“I started to get a headache. A very small headache at first. It was getting hard to think again. I remembered that Janey Morrison had an electric pencil sharpener on her desk. There were all those fluorescents in Jim’s office. The heaters. The vending machines in the concession down the hall. When you stopped to think of it, the whole fucking building ran on electricity; it was a wonder that anyone could get anything done. That was when the idea began to creep in, I think. The idea that Logon’s was going broke because no one could think straight. And the reason no one could think straight was because we were all cooped up in this highrise building that ran on electricity. Our brainwaves were completely messed up. I remember thinking that if you could have gotten a doctor in there with one of those EEG machines, they’d get some awfully weird graphs. Full of those big, spiky alpha waves that characterize malignant tumors in the forebrain.
“Just thinking about those things made my headache worse. But I gave it one more try. I asked him if he would at least ask Sam Vadar, the editor-in-chief, to let the story stand in the January issue. As Lagan’s fiction valedictory, if necessary. The final Logon’s short story.
“Jimmy was fiddling with a pencil and nodding. He said, Til bring it up, but you know it’s not going to fly. We’ve got a story by a one-shot novelist and we’ve got a story by John Updike that’s just as good… maybe better… and—’
” ‘The Updike story is not better!’ I said.
” ‘Well, Jesus, Henry, you don’t have to shout—’
” ‘I am not shouting!’ I shouted.
“He looked at me for a long time. My headache was quite bad by then. I could hear the fluorescents buzzing away. They sounded like a bunch of flies caught in a bottle. It was a really hateful sound. And I thought I could hear Janey running her electric pencil sharpener. They’re doing it on purpose, I thought. They want to mess me up. They know I can’t think of the right things to say while those things are running, so… so…
“Jim was saying something about bringing it up at the next editorial meeting, suggesting that instead of an arbitrary cut-off date they publish all the stories which I had verbally contracted for… although…
“I got up, went across the room, and shut off the lights.
” ‘What did you do that for?’ Jimmy asked.
” ‘You know why I did it,’ I said. ‘You ought to get out of here, Jimmy, before there’s nothing left of you.’
“He got up and came over to me. ‘I think you ought to take the rest of the day off, Henry,’ he said. ‘Go home. Rest. I know you’ve been under a strain lately. I want you to know I’ll do the best I can on this. I feel as strongly as you do… well, almost as strongly. But you ought to just go home and put your feet up and watch some TV.’
” ‘TV,’ I said, and laughed. It was the funniest thing I’d ever heard. ‘Jimmy,’ 1 said. ‘You tell Sam Vadar something else for me.’
” ‘What’s that, Henry?’
” ‘Tell him he needs a Fornit. This whole outfit. One Fornit? A dozen of them.’
” ‘A Fomit,’ he said, nodding. ‘Okay, Henry. I’ll be sure to tell him that.’
“My headache was very bad. I could hardly even see. Somewhere in the back of my mind I was already wondering how I was going to tell Reg and wondering how Reg was going to take it.
” ‘I’ll put in the purchase order myself, if I can find out who to send it to,’ I said. ‘Reg might have some ideas. A dozen Fornits. Get them to dust this place with fomus from end to end. Shut off the fucking power, all of it.’ I was walking around his office and Jimmy was staring at me with his mouth open. ‘Shut off all the power, Jimmy, you tell them that. Tell Sam that. No one can think with’ all that electrical interference, am I right?’
” ‘You’re right, Henry, one hundred percent. You just go on home and get some rest, okay? Take a nap or something.’
” ‘And Fornits. They don’t like all that interference. Radium, electricity, it’s all the same thing. Feed them bologna. Cake. Peanut butter. Can we get requisitions for that stuff?’ My headache was this black ball of pain behind my eyes. I was seeing two of Jimmy, two of everything. All of a sudden I needed a drink. If there was no fornus, and the rational side of my mind assured me there was not, then a drink was the only thing in the world that would get me right.
” ‘Sure, we can get the requisitions,’ he said.
” ‘You don’t believe any of this, do you, Jimmy?’ I asked.
” ‘Sure I do. It’s okay. You just want to go home and rest a little while.’
” ‘You don’t believe it now,’ I said, ‘but maybe you will when this rag goes into bankruptcy. How in the name of God can you believe you’re making rational decisions when you’re sitting less than fifteen yards from a bunch of Coke machines and candy machines and sandwich machines?’ Then I really had a terrible thought.
‘And a microwave oven!’ I screamed at him. ‘They got a microwave oven to heat the sandwiches up in!’
“He started to say something, but I didn’t pay any attention. I ran out. Thinking of that microwave oven explained everything. I had to get away from it. That was what made the headache so bad. I remember seeing Janey and Kate Younger from the ad department and Mert Strong from publicity in the outer office, all of them staring at me. They must have heard me shouting.
“My office was on the floor just below. I took the stairs. I went into my office, turned off all the lights, and got my briefcase. I took the elevator down to the lobby, but I put my briefcase between my feet and poked my fingers in my ears. I also remember the other three or four people in the elevator looking at me rather strangely.” The editor uttered a dry chuckle. “They were scared. So to speak. Cooped up in a little moving box with an obvious madman, you would have been scared, too.”
“Oh, surely, that’s a little strong,” the agent’s wife said.
“Not at all. Madness has to start somewhere. If this story’s about anything—if events in one’s own life can ever be said to be about anything—then this is a story about the genesis of insanity. Madness has to start somewhere, and it has to go somewhere. Like a road. Or a bullet from the barrel of a gun. I was still miles behind Reg Thorpe, but I was over the line. You bet.
“I had to go somewhere, so I went to Four Fathers, a bar on Forty-ninth. I remember picking that bar specifically because there was no juke and no color TV and not many lights. I remember ordering the first drink. After that I don’t remember anything until I woke up the next day in my bed at home. There was puke on the floor and a very large cigarette burn in the sheet over me. In my stupor I had apparently escaped dying in one of two extremely nasty ways—choking or burning. Not that I probably would have felt either.”
“Jesus,” the agent said, almost respectfully.
“It was a blackout,” the editor said. “The first real bona fide blackout of my life—but they’re always a sign of the end, and you never have very many. One way or the other, you never have very many. But any alcoholic will tell you that a blackout isn’t the same as passing out. It would save a lot of trouble if it was. No, when an alky blacks out, he keeps doing things. An alky in a blackout is a busy little devil. Sort of like a malign Fornit. He’ll call up his ex-wife and abuse her over the phone, or drive his car the wrong way on the turnpike and wipe out a carload of kids. He’ll quit his job, rob a market, give away his wedding ring. Busy little devils.
“What / had done, apparently, was to come home and write a letter. Only this one wasn’t to Reg. It was to me. And / didn’t write it—at least, according to the letter I didn’t.”
“Who did?” the writer’s wife asked.
“Bellis.”
“Who’s Bellis?”
“His Fornit,” the writer said almost absently. His eyes were shadowy and faraway.
“Yes, that’s right,” die editor said, not looking a bit surprised. He made the letter in the sweet night air for them again, indenting at the proper points with his finger.