Part Eighteen

Like Gaul, all narrative is divided into three parts.

The first-person narrative is typically the most honest. Because you, the reader, know up front that you’re getting a one-sided, half-assed perspective. You know that the “I” telling the story is missing things, leaving out details, and utterly in the dark about some goings-on. You read a first-person narrative skeptically. Up front, you know you’re not getting the whole story. In The Great Gatsby, when the narrator tells us “I’m the most honest person I know,” you know he’s full of crap.

The second-person narrative is less honest than the first-person narrative. A second-person narrative (I’m thinking of Bright Lights, Big City as a prime example) is a tarted-up version of the first person narrative. As a reader, you know that you’re still only getting a one-sided view of things… but you don’t care as much, because you have been inserted into the story and thus are suddenly made more interesting, more intelligent, and more eloquent. It’s like when a pretty salesgirl flirts with you – you know it’s a crock, but you’re flattered into playing along.

The third-person narrative – like the one I’m about to launch into – is just a blatant lie. It creates this illusion of omniscience. It camouflages the author’s biases and ignorance and omissions. The third party narrator assures you that you’re learning everything there is to learn. That nobody has said anything important behind your back. That a main character didn’t, out of the blue, sneak off one day and boff some co-ed when nobody was looking. When in fact the third-person narratives are just as biased and selective in their truth-telling as the first-person narratives. Read The Stand. Classic third-person narration. All that interior monologue. All these different characters in different parts of the country. You think you know everything, reader, until a few decades later when Stephen King lets us know that it was all just a subplot in the Dark Tower story.

But when Preacher graduated I wasn’t around anymore, and so I have to depend on other people to know what happened to him then. When I only know about some chapter of his life from a single source I don’t have any objection to simply presenting a heavily edited version of that person’s reminiscence. That’s how I’ve handled it so far. You, reader, know I am editing the crap out of these things, and you know I have my own axes to grind, and so you take in this information with a properly jaundiced eye.

But when I have fairly detailed accounts of the same event from several different sources – and when I’m not one of those sources – I am in a quandary. Do I attempt to create what I think is a truthful (if not necessarily factually accurate) version of what happened? I knew Preacher pretty well, once. When some of these people would tell me a story about something they did with Preacher – especially before the desert, but afterwards, too – often I can picture him in that situation, hear the timbre of his voice, see his expression. But I wasn’t really there. So while I can offer some educated guesses as to his motivations and his thought processes, in the end they are nothing more than guesses.

Do I create a fake third-person narrative from these sources? Or do I tell the story Rashomon-style, one interview after another, and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions about what really happened?

There is never one correct answer to the question “what really happened,” of course.

All of this dithering is a prelude to trying to justify the next few passages. Because slogging through this sordid tale in a sort of thematic chronological order I have run smack dab into Moira Callahan. In 2001 Preacher Haywood ran into an old classmate of ours who asked him about Moira Callahan and he replied:

“It’s impossible to overstate the importance of what I learned from Moira Callahan. And it’s impossible to overstate the important of unlearning most of it later.”

What this says to me – other than the fact that Preacher is the sort of person who can unselfconsciously use expressions like “unlearned” – is that I had better pay more attention to this saga than I might otherwise have done.

And I have the advantage of a pretty detailed parallax view of that period of Preacher’s life. He never talked much about it, except for one time toward the end. But Moira told me EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, in excruciating and (for me) embarrassing detail. Proudly. Plus I talked to a lot of our old college friends who knew bits and pieces of the story. And, most revoltingly, a big chunk of that time is documented in two journals that Preacher and Moira kept. In due course I will relate more on the how and why of those journals, but suffice it to say that when she handed photocopies of them to me – photocopies missing a few pages, I might add – I was able to learn far more than I wanted to about those months. And because part of the journal “exercise,” as Moira called it, was to highlight the differences in the way she and Preacher perceived the same events, I find it easy to succumb to temptation and write a sort of synthesized third-person narrative blending together my own recollections, the interviews, the journals, and what I think Preacher was like back then.

So forgive me the great dishonesty I am about to perpetrate in the name of Truth. Sometimes it’s necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.

(It occurs to me that I should also seek forgiveness for destroying the narrative flow with this little Apology. That last bit of Haywood sermon was a perfect segue to the Moira story, and I’ve gone and wrecked it with this prolonged meditation on why I’m a goddamned liar.)