I WAS BEGINNING TO sound like a character in a book. I had to escape the relentless pressure of the words. I had to get away. From the typewriter keys. From my wrinkled hands, which prove my brain lies to me about my age. From the faces staring through the green crack where the corridors synchronize into a fracture of seeing. From the feeling that I had begun to parrot on these pages, blandly resuscitating facts. (Janice, once you start a project like this, it’s impossible to tell what is truly important or who will find what the most interesting, so it’s no use second guessing your decisions, no matter how I may have protested against some of them.)
I went for a hobbling walk, leaning heavily on my cane every step of the way. But when you’ve lived in a place this long, no walk can occur solely in the present. Every street, every building, appears to you encrusted with memories, with perspectives that betray your age, your cynicism, your sentimentality, or your lack of feeling where you should feel something. Here, the site of a quick fuck, a fumbling moment of ecstasy. (‘Lover’s tryst’, Janice, is, I believe, the preferred term; once again your style slips from Duncanisms to gutterisms.) There, a farewell to a departing friend. A fabled lunch with an important artist. The dust-smudged window of a rival gallery, still floundering along while you are forever out of business. A community square, where once you held an outdoor party, strung with paper lanterns. And if this were not enough – not relentless enough, not humbling enough – that unspeakable vision overlaying all of it, had you only the glasses to see: the mark of the gray caps on the city in a thousand signs and symbols only Duncan and I can see.
It is not an easy thing for me to walk through Ambergris these days but there is also comfort: why, she said, her heart breaking a little, there are so many friends to visit, even if they are all in the ground.
But at first I just hobbled down Albumuth Boulevard in the late afternoon light, letting my path be decided by the gaps between supplicants and pilgrims. Happy that everything appeared normal, that evidence of the Shift was hidden, or so minute that I didn’t notice it. (Or maybe you didn’t notice it because you had become so used to it.)
I took deep breaths, to catch all the smells in this most beautiful and cruel of all cities: passion flower and incense, lemon trees and horse flop, rotting meat and coffee grounds. For a few minutes I tried to pretend to be a tourist, a passerby, an incidental part of the city. It didn’t work. How could it? I am Janice Shriek.
MY LEG WAS already beginning to ache, but I thought I might feel more optimistic if I headed for the site of my greatest triumphs. I hadn’t visited it in ages, so I went despite the discomfort. After a good half hour, I finally stood in front of what had once been the Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. A flower shop and a bakery stood to either side, but the part of the building that had housed the gallery lay empty as if cursed. The shadow where the hand-painted sign had once hung had been branded into the wall by years of hard weather. Beyond the cracked windows lay dust, mouldy frames, and darkness. No paintings. No paint not peeling. Just seasons and seasons of neglect. The smell of stale bread, rotting wood. Layers of purple fungus had taken root in the closest wall. Passersby hardly spared the place a second glance. It should have been a monument, or at least a memorial. It had housed dozens of famous paintings and painters. Conversations that shaped all aspects of the art world had taken place there. Much of the art mentioned in the Hoegbotton tourist guides, the descriptions of the New Art movement, had started with my gallery. I had started there. Everything I have been since came from my gallery. This dump. This husk of broken timbers. Even my memories of it – saturated in the marinade of all five senses and as sharp as yesterday – could not bring it to sudden life. I might as well have never left the typewriter. I was still trapped in an afterword.
I headed into the Religious Quarter, immediately calmed by the sound of bells – bells from steeples and cathedrals, from alcoves and altars, which I could never quite find the source of, which lingered at the edge of hearing.
I disturbed a boy in the act of lighting a candle in the recess that marked the northernmost corner of the Church of the Seven-Edged Star. He looked up at me, his face whiter even than his white robes against the tousle of black hair, his eyes a glistening green, his mouth forming a half-conscious ‘O’, the long match held with divine grace in his slightly upturned right hand. The white of his revealed wrist sent a shudder through me, but he smiled and the image of grace returned.
He was right to light the candle, for the Quarter at that hour had not only distant bells but distant light, the dusk so strong it might as well have been a smell, a musk, that slid over the unprotected surfaces of cobblestones, windows, and walls, leaving behind the chaos of rippling illuminations that remain in the Quarter after dark. Priests shuffled past, murmuring mouths and bare feet. Truffidians, Manziists, Menites, Cultists? Doubtless Duncan the historian would have known. No matter how Ambergris Shifted, we could count on the rituals of the Quarter remaining the same.
Moving on, I walked to the edge of the Religious Quarter – by now an act of will, as my leg really hurt – past the stern-looking Truffidian Cathedral, and by way of a flurry of alleys soon found myself in front of Blythe Academy. The dark covered the academy comfortably, content to linger at the outskirts of lamps and torches.
