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significant way." The short story will have, oftentimes, a brief sequence of causally linked events, but ultimately it turns on the moment.
    The novel is going to be saying to your reader, "Look, this is going to take some time. Let's go for a long walk, and I want to tell you about all these things that happened in the life of this character in my unconscious; all these things that happened to him, which somehow fit together, are somehow causally linked." In a novel, there will be many revealing moments but ultimately the focus of a novel is on that—I won't call it a chain, because that argues for a certain kind of linear structure, but—that certain configuration of causally linked events. That's the focus of a novel.
    Oftentimes I've found that my novels come out of the wedding of two separate visions that seemed to be two different novels, two books that really weren't working and seemed quite different from each other. (I've got a number of potential novels and stories running around in my unconscious at any given meditative moment.)
    Let me go back to one of those really god-awful novels that never saw the light of day, my first Vietnam-based novel, called What Lies Near. It was about a guy in military intelligence who visits the holding cell in an interrogation camp for suspected Viet Cong. He goes into a cell vacated by a prisoner who's been tortured and taken somewhere else, and he finds a piece of graffiti written on the wall. The novel I wrote was just straight out of literal memory stuff. As a military intelligence agent, I had gone to an interrogation center run by the ARVNs—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which is South Vietnamese—and there was a cell where they kept the Viet Cong prisoners while they tortured them—horribly, as the South Vietnamese often did. I went in the cell and—these are the tropics; it was a hundred degrees and 95 percent humidity outside this windowless space about six feet square, which had an iron door with a little plate kept shut and a stone ledge for sleeping and a hole in the floor—I stepped in and instantly broke into a heavy sweat from the closeness of the air and the foul smells from the hole in the floor, and the walls were stained with lichen, and I was ready to turn and flee.
    But—I don't know what made me think of this—I wondered about graffiti. Was there some trace of the people left behind? I looked at the walls, and there were obviously some places that had been scratched—the scratchings then obliterated by the caretakers of the place. Very carefully monitored. There was nothing else to see, and I was about to leave when I noticed a little wooden stand against one wall. I thought, well, if somebody wanted to put some graffiti where it would survive scrutiny, he'd put it behind that. So I pulled that stand away from the wall and suddenly heard the frantic rustle of brittle little feet, and dozens of three-inch cockroaches scattered from behind this thing—just that last turn of the horror of the place: these people are kept in darkness with roaches crawling all over, waiting to be tortured—and, sure enough, there was a piece of graffiti scratched into the wall behind the wooden stand.
    It read, "Ve siuh la khoe," which means, "Hygiene is healthful."
    Suddenly I was in the presence of this remarkable mind. To have that kind of irony, that kind of detachment!
    Well, I wrote the terrible novel called What Lies Near, in which the agent finds this graffiti and then spends the rest of the novel trying to track down the guy who wrote it. I myself didn't try to track him down; the novel was driven by what had happened there, in that cell, and I was just sort of tunnel' visioned onto it. It was slavish to what really happened, and that was not enough to sustain a novel. It was not a novel.
    In 1983, ten years after the failure of What Lies Near, I had found my way into my unconscious and just published Countrymen of Bones . I began my fourth novel and moved