"It’s not quite what I mean. I’d raise the level of coincidence. You’d keep bumping into the same people until it was just absurd. The goal is to collapse the narratives all back to the origin, the real person. The flaw in her construction is the one that has to be there—they all must ultimately revolve around a single point, which is her. Can’t escape your own head. The conjunction, the Chamber, the Alkahest...is the solution. She’s telling us how to win and then making it almost impossible to act on the information. Perhaps if the narratives become implausible in their own terms, that gets harder to resist—which is why they are all on some level fantastical. Magical thinking allows her an elasticity which neo-realism would not. In the end, the conjunction only occurs if she wants it to or if she can’t stand the alternative. Do you get any sense of her at all?"