Even from the street I could see directly into the courtyard, and beyond the courtyard into the student apartments, here and there a window illumined with golden light. In the foreground, the pale willow trees rustled in the breeze. (As pale willow trees are wont to do.) The stone benches and tables were solid, dark, strangely comforting masses. A monk strode across the courtyard. Another followed, cowl hiding his face. The sweet, pungent scent of honeysuckle wound itself around me.
I do not know how long I stood there, remembering those long-ago conversations, but as I did, an unbearable sadness came over me. Nothing I can type on these pages can convey – truly – what I felt as I looked into the darkened courtyard where Duncan, Bonmot, and I had sat and talked. And, if I am truthful, that place I stood in front of, which meant so much to me, no longer had any more to do with me than the Borges Bookstore. The moment, the spirit, had passed out of it and it was just a place once more. Duncan no longer taught there. Bonmot no longer sat behind the desk in his office, listening to the imagined miseries of yet another homesick student. Duncan had disappeared. Bonmot had died more than twelve years ago.
What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.
I stood there, mourning the death of that place, even though it had not really died, even though it had since spawned a thousand stories to join the millions of stories that comprised the city, and then I walked back here, to the typewriter, to continue my epic, my afterword, so consumed by what? By emotion. That my hands are shaking. They are shaking right now. What shall stop them? Perhaps a dose of the dead past.
AT BONMOT’S FUNERAL, some twelve years ago, men and women who would not have dared visit him while he was alive circled around the polished oak coffin like impatient iridescent flies. The day held a hint of rain in the gravel sky, the air moist and cool. The smell of mould was everywhere.
Outside the Truffidian Cathedral, Martin Lake dourly limped about on his polished cane, stopping to mutter grim Lake-isms to friends such as Merrimount and Raffe, all of whom avoided me as if I embodied a disease they might one day become. That’s how far I had fallen. I limped like Lake by then. I had a cane like him. But I was not enough like him, especially now that he had passed from ‘successful’ to that ethereal realm where one’s fame will always outlive the fading mortal body.
The Morrow Ambassador to the House of Hoegbotton – newly renamed to reflect the aftermath of war – presented a dapper sight in slick black tuxedo and tails, at least until he managed to slide in a patch of mud created by overzealous grave diggers and groundskeepers. A general from the Kalif’s army, a supposed friend of Bonmot’s in his youth, looked out of place in turban and gold-and-red glittery uniform, his presence barely tolerated by a city that so frequently had been bombarded by his masters.
Dozens of priests arrived from the Religious Quarter, from orders as diverse as the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star and Manziism. They all wore variations of black-on-white and sombre stares. They all had guards with them. Ever since the War of the Houses, no one trusted anyone else. Hoegbotton’s men were out in force as well, armed with guns and with knives. Some of them stood in motored vehicles, in well-heeled clumps, staring.
Business leaders also arrived to pay their bemused respects. The newly ascendant Andrew Hoegbotton, a weaselly stick figure of a man with large, liquid eyes, shared uneasy space with Lionel Frankwrithe, a smug middle-aged man who kept snapping out his pocket watch in a sudden motion that kept wretched Andrew flinching. Truces between House F&L and House H&S rarely lasted very long any more.
At the edges, surrounding these dim luminaries, stood beggars, prostitutes, and the working poor, all of whom Bonmot had helped at some period in his life, whether as Antechamber or as the Royal of Blythe Academy. As the Ambergris Daily Broadsheet noted:
Every element of Ambergrisian society turned out yesterday to grieve the death of a man most had abandoned in his exile and which, happy coincidence, they now remembered as the hour of heart-felt high-profile memorial speeches grew near. (Janice, you know I wrote this.)
The procession from the cathedral to Bonmot’s final resting place was silent. The flags of the Religious Quarter lay limp against the breezeless sky. As we walked, our procession grew larger and more diverse. More and more people left their homes or temples to join us. I remember thinking that this wasn’t just a funeral for Bonmot – it was a funeral for the city. So much uncertainty faced us now. We’d been shaken out of our preconceptions by the War and its aftermath. We’d been roused from our blindness – or so we hoped.
The procession ended with an interminable parade into and through Trillian’s Cemetery. They say Trillian populated the cemetery with the victims of his bloody merchant wars. But within its walls I have always felt a theme of renewal and peace rather than death. Its massive oak trees, its giant, curling green ferns, its elegant stone houses for the departed – they all conspired to make the visitor think of woodland walks and primordial forests rather than decay. That day, the graveyard seemed more alive than the insensate, gangrenous city surrounding it.
The trio of violinists abruptly stopped playing. The coffin was lowered into its final resting place, a headstone to be added later. The grave diggers who would fill in the dirt stood leaning on their shovels next to the mound of earth, their stares flat and steady. In front of them, the current Antechamber began to give the final speech of the afternoon, a few hollow words about his predecessor, couched in platitudes and numbing repetition.
