This is a place, a very real place in Palo Alto, but in an even more important sense, this is an unreal place, the location of a very special ramen noodle shop that exists only in my mind. The strange thing about this real place is that I don’t think the fictional place (from an as-yet unpublished story) is consciously derived from it; yet the ramen shop (fictionally located in the dark glass arch) fits so precisely between the stairs upwards on the right (fictionally, to the upper terrace, only opened for special parties) and the tunnel to the left (fictionally, leading off to the chef’s domicile) that I can only imagine this real place, which I have walked past so many times, must have burrowed its way into my subconscious and provided me with the layout I needed for the ramen shop when I needed it.
I’ve seen this before in stories where an image I encountered years earlier subconsciously wormed its way into a story – most notably, when names and resonances of Wargames and The Bionic Woman wormed their way into my first published story, “Sibling Rivalry”, without me realizing it until much later.
Funny how the mind works …
-the Centaur
