 Simon and Schuster Audio presents Memories of the Future A Novel by Siri Hustvedt Read by Catherine Fenton Chapter 1 Years ago I left the wide, flat fields of rural Minnesota for the island of Manhattan to find the hero of my first novel. When I arrived in August of 1978 he was not a character so much as a rhythmic possibility, an embryonic creature of my imagination which I felt as a series of metrical beats that quickened and slowed with my steps as I navigated the streets of the city. I think I was hoping to discover myself in him to prove that he and I were worthy of whatever story came our way. I wasn't looking for happiness or comfort in New York City. I was looking for adventure and I knew the adventurer must suffer before he arrives home after countless trials on land and sea or is finally snuffed out by the gods. I didn't know then what I know now. As I wrote I was also being written. The book had been started long before I left the plains. Multiple drafts of a mystery had already been inscribed in my brain but that didn't mean I knew how it would turn out. My unformed hero and I were headed for a place that was little more than a gleaming fiction, the future. I had given myself exactly twelve months to write the novel. If at the end of the following summer my hero was still born or died in infancy or turned out to be such a dullard that his life deserved no comment, in other words, if he was not a hero after all. I would leave him and his novel behind me and throw myself into the study of my dead or failed boys' ancestors, the denizens of the volumes that fill the phantom cities we call libraries. I had accepted a fellowship in comparative literature at Columbia University and when I asked if I could defer my admission until the following year the invisible authorities had sent me a long-winded letter agreeing to my request. A dark room with a kitchenette, an even darker bedroom, a tiny black-and-white tiled bathroom and a closet with a bulging plaster ceiling at 309 West 109th Street.