‘Give back to this earth this good man, O Lord,’ he said, much to the grumbling dismay of several Manziists present, who missed their traditional rat-festooned funeral ceremony. ‘Give back to this good man the earth, O Lord,’ he said again, like a man who, having missed his memorized mark, has to start over in the correct order. ‘And let you, O Lord, serve as a light to him, for we are imperfect vessels and we platitude simile extended metaphor with barely any pauses followed by more repetition. Period. Comma. Stop. Start. Here I go again about God and the dirt and wait: another platitude, quote from the Truffidian Bible everyone’s heard a thousand times before, and even though I once actually knew Bonmot when I was a junior priest, not a single personal anecdote about the man because the scandal of his long-ago departure as Antechamber might somehow still cling to me like a fetid stench. Amen.’
While they buried our friend, I watched a glossy emerald beetle, carapace age-pocked and mossy, fend off an attack by a dozen fuzzy ants, their red thorax glands releasing tiny jets of bubbly white poison. This drama took place in a leafy alcove while storks flew against the rapidly darkening sky and moth wings muttered on mottled tree trunks, the world in constant rebellious motion against the stark silence within the coffin.
Duncan came, of course, his face ever more deeply lined with the weight of secret knowledge (or maybe I had just stayed out too late the night before), his gaze settling upon the assembled rabble in search of one perfect, elusive face . . . but Mary did not come. Parties, lecture series, concerts, readings, she attended, even during wartime. Funerals, however, never made Mary’s agenda. She did not like funerals. People, for her, did not die, and places never became disenfranchised from those moments that made them important. Both became entombed in her books, and, until placed there, never failed to behave as less than caricature or puppetry.
‘Duncan,’ I said. ‘She’s not coming. She never was going to come. Not for you. Not for Bonmot.’ She would be writing, or doing something equally destructive to Duncan’s (lack of a) career.
He would not answer me. He would not look at me. He stared at the coffin as the Antechamber tossed a clot of earth on Bonmot’s coffin, too downcast at Sabon’s absence to utter a word.
Time had made no difference. Whether minutes after the dissolution of their relationship or years after, Duncan was the same. Even when increasingly attacked and hounded by the words like knives from her various books, he allowed her to control his heart.
As we left the funeral, Duncan was still searching the crowd for any sign of Mary.
(Janice, I accepted your dressing down, which you conveniently dilute and misremember, because I knew you hurt from Bonmot’s death as much as I did. But please do not mistake my silence for agreement with your reading of my thoughts. If I surveyed the crowd, it wasn’t to search for Mary. I knew she wasn’t coming. My gaze was blind – I saw nothing, but always looked inward to my memories of Bonmot. While the procession lurched toward the cemetery, while the Antechamber gave his depressing speech, even while you lashed out at me, I was nowhere near that place. I was where you should have been – in the courtyard, sitting on a bench beside Bonmot and talking. Besides you, our mother, and Lacond, Bonmot was one of the few people keeping me above ground. I never really bought into religion, but I believed in Bonmot, and because he had faith, I had faith through him. And I was heartbroken for missed opportunities, because it had been so many years since I’d had a personal conversation with him.
(You congratulate yourself on being sensitive to my thoughts, but you barely knew them at times. It stung that you saw what no one else could – that the fungus had continued to colonize my skin, that even as I stood there and watched them pour dirt over Bonmot’s coffin my body fought a thousand battles more vigorous than those between beetle and ants, that I would not be changed utterly – and yet you could not understand why I might be distracted. That my mind was consumed by another attempt to stand firm against the invasion of my own body on the most basic levels, like pissing black blood or sweating out green liquid fungus.)
DUNCAN AND MARY. For a time, long before that horrible day in the graveyard, they were inseparable. And yet: never a more unlikely couple, a pair less paired, less suited for suitability. Would that I could provide a complete chronicle of the misshapen event. Alas, I cannot tell this part of the story through Duncan’s journal. I am embarrassed to report that Duncan’s journal entries on these matters prove nearly incomprehensible in their extremes of love, despair, lust, and, yes, love again, repetitious and maudlin. I will spare the reader the full scope of their sexual senility by only providing excerpts. I suggest you fill in any blanks with applicable entries from your own diary . . .
It was, as they say, a beautiful spring day when Duncan first recorded his utter surrender. Outside, the willow trees breathed gently from side to side under a merciful sun, and street vendors danced joyously in anticipation of Duncan’s ardour, and the birds stopped in mid-air to witness the innocence that was Duncan’s lust, and the gray caps came above ground to gift all citizens of the city with garlands of sweet-smelling fungus, and I must stop before I make myself sick. (I’m already sick. This whole section will make me sick, I think.)
