It's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen. What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. The pictures get jumbled. You tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
It wasn't a question of deceit. Just the opposite; he wanted to heat up the truth, to make it burn so hot that you would feel exactly what he felt.
A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. That's what fiction is for. It's for getting at the truth when the truth isn't sufficient for the truth. Fiction is the lie that helps us understand the truth. A lie, sometimes, can be truer than the truth, which is why fiction gets written.
