[Upon the altar, the Cappan Aquelus’s men found an] old weathered journal and two human eyeballs preserved by some unknown process in a solid square made of an unknown clear metal. Between journal and squared eyeballs blood had been used to draw a symbol …
More ominous still, the legendary entrance, once blocked up, boarded over, lay wide open, the same stairs that had enticed Manzikert I beckoning now to Aquelus.
The journal was, of course, the one that had disappeared with Samuel Tonsure 60 years before. The eyes, a fierce blue, could belong to no one but Manzikert I. Who the blood had come from, no one cared to guess.
—From Duncan Shriek’s depiction of the Silence in
The Hoegbotton Guide to the Early History of Ambergris
Mary Sabon once said of my brother Duncan Shriek that “He is not a human being at all, but composed entirely of digressions and transgressions.” I am not sure what she hoped to gain by making this comment, but she said it nonetheless. I know she said it, because I happened to overhear it three weeks ago at a party for Martin Lake. It was a party I had helped put together, to celebrate the artist’s latest act of genius: a series of etchings that illustrated The Journal of Samuel Tonsure. (One of many parties I have missed over the years. Maybe if I’d been there, everything would have turned out differently. Maybe it even would have affected the past portrayed in Mary’s books.)
Sabon arrived long after Lake, a reticent and not entirely undamaged man, had left for the Café of the Ruby-Throated Calf. I had not invited her, but the other guests must have taken her invitation for granted: they clustered around her like beads in a stunning but ultimately fake necklace. The couples on the dance floor displayed such ambition that Sabon’s necklace seemed to move around her, although she and her admirers stood perfectly still.
Rain fell on the skylight above with a sound like lacquered fingernails tapping on a jewelry box. Through the open balcony doors came the fresh smell of rain, mingled—as always in Ambergris—with a green dankness. As I hobbled down the wide marble staircase, into their clutches, I could pick out each individual laugh, each flaw, each fault line, shining through their beaded faces. There were names in that flesh necklace—names that should someday be ticked off a list, names that deserve to be more public.
At ground level, I could no longer see anything but patches of Sabon—a glimpse of red hair, of sallow cheek, the pink allure clumping, a flash of eye, the eyelashes overweighed with liner. The absurd pout of a lip. The crushing smell of a perfume more common to a funeral parlor. She looked so different from the first time I had met her—lithe, fresh student—that I thought for a moment she had put on a disguise. Was she in hiding? From what?
“He is not a human being at all, but composed entirely of digressions and transgressions.”
I admit I laughed at Sabon’s comment, but I laughed out of affectionate recognition, not cruelty. Because Duncan did digress. He did transgress. He might well have dashed Sabon’s living necklace to bead pieces with just as amusing a phrase to describe Sabon, had he not disappeared, possibly forever, a few days before the party. That was another thing—Duncan was always disappearing, even as a child.
Sabon’s comment was amusing, but not, as one gentleman misidentified it, “the definitive statement.” A shame, because my brother loved definitive statements. He used to leap up from his chair at definitive statements and prick the air out of them, deflate them with his barbed wit, his truculent genius for argument, his infinite appreciation of irony. (I think you both mock me here. Whatever I might have been in my youth—and I can’t remember ever having been a witty conversationalist—I’m long past any such trickery. Let the spores be tricky. Let those who ignore them—from the Nativists on down—expend their energy in fanciful phrasings, for all the good it will do them.)
I really ought to start again, though. Begin afresh. Leave Sabon to her admirers for now. There will be time to return to her later.
Duncan often started over—he loved nothing better than to start again in the middle of a book, like a magician appearing to disappear—to leave the reader hanging precariously over an abyss while building up some other story line, only to bring it all back together seamlessly in the end, averting disaster. I would be a fool to promise to duplicate such a feat.
For a time, Duncan sat next to the desk in my apartment—in an old comfortable yellow chair our parents had bought in Stockton many years before. There he would sit, illumined by a single lamp in a twilight broken only by calls to prayer from the Religious Quarter, and chuckle as he read over the transcript of his latest chapter. He loved his own jokes as if they were his children, worthy of affection no matter how slack-jawed, limb-lacking, or broken-spined.
But I best remember Duncan at his favorite haunt, the Spore of the Gray Cap, a place as close as the tapping of these keys. (Favorite? Perhaps, but it was the only one that would have me, at times. At the more respectable establishments, I would walk in and be greeted with a silence more appropriate to the sudden appearance of some mythical beast.) Sober or drunk, Duncan found the Spore perfect for his work. Within its dark and smoky back chambers, sequestered from the outer world by myopic, seaweed-green glass, my brother felt invisible and invincible. Through a strange synchronicity of the establishment’s passageways out of keeping with its usual labyrinthine aura, those who congregated at the altar of the bar could, glancing sideways down the glazed oak counter, see Duncan illuminated by a splinter of common space—at times scribbling inspired on his old-fashioned writing pad, at times staring with a lazy eye out of a window that revealed nothing of the outer world, but which may, reflecting back with a green wink, have revealed to him much of the inner world. (The outer world came to me—at various times I entertained Mary, Sirin, Sybel, and, yes, even Bonmot, pillar of the community, in that place.)
He had become a big man by then, with a graying beard, prone to wearing a gray jacket or overcoat that hid his ever-evolving physical peculiarities. Sometimes he would indulge in a cigar—a habit newly acquired from his association with the fringe historian James Lacond—and sit back in his chair and smoke, and I would find him there, gazing off into a memory I might or might not be able to share. His troubles, his disease, could not touch him in those moments.
I much prefer to remember my brother in that space, calm and at the center of himself. While he was there, many regular taverngoers referred to him as the God of the Green Light, looking as he did both timeless and timeworn. Now that he is gone, I imagine he has become the Ghost of the Green Light, and will enter the annals of the Spore as a quiet, luminescent legend. Duncan would have liked that idea: let it be so.
But I do choose to begin again—Duncan, after all, often did. Like the shaft of green light shooting down the maze of passageways at the Spore, each new shift of attention and each new perspective will provide only a fraction or fracture of the man I knew, in several senses, not at all.
If there is a starting point in Duncan’s life, it would have to be the day that our father, Jonathan Shriek, a minor historian, died at our house in Stockton, a town some hundred miles south of Ambergris, on the other side of the River Moth. Unexpected reversal ripped through Dad and destroyed his heart when I was thirteen and Duncan only ten. I remember because I was seated at the kitchen table doing my homework when the mailman came to the door. Dad heard the bell and hopped up to answer it. “Hopped” is no exaggeration—Dad was a defiantly ugly man, built like a toad, with wattles and stocky legs.
I heard him in the hall, talking about the weather with the mailman. The door shut. The crinkle of paper as my father opened the envelope. A moment of silence, as of breath being sucked in. Then a horribly huge laugh, a cry of joy or triumph, or both. He came into the kitchen and barreled past me to the open hallway that led to the back door.
“Gale,” he was shouting. “Gale,” my mother’s name. Out into the backyard he stumbled, me right behind him, my homework forgotten, beside myself with suspense. Something marvelous had happened and I wanted to know what it was.
At the far end of the lawn, Duncan, ten and still sandy-haired, was helping our mother with the small herb garden. My father ran toward them, into the heart of the summer day. The trees were lazy in the breeze. Bees clustered around yellow flowers. He was waving the letter over his head and yelling, “Gale! Duncan! Gale! Duncan!” His back to me. Me running after him, asking, “What, Dad? What is it?” (I remember this with the same kind of focused intensity as you, Janice. Dad was running toward us. I was smiling because I loved seeing Dad’s enthusiasm. I loved seeing him so euphoric, so unselfconscious for once.)
He was almost there. He was going to make it. There is no doubt in my mind, even today, that he was going to make it. But he didn’t. He stumbled. He fell into the sweet, strange grass. (“Mottled with shadows from the trees,” I wrote in my journal later. It is those shadows I remember most from that day—the dappling and contrast of light and dark.) The hand with the letter the last to fall, his other hand clutching at his chest.
I stopped running when I saw him fall, thought he had tripped. Looked up across the lawn at my mother and brother. Mom was rolling her eyes at her husband’s clumsiness, but Duncan’s face was pale with horror. Duncan knew our father hadn’t fallen, but had been made to fall. (I don’t know how I knew, just remember the way Dad’s smile flattened and his face took on a sudden pallor and sadness as he fell, and know he knew what was happening to him.) A moment later, Mom realized this, too, and all three of us ran-to-him converged-on-him held-him searched-for-a-pulse called-for-the-doctor, and sat there crying when he did not move, get up, say it had all been a joke or accident. (Even now, the smell of fresh grass is the smell of death to me. Was there, even then, a sentinel in the shadows, peering out at us?)
It was Duncan who took the letter from Dad’s hand and, after the doctor had gone and the mortician had removed the body, sat down at the kitchen table to read it. First, he read it to himself. Then, he read it to us, Mom staring vacant-eyed from the living room couch, not hearing a word of it.
The letter confused Duncan in ways that did not occur to my mother, to me. It bent the surface of his world and let in a black vein of the irrational, the illogical, the nonsensical. To me, my father was dead, and it didn’t matter how or why, because he was dead regardless. But to Duncan, it made all the difference. Safely anchored in place and family, he had been a madly fearless child—an explorer of tunnels and dank, dark places. He had never encountered the brutal dislocation of chance and irony. Until now. (Did it make a difference? I don’t know. My resolve has always seemed something fiercely internal.)
For our father, Jonathan Shriek, minor historian, had died in the grasp of a great and terrible joy. The letter, which bore the seal of the Kalif himself, congratulated him “for having won that most Magnificent Award, the Laskian Historical Prize,” for a paper published in the Ambergrisian Historical Society Newsletter. The letter asked my father to accept an all-expenses-paid trip to the Court of the Kalif, and there study books unread for five centuries, including the holiest-of-holies, The Journal of Samuel Tonsure.
The letter had become a weapon. It had rescued our father from obscurity, and then it had killed him, his blood cavorting through his arteries at a fatal speed. (I couldn’t get it out of my head that he had died due to something in his research, as irrational as that might seem. It instilled in me a kind of paranoia. For a while, I even thought it possible that the letter had been poisoned in some way by the Kalif’s men, that Dad had been too close to the solving of some historical mystery the Kalif would prefer remain unsolved.)
The funeral that followed was farce and tragedy. We attended the wrong casket and were shocked to be confronted by the visage of a young man, as if death had done my father good. Meanwhile, another family with a closed casket had buried our father.
“Death suited him.” It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true—it seemed true. That he had gone into death old and come back young. And more comforting still—the idea that there had been a mistake and he was alive somewhere.
Of us all, Duncan stared the longest at that young man who was not our father, as if he sought the answer to a mystery for which there could be no solution.
Four years later, we moved from Stockton to Ambergris, there to live with our mother’s side of the family in a rheumy old mansion with a flooded basement. Set against the banks of the River Moth, remote from much of Ambergris, the place could hardly be called an improvement over the house we had grown up in, but it was less expensive, and our mother had come to realize that with her husband dead nothing much remained to keep her in Stockton. Thus, we shared space with an ever-changing mob of aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and friends of the family. (Although, over the years, this cacophony of distant relations reduced itself to just our mother, which is probably how she would have preferred it from the beginning.)
We came to Ambergris across the thick sprawl of the muddy River Moth, by ferry. I remember that during the journey I noticed Duncan had a piece of paper in his shirt pocket. When I asked him what it was, he pulled it out and showed it to me. He had kept the letter from the Kalif to our father; as far as I know, he has it still, tattered and brittle. (I do have it—or the remains of it, anyhow. I don’t dare open it anymore, for fear it will turn to dust.)
“I don’t want to forget,” he said, with a look that dared me to doubt his loyalty to our father.
I said nothing, but the thought occurred to me that although we might be traveling to a new place, we were still bringing the past with us.
Not that Ambergris didn’t have a rich past of its own—just that we knew much less about it. We knew only that Ambergris played host to some of the world’s greatest artists; that it was home to the mysterious gray caps; that a merchant clan, Hoegbotton & Sons, had wrested control of the city from a long line of kings; that the Kalif and his great Western Empire had thrice tried to invade Ambergris; that, once upon a time, some centuries ago, a catastrophe called the Silence had taken place there; and that the annual Festival of the Freshwater Squid often erupted into violence, an edgy lawlessness that some said was connected to the gray caps. The gray caps, we learned from helpful relatives seeking to reassure us, had long since retreated to the underground caverns and catacombs of Ambergris, first driven there by the founder of the city, a whaler despot named Manzikert I. Manzikert I had razed the gray caps’ city of Cinsorium, massacred as many of them as he could, and built Ambergris on the smoldering ruins. (It all sounded incredibly exciting and exotic to us at that age, rather than horrifying.)
Of artists, we found ample evidence as soon as we arrived—huge murals painted onto the sides of storehouses—and also of the Hoegbotton clan, since we had to pay their tariffs to leave the docks and enter the city proper.
As for the gray caps, as our relatives had promised, we discovered scant initial trace of this “old, short, indigenous race,” as the guidebooks called them. They were rarely seen aboveground during the day, although they could be glimpsed in back alleys and graveyards at dusk and during the night. We knew only what we had gleaned from Mom’s rare but unsettling bedtime stories about the “mushroom dwellers of Ambergris,” and a brief description from a book for children that had delighted and unnerved us simultaneously:
Fifty mushroom dwellers now spilled out from the alcove gateway, macabre in their very peacefulness and the even hum-thrum of their breath: stunted in growth, wrapped in robes the pale gray-green of a frog’s underbelly, their heads hidden by wide-brimmed gray felt hats that, like the hooded tops of their namesakes, covered them to the neck. Their necks were the only exposed part of them—incredibly long, pale necks; at rest, they did indeed resemble mushrooms.
Of the Silence, we had heard even less—a whisper among the adults, a sense that we should not ask about it. Even in Stockton, so far from what had happened—separated by both time and geography—there seemed to be a fear that, somehow, the event might be resurrected by the most casual of comments. No, I discovered the Silence much later—only learned during my brief attendance at the Hoegbotton School for Advanced Studies, for example, that the annotations in Ambergrisian history books (A.S. and B.S.) stood for After Silence and Before Silence. Of Samuel Tonsure’s journal, so inextricably linked to the Silence, I heard not even a whisper until Duncan educated me. (I may have given you the most personalized and eccentric education on the Silence in the history of Ambergris!)
We did not learn much about any of this from Mom. For a good portion of our youth in Ambergris, rare was the day that she rose before noon. Sometimes we barely saw her. She had so many rooms to hide in in that house. Her internal clock, her rhythms, became nocturnal and erratic. She continued to paint, but sometimes we would return home to find that instead of a canvas she had painted the wall of an unused room in a welter of dissonant colors. Until the basement began to flood with river water every time it rained, she loved to sit down there in the damp and read by an old oil lamp we’d brought with us from Stockton, an heirloom dating back to the time of the pirate whalers. (When she was there, Janice and I would sometimes join her. We’d pull up chairs and listen to the whispering gasp of the river water as it tried to get in through the floorboards, and we’d read our books or do our homework. Mom rarely said anything, but there was something about being together in the same room that felt comfortable. I think she enjoyed it, too, but I don’t know for sure.)
I do remember that in our mother’s absence one of my aunts tried to help orient us to the city, telling us, “There’s a Religious Quarter, a Merchant Quarter, and an old Bureaucratic Quarter, and then there are places you don’t go no matter what. Stay out of them.” Faced with such vague warnings, we had to discover Ambergris in those early days by exploring for ourselves or asking our classmates.
The move to Ambergris changed my relationship with Duncan. Before the move, Duncan had been the annoying shadow, the imitator who always had to do what I was already doing. When I started a rock collection at the age of eight, inspired by the exposed granite on the hillside near our house in Stockton, Duncan started one, too, even though he didn’t understand why. No matter how I shooed him away, Duncan had to follow me up the hill. A cautious distance away from my irritated mumblings, he would squat in his wobbly way and run his hand through the pebbles, looking for the shiniest ones. Over time, he would squinch closer and closer, waddling like a duck, until before I knew it we were looking for stones together and my collection became our collection.
When I became entranced by the children’s stories of mammalogist Roger Mandible, Duncan not only stole the books from my room but colored in them and scrawled his name, handwriting as neat as a drunken sailor’s, across many of the pages.
By the time I’d reached the age of fourteen or fifteen, I’d realized he copied me because he loved me and looked up to me. (I didn’t look up to you for long—you stopped growing after you turned fourteen, I believe.)
But by then the death of our father and the move to Ambergris had transformed me into something more than Duncan’s sister. There was something in the connection Dad and Mom had that had energized them both—that had made them both more than they had been alone. Because without Dad, Mom lost, or forgot, how to take care of us. I’m certain if Mom had died instead that Dad would have behaved the same way. He was no more practical than our mother. He was as apt to fall over and stub a toe putting on his pajamas as she was to cut herself chopping up carrots. They shared a general absentmindedness that Duncan and I, looking back on those years as adults, found endearing. Dad searching for the newspaper he held in the crook of his arm. Mom looking for the earrings she’d just put back in the jewelry case. Somehow, together, though, they muddled through and managed to disguise their individual incompetence at the job of parenting.
With Dad dead and the move to Ambergris having unmoored Mom from any last vestiges of parental regard, I became Duncan’s mother in many ways. I made sure he got up in time for school. I made him breakfast. I helped him with his homework. I made sure he got to bed on time. He stopped copying me and started obeying me. (… Although with a smoldering disrespect for authority as embodied by my suddenly strict sister. But I’m lying. I welcomed it. I needed some structure. I needed someone to tell me what to do back then. I was still just a child. And a frequently scared one, despite all of my explorations. To take the lead while exploring seemed natural; to take the lead in everyday life was monstrously difficult.) Gone was the admiration, perhaps, but so too the corrosive disease of competition. At least, back then.
Somehow, despite our rough knowledge and this change in our roles, we managed to fit in, to get along, to come to feel part of Ambergris with greater ease than might have been expected. Much of it had to do with our attitude, I think. Duncan and I should have been upset about leaving our old school and friends behind, but we weren’t. Not really. In a sense, it came as a great relief to escape the pity and concern others showed us, which trapped us in an image of ourselves as victims. Freedom from that meant, in a way, freedom from the moment of our father’s death. This made up for the other dislocations.
(Dare I deprive the reader of that first glimpse of Ambergris? That first teasing glimpse during the carriage ride from the docks? That glimpse, and then the sprawl of Albumuth Boulevard, half staid brick, half lacquered timber? The dirt of it, the stench of it, half perfume, half ribald rot. And another smell underneath it—the tantalizing scent of fungi, of fruiting bodies, of spores entangled with dust and air, spiraling down like snow. The cries of vendors, the cries of the newly robbed, or the newly robed. The first contact of shoe on street out of the carriage—the resounding solidity of that ground, and the humming vibration of coiled energy beneath the pavement, conveyed up through shoe into foot, and through foot into the rest of a body suddenly energized and woken up. The sudden hint of heat to the air—the possibilities!—and, peeking from the storm drains, from the alleyways, the enticing, lingering darkness that spoke of tunnels and sudden exploration. One cannot mention our move to Ambergris without setting that scene, surely! That boulevard became our touchstone, in those early years, as it had to countless people before us. It was how you traveled into Ambergris, and it was how they carried you out when you finally left.)
