I: A very nice passage from a rather eccentric story. Whence came the dwarf? Did he walk out of your imagination or out of your life?

X: From life, at first. When I was going to college at the University of Florida, I had a classmate named David Wilson who was a dwarf. We took statistics together. He tutored me past the rough bits. He was poor but couldn’t get enough financial aid and his overall grades weren’t good enough for scholarships, so he rented himself out for dwarf-tossing contests at local bars. He had a talent for math, but here he was renting himself out to bars, and sometimes to the county fair when it came by. One day, he stopped coming to class and the next week I learned from a rather lurid article in the local paper that he had drunk himself to death.

I: Did he visit you at the foot of your bed?

X: You will remember I had resolved not to write about Ambergris ever again, but at first I resolved not to write at all. So I didn’t. For five months I quit writing. It was hell. I had to turn a part of myself off. It was like a relentless itching in my brain. I had to unlearn taking notes on little pieces of paper. I had to unlearn making observations. Or, rather, I had to ignore these urges. And I was thinking about David Wilson because I had always wanted to write about him and couldn’t. I guess I figured that if I thought about a story I couldn’t write, I’d scratch the itch in a harmless way … And it was then that the dwarf—or what I thought was the dwarf—began to haunt me. He’d stand at the foot of the bed and … well, you read the story. To stop him from haunting me, I relented and sat down to write what became “Learning to Leave the Flesh.”

I: But he was already Dvorak.

X: No. Dvorak was just a dwarf. He had nothing of David Wilson in him. David Wilson was a kind and gentle soul.

I: The story mentions Albumuth Boulevard.

X: Yes, it does. I had not only broken my vow not to write, but Ambergris had, in somewhat distorted form, crept back into my work.

I: Did you see the dwarf again?

X: One last time. When he became the manta ray. That was when I realized that I had brought something back from Ambergris with me. It scared the shit out of me.

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.