haunt me. He’d stand at the foot of the bed and… well, you read the story. To stop him from haunting me, I relented and sat down to write what became “Learning to Leave the Flesh.”
I: But he was already Dvorak.
X: No. Dvorak was just a dwarf. He had nothing of David Wilson in him. David Wilson was a kind and gentle soul.
I: The story mentionsAlbumuth Boulevard.
X: Yes, it does. I had not only broken my vow not to write, but Ambergris had, in somewhat distorted form, crept back into my work.
I: Did you see the dwarf again?
X: One last time. When he became the manta ray. That was when I realized that I had brought something back from Ambergris with me. It scared the shit out of me.
I: The manta ray is mentioned in the transcripts, but never described. What is a manta ray?
X: You’ve never heard of a manta ray?
I: Perhaps under another name. What is it, please?
X: A big, black, saltwater… fish, I guess, but wide, with flaps like huge, graceful wings. Sleek.
Smooth. Like a very large skate or flounder.
I: Ah! A flounder! You’ll forgive my ignorance.
X: Clearly you devote too much time to your job.
I: You may be right, but to return to our topic: you were given this fish by the apparition of the dwarf. It is important that we get the symbolism correct.
X: No. The “fish” was the dwarf all along, leading me astray. The dwarf became the manta ray.
I: How did this happen?
X: I wish I could say Hannah saw it too, but she had fallen asleep. It was a cold night and I was wide awake, every muscle in my body tense. Suddenly, as before,Wilson stood at the foot of my bed. He just watched me for a long time, a smile upon his face… and then, as I watched him, he became like a pen-and-ink drawing of himself— only lines, with the rest of him translucent. And then this drawing began to fill up with cloudy black ink — like from a squid; do you know what a squid is?
I: Yes.
X: And when he was completely black with ink, the blackness oozed out from his body, until his body was eclipsed by the creature that looked exactly like a manta ray. It had tiny red eyes and it swam through the air. It terrified me. It horrified me. For the creature was Ambergris, come to reclaim me. The blackness of it was diffused by flashes of light through which I could see scenes of the city, of Ambergris, tattooed into its flesh — and they were moving. I hid under the covers, and when I looked again, in the morning, it was gone.
I: Did you tell your wife?
X: No! I should have, but I didn’t. I felt as if I were going mad. I couldn’t sleep. I could hardly eat.
I: This is when you lost all the weight?
X: Yes.
I: What, specifically, did you think this black creature was? Surely not “Ambergris,” as you say?
X: I thought I’d brought it back with me from Ambergris — that it was a physical manifestation of my psychosis.
I: You thought it was a part of you. I know you were terrified by it, but did you ever, for a moment, consider that it might have been benevolent?
X: No!
I: I see. It has been my experience — and my experience is substantial — that some men learn to master their madness, so that even if all manner of horrific hallucinations surround them, they do not react. They live in a world where they cannot trust their senses, and yet no one would guess this from their outward composure.
X: I am not one of those men. It terrified me to my soul.
I: And yet such men find such hallucinations a blessing, for they give warning of a skewed reality.
How much worse to slip — to just slip, as if slouching in your chair, as if blinking — into madness with no immediate sign that you had done so. So I call your visitation a helper, not a destroyer.
X: You may call it what you will. I did not think to call it anything.
I: What did you do to reestablish your equilibrium after this incident?
X: I began to write again. I spent eight to ten hours in my work room, scribbling away. Now I felt my only salvation was to write — and I wrote children’s stories. “Sarah and the Land of Sighs”
was the first one, and it went well. My agent liked it. It sold. Eventually, it won an honorable mention for the Caldecott. So I wrote more stories, except that at some point — and I still can’t recall when exactly— the manta ray reappeared.
I: What was your reaction?
X: Fear. Pure, unadulterated fear.
I: Tell me what happened.
X: I will not discuss what happened. But I have written about it — a story fragment you could call it.
X reached under the desk and handed me a thin sheaf of papers. I took them with barely disguised reluctance.
“Fiction lies.”
X snorted. “So do people.”
“I will read with reservations.”
“Yes, and if you’ll excuse me… ” He trotted off to use the bathroom.
Leaving me with the manuscript. The title was “The Strange Case of X.”
I began to read.
The man sat in the room and wrote on a legal sheet. The room was small, with insufficient light, but the man had good pens so he did not care. The man was a writer. This is why he wrote.
Because he was a writer. He sat alone in the room which had no windows and he wrote a story.
Sometimes he listened to music while he wrote because music inspired him to write. The story he wrote was called “Sarah and theLandofSighs ” and it was his attempt to befriend the daughter of his wife, who was not his own daughter. His children were his stories, and they were not always particularly well-behaved. “Sarah and theLandofSighs ” was not particularly well-behaved. It had nothing at all to do with the world of Ambergris, which was the world he wrote about for adults (all writers have separate worlds they write about, even those writers who think they do not have separate worlds they write about). And yet, when he had finished writing for the day and reread what he had written, he found that bits and pieces of Ambergris were in his story. He did not know how they had gotten into his story but because he was a writer and therefore a god — a tiny god, a tiny, insignificant god, but a god nonetheless — he took his pen and he slew the bits and pieces of Ambergris he found in his children’s story. By this time, it was dusk. He knew it was dusk because he could feel the dusk inside of him, choking his lungs, moving across that part of him which housed his imagination. He coughed up a little darkness, but thought nothing of it. There is a little darkness in every writer. And so he sat down to dinner with his wife and her daughter and they asked him how the writing had gone that day and he said, “Rotten! Horrible! I am not a writer. I am a baker. A carpenter. A truck driver. I am not a writer.” And they laughed because they knew he was a writer, and writers lie. And when he coughed up a little more darkness, they ignored it because they knew that there is a little more darkness in a writer than in other souls.