But as fascinated as Duncan would become with Ambergris, he went elsewhere for his education. At our mother’s insistence, in one of her few direct acts of parenting. Duncan received his advanced degrees in history from the Institute of Religiosity in Morrow (or as historians often call it, “that other city by the River Moth,” a good hundred miles from Ambergris), his emphasis on the many masters of the arts who had been born or made their fortune in Ambergris, as well as on the Court of the Kalif—for he saw in these two geographical extremes a way to let his interests sprawl across both poles of the world. He could not study the artists of Ambergris without studying the very anatomy of the city—from culture to politics, from economics to mammalogy. And because Ambergris spread tentacles as long and wide as those of the oldest of the giant freshwater squid, this meant he must study Morrow, the Aan, and all of the South. Study of the Kalif, which I always felt was a secondary concern for him, meant mapping out all of the West, the North. (Early on, I had no idea what constituted a “secondary concern.” Anything and everything could have been useful. The important thing was to accumulate information, to let it all but overwhelm me.)
In that Duncan was never what I would call religious, I believe that this monumental scope represented his attempt to re-place himself within the world, to discover his center, lost when our father died, or to build himself a new center through accumulation of knowledge. In a sense, History was always personal to Duncan, even if he could not always express that fact.
To say Duncan studied hard would be to understate the ardor of his quest for knowledge. He devoured texts as he devoured food, to savor after it had been swallowed whole. He memorized his favorite books: The Refraction of Light in a Prison, The Journal of Samuel Tonsure, The Hoegbotton Chronicles, Aria: The Biography of Voss Bender. Years later, he would delight me, no matter how odd the circumstances of our meetings, with dramatic readings, in the imagined pitch and tone of the authors, him still so passionate in his love of the words that I would forever find my own enthusiasm inadequate.
In short, Duncan became overzealous. Obsessed. Driven. All of those (double-edged) (s)words. He did not allow for his own human weakness, or his need to feel connected to the world through his flesh, through interactions with other human beings. Better, I am sure he felt, to become the dead hand of the past, to become its instrument.
Duncan did not make friends. He did not have a woman friend. When I visited him, during breaks in my own art studies at the Trillian Academy, at his rooms at the Institute, he could not introduce me to a single soul other than his instructors. Duncan must have appeared to be among the most pious of all the pious monks created by History. (I had friends. Your infrequent trips to visit meant your idea of my life in that place was as narrow as that sliver of emerald light in the Spore that you keep going on about. I needed to converse with people to test out my theories, to gauge dissent and to begin to realize what ideas, when expressed to others in the light of day, evaporated into the air.)
Recognizing both his genius and his desire for lack of contact, the Institute, its generosity heightened by the small scholarship our father had endowed it with as well as the memory of him walking its hollowed halls, had, by the second semester, isolated Duncan in rooms that expanded with his loneliness. My brother’s only window looked out at the solid, unimaginative brick of the Philosophy Building, giving him no alternative to his vibrant inner life. (This was, after all, the point of the Institute—to focus on the unexamined life. Nothing wrong with that.)
As if to embody the complexity and brittle joy of his inner life in the outer world, Duncan slowly covered the walls of his rooms with maps, pictures, diagrams, even pages torn from books. Ambergrisian leaders stared down impishly, slightly crooked, half-smothered by maps of the Kalif’s epic last battle against the infidel Stretcher Jones. Bark etchings by the local Aan tribespeople shared space with stiff edicts handed down by even stiffer Truffidian priests. James Alberon’s famous acrylic painting of Albumuth Boulevard formed the backdrop for a hundred tiny portraits of the original Skamoo synod. The bewildering greens and purples of Darcimbaldo’s “The Kiosks of Trillian Square” competed with the withered yellows of ancient explorers’ maps, with the red arrows that indicated skirmishes on military schemata.
Duncan devoted one dark, ripe little corner to the “changing facade of Ambergris,” as he called it. At first, this corner consisted only of overlapping street plans, as if he were building an image of the city from its bones. The stark white paper, the midnight-black veins of ink, contrasted sharply with everything else in his rooms. The maps were so densely clustered and layered that the overall effect reminded me of a diagram of the human body. Or, perhaps more metaphorically accurate, like a concentrated forest of intertwining vines (recalling the forests of my youth in Stockton), through which no one could possibly travel, even armed with a machete. (My first great accomplishment—a way of cross-referencing dozens and dozens of seemingly unrelated phenomena so that, in a certain light, in a certain darkness, I could begin to see the patterns, the connections. Later, I would use this same technique, on a vastly different scale, at the Blythe Academy.)
With each visit, I noticed that the forest had grown—from a dark stain, to a presence that variously resembled in shape a mushroom, a manta ray, and then some horribly exotic insect that might kill you with a single sting. Gradually, in an inexorable invasion through both time and space, Ambergris came to dominate his rooms, and then layer itself to a thickness greater than the walls, or so it often seemed, sitting in my chair, looking over a manuscript.
The stain had become the wallpaper, and the last remnants of non-Ambergris materials had become the stain. Looking back on those earliest diagrams and montages on his walls, could he have guessed how far they would lead him? How far he would travel, and at what price? (Underneath, any astute observer could have found a wealth, a riot, of new information. You had only to peel away a corner and there, revealed, the secret obsession: the ghosts of the Silence, the gray caps, and much else. “I’m going underground,” it all said. For those who could read it.)
“Your wall has changed. Has it changed your focus?” I asked him once.
“Perhaps,” he replied, “but it still doesn’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t make sense?” I asked.
“They’re the only ones who could have done it. But why? And how?”
I looked at him in confusion.
“The Silence,” Duncan said, and a shiver, a resonance, passed through me. The Silence and the gray caps.
More than two hundred years before, twenty-five thousand people had disappeared from the city, almost the entire population, while many thousands had been away, sailing down the River Moth to join in the annual hunt for fish and freshwater squid. The fishermen, including the city’s ruler, had returned to find Ambergris deserted. To this day, no one knows what happened to those twenty-five thousand souls, but for any inhabitant of Ambergris, the rumor soon seeps through—in the mottling of fungi on a window, in the dripping of green water, in the little red flags they use as their calling cards—that the gray caps were responsible. Because, after all, we had slaughtered so many of them and driven the rest underground. Surely this was their revenge?
I had only learned about the Silence the semester before; it was frightening how adults could keep the details of certain events from their children. It came as a revelation to me and my classmates, although it is hard to describe how deeply it affected us.
“It keeps coming back to the Silence,” Duncan said. “My studies, Dad’s studies. And Samuel Tonsure’s journal.”
Tonsure, Duncan had told me, was one of those who pursued the gray caps underground during the massacre that had preceded the founding of Ambergris. He had never returned to the surface, but his journal, a curious piece of work that purported to describe the gray caps’ underground kingdoms, had been found some seventy-five years later, and subsequently pored over by historians for any information it might impart on the Silence or any other topic related to the gray caps. They were studying it still, Duncan included.
“You’re not Dad, Duncan,” I said. “You could study something else.”
Even then, before he was employed by James Lacond, before he met Mary, I sensed the danger there for Duncan. Even then, I knew somehow that Duncan was in peril. (We’re all in peril from something. I count myself lucky not to have succumbed to the usual perils, like addiction to mushrooms or alcohol.)
But Duncan just stared at me as if I were stupid and said, “There’s nothing else to study, Janice. Nothing important.”
I remember the inevitable progression of the images on his walls with the clarity of dream. However, beyond the few words reproduced above, our conversations have faded into the oblivion of memory.
Duncan emerged from those rooms with a degree and good prospects (an exaggeration; I perhaps had the prospect of a brief flash of fame, followed by an urgent need to make a living in a profession other than the one I had chosen as my passion), but even then he was different from the other students. I watched his professors circle him at the various graduation parties. They treated him with a certain worried detachment, perhaps even fearfully, as if he had grown into something they could no longer easily define. As if they dared not develop any emotional attachment to this particular student. (Mom, who had continued to recede into her memories, did not come up for the ceremony—and we rarely went to see her, now that we were grown.)
Later, Duncan told me that he had never known solitude, never known loneliness, as he did in those few hours after graduation when he walked like a leper through gilded rooms tabled with appetizers and peppered with conversations meant for everyone but him. The tall towers of senior professors glided silent and watchful, the antithesis of Mary Sabon and her quivering, eager necklace of flesh. (Everyone feels isolated at those types of events, no matter how good the party, or how scintillating the conversation, because you’re about to be expelled into the world, out from your own little piece of it.)
Yet out of his zeal, his loneliness, his passion that had literally crawled up the walls of his rooms, Duncan had already created something that might take the place of the silence or at least provide an answer to it. He had written a book entitled On the Refraction of Light in a Prison.
Despite countless exams, essays, and oral presentations, Duncan had found the time to write a groundbreaking tome that analyzed the mystical text The Refraction of Light in a Prison (written by the imprisoned Monks of Truff from their high tower in the Court of the Kalif). It will not surprise anyone that this was one of the subjects our father had meant to tackle prior to his sudden death. (How could I not tackle it before going on? It was like completing my father’s life in some small part. I remember looking at the finished book, with the inscription, “To my father, Jonathan Shriek,” and thinking that I had resurrected him for a time, that he was alive again in my book. When I sent the book to our mother, she broke from her usual stoic silence to write me a long letter relating stories about Dad she had never felt comfortable telling me before.)
I had the privilege of reading the book (and helping to edit it, in your incendiary way) in manuscript form on one of my trips to Morrow. By then, my own education in Stockton and Ambergris had reached its somewhat disappointing end, and I was torn between pursuing a career in art or diving into art history. I had done much advanced research and encountered much in the way of genius, but I remember even then being astounded by the brilliant audacity of my brother’s conclusions. At the same time, I was concerned that the book might be too good for its intended audience. Perhaps my brother was destined for obscurity. I admit to a sting of satisfaction in the thought, for nothing is more savage than sibling rivalry.
In any event, Duncan found a publisher in Morrow after only three months: Frankwrithe & Lewden, specialists in reference books, odd fictions, and histories. Frankwrithe & Lewden was an ancient publisher, rumored to have been established under the moniker “Writhelewd” during the last century of the Saphant Empire. Then, as the Empire collapsed into fragments not long after “Cinsorium” became “Ambergris,” they transplanted their operations to Morrow, their name mangled and transformed during the long trek upriver in flat-bottomed boats. Who better to publish Duncan’s esoteric work?
Frankwrithe & Lewden published fifteen thousand copies of On the Refraction of Light in a Prison. By barge, cart, and motored vehicle, the book infiltrated the southern half of the continent. Bookstores large and small stocked it. Traveling book dealers purchased copies for resale. Review copies were sent out with colorful advance blurbs from the dean of the Institute and the common man on the street (a badly conceived F&L publicity stunt, soliciting random opinions from laypeople that resulted in blurbs like, “‘Not as good as a bottle of mead, but me and the missus quite enjoyed the bit about monk sex.’—John Tennant, plumber”).
At first, nothing happened. A lull, a doldrums of no response, “as if,” Duncan told me later, “I had never written a book, never spent four years on the subject. In fact, it felt as if I, personally, had never existed at all.” Then, slowly, the book began to sell. It did not sell well, but it sold well enough: a steady drip from a faucet.
The critical response, although limited, did give Duncan hope, for it was, when and where it appeared, enthusiastic: “After an initial grounding in cold, hard fact, Shriek’s volume lofts itself into that rarefied air of unique scholarly discourse that distinguishes a good book from a bad book” (Edgar Rybern, Arts & History Review). Or, this delicious morsel: “I never knew monks had such a difficult life. The overall sentiment expressed by this astonishing book is that monks, whether imprisoned or not, lead lives of quiet contemplation broken by transcendental bursts of epiphany” (the aforementioned James Lacond, Truff love him, with a rare appearance in the respectable Ambergris Today).
The steady drip became stronger as the coffers of the various public and private libraries in the South, synchronized to the opinions of men and women remote from them (who might well have been penning their reviews from a lunatic asylum or between assignations at a brothel), released a trickle of coins to reward words like “rarefied air,” “good,” and “astonishing.”
However, even the critics could not turn the trickle into a torrent. This task fell to the reigning head of the Truffidian religion, the Ambergris Antechamber himself, the truculent (and yet sublime) Henry Bonmot. How dear old Bonmot happened to peruse a copy of On the Refraction of Light in a Prison has never been determined to my satisfaction (but it makes me laugh to think of how he became introduced to us). The rumor that Bonmot sought out blasphemous texts to create publicity for Truffidianism (because the rate of conversions had slowed) came from the schismatic Manziists, it was later proved. That Duncan sent Bonmot a copy to foment controversy demonstrates a lack of understanding about my brother’s character so profound I prefer not to comment on it.
The one remaining theory appears the most probable: Frankwrithe & Lewden conspired to place a copy on the priest’s nightstand, having first thoughtfully dog-eared those pages most likely to rescue him from his impending slumber. Ridiculous? Perhaps, but we must remember how sinister F&L has become in recent years. (Once upon a time, in a still-distant courtyard, I did ask Bonmot about it, but he couldn’t recall the particulars.)
Regardless, Bonmot read Duncan’s book—I imagine him sitting bolt upright in bed, ear hairs singed to a crisp by the words on the page—and immediately proclaimed it “to contain uncanny and certain blaspheme.” He banned it in such vehement language that his superiors later censured him for it, in part because “there now exists no greater invective to be used against such literature or arts as may sore deserve it.” (It was my good fortune that he turned to my explication of Chapter One of The Refraction of Light in a Prison, “The Mystical Passions,” which in its protestations of purity manages to list every depraved sexual act concocted by human beings over the past five thousand years. It was my theory, and Dad’s, that this was the monks’ method of having it both ways. It didn’t help that I included Dad’s mischievous footnote about the curious similarity between the form of certain Truff rituals and the acts depicted in the chapter.)
Luckily for Duncan, the darling (and daring!) Antechamber’s excellent imitation of a froth-mouthed dog during his proclamation so embarrassed the more practical administrative branch of the Truffidian Church—“them what pay the bills,” as an artist friend of mine once put it—that they neglected to impose a sentence or a penalty. Neither did the Truffidian Church exhort its members to “stone, pummel, or otherwise physically assault” Duncan, as occurred some years later to our soon-to-be editor Sirin, who had decided to champion a book on the “cleansing merits of interreligious romantic love.” (Sirin, alerted by a sympathetic typesetter, managed to change both the decree and the flyers created by it, causing the designated Truffidian Voice, the Antechamber standing by his side, to read a decree in front of the famous porcelain representation of the God Truff and all others in the Truffidian Cathedral that called for the Antechamber’s stoning, pummeling, and much worse. I teased Bonmot about this event many times.)
The ban led to the predictable upswing in sales, lofting the book into the “rarefied air” that distinguishes an almost-bestseller from a mediocre seller. (F&L took advantage of the ban to an uncanny degree, I must say, but it is not true that they had ten thousand copies of a new edition printed two nights before the announcement with “Banned by the Antechamber!” blaring across the cover in seventy-two-point bold Nicean Monk Face.)
Suddenly, Duncan had something of a reputation. Newspapers and broadsheets, historians and philosophers, decried and debated, lauded and vilified both the book and Duncan—on unusually obscure elements of Duncan’s argument (for example, whether or not the Water People of the Lower Moth Delta had ever been exposed to the teachings of Truff). Meanwhile, the Court of the Kalif denied it still held the monks who had written the original The Refraction of Light in a Prison and declared the new book to consist of a vast, sprawling fiction built on the foundation of another vast, sprawling fiction. (The Kalif also revoked Father’s prize, an action I never forgave.)
But no matter what position a particular commentator took, it was always with the underlying assumption that On the Refraction of Light in a Prison contained ideas of substance and scholarship. Duncan was asked to contribute articles to several major and minor historical journals. Inasmuch as the fate of the monks had become a political issue, and thus one of interest to many people, he was invited to more parties peopled by the Important than he could have stomached on his most extroverted day … and yet did not reply to a single invitation.
What made him reluctant to savor his newfound notoriety? The fear of the consequences of the ban did not make him a recluse, nor did his innate distress in social situations. The true answer is hinted at in his journal, which I have beside me now for verification purposes. Scrawled in the margin of an entry from this era, we find the words “Is this how Dad felt?” Remembering the fate of our father, dead at the zenith of his happiness, Duncan truly believed he too would die if he partook of too much joy—if not by heart attack, then by some other means. (Your theory may be correct on a subconscious level, but on the conscious level, I was merely obsessed and somewhat paranoid. Obsessed with the possibilities of the next book. Paranoid about how people would continue to receive my studies. Worried about how I would do on my own, so to speak, without Dad’s research notes to prop me up.)
Of course, I did not understand this until much later. At the time, I believed his shyness had led him to squander perhaps his only opportunity to take up a permanent place in the public imagination. On this, I turned out to be wrong. Debate raged on for a while regardless, perhaps fed by Duncan’s very absence.
Then, to compound the communal mystification, Duncan disappeared from sight—much as he would several decades later in the week before Martin Lake’s party. His rooms in Morrow (which the Institute had let me keep for a year following graduation) were untouched—not a sock taken, not a diagram removed from the walls … Duncan simply wasn’t there.
I walked around those rooms with the school’s dean, and it struck me as I stared at the crowded walls that Duncan’s physical presence or absence meant nothing. Everything that comprised his being had been tacked or glued or stabbed to those walls, an elaborate mosaic of obsession.
Clearly, the school understood this aspect of Duncan, for they made a museum out of the rooms, which then became the physical location for discussions of Duncan’s work. Much later, the “museum” became a storehouse, crumbled over time into a boarded-up mess, and then a broken-down safety hazard; such is the staying power of fame. (I never expected it would last as long as it did, to be honest.)
As we walked together, the Dean made sympathetic sounds, expressed the hope that Duncan would “soon return to his home.” But I knew better. Duncan had emerged from his cocoon. The wallpaper of plans, photographs, diagrams was just the husk of his leaving, the remains of his other self. Duncan had begun to metamorphose into something else entirely.
That is, assuming he was still alive—and without the evidence of a dead body, I preferred to believe he was. (I was. As you know. Such melodrama!)
Now I should start again. Now I should skip six months of worry. Now I should tell you how I came to see Duncan again. This is such a difficult Afterword to write. Sometimes I am at a loss as to what to put in and what to leave out. Sometimes I do not know what is appropriate for an Afterword, and what is not. Is this an Afterword or an afterward? Should I massage the truth? Should I maintain an even tone? Should I divide it all into neat, easily digestible chapters? Should I lie? (Dad, in his notes on writing: “A historian is half confidence artist and half stolid purveyor of dates and dramatic re-creations.”)
Duncan reintroduced himself to me six months later with a knock on my door late one night in the spring. The prudent Ambergrisian does not eagerly open doors at night.
I called out, “Who is it?” and received, in such a jubilant tone that I could not at first place the voice, the response, “Your brother, Duncan!” Shocked, relieved, perplexed, I opened the door to a pale, worn, yet strangely bulky brother wrapped in an old gray overcoat that he held closed with both hands. Comically enough, a sailor’s hat covered his head. His face was flushed, his eyes too bright as he staggered past me, pieces of debris falling from him onto the floor of my living room.
I locked the door behind him and turned to greet him, but any words I might have spoken died in my throat. For he held his overcoat open like the wings of some great bird, and what I saw I could not at first believe. Just brightly colored vest and pants, I thought, but protruding, like barnacles on a ship’s hull. How unlike my brother to wear anything that outlandish. I took a step closer …
“That’s right,” Duncan said, “step closer and really see.”
He tossed his hat onto a chair. He had shaved off his hair, and his scalp was stippled and layered in a hundred shades of blue, yellow, green, orange.
