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.”