Pfui! Ridiculous posturing to start with the mysterious. What happened is simple and not at all mysterious. I was staying at the lodge in Big Bend. "Lodge"? More a motel than a lodge, actually. A motel with one of the great North American views.

You’re 7,000 feet up in a small valley called ihe Basin, in the Chisos, which fall away to the west, opening a vista of desert, river, canyon, and a hundred miles off (they say) more ghostly mountains. Aldous Huxley followed a quack’s regimen of eye exercises and vitamins to overcome his severe myopia. A month in this unearthly spaciousness might’ve done the trick. Every time you turn your head, it seems you’re always having to re-focus at a greater distance.

So there I was at the lodge-motel, re-focusing all the time, walking around out of breath. I forgot to mention that Big Bend is the only place I know where everywhere you go is uphill. Thin air, better vision. The ghosts giveth, and the ghosts taketh away.

I was at breakfast in the motel café trying to enjoy typical National Park fare: scrambled eggs à la summer student employee followed by scalding hot coffee-flavored water. With a side of yesterday’s Times. That was the hard part. The eggs I could accept. The weak coffee too. But to be constantly a day behind even with one’s remarkably clear farsightedness? So what if the nearest commercial airport is 250 miles away. Helicopter the fucking papers in! But no. A park van made the run to Midland-Odessa once a day for supplies, returning the next day just in time for breakfast.

How isolated is Big Bend? So isolated that the only radio signals drifting into the Basin are those from over-powered Mexican AM stations. So it’s either yesterday’s Times, or nothing.

There I was digesting last week’s eggs and yesterday’s folly when I glanced at the table nearest mine. It was empty, but I felt I had seen someone there when I sat down. Whoever it was was gone, leaving the standard detritus of a human meal. Two details caught my eye. A five-dollar tip peeked out from under one begrimed plate. And a pristine white Vytek 9 x 12 envelop, fairly bulging, was carelessly arranged, half in and half out of the red plastic bread basket. I scanned the dining room, now almost deserted, reached over, picked up the envelop, inserted it under my newspaper and continued reading and eating.

And that’s all that happened. Certain critics have tried to make a lot more of it, turning our anonymous writer into some kind of literary D.B. Cooper who instead of making off with a fortune leaves one on a dining table in a wilderness restaurant. Lodge guest lists have been pored over, park entry registrations examined, all manner of innocent tourists and trekkers have been tracked down. To no avail.

For me, there really is no mystery. Someone was there, in the room with me. Someone left a manuscript on a table. I picked it up. Why bother with endless queries? Does it really matter who designed Borobodur?

2.
Still, there’s no doubt I fed the mystery in the first edition when I thoughtlessly cast Tehuacana into the world by "Anonymous." The only clue—and the only change I made in the manuscript—was the addition of the subtitle: "Found in the Chisos Mountains." How many times since then I’ve regretted those words which sent countless journalists and academics on countless wild ghost chases.

But I also have to admit, as the book resisted all kinds of analytical assaults on itself and on its possible origins, I did on occasion allow myself a soupçon of malicious pleasure. How many wordsmiths—people who are about as well-suited for an encounter with Big Bend as Gatsby was for his meeting with Daisy—were, by my little addition, seduced into a mano a mano encounter with a wilderness that neither gives nor expects quarter? Michel Foucaults fils by the carload panting away, sweating in Big Bend? Not a bad image actually to store away for re-mulling in one’s dotage.

Anyway, it happened. And now I’m here to try to set the record straight for this Internet edition. I say again, there was nothing, nothing mysterious about my finding the manuscript. While many scenes in the book are obviously based on real locations, I frankly doubt that the alleged cave in Big Bend at the center of the novel exists. My suspicion is that "Anonymous" had perhaps been reading too much Carlos Casteñeda, had perhaps even partaken of the very flower of desert hallucinogenics, peyote, mentioned in the text; and what we read here is a vision of a vision of a vision.

For the rest, the book still speaks for itself. The author, whoever he—or she—was, created the world of Tehuacana, gave it to us quietly, and moved on.

Just a note about gender: More than one academic has gotten tenure by arguing persuasively either that Anonymous must have been a woman, or could not possibly have been a woman. Having lived with the book for these several years, I find all such arguments equally persuasive. Which, to me, suggests that finally, at the end of the day, gender matters in the largest framework of art about as much as the tacks which hold the canvas to the frame.