“Mushrooms. Hundreds of mushrooms. I had to wear the overcoat and hat or every casual tourist on Albumuth Boulevard would have stared at me.” He looked down at his body. “Look how they glow. What a shame to be rid of them.” He saw me staring unabashedly. “Stare all you like, Janice. I’m a dazzling butterfly, not a moth … well, for another hour or two.” (A butterfly could not compare. I was magnificent. Every part of my body was receiving. I could “hear” things through my body, feel them, that no human short of Samuel Tonsure could understand.)
He did not lie. From the collar of his shirt to the tips of his shoes, Duncan was covered in mushrooms and other fungi, in such a riot and welter and rash of colors that I was speechless. I walked up to him to examine him more closely. His eyelashes and eyebrows were lightly dusted with purple spores. The fungi had needled his head, burrowed into the skin, forming whorls of brightness that hummed with fecundity. I took his right hand in mine, examined the palm, the fingers. The palms had a vaguely greenish hue to them. The half-moons of his fingernails had turned a luminous purple. His skin was rubbery, as if unreal. Looking up into his eyes, I saw that the spark there came from pale red ringing the pupil. Suddenly, I was afraid. (To be honest, to dull the pain a bit, I’d had a few drinks at a tavern before stumbling to your door. That might have contributed to the condition of my eyes.)
“Don’t be,” he said. “Don’t be afraid,” scaring me even more. “It’s a function of diet. It’s a function of disguise. I haven’t changed. I’m still your brother. You are still my sister. All of this will wash away. It’s just the layers added to me the past three months. I need help scraping them off.”
I laughed. “You look like some kind of clown … some kind of mushroom clown.”
He took off his overcoat, let it fall to the floor. “I agree—I look ridiculous.”
“But where have you been? How did this happen?” I asked.
He put a finger to his lips. “I’ll answer your questions if you’ll help me get rid of this second skin. It itches. And it’s dying.”
So I helped him. It was not as simple as having him step out of his clothes, because the mushrooms had eaten through his clothes and attached themselves to his poor pale skin. A madness of mushrooms, mottling his skin—no uniform shape or variety or size. Some pulsed a strobing pink-blue. Others radiated a dull, deep burgundy. A few hung from his waist like upside-down wineglasses, translucent and hollow, the space inside filled with clusters of tiny button-shaped green-gold nodules that disintegrated at the slightest touch. Textures from rough to smooth to rippled to grainy to slick. Smells—the smells all ran together into an earthy but not unpleasant tang, punctuated by a hint of mint. The mushrooms even made noises if you listened carefully enough—a soft pough as they released spores, an intermittent whine when left alone, a pop as they became ghosts through my rough relocations.
“Remember BDD when you three had to wash all that mud and filth off of me?” he asked, as we worked with scrubbing implements and towels in the bathroom.
“Of course I do,” I said.
Before Dad Died, BDD, a grim little acronym meant to help us remember when we had been a happy family. If we had arguments or bouts of depression that threatened to get out of control, one of us would remind the others that we had all behaved differently before Dad died. We held BDD time in our heads as a sanctuary whenever our anger, our loss, became too great.
Once, Duncan, his usual mad, exploring, BDD self, had managed to get stuck in a sewer pipe under our block and we had had to pull him out after a frantic half hour searching for the source of his pathetic, echoing voice. Then Mom, Dad, and I spent another three hours forcing the black-gray sludge off of him, finally standing back to observe the miracle we had wrought: a perfectly white Duncan, “probably as clean as he’s ever been,” as Dad observed.
I wonder, Mary, if Duncan ever shared memories like this with you, while the lights flickered outside his apartment windows?
“Remember BDD…”
Duncan’s remark made me laugh, and the task at hand no longer seemed so strange. I was just helping clean up Duncan after another BDD exploration mishap, while Duncan looked on half in relief, half in dismay, as the badges of his newly gained experience fell away, revealed as transitory. (I was losing sensation with each new layer peeled off—reduced to relying on old senses. I knew it had to be done, but I felt as if I were going blind, becoming deaf, losing my sense of smell.)
Me, I felt as if I were destroying a vast city, a community of souls. On one level, I lived with the vague sense of guilt every Ambergrisian feels who can trace their family’s history back to the founding of the city. Even for me, even come late to Ambergris, a mushroom signifies the genocide practiced by our forefathers against the gray caps, but also the Silence and our own corresponding loss. Can anyone not from Ambergris, not living here, understand the fear, loss, guilt, each of us feels when we eradicate mushrooms from the outside of our apartments, houses, public buildings? The exact amount of each emotion in the pressure of my finger and thumb as I pulled them from their suction cup grip on Duncan’s skin.
It took five hours, until my fingertips were red and my back ached. Duncan looked not only exhausted but diminished by the ordeal. We had moved back into the living room, and there we sat, surrounded by the remains of a thousand mushrooms. It could have been a typical family scene—the aftermath of a haircut—except that Duncan had left behind something more profound than his hair. Already the red brightness had begun to fade from his eyes, his hands less rubbery, the half-moons of his fingernails light purple.
I had opened a window to get the smell of mushrooms out and now, by the wet, glistening outdoor lamps, I could see the beginning of a vast, almost invisible spore migration from the broken remains at our feet, from the burgundy bell-shaped fungi, from the inverted wineglasses, from the yellow-green nodules. Like ghosts, like spirits, a million tiny bodies in a thousand intricate shapes, like terrestrial jellyfish—oh what am I trying to say so badly except that they were gorgeous, as they fled out the window to be taken by the wind. In the faint light. Soundlessly. Like souls.
In that moment, almost in tears from the combination of beauty, exhaustion, and fear of the unknown, I think I caught a glimpse of what Duncan saw; of what had created the ecstasy I had seen in him when he had stumbled into my apartment five hours before. A hundred, a thousand years before. (I tried so hard to capture this for Mary, and yet I couldn’t make her see it. Maybe that is where the failure occurred, and maybe it is my failure. Not all experiences are universal, even if you’re in the same room when something miraculous occurs. I suppose it was too much to ask that she take it on faith?)
“Look,” I said, pointing to the spores.
“I know,” my brother said. “I know, Janice.”
Such regret in that voice, mixed with a last, lingering joy.
“I’m less than I was, but I’ve captured it all here.” He tapped his head, which still bore the scars of its invaders in the vague echo of color, in the scrubbed redness of it. “The spores are part of the record. They will float back to where I’ve been, navigating by wind and rain and by ways we cannot imagine, and they will report to the gray caps. Who I was. Where I was. What I did. It will make it all the more dangerous next time.”
I sat upright in my chair. Next time? He stood there, across the room from me, dressed in the rags of his picked-apart clothes, surrounded by the wreckage of fungal life, and he might as well have been halfway across the city. I didn’t understand him. I probably never would. (I didn’t need you to understand what I myself saw but dimly. I wanted you to see—and you saw more than most, even then. Mary saw it all, by the end, and she stitched her eyes shut, stopped up her ears, taped her mouth.)
“Yes, well, Duncan, it’s been a long night,” I started to say, but then his eyes rolled up in their sockets and he fell to the soft floor, dead asleep. I had to drag him to the couch.
There he remained for two days. I took time off from my job at an art gallery to watch over him. I went out only for food and to buy him new clothes. He slept peacefully, except for five or six times when he slipped into a nightmare that made him twitch, convulse, cry out in a strange language that sounded like birdsong. I remember staring down at his pale face and thinking that he resembled in texture and in color nothing more or less than a mushroom.
Duncan had no believable explanation for his enfeebled state when he finally awoke on the third morning. As I fed him toast and marmalade at the kitchen table, I tried to get some sense of what he might have endured in the six months since I had last seen him. Although I had swept away the remains of the mushrooms, their presence haunted us.
Elusiveness, vagueness, as if a counterpoint to the terrible precision of his writing, had apparently become Duncan’s watchwords. I had never known him to be talkative, but after that morning, his terseness began to take on the inventiveness of an art form. I had to pull information out of him. (I was trying to protect you. Clearly, you still don’t believe that, but I will give you this: you’re right that I should have found a way to tell you.)
“Where have you been?” I asked him.
He shrugged, pulled the blanket closer around him. “Here and there. Mostly there,” and he giggled, only trailing off when he realized he had lapsed into hysteria.
“Was it because of the Truffidian ban?” I asked.
He shook his head. “No, no, no. That silliness?” He raised his head to stare at me. His gaze was dark and humorless. “No. Not because of the ban. They never published my picture in the newspapers and broadsheets. No Truffidian outside of Morrow knows what I look like. No, not the ban. I was doing research for my next few books.” He rolled his eyes. “This will probably all go to waste.”
“Did you only go out at night?” I asked. “You’re as pale as I’ve ever seen you.”
He would not meet my gaze. He wrenched himself out of the chair and walked to the window, hands in his pockets. “It was a kind of night,” he said.
“Why can’t you just tell me?”
He grinned. “If you must know, I’ve been with Red Martigan and Aquelus, Manzikert and Samuel Tonsure.” A thin smile, staring out the window at some unnameable something.
A string of names almost as impenetrable as Sabon’s necklace of human beads, but I did recognize the names Manzikert I and Tonsure. I knew Duncan had continued to study Tonsure’s journal.
“I found,” Duncan said in a monotone, as if in a trance, “something in Tonsure’s journal that others did not, because they were not looking for it…”
Here I mix my memories of the conversation with a transcript of the account found in my brother’s journal, which I am lucky enough to have in a trunk by my side along with several other things of Duncan’s. (It’s something of a shock to find you rifling through my papers and notebooks. Usually, it takes a person years to develop the nerve to attempt outright theft. For a moment, I was upset, even outraged. But, really, Janice, I’d rather you quote me than paraphrase, since the meaning becomes distorted otherwise.)
I found something in Tonsure’s journal that others did not, because they were not looking for it. Everyone else—historians, scholars, amateurs—read it as a historical account, as a primary source to a time long past, or as the journal of a man passing over into madness. They wanted insight into the life of Tonsure’s captor, Manzikert I. They wanted insight into the underground land of the gray caps. But although the journal can provide that insight, it is also another thing entirely. I only noticed what was hidden because I had become so accustomed to staring for hours at the maps and diagrams on the walls of my rooms at the Institute. I fell asleep to their patterns. I dreamt about their patterns. I woke up to their patterns.
When I finally began to read Tonsure’s journal, I was alive with patterns and destinations. As I read, I began to feel restless, irritable. I began to feel that the book contained another level, another purpose. Something that I could catch only flashes of from a copy of the journal, but which might be as clear as glass or a reflecting mirror in the original.
As I reached the end of the journal—the pages and pages of Truffidian religious ritual that seem intended to cover a rising despair at being trapped belowground—I became convinced that the journal formed a puzzle, written in a kind of code, the code weakened, diluted, only hinted at, by the uniform color of the ink in the copies, the dull sterility of set type.
The mystery ate at me, even as I worked on On the Refraction of Light in a Prison, especially because one of the footnotes added to The Refraction of Light in a Prison by the editor of my edition contains a sentence I long ago memorized: “Where the eastern approaches of the Kalif’s empire fade into the mountains no man can conquer, the ruined fortress of Zamilon keeps watch over time and the stars. Within the fortress, humbled by the holes in its ancient walls, Truffidian monks guard the last true page of Tonsure’s famous journal.”
That the love of a woman might one day become as mysterious to Duncan as a ruined fortress, that he could one day find the flesh more inexplicable than stone, must have come as a shock.
After the discovery, my curiosity became unbearable. I could not fight against it. As soon as I graduated, I began to make plans to visit Zamilon. These plans, in hindsight, were pathetically incomplete and childish, but, worse, I didn’t even follow the plans when I finally made the journey.
One night, as I stared at the maps on my walls, the pressure grew too great—I leapt out of bed, put on my clothes, took my advance money from Frankwrithe & Lewden from the dresser, peeled a map of the eastern edge of the Kalif’s empire from the wall, and dashed out into the night.
Without a thought for my peace of mind, or our mother’s. Typical. How many times should we have to forgive Duncan just because he was always the eccentric genius in the family? (Surely this doesn’t reflect your feelings now, but only your emotions at the time? Not with everything you’ve seen since? I refuse to defend myself on this count, especially since we would have need to forgive you many times over in the years to come.)
The wanderings and mishaps of the next two months are too strangely humorous for me to bother relating, but suffice it to say that my map was faulty, my funds inadequate. I spent as many days earning money as traveling to my destination. I became acquainted with a dozen different forms of transportation, each with its own drawbacks: mule, mule-drawn cart, mule-powered rolling barge, leaky canoe, the rare smoke-spitting, back-farting motored vehicle, and my own two slogging feet. I starved. I almost died from lack of water. Once, when I had had the good fortune to earn some money as a scribe for an illiterate local judge, I was robbed within minutes of leaving the accursed town. I survived a mudslide and a hailstorm. My feet became thick, insensate slabs. My senses sharpened, until I could hear the stirrings of a fly on a branch a hundred feet away. In short, in every way I became more attuned to the details of my own survival.
Nor were the monks of Zamilon more understanding than the elements of nature or the vagaries of village dwellers. It took an entire week to convince the monks that the rag-clad, unshaven, stinking stranger before them was a serious scholar. I stood in front of Zamilon’s hundred-foot gates, upon the huge path cut out of the side of the mountain, the massive stone sculptures from some forgotten demonology leering at me from either side, and listened while the monks dumped down upon me, like boiling oil, the most obscure religious questions ever shouted from atop a battlement.
However, eventually they relented—whether because of my seriousness or the seriousness of my stench, which was off-putting to other pilgrims, I do not know. But when I was finally allowed to examine the page from Tonsure’s journal, all my suffering seemed distant and unimportant. It was as I had suspected: the original pages, the supposed idiosyncrasies found upon them, created a pattern intended as a map for anyone lucky enough to decipher it. I only had access to one page—and would never see the rest, imprisoned as it was by the Kalif along with the authors of The Refraction of Light in a Prison—but that was enough to parse a fragmented meaning of the whole.
I wrote down my findings—and, indeed, a first account of my journey—on a dozen sheets of paper, forced myself to memorize the evidence before I left Zamilon, and then burned my original scribblings. The knowledge seemed too precious and too personal to commit permanently to paper. It frightened me. With what I had learned, I could now, if I dared, if I desired, access the gray caps’ underground kingdom … and survive.
I thought about at least two things on my long journey to Ambergris from Zamilon. (I had no intention of returning to Morrow.) First, to what extent had Tonsure corrupted his own journal in order to transmit this secret code—or had he corrupted it at all? In other words, did the coherent elements of the journal accurately reflect events and Tonsure’s opinions of those events, or had he, to create a book that was also a map, sacrificed reality on the altar of symbolism?
Further, I was now convinced that Tonsure had written the entire journal after he followed Manzikert I belowground. He had encrypted it in the hope that even if he never made it back to the surface, the gray caps might preserve the journal, not realizing it posed a threat to their secrets. This revelation, if supportable, would change the entire nature of discourse surrounding the journal, render obsolete a hundred scholarly essays, and not a few whole books besides. The battered journal returned to the surface by the gray caps had not been the half-coherent ramblings of a mind slowly going insane, but a calculated risk taken by a man all too aware of his predicament.
What followed from this conclusion is simply this: Another, earlier version of the journal must have, at one point, existed, whether a polished product or a loose collection of notes. And from this earlier version, Tonsure had created a facsimile that contained the map, the schematic, for navigation of the gray caps’ underground strongholds. Something even the gray caps had not been able to decipher. Something that would be Tonsure’s secret and his alone.
Second, and most important, my head was filled with the grandeur of Tonsure’s design, the genius of it, which I had seen but a fragment of and which our father had glimpsed only in the potential for research revealed by the letter that had killed him.
When I finally made my way back to Ambergris and strode down Albumuth Boulevard, I had only one thought. It ran through my mind over and over, like a challenge, like a curse: Did I have the courage to act on what Tonsure had given me? Could I live with not acting on that knowledge?
I found out that my courage outweighed my fear. Perhaps because I could not let Tonsure’s supreme act of communication go to waste. The thought of him reaching out from beyond his own death only to be thwarted by my cowardice … it was too much to bear. More’s the pity.
So I found my way down among them and back again without being disfigured or murdered. It was easy in a way. With Tonsure as my guide, I could not miss this sign here, that symbol there, until even the vaguest scratch in muddied rock, the slightest change in temperature or fruiting bodies alerted me to the next section of the path. It was a strange, dark place, and I was afraid, but I was not alone. I had Tonsure with me.
Do I understand most of what I saw down there? No. Does the memory of seeing things I do not understand help me, do me any good at all? No. For one thing, who would believe me? They would say I am having visions. I’m not sure I believe it all myself. Thus, I have become no better off than Samuel Tonsure, except that I may move above- and belowground at will.
When Duncan related portions of this to me in person, he ended with the lines, “And now you will have to believe me when I say that I cannot tell you anything else, and that it will do no good to press me for information or ask more questions. This is for your own protection as much as anything else. Please trust me on this, Janice.”
Such a sense of finality informed his words that it never occurred to me to probe further. I just nodded, thinking about the mushroom spores floating out the window three nights before, from a room that now seemed so gray and empty. I was still trying to absorb that image. Unhappily, Duncan’s journal entries are no more revealing than our conversations (You didn’t think I’d leave both of my journals aboveground, did you?), but at the time, I was secretly glad he didn’t tell me more—his experience was so remote from mine that the simplest word sounded as if spoken in another language.
“I’m just glad you’re safe again, and home,” I said.
“Safe?” he said with a bitter little laugh. “Safe? Look at my hands.” He held them out for my inspection. The half-moons of his fingernails shone a faint green. Along the outer edge of both hands a trail of thin, fernlike fungi followed a rough line down to the wrists. Perhaps, in certain types of light, it might be mistaken for hair.
“That will go away in time,” I told him.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. I think I’ve been branded. I think I will always have these marks, no matter how they manifest themselves.”
Duncan was right, although the manifestations would not always be fungal: for decades, he would carry everywhere a reproduction of Tonsure’s journal, the pages more worn with each passing year, until finally I began to feel that the diary of the madman had become Duncan’s own. And he would add more marks to the book, nearly silent scars that would leave their own strange language on his skin. Unspoken. Unwritten. But there.
Until only in the dim green light of the Spore would he feel truly comfortable aboveground.
Can I start again? Will you let me start again? Do you trust me to? Perhaps not. Perhaps all I can do is soar over. Perhaps we’ll fly as the crow flies—on night wings, wind rattling the delicate bones of the rib cage, cold singeing feathers, gaze scouring the ground below us. The landscape will seem clear but distant, remote yet comprehensible. We will fly for ten years straight, through cold and rain and the occasional indignant sparrow certain we’ve come to raid the nest. Ten years shall we fly across before we begin our slow, circling descent to the cause of Duncan’s calamity. Those ten years brought five black books flapping their pages. Five reluctant tombstones. Five millstones round my brother’s neck. Five brilliant bursts of quicksilver communication. Five leather-clad companions for Duncan that no one can ever take away. (Five progressively grandiose statements that stick in my craw.)
We fly this way because we must fly this way. I did not see much of Duncan during those ten years. The morning after my conversation with him, he borrowed money from me against expected book royalties and left my apartment. He rented a small one-bedroom at the east end of Albumuth Boulevard in one of the several buildings owned by the legendary Dame Truff. Did he delight in living so close to the Religious Quarter, to know that he, the blasphemer, slept within a few blocks of the Antechamber’s quarters in the Truffidian Cathedral? I don’t know. I never asked him. (I delighted in the dual sensations of normalcy and danger, something you, Janice, always craved, but was new for me. To wake up every morning and make eggs and bacon with the full knowledge that my dull routine might be swiftly shattered by the appearance of the Antechamber’s goons.)
