START AGAIN. START OVER. How am I supposed to get through this part? I could ignore it, I suppose, but it wouldn’t go away – it would be a huge, gaping hole in this afterword. A few snapped golden threads. An unrealized opportunity. Did I become more of Duncan’s life then, or did I become a shadow to him?
Release my breath. Breathe in again. Imagine a courtyard with stone benches and willows and the scent of honeysuckle and sweet, good conversation.
I remember Bonmot asked me about death once when Duncan was off grading papers. I don’t recall the context, or who had broached the subject.
‘Are you afraid of death?’ he asked me.
‘I’m afraid of not knowing,’ I said. ‘I would like to know. I would like to know when I am going to die.’
Bonmot laughed. ‘If you knew, you might relax too much. You might think, “I’ve got twenty years. Today, I don’t need to do a thing.” Or you might not. I don’t know.’ He took a bite of his sandwich.
‘Duncan’s not afraid of death,’ I said.
Bonmot looked at me sharply. ‘What makes you think that?’
‘The way he courts it. The way he puts himself in the path of death.’
Suddenly, I felt as though Bonmot was angry with me.
‘Duncan is afraid of death, trust me. Sometimes, I think he is more afraid of death than anyone I’ve ever met. Do you understand why I say that?’ (I’m not afraid of death – I’m afraid of dying too soon.)
At the time, I didn’t. I didn’t understand at all. Now, I do understand. It is all too clear now.
A courtyard. Stone benches. Willow trees. Honeysuckle.
Bonmot: ‘You needn’t be afraid of death. If you believe, you will come back.’
Me: ‘Believe in what?’
Bonmot: ‘Anything. It doesn’t matter what.’
But I’m not there. I am here, and I know that we die. We die and we don’t come back. Ever. Why should it matter that I tried to hasten the process – to go further than Duncan, to beat him to the beginning of the race, to fall between the glistening strands and keep on falling through the darkness? (I had my watchers on you by then. I would never let you fall between the strings – me, yes, but not you.)
I’m sorry. I’ve tried so hard to stick to a sophisticated style, something I thought Duncan would recognize and appreciate, even if he is gone forever. But the truth is, I can’t keep on this way. Not all the time. The green glass glares at me. The hole in the floor is opening. I defy anyone under these circumstances to smile and dance and prattle on as if nothing had gone wrong.
We die. We die. It shrieks at me from an empty cage. Let my future editor, strange beast that he is, earn his wages and edit me. Edit all of me. Edit me out if necessary. By then I won’t care. The flesh necklace can glitter with its scornful laughter and, laughing, shiver to pieces.
But where was I? It feels strange to type the words ‘But where was I?’ but it helps orient me when I am truly lost. There’s a loud gaggle of musicians – some might call them a band, but I wouldn’t – out there now, and although I glimpse only frenetic slices of them, the sound distracts me. Sometimes, I wonder if the lyrics infiltrate my own words, change them or their meaning. Sometimes, I wonder if my words fly off the page and into their mouths, to infiltrate their lyrics, change them as they are changing me. Surely this is how Duncan became misunderstood. (No, my dear sister – I became misunderstood because everyone was terrified of understanding me.)
So if you can hear me through all of this noise, lean close, listen, and I will tell you a kind of truth that once made sense to me and may again, in time, undergo that startling transformation from madness to the purest form of sanity. If you are feeling low. If you are so full of poison that you can find no light within you. If everywhere you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt. No matter what the so-called experts might say, a suicide attempt will clean you right out. True, it will also squeeze from your body the last remnants of the last smile, the last laugh, the last scrap of hope, of any small, shy, but still-bright part of you that ever cared about anything. Nothing will remain. Not religion. Not friends. Not family. Not even love. A carcass picked clean and lying forgotten by the side of Albumuth Boulevard. A hollowed-out statue. A wisp of mist off the River Moth.
But that doesn’t last – how could it? – and at least it drains the poison so that even in your isolation from yourself, you feel . . . gratitude. Which fades in turn because at the end you don’t even feel numb, because to feel numb implies that at some point you were not numb, and so you feel like you don’t really exist any more – which is the truest sort of truth: after a suicide attempt, you don’t really exist any more, just the images of you in other people’s eyes.
Later, as I stared at the blood welling up from an accidental pen puncture (how could they let you have a pen, with all the money I was paying them?!), absentminded and remote from the pain, I was amused at how concerned doctors get about such things; one would have thought a gardening convention had blossomed around the fertile flower bed of my body for all the quick consternation they displayed at this pinprick.
Which belonged to a different world than my poor wrist, sliced to the bone. I could see the bone wink through at me the night I did it, as if it shared the joke in a way the blood could not. The blood wanted only to escape, but the good, solid bone – it ground against the knife – made me reconsider, if only for a moment, the bravery, the honesty, of pain. Craven, quivering flesh. Foolish blood. And the bone winking through. I wish I could remember what it said to me. I remember only fragments: the roar of blood as it raced away drowned out the murmur of the bones. Besides, I was preoccupied: I was laughing because my hand flopped off the end of my wrist in a way I found hilarious. I was shaking so hard that I could not hold the knife to cut my other wrist. This was simply the most stunning miscalculation I had ever made! I flopped around like a half-dead fish, unable to finish what I had started, but had no one to help me out. Even funnier – and I almost tore myself apart with laughter over this one – I was not enveloped in a warm hum of numbness. Not so lucky, no. The pain blazed through me as intensely as if my blood were boiling as it left me. So intense my laugh became a scream, my scream something beyond even the vocal cords of an animal. Death, it seemed, wasn’t all that much fun after all, especially when I became vaguely aware that someone had smashed in the door and was carrying me out of the apartment, and he was weeping louder than I was . . . (That was me, Janice. When I saw you like that, your eyes so blank, blood everywhere, I couldn’t take it. Nothing affected me like that. Not the underground. Not the disease taking over my body. But you, crumpled in the bathtub, half-dead. You looked as though, without ever going underground, you had suffered all the terrors to be found there.)
