“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 hardboiled 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. 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 the University of Florida, I had a classmate 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 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 mentions Albumuth 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.