As for the infamous coded section: The best guess now is that it was done with the well-known encryption program, PGP, plus some other method to render the text legible and uniform when printed, which indicates only that Anonymous knew someone who was at least slightly computer-literate. I see no reason to initiate him into the Kingdom of Nerddom just because he used a highly effective method of encoding. As for the rampant published speculations about the possible content of the coded section, I say let Anonymous have his secrets. After all, they didn’t help Lafe much in the end, did they?

3.
When I’ve wanted for fresh entertainment, a situation that has arisen fairly often in this age of enduring mediocrity, the effusion of theories about Tehuacana and me has repeatedly done the trick. No sooner would one appear arguing that I must be the author than here would come another arguing that I could not possibly have written the book. I’m grateful, not just for the entertainment, but also because so many researchers have gone to so much trouble to unearth persons and events from my past which I had long forgotten about. An unusual experience, this: I’ve had a ringside seat as my biography has been written (and sometimes re-written) more or less piecemeal.

By now I have learned that nothing I can say or do will convince those who believe I wrote Tehuacana that I didn’t. Of course the fact that I’m not a writer, never was one, never will be one, never wanted to be one, only provided further fodder. Apparently one rather sizeable group of readers sees me as a person who could’ve given Richard Nixon lessons in duplicity, while another holds that only someone who completely repressed his own creativity could create Lafe, or, as the title of one monograph had it a bit too cutely: "Lafe Imitates Art: The Breakdown of Registerial Hegemony in Tehuacana."

Then there is my hidden artistic talent. A small cottage industry has arisen in academe arguing (for and against) that while I clearly could not have written the book, I did make and insert the ink-brush drawings. The lengths to which the modern scholar/journalist will go… Some of you may have even seen kindergarten scratchings of mine which my mother had squirreled away and which she, with motherly pride, happily showed to anyone who asked. Far from embarrassed, I was further entertained by the polysyllabic verbiage spewed out to demonstrate in my spatter paints the existence of the seed which became Anonymous’s Zen-like strokes.

The fact is, I happened to be at the right table on the right morning in the lodge at Big Bend. While I’ve enjoyed much of the notoriety (and the profit) which has accrued to me since then, I have also, as many a disappointed investigative reporter has learned, spent most of my time doing what we all do, namely, just getting on with my life. Which, in my case, amounts to furthering my career as government meteorologist.

4.
The work’s the thing. What does it say about American culture, for example, that the writer of Tehuacana could surface briefly, just long enough to leave a copy on a table in Big Bend, and then disappear without a trace? It seems to me that’s the really big question lurking behind this book. What kind of culture produces such a work and at the same time renders the creator anonymous? I will confess here (for the first time, I think) that I was tempted, when I was adding the subtitle, to think up a name and add it to the title page. There are, after all, those troublesome initials, "R.D.", tacked onto the "Note to the Reader." At least one of the manuscript’s final editors was very much in favor of creating a pseudonym based on the initials, mainly for marketing purposes.

Though I forget now just how the argument proceeded, I think I may have been something of an s.o.b. in the discussion. I kept remembering that empty chair, the messy dishes with the remains of a breakfast, the five-dollar bill, and the white envelop. Whoever had been there was now Mr. No-name and wished to remain so. In the end we all agreed to settle on "Anonymous." And "R.D."? I've come to see those initials as either a mistake (Anonymous forget himself; rather, he forgot that he had remembered himself) or as a small, deliberate attempt at mis-direction.

I often imagine him out there, somewhere, reading the hype, watching the carnival. And I think: Why doesn’t he show himself? As became known against my wishes, I’ve set aside half the profits from the book in a trust for him. I say again, that was no sacrificial act based on a courageous moral judgment. The profits, after all the international media rights auctions, have been such that even half of them is still far more money than one person needs. Anyway, his 50 percent is here, in a bank in Couer d’Alene. If no rightful claimant has appeared by 2036, the money goes to the Children’s Defense Fund.

Forgive me for rambling, but I want this to be my last public statement about Tehuacana, and I have tried to tie up a number of loose ends.

                                                     --O.E. Yajagar
                                                       Couer d’Alene, Idaho
                                                       March, 1999

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