While Duncan published, I perished half a dozen times. I shed careers like snakeskins, molting toward a future I always insisted was the goal, not merely an inevitable destination. Painter, sculptor, teacher, gallery assistant, gallery owner, journalist, tour guide, always seeking a necklace quite as bright, quite as fake, as Mary Sabon’s. I never finished anything, from the great sprawling canvases I filled with images of a city I didn’t understand, to filling the great sprawling spaces in my gallery. I’ve never lacked energy or drive, only that fundamental secret all good art has and all bad art lacks: a healthy imagination. Which, as I look back, is intensely ironic, considering how much imagination it took to get to this moment with my sanity intact, typing up an afterword that, no matter how sincere, will no doubt be as prone to accusations of pretense and bombast as any of my prior works.
I did my best to keep in contact with Duncan, although without much enthusiasm or vigor. The long trek to his loft apartment from mine often ended in disappointment; he was rarely home. Sometimes, curious, I would sneak up to the door and listen carefully before knocking; I would look through the keyhole, but it revealed only darkness.
My reward for spying usually took the form of a rather echoing silence. But more than once I imagined I heard someone or something scuttling across the floor, accompanied by a dull hiss and moan that made me stand up abruptly, the hairs rising on my arms. My tremulous knock upon the door in such circumstances—whether Duncan Transformed or Duncan with Familiars, I wanted no part of that sound—was usually enough to reestablish silence on the other side. And if it wasn’t, my retreat back into the street usually changed from walk to run. (I heard you sometimes, although I was usually engrossed in my work and thought it best that you not enter. Ironically enough, a couple of times, I thought you were them, gray-capped sister.)
I imagine I looked rather pathetic in front of his apartment—this thin, small woman crouched against a splintery door, eagerly straining for any aural news of the interior. I remember the accursed doorknob well—I hit my head on it at least a dozen times.
Thwarted, I gained any news of Duncan from rare interviews in the newspapers, which usually focused on writing technique or opinions on current events. For some reason, people are under the deluded impression that a historian—blessed with hindsight—can somehow illuminate the present and the future. Duncan knew nothing about the present and the future. (I knew nothing about the present and the immediate past. I would argue, however, that I began to glean an inkling of the future.)
The biographical notes on the dust jackets of his books were no help—they crackled with a terseness akin to fear: “Duncan Shriek lives in Ambergris. He is working on another book.” Even by investigating the spaces between the words, those areas where silence might reveal a clue, could anyone ever “get to know” the author from such a truncated paragraph? More importantly, no one would ever want to know the author from such a paragraph.
Only in the fifth book did more information leak through, almost by accident, like a water stain on a ceiling: “Shriek intends to write a sequel to his bestselling tome, Cinsorium.”
By then, Duncan’s luck had run out, and all because of a single book we must circle back to, a delighted Sabon as raptor swooping down to observe over our feathered shoulder—Mary’s presence doubling, trebling, the scope of the disaster, because it was she who turned Duncan into fodder for her own … what shall we call it? Words fail/cannot express/are not nearly enough. (Triumph. Unqualified. You must give her that. Bewitching eyes and the pen of a poet.)
Gliding, wheeling, we circle back through the wind stream and let the titles fall in reverse order so that we might approach the source by a series of echoes or ripples: Vagaries of Circumstance and Fate Amongst the Clans of the Aan; Mapping the Beast: Interrogatories Between the Moth and Those Who Travel Its Waters; Stretcher Jones: Last Hope of the West; Language Barriers Between the Aan and the Saphant Empire. And the first book, sprawling out below us in all of its baroque immensity: Cinsorium: Dispelling the Myth of the Gray Caps. This maddening book, composed of lies and half-truths, glitters beneath us in all of its slivers and broken pieces, baubles fit for our true crow-self.
What is it about even half of the truth that can tear at the fabric of the world? Was it fear? Guilt? The same combination of emotions that flickered through my thoughts as I extinguished the welter of mushrooms from Duncan’s poor pale body?
I don’t mean to speak in riddles. I don’t mean to fly too high above the subject, but sometimes you have no choice. Still, let me land our weary crow and just tell the story …
Perhaps Duncan should have realized what he had done after Frankwrithe & Lewden’s reaction to the manuscript. (I realized it when I read over the first draft and saw the thousand red wounds of revision marks left by my second editor—lacerations explaining in their cruel tongue that this book would either behave itself or not be a book at all.)
A month after submission of the book, Duncan’s editor, John Lewden, summoned Duncan to F&L’s offices in downtown Morrow. The journey from Ambergris took Duncan two grueling days upriver by barge, into the heart of what proved to be a glacial Morrow winter. Once there, Duncan found that his editor was “on vacation” and that F&L’s president, Mr. L. Gaudy, would talk to him instead.
A secretary quickly escorted Duncan into Gaudy’s office, and left immediately. (I remember the office quite well. It was “resplendent,” with a rosewood desk, a dozen portraits of famous F&L authors, and an angry, spitting fireplace in the corner opposite the desk.)
Gaudy, according to Duncan’s journal, was “a bearded man of indeterminate age, his gaunt flesh wrapped across sharp cheekbones.” He sat behind his desk, staring at the room’s fireplace. (His eyes were like blue ice, and in his presence I smelled a certain cloying mustiness, as if he spent most of his time underground, or surrounded by hundred-year-old books.)
Duncan moved to sit, but Gaudy raised one hand, palm out, in abeyance. The calm behind the gesture, almost trancelike, made Duncan reluctant to disobey the man, but “also irritated me intensely; I had the feeling he knew something I did not, something I wanted to know.”
They remained in those positions, respectively sitting and standing, for over five minutes. Duncan somehow sensed that just as he should not sit down, he also should not speak. “I began to think this man held some power over me, and it was only later that I realized something in his eyes reminded me of Dad.”
When Gaudy finally lifted his bespectacled face to stare at Duncan, the flames reflected in the glass, Duncan saw an expression of absolute peace on the man’s face. Relieved, he again moved to sit down, only to again be told, through a gesture, to remain standing.
Duncan began to wonder if his publisher had gone insane. “At the very least, I wondered if he had mistaken me for someone else.”
As the fire behind them began to die, Gaudy smiled and broke the silence. He spoke in a “perfectly calm voice, level and smooth. He stared at the fireplace as he spoke, and steepled his fingers, elbows on the desk. He appeared not to draw a single extra breath.”
He said:
“You need not sit and thus defile my perfectly good chair because it will take no time at all to say what needs to be said to you. Once I have said what I am going to say to you, I would like you to leave immediately and never return. You are no longer welcome here and never will be welcome again. Your manuscript has performed the useful function of warming us, a function a thousand times more beneficial than anything it might have hoped to accomplish as a series of letters strung together into words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The fire has purified it, in much the same manner as I would like at this moment—and will desire at all moments in the future—to purify you, were it not outside of the legal, if not moral, boundaries placed upon us by the law and society in general. By this time it ought to be clear to you, Mr. Shriek, that we do not intend to buy the rights to your ‘book’—and I use the word ‘book’ in its loosest possible sense—nor to its ashes, although I would sooner buy the rights to its ashes than to its unblemished pages. However, on the off chance that you still do not comprehend what I am saying to you, and allowing for the possibility that you may have entered a state of shock, I shall continue to talk until you leave this room, which happy event I hope will take place before very much longer, as the sight of you makes me ill. Mr. Shriek, as you must be aware, Frankwrithe & Lewden has a history that goes back more than five hundred years, and in that time we have published our share of controversial books. Your first book—which, by the way, you may be fascinated to know is as of this moment out of print—was the forty-first book to be banned by the various Antechambers of Ambergris over the years. We certainly have no qualms in that regard. Nor have we neglected to publish books on the most arcane and obscure topics dreamt of by the human brain. As you are no doubt aware, despite the fact that many titles no longer have even a nostalgic relevance, we keep our entire, and considerable, backlist in print—Pelagic Snail Rituals of the Lower Archipelago comes to mind, there being no such snail still extant, nor such an archipelago; still, we keep it in print—but we will make an exception for your first book, which shall be banished from all of our catalogs as well. As I would have hoped you had guessed by now, although you have not yet left this office never to return, we do not like your new book very much. In fact, to say I do not like your book would be like calling a mighty tree a seedling. I loathe your book, Mr. Shriek, and yet the word ‘loathe’ cannot convey in even a thousandth part the full depths of my hatred for this book, and by extension, you. But perhaps I should be more specific. Maybe specifics will allow you to overcome this current, potentially fatal, inertia—tied no doubt to the aforementioned shock—that stops you from leaving this office. Look—the last scrap of your manuscript has become a flake of ash floating above the fireplace. What a shame. Perhaps you would like an urn to collect the ashes of your dead newborn? Well, you can’t have one, because not only do we not have an urn, but even if we did, we would not allow you to use it for the transport of the ashes, if only from the fear that you might find some way to reconstruct the book from them—and yes, we do know it is likely you have a copy of the manuscript, but we will feel a certain warmth in our hearts if by burning this copy we can at least slow down your reckless and obstinate attempt to publish this cretinous piece of excrement. Returning to the specifics of our argument against this document: your insipid stupidity is evident from the first word of the first sentence of the first paragraph of your acknowledgments page, ‘The,’ and from there the sense of simple-minded, pitiable absence of thought pervades all of the first paragraph until, by the roaring crescendo of imbecility leading up to the last word of the first paragraph, ‘again,’ any possible authority the reader might have granted the author has been completely undermined by your inability to in any way convey even an unoriginal thought. And yet in comparison to the dull-witted pedantry of the second paragraph, the first paragraph positively shines with genius and degenerate brilliance. Perhaps at this point in our little chat, I should repeat that I don’t very much like this book.”
Gaudy then rose and shouted, “YOU HAVE BEEN MEDDLING IN THINGS YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT! DO YOU THINK YOU CAN POKE AROUND DOWN THERE TO YOUR HEART’S CONTENT AND NOT SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES?! YOU ARE A COMPLETE AND UTTER MORON! IF YOU EVER COME BACK TO MORROW, I’LL HAVE YOU GUTTED AND YOUR ORGANS THROWN TO THE DOGS! DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. ME??!”
What other rhetorical gems might have escaped Gaudy’s lips, we will never know, for Duncan chose that moment to overcome his inertia and leave Frankwrithe & Lewden’s offices—forever.
“It’s not so much that he frightened me,” Duncan told me later. “Because after going belowground, really, what could scare me? It was the monotone of his delivery until that last spit-tinged frothing.” (I was terrified, Janice. This man was the head of an institution that had been extant more than five hundred years ago. And he was telling me my work was worthless! It took a month before I even had the nerve to leave my apartment in Ambergris. I rarely visited Morrow again, and kept a low profile whenever I did.)
Later, during the War of the Houses (as it came to be called), we realized that Gaudy, for political reasons, could hardly have reacted any other way to Duncan’s manuscript. But how could Duncan know that at the time? He must have been shaken, at least a little bit. (Yes. A bit.)
Undaunted, Duncan found a new publisher within six months of Gaudy’s strange rejection. Hoegbotton Publishing, a newly created and overeager division of the Hoegbotton & Sons trading empire, gave Duncan a contract. In every way, the book struck Duncan’s new editor, Samuel Hoegbotton—an overbearing and inconsequential young man with hulking shoulders, a voice like a cacophony of monkeys, and severe bad breath (who would never find favor in the eyes of his tyrannical father, Henry Hoegbotton)—as “A WORK OF GENIUS!” Duncan was happy to agree, bewildered as he might have been, unaware at the time that Samuel had transferred from the Hoegbotton Marketing Division. Samuel had not set foot in a bookstore since his twelfth birthday, when his mother had presented him with a gift certificate to the Borges Bookstore. (“Promptly traded in for its monetary value,” Sirin, our subsequent editor, mused disbelievingly some years later.) That Samuel died of a heart attack soon after publishing Duncan’s fifth book surprised no one. (Except me!)
The book, published with the full (perhaps crushing) weight of the Hoegbotton empire behind it, was called Cinsorium: Dispelling the Myth of the Gray Caps. It became an instant bestseller.
Despite this success, Cinsorium signaled the beginning of Duncan’s slide into the obscurity I had previously wished upon him. If he had dreamt of a career as a serious historian—the sort of career our father would have died for—he should have suppressed the book and moved on to a new project. Samuel Hoegbotton, contributing to the disaster, ordered the printing of a banner across the top of the book (almost, but not quite, obscuring my name) that proclaimed: “At Last! The Truth! About the Gray Caps! All Secrets! Revealed!”
I bought the book as soon as it came out, not trusting Duncan to send me a copy. (I would have, if you’d asked.) It disappointed me for contradictory reasons: because it showed little of the scholarly care displayed by On the Refraction of Light in a Prison, and because it never mentioned, even once, Duncan’s underground journey. I had already accepted the irritation of waiting to read about the trip along with everyone else. This I could have tolerated, even though it indicated a lack of trust. But not to mention it at all? It was too much. (I did mention Zamilon, though. Wasn’t that enough? To start with?)
The book did not “reveal” all secrets. It obscured them. Duncan tantalized readers with incredible images he claimed had come from ancient books, the existence of which most scholars discounted. Mile-high caverns. Draperies of fungi that “undulated in time to a music conveyed at too high a pitch for the human ear.” Mushrooms that bleated and whined and “talked after a fashion, in the language of spores.” (Yes, perhaps I obscured some deeper truths, but nothing was made up.)
In typical Duncanesque prose, it tried with almost superhuman effort to hide the paucity of its insight:
Although the inquisitive reader may wish for further extrapolation regarding this aspect of Tonsure’s journal, such extrapolation would be so speculative as to provide a poor gruel of a meal indeed, even for the layperson. Some mysteries are unsolvable.
(One part fear, I suppose. One part truth. Some mysteries are unsolvable. Just when you unearth the answer, you discover another question.)
A beautiful sword, but blunt, the book relied on quotations from “unnamed sources” for the bulk of its more exotic findings. Although claiming to know the truth about the gray caps, Duncan instead spent most of the book combining a history of fungi with historical suppositions that made me laugh:
Could it be that the rash of suicides and murders in the Kalif’s Court fifty years before the Silence were the result of emanations from a huge fungus that lay under the earth in those parts? Might much of the supposed “courtly intrigues” of the period actually have more to do with fruiting bodies? Might this also reveal the source of the aggression behind so-called bad Festivals in Ambergris?
The book, in short, violated most rules of historical accuracy and objective evidence. Duncan mentioned that he had journeyed to examine the page of Tonsure’s journal, but he gave no specifics of location or content. Certainly nothing like the detail and “local color” provided by his own journal. (I admit Cinsorium was hardly my finest hour, although I had my reasons for writing it at the time. My thoughts turned to Tonsure and his encryptions. My need for encryption was not as urgent as his, or as profoundly solitary, but I still felt a certain danger. Not just from the gray caps, but from those who might read the unexpurgated truth and … reject it. And reject it violently. Couldn’t I, I reasoned—falsely—allude to and suggest that truth so that, perhaps, even if in just a thousand minds, my suspicions might harden into certainty? It is a question I wrestled with even later, working with James Lacond, although by then I had come to realize that the best I could hope for was a hardening certainty in a mere handful of souls.)
The most daring idea in Cinsorium was the theory that Tonsure had rewritten the journal after completing it, which alienated dozens of influential scholars (and their followers, don’t forget) who had based hundreds of books and papers on the conventionally accepted chronology. (I don’t think it alienated them—most of them lacked the resources or the knowledge to verify or deny the discovery. I didn’t feel like an outcast, at first. Besides, is it fair to chastise me for both poor scholarship and unique ideas?)
As I read, I became struck by the way that half-truths wounded Duncan’s cause more seriously than outright lies. He stumbled, he faltered throughout the book, but continued on anyway—persevering past the point where any reasonable person might have given up on such a hopeless trek.
Oddly, it made me love him for being brave, and it almost made me cry as well. I knew that he held our father in his head as he wrote, running toward him across the summer grass. That, I could respect. But by not revealing all, he became lost in the land between, where lies always sound like lies, and so does the truth. He could not protect the gray caps and satisfy serious readers without betraying both groups. (The gray caps needed no protection, only the readers. Janice, you may now be beyond protection, but there are still things that can be done for those aboveground.)
In part due to these defects, Cinsorium had a peculiar publication history. It became an instant bestseller when the Kalif’s Minister of Literature, rather than ban the book, had his operatives buy all available copies and ship them off to the Court. Readers in the South bought most of the second printing, the Kalif distracted by warfare with the Skamoo on his northern border. However, despite the sale of more than fifty thousand copies, Hoegbotton refused to go to a third printing.
Certainly the strange and curious silence created by the book must be seen as a reason for Hoegbotton’s reluctance to reprint Cinsorium. This silence occurred among those most raucous of vultures, critics. In the superheated atmosphere that is the Southern book culture, such omissions rarely occur. Even the most modest self-published pulp writer can find space in local book review columns. (Fear. It was fear.) This lack of attention proved fatal, for although many journals noted the book’s publication in passing, only two actual reviews ever appeared, both in a fringe publication edited by James Lacond. Lacond, a passing acquaintance of Duncan’s even in those days before the war, wrote that “Subtle subjects require subtle treatments. For every two steps back, Shriek takes three steps forward, so that in the circular but progressive nature of his arguments one begins to see this pattern, but also a certain truth emerging.” Perhaps. Perhaps not. (At least someone was prepared to accept it!)
But none of these events concerned me, not in light of what I thought the book told me about Duncan. The book, I felt, was an argument between Duncan and Duncan, and not about any of the surface topics in the book. Duncan did not know what, exactly, he had seen while underground. He had only a rudimentary understanding of the gray caps. (This is true—I didn’t know what I’d seen. But I couldn’t keep what I didn’t know to myself. How could I? I saw too many things that might shake someone’s worldview.) This kept alive Duncan’s compulsion to do what I most feared: return to the underground until he felt he understood … everything.
Perhaps it should not have surprised me that Duncan’s next four books settled back into the realm of acceptable accomplishment. Duncan reverted to the scholarship that had been his trademark. It was too late, of course. It didn’t, and couldn’t, matter, because the cowardly critics who had refused to review Cinsorium had read it. And so Duncan’s scholarly style steadily lost readers seeking further crass sensationalism, while critics savaged later books, most of them omitting any reference to Cinsorium. It hung over Duncan’s work like a ghost, an echo. The reviews that did appear dismissed Duncan’s work in ways that made him appear a crank, a misfit, even a heretic. (I’ve always blamed Gaudy for this, although for a long time I had no proof, or even a coherent theory. But I now believe Gaudy used his connections to blacklist me in typical F&L fashion—with the underhanded compliment, the innuendo, the insinuation. Did Gaudy do more than meet with a few influential journal editors? Perhaps not, but that might have been enough.) They appended the story of his banning by Bonmot in harmful ways: “This, the latest offering from the author who blasphemed against the Truffidian Church, concerns…” It did not matter what it concerned.
Shortly after the publication of Vagaries of Circumstance and Fate Amongst the Clans of the Aan, Hoegbotton announced that Duncan had been dropped from their stable of writers. Gaudy must have been laughing from behind his rosewood desk in Morrow. No other publisher of note would prove interested in Duncan’s sixth book. None of his books would long remain in print. For all practical purposes, Duncan’s career as a writer of historical books had come to an end, along with any hopes of serious consideration as a historian. At the age of thirty-three.
It would only get worse after he met Sabon, who would spend much of her time chipping away at Duncan’s respectability, so that his books no longer contained anything but metaphorically shredded pages.
