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Later, after Charles had become my best and only friend in the world, after I had already developed the habit of writing down his exploits as Radiant City's only forensic flaneur (not without fictional decorations to his strange reports; not because he didn't succeed but because it was so hard to describe what he did), after, most significantly, he found the man who murdered my wife — at the end of the beginning of our relationship, in short — I asked him if he had ever been diagnosed with schizophrenia.
It was not meant as an insult, and he did not take it as such. "Did you know that we have one of the highest numbers in the country of psychiatrists per capita but the lowest recovery rate from serious psychiatric issues?" We, when he talked, was always Radiant City. Here. The city. Everywhere.
She.
I changed the topic. We spent the rest of our hour together talking about our common passion - architecture.
Before Charles first entered my office I knew very little of him and when he did my first instinct was to think there was little to know. A more average man could hardly be casted on purpose. He had neither the brilliant flamboyance of the genius detective nor the grim steel of the private eye. He was just somebody.
A very unimpressive-looking somebody who had been quietly recommended to me by a person I won't mention in writing.
I asked him about his methods. He didn't dissemble or pretend mystery: it was just difficult for him to find words to translate an experience that was one of communication but not language. He finally settled, not for the first time I think, with "I walk around."
I thought I knew what he meant. I hired him on the spot.
-
We took a walk together the night he finished his investigation. It was raining and neither one of us was carrying an umbrella. I wanted a hand free while the other held the gun in my pocket, and his hands were handcuffed behind his back, under his raincoat. I thought I was being clever. As we walked through the lonely night towards my wife's unmarked tomb I thought I was in control.
He didn't pretend to be. He never pretended to be in control - even to himself.
"Did you know that very few people ever leave their usual neighborhood?" It wasn't meant as a question; silence made him nervous (I would later understand that it wasn't my gun but it wasn't the silence either, it was the things he would hear when nobody was talking).
"We're pretty far from mine," I replied congenially. I had always found it easy to talk with him; still do. I believe, and I find comfort in it, that he felt and still feels the same.
"Are we? This alley has exactly the opposite aspect ratio as your office. In psychoarchitectural terms" — he'd explain that term later and lend me books, all of them either out of print, never published, or subject to damnatio memoriae — "that means they have the same impact on our subconscious. The underground maintenance tunnels you're taking me have the same atmospheric sounds as the service basement in your mansion. It's not a coincidence that both places have seen murder and the concealment of murder."
"What else could it be?" I was trying to think thru the implications of what he knew, or even its outline. Had he told anyone? Surprising him in my basement I thought I had caught him in the nick of time, but had I been almost too late or almost quick enough?
"The city." He turned suddenly around a corner in the alley that wasn't hidden as much as unexpected; you would be surprised how much of the city is invisible because it's not supposed to be there. I didn't shoot him — I'm glad I didn't. I just followed him.
He was waiting for me at the end of another alley. I suddenly felt afraid without knowing why.
Charles looked at me with something like anger but not anger at me. "The city drives us crazy. I think it's by design."
I was outright terrified for no reason at all ("the angles," he'd explain later, "look like bones") and started shooting at the walls until I ran out of bullets. Then I curled up on the floor, afraid to move.
Charles just walked out, his hands still handcuffed, and went looking for a cop. I was grateful when he came back for me, and I have thought of him as a friend ever since.
After my arrest but before my trial he visited me for the first time. He visited everybody he caught who wanted to talk with him. When I asked him why he told me that he could never be sure how much of a crime any criminal was guilty of and how much of it was the city, so until it stopped doing it he had to assume we were all unwilling accomplices and treat us like that.
I asked if he was writing a book about his theory. He said he didn't felt comfortable with the textual architecture of books, but agreed to let me write about some of his cases, including mine. His description of staying at my office and my home, idling around open to what the architecture was doing to him and then drifting thru city and buildings to see what other places "felt the same shape of insane" was honest, nonsensical, and unwriteable. I made something up he didn't complain about, and that was my first published article about him. There would be more - "banker turned murderer turned prison inmate turned amateur crime writer" was an uncommon enough condition that publishers made a reasonable bet on me (one of them was my wife's uncle - but I've written about him elsewhere).
It's not a bad life. I'm as confined in this prison with other criminals — in his view, perhaps we're all psychiatric inmates, although on this I'm more cynical — as my friend is free to roam the city, but I don't feel any worse here than I was outside, and there's more time to read and write. Charles told me that the difference is even less than this, that the architecture of both mirror each other in ways he can see but not quite describe. I can do neither, but I know that the random-seeming small objects he requested the Warden to allow in my cell seem to change the place in some way, and that I sleep better when I move my pillow to the right angle.
I read and write for fame, and I read and write to escape boredom. But I also read and write to try to learn what he sees. Understand it even better than he does.
One day I'll be out of here, and when I do I want to hear Radiant City the way Charles does.
And when I reply with a request the City will say yes.