“What’s the plot?” the agent asked.
“No,” the editor said, “that doesn’t matter. It was just a story about a young man gradually losing his struggle to cope with success. It’s better left vague. A detailed plot synopsis would only be boring. They always are.
“Anyway, I wrote him a letter. It said this: ‘Dear Reg Thorpe, I’ve just read “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” and I think it’s great. I’d like to publish it in Lagan’s early next year, if that fits. Does $800 sound okay?
Payment on acceptance. More or less.’ New paragraph.”
The editor indented the evening air with his cigarette.
” “The story runs a little long, and I’d like you to shorten it by about five hundred words, if you could. I would settle for a two-hundred-word cut, if it comes to that. We can always drop a cartoon.’ Paragraph. ‘Call, if you want.’ My signature. And off the letter went, to Omaha.”
“And you remember it, word for word like that?” the writer’s wife asked.
“I kept all the correspondence in a special file,” the editor said. “His letters, carbons of mine back. There was quite a stack of it by the end, including three or four pieces of correspondence from Jane Thorpe, his wife.
I’ve read the file over quite often. No good, of course. Trying to understand the flexible bullet is like trying to understand how a Mobius strip can have only one side. That’s just the way things are in this best-of-all-possible
worlds. Yes, I know it all word for word, or almost. Some people have the Declaration of Independence by heart.”
“Bet he called you the next day,” the agent said, grinning. “Collect.”
“No, he didn’t call. Shortly after Underworld Figures, Thorpe stopped using the telephone altogether.
His wife told me that. When they moved to Omaha from New York, they didn’t even have a phone put in the new house. He had decided, you see, that the telephone system didn’t really run on electricity but on radium. He thought it was one of the two or three best-kept secrets in the history of the modern world. He claimed — to his wife — that all the radium was responsible for the growing cancer rate, not cigarettes or automobile emissions or industrial pollution. Each telephone had a small radium crystal in the handset, and every time you used the phone, you shot your head full of radiation.”
“Yuh, he was crazy,” the writer said, and they all laughed.
“He wrote instead,” the editor said, flicking his cigarette in the direction of the lake. “His letter said this:
‘Dear Henry Wilson (or just Henry, if I may), Your letter was both exciting and gratifying. My wife was, if anything, more pleased than I. The money is fine… although in all honesty I must say that the idea of being published in Lagan’s at all seems like more than adequate compensation (but I’ll take it, I’ll take it). I’ve looked over your cuts, and they seem fine. I think they’ll improve the story as well as clear space for those cartoons. All best wishes, Reg Thorpe.”
“Under his signature was a funny little drawing… more like a doodle. An eye in a pyramid, like the one on the back of the dollar bill. But instead of Novus Ordo Seclorum on the banner beneath, there were these words: Fornit Some Fornus.”
“Either Latin or Groucho Marx,” the agent’s wife said.
“Just part of Reg Thorpe’s growing eccentricity,” the editor said. “His wife told me that Reg had come to believe in ‘little people,’ sort of like elves or fairies. The Fornits. They were luck-elves, and he thought one of them lived in his typewriter.”
“Oh my Lord,” the writer’s wife said.
“According to Thorpe, each Fornit has a small device, like a flitgun, full of… good-luck dust, I guess you’d call it. And the good-luck dust — ”
” — is called fornus,” the writer finished. He was grinning broadly.
“Yes. And his wife thought it quite funny, too. At first. In fact, she thought at first — Thorpe had conceived the Fornits two years before, while he was drafting Underworld Figures — that it was just Reg, having her on. And maybe at first he was. It seems to have progressed from a whimsy to a superstition to an outright belief. It was… a flexible fantasy. But hard in the end. Very hard.”