Odd. It strikes me for the first time that Duncan has been preparing me for this moment all of my life. There’s a green light shining upon the typewriter keys, and maybe it’s the light that allows me to see so clearly. Must we always be blind to those we are close to? Must we always fumble for understanding? Duncan never mistrusted me. He just didn’t want me to implode from the information he had—he wanted to dole it out in pieces, so that it would not be such a shock to my system. And yet it would have been a shock, no matter how gradual. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.
If Duncan feared losing me, he must have also feared losing his audience.
Which reminds me. I should ask: Am I losing you? Have I lost you already? I hope not. There’s still a war to come, for Truff’s sake.
Maybe the only solution is to start over.
Should I? Perhaps I should.
We don’t see many things ahead of time. We usually only avoid disaster at the last second, pull back from the abyss by luck or fate or blind stupid chance. Exactly nine years before Mary Sabon began to destroy my brother like an old house torn down brick by brick, Duncan sought me out at my new Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. How he found me there, I still don’t know (a mundane story, involving broadsheet adverts and luck). I had just bought the gallery—a narrow place off Albumuth Boulevard (I remember when it was a sweets shop that also sold mood-altering mushrooms—a much more honest trade)—with the help of a merchant loan against our mother’s property along the River Moth. (That took some persuading!)
Outside, the sky was a blue streaked with gold, the trees once again threatening to release their leaves, turning yellower and yellowest. The smell of burning leaves singed nostrils, but the relief of slightly lower temperatures added a certain spring to the steps of passersby.
Half the proposed gallery lay in boxes around my feet. Paintings were stacked in corners, splashes of color wincing out from the edges of frames. Piles and piles of papers had swallowed my desk.
I was happy. After years of unhappiness. (It’s easy to think you’d been unhappy for years, but I remember many times you were invigorated, excited, by your art, by your studies. The past isn’t a slab of stone; it’s fragmented and porous.) By now I had given up my dream of a career as a painter. Rejection, rejection, rejection. It had made the part of me that wanted to paint wither away, leaving a more streamlined Janice, a smoother Janice, a less creative Janice. I had decided I would do better as a gallery owner, had not yet realized I was still traveling toward remote regions marked on maps only by terms such as “Art Critic” and “Historian.” (You were traveling toward me, Janice. That’s not such a bad thing.) Only later did I come to see my initial investment in the gallery as a form of self-torture: by promoting the works of others I could denigrate my own efforts.
This time, Duncan had a haunted look about him, the joy of his previous underground adventures stripped away, leaving behind only a gauntness akin to death. The paleness that had taken over his features had blanched away any expression, any life, in his limbs, in his movements. He:
Beard like the tendrils of finely threaded spores.
Swayed in the doorway like a tall, ensanguinated ghost, holding the door open with one shaking, febrile arm.
Shoes tattered and torn, as if savaged by a dog.
Muttered my name as if in the middle of a dream.
Clothes stained everywhere with spores, reduced to a fine, metallic dust that glittered blackly all around him.
Trailed tiny obsidian mushrooms, trembling off him at every turn.
Eyes embedded with black flecks, staring at some nameless vision just beyond me.
Clutched something tightly in his left hand, knuckles pale against the dark coating of spore dust.
He staggered inside, fell to the floor amid the paintings, the curled canvases, the naked frames vainglorious with the vision of the wall behind them. The gallery smelled of turpentine, of freshly cut wood, of drying paint. But as Duncan met the floor, or the floor met Duncan, the smells became one smell: the smell of Duncan. A dark green smell brought from deep underground. A subtle interweaving of minerals and flesh and fungus. The smell of old water trickling through stones and earth. The smell of lichen and moss. (Flesh penetrated by fungus, you mean—every pore cross-pollinated, supersaturated. Nothing very subtle about it. The flesh alive and prickly.) The smell, now, of my brother.
I locked the door behind him. I slapped his face until his gaze cleared, and he saw me. With my help, he got to his feet and I took him into the back room. He was so light. He might as well have been a skeleton draped with canvas. I began to cry. His ribs bent against my encircling arm as I gently laid him down against a wall. His clothes were so filthy that I made him take them off and put on a painter’s smock.
I forced bread and cheese on him. He didn’t want it at first. I had to tear the bread into small pieces and hold his mouth open. I had to make him close his mouth. “Swallow.” He had no choice. He couldn’t fight me—he was too weak. Or I was, for once, too strong.
Eventually, he took the bread from my hands, began to eat on his own. Still he said nothing, staring at me with eyes white against the dust-stippled darkness of his forehead and jutting cheekbones.
“When you are ready, speak,” I said. “You are not leaving here until you tell me exactly what happened. You are not leaving here until I know why. Why, Duncan? What happened to you?” I couldn’t keep the anguish from my voice.
Duncan smiled up at me. A drunkard’s smile. A skeleton’s smile. My brother’s smile, as laconic as ever.
“Same old sister,” he said. “I knew I could count on you. To half kill me trying to feed me.” (To help me. Who else would help me back then?)
“I mean it. I won’t let you leave without telling me what happened.”
He smiled again, but he wouldn’t look at me. For a long time, he said nothing as I watched him.
Then the flood. He spoke and spoke and spoke—rambling, coherent, fragmented, clever. I began to grow afraid for him. All these words. There was already less than nothing inside of him. I could see that. When the last words had left his mouth, would even the canvas of his skin flap away free, the filigree of his bones disintegrate into dust? Slowly, I managed to hear the words and forget the condition of the one who spoke them. Forget that he was my brother.
He had gone deeper into the underground this time, but the research had gone badly. He kept interspersing his account with mutterings that he would “never do it again.” And, “If I stay on the surface, I’m safe. I should be safe.” At the time, I thought he meant staying physically aboveground, but now I’m not so sure. (Be sure.) I wonder if he also meant the surface of his mind. That if he could simply restrain himself from the divergent thinking, the untoward analysis, that had marked some of his previous books, he might once again be a published writer. (Who knows? I might have given up on myself if forced to listen to my own ravings. I might have even become a respectable citizen.)
As he spoke, I realized I wasn’t ready for his revelations. I had made a mistake—I didn’t want to hear what he had to say. I needed distance from this shivering, shuddering wreck of a man. He clung to the edges of the smock I had given him like a corpse curling fingers around a coffin’s lining. The look on his face made me think of our father dying in the summer grass. It frightened me. I tried to put boundaries on the conversation.
“What happened to the book you were working on?” I asked him.
He grimaced, but the expression made him look more human, and his gaze turned inward, the horrors reflected there no longer trying to get out.
“Stillborn,” he gasped, as if breaking to the surface after being held down in black water. He lurched to his feet, fell back down again. Every surface he touched became covered in fine black powder. “Stillborn,” he repeated. “Or I killed it. I don’t know which. Maybe I’m a murderer. I was … I was halfway through. On fire with ancient texts. Bloated with the knowledge in them. Didn’t think I needed firsthand experience to write the book. Such a web of words, Janice. I have never used so many words. I used so many there weren’t any left to write with. And yet, I still had this fear deep in my skull. I couldn’t get it out.” (I still can’t get it out of my head, sometimes. Writing a book and going underground are so similar. That fear of the unknown never really goes away. But, after a while, it becomes a perverse comfort.)
He relinquished his grasp on the object in his hand, which I had almost forgotten.
It rolled across the floor. We both stared at it, he as astonished as I. A honey-and-parchment-colored ball. Of flesh? Of tissue? Of stone?
He looked up at me. “I remember now. It needs moisture. If it dries, it dies. Cracks form in its skin. It’s curled into a ball to preserve a pearl of moisture between its cilia.”
“What is it?” I said, unable to keep the fear from my voice.
He grinned in recognition of my tone. “Before Dad died,” he said, “you would have found this creature a wonderful mystery. You would have followed me out into the woods and we would have dug up fire-red salamanders just to see their eyes glow in the dark.”
“No,” I said. “No. There was no time when I would have found this thing a wonderful mystery. Where did you find it?”
His smirk, the way it ate up his face, the way it accentuated the suddenly taut bones in his neck, made the flesh around his mouth a vassal to his mirth, sickened me.
“Where do you think it came from?”
I ignored the question, turned away, said, “I have a canteen of water in the front, near my desk. But keep talking. Keep telling me about your book.”
He frowned as I walked past him into the main room of the gallery. From behind me, his disembodied voice rose up, quavered, continued. A thrush caught in a hunter’s snare, flapping this way and that, ever more entangled and near its death. His smell had coated the entire gallery. In a sense, I was as close to him searching for the canteen as if I stood beside him. Beyond the gallery windows lay the real world, composed of unnaturally bright colors and shoppers walking briskly by.
“So I never finished it, Janice. What do you think of that? I couldn’t. Wouldn’t. I wrote and wrote. I wrote with the energy of ten men each evening. All texts I consulted interlocked under my dexterous manipulations. It all made such perfect sense … and then I began to panic. Each word, I realized, had been leading me further and further away from the central mystery. Every sentence left a false trail. Every paragraph formed another wall between me and my thesis. Soon, I stopped writing. It had all been going so well. How could it get so bad so quickly?
“I soon found out. I backtracked through the abyss of words, searching for a flaw, a fissure, a crack in the foundation. Perhaps some paragraph had turned traitor and would reveal itself. Only it wasn’t a paragraph. It was a single word, five pages from the end of my silly scribblings, in a sentence of no particular importance. Just a single word. I know the sentence by heart, because I’ve repeated it to myself over and over again. It’s all that’s left of my book. Do you want to hear it?”
“Yes,” I said, although I wasn’t sure. I was still searching for the canteen under all the canvases.
“Here it is: ‘But surely, if Tonsure had not known the truth then, he knew it after traveling underground.’ The word was ‘truth,’ and I could not get past the truth. The truth stank of the underground, buried under dead leaves and hidden in cold, dry, dark caverns. The truth had little to do with the surface of things.
“From that word, in that context, on that page, written in my nearly illegible hand, my masterwork, my beautiful, marvelous book unraveled syllable by syllable. I began by crossing out words that did not belong in the sentence. Then I began to delete words by rules as illegitimate and illogical as the gray caps themselves. Until after a week, I woke up one morning, determined to continue my surgical editing of the manuscript—only to find that not even the original sentence had been spared: all that remained of my once-proud manuscript was that single word: ‘truth.’ And, truth, my dear sister, was not a big enough word to constitute an entire book—at least not to me.” (Or my publishers, come to think of it. If there had been any publishers.)
I had found the canteen. I came back into the room and handed it to him. “You should drink some. Rinse out the lie you’ve just told.”
He snorted, took the canteen, raised it to his lips, and, drinking from it, kissed it as seriously as he would a lover.
“Perhaps it is in part a metaphor,” he said, “but it is still, ironically enough, the truth.”
“Don’t speak in metaphors, then. How do you tell truth from lies otherwise?”
“I want to be taken literally.”
“You mean literarily, Duncan. Except you’ve already been taken literarily—they’ve all ravished you and gone on to the next victim.”
“Literally.”
“Is that why you brought this horrible rolled up ball of an animal with you?”
“No. I forgot I had it. Now that I’ve brought it here, I can’t let it die.” (Actually, Janice, I did bring it with me on purpose. I had just forgotten the purpose.)
He sidled over to the golden ball of flesh, poured water into his hand.
He looked up at me, the expression on his face taking me back to all of his foolish explorations as a child. “Watch now! Watch carefully!”
Slowly, he poured water over the golden ball. After a moment the gold color blushed into a haze of purple-yellow-blue-green, which then returned to gold, but a more vibrant shade of gold that flashed in the dim light. Duncan poured more water over the creature. It seemed to crack apart, fissures erupting across its skin at regular intervals. But no—it was merely opening up, each of its four legs unfurling from the top of the ball, to settle upside down on the floor. Immediately, it leapt up, spun, and landed, cilia down, revealed as a kind of phosphorescent starfish.
Duncan dribbled still more water over it. Each of its four arms shone a different glittering shade—green-blue-yellow-purple—the edges of the blue arm tinged green on one side, yellow on the other.
“A starfish,” I said.
“A compass,” he said. “Just one of the many wonders to be found belowground. A living compass. North is blue, so if you turn it like so,” and he reached over and carefully turned the starfish, “the arm shines perfectly blue, facing as it does due north.”
Indeed, the blue had been cleansed of any green or yellow taint.
“This compass saved me more than once when I was lost,” he said.
I stared at my ungainly, stacked frames. “I’m sick of wonders, Duncan. This is just a color to me, just a trick. The true wonder is that you’re still alive. No one could have expected that. You suffer what may have been a mental breakdown, go down below, return with a living compass, and expect me to say … what? How wonderful that is? How awed I am by it all? No. I’m appalled. I’m horrified. I’m angry. I’ve failed at one career after another. I’m about to open my own gallery. I haven’t seen you in almost ten years, and you shamble in here, a talking skeleton—and you expect me to be impressed by a magic show? Have you seen yourself lately?”
I can’t remember ever being so furious—and out of nowhere, out of almost nothing. My hands shook. My shoulders had become rigid blocks of stone. My throat ached. And I’m not even sure why. (Because you were scared, and because you were my sister, and you loved me. Even when you were mad at me, I was your family.) I almost want to laugh, typing this now. Having seen so many strange things since, having been at peace lying on a floor littered with corpses, having accepted so much strangeness from Duncan, that starfish seems almost mundane in retrospect, and my anger at Duncan self-indulgent.
He scooped up the starfish, held it in his hands. It lay there as contentedly as if in a tidal pool. “I don’t expect anything, Janice,” he said, each word carefully weighed, wrapped, tied with string before leaving his mouth. “I have no one else to tell. No one else who saw me the last time. No one else who might possibly believe anything I saw. Starfish or no starfish.”
“Tell Mom then. Mom would listen. If you speak softly enough, Dad might even pick up a whisper of it. Did you meet him down there?”
He winced, sat back against the wall, next to a leering portrait by a painter named Sonter. The shadows and the sheen of black dust on his skin rendered him almost invisible.
Coated by the darkness, he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I didn’t realize … But you know, Janice, you are the only one who won’t think me crazy.”
The starfish had begun to explore the crook of Duncan’s arm. Its rejuvenated cilia shone wetly, a thousand minute moving jewels among the windless reeds of his arm hairs.
“It’s so hard,” he said. “Half of what you see seems like a hallucination, or a dream, even while you’re living it. You are so unsure about what’s real that you take all kinds of stupid risks. As if it can’t hurt you. You float along, like a spore. You sit for days in caverns as large as cities, let the fungi creep up and devour you. The stars that can’t be stars fall in on you in waves. And you sit there. An afternoon in the park. A picnic for one.
“Things walk by you. Some stop and stare. Some poke you or hit you, and then you have to pretend you’re in a dream, because otherwise you would be so afraid that nothing would stop you from screaming, and you’d keep screaming until they put a stop to you.”
He shivered and rolled over on his side. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he whined, the starfish on his shoulder a golden glimmer.
“Was it worth it?” I asked him, not unkindly. “Was it?”
“Ask me in fifty years, Janice. A hundred years. A thousand.” (It didn’t take that long. Within five years, I began to recognize that my sojourn underground was akin to one more addict’s hit of mushrooms. It took ten years of these adventures for me to realize that I could only react to such journeys, never predict. Always absorbing, but mostly in the physical sense.)
He twisted from side to side, holding his stomach.
“I thought I could get it out of me if I talked about it,” he said. “Flush it from my brain, my body. But it’s still in there. It’s still in me.”
Again, he was talking about two things at once, but I could only bear to talk about what I might be able to help him with right then.
“Duncan,” I said, “we can’t wash it off of you this time. I think it’s inside of you, like some kind of poison. Your pores are clogged with black spores. Your skin is … different.”
He gasped. Was he crying? “I know. I can feel it inside of me. It’s trying to change me.”
“Talk about it, then. Talk about it until you talk it all out.”
He laughed without any hint of humor. “Are you mad? I can’t talk it out of my skin. I can’t do that.”
I joined him along the wall, moving Sonter’s portrait to the side. The starfish had splayed itself across the side of his neck like an exotic scar.
“You’re due north,” I said. “Its arm is blue. And you’re right, Duncan. It’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
He moved to pull it off, but I caught his arm. “No. Don’t. I think it’s feeding on the spores embedded in your skin.” It left a trail of almost-white skin behind it.
“You think so?” His eyes searched mine for something I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to give.
In that moment before he began to really tell me his story, to which all of this had been foolish, prattling preamble—in that moment, I think I loved my brother as much as I ever had in all the years since his birth. His face shone darkly in my doomed gallery, more precious than any painting.
We lay side by side, silent in the semi-darkness of the back room, surrounded by dead paint. The now-reluctant glare from the main room meant the sun had begun to fade from the sky. The starfish flinched, as if touched by the memory of light, as it continued its slow migration toward the top of Duncan’s head.
I could remember afternoons when Duncan and I would sit against the side of the house in Stockton, out of the sun, eating cookies we’d stolen from the kitchen while we talked about school or the nasty neighbor down the street. The quality of light was the same, the way it almost bent around the corner even as it evaporated into dust motes. As if to tell us we were never alone—that even in the stillness, with no wind, our fingers stained by the grass, we are never really outside of time.
Duncan began to talk while I listened without asking questions or making comments. I stared at nothing at all, a great peace come over me. It was cool and dark in that room. The shadows loved us.
But memory is imperfect, incomplete, fickle. It tells us the exact shade of our mother’s blouse the day our father died, but it cannot accurately recall a conversation between siblings decades after that. Thus, I resort, as I already have through most of this afterword, to a much later journal entry by Duncan—clearly later because it is polluted by the presence of Mary Sabon; so polluted that I could not easily edit her out of it. (You can’t erase the past just because you wish it hadn’t happened.)
Does it make any difference now to Duncan who sees it? None. So why not steal his diary entry and spill his innermost thoughts like blood across the page, fling them across the faces of Sabon’s flesh necklace in a fine spackle of retreating life. I’ll let Duncan tell us about his journeys underground. (Do I have a choice? But you’re right—it doesn’t matter anymore. I will not edit it, or anything else, out, although I may protest from time to time. I haven’t decided yet if you’re a true historian or one step removed from a gossip columnist.)
Tonsure got parts of it right—the contractions of spaces, small to large, and how mysterious perspective becomes after long periods underground. The way the blackness picks up different hues and textures, transformed into anti-color, an anti-spectrum. The fetid closeness and vastness, the multitude of smells, from the soothing scent of something like mint to the putrid stench of rotting fungi, like a dead animal … and yet all my words make of me a liar. I struggle to express myself, and only feel myself moving further from the truth. No wonder Mary thinks me a fool. No wonder she looks at me as if I am much stranger than the strangest thing she has ever seen. I caught a glimpse of her soft white breast when she leaned down to pick up a book. I’d be rougher than nails to her skin. The thought of being close tantalizes and yet makes me sick with my own clumsiness.
That is one thing I prefer about the underground: the loss of self to your environment is almost as profound as orgasm or epiphany, your senses shattered, rippled, as fragmented and wide as the sky. Time releases its meaning. Space is just a subset of time. You cease to become mortal. Your heartbeat is no longer a motion or a moment, but a possibility that may someday arrive, and then pass, only to arrive again. It’s the most frightening loss of control imaginable.
For me it was still different than for Tonsure. He had no real protection, no real defenses, until he adapted. At least I had the clues Tonsure left behind. At least I knew how to make myself invisible to them, to lose myself but not become lost. To become as still as death but not dead. Sometimes this meant standing in one place for days. Sometimes it meant constant, manic movement, to emulate the frantic writhing of the cheraticaticals [no known translation].
