I saved a man’s life once, when I was a boy. Or so I remember. He was a sailor who’d come from far away, from beyond the four oceans, and I saw him on the street, outside a public house no longer standing, entertaining, by pale moon- and flickering night-light, a good crowd of citizens with tales spun out of the many of his sea voyages. Places he’d seen. Experiences that had become his own. He was a good storyteller, varying his pace, embellishing the appropriate detail, balancing always deftly on the narrative tightrope of cause-and-effect, and the crowd hung on every word he lay across that tightrope, following him across the chasm of his fiction. Or so you call it—for here is a peculiarity of our little port town: it is illegal to tell a lie, but our definition of truth is: anything which can be imagined. From setting to setting, from adventure to adventure (“And far across the western sea, is a land called ) the storyteller took us that night, until we arrived in (Atlantis, where wealth knows no limit and life no termination,” he said.) As he desrcibed this opulent island city, I could tell the hearers dropping away, their disbelief no longer suspended but broken—attentions falling from tightrope into the abyss below. I plummeted too, unable to create in my mind the image of these Atlantean immortals and their illimitable opulence. Oh, what mental darkness! As if the very midnight had extinguished the night-lights and the moon. They arrested him after that, charged him with uttering falsities; brought him, shackled, to the court room for trial. It was after the arguments had been made but before the verdict come that, having mulled over his descriptions of Atlantis, I made epiphany. A single detail first—then, rushing in, the rest: the ageless people, the divine architecture, the ocean, bejeweled with resplendent sun! All etched with exquisite sharpness on the inside of my mind. “I imagine it,” I cried, leaping to my feet, to the surprise of the elder judge and everyone in the gallery, “I imagine it:
“I imagine Atlantis!”