Black Ink

Black Ink

Emily got to the Milton house that evening.

She never said one word about the money or about the divorce. Whatever had been sitting between us for months was not in the house. After a plain dinner she took my hand and walked me toward the bedroom.

It was the first time in six months she had sat down next to me on that old wood bed.

Emily took a dark brown glass bottle out of her bag, no bigger than two fingers, the oil she used to put on me every night, rank herbs cut with cold mint. She opened it, turned the dropper, and poured a few thick drops into her palm. Then she worked her hands together until the oil went warm, and in the quiet of that house the sound carried, a low rasp of skin on skin.

"Come here. Let go of it..." Emily said it low and even, the same way she said it every time.

She got her fingers into the back of my neck and started working the shoulder muscle, which had been locked up for days. Her hands kept a rhythm that never came off, circles even enough to set a watch by. Then she moved both thumbs up to my temples.

She worked with her eyes closed. Under the floor the furnace came on and ran. Out front the red maple went against the siding in a wind that had come up after dinner. The brown bottle stood open on the nightstand with no label on it, and the glass under the shoulder had gone cloudy where a thumb had been rubbing it for years.

The warm oil went through the skin. The smell came up into my nose and stayed, thick, and got into every nerve I had strung tight. Heat spread out from both temples and moved down through me, and behind it came a numbness that was pleasant and complete. Her fingers found each point and pressed and turned, a technique clean enough that she had to have done it a thousand times on this exact body. Every pass took something out with it. The fear, Dr. Evelyn and her false layer, the whole afternoon, all of it swept out of my head like dust off a floor. My chest let go, my eyelids came down, and the rest of me went somewhere soft and slow and entirely willing to be handled.

That night, under my wife's hands and that oil, 50 nights of not sleeping came off me at once and I went down into sleep with nothing in it. Black, level, still, the way a lake is still once it has frozen over.

I woke the next morning clear-headed for the first time in weeks. Emily made breakfast and smiled while she did it, and then we drove to Dr. Evelyn Reed's office for the appointment.

The session went the other way.

Dr. Evelyn put leads on my head and ran me through a set of reflex tests. She watched the numbers come up on her monitor, and her face went from careful to lost.

The paste she used to set the leads was cold and smelled like nothing at all. Her monitor was an old one with a fan inside it, and the fan ran the whole session. On the corner of the desk where the folder had been there was a stack of blank intake forms squared up to the edge.

My readings were normal. Everything she had recorded the day before, the disorganization and the marks of somebody working on my memory, was off the screen with nothing left behind.

"That's not possible..." Dr. Evelyn pushed her glasses up and said it to herself, her eyes going back and forth between the screen and my face. "How does this happen?"

"Is there a problem, Doctor?" Emily asked. She was standing next to my chair with her arms down at her sides.

"Yesterday... his involuntary responses showed a serious break," Evelyn said, and then she stopped. She had the look of somebody whose training had just come up short.

"Today... every number says he's fine. I can't... I have no explanation for it."

She was sure about what had come out of me under hypnosis the day before, and she had nowhere to put a man who turned up clean after one night's sleep. In the end she offered the safe thing.

"I think you should go home, rest, and we'll keep watching it..."

She walked us out and shook Emily's hand and then mine. Her hand was dry and she let go first. Emily looked at her phone all the way down in the elevator and said nothing, and the car had been sitting in the sun long enough that the wheel was hot to hold.

The air in the car on the way back to Milton got close. Emily sat with her arms folded and her mouth set.

"I told you, James! That woman is a fraud. She made the whole thing up about your memory being tampered with to scare you into signing for a long, expensive course of treatment. And look what happened the minute I walked in there with you today."

I had nothing to set against it, and she kept going. I let out a breath and nodded.

"Yeah... maybe you're right. I won't go back."

The road stayed empty. Emily looked out the window for a while, and then she turned toward me like the thought had just come to her.

"Hey, James... if the writing still isn't coming, why don't you try a site called Black Ink?"

Screeeeeech!

The tires tore at the blacktop. I had both feet into the brake and the car stopped dead in the middle of the road. Emily went forward against the belt and her head came within an inch of the dash.

"Are you out of your mind, James?" She put a hand flat on her chest. "What kind of driving is that?"

I turned in the seat and looked at my wife.

"What did you just say? What site did you tell me to go to?"

"What about it?" Emily brought her hand down hard on her thigh.

"I'm trying to help you! If you can't write it, pay somebody to build the frame and then fix it up yourself. There are thousands of authors out there doing exactly that."

"You're insulting me, Emily." I hit the wheel with the flat of my hand.

"I'm a bestselling novelist! Putting my name on a book some anonymous hand wrote for cash off a board like that is the dirtiest thing anyone in this trade can do. Do you think that little of my honor?"

"Your honor?" Emily made a sound that was almost a laugh.

"Does honor cover $12,000 at the clinic? Does honor buy formula for a kid we don't have yet? Hold on to it, then. Hold on to it and go under with it."

The fight ended, and neither of us said anything for the last nine miles.

We got back to the old house in Milton worn all the way down. Emily went into the bedroom and shut the door, and I went to the kitchen and made myself a pot of instant ramen. It went down flat and rubbery, like eating ash.

I washed the pot and set it upside down on the rack. The kitchen clock had run 11 minutes fast since I was a kid and nobody had ever bothered to fix it. The back door was locked and the chain was on. I checked both of them twice before I went up.

When I was done I went up to the second floor, into what had been my father's study, and locked the door behind me.

The room was dark. The desk lamp put down a gray wedge of light, and my own face came back at me off the laptop screen, thinner than I remembered it.

There was an Underwood on the shelf behind the desk with a dish towel over it. The room smelled like old paper and hot dust off the radiator. I pulled the chair in and turned the laptop toward me.

I sat down and put my head in my hands. What Emily had said in the car, the money, and 50 days without one usable line, all of it going around in the same track.

Honor, or staying alive?

I put both hands on the keyboard. In the dark of that old room I typed it into the browser bar one letter at a time.

B - L - A - C - K - I - N - K . C . O . M

The screen flashed. A solid black page came up with a burning quill in the middle of it.

I moved the cursor over the button that said Create an author account, held it there a few seconds... and pressed down.