One World, Told Twice

The rule I made before I wrote a word of The Image, and what it cost to keep

21 September ~ 3 min read

Before I wrote a sentence of The Image, I wrote a rule on an index card and stood it against the lamp: Nobody travels.

The premise practically begs for travel. A museum technician in Los Angeles sounds a five-hundred-year-old conch; a young woman in Tenochtitlan hears a conch across the lake. The obvious book has a door between them—a portal, a dream, a fever, a shell that is a time machine. I love some of those books. I did not want to write one, because the moment a character crosses over, the reader relaxes. Travel means the two places are separate, and separate places can be left. I wanted a book in which there was nowhere to go.

So the two books of The Image are not two worlds. They are two descriptions of one.

Book I is a year in Los Angeles. Book II counts down the last twenty days in Tenochtitlan. The four women who enter Mateo’s year—at a café, in a classroom, at a service gate, at a water valve—are, in Book II, the four women joined to the god’s image and named for four goddesses. They are the same women, described a second time. The gifts are the same gifts. The gate on its latch is the same gate. Nobody has gone anywhere; the description has changed, and the reader is the only person in either city who has read both.

A composer has a word for this, and it is canon: one line, entering twice, at different times, and the ear hearing the result as a single music. The trick of a canon is that the second voice never catches the first and never needs to. It is always the same tune. What changes is what you hear the first voice meaning, once the second has begun.

The rule cost me things. It cost me the scene every reader of the premise expects—Mateo standing on the causeway, or Citlali on Wilshire Boulevard—and I wrote versions of both before I admitted that the rule was right and the scenes were wrong. It cost me a certain kind of suspense: if nobody can cross, nobody can be rescued by crossing, and I had to find the danger elsewhere. I found it in the one place I hadn’t looked, which was kindness. Mateo’s year turns golden. Every good thing that happens to him is a good thing. The book’s tension is a technician keeping a file—Item. Test. Finding.—on his own good fortune, and the file filling up.

What the rule gave back was the Interludes. Three times in Book I, between Mateo’s chapters, the narrative crosses the lake for a few pages—not Mateo, the narrative—and we watch the flower-keeper’s first year in the house that keeps the image: the teachers instructing his breath, the flutes, the gathering of his hair. Nobody travels. The second voice of the canon has simply entered, quietly, under the first, and by the time Book II begins the reader has been hearing it all along.

It also cost me the Prelude, which I mean as a gift. The book opens with a few pages in Tenochtitlan before Los Angeles is ever named: a young woman cutting flowers at the water, a conch across the lake, birds going up. If you ever read a sample of this book, it will start there, because without those pages the opening reads as a Los Angeles novel, and it isn’t one. It isn’t a Tenochtitlan novel either. The Prelude is the rule made visible: the second city is on page one, and it never leaves.

People ask me which city is real. The book declines to say, and I’ve come to think that declining is not coyness but the point. Each city explains the other completely. Los Angeles explains why a young man might accept a year of honors without asking what they cost. Tenochtitlan explains what the honors were for. Choose one as real and the other becomes a metaphor, and a metaphor can be set down. I wanted a book you could not set down that way.

The index card is still against the lamp. It has one word added underneath, in a different pen, from somewhere around the middle of the second draft: Neither.

~ Liam