IN PIERRE MENARD, TEXAS, it’s been rumored, the last battle of the Civil War is still being fought. My guide, who we’ll call Pedro, picks me up from the downtown San Antonio Greyhound station on aWednesday morning and informs me I’m to be the first reporter to have complete access to Pierre Menard—its soldiers, generals, and financiers—in at least six years. When I correct him that I’m not a reporter, he swats my words away, as if I’m joking.
“You know what I mean,” he says.
Pedro is an avid reader of mass-market science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, and most of the way there we talk about the decades-long sagas and tribulations of medieval rats.
After about an hour on Interstate 10, we exit off. I stick the blindfold in my bag, which is the only thing I carry, aside from my analog film camera—phones and digital technology are not permitted in Pierre Menard, but I’d been told nothing about film cameras.
