X: What’s to tell? It’s dirty and gray and yet more alive than any city except—
I: Ambergris?
X: I didn’t say that. I may have thought it, but then a city out of one’s imagination would have to be more alive, wouldn’t it?
I: Not necessarily. I would have liked to have heard more aboutNew York from your unique perspective, but you seem agitated and—
X: And it’s completely irrelevant.
I: No doubt. What did you do after the incident inNew York?
X: I flew back toTallahassee without finishing my business… what did I say? You look startled.
I: Nothing. It’s nothing. Continue. You flew back without finishing your business.
X: And I told Hannah we were going on vacation right now for two weeks. We flew toCorfu and had a great time with my Greek publisher — no one recognized me there, see? Hannah’s daughter Sarah loved the snorkeling. The water was incredible. This clear blue. You could see to the bottom.
I: What did Sarah think of Ambergris?
X: She never read the books. She was really too young, and she always made a great show of being unimpressed by my success. I can’t blame her for that — she did the same thing to Hannah with her magazine.
I: Did the vacation make a difference?
X: It seemed to. No more visions for a long time. Besides, I’d reached a decision — I wasn’t going to write about Ambergris ever again.
I: Did Hannah agree with your decision?
X: Without a doubt. She saw how shaken I’d been after getting back fromNew York. She just wanted whatever I thought was best.
I: Did it work out?
X: Obviously not. I’m sitting here talking to you, aren’t I? But at first, it did work. I really thought that Ambergris would cease to exist if I just stopped writing about it. But my sickness went deeper than that.
I: I’m afraid we have reached a point where I must probe deeper. Tell me about the fire.
X: I don’t want to.
I: Then tell me about the thing in your work room first.
X: Can’t it wait? For a little while?
The dripping of water had become a constant irritation for me. If it had become an irritation, then I had failed to concentrate hard enough. I had not left enough of myself outside the room. I wondered how long the session would last — more specifically, how long my patience would last. If we are to be honest, the members of my profession, then we must recognize that our judgments are based on our own endurance.
How long can we go on before we simply cannot stand to hear more and leave the room? Often the subject, the patient, has nothing to do with the decision.
“I hear music down here sometimes,” X said, staring at the ceiling. “It comes from above. It sounds like some infernal opera. Is there an opera house nearby, or does someone in this building play opera?”
I stared at him. This part was always difficult. How could it fail to be?
“You are avoiding the matter at hand.”
“What did you think of my book?” X asked. “One writer to another,” he added, not quite able to banish the condescension from his voice.
Oddly enough, the first novella in the book, ‘Dradin, In Love,’ had struck me, on a very primitive level, as evidence of an underlying sanity, for X clearly had conceptualized Dradin as a madman. No delusions there, for Dradin was a madman. I had even theorized that X saw Dradin as his alter ego, but dismissed the idea on the basis that it is unwise to match events in a work of fiction with events in the writer’s life.
Of course, I did not think it useful to share any of these thoughts with X, so I shrugged and said, “It was fanciful in its way and yet some of its aspects were as realistic as any hard-boiled thriller. I thought
‘Dradin, In Love’ moved slowly. You devote an entire chapter to Dradin’s walk back to his hostel.”
“No, no, no! That’s foreshadowing. That’s symbolism. That’s showing you the beginning of the carnage, in the form of the sleeping mushroom dwellers.”
“Well, perhaps it did not speak to me as forcefully as you wanted it to. But you must remember, I was reading it for clues.”
“As to my mental state? Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Of course. To both questions. And I must also determine whether you most identify with Dradin, or the dwarf Dvorak, or the priest Cadimon, or even the Living Saint.”
“A dead end. I identify with none of them. And all of them contain a part of me.”
I shrugged. “I must gather clues where I can.”
“You mean if I don’t give you enough information.”
“Some give me information without meaning to.”
“I am not sure I can give you what you want.”
“Actually,” I said, picking up City of Saints and Madmen, “there was a passage in here that I found quite interesting. Not from ‘Dradin, In Love,’ but from this other story, ‘Learning to Leave the Flesh.’
You make a distinction in the introduction to that tale — you call it a forerunner to the Ambergris stories, and yet in your response to the other interrogatories, you say the story was written quite recently.”
“Surely you know that a writer can create a precursor tale after he has written the tales which come after, just as he can write the final tale in a series before he has finished writing the others.”
The agitation had returned to X’s features, almost as if he knew I was steering the conversation back toward my original objective.
“True, true,” I said as I turned pages, “but there is one passage — about the dwarf, Davy Jones, that interests me most. Ah, here it is — where Jones haunts the main character. Why don’t you read it for me?” I handed it to him and he took it with a certain eagerness. He had a good reading voice, neither too shrill nor too professional.
“Then he stands at the foot of my bed, staring at me. A cold blue tint dyes his flesh, as if the TV’s glow has burnt him. The marble cast of his face is as perfect as the most perfect sentence I have ever written.
His eyes are so sad that I cannot meet his gaze; his face holds so many years of pain, of wanting to leave the flesh. He speaks to me and although I cannot hear him, I know what he is saying. I am crying again, but softly, softly. The voices on the street are louder and the tinkling of bells so very light.”
I: A very nice passage from a rather eccentric story. Whence came the dwarf? Did he walk out of your imagination or out of your life?
X: From life, at first. When I was going to college at theUniversityofFlorida, I had a class-mate named David Wilson who was a dwarf. We took statistics together. He tutored me past the rough bits. He was poor but couldn’t get enough financial aid and his overall grades weren’t good enough for scholarships, so he rented himself out for dwarf-tossing contests at local bars. He had a talent for math, but here he was renting himself out to bars, and sometimes to the county fair when it came by. One day, he stopped coming to class and the next week I learned from a rather lurid article in the local paper that he had drunk himself to death.
I: Did he visit you at the foot of your bed?
X: You will remember I had resolved not to write about Ambergris ever again, but at first I resolved not to write at all. So I didn’t. For five months I quit writing. It was hell. I had to turn a part of myself off. It was like a relentless itching in my brain. I had to unlearn taking notes on little pieces of paper. I had to unlearn making observations. Or, rather, I had to ignore these urges. And I was thinking about David Wilson because I had always wanted to write about him and couldn’t. I guess I figured that if I thought about a story I couldn’t write, I’d scratch the itch in a harmless way… And it was then that the dwarf — or what I thought was the dwarf — began to
