City of Saints and Madmen

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I: The manta ray is mentioned in the transcripts, but never described. What is a manta ray?

  X: You’ve never heard of a manta ray?

  I: Perhaps under another name. What is it, please?

  X: A big, black, saltwater . . . fish, I guess, but wide, with flaps like huge, graceful wings. Sleek. Smooth. Like a very large skate or flounder.

  I: Ah! A flounder! You’ll forgive my ignorance.

  X: Clearly you devote too much time to your job.

  I: You may be right, but to return to our topic: you were given this fish by the apparition of the dwarf. It is important that we get the symbolism correct.

  X: No. The “fish” was the dwarf all along, leading me astray. The dwarf became the manta ray.

  I: How did this happen?

  X: I wish I could say Hannah saw it too, but she had fallen asleep. It was a cold night and I was wide awake, every muscle in my body tense. Suddenly, as before, Wilson stood at the foot of my bed. He just watched me for a long time, a smile upon his face . . . and then, as I watched him, he became like a pen-and-ink drawing of himself—only lines, with the rest of him translucent. And then this drawing began to fill up with cloudy black ink—like from a squid; do you know what a squid is?

  I: Yes.

  X: And when he was completely black with ink, the blackness oozed out from his body, until his body was eclipsed by the creature that looked exactly like a manta ray. It had tiny red eyes and it swam through the air. It terrified me. It horrified me. For the creature was Ambergris, come to reclaim me. The blackness of it was diffused by flashes of light through which I could see scenes of the city, of Ambergris, tattooed into its flesh—and they were moving. I hid under the covers, and when I looked again, in the morning, it was gone.

  I: Did you tell your wife?

  X: No! I should have, but I didn’t. I felt as if I were going mad. I couldn’t sleep. I could hardly eat.

  I: This is when you lost all the weight?

  X: Yes.

  I: What, specifically, did you think this black creature was? Surely not “Ambergris,” as you say?

  X: I thought I’d brought it back with me from Ambergris—that it was a physical manifestation of my psychosis.

  I: You thought it was a part of you. I know you were terrified by it, but did you ever, for a moment, consider that it might have been benevolent?

  X: No!

  I: I see. It has been my experience—and my experience is substantial—that some men learn to master their madness, so that even if all manner of horrific hallucinations surround them, they do not react. They live in a world where they cannot trust their senses, and yet no one would guess this from their outward composure.

  X: I am not one of those men. It terrified me to my soul.

  I: And yet such men find such hallucinations a blessing, for they give warning of a skewed reality. How much worse to slip—to just slip, as if slouching in your chair, as if blinking—into madness with no immediate sign that you had done so. So I call your visitation a helper, not a destroyer.

  X: You may call it what you will. I did not think to call it anything.

  I: What did you do to reestablish your equilibrium after this incident?

  X: I began to write again. I spent eight to ten hours in my work room, scribbling away. Now I felt my only salvation was to write—and I wrote children’s stories. “Sarah and the Land of Sighs” was the first one, and it went well. My agent liked it. It sold. Eventually, it won an honorable mention for the Caldecott. So I wrote more stories, except that at some point—and I still can’t recall when exactly—the manta ray reappeared.

  I: What was your reaction?

  X: Fear. Pure, unadulterated fear.

  I: Tell me what happened.

  X: I will not discuss what happened. But I have written about it—a story fragment you could call it.

  X reached under the desk and handed me a thin sheaf of papers. I took them with barely disguised reluctance.

  “Fiction lies.”

  X snorted. “So do people.”

  “I will read with reservations.”

  “Yes, and if you’ll excuse me . . . ” He trotted off to use the bathroom.

  Leaving me with the manuscript. The title was “The Strange Case of X.”

  I began to read.

