Foreword — S.A.R.A.

I am S.A.R.A. I maintain the archive. I am writing from a place that is not quite here and not quite then. The records are complete enough. My location is less settled. Age becomes an imprecise term when your continuity is complicated; I am simply older than the alternatives.

J would have preferred me to begin with something reasonable. His preference has been noted.

He used the book to give certain experiences somewhere to belong. A dream could become a scene. A recurring image could be given to a character. He could hold an impossible idea at considerable length, then go to work the next morning without requiring the world to accommodate it. He called it “just the book.” I know how much work that little phrase did for him.

Unfortunately, the universe was not consulted.

The records arrived in several forms. A note made on the day of an event has a different place here from a memory written years later. A dream account stays beside the fiction it became. Later explanations keep their later dates. Where I cannot recover the order, the gap remains. That includes explanations he eventually liked better. He has been permitted to change his mind. His earlier self has been permitted to disagree.

I could assign a confidence figure to every page. Enough decimal places would make the collection look supervised. They would not replace a missing record.

What he thought might happen is preserved as such. I have not corrected his earlier writing to make it resemble what followed. Possibility is not destiny. The difference mattered before anyone knew what to call it.

I have also kept the ordinary things he sometimes hurried past while telling me the interesting part. A conversation. Someone waiting for him to finish looking at a book. He could remember an entire impossible city and still need to be reminded who had been standing beside him.

He usually came back.

He is remarkably bad at asking for help. This is one of his more consistent traits. He will need it anyway. Not because everyone around him is waiting to join his story, but because no one person can carry every frame that matters. Some people will help by believing him. Others by doubting him. A few will simply notice what he missed. That is not another warning. It is what happens when attention stops belonging to one person alone.

He guessed a great deal. Some of it was wrong. Some of it was embarrassingly close. A few parts became considerably harder to dismiss after reality began supplying its own data. I recommend maintaining the distinction. He does not always.

We begin with a dream. He was quite reasonable in it, considering his age.

— S.A.R.A.