I found the standing still worse than the walking and running. I could disguise myself from the gray caps, but not from their servants—the spores, the parasites, the tiny mushroom caps, fungi, and lichen. They found me and infiltrated me—I could feel their tendrils, their fleshy-dry-cold-warm pseudopods and cilia and strands slowly sliding up my skin, like a hundred tiny hands. They tried to remake me in their image. If it had been you, Mary, I would not have minded. If you had found me, I would have given up my identity as easily as a wisp of cloud.
I drifted and drifted, often so in trance that I did not have a single conscious thought for hours. I was a pair of eyes reporting to a brain that had ceased to police, to analyze, the incoming images. It all went through me and past, to some place other. In a way, it was a kind of release. Now, it makes me wonder if I had learned what it feels like to be a tree, or even, strike me dead, a gray cap. But, that cannot be so—the gray caps are always in motion, always thinking. You can see it in their eyes.
Once, as I stood in one of my motionless trances, a gray cap approached me. What did he do? Nothing. He sat in front of me and stared up at me for hours, for days. His eyes reflected the darkness. His eyes had a quality that held all of me entirely, held me against my will. Mary holds me, but not against my will—her eyes and my will are in accord. Her eyes: green, green, green. Greener than Ambergris. Greener than the greenest moss by a trickling stream.
After a time, I realized the gray cap had gone, but it took me weeks to return to the surface of my thoughts, and months to find the real surface, and with it the light. The light! A weak trickle of late afternoon gloom, presage of sunset, and yet it pierced my vision. I could not open my eyes until after dusk, fumbling my way along the Moth riverbank like some pathetic mole. The light burned into my closed eyelids. It seemed to crack my skin. It tried to kill me and birth me simultaneously. I lay gasping in the mud, writhing, afraid I would burn up.
I took a long sip from the canteen at this point, if only to assuage Duncan’s remembered heat. The starfish now served as an exotic, glowing ear, eclipsing flesh and blood. It hummed a little as it worked. A smell like fresh-cut orange surrounded it.
I offered Duncan the canteen. He used the opportunity to pour more water on his pet. I was about to prod him to continue when he pulled the starfish from his ear, sat up, and said, looking down at the compass as it sucked on his fingers, “Do you know the first sentences of the Truffidian Bible?”
“No,” I said. “Do you?” Our parents had treated religion like a door behind which stood an endless abyss: better not to believe at all, the abyss revealed, than have it be closed over, falsified, prettied up. (And yet, there is something in my skin now, after all these years, that hums of the world in a way that predicts the infinite.)
“Yes, I do know them. Would you like to hear them?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“No. Those words are ‘The world is broken. God is in exile.’ Followed shortly thereafter by ‘In the first part of creation, God made light and made vessels for the light. The vessels were too fragile: they broke, and from the broken vessels of the supernal lights, the material world was created.’”
Something very much like a void opened up inside me. A chill brought gooseflesh to my skin. Each word from my mouth sounded heavier than it should have: “And what does the creation of the world have to do with the gray caps?”
He put a finger to his lips. His face in the sour light gave off a faint glow, pale relative to the illumination of the starfish. His skin winked from behind the mushroom dust. He looked so old. Why should he look so old? What did he know?
He said: “A machine. A glass. A mirror. A broken machine. A cracked glass. A shattered mirror.”
I remember now the way he used the phrases at his disposal. Clean, fine cuts. Great, slashing cuts. Fractures in the word and the world.
“Some things should not be articulated. Some words should never be used in exact combination with other words.” My father said that once, while reading a scathing negative review of one of his essays. He said it with a tired little sigh, a joke at his expense. His whole body slumped from the words. Weighed down with words, like stones in his pocket.
A machine. A glass. A mirror. Duncan’s journal, with the advantage of distance, described his discovery much more gracefully …
But it doesn’t work right. It hasn’t worked right since they built it. A part, a mechanism, a balance—something they don’t quite understand. How can I call it strictly a machine? It is as much organic as metallic, housed in a cavern larger than three Truffidian Cathedrals. You feel it and hear it before you see it: a throbbly hum, a grindful pulse, a sorrowful bellow. The passageways rumble and crackle with the force of it. A hot wind flares out before it. The only entrance leads, after much hard work, to the back of the machine, where you can see its inner workings. You are struck by the fact of its awful carnality, for they feed it lives as well as fuel. Flesh and metal bond, married by spores, joined by a latticework of polyps and filaments and lazy strands. Wisps and converted moonlight. Sparks and gears. The whole is at first obscured by its own detail, by those elements at eye level: a row of white sluglike bodies curled within the cogs and gears, eyes shut, apparently asleep. Wrinkled and luminous. Lacking all but the most rudimentary stubs of limbs. But with faces identical to those of the gray caps.
You cannot help but look closer. You cannot help but notice two things: that they dream, twitching reflexively in their repose, eyelids flickering with subconscious thought, and that they are not truly curled within the machine—they are curled into the machine, meshed with it at a hundred points of contact. The blue-red veins in their arms flow into milk-white fingers, and at the border between skin and air, transformed from vein into silvery wire. Tendrils of wire meet tendrils of flesh, broken up by sections of sharp wheels, clotted with scraps of flesh, and whining almost soundlessly as they whir in the darkness.
As you stare at the nearest white wrinkled body, you begin to smell the thickness of oil and blood mixed together. As the taste bites into your mouth, you take a step back, and suddenly you feel as if you are falling, the sense of vertigo so intense your arms flail out though you stand on solid ground. Because you realize it isn’t one pale dreamer, or even a row of them, or even five rows of five hundred, but more than five thousand rows of five thousand milk-white dreamers, running on into the distance—as far as you care to see—millions of them, caught and transfixed in the back of the machine. And they are all dreaming and all their eyelids flicker in unison, and all their blood flows into all the wires while a hundred thousand sharpened wheels spin soundlessly.
The hum you hear, that low hum you hear, does not come from the machinery. It does not come from the wheels, the cogs, the wires. The hum emanates from the white bodies. They are humming in their sleep, a slow, even hum as peaceful as they are not—how can I write this, how? except to keep writing and when I’ve stopped never look at this again—while the machine itself is silent.
The rows blur as you tilt your head to look up, not because the rows are too far away, but because your eyes and your brain have decided that this is too much, this is too much to take in without going mad, that you do not want to comprehend this crushing immensity of vision, that if comprehended completely, it will haunt not just your nightmares for the rest of your life—it will form a permanent overlay upon your waking sight, and you will stumble through your days like a blind man, the ghost-vision in your head stronger than reality.
So you return to details—the details right in front of you. The latticework of wires and tubes, where you see a thrush has been placed, intertwined, its broken wings flapping painfully. There, a dragonfly, already dead, brittle and glassy. Bits and pieces of flesh still writhing with the memory of interconnection. Skulls. Yellowing bones. Glossy black vines. Pieces of earth. And holding it all together, like glue, dull red fungus.
But now the detail becomes too detailed, and again your eyes blur, and you decide maybe movement will save you—that perhaps if you move to the other side of the machine, you will find something different, something that does not call out remorselessly for your surrender. Because if you stand there for another minute, you will enmesh yourself in the machine. You will climb up into the flesh and metal. You will curl up to something pale and sticky and embrace it. You will relax your body into the space allowed it, your legs released from you in a spray of blood and wire, you smiling as it happens, your eyes already dulled, and dreaming some communal dream, your tongue the tongue of the machine, your mouth humming in another language, your arms weighed down with tendrils of metal, your torso split in half to let out the things that must be let out.
For a long time, you stand on the fissure between sweet acceptance of dissolution and the responsibility of movement, the enticing smell of decay, the ultimate inertia, reaching out to you … but, eventually, you move away, with an audible shudder that shakes your bones, almost pulls you apart.
As you hobble around to the side of the machine, you feel the million eyes of the crumpled, huddled white shapes snap open, for a single second drawn out of their dreams of you.
There is no history, no present. There are only the sides of the machine. Slick memory of metal, mad with its own brightness, mad with the memory of what it contains. You cling to those sides for support, but make your way past them as quickly as possible. The sides are like the middle of a book—necessary, but quickly read through to get to the end. Already, you try in vain to forget the beginning.
The front of the machine has a comforting translucent or reflective quality. You will never be able to decide which quality it possesses, although you stand there staring at it for days, ensnared by your own foolish hope for something to negate the horrible negation of the machine’s innards. Ghosts of images cloud the surface of the machine and are wiped clean as if by a careless, a meticulous, an impatient painter. A great windswept desert, sluggish with the weight of its own dunes. An ocean, waveless, the tension of its surface broken only by the shadow of clouds above, the water such a perfect blue-green that it hurts your eyes. A mountain range at sunset, distant, ruined towers propped up by the foothills at its flanks. Always flickering into perfection and back into oblivion. Places that if they exist in this world you have never seen, or heard mention of their existence. Ever.
You slide into the calm of these scenes, although you cannot forget the white shapes behind the machine, the eyelids that flicker as these images flicker. Only the machine knows, and the machine is damaged. Its thoughts are damaged. Your thoughts are damaged: they run liquid-slow through your brain, even though you wish they would stop.
After several days, your vision strays and unfocuses and you blink slowly, attention drawn to a door at the very bottom of the mirror. The door is as big as the machine. The door is as small as your fingernail. The distance between you and the door is infinite. The distance between you and the door is so minute you could reach out and touch it. The door is translucent—the images that flow across the screen sweep across the door as well, so that it is only by the barely perceived hairline fracture of its outline that it can be distinguished beneath the desert, ocean, mountains, that glide across its surface. The door is a mirror, too, you realize, and after so long of not focusing on anything, letting images run through you, you find yourself concentrating on the door and the door alone. In many ways, it is an ordinary door, almost a nonexistent door. And yet, staring at it, a wave of fear passes over you. A fear so blinding it paralyzes you. It holds you in place. You can feel the pressure of all that meat, all that flesh, all the metal inside the machine amassed behind that door. It is an unbearable weight at your throat. You are buried in it, in a small box, under an eternity of rock and earth. The worms are singing to you through the rubble. The worms know your name. You cannot think. Your head is full of blood. You dare not breathe.
There is something behind the door.
There is something behind the door.
There is something behind the door.
The door begins to open inward, and something fluid and slow, no longer dreaming, begins to come out from inside, lurching around the edge of the door. You begin to run—to run as far from that place as you possibly can, screaming until your throat fills with the blood in your head, your head now an empty globe while the rest of you drowns in blood. And still it makes no difference, because you are back in that place with the slugs and the skulls and the pale dreamers and the machine that doesn’t work that doesn’t work that doesn’t work thatdoesn’twork hat doesnwor atdoeswor doeswor doewor dowor door …
This entry about a defective “machine” built by the gray caps is the strangest part of my brother’s journal. By far. In its pure physicality I sense a level of discomfort rare for Duncan. As if, from fretful tossing and turning, he woke, reached for pen and notepad from the nightstand, and wrote down his first impressions of a fading nightmare. He appears at first anxious to record the experience, and then less so, the use of second person intended to place the burden of memory on the reader, to purge the images from his head. (It is more that I could not find words to accurately convey what I saw, and so I tried to describe how I felt instead—in a sense presaging Ambergrisians’ reaction to the recent Shift.)
If Duncan had, in the gallery that afternoon, told me about the machine with the calm madness of that journal entry, a silence would have settled over us. Our conversation would have faded away into a nothingness made alive and aware by his words. Thankfully, Duncan told his story with less than brutal lucidity. He used stilted words in rows of sentences crippled by fits and starts—a vagabond, poorly rehearsed circus of words that could not be taken seriously. He focused on the front of the machine with its marvelous visions of far-distant places. He dismissed the back of the machine with a single sentence. Somehow, I could not reconcile his vision with my memory of the spores floating out of my apartment window.
Even so, an element of unreality entered the gallery following his revelation. I remember staring at him and thinking that his face could not be composed of flesh and blood, not with those words coming from his mouth. The light now hid his features, but his hands, lit by the starfish, glowed white.
“The door in the machine never fully opens,” Duncan said in a distant tone.
“What would happen if it did?”
“They would be free…”
“Who?” I asked, although I knew the answer.
“The gray caps.”
“Free of what?”
Pale hands, darkened face, gray speech. “I think they care nothing for us one way or the other, Janice. They have only one purpose now. The same purpose they’ve had for centuries.”
“In your unconfirmed opinion, brother,” I said, and shivered at the way the mushroom dust on his face still glittered darkly.
“What do you know about the Silence?”
“The gray caps killed everyone in the city,” I said.
He shook his head. Forgetting the starfish in his hands, he stood abruptly. The starfish fell to the floor and began to curl and uncurl in a reflexive imitation of pain. Now Duncan was stooped over me. Now he was crouched beside me. If there were ever a secret he truly wanted to tell me, this was the secret. This was the cause of it. We had returned to the last survivor of his sixth book, alive amid all of the suicides: the truth. As my brother saw it.
“You learned it wrong,” he told me. “That’s not what happened. It didn’t happen like that. I’ve seen so many things, and I’ve thought a lot about what I’ve seen. They disappeared without a single drop of blood left behind. Not a fragment of bone. No. They weren’t killed. At least not directly. Try to imagine a different answer: a sudden miscalculation, a botched experiment, a flaw in the machine. All of those people. All twenty-five thousand of them. The men, the women, the children—they didn’t die. They were moved. The door opened in a way the gray caps didn’t expect, couldn’t expect, and all those people—they were moved by mistake. The machine took them to someplace else. And, yes, maybe they died, and maybe they died horribly—but my point is, it was all an accident. A mistake. A terrible, pointless blunder.”
He was breathing heavily. Sweat glistened on his arms, where before the black dust had suppressed it.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life. They’ve killed thousands of people. They’ve done terrible things. And you have the nerve to make apologies for them?!”
“Would it be easier to accept that they don’t give a damn about us one way or the other if we hadn’t massacred them to build this city? What I think is crazy is that we try to pretend they are just like us. If we had massacred most of the citizens of Morrow, we would expect them to seek revenge. That would be natural, understandable, even acceptable. But what about a people that, when you slaughter hundreds of them, doesn’t even really notice? That doesn’t acknowledge the event? We can’t accept that reaction. That would be incomprehensible. So we tack the idea of ‘revenge’ onto the Silence so we can sleep better at night—because we think, we actually have the nerve to think, that we understand these creatures that live beneath us. And if we think we understand them, if we believe they are like us in their motivations, then we don’t fear them quite as much. If we meet one in an alley, we believe we can talk to it, reason with it, communicate with it. Or if we see one dozing beneath a red flag on the street during the day, we overlook it, we make it part of the scenery, no less colorful or benign than a newly ordained Truffidian priest prancing down Albumuth Boulevard in full regalia.”
“You’re crazy, Duncan. You’re unwell.” Anger again burned inside of me. The idea of the Silence reduced to a pathetic mistake enraged me. The idea that my own brother might utter the words that made it so seemed a betrayal of an unspoken understanding between us. Before this moment, we could always count on sharing the same worldview no matter what happened, even when we saw each other at wider and wider intervals.
“It’s more complicated than you think,” he said. “They are on a journey as much as we are on a journey. They are trying to get somewhere else—but they can’t. It doesn’t work. With all they can do, with all they are, they still cannot make their mirror, their glass, work properly. Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that kind of sad?”
I slapped him across the face. My hand came away black with spores. He did not move an inch.
“Sad?” I said. “Sad? Sad is twenty-five thousand lives snuffed out, not a broken machine. Not a broken machine! What is happening to you that you cannot see that? Regardless of what happened. Not that I believe you. Frankly, I don’t believe you. Why should I? For all I know, you’ve been in the sewers for the past few weeks, living off of rats and whatever garbage you could get your hands on. And all you’ve seen is the reflection of your own filthy face in a pool of scummy water!”
Duncan smiled and pointed at the starfish. “How do you explain that?”
“Ha!” I said. “It was probably groveling for garbage along with you. It definitely isn’t proof of anything, if that’s what you mean. Why didn’t you bring something substantive, like a gray cap willing to corroborate your statement?”
“I did bring a gray cap,” he said. “Several, in fact. Although not by choice. Take a good look through the doorway, out the front window, to the left. I doubt they would corroborate anything, though. I think they’d like to see me dead.”
“Don’t joke.”
“I’m not. Take a look.”
Reluctantly, I raised myself, my left leg asleep—even less impressed by Duncan’s story, apparently, than I was. I peered around the doorway. Sheathed like swords by the fading light, more sharp shadow than dream, three gray caps stood staring in through the window. They stood so still the cobblestones of the street behind them seemed more alive. The whites of their eyes gleamed like wet paint. They stared at and through me. As if I meant nothing to them. The sight of them sent a convulsive shudder through me. I ducked back, beside Duncan.
“Maybe we should leave by the back door,” I said.
A low, humorless laugh from Duncan. “Maybe they came for your gallery opening.”
“Very funny. Follow me…”
In a pinch, I still trusted my brother more than anyone else in the world.
Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only the puppet’s heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together … When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain … every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it—and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal. All through the darkness where shining strings are the only light, a woundedness occurs. And this hurt affects each strand and each puppet in a different way, because we are all puppets on strings and we all hurt and are hurt. And all the strings shimmer on regardless, and all of our actions, no matter how small, have consequences to other puppets … After we are dead, gone to join the darkness between the lines of light, the strands we leave behind still quiver their lost messages into the hearts of those other puppets we met along the way, on our journey from light into not-light. These lost strands are the memories we leave behind … Magnify this effect by 25,000 souls and perhaps you can see why I cannot so lightly dismiss what you call a mistake. Each extinguished life leaves a hole in many other lives—a series of small extinguishments that can never be completely forgotten or survived. Each survivor carries a little of that void within them.
This is part of a letter I wrote to Duncan—the only attempt following our conversation to express my feelings about the Silence to him. One day I came home to my apartment early to find Duncan gone on some errand. For some reason I had been thinking about the Silence that day, perhaps because two or three new acquisitions had featured, in the background, the shadowy form of a gray cap. I sat down at my desk and wrote Duncan a letter, which I then placed in his briefcase full of papers, expecting he’d come across it in a week or a month. But he never mentioned it to me. I never knew whether he had read it or not until, going through his things after this final disappearance, I found it in a folder labeled simply “Janice.” (I did read it, and I cried. At the time, it made me feel more alone than I had ever felt before. Only later did I find it a comfort.)
Duncan stayed at my apartment for nearly six months. By the fifth month, he appeared to have made a full recovery. We did not often speak of that afternoon when he had told me his theory about the Silence. In a sense, we decided to forget about it, so that it took on the hazy lack of detail specific only to memory. We were allowed that luxury back then. We did not have Sabon’s glittering necklace of flesh to set us straight.
The starfish lasted four months and then died in a strobe of violent light, perhaps deprived of some precious nutrient, or perhaps having attained the end of its natural life cycle. Its bleached skeleton on the mantel carried hardly more significance than a snail’s shell found by the riverbank.
Time to start over. Another dead white page to fill with dead black type, so I’ll fill it. Why not? I’ve nothing better to do, for now anyway. Mary’s still holding court at the bottom of that marble staircase at Lake’s party, but I think I’ll make her wait a little longer.
Especially since it strikes me that at this point in the narrative, or somewhere around here, Duncan would have paused to catch his breath, to regroup and place events in historical context. (If it were me, I would have skipped “historical context” and returned to that marble staircase, since that’s really the only part of this story I don’t know already.) Years passed. They seem now like pale leaves pressed between the pages of an obscure book.
