When I get back outside, Gus is blowing his nose, looking miserable.
“So,” I point into the window, “That’s Alexis at the front counter. Melinda was in the back.”
“Ah,” Gus replies, a thoughtful but unsurprised look on his face. I decide to unload everything Melinda told me.
“A hoax, huh?” Gus seems to earnestly consider the idea that he may be part of a massive hoax perpetrated by a Jesuit scholar in a conspiracy that includes Gus himself along with hundreds of years of similar-minded Gus-alikes who also called themselves Athanasius.
After all the cogs finish moving in his brain, he decides to answer the other floating question. “I got the book at a convention from a seller who had hundreds of other map books. I initially picked up Book of the Hermetic Order of Owl because I like the cover but eventually realized with all the maps it was something you’d enjoy.”
“So you’re not a part of a massive hoax?”
“Not that I know of, anyway.” The earnestness strikes me as real. Though I realize Gus’ lack of involvement doesn’t eliminate the possibility it’s all a hoax.
“Are hoaxes like this common?” Gus spends the majority of his time in other people’s worlds, if anyone can spot a hoax it’d be him. Or, I guess, that knowledge just makes him twice as likely to believe in anything.
“Sure, I mean, or rather,” Gus digs through the cobwebs of his mind, “Sometimes these things might be presented as fiction at one point and change over time. Look at a story like Frankenstein, if we didn’t know, like culturally, that the story was fiction, what would we think of it? If the book wasn’t famous and we just found it–one copy of Frankenstein–how would the world perceive it?”
“Reality isn’t a state of simply existing.” Melinda’s words pingpong in my brain.
“Right,” Gus seems impressed, “Reality is whatever we make it out to be. History is as malleable as fiction.”
Which leaves us in a bit of a pickle. When I make maps, I tend to create the worlds inside my head, with small narratives bursting into life with each pen stroke of a new region. They’re not fully thought out narrative stories, more like moments that help me understand why a region might exist. If there is a desert landscape, I may picture a boy walking to gather water. That small moment is enough for me to flesh out the world internally, which helps me create the rest of the map.
Is that all Owl is? Is this book not a hoax, but a work of fiction never meant to be taken as reality? Melinda seems to be the caretaker of the narrative more than Gus. She’s the one who mentions Owl to the newspaper. She’s the one who’s laid the breadcrumbs to Sedona.
A bell jingles behind me. Alexis peeks her head out of the book shop, her mess of hair bobbling on her head.
She approaches us and whispers, “Don’t lose faith,” and hands me a VHS tape. She looks up and down the street, smiles at Gus, and returns to the shop.
The tape is in a blank Scotch branded sleeve, adorned with a gradient globe and promising two hours of SP recording, four hours of LP recording, and six hours of EPSLP recording. On a sticker on the side of the tape, written with a Sharpie is just one word, OWL.
Gus looks at me with a shrug, “The hotel has portable VHS players for rent at the front desk.”
