“My God, what did you say to her?” the agent asked.
“I tried to reassure her,” the editor said. “There I was, freshly returned from a five-martini lunch, talking to this terrified woman who was standing in a drugstore phone booth in Omaha, trying to tell her it was all right, not to worry that her husband believed that the phones were full of radium crystals, that a bunch of anonymous people were sending android Girl Scouts to get the goods on him, not to worry that her husband had disconnected his talent from his mentality to such a degree that he could believe there was an elf living in his typewriter.
“I don’t believe I was very convincing.
“She asked me—no, begged me—to work with Reg on his story, to see that it got published. She did everything but come out and say that ‘The Flexible Bullet’ was Reg’s last contact to what we laughingly call reality.
“I asked her what I should do if Reg mentioned Fornits again. ‘Humor”him,’ she said. Her exact words—humor him. And then she hung up.
“There was a letter in the mail from Reg the next day—five pages, typed, single-spaced. The first paragraph was about the story. The second draft was getting on well, he said. He thought he would be able to shave seven hundred words from the original ten thousand five hundred, bringing the final down to a tight nine thousand eight.
“The rest of the letter was about Fomits and fornus. His own observations, and questions… dozens of questions.”
“Observations?” The writer leaned forward. “He was actually seeing them, then?”
“No,” the editor said. “Not seeing them in an actual sense, but in another way… I suppose he was. You know, astronomers knew Pluto was there long before they had a telescope powerful enough to see it. They knew all about it by studying the planet Neptune’s orbit. Reg was observing the Fornits in that way. They liked to eat at night, he said, had I noticed that? He fed them at all hours of the day, but he noticed that most of it disappeared after eight p M ”
“Hallucination?” the writer asked.
“Nd*,” the editor said. “His wife simply cleared as much of the food out of the typewriter as she could when Reg went out for his evening walk. And he went out every evening at nine o’clock.”
“I’d say she had quite a nerve getting after you,” the agent grunted. He shifted his large bulk in the lawn chair. “She was feeding the man’s fantasy herself.”
“You don’t understand why she called and why she was so upset,” the editor said quietly. He looked at the writer’s wife. “But I’ll bet you do, Meg.”
“Maybe,” she said, and gave her husband an uncomfortable sideways look. “She wasn’t mad because you were feeding his fantasy. She was afraid you might upset it.”
“Bravo.” The editor lit a fresh cigarette. “And she removed the food for the same reason. If the food continued to accumulate in the typewriter, Reg would make the logical assumption, proceeding directly from his own decidedly illogical premise. Namely, that his Fornit had either died or left. Hence, no more fornus.
Hence, no more writing. Hence…” The editor let the word drift away on cigarette smoke and then resumed:
“He thought that Fornits were probably nocturnal. They didn’t like loud noises—he had noticed that he hadn’t been able to write on mornings after noisy parties—they hated the TV, they hated free electricity, they hated radium. Reg had sold their TV to Goodwill for twenty dollars, he said, and his wristwatch with the radium dial was long gone. Then the questions. How did I know about Fornits? Was it possible that I had one in residence? If so, what did I think about this, this, and that? I don’t need to be more specific, I think. If you’ve ever gotten a dog of a particular breed and can recollect the questions you asked about its care and feeding, you’ll know most of the questions Reg asked me. One little doodle below my signature was all it took to open Pandora’s box.”
“What did you write back?” the agent asked.
The editor said slowly, “That’s where the trouble really began. For both of us. Jane had said, ‘Humor him,’ so that’s what I did. Unfortunately, I rather overdid it. I answered his letter at home, and I was very drunk.
The apartment seemed much too empty. It had a stale smell—cigarette smoke, not enough airing. Things were going to seed with Sandra gone. The dropcloth on the couch all wrinkled. Dirty dishes in the sink, that sort of thing. The middle-aged man unprepared for domesticity.
“I sat there with a sheet of my personal stationery rolled into the typewriter and I thought: I need a Fornit. In fact, I need a dozen of them to dust this damn lonely house with fornus from end to end. In that instant I was drunk enough to envy Reg Thorpe his delusion.
“I said I had a Fomit, of course. I told Reg that mine was remarkably similar to his in its characteristics.
Nocturnal. Hated loud noises, but seemed to enjoy Bach and Brahms… I often did my best work after an evening of listening to them, I said. I had found my Fornit had a decided taste for Kirschner’s bologna… had Reg ever tried it? I simply left little scraps of it near the Scripto I always carried—my editorial blue pencil, if you like—and it was almost always gone in the morning. Unless, as Reg said, it had been noisy the night before. I told him I was glad to know about radium, even though I didn’t have a glow-in-the-dark wristwatch. I told him my Fornit had been with me since college. I got so carried away with my own invention that I wrote nearly six pages. At the end I added a paragraph about the story, a very perfunctory thing, and signed it.”
“And below your signature—?” the agent’s wife asked.
“Sure. Fornit Some Fornus.” He paused. “You can’t see it in the dark, but I’m blushing. I was so goddammed drunk, so goddammed smug… I might have had second thoughts in the cold light of dawn, but by then it was too late.”
“You’d mailed it the night before?” the writer murmured.
“So I did. And then, for a week and a half, I held my breath and waited. One day the manuscript came in, addressed to me, no covering letter. The cuts were as we had discussed them, and I thought that the story was letter-perfect, but the manuscript was… well, I put it in my briefcase, took it home, and retyped it myself. It was covered with weird yellow stains. I thought…”
“Urine?” the agent’s wife asked.
“Yes, that’s what I thought. But it wasn’t. And when I got home, there was a letter in my mailbox from Reg. Ten pages this time. In the course of the letter the yellow stains were accounted for. He hadn’t been able to find Kirschner’s bologna, so had tried Jordan’s.
“He said they loved it. Especially with mustard.
“I had been quite sober that day. But his letter combined with those pitiful mustard stains ground right into the pages of his manuscript sent me directly to the liquor cabinet. Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Go directly to drunk.”
“What else did the letter say?” the agent’s wife asked. She had grown more and more fascinated with the tale, and was now leaning over her not inconsiderable belly in a posture that reminded the writer’s wife of Snoopy standing on his doghouse and pretending to be a vulture.
“Only two lines about the story this time. All credit thrown to the Fornit… and to me. The bologna had really been a fantastic idea. Rackne loved it, and as a consequence—”
“Rackne?” the author asked.
“That was the Fornit’s name,” the editor said. “Rackne. As a consequence of the bologna, Rackne had really gotten behind in the rewrite. The rest of the letter was a paranoid chant. You have never seen such stuff in your life.”
“Reg and Rackne… a marriage made in heaven,” the writer’s wife said, and giggled nervously.
“Oh, not at all,” the editor said. “Theirs was a working relationship. And Rackne was male.”
“Well, tell us about the letter.”
“That’s one 1 don’t have by heart, it’s just as well for you that I don’t. Even abnormality grows tiresome after a while. The mailman was CIA. The paperboy was FBI; Reg had seen a silenced revolver in his sack of papers. The people next door were spies of some sort; they had surveillance equipment in their van. He no longer dared to go down to the corner store for supplies because the proprietor was an android. He had suspected it before, he said, but now he was sure. He had seen the wires crisscrossing under the man’s scalp, where he was beginning to go bald. And the radium count in his house was way up; at night he could see a dull, greenish glow in the rooms.