I closed the book on my index finger and looked at Anna. "He was afraid that Galen would disappear after he died?"

"No, not the physical Galen – only the people and the animals that were his. He didn't create the town – only the people."

"I guess he was wrong then, huh? I mean, everybody is still here, aren't they?" Way off in the outside distance a train hooted.

"Yes, but not completely. Before Father died, he had written the history of the town up until the year three thousand –"

"Three thousand?"

"Yes, three thousand and fourteen. He was still working on it when he died. Absolutely unexpectedly. He lay down for a nap one afternoon and died. It was horrible. Everyone here was terrified that they all would disappear the moment he passed away, so when it actually did happen and things remained the same, we were jubilant."

"Anna, do you know the story by Borges, 'The Circular Ruins'?"

"No."

"A guy wants to create a man in his dreams, but not just a little dream man – a real flesh-and-blood man. The real thing."

"Does he do it?" She smoothed her hand across the top of the couch.

"Yes."

There's a point where even a sponge can't absorb any more water but reaches a saturation point. Too much stimulus, too many things happening all at once, all of them incredible, but taken together, they made my brain play five-dimensional chess.

She patted the cushion beside her. "Come on, Thomas, come here and sit down next to me."

"I don't think I want to right now."

"Thomas, I want you to know everything. I want to try to be totally honest with you. I want you to know about me, Galen, Father, everything.

"Do you know why?" She shifted completely around so that she faced me over the back of the sofa. Her damned breasts rested on that soft shelf. "A couple of years ago everything that Father had written was still happening. If someone was supposed to give birth to a boy on Friday, the ninth of January, it happened. Everything went as he had written it down in his Galen Journals. It was Utopian –"

"Utopian? Really? Well, then, what about dying? Aren't people here a little afraid of dying?"

She closed her eyes and shook her head. The dumb student was asking a dumb question again. "Not at all, because death is nothingness."

"Oh, come on, Anna. Don't get heavy and religious with me now, all right? Just answer the question."

"No, Thomas, you misunderstand me. Remember that when one of them dies, it isn't the same thing as when a normal person dies. When we go, there is a chance that there's a heaven or a hell. For the people in Galen, Father didn't create an afterlife for them, so there is no question in their minds. They just disappear. Poof!" She flung her unclenched hands up as if releasing fireflies.

"An existentialist's delight, eh?"

"Yes, and since they know that nothing comes afterward for them, they don't worry about it. Nobody is going to judge them or throw them into a fiery pit. They live and they die. As a result, most of them spend their lives trying to be as happy as possible."

"But doesn't anyone rebel? Don't at least some of them want to live longer?"

"Of course, but that isn't possible. They have to get used to it."

"And nobody complains? Nobody runs away?"

"Any Galener who tries to leave, dies."

"Uh-oh, now, look –"

She laughed and fluttered a hand at me. "No, no, I don't mean it that way. This was part of Father's security system. As long as the people live here, everything will be fine for them. But if they try to leave and they're gone for more than one week, then they die of heart attacks or cerebral hemorrhages, fulminating hepatitis…." The hand fluttered again and floated, weightless, back down to the couch. "It's silly to talk about, because no one ever tries to leave, because it hasn't been written –"

"Written! Written! So all right, so where is this great almightly oracle of his?"

"You will see it in a little while, but I want you to know the story of it first, so that when you do see it, you will understand everything better."

"Ha! Fat chance of that. I'm not understanding things now!"

Anna's story was fantastic and involved, and she made a hundred detours along the way. I ended up sitting next to her on the couch, but only after I'd spent an hour perched uncomfortably on the hot radiator beneath the windowsill.

Marshall France began The Night Races into Anna to make his daughter feel better. One of the main characters in the book was his good friend Dorothy Lee, only he changed her name to Dorothy Little. After he accidentally "killed" her and the cats came to tell him, he realized what he was capable of doing. He stopped writing The Night Races and began The Galen Journals. For months he researched, wrote, and rewrote. Since he was a perfectionist, he would sometimes do twenty drafts of a book before he felt that it was right, so it isn't hard to imagine how long he worked and "prepared" for Galen.

The first person he created after Dorothy Lee was a man named Karl Tremmel. An innocuous plumber from Pine Island, New York, who brought his wife and two little girls out to Galen in a silver Airstream trailer. There hadn't been a plumber in Galen in years.

Then came a barber named Sillman, a mortician named Lucente (I tried to smile at the in joke, but I didn't have it in me)… and the parade of Marshall France characters was on.

They lived quiet, uneventful lives except for a post-office clerk named Bernard Stackhouse, who got drunk one night and accidentally blew his head off with a shotgun.

Et cetera, et cetera. A small factory outside of town that employed five hundred people caught fire mysteriously in the middle of the night, and after the insurance claims were settled, the owners decided to relocate a hundred miles closer to St. Louis.

"In a few years the only ones left here were Father and I, Richard, and 'Father's people.'"

"Why did he let Richard stay?"

"Oh, because we needed to have at least a couple of normal people in case some kind of emergency ever came up and one of us would have to leave here for a while. Remember, the others will die if they leave for more than a week."

"How did he get the rest of the 'normal' people to go? The ones who didn't work at the factory?"

"Father wrote it so that some of them – some of the normal Galeners – wanted to move on. One person was convinced that his house was haunted, another man's natural-gas tank exploded when he was away on vacation and he decided to move to Illinois… Do you want me to go on?"

"And none of them suspected anything?"

"No, of course not. Father wrote it so that everything would look totally natural and acceptable. He didn't want anyone to come around asking questions."

"Did he ever… ?" One of my fear-yawns took over. "Did he ever use, uh, violence?"

"No. No one was hurt when the factory burned down. But it depends on what you would call violence. He did cause the fire and he did make that man's gas tank explode. But he never hurt anyone. He didn't need to, Thomas. He could write anything he wanted."

France went on creating, but he didn't know how long it would last. That's why Anna had had me read that one notebook entry. In the end, he decided that the only thing he could do was to get down as much about each character as he could and then take it as far into the future as he could go. Then hope for the best to happen after he died.

"It will probably be explained in the notebooks, Anna, but just how much of people's lives did he control? I mean, does it say things like, 'Eight-twelve Joe Smith woke up and yawned for three seconds. Then he – '"

She shook her head. "No, no. He found that he could leave most of their lives up to them. Later on, he decided only about the big things in their lives, the big events – who they were to marry, how many children each of them would have, when they died and how…. He wanted them to have –"