing about? By a reader whom we could never, under any circumstances, perceive?

“Maybe as we speak, there’s a reader reading every word that comes out of my mouth. Oh—but if that were true, then maybe me talking about it like this would be a pretty big problem? Characters suddenly spouting meta crap doesn’t really get a good reception most of the time. Maybe the readers who don’t like meta stuff are thinking, ‘Oh, great, the author’s jacking off over how clever he is again!’ right about now.”

Takanashi was deathly silent. Of course, that was probably the natural reaction considering how absurd and unfounded the nonsense I was spouting was. Eventually, however...

“The Late Queen Problem.”

...she spoke up.

“Huh? ‘The late queen’? Excuse me?”

“The Late Queen Problem,” Takanashi repeated. “In simple terms, it’s a structural problem inherent to the mystery genre. A large number of stories attributed to Ellery Queen are structured around it, hence the name.”

“Hmm? This is news to me. I’ve never been a huge mystery person,” I said, though if I were being honest, I would’ve said that I didn’t read mystery novels at all. I read all the big, nationally popular mystery manga, sure, but I preferred to avoid the whole rest of the genre. Frankly, I wasn’t a fan. In fact, I couldn’t stand it.

Maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, and doing so will probably come across as me crapping on the mystery genre as a whole, but I had no interest in reading stories where I didn’t know what was going to happen. Why would I want to read a story where the heroine might die or end up being the villain? No, I was into stories where the main character was an OP AF badass who transferred into an all girls’ academy, or stories where the main character was reincarnated in another world with cheat skills and got a harem. I liked nice, comfortable stories that laid their chosen fantasy on thick.

“So, Takanashi—why bring up this whole late whatever problem?” I asked.

“Your explanation brought it to mind, that’s all,” Takanashi replied. “The scenario you described was rather reminiscent of an aspect of the Late Queen Problem—that is, what people refer to as the First Late Queen Problem.”

“And what sort of problem is that?”

“It may be difficult to explain to someone who doesn’t read mysteries, but to force it into terms you’d understand...the problem boils down to the fact that a master detective can never genuinely arrive at the truth of a crime.”

“Oh?” I cocked my head without even realizing it. A master detective can never find the truth? Isn’t finding the truth exactly what makes someone a master detective though?

“In mystery novels, the starring detective gradually assembles clues, working their way toward unraveling a mystery. Once they’ve amassed all the clues they need, they reason their way to the truth of the mystery and put on a show of explaining their logic to the cast of characters involved in the incident.”

“Hmm.”

“In short, in order for the detective to solve the mystery—to arrive at the truth—they have to find all the hints that point toward that solution...but in truth, there’s no way for anyone to ever possibly tell whether all of the evidence in a mystery story has actually been discovered.”

“Huh...? Wait, no, of course you could. You can tell you’re almost at the end just by looking at how many pages are left in the book! And besides, doesn’t the detective starting to explain their logic prove that they’ve found all the clues on its own?”

“That’s something we can only say from a reader’s perspective. The detective within the story has no concrete means of proving that they’ve truly found all the clues relating to the mystery they’re trying to solve.”

I paused to mull the idea over, and in the meantime, Takanashi carried on.

“Even if the detective believes that they’ve unraveled the mystery in full—even if the criminal confesses their crimes—there could always be another perpetrator lurking behind the scenes who secretly pulled all the strings. There could be a true villain who manipulated the criminal into committing their misdeeds without the criminal having ever even realized it. As readers, we know that there is no true villain—that there can’t be a secret character who never appears at any point in the text of the story—but the detective has no such knowledge, and they can’t prove that an overarching undiscovered criminal doesn’t exist.”

“Proving that something doesn’t exist... This is starting to veer toward probatio diabolica territory.”

“So long as a mystery novel remains a mystery novel, the work itself can never prove that the solution it presents to its central mystery is, in fact, the complete and genuine truth. After all, the detective can never know whether information that they simply aren’t aware of exists—and that is the First Late Queen Problem.”

“Ha ha! Interesting. That’s so meta that it’s almost hilarious,” I said.

To put this whole matter into simple shonen manga terms: when the protagonist beats the final boss of the story, there isn’t really any way for them to prove that the character they beat was truly the final boss. If they don’t know for sure it’s really over, isn’t it kind of weird for them to act like the problem is totally done and dusted? Or, well, something to that effect, anyway.

Hmm. It’s not that I didn’t understand what she was saying, per se—it just felt like a lot of quibbling no matter how I looked at it. If you posted something like that online, people would probably think you were just an obnoxious hater, out to flame the story for no good reason. They’d probably be all “You could just not read manga, y’know?” and stuff.

“What you were describing before, Sagami—the idea that we may all be characters in a work of fiction—strikes me as rather similar to the Late Queen Problem. We ourselves are incapable of conclusively proving that we’re not fictional. Nor, for that matter, could we ever prove that we are fictional. We can never exceed the boundaries of our own perceptions, so if, hypothetically, you were correct and a reader in another world was observing our every action, there would be no conceivable means for us to perceive them. In short, arguing the point at all is an exercise in futility.”

“...”

“This has all become a little hard to follow, hasn’t it...? In retrospect, I suppose that ‘The Butterfly Dream’ might have been a better example to invoke.”

“Oh! That one, I know. That was Zhuangzi’s idea, wasn’t it?”

