The next day, as the writer wrote, he felt the weight of the dark creature on his shoulder, but when he looked up, it still hugged the wall where it met the ceiling. He returned to his work, but found himself overcome by thoughts of Ambergris.
Surely, these thoughts said, he had abandoned Ambergris for too long. Surely, it was time to come home to the city. His pen, almost against his will, began to write of the city: the tendrils of vines against the sides of buildings in the burnt out bureaucratic district; the sad, lonely faces on the statues in Trillian Square; the rough lapping of water at the docks. The pen was a black pen. Writers write with black pens. He dropped the pen, picked up the blue pens he used for editing, but the best he could do when he tried to run a line through what he had written was to correct his poor spelling. Writers may write, writers may edit, but writers are lousy spellers. He looked up again at the manta ray. He looked up at the little darkness and he said, “You are dark, and all writers have a little darkness inside them, but not all writers have a little darkness outside them. What are you? Who are you?” But the darkness did not answer. The darkness could only write. And edit. As if it too were a writer.
Within a short time, the writer wrote only about Ambergris. He described every detail of its glistening spires as the morning light hit them. He described the inner workings of the Truffidian religion that so dominated the city’s spiritual life. He described houses and orphans, furniture and social customs. He wrote stories and he wrote essays. He wrote stories disguised as essays. A part of him delighted in the speed with which the pen sped effortlessly, like a talented figure skater, across the ice of his pages. A part of him pompously scorned the children’s stories he had worked on before his transformation. A part of him was so frightened that it could not articulate its fear. A part of him screamed and gibbered and raged against the darkness. It seemed that Ambergris was intent on becoming real in the world that the writer knew as real, that it meant to seduce him, to trick him into believing it existed without him. But a writer writes, even when he doesn’t want to write, and so he wrote, but not without pain. Not without fear. For days he ate nothing and fed the creature on the wall everything, hoping it would reveal more of Ambergris to him. His wife began to worry, but he impatiently told her everything was fine, was fine, was fine. He began to carry a notebook everywhere and write notes at embarrassing times during social events. Soon, he stopped attending social events. Soon, he slept in his work room, with the bright darkness above him as a night-light. Being a writer is addictive. Being a writer is an addiction. All those words, all those words. The act of writing is addictive. But the writer didn’t feel like a writer anymore. He felt like a drug addict. He felt like a drug addict in constant need of a fix. Could he be fixed? His fingers and his wrist were constantly sore and arthritic from overuse. His mind was a soaring, wheeling roller coaster of exhilaration and fear. When the creature held back information or he was forced away from his desk by his wife, or even the need to perform bodily functions, he had the shakes, the sweats. He vomited. He was sick with Ambergris. It was a virus within him, attacking his red and white blood cells. It was a cancer, eating away at corpuscles. It was a great, black darkness in the corner of his mind. He was drunk on another world. And the thing on the wall, always growing larger, stared down at him and rippled its wings and mewled for more food, which, of course, consisted of pieces of the writer’s soul. His whole life had become a quest for Ambergris, to make Ambergris more real. He would find notes on the city that he did not remember writing scattered around the house, even the manuscripts of librettos by Bender, stories by Sirin. His wife thought he had written them, but he knew better. He knew that the creature on the wall had written them, and then left them, like bread crumbs, for him to follow, to the gingerbread house, to the witch, to death.
Finally, one wan autumn day, when the leaves outside the house had turned golden brown and distributed themselves across the lawn, the writer knew he must destroy the creature or be destroyed by it. He was sad that he must destroy it, for he knew that he was destroying a part of himself. It had come out of him. He had created it. But he was a writer. All writers write. All writers edit. All writers, surely must, on occasion, destroy their creations before their creations turn stale and destroy them. The writer had no love for the creature anymore, only hatred, but he did love his wife and his wife’s daughter, and he thought that such love was the greatest justification he could ever have for his actions. And so he entered his work room and attacked the darkness. His wife heard terrible sounds coming from the work room—a man crying, a man screaming, a man pounding on the walls; and was that the smell of fire?—but before she could come to his rescue, he stumbled out of the room, his features stricken with fear and failure. She asked what was wrong and held him tight. “All writers write,” he whispered. “All writers edit,” he muttered. “All writers have a little darkness in them,” he sobbed. “All writers must sometimes destroy their creations,” he shouted. But only one writer has a darkness that cannot be destroyed, he thought to himself as he clutched his wife to him and kissed her and sought comfort in her, for she was the most precious thing in his life and he was afraid—afraid of loss, afraid of the darkness, and, most of all, afraid of himself.
* * *
After I had finished reading, I turned to the writer and I said gently, “This is an interesting allegory in its way, although the ending seems a little … melodramatic? And a most valuable document as well. I can see how people would like your writing.”
The writer again sat behind the desk. “It’s not an allegory. It’s my life.” He seemed defeated, as if he had reread the tale over my shoulder.
“Don’t you think it is time to discuss the fire?” I asked him. “Isn’t this all leading to the fire?”
He turned his head to one side, as if he were a horse resisting a bit. “Maybe. Maybe it is. When can I see my wife?”
“Not until we’re done,” I said. Who knew when he would see his wife? It has been my experience that I must lie, or half-lie, in order to preserve a certain equilibrium in the patient. I do not enjoy it. I do not relish it. But I do it.
“You have to understand,” X said, “that I don’t fully understand what happened. I can only guess.”
“I will gladly accept your best guess.”
But, despite my control, a grim smile played across my lips. I could smell his desperation: it smelled like yellow grass, like stale biscuits, like sour milk.
X: Gradually, the manta ray grew in size until it covered more than ten feet of the wall. As it grew, it began to change the room. Not visual changes, at first, but I began to smell the jungle, and then auto exhaust, and then to hear noises as of a bustling but faraway city. Gradually, the manta ray fit itself into its corner and shaped itself to the wall like a second skin. It also began to smell—not a pleasant smell: like fruit rotting, I guess.
I: And this continued until…?
X: Until one day I woke up early from a terrible nightmare: I was being stabbed in the palm by a man with no face, and I didn’t even try to pull away while he was doing it … I walked into my work room and there was an intense light coming from the corner where the creature had been—just a creature-shaped hole through which Ambergris peeked. It was the Religious Quarter endless calls to prayer and lots of icons and pilgrims.