Even the house party itself had become a legend. Around the shores of Lake Geneva, the vacation hotels set up telescopes in their lakeside windows so guests could watch what everyone said was an orgy of incest at the villa. Middle-class tourists, bored on their summer tour, they put their worst fears under Lord Byron's roof. Just that handful of young people, trying to live outside the million rules of their culture, and people spied on them through telescopes, expecting to see monsters.

Here, we were the modern equivalent of the people at Villa Diodati.

We were the modern version of the Algonquin Round Table.

Just people telling stories out loud to each other.

People looking for one idea that would echo for the rest of time. Echo into books, movies, plays, songs, television, T-shirts, money.

It was these same faces—among three times as many, a mob—when we first met in person, in the back of a coffeehouse. Us: the faces who made the final cut. Even then, Countess Foresight wore her signature turban. The Duke of Vandals, his blond ponytail. The Missing Link, his long-hanging nose and dark wilderness of beard.

The way people gossip about the Villa Diodati today, in time people will talk about that coffee shop. People who never saw the advertisement will swear they were there. They were smart and didn't agree to go along on the retreat. Otherwise, they might be dead. Or rich. Over time, that coffeehouse, with its racks of free newspapers and bulletin board pinned full of business cards offering colonic irrigation and holistic pet counseling, that shop would have to be the size of a stadium to hold the people who will claim to have been there that night.

That night will become a legend.

The Mythology of Us.

The hemp people and poets and housewives and us, standing with paper cups of coffee, we listened while Mrs. Clark talked. Her out-there breasts and that silicone pout making some people giggle. When someone asked about a phone number for the outside world to reach people on retreat, Mrs. Clark said, yes. She said, “It's 1-800-FUCK-OFF.”

It's that moment, some people walked away.

Meaning, No. No contact with the outside world. No television or radio or telephone or Internet. Just you and what you bring in your one suitcase.

Meaning more people walked away.

The people who walked away, the first-round survivors. The smart ones who get to tell their own story. The camera behind the camera behind the camera, Mr. Whittier would say. They'll have their ultimate truth—but just about that night.

Those poor idiots sold short.

We all saw the advertisement, just in different ways. On different bulletin boards around town, it said:

WRITERS' RETREAT:

ABANDON YOUR LIFE FOR THREE MONTHS.

Just disappear. Leave behind everything that keeps you from creating your masterpiece. Your job and family and home, all those obligations and distractions—put them on hold for three months. Live with like-minded people in a setting that supports total immersion in your work. Food and lodging included free for those who qualify. Gamble a small fraction of your life on the chance to create a new future as a professional poet, novelist, screenwriter. Before it's too late, live the life you dream about. Spaces very limited.

The advertisement was printed on an index card. A recipe card. Boxed inside a dashed line, like a coupon you'd cut out. And at the bottom was a phone number. It was Mrs. Clark's number, stapled to the cork bulletin board in the library foyer. By the restrooms in the back of the supermarket. In the Laundromat. That advertisement on an index card, one week it was everywhere. The next week, it was nowhere.

All the cards had disappeared.

People who saw it, if they called the phone number, they got a recording of Mrs. Clark saying the coffeehouse, the time and date we should all meet.

Already, in our minds, here in the red-and-yellow fake firelight, we could picture the future: the scene of us telling people how we'd taken this little adventure and a crazy man had kept us trapped in an old theater for three months. Already, we were making matters worse. Exaggerating. We'd say how the place was freezing-cold. There was no running water. We had to ration the food.

None of that was true, but it does make a better story. No, we'd warp the truth. Blow it up. Stretch it out. For effect.

We'd create our own incestuous orgy of people and animals for the world to gossip about.

The little backstage dressing room we each got, talking about it, we'd load it with poisonous spiders. Hungry rats. Not just Director Denial's cat hair sticking everywhere.

A ghost. We'd put a ghost in the old theater to build the story, make room for special effects. Oh, we'd haunt this place ourselves, pack it with lost souls.

We'd turn our lives into a terrible adventure. A true-life horror story with a happy ending. A trial we'd survive to talk about.

Except for Lady Baglady with her handful of dead husband. Miss America with her fetus, snowballing bigger and bigger, cell by cell, inside her. And Miss Sneezy with her mold allergy, the rest of us wanted more. More pain and suffering to dredge up, later, on national talk shows. Those television shows Miss America talked about. Even if we never sparked a good idea, never wrote our masterpiece novel, this three months trapped together could be enough to make a memoir. A movie. A future of not working a regular job. Just being famous.

A story worth selling.

For now, sitting around the glass fireplace, we're ticking off the details we need to remember to create this scene on national television. So we could advise “on the set” in making the movie “authentic.” The story of how we were kidnapped and held hostage and every day Miss Sneezy got more sick and the baby inside Miss America got bigger.

No one will say it, but Miss Sneezy's death would make a perfect third-act climax. Our darkest moment.

The perfect ending would be the landlord stumbling in after the lease has expired, just in time to rescue the fragile Miss America. The demented Lady Baglady. A few of us would come limping out, squinting and weeping, into the sunlight. The rest of us would be carried out on stretchers and slid into ambulances for a siren's trip to the hospital. The movie could jump ahead a little to show us all standing bedside as Miss America gives birth. Then jump again, to show us at the funeral for Miss Sneezy. The ghost of poor Miss Sneezy, sacrificed to juice the plot.

We'd have Agent Tattletale's camera for video support. The Earl of Slander's audiocassettes for voice-over.

Then, as completion, Miss America would name her new child Miss Sneezy, or whatever her first name had been. A sense of the circle mended. Of life going on, renewed. Poor, frail Miss Sneezy.

In the movie–book–T-shirt story, we'd all love Miss Sneezy . . . her deep courage . . . her sunny humor.

Sigh.

No, unless one of us coughs up a new-fangled Frankenstein or Dracula, our own story will have to get a lot more dramatic before it would be worth selling. We need everything to get much, much worse before it's all over.

Screw the idea of creating anything original. It's no use, writing some let's-pretend piece of fiction. That takes so much effort for what little you get in cash money.

Especially split seventeen ways. Royalty-wise. Sixteen ways, if you subtract the doomed Miss Sneezy.

All of us silent, but commanding her: Cough.

Hurry up and die, already.

No, when everyone else walked out of that coffeehouse meeting, we were the smart ones. Yes, it looked like a crackpot venture that would lead to big trouble, but, hey—it looked like a crackpot adventure that could lead to big money.

All of us sitting here silent, but commanding Miss Sneezy: Cough.