Dispatch from a Colored Room

From the correspondence of Gauthier Leblanc, letter #1

Imen is even-handed with his children; all experience in their own time the cuff and the caress, the kiss and the rod. You are just born, Aimee, and my flesh has sentenced itself to die.

A physician friend has diagnosed me with a chancre that presses on the older precincts of the brain, those that govern basic impulses and operations. I had suspected the ailment for some time, due to certain alterations in my perception, and now they are confirmed. The question now turns to what to do -- though you will of course know, as you read, what has been done. If you are reading this letter, and those that will follow, at the funeral of an old man, who lived a happy life and left a satisfactory inheritance, then I will have unhorsed my brain's Black Rider (which I have named for the structure in which it resides, the "black substance" in the very base of the brain, about which you will have learned in school -- paying better attention, naturally, than your father did) and gone on to a happier existence. Perhaps you will read them long after I am dead, but on a bed or divan in a comfortable apartment on the middle terraces, a poorer bequest than a life with a healthy father but one in which I will, nonetheless, take some small pride before my last breath departs. 

But, my darling, there is the greater possibility that I will doubly fail you -- fail to defeat the Black Rider, to be sure, but fail also to provide for my own treatment. In that case, I shall leave a yet more meager bequest. I will do all I can, and that will be to disencumber you of my failing flesh. 

You are seven days old, and the most light my life has ever known. If ever I write one true thing, it is this: I will not rationalize my failures. I know my love, and my disease, and what I must do.