“Is there another Fresca, love? My throat’s dry as hell.”
The writer’s wife fetched him one silently, and when she handed it to him she impulsively bent and kissed his wrinkled, alligator-hide cheek. He smiled, and his eyes sparkled in the dim light. She was, however, a good and kindly woman, and the sparkle did not in any way fool her. It was never merriness which made eyes sparkle that way.
“Thank you, Meg.”
He drank deeply, coughed, waved away the offer of a cigarette.
“I’ve had enough of those for the evening. I’m going to quit them entirely. In my next incarnation. So to speak.
“The rest of my own tale really needs no telling. It would have against it the only sin that any tale can ever really be guilty of — it’s predictable. They fished something like forty bottles of Black Velvet out of my car, a good many of them empty. I was babbling about elves, and electricity, and Fornits, and plutonium miners, and fornus, and I seemed utterly insane to them, and that of course is exactly what I was.
“Now here’s what happend in Omaha while I was driving around — according to the gas credit slips in the Chevy’s glove compartment — five northeastern states. All of this, you understand, was information I obtained from Jane Thorpe over a long and painful period of correspondence, which culminated in a face-to-face meeting in New Haven, where she now lives, shortly after I was dismissed from the sanitarium as a reward for finally recanting. At the end of that meeting we wept in each other’s arms, and that was when I began to believe that there could be a real life for me — perhaps even happiness — again.
“That day, around three o’clock in the afternoon, there was a knock at the door of the Thorpe home. It was a telegraph boy. The telegram was from me — the last item of our unfortunate correspondence. It read: REG
HAVE RELIABLE INFORMATION THAT RACKNE IS DYING IT’S THE LITTLE BOY ACCORDING TO
BELLIS BELLIS SAYS THE BOY’S NAME IS JIMMY FORNIT SOME FORNUS HENRY.
“In case that marvelous Howard Baker question of What did he know and when did he know it? has gone through your mind, I can tell you that I knew Jane had hired a cleaning woman; 1 didn’t know — except through Bellis — that she had a li’1-devil son named Jimmy. I suppose you’ll have to take my word for that, although in all fairness I have to add that the shrinks who worked on my case over the next two and a half years never did.
“When the telegram came, Jane was at the grocery store. She found it, after Reg was dead, in one of his back pockets. The time of transmission and delivery were both noted on it, along with the added line No telephone/Deliver original. Jane said that although the telegram was only a day old, it had been so much handled that it looked as if he’d had it for a month.
“In a way, that telegram, those twenty-six words, was the real flexible bullet, and I fired it directly into Reg Thorpe’s brain all the way from Paterson, New Jersey, and I was so fucking drunk I don’t even remember doing it.
“During the last two weeks of his life. Reg had fallen into a pattern that seemed normality itself. He got up at six, made breakfast for himself and his wife, and then wrote for an hour. Around eight o’clock he would lock his study and take the dog for a long, leisurely walk around the neighborhood. He was very forthcoming on these walks, stopping to chat with anyone who wanted to chat with him, tying the pooch outside a nearby cafe to have a midmorning cup of coffee, and then rambling on again. He rarely got back to the house before noon. On many days it was twelve-thirty or one o’clock. Part of this was an effort to escape the garrulous Gertrude Rulin, Jane believed, because his pattern hadn’t really begun to solidify until a couple of days after she started working for them.