Duplicity

Chapter 4

To the Reader:

The document that you hold originally took the form of six marbled composition notebooks of the kind still sold today in office supply, grocery, convenience, and so-called “dollar” stores. The notebooks were bound with rubber bands and labeled, on half a sheet of loose paper, in large capitalized letters, “DUPLICITY.” The handwriting in the notebooks is of different colored inks— red, blue, black — and increasingly stingy, so small that at first it was mistaken for code.

How the notebooks came to be published is explained in the afterword. For now, suffice it to say that they have been published as discovered, with only obvious spelling and punctuation errors corrected. Since there were so few of them (impressive, given the swiftness of composition), struck-out words, phrases, and sentences have been eliminated. Otherwise, apart from having been set in type with standard conventions of book design brought to bear, the result, down to the pen sketches that are the author’s own, faithfully duplicates the contents of the six notebooks.

As to the provenance of the notebooks, who wrote them and how they were discovered and came to my attention, all this is explained in the afterword.

However it is strongly suggested that you read what follows first.

— G. S.

“Book B is false.”

— Book A

“Book A is true.”

— Book B