thought 23
Teddy found something in himself it would have been impossible not to find. It is as though what he became, what he would become, was part of him all along. But it’s not like beating you over the head with it is going to make you any more keenly aware of the fact that I didn’t really write anything fiction here, for Teddy and his story. I’ve always been much too narcissistic for anything of that sort. I simply wrote myself into another character’s skin, as it withers and sags through the story of another dimension—one that ends as precisely as it began. The science of the novel is its predictability, the knowing that its story wouldn’t change from beginning to end. The fiction, I guess, is the one its characters create for themselves before and after they come into this existence—and the idea that simple conceptions have conceptions of their own. Such is man. Twisted up with his regret, Teddy inserts himself into his memory, so he can live a life that could have been: a life with Sylvie, a normal life, one filled with the comfort of knowing, what would surely seem pure perfection compared to the anguish and decrepitude he for so long suffered through. Such wonderful chaos Teddy has loosed beyond the page. How both sad and delighted I was to watch him disappear.