Oddly enough, I don’t give a damn about historical context at the moment. I can see the sliver of green light becoming dull, indifferent—which means the sun is going down outside. And we all know what happens, or can happen, when the sun goes down, don’t we? Don’t answer that question—read this instead:
The death of composer/politician Voss Bender and the rise of the Reds and Greens, who debate his legacy with knives: a civil war in the streets, which the trader Hoegbotton uses to solidify control of the city. I witness a man die right outside my gallery, hit in the head with a rock until his skull resembles a collection of broken eggshells dripping with red-gray mush. No art to it that I could see. No reason, either. Followed by: defeat of the Reds, disbanding of the Greens, the tossing of Bender’s ashes in the River Moth—only, the wise old river doesn’t want them, according to legend, and blows them back in the faces of the assembled mourners; thus dispersing Bender all across the city when the mourners go home. Scandal in the Truffidian Church—boring as only a Truffidian scandal can be: oh my goodness, the Antechamber Henry Bonmot, whom I still miss terribly, has been caught taking money from the collection plates! At the same time, the River Moth overflows its banks for a season and takes a sizable portion of our mother’s property with it, making us officially heirs of Nothing but an old, rotting mansion. The Kalif of the Western Empire chokes on a plum pit, replaced by another faceless bureaucrat. Meanwhile, infant mortality continues to decline, along with the birth rate, while old people die in droves from a heat stroke that withers even the hardiest southern trees. A slight upswing in the fortunes of motored vehicles due to an influx of oil from the Southern Islands is offset by a plummet in the availability of spare parts. Voss Bender’s posthumously produced opera, Trillian, reaches the two-year mark of its first run, its full houses unscathed by the dwindling tourist trade (no one likes to die while on holiday, whether by heat stroke or by gray cap). Other composers and playwrights, who could really use the Bender Memorial Theater as a venue for their own drivel, gnash their teeth and whine in the back rooms of bars and taverns: Bender, dead, still lives on! Three Festivals of the Freshwater Squid pass by without so much as a pantomime of real violence—what is wrong with us as a people, I ask you, that we have become so passive? Are we not animals? Perhaps this squalid, shameful peace has something to do with the introduction of the telephone, at least for the well-off, which allows Ambergrisians to call up total strangers and breathe at them, make funny noises, or vent our rage at the string of flat, bloodless festivals. The telephone: come to us from the Kalif, his empire, a domesticated beast, taken to colonizing through commerce rather than warfare; the ghost of the rebel Stretcher Jones, as Duncan might have put it, would never have recognized this temporarily toothless Empire, slumped back on its haunches. Inexplicably, guns arrive with the telephone. Lots of guns. In all types and sizes, mostly imported through Hoegbotton & Sons. Hoegbotton’s armed importer-exporters, now doing a brisk trade in bandages, tourniquets, and bolted locks, are respected and feared the length and breadth of the River Moth—except by the operatives of Frankwrithe & Lewden, who continue their quiet infiltrations of Hoegbotton territory. More festivals, replete with the sound of gunplay. More years of Trillian and its vainglorious blather; will Voss Bender never die? Yes, this really is a historical summary of which my brother would be proud. (Not really, but think anything you like.)
Meanwhile, everything Duncan had told me about his underground adventures began to recede into the distance as “real life” took over again, for both of us. A retreat of sorts, you could call it—me from what Duncan had said, Duncan from what he had done. Perhaps he needed time to absorb what had happened to him. Perhaps he had been exhausted by what he had seen, and he couldn’t physically undertake another journey so soon. Whatever the reason, he would become, in a sense, a religious man, while I would take a different path entirely. (I never became any more or less religious than I’d always been, or do you mean this as a joke? What I became was more aware of the world, the texture and feel of it, the way it changed from day to day, minute to minute, and me with it. And I did continue with my work, although I don’t blame you for not noticing.)
If I gave Duncan’s life less attention in those years after the starfish, it was because my fortunes waxed unexpectedly. Martin Lake—an arrogant, distant prick of a man—rose to prominence through my gallery, his haunted haunting paintings soon a fixture next to the telephones in the living rooms of the city’s wealthiest patrons of the arts. (And who can say, in the long run, which was the worthier work—Lake’s bizarre melancholia or the telephone’s febrile ring.)
My gallery sparked a nameless, shapeless, and unique art revolution that soon became labeled (pinned like one of Sirin’s butterflies) “the New Art.” The New Art emphasized the mystical and transformative through unconventional perspective, hidden figures, strange juxtapositions of color. (It would be most accurate to say that the New Art opened up to include Martin within its ranks, and that he devoured it whole.)
As soon as I saw the change in Lake’s art—he had been, at best, uninspired before whatever sparked his metamorphosis—I sought out anything similar, including the work of several of Lake’s friends. Within months, I had a monopoly on the New Art. Raffe, Mandible, Smart, Davidson—they all displayed their art with me. Eventually, I had to buy the shop next door as an annex, just to have enough space for everyone to come see my art openings.
I had begun to experience what Duncan had known briefly after the publication of his first book: fame. And I hadn’t even had to create anything—all I had had to do was exploit Lake’s success, and build on it. (You’re too modest. You made some brilliant decisions during that time. You were like one of the Kalif’s generals, only on the battlefield of art. Nothing escaped your attention, until much later. I admired that.)
Suddenly, the local papers asked for my opinion on a variety of topics, only a few of which I knew anything about, although this did not stop me from commenting.
I have some of the clippings right here. In the Ambergris Weekly, they wrote, “The Gallery of Hidden Fascinations lives up to its name. Janice Shriek has assembled a group of top-notch new artists, any one of whom might be the next Lake.” The Ambergris Daily Broadsheet, which Duncan and I would one day work for, noted, “Janice Shriek continues to build a dynasty of artists who are determining the direction of the New Art in Ambergris.” The clippings are a bit faded, but still readable, still a source of pleasure. (As well they should be—you worked hard for your success.) I can remember a time when I kept such clippings in a jacket pocket. I’d pull them out and make sure they still said what I thought they had said, that I hadn’t imagined it.
However, the New Art soon became about something other than artistic expression. A kind of tunnel vision set in whereby a painting was either New Art or Not New Art. Those works identified as Not New Art were dismissed as unimportant or somehow of lesser ambition. I admit to participating in this mindset, although for the ethically pure reason that I wanted my gallery to make money. So I would do my best to label whatever I had hanging there as “New Art,” from the most experimental mixing of media to the most hackneyed scene of houseboats floating idyllically down the River Moth.
“That’s an ironic New Art statement,” I would say of the hackneyed houseboats, mentally genuflecting before the latest potential customer. “In the context of New Art, this painting serves as a condemnation of itself in the strongest possible terms.”
I have to say, I loved the sheer randomness of it all—there is nothing more liberating than playing an illogical game where only you understand all of the rules.
My gallery grew fat on Lake’s leavings, even after he left me, while Ambergris continued to prosper even as it headed ever deeper into complete moral and physical collapse or exhaustion. As the city’s fate, so my own—and it took so little time. This is what, looking back, I marvel at—that I could discover so many new appetites, vices, and affectations in so short a time. Four years? Maybe five? Before beginning the inevitable plummet. These things never last—you ride them, you live inside of them, and then, almost without warning, you are flung to the side, spent, used up. (Although you must admit that, in this case, you flung yourself to the side.)
Most nights, I would be at a party until close to dawn. If not a party, then permanent residency at the Café of the Ruby-Throated Calf, drinking. I wore the same clothes for three or four days, no longer able to distinguish between dawn and dusk. It was one continuous swirling spangle of people and places in which to revel in my fame ever more religiously.
I met many influential or soon-to-be-influential people during that time (unsurprising, as you were one of those people, Janice), Sirin being a prime example.
My first memory of Sirin, our enigmatic future editor, has me slouched in a chair at the café and feeling someone slide into the chair next to me. When I opened my eyes, a slender, dark-haired man sat there. He held his head at a slight angle. He smelled of a musky cologne. His mouth formed a perpetual half smile, his eyes bright, penetrating, and reflectionless. The man I saw reminded me of old tales about people who could shape-change into cats. He looked like a rather smug, perhaps mischievous, feline. (He was the most exasperating, talented, maddening genius I’ve ever met. My initial reaction to meeting him was to want to simultaneously punch him, hug him, shake his hand, and throw him down a dark well. Instead, I generally stayed clear of him and let Janice serve as my intermediary, as she saw mostly his charming side.)
“Janice Shriek,” he said. It was not a question.
“Yes?”
“Sirin,” he said. He handed me a card.
Still struggling with context (with alcohol, you mean), I looked down. The card gave his address at Hoegbotton & Sons, on Albumuth Boulevard.
“I like what you do,” he said. “Come find me. I may have a use for you.”
Then he was gone. At the time, Sirin was a great womanizer, attending parties and cafés just to identify his next victims. I wasn’t sure what “use” he might have for me, and I was skeptical.
Sirin’s fame as an editor and writer had begun to spread by that time. He had, like the mythical beast he took his name from, generic yet universal qualities. He brought to his editing the same sensibilities found in his writing. He could mimic any style, high or low, serious or comedic, realistic or fabulist. It sometimes seemed he had created the city from his pen. Or, at least, made its inhabitants see Ambergris in a different light. That he thought too much of himself was made tolerable by the depth and breadth of his talent. It never occurred to me that he would want me to write for him.
People like Sirin would come out of the haze of lights and nights, and I would receive them with a gracious smile, an arm outstretched, to indicate, “Sit. Sit and talk awhile!” I was very trusting and open back then. (Trusting? Perhaps. But can you be trusting or suspicious when you are not yourself? I came to some of those all-night sessions at the café, Janice, but most of the time you were in such an altered state that you didn’t recognize me. And that conversation you recall so fondly? Your end of it was often, I hate to say it, a garbled warble of slurred speech and mumbled innuendo. Although it probably didn’t matter, because only rarely were the people you spoke to any better off. I don’t mean to reproach, but I must bring a sense of reality to this glorious, decadent age you write of with such wistful fondness. I became so bored that I stopped coming to the café. It wasn’t worth my time. I’d rather be underground, off on the scent of some new mystery.)
Sybel—luminous, short, sweet Sybel—was one of those people I met during this time. He had a thick rush of dirty blond hair exploding off the top of his head like waves of pale flame, clear blue eyes, a grin that at times appeared to be half grimace, and he wore outrageous clothes in the most impossible shades of purple, red, green, and blue. He rarely sat still for very long. In those early years, he had the metabolism of a hummingbird. A coiled spring. A hummingbird. A marvel.
The first thing Sybel said to me was, “You need me. New Art will soon be dead. The newest art will be whatever Janice Shriek decides it is. But you still need me.” Which made me laugh.
But I did need him. Sybel had explored every crooked mews in Ambergris. A courier for Hoegbotton, he also knew everyone. A member of the Nimblytod Tribes, he had an affinity for tree climbing that no one could match, and a cut-bark scent that clung to him as if it was his birthright. His only pride revolved around his knowledge of the streets, and his well-tended, lightweight boots, which had been given to him by his tribe when he had left for the city. He couldn’t have been more than eighteen years old when I met him for the first time.
“I’m quick and good,” he said, but did not specify good at what. “I’m eyes and ears and feet, but I’m not cheap,” he told me, and then named a large monthly fee.
I suggested a smaller amount, but added, “And you can stay at my apartment whenever you like.” After all, I was rarely there, except to catch up on three or four hours of sleep.
So it was that I acquired a roommate I rarely saw. I know he welcomed the refuge, though: his tumultuous love life meant he was continually getting kicked out of some woman’s bed.
I soon found I had chosen well. From careful observation at Hoegbotton—when he was not out all night cavorting with painters and novelists, sculptors and art critics—Sybel had learned how to run a business, something I never did well. Over time, he became my gallery assistant—on and off, because he had a habit of disappearing for several days at a time. But I was hardly punctual myself, and I loved his energy, so I always forgave him, no matter what his transgressions. I used to imagine that every once in a while, Sybel got the urge to return to his native forests, that he would fling off his clothes and climb into the welter of trees near the River Moth, soon happily singing as he leapt from tree to tree. But I’m sure his absences had more to do with women. (Actually, Sybel’s absences had a myriad of causes, because he led a myriad of lives, some of which he did not tell you about. I cannot remember exactly when I entered into one of those lives, but I do remember many a morning when, having emerged from yet another dank hole in the ground, grimy with dirt and sweat, I would stand exhausted by the banks of the River Moth beside a particular tree chosen in advance, inhabited by a certain member of the Nimblytod Tribe.
(Sybel always smiled down at me from that tree. I don’t know if he liked the dawn or liked the tree or liked me, but it always made me smile back, no matter how grim the context of my emergence.
(Our meetings had a practical purpose, though. The Nimblytod were renowned for their natural cures, using roots, bark, and berries. Sybel made a considerable amount of money on the side selling various remedies. You had to go to him, though, and that meant appearing at a particular tree by the riverbank at a particular time.
(For me, he did two things—sold me a tincture of ground bark and leaves for fatigue and, if I thought it was warranted, snuck a rejuvenating powder into your tea, Janice, to balance the effects of your debauchery.
(“If she ever found out, she’d be furious,” Sybel told me once.
(“Better that than dead,” I said.
(“She’s much stronger than you think,” Sybel said. “She can go on this way for a long time. So can I.” He was looking at me with some measure of amusement—me in my fungal shroud, giving every appearance of being on my last legs. Who was I to lecture anyone about these things?
(I just stared back at him and said, “I want my tincture. Where’s my tincture, tree man?”
(He never left that damned tree during any of my meetings with him there. Not once. Just tossed my cure down to me.)
Sirin and Sybel were the only men I didn’t sleep with during that time—for, suddenly, I had dozens of lovers. I slept with more men than there were paintings on the walls of my gallery, my nights a blurred fantasy of probing tongues, stroking hands, and hard cocks. I slept, quite a few times under the stars, with Lawrence, with John, with James, with Robert, with Luke, with Michael, with George … and the list goes on without me, intertwined with the sound of drums and a line of dancers. About as interesting, in retrospect, as Sabon’s necklace. I’m sure Duncan rolled his eyes behind my back whenever I mentioned a new “boyfriend,” since the longevity of my boyfriends was akin to that of a mayfly. I can hardly remember their names. (Since I was actually paying attention during that period, I remember them. There was the painter James Mallock, whom you called “old hairy back”; and the sculptor Peter Greelin—too clutchy, you said; and the theater owner Thomas Strangell, who had trouble getting it up on opening nights; and so many more—“an endless parade of erotic follies,” as you used to typify it. In an odd sense, it didn’t bother me, Janice. At least you were enjoying yourself. I don’t know if you ever realized this, but before that you rarely seemed to enjoy yourself.)
I became addicted to anonymous sex, sex without love, sex as an act. I loved the feel of a man’s chest against my breasts, the quickening of his breath while inside me, the utterly sublime slide of skin against skin. Each encounter faded from memory more quickly than the last, so that I only became more ravenous. Before, I had been starving; now, I felt as if I could never be satiated.
In other words, I began, under the steady, orgasmic pressure of fame, to become someone totally different than I had been. Can I blame me? It felt marvelous. It felt so good I thought I would die from ecstasy. I was successful for the first time ever. For the first time ever, it was me, not Duncan, who commanded respect. If our father had been alive, he wouldn’t have ignored me—he couldn’t possibly have ignored me. (He never ignored you, Janice. No one ignored you. You just couldn’t see them looking at you, for some reason.)
And still I consumed and consumed and consumed. I could not stop. Even in the midst of such carnality, a part of me remained distant, as if I were pulling the strings of my own puppet. I used to walk through a crowd of people, most of whom I knew intimately, and feel utterly alone. I had written that letter to Duncan about the golden threads and yet forgotten everything it meant.
Even Sybel had his doubts about my philosophy of life, despite how perfectly it fit in with the New Art ideal. We’d sit on the steps leading into the courtyard at Trillian Square, eating fruit that Sybel had plucked from some trees near the River Moth.
“How do you think everything is going?” Sybel would ask, a typical way for him to start a conversation if concerned about me.
I’d reply, “Great! Wonderful! Spectacular! Did you see that new painting? The one by Sarah Sharp? And it only cost us half of what it should have. If I can sell it, there are twenty more where that one came from. And after that there will be twenty more from somewhere else and then before you know it another gallery and after that, who knows. And that reminds me, did you see the mention in the Broadsheet? You need to make sure the theater owners see that—free advertising for us both. We have to maximize any leverage we get.”
And I couldn’t. Stop. Talking. And Sybel would eat his fruit and sometimes he’d put his hand on my shoulder and he’d feel that I was trembling and that I couldn’t control it, and that touch would become a firmer grip, as if he were steadying me. Righting me.
Despite this, I didn’t stop. I refused to stop—I wanted to eat, drink, and screw the world. Each new party, each new artist, each new day, started the process anew. With what glittering light shall we drape the new morning? Starved for so long, I now became the Princess of Yes. I. Simply. Could. Not. Say. No.
It is because I could not say no, ironically enough, that I became involved in so many projects for Sirin at Hoegbotton Publishing—and inadvertently provided the catalyst for the clandestine (and erratic) second career of Duncan, my by then thirty-six-year-old brother.
This new secret history he would carry with him was only one of many. He already brought with him the labyrinth beneath the city. He already brought with him a secret understanding of his own books—and a personal history increasingly intertwined with Ambergris’s. For Duncan had discarded his public self; he had returned to the facelessness from which he had come. (What freedom there can be in this! Unfettered from all of the distractions, finally and forever. Yes, I would long for, pine for, legitimate publication many times—but then I felt that first rush of anonymity after the last book went out of print, and with it fled any obligation to anything other than tracking the mystery of the gray caps.)
To become … someone else. I was learning that lesson every day as Janice Shriek remade herself into a hundred different images reflected from store windows and mirrors and the approving or disapproving expressions on other people’s faces. No longer jailed by expectations—of himself or anyone else. No longer anything but himself.
And yet, even then, he was beginning a slow slog back toward the printed page, from a different angle—a forced march with no true destination, just a series of way stations. At first, it must have seemed more of a trap than an opportunity …
Duncan could publish nothing with Hoegbotton, at least directly. The last meeting with his editor had ended with a violent shouting match and an overturned desk. (For the record, I had nothing against either my editor or the desk—especially the desk. My reaction to the rejection of what would have been my sixth book for Hoegbotton was a delayed reaction to L. Gaudy’s calm diatribe several years earlier in the offices of Frankwrithe & Lewden. All my editor at Hoegbotton said was, “I’m very sorry, Duncan, but we cannot take your latest book.” Yet I found myself doing what I should have done to Gaudy—trying to beat his silly, know-nothing head against a desk. I’m lucky he didn’t have me detained by Hoegbotton’s thugs.)
But as I have written, Hoegbotton offered me more opportunities than I could possibly accept, and I did not turn them down. With the result that I had no choice but to enlist Duncan’s help. Duncan took to it easily enough. (What choice did I have?) He was even eager for it. In fact, I can now reveal that the entire series of seventy-five travel pamphlets Hoegbotton published, one for each of the Southern Islands, was written by Duncan, not me. He would take my feverish, indifferent research, fortify it with his less-frenzied studies, and try to mimic my prose style, codified in many an art catalog:
Archibald with Earwig, by Ludwig Poncer, Trillian Era, oils on canvas. This titular crenellation of high and low styles, by virtue of its unerring instinct for the foibles of both the human thumb and the inhuman earwig, has delighted generations of art lovers who pine for the shiver of dread up the spine even as their lips part to offer the sinister white of a smile.
