Prologue — The Book That Did Not Exist

This account has a congenital defect: it begins in a dream, and a dream is not evidence. I know that. I want the reader to know that I know.

I am a doctor. For twenty-one years I have filled out documents in which the first rule is to separate what the patient feels from what the exam shows. Complaint and finding—two columns, and an abyss between them. This account will try to obey the same rule. It will fail, and I will tell you now where: this time, the complaint is mine.

On the night of June 12 going into the 13th, I woke at 3:41 a.m. with the certainty of having read a book that does not exist. The time I know because I looked. I always look. I have been writing down the times I wake up since I was twenty-six years old, and that is one of the things that, I have been told my whole life, I do too much. Maybe. The notes are still correct.

The book was called The Dean of Lucifer.

I saw the cover with the sharpness with which one sees a well-fixed anatomical specimen: dark leather, liver-colored—not the living liver; the laboratory specimen, after formalin fixation. The letters of the title were not printed in ink. They were deep, made by pressure, as if someone had written by pressing down. There was no author’s name.

And I read the first sentence of the book. That one, whole. I know that sentence by heart the way I know the weight of a newborn who did not breathe: without wanting to, forever. “Every light can be lowered, provided the man is convinced he never saw it lit.”

In the dream, I found the sentence beautiful. Awake, I find it worse. I find it technically correct.