In the night room Page 0,87

and the Institute I went to aren’t real anymore, when they used to be? How come the stuff I remember seems to come from you? What the hell happened, did you make me up or something?”

The waitress appeared at our booth and gave us each a laminated menu. “Oh, aren’t those cute?” she said, pointing at the hundred-dollar bills Willy had left on the table. “They almost look real. Can I pick one up?”

“You can keep it, if you like,” Willy said. “I gather they’re not exactly—what’s the word?—fungible. I want a hamburger, medium. With fries. Make that two hamburgers, with fries.”

The waitress said, “Wow, it even feels real. So your name is L’Duith? What is that, French?” She was a comfortable woman in her mid-forties who looked as though she had been born wearing a hairnet.

“It’s part of an anagram,” I said. Willy was staring at me intently. “I’ll have a medium burger, too. And a Diet Coke.”

The waitress went off to the kitchen, and Willy focused on me in a way I found extravagantly painful.

I looked down at my hands, then back at her. Her eyes concentrated on mine, and I knew she was watching for signs of evasiveness or duplicity. She would have spotted a lie or a deliberate ambiguity before the words left my mouth.

“Right after we sat down, you asked me if I made you up. I don’t suppose you were being completely serious, but you hit the truth right bang on the head. Everything you know and everything that ever happened to you—in fact, everything you ever did before you showed up at that reading—came out of my head. As far as you’re concerned, I might as well be God.”

“You know, when I first saw you, I did think you were kind of godlike. I worshipped you. And you were certainly pretty godlike in bed!”

The waitress chose that moment to place two glasses of water on our table. Her face made it clear that she’d heard Willy’s last remark and had interpreted it to mean that I was a lecherous pig. She wheeled away.

“Oops,” Willy said.

“I worship you, too,” I said. “These simple words, all this deep feeling. I hope this is what God feels for his creatures.”

I moved my hand to the center of the table, and she placed hers in it. We were both on the verge of tears.

“Say more,” Willy said. “This is going to be the bad part, I know, but you have to tell me. Don’t be weak now. How could you make me up?”

She was right. I had to tell her the truth. “Before you showed up, I was writing a book. Its first sentence was something like, ’In a sudden shaft of brightness, a woman named Willy Bryce Patrick turned her slightly dinged Mercedes away from the Pathmark store on the north side of Hendersonia, having succumbed to the temptation’— no, it was ‘compulsion’—’having succumbed to the compulsion, not that she had much choice,’ I forget what comes next, something about driving a little more than two miles on Union Street, which I also happened to make up.”

“Your first sentence was about me.”

“You didn’t exist until I wrote that sentence. That’s where you were born. Hendersonia was born then, too, and Michigan Produce, and the Baltic Group, and everything else.”

“That’s nuts. I was born in Millhaven.”

“Should we call the Births and Deaths office, or whatever it’s called, and ask them to find your birth certificate?”

She looked uncomfortable.

“Willy, the reason you couldn’t find Hendersonia in the atlases is that Hendersonia only exists in the book I was writing. I named it after a book about Fletcher Henderson.”

“In your book, you named a town after another book?”

“The name of the book is Hendersonia. A man named Walter C. Allen wrote it. It’s a wonderful book, if you’re obsessively interested in Fletcher Henderson. Do you know who he was?”

“A great bandleader and arranger. In the twenties, he hired Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. Big influence on Benny Goodman.”

“See? You’re not a geeky jazz fan, Willy. You know that because I know it. Stuff from my head, at least the kind of stuff I think is important, gets into yours. Your memory is really my memory.”

“This is . . . Even with the things that have been happening, it’s still hard for me to believe that . . .” She removed her hand from mine and made a vague shape in the air.

“Let me tell you some things about yourself that