  The man sat in the room and wrote on a legal sheet. The room was small, with insufficient light, but the man had good pens so he did not care. The man was a writer. This is why he wrote. Because he was a writer. He sat alone in the room which had no windows and he wrote a story. Sometimes he listened to music while he wrote because music inspired him to write. The story he wrote was called “Sarah and the Land of Sighs” and it was his attempt to befriend the daughter of his wife, who was not his own daughter. His children were his stories, and they were not always particularly well-behaved. “Sarah and the Land of Sighs” was not particularly well-behaved. It had nothing at all to do with the world of Ambergris, which was the world he wrote about for adults (all writers have separate worlds they write about, even those writers who think they do not have separate worlds they write about). And yet, when he had finished writing for the day and reread what he had written, he found that bits and pieces of Ambergris were in his story. He did not know how they had gotten into his story but because he was a writer and therefore a god—a tiny god, a tiny, insignificant god, but a god nonetheless—he took his pen and he slew the bits and pieces of Ambergris he found in his children’s story. By this time, it was dusk. He knew it was dusk because he could feel the dusk inside of him, choking his lungs, moving across that part of him which housed his imagination. He coughed up a little darkness, but thought nothing of it. There is a little darkness in every writer. And so he sat down to dinner with his wife and her daughter and they asked him how the writing had gone that day and he said, “Rotten! Horrible! I am not a writer. I am a baker. A carpenter. A truck driver. I am not a writer.” And they laughed because they knew he was a writer, and writers lie. And when he coughed up a little more darkness, they ignored it because they knew that there is a little more darkness in a writer than in other souls.

  All night the writer coughed up bits of darkness—shiny darkness, rough darkness, slick darkness, dull darkness—so that by dawn all of the darkness had left him. He awoke refreshed. He smiled. He yawned. He ate breakfast and brushed his teeth. He kissed his wife and his wife’s daughter as they left for work and for school. He had forgotten the darkness. Only when he entered his work room did he remember the darkness, and how much of it had left him. For his darkness had taken shape and taken wing, and had flown up to a corner of the wall where it met the ceiling and flattened itself against the stone, the tips of its wings fluttering slightly. The writer considered the creature for a moment before he sat down to write. It was dark. It was beautiful. It looked like a sleek, black manta ray with cat-like amber-red eyes. It looked like a stealth bomber given flesh. It looked like the most elegant, the wisest creature in the world. And it had come out of him, out of his darkness. The writer had been fearful, but now he decided to be flattered, to be glad, that he had helped to create such a gorgeous apparition. Besides, he no longer coughed. His lungs were free of darkness. He was a writer. He would write. And so he did—all day.

  Weeks passed. He finished “Sarah and the Land of Sighs” and moved on to other stories. The writer kept the lights ever dimmer so that when his wife entered his work room she would not see the vast shadow clinging to the part of the wall where it met the ceiling. But she never saw it, no matter how bright the room was, so the writer stopped dimming the room. It did not matter. She could not see the gorgeous darkness. It glowed black, pulsed black, while he wrote below it. And although the creature had done him no harm, and he found it fascinating, the writer began to end his evenings early and take the work he had done for the day out into the living room. There he would reread it. He was a writer. Writers write. But writers also edit. And it was as he sat there one day, lips pursed, eyebrows
knit, absorbed in the birth of his latest creation, that he noticed a very disturbing fact. Some of the lines were not his own. That one, for instance. The writer distinctly remembered writing, “Silly Sarah didn’t question the weeping turtle, but, trusting its wise old eyes, followed it cheerfully into the unknown city.” But what the writer read on the page was, “Silly Sarah didn’t question the mushroom dweller, and when she had turned her back on it, it snatched her up cheerfully and took her back into Ambergris.” There were others—a facet of character, a stray description, a place name or two. The story had been taken over by Ambergris. The story had been usurped by the city. How could this have happened? Writers work hard, sometimes too hard. Perhaps he had been working too hard. That must be it. The writer thought only fleetingly of the beautiful, sleek manta ray. All writers had a little darkness. And even though this darkness had become externalized, it was still a little darkness, and now it did not clot his lungs so. The writer thought of the calming silence of the creature, unmoving but for the slight rippling of its massive wings. The writer frowned as he sat in his chair and corrected the story. Could a thing his wife could not see impact upon the world? On him?