“The Butterfly Dream”: one day, Zhuang Zhou (often known as Zhuangzi) dreamed he’d become a butterfly. In that dream, he forgot all about having ever been a human, flying freely wherever his whims took him, until suddenly he awoke with a start, recalling that he was a human named Zhuang Zhou in a flash. In that moment, a thought occurred to him: had he become a butterfly in a dream, or was he a butterfly who was now dreaming of being a human?

That’s the tale, in broad strokes. It was easy enough to laugh off—of course he wasn’t a butterfly dreaming of being human—but just like the five-minute hypothesis, when it came time to actually prove the matter one way or another, there was simply no way to manage it. So long as we are human, that proof remains beyond us.

“So, the current me, the human being named Sagami Shizumu, could very well be someone else—maybe even something not human at all—dreaming of being Sagami Shizumu, just like I could be a fictional character in a work written by some unknown author? Interesting. You’re right—they are more or less the same assertion, in the end,” I admitted.

“No one could say for sure whether the butterfly or the human was their real self, and no one can prove whether this world is real or a work of fiction. We can’t prove the truth one way or another, and we can’t definitively rule out either possibility. No matter how preposterous the hypothesis may seem, it’s still possible to argue it into a place of potential reality if you’re willing to twist logic enough to do so. In other words, arguing the point—”

“...is an exercise in futility.”

“Quite so,” Takanashi said definitively, then paused to take a sip of her tea.

Hm. How strange. Is it just me, or has she argued me into a corner? If someone said she’d just argued circles around me, I wouldn’t have been able to dispute the idea. Normally, I’d expect to have felt frustrated by that, but strangely enough, her polite and logical refutation of the point I’d tried to make had left me feeling almost refreshed instead.

“You know, you’re incredible, Takanashi,” I said.

“...”

“Could you maybe try to look at least a little less openly suspicious?” Hmmm. I’m starting to notice a pattern: giving compliments to people who know what I’m like gets me nothing but scowls in exchange. Not that I didn’t bring that upon myself, but still. “I’m really, genuinely impressed, that’s all. Inspired, even. I was perfectly aware that I was coming at you with a nonsensical, downright insane theory, and yet instead of dismissing me, laughing at me, or condescending to me, you listened and offered a well-reasoned explanation of your own opinion in exchange.”

I’d been fully prepared for a “What the hell are you talking about, you lunatic?” when I’d brought the subject up, but she’d engaged with my ideas and willingly responded to them. That was beyond my expectations, and honestly, it was rather nice. I believe it’s human nature to want others to identify with you—to seek out affirmation—but even when you don’t get either of those things, having someone at least hear your ideas out and take them seriously is by no means unpleasant.

“Andou thinks so too, you know? He tells me all the time that he loves that side of you,” I said.

“H-He does?”

“No, I just made that up.”

Takanashi went red in the face as she took in a sharp breath and shot me a frigid glare. Ooh, how terrifying!

I’d been lying about Andou having said that to me, yes, but in all fairness, I had gotten the distinct impression that he really felt that way. He might not have used the word “love,” but it certainly seemed like he earnestly respected Takanashi’s conscientiousness and sincerity.

“I don’t believe I’ve done anything worthy of being complimented today,” said Takanashi. “I was simply taught from a young age to listen carefully to people when they speak to me.”

“The fact that you actually follow through on all the things they taught you to do when you were little strikes me as plenty praiseworthy on its own,” I countered. “It’s probably not my place to say this, but listening carefully to someone like me must be more than a little stress-inducing.”

“You’re right. It isn’t your place to say that,” Takanashi said, then she heaved a deep sigh...before suddenly laughing like a person who’d acquiesced to their fate. “In spite of everything, the two of us seem to have reached a point where we can manage a casual chat, haven’t we? I’d sooner not have to see you at all, but the thought of running away from you was so vexing that I couldn’t bring myself to, and now here I am, speaking with you face-to-face.”

“I guess you just buckled to social pressure.”

“I’m inclined to agree...but regardless, thanks to that decision, I’ve reached an understanding.”

After saying that, Takanashi looked straight at me. She gazed right into my eyes, silently and intently.

A chill ran down my spine, and I shuddered reflexively. I felt a strange sense of unease. It was like she was staring right through me—reading me. Takanashi was trying to view me in my totality. She was assessing who Sagami Shizumu was as a character...or at least, that’s the sense I got. This was a first for me. I liked acting as a third party, viewing those around me from up on high and delivering conceited impressions of their actions unsolicited. Having someone else assess me—look at me in that same way—was something new.

“At first, I didn’t know what to make of you as a person. I found you off-putting—severely disquieting on occasion—but that was the extent of it. That said, over the course of our many recent exchanges, I believe I’ve come to understand what drives you, at least to some extent,” said Takanashi. She spoke like a simple reader, sharing her impression of the work she’d just consumed.

“You aren’t a reader, Sagami. You’re—”

I didn’t hear a single word she said after that point. Well, I probably heard her in a physical sense, but what she said didn’t manage to reach my heart or mind at all. My instincts—my nature—my character—rejected her impression of me. I couldn’t hear it. I couldn’t accept it. I couldn’t let it be portrayed as dialogue.

If I heard what she had to say, I would have ceased to be myself—to be a reader. I don’t know why I had that sense, but it was very clear to me.