Blah blah mumble mumble and so forth and so on yawn yawn.
Duncan also wrote, under the pseudonym “Darren Nysland,” the three-hundred-page Hoegbotton Study of Native Birds (which included my lovely, poetic entry on the plumed thrush hen), still in print and often referenced by serious ornithologists. (As well it should be. It came into existence with excruciating slowness over many months. I soon wished a pox upon the entire avian clan. I never want to see another bird, unless eggwise, sunny-side up on my breakfast plate, or simmering in some sort of mint sauce.)
When, much later, I could not complete an essay on Martin Lake for the Hoegbotton Guide to Ambergris, Duncan did an admirable job of presenting my (crackpot, or at least unsupportable) ideas in good, solid prose. (And doing what you would not—protecting the identity of Lake’s real lover. I wonder if you noticed. That and the peculiar “messages” I embedded in the text.) As if this was not confused enough, my work sometimes appeared under pen names, and thus when this work was actually written by Duncan, he appeared in print twice removed from his words.
I loved helping Duncan in this way. I loved that his style and my style became entangled so that we could not between us tell where a Janice sentence began and a Duncan sentence ended. For this meant I was very nearly his equal. (No comment.)
It was during this period that the Spore of the Gray Cap first became his favorite haunt. He had begun to put on a little weight, to grow a mustache and beard, which suited him. He even began to smoke a pipe. Thus outfitted, he would spend a few hours a day at the Spore, sitting in the (this very) back room, where he could keep a friendly eye on the bar’s regulars and yet not have to speak to them. The bartenders loved him. Duncan never made a fuss, tipped well when he could, and added a sense of authentic eccentricity that the Spore needed. (These were not the only or even the primary reasons I spent so much time here. At some point, Janice, you will have to abandon suspense for a fully dissected chronology, will you not? Or perhaps I can help. It just so happens that below the back room of the Spore lies the easiest portal to the gray caps’ underground kingdom.)
This deception continued for over three years, to the continued glorification of Janice Shriek, with rarely even the warmth of reflected light for poor Duncan. Hoegbotton did pay very well, and I dutifully gave Duncan sometimes as much as three-fourths of our earnings. (H&S could afford to pay well—not only were its trading activities booming, but it had managed to make inroads into the Southern jungles, and to consolidate control of almost all trade entering Ambergris. This was no benevolent organization, but perhaps being an anonymous thrall was better than the alternative.)
I suppose for this reason alone Duncan would have continued to supply his work for my byline. But we eventually put a stop to it anyway. I believe it was because my own instability made him yearn for stability of his own. When your sister continually looks pale as death, throws up on a regular basis, introduces you to a new boyfriend every other week, and is given to uncontrollable shaking, you begin to wonder how long it will be before people stop assigning her freelance work. (Not true—you flatter yourself. There were two reasons. First, I was sick of writing fluff. You try writing seventy-five articles on vacation opportunities in the Southern Islands and you will have written a new definition of boredom. Vomiting would be the least of your worries. Second, freelancing did not appeal because there was no set schedule, and I could never know when you might have work for me. Third, I began to see that this facile copy writing was taking a lot of energy away from my underground inquiries, which became more urgent the more it seemed that the symptoms I’d manifested after coming aboveground were not going away.)
Besides, Sirin, now my editor at Hoegbotton, had published all manner of pamphlets early in his career, passing off fiction as nonfiction and nonfiction as fiction; when his readers could not tell the difference between the two, it filled him with a nonsensical glee. Several times, he wrote an essay in a periodical, a scathing review of it under a pen name, then a letter to the editor under yet another pen name, this alter-alter ego defending Sirin’s original point. In short, Sirin was as apt to ape a novel in his essays as to mummify a treatise in his fancies. He was also a scrupulous rewriter of other writers’ work, always sensitive to a change in tone or style, and drove Duncan to near insanity with his relentless line edits. With such an editor, it would not have been long before Sirin sniffed out the hoax. (I’m sure he sniffed out the hoax from nearly the beginning but chose not to say anything. What did it matter to him who wrote what so long as someone wrote it?)
For these reasons (and more, too tedious to, etc., etc.), the arrangement did not last. One day I came to Duncan with an assignment (the abysmal task of creating an “upbeat” listing and description of funeral homes and cemeteries in Morrow; it made me suspicious—had Sirin come up with that to torment me?) and Duncan told me he couldn’t do it. No, Duncan had taken a “regular” job.
My brother, Duncan Shriek, the fearless explorer, had finally accepted everyday reality as his own—just as I had begun to reject it. Joined the humdrum, wash-the-dishes, take-out-the-garbage, go-to-bed-early, get-up-and-go-to-work life shared by millions of people from Stockton to Morrow, Nicea to Ambergris. My shock only amused him. (Actually, dear sister, it was your squinty-eyed, sallow face, the way your pupils seemed ready to rise up into your head as your jaw, as if in balance, dropped. You looked, in short, as if we had traded places, sunshine for the subterranean. At least one of us was taking out the garbage.)
What job had Duncan taken? A teaching job at Blythe Academy, a minor Truffidian religious school. Blythe might have been best known for its longevity—it had been established some years before the Silence, although it had wandered from place to place, finally coming to rest a few blocks from the Truffidian Cathedral. In a bit of irony I’m sure they had thought made good sense, Blythe’s library had been superimposed on the ruins of an old gray cap library. (It wasn’t ever a library. It was more of a marker for the Machine.) In the center of their main reading room, the circular nubs of that former structure remained, looking cold, remote, and threatening.
Blythe had a pointed history of accepting as many students from “artistic” or “creative” parents as possible, especially those of a certain social status—regardless of whether they believed in Truffidianism. I suppose the founders believed that the rote, compulsory weekly religious services in the small chapel behind the school might eventually permeate the brains of their charges—or at the very least instill the kind of guilt that in later years results in large sums of money being sent in to support new buildings, philosophies, or styles of teaching.
Blythe had also had famous teachers from time to time—Cadimon Signal for a few years, and even some of the Gorts who had gained such fame from the statistician Marmy Gort’s controversial findings. Certainly, there was no shame in attending as a student or teaching at the school. However, as Duncan soon found out, greater shame could be found in those serving as headmaster, or Royal, to the school.
Imagine Duncan’s shock the first day, arriving in starched collar and suffocating tie, to find his interviewer, the Vice Royal of Blythe Academy, joined by the Royal himself, who turned out to be none other than the former Antechamber, Bonmot. His features, already naturally condensed into a look of continual bemusement by the circumstances of his fall from grace, had attained a sublime parody of surprise (did anything really surprise him anymore?) as he looked up at Duncan and slowly realized who he was.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Duncan said with a toothy grin, as Bonmot nodded like a man in dream.
For a short while, Duncan once again disappeared from my life, although this was a much gentler disappearance: his ghost remained behind. Postcards fluttered into my mailbox with alarming regularity, for him—at least one every two weeks. Duncan wrote in tiny letters, fitting long-winded, philosophical diatribes on them. (Not long-winded. Just, perhaps, impractical for the allotted space.) I would respond with postcards that teased him in the language of fashions and gossip—although, truth be told, sometimes I had Sybel write them when I was too busy. (It was no secret. Sybel told me, and his handwriting was markedly different from yours. He used to apologize to me for you when I collected my remedies from him. It was no secret, but also no sin. Still, I must admit to exasperation at the few times Sybel asked for advice on what he should write to me about!) From the evidence of the postcards alone, we might have been the two most uniquely different people in the world.
But the postcards were a way to remind each other of our existence, and those things most important to us at the time. Could I help it that my mind concerned itself with the ephemeral, the weightless, the surface, while Duncan continued to plunge into the depths?
On the corporeal level, the postcards meant nothing. What is a scrawl of letters next to that infinity of physical details that makes up a face? So I dropped by the Blythe Academy for lunch whenever I could find the time—at least once a month, depending on what demands Sybel and my ever-expanding gullet of a gallery made on me.
I shared the ghost of Duncan, this Serious Man seemingly more concerned about his students than his life’s work (so it might have seemed, I’ll admit) with Bonmot, for the Antechamber and my brother had become friends. (Good friends? Great friends? I honestly don’t know. The dynamic of our relationship was transformed day by day. On some level, despite our affection for one another, I think there was a certain caution, a certain wariness. He may have felt my obsession with the gray caps would lead me to discoveries that might bring dishonor to his faith in God. I know I was afraid that his religion might somehow infect my studies, change me in a way that I did not want to be changed.)
Without question, these lunches became the high point of my days. Whether in the sleepy cool heat of spring, the hot white light of summer, or the dry burnt chill of fall and winter. By the carp-filled fountain. They laughed so much!
I’d never seen Duncan laugh without bitterness or sarcasm since Before Dad Died. It almost felt like we were huddled around the dinner table in the old house in Stockton again, with Dad telling us some obscure fact he’d dug up in his research. Usually, he would mix in some lie, and the unspoken assumption was that we’d try to ferret it out with our questions. Sometimes, the truth was so outrageous that finding the lie took a while. He would sit back in his chair, eyebrows raised in a look of innocence—something that always made Mom laugh—and answer us with a straight face. (I always knew when Dad wasn’t telling the truth, because the faintest lilt or musical quality would enter his voice—as if the joy of constructing the story was too much for him to contain.)
These lunches with Bonmot formed pockets of time and space separate from the stress and rigor of my responsibilities (or lack thereof). Where everything else blended together in a blur of faces and cafés and alcohol, that sun-filled courtyard with its rustling willows, light-soaked dark wooden benches, and aged gray stone tables riven with fissures still remains with me, even in this place. And Bonmot was one with the benches and tables: weathered but comfortable, solid and stolid both. His hands felt like stone hands, his two-fisted greeting like having your skin encased in granite. He had been a farmer’s son before he found his calling, and his hulking physique remained intact, along with a startling openness and honesty in his light brown eyes. Nothing in him indicated a propensity for clerical crimes. (The honesty didn’t come easily to him. He had earned his reform, and it had transformed him.) His speech rippled out like liquid marble, strong and smooth. He was, in all ways, a comfort.
As for Bonmot and Duncan, they pulled back far enough from the rift that was Duncan’s long-ago banned book to find they shared many interests, from explorations of history and religion to a taste for the same music and art. More than once, I would walk into that blissful place carrying sandwiches bought from a sidewalk vendor to find the two men deep in conversation, Bonmot’s wrinkled face further creased with laugh lines, his melon-bald head bowed and nodding as Duncan hammered home some obscure point, Duncan’s hands heavy with the weight of knowledge being expressed through them. Two veterans of exile, reborn in the pleasure of each other’s company. (Which isn’t to say we didn’t argue—we argued, sometimes viciously. We knew where we stood with one another.)
Early on, Duncan dispensed with politeness and pressed Bonmot about his faith. Duncan’s journal relates one such discussion, over an early lunch I wasn’t at:
Bonmot irritates me with his faith sometimes, because it seems based on nothing that is not ephemeral. And yet my own faith, misdiagnosed as “obsession,” cannot incite such blind obedience or trust.
“What I don’t understand,” I said to Bonmot today, “is how you went from corrupt Truffidian Antechamber to beatific Blythe Academy Royal.”
I supposed I was interested because of my own “scandal,” even if it was just the ignominious fate of being out of print. Perhaps I could re-create Bonmot’s path.
But Bonmot laughed and dispelled any hope of true explanation by saying, “Better to ask how I became corrupt in the first place. But, really, to answer your question, I had no choice. It just happened. When you are inside a situation like that, you see the world in a way that allows you to rationalize what you are doing. When you lose that perspective, you wake up.”
“Are you saying that no trigger, no incident, brought you to the realization?”
“No,” Bonmot said. “I literally woke up one day and had the distance to realize that I had gotten onto the wrong path and I had to change.”
“Very convenient,” I said, which made Bonmot emit one of his rare belly laughs, doubled over for a moment or two.
(Did the disappointed look on my face amuse him? No, he was too kind for that. Was he laughing at something else entirely—some cosmic personal or religious joke? I couldn’t tell at the time, but I thought about it often, because it confused me. Now, if I had to guess, I would say that Bonmot was laughing at the memory of his own foolishness, laughing too at the sheer luck of having escaped it.)
“Ah, Duncan,” he said, wiping a tear from his cheek. “I admit it is convenient. That I should have been redeemed so easily. Such a pat revelation. But the good news is, the same may happen for you one day, if you have need of it.”
“I do need a few revelations,” I said.
“Maybe you need God,” Bonmot said, though with a lilt to his voice that let me know he might be teasing. “Do you think maybe that’s why you’ve come to me?” His tone made it so. I hadn’t come to him for that reason, and yet I was almost open to it in a strange way.
“You have faith in something you cannot see,” I said. “I can understand that, but I can’t believe in it.”
He shrugged. “‘There is no speech, there are no words; the song of the heavens is beyond expression.’ Not just something, but someone.”
“Someone, then,” I said. “So tell me—why are we so different? I also believe in something or someone I cannot see. It just happens to live underground.” I said it casually, and it came out like a joke, but my breath quickened, and I think that on some level, I really wanted a profound answer. I wanted an answer of some kind, at least—one that would help me understand why I could not stop pursuing my mystery.
“There’s a difference,” Bonmot said, although I’ve wondered ever since how he could know such a thing, without having seen what I’ve seen, down there.
“What is the difference?”
“Your unseen world only exists inside your head,” he said, in as gentle a way as he could—he even reached out across the table with his huge hands, as if, for a second, he meant to console me. “My unseen world, however, is the truth. It is truth that convinces and the divine that gives the gift of true faith.”
I’ve always had a problem with Truth and those who espouse Truth, no matter how much I might love and respect them. Faith, on the other hand, has never been an issue for me. But, I said, because I could: “I thought it might be a question of scale. Of the number of souls infected with the delusion.”
Bonmot wasn’t smiling anymore. “No, it’s not a matter of scale.”
(But of course it was a question of scale. That’s why I failed. You must infect the minds of hundreds of thousands to get anything done, to make an impact. You can’t live out your days presenting your theories to a hundred souls at a meeting of a discredited historical society. It doesn’t make a difference.)
“What, then?”
Bonmot said, “I told you already. But you aren’t ready to listen. You have to know the truth—have something worth believing in. Over time. Over centuries. Something so important people are willing to form their whole lives around it. To live, and, yes, die for it. And that means it must be much bigger than anything imaginable. ‘Silence with regard to You is praise,’” he quoted. “‘The sum total of what we know of You is that we do not know You.’”
I leaned closer, across the table. “What if you could know, though? Would that diminish it? If you could see what I have seen. I think it might change your mind.” (And, toward the end, didn’t he change? And didn’t I wish then that I’d never tried to see him uncertain.)
“‘The angels of darkness, whose names I do not know,’” Bonmot said. “You must take care to resist the false light.”
“The false light.” I shivered. Samuel Tonsure had written that once in his journal. But Tonsure hadn’t known about the Machine, about the door. There was, I had become convinced, a real door, not just an illusion or a delusion or a mirror. A door. And here Bonmot was talking about not letting in a false light. For a moment, just a moment, I asked myself if he might have some insight into the same truth I sought. (After all, Bonmot often professed to be an expert on Zamilon, a place I had become convinced held, in some time period, the answer to the mystery of the Machine. But the tough old bastard never imparted what he knew, no matter how I tried to pry that knowledge from him. And then it was too late.)
I pulled away, sat up straight on the bench, felt the lacquered rough-smoothness of its grain against my palms. Felt the sun against my face. Felt the breeze. Wondered at how I could get so lost in a conversation that I forgot the world around me.
I started again. I don’t know why I tried. Bonmot couldn’t convince me and I couldn’t convince him. “It is that important to me, Bonmot. It’s a religion to me.”
“I’ve no doubt of your sincerity,” Bonmot said. “I’m just not sure what you want from me.”
“To say my theories are not incompatible with your beliefs,” I said.
“But your theories are impossible. Nor are they truly relevant to the larger world.”
This made me angry for an instant. “Relevant? Relevant. How about this—our future survival in Ambergris. A second Silence. Is that relevant enough for you?”
Bonmot sighed. It was like stone or solid earth sighing. “That’s what Truffidianism is all about, my friend. Exactly that—you should read our texts more closely in future. ‘The same fate is in store for everyone, pure and impure, righteous and wicked, the good and the sinners.’”
“‘No one makes it out,’ as Tonsure once wrote,” I said. “But what if that fate is coming sooner to all of us than it should?”
Bonmot shrugged. “I don’t believe in what you believe.”
But I knew that, faced with the reality of it, he would not be so calm or accepting. I knew that the reality of what might one day happen would trump the imaginations of even those who had the capacity to believe in an all-powerful being that had never once manifested in the flesh to Bonmot or, to the best of my knowledge, anyone else.
(I once had a conversation about Faith and Truth with Sybel while waiting for him to relinquish a tincture. “What’s the attraction of Truffidianism? Of a single Truth, Sybel?” I asked. “It’s simple,” he replied. “You don’t have to search anymore. You can just be.” “So can a tree, Sybel,” I said, which was probably the wrong thing to say.)
Conversations like this one usually ended amicably on both sides—for Duncan because he found much about Truffidianism compelling (that may be wish fulfillment on your part, Janice) and for Bonmot because he had been too flawed in his past to judge the disbelief of others too harshly. And still they went back and forth, sometimes comically.
Duncan: “I’ve seen a kind of a god. It lives underground.”
Bonmot: “The Silence was more about sin than mushrooms.”
Duncan: “But rats, Bonmot? Why do you have to worship rats?”
Bonmot: “The ways of God are mysterious, Duncan. And, besides, you are coming perilously close to blasphemy … only some of us worship rats. I do not worship rats.”
Duncan: “Rats, Bonmot? Rats?”
We talked about serious subjects, yes, but we also told dirty jokes and teased each other mercilessly. I shared wicked stories about the outrageous behavior of my artists, while Bonmot shared tales from his days at the religious academy in Morrow. (My personal favorites concerned the exploits of the head instructor, Cadimon Signal.) Rarely were our conversations revelatory. That’s not the point. These were people I loved and came to love. For me, some months, it saved me to be in such company. It took me out of the self-destructive spiral of my own thoughts in a way that even Sybel couldn’t. For Bonmot, I think our lunches allowed him to relax in a way he had not relaxed since he entered the priesthood. (And I had fun, too. But, really, Janice, you make it all sound so perfect. It was fun, but it wasn’t perfect.)
I should have been envious of the way Duncan and Bonmot talked, but the truth is, it made me happy for them both: the hulking giant and my relatively “dainty” brother. When I approached them with my sandwiches, I often felt guilty for taking them from their collective world of words and ideas, twinned heads turning to look up at me, bewildered—who was this intruder?—followed by recognition and a gracious acceptance into their company. (This is a subtle piece of misdirection that allows you to keep your own emotional intimacy with Bonmot secret, I think. As I had Lacond later, so you had Bonmot, in a way I didn’t. I was often the intruder, Janice. You two took so easily to one another it was remarkable. But if you don’t want to share such details here, I won’t make you.)
I still remember how Bonmot’s generous drum of a laugh, deep and clear, often drew disapproving looks from the students studying nearby. And yet even then, during what I considered retreats from the exhausting carnality of my “normal” life, Mary Sabon was with us, folded into the pages of the grade book Duncan kept with him. There never really is a finite beginning, is there? No real starting point to anything. Beginnings are continually beginning. Time is just a joke played by watchmakers to turn a profit. Through memory, Time becomes conjoined so that I see Mary as a physical presence at those lunches, leaning against Duncan, trying to get his attention.
She is everywhere now. I am, almost literally, nowhere.