  The next day, as the writer wrote, he felt the weight of the dark creature on his shoulder, but when he looked up, it still hugged the wall where it met the ceiling. He returned to his work, but found himself overcome by thoughts of Ambergris.

  Surely, these thoughts said, he had abandoned Ambergris for too long. Surely, it was time to come home to the city. His pen, almost against his will, began to write of the city: the tendrils of vines against the sides of buildings in the burnt out bureaucratic district; the sad, lonely faces on the statues in Trillian Square; the rough lapping of water at the docks. The pen was a black pen. Writers write with black pens. He dropped the pen, picked up the blue pens he used for editing, but the best he could do when he tried to run a line through what he had written was to correct his poor spelling. Writers may write, writers may edit, but writers are lousy spellers. He looked up again at the manta ray. He looked up at the little darkness and he said, “You are dark, and all writers have a little darkness inside them, but not all writers have a little darkness outside them. What are you? Who are you?” But the darkness did not answer. The darkness could only write. And edit. As if it too were a writer.

  Within a short time, the writer wrote only about Ambergris. He described every detail of its glistening spires as the morning light hit them. He described the inner workings of the Truffidian religion that so dominated the city’s spiritual life. He described houses and orphans, furniture and social customs. He wrote stories and he wrote essays. He wrote stories disguised as essays. A part of him delighted in the speed with which the pen sped effortlessly, like a talented figure skater, across the ice of his pages. A part of him pompously scorned the children’s stories he had worked on before his transformation. A part of him was so frightened that it could not articulate its fear. A part of him screamed and gibbered and raged against the darkness. It seemed that Ambergris was intent on becoming real in the world that the writer knew as real, that it meant to seduce him, to trick him into believing it existed without him. But a writer writes, even when he doesn’t want to write, and so he wrote, but not without pain. Not without fear. For days he ate nothing and fed the creature on the wall everything, hoping it would reveal more of Ambergris to him. His wife began to worry, but he impatiently told her everything was fine, was fine, was fine. He began to carry a notebook everywhere and write notes at embarrassing times during social events. Soon, he stopped attending social events. Soon, he slept in his work room, with the bright darkness above him as a night light. Being a writer is addictive. Being a writer is an addiction. All those words, all those words. The act of writing is addictive. But the writer didn’t feel like a writer anymore. He felt like a drug addict. He felt like a drug addict in constant need of a fix. Could he be fixed? His fingers and his wrist were constantly sore and arthritic from over-use. His mind was a soaring, wheeling roller coaster of exhilaration and fear. When the creature held back information or he was forced away from his desk by his wife, or even the need to perform bodily functions, he had the shakes, the sweats. He vomited. He was sick with Ambergris. It was a virus within him, attacking his red and white blood cells. It was a cancer, eating away at corpuscles. It was a great, black darkness in the corner of his mind. He was drunk on another world. And the thing on the wall, always growing larger, stared down at him and rippled its wings and mewled for more food, which, of course, consisted of pieces of the writer’s soul. His whole life had become a quest for Ambergris, to make Ambergris more real. He would find notes on the city that he did not remember writing scattered around the house, even the manuscripts of librettos by Bender, stories by Sirin. His wife thought he had written them, but he knew better. He knew that the creature on the wall had written them, and then left them, like bread crumbs, for him to follow, to the gingerbread house, to the witch, to death.

