Books like Djinn

The other night I discovered Alain Robbe-Grillet in my apartment. He was waiting for me in my library, smoking a cigarette in the dark, which I thought was a little too film noir to be taken seriously. He sat me down and, in his indulgent French accent, explained to me a secret that undermined all literary fiction. I was astonished, to say the least. I looked up at my shelves of books. My beloved books! They might as well have been cheap greeting cards at that point. Receipts from a joyless trip to the mall. At best: hastily-scrawled notes reminding me what not to forget. I looked at Robbe-Grillet as he casually inhaled from his cigarette—a little red ember pulsating in the dark—and I didn't know whether to thank him or punch him in the face. However, before I could do either, almost as if he'd read my mind, he sprang up and thwacked me upside the head with something hard and heavy. I reeled. "What kind of weapon was that?" I drawled out. But he just stood there with his arrogant Frenchman's grin. I felt as if he'd struck me with a whole alphabet of encyclopedias, but in his hand all I saw was a single slender book with a one-syllable title.Forced to sleep by the blow, I dreamed. I dreamed I was in a house full of mirrors. Every time I fixed my bearings I realized that the objects I was looking at for reference—a couch, a potted plant, a piano—were actually carefully-positioned reflections that were deceptively warped and flipped around in an effort to disorient me. And as I searched further, I realized there was no couch, no potted plant, no piano. There were only reflections. The puzzle was so delightful I fell on the floor and laughed.When I woke up in my library, Alain Robbe-Grillet had vanished. Daylight oozed through the windows, and I cradled my swollen head. I tried to recall the secret he'd told me. I grasped and pawed for it. It should've been right there on the tip of my tongue, but the tip of my tongue was missing. Whether Robbe-Grillet had surgically removed it while I was unconscious or whether I'd bitten it clean off when he hit me, I don't know, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I can only assume he took it with him back to France.This book should be a religion among writers.