Dispatch from a Colored Room

From the correspondence of Gauthier Leblanc, letter #3

I have had an experience that I ought not commit to paper. But, Aimee, you will learn this if ever you give me a grandchild: One gains wisdom as a parent, only to lose it when one's child is far away. In any case, this may be the hinge between two parts of a life, the key to understanding how I have moved given where I had been before.

I had despaired of learning my poem's fate. We had a few good weeks, Jesson and I, every day saving a little of our meager take; but he has committed some indiscretion whose nature he will not disclose, and the cost of moving, lease-breaking, and bribing the landlord (thankfully we are paid in cash) has ruined us again. Naturally, I did not leave a forwarding address, not even yours -- especially not yours!

There is no highway here; I work harvesting blue scum from the drug bogs. This material will be strained, separated, dried, and sent to my former workplace, where it will be loaded into trucks, shipped to some higher terrace, and refined into an anti-chancre agent that would cost me a month's salary for a week's supply. (You may wonder if eating the raw scum could possibly have a similar effect. The agent in question does not reduce chancres of the brain, and in any case the critical dosage is in the gallons daily, with the near certainty of poisoning from other chemicals in the scum -- so, you see, I made the inquiry regardless. Why not? I am desperate.) Particulates in the air have turned my mucus an alarming cyan shade and greatly increased its production, compromising my breathing; naturally, a number of treatments have been developed for this condition, and all are sold on the routes between the bogs and the fetid workers' dormitories, in one of which Jesson and I share a room. I have tried many of these prophylactics, and the only one that provides reliable relief is a simple nasal irrigation with some sort of weakly medicated solution -- in any case, there is a small boutique where I stop weekly for the treatment, and at my last stop I was accosted by the Dandelion Knight.

Note well, now: When I say "The Dandelion Knight," I do not mean some crew of rowdies who carve asterisks on walls to justify their other vandalisms. I mean Aurcryn-Jon himself, pale and yellow-haired, switch-thin in green motley, lounging in one of the irrigator's questionable chairs with a finger on his staff. Watching the door, so there was no chance of my running unnoticed, though I gave serious thought to doing it noticed. But perhaps it is best I held my ground.

There was a piece of paper between his first and middle fingers. They twitched, offering it to me.

The paper was printed on the letterhead of a press whose name I will not yet say; after the salutation, the first word was "Congratulations!" I read on to discover that this press was the printer of The Giant's Chair. 

For a moment, I was elated; the sum named in the letter was not as large as that Mme Brisbois named, but it would buy a week of rent or two of food. Then I returned to the world, where the editors of The Giant's Chair thought I lived at my old address, and the Dandelion Knight acted as my courier. "How did you get this?" I asked.

"Is it real, should have been your first question," the Dandelion Knight said. "I found the letter at your old apartment. You'll never get the chance to stop running as long as you stay with that Desrosiers, you know."

I stared at the letter, then at the Dandelion Knight, and asked "Why do you care?"

"I love the poor," he said, "and I doubly love poets, for they are often the poorest of all -- having neither money, nor the scales on their eyes that would free them to pursue it."

Aimee, you are too young to know me, but when you know me, you will know I could not let that pass. "You are a flirt," I said, "and no subtle one. What use do you think I will be to you?"

"What use a fresh-faced maiden to a strapping lad just freed into the world?"

"I am a married man, sir, and my shoulders are wider than yours." (Ah, Aimee. Do you even remember the shoulders on which you wept, slept, vomited your mother's milk with smiling nonchalance?)

"Well, that is all right, for I mean to love you less by a third part."

For all my brashness in Aurcryn-Jon's face, I confess this sent a frisson down my spine. The Dandelion Knight's staff was heavy, with a dull gleam; the hand that caressed it was long, but strong and hard. Then I understood his meaning, or guessed I did. "By my arithmetic, you mean to bring surcease to my poverty," I told him, "but not my poetry."

"They tell me longshoremen have no head for figures," said the Dandelion Knight, "but I have never believed it!"

"How do you intend to effectuate this change?"

"At last, the nut of the matter," he said. "Here is how."

And he told me. But, Aimee, I cannot finish. I am standing at the Ashview station, waiting for the Snapdragon train to turn around in the station-yard and come my way. It is almost to the platform, uncoiling like a snake. I will let it swallow me whole, the first time in my life; and, if Aurcryn-Jon's plan bears fruit, then I will write to you and tell you of its flavor.