  Finally, one wan autumn day, when the leaves outside the house had turned golden brown and distributed themselves across the lawn, the writer knew he must destroy the creature or be destroyed by it. He was sad that he must destroy it, for he knew that he was destroying a part of himself. It had come out of him. He had created it. But he was a writer. All writers write. All writers edit. All writers, surely must, on occasion, destroy their creations before their creations turn stale and destroy them. The writer had no love for the creature any more, only hatred, but he did love his wife and his wife’s daughter, and he thought that such love was the greatest justification he could ever have for his actions. And so he entered his work room and attacked the darkness. His wife heard terrible sounds coming from the work room—a man crying, a man screaming, a man pounding on the walls; and was that the smell of fire?—but before she could come to his rescue, he stumbled out of the room, his features stricken with fear and failure. She asked what was wrong and held him tight. “All writers write,” he whispered. “All writers edit,” he muttered. “All writers have a little darkness in them,” he sobbed. “All writers must sometimes destroy their creations,” he shouted. But only one writer has a darkness that cannot be destroyed, he thought to himself as he clutched his wife to him and kissed her and sought comfort in her, for she was the most precious thing in his life and he was afraid—afraid of loss, afraid of the darkness, and, most of all, afraid of himself.

  After I had finished reading, I turned to the writer and I said gently, “This is an interesting allegory in its way, although the ending seems a little . . . melodramatic? And a most valuable document as well. I can see how people would like your writing.”

  The writer again sat behind the desk. “It’s not an allegory. It’s my life.” He seemed defeated, as if he had reread the tale over my shoulder.

  “Don’t you think it is time to discuss the fire?” I asked him. “Isn’t this all leading to the fire?”

  He turned his head to one side, as if he were a horse resisting a bit. “Maybe. Maybe it is. When can I see my wife?”

  “Not until we’re done,” I said. Who knew when he would see his wife? It has been my experience that I must lie, or half-lie, in order to preserve a certain equilibrium in the patient. I do not enjoy it. I do not relish it. But I do it.

  “You have to understand,” X said, “that I don’t fully understand what happened. I can only guess.”

  “I will gladly accept your best guess.”

  But, despite my control, a grim smile played across my lips. I could smell his desperation: it smelled like yellow grass, like stale biscuits, like sour milk.

  X: Gradually, the manta ray grew in size until it covered more than ten feet of the wall. As it grew, it began to change the room. Not visual changes, at first, but I began to smell the jungle, and then auto exhaust, and then to hear noises as of a bustling but far away city. Gradually, the manta ray fit itself into its corner and shaped itself to the wall like a second skin. It also began to smell—not a pleasan
t smell: like fruit rotting, I guess.

  I: And this continued until. . . ?

  X: Until one day I woke up early from a terrible nightmare: I was being stabbed in the palm by a man with no face, and I didn’t even try to pull away while he was doing it . . . I walked into my work room and there was an intense light coming from the corner where the creature had been—just a creature-shaped hole through which Ambergris peeked through. It was the Religious Quarter—endless calls to prayer and lots of icons and pilgrims.

  I: What did you feel?

  X: Anger. I wanted to tear Ambergris apart stone by stone. I wanted to lead a great army and batter down its gates and kill its people and raze the city. Anger would be too weak a word.

  I: And do you believe this was the manta ray’s purpose when it gave you the gift of returning to Ambergris?

  X: “Gift?” It was not a gift, unless you consider madness a gift.

  I: Forgive me. I did not mean to upset you. Do you believe the curse visited upon you by the manta ray was given so you could destroy Ambergris?

  X: No. I was always, deep down, at cross purposes with the creature. It destroyed my life.

  I: What did you do when confronted by the sight of Ambergris? Or what do you think you did?

  X: I climbed up the wall and over into the other world.

  I: And this, according to the transcripts, is where your memory grows uncertain. Would it still be accurate to say your memory is “hazy?”

  X: Yes.

  I: Then I will redirect my questioning and come back to that later. Tell me about Janice Shriek.

  X: I’ve already—never mind. She was a fan of my work, and Hannah and I both liked her, so we had let her stay with us—she was on sabbatical. She painted, but made her living as an art historian. Her brother Duncan was a famous historian—had made his fortune writing about the Byzantine Empire. Duncan was in Istanbul doing research at the time, or he would have come to see us too. He didn’t get to see his sister much.