Inside the Academy, Duncan breathed gently on the neck of the woman child (she was already twenty-one!) he had kept after class for ‘further instruction’:
Today Mary wore a white blouse, and as I pointed out a relevant passage in Tonsure’s journal, she stood next to me, our clothes just touching. I felt a pressure between us, as if she held me up or I held her up, and if the tension was broken, one of us would fall. I turned my head into the blindness of that endless white as she stood beside me, and every inch of my body knew the certainty of her generous hips where the blouse disappeared into her skirt and the reckless knowledge of her soft neck above the blouse, the face shining above the neck. All of these elements destroyed me more than what I saw, which was just the blouse, filled with her. The stitching on the blouse. The texture of the fabric itself. The soft curving caress of her breast beneath. So near. The nearness of her made me tremble. The smell of her, the smell of clean, firm skin. All I would have had to do was incline my head forward a fraction of an inch and my lips would have kissed her through the fabric. Time was extinguished by the tension between giving in, feeling her breast against my mouth for what might be only a second before her mutiny, and staying in position, forever teased by the possibility. Teetering on the edge of an abyss, where to fall was to fall was to fall into bliss, bliss, bliss; but torment, too . . . And yet what if the action met not with outrage or rejection, but with a sigh of acceptance? Would that not be worth the risk? Would it not be worth the cost to remove the torment by attempting to consume it? To extinguish the flame by joining it?
For all of his wretched fumbling for words – I hope he didn’t fumble that way with her bra strap! – I could have defined his condition for him with one word: lust. Why, I had become a world-renowned expert on lust by then, seeing the problem first-hand from several dozen different positions. I could have helped Duncan, except he didn’t ask my advice; instead, he wrote it all down in his journal. (Not fair. I knew you would have advised me against it, and this I could not bear the thought of. I must say – I do appreciate you baring my soul in your afterword.)
I was destroyed by this. Destroyed. How can I describe the heaviness of her body next to me? The rich physicality of her, the smell of her skin, the way her body eclipsed my senses. She annihilated my dream of her – even flame too light a metaphor. Confronted by the reality of her, I was tormented by the urgency of a choice I could not make. I shuddered and drew back, so overcome with desire that I shivered and said nothing, even though an awkward pause had descended over our conversation, her gaze upon me.
Had Duncan taken lovers before Sabon? Rarely. He had no time for love with so much mucking about in underground tunnels ahead of him. I’ll tell you the distasteful truth: he lost his virginity to a prostitute the night he graduated from the Religious Institute in Morrow. (One begins to wonder if you really have my best interests in mind.)
I remember it quite well. She arrived at the Institute much earlier than Duncan intended, before I had left for my own quarters. He made her wait in the cloakroom while he finished getting dressed; I felt like asking him why he bothered.
She and I had nothing to talk about, although I looked her over as thoroughly as if she had been meant for me. She seemed as respectable as anyone from Sabon’s necklace of flesh, which is to say: not at all. Her blonde hair had streaks of brown in it, and her face was too pale. Her hastily applied make-up encircled her eyes with too much blue. She looked ghost-like, waif-like, her dress a size too big. She wore it bravely nonetheless, struggling not to be lost in the greens of it.
Duncan came out then, his entrance accompanied by an expression of such utterly pathetic excitement that I found myself forgiving him, almost envying him. How could I pass judgment knowing how alone he had been? . . . But that wasn’t all: as I closed the door, I saw them standing there in front of his wall of oddities, and the stare of recognition that passed between them, the alone meeting the lonely, carried with it a level of comprehension much deeper than anything I ever saw between Duncan and Mary; as deep as if they had been lovers for twenty years. (The truth was, you spent about as much time with that prostitute as you did with Mary over the years, so how could you know?)
The deliciousness of that moment, my intent almost exposed to Mary by my silence, lingers with me still, and I wonder if the consummation of this feeling could ever compare to the sheer, excruciating sweetness of this tension that binds me to her and her to me in this enclosed space of memory – my mouth so close to her blouse, which I must either kiss or tell her how I burn, and yet can do neither. There is no time in such a place, only thoughts and flesh transposed. The white of her blouse. The white of her beneath the white. And in my thoughts, where I can enslave everyone and everything, I cross the space between our bodies. I place my mouth upon her breast. She expresses neither surprise nor shock, but only sucks in her breath, moans, and slowly places her soft hands behind my head, drawing me into her, her hands so cool on my hair, her body soft soft soft.
I think I am going mad.
Mad? What did my poor, deluded brother know about going mad? I find it somewhat pathetic that my brother, the great historian, could not tell the difference between going mad and falling in love. The difference, as I know from bitter experience, is that when you go mad, you go mad utterly alone. Quite perfectly alone. That is the only difference.
How do I know this? I know this because one afternoon, while Duncan wrestled with an entirely different sort of madness, I entered my apartment, turned on the lights, and went into the bathroom, never intending to come back out again . . .