So you can imagine my amusement over the doctor’s concern about my thumb prick. The pricks should have been more concerned about where I found the pen – and where they had made me stay, and whose company I’d been keeping.
For you see, the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital is not what I would call the most hospitable of accommodations. I will not be recommending it to my friends and family. I will not be tipping generously. Indeed, I will not even be stealing the bath towels or the little soaps from the shower. (I did think about putting you in Sybel’s care – having him take you to live with the Nimblytod Tribes amid the thick foliage of tall trees. You would drink rainwater from the cups of lilies and feast on the roasted carcasses of songbirds. But then I remembered the casual nonchalance with which Sybel provided anyone who asked with the tinctures/powders/substances of their choice and, knowing of your addictions, I could not take the chance. Thus, you wound up in the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital instead.)
Strange light, strange life, to end up in a place like that: an ivy-shrouded fortress of cruel stone and sharp angles, and gray like the inside of a dead squid, gray like a gray cap, gray like a thunder-storm, but not as interesting. Little windows like crow-pecked eyes, not even round or square sometimes, but misshapen. Had former inmates chiselled at them, attempting to escape? If you looked at the gray stone up close, you could see that it wasn’t just stone – a type of gray fungus had coated those walls. It fitted over the stone like skin; you could almost see the walls breathing through their fungal pores.
Smells? Did I mention smells? The smell of sour porridge. The smell of rotting cheese. The smell of unwashed others. Stench of garbage, sometimes, wafting up from the lower levels. Oil, piss, shit. All of it covered by the clean smell of soap and wax, but not covered well enough.
Intertwined with the echo of smells came the echo of sounds – screams so distant behind padded walls that I sometimes thought they came from inside my own head. The panting of inmates like animals in distress. A low screeching warble for which I could never find a source.
The hallways were like corridors to bad dreams. They rambled this way and that with no order, no coherence. You might find your destination, or you might not. It all depended on luck. I remember that once I turned a corner, and there was a dandelion growing out of a clump of dirt on the floor. After that, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the lower levels were vast swamps or brambles, through which inmates thrashed their way to open space. Once, I swear I even saw a gray cap in the distance, running away from me towards a doorway. But I was not particularly stable; who knows what I really saw? (You’re exaggerating. It wasn’t that bad. I wouldn’t have sent you there if it was a torture chamber.)
All this – this grand design, this palace – was run by a man they called only Dr V, as if his last name were so hideous or so forbidden that even saying ‘Dr V’ aloud might lead to some arcane punishment. I had the impression that the man’s name was very long. All I know is, I never saw him, not once, during my stay in those glorious apartments, those rooms fit for a king, or at least a rat king.
But as bad as the facilities might have been, I found my fellow inmates more disturbing. My new best friends were, predictably, all depressed, suicidal people. If you want to make a suicidal person even more depressed, keep them cooped up with several other suicidal people, that’s what I always say.
My friends included Martha of the Order of Eating Disorders, who looked like a couple of wet matchsticks sewn together with skin; a writer who would not give his name and thought he had created all of us; Sandra, who suffered through experimental treatments, involving street lamps and an engine from a motored vehicle, that could have cooked a couple of hundred dinners; Daniel, who had reason to be devoid of hope – his deformity had fused his two legs into one stump that fed into his head, which had stuck to his shoulder in an unattractive way – and, of course, Edward.
Edward was different from the rest, and he stayed away from us at first. I would see him in the mornings, hunched in a corner. Short, dressed all in gray, with a large felt hat. Bright, dark eyes that peered from a pale, slack face. His hands had long dirty nails that looked as if they might snap off at the slightest suggestion of a breeze. A stale, dull, rotting smell came from his general direction, which I later discovered was due to the mushrooms he kept about his person. Sometimes, he made little chirping sounds, akin to the cricket that sang to me from outside my cell when the moon was full.
Edward, according to the experts, thought he was a gray cap. His misfortunes included losing his job as a bookbinder for Frankwrithe & Lewden; falling in love with a woman who could not love him back; the recent death of his grandfather, his only living relative; and not being taken seriously. (This last the fate of many of us.) He’d swallowed whole handfuls of poisonous mushrooms. The landlady had found him in time, but only because she stopped by to enquire about the lateness of the rent. He should have been grateful, but he was not.
In Edward, I seemed to have found someone who was distant cousin to Duncan. (I’d have been much like Edward if I’d let my obsession eat me. But I didn’t want to be a gray cap, Janice – I wanted to learn about them.) I told Edward – with dull sunlight seeping through the dusty fungal filigree of the dull windows, in that dull common room with dull faded carpets and dull faded paint covered with lichen, while we and the other dull inmates sat in our stupid dull deckchairs – pulled off a Southern Isles vacation ship? or a Moth River ferry? – waiting to start another dull hopeless session of rehabilitation with a woman so cheerless and uninteresting that I cannot even conjure up a shadow of her name – I told him about the singing of the blood, the murmuring of the bone, and he agreed it sounded like a much superior method for a suicide attempt. The mushrooms he had taken had made his body fall asleep. A knife wound, on the other hand, spoke to you in a myriad of voices. It told you how you really felt. He nodded like he understood. I nodded back as if I knew what I was talking about.
Edward only spoke to me using his chirps and whistles, and the occasional drawing. He always drew tunnels – crisscrossing tunnels, honeycombing tunnels, tunnels without end. He used black chalk or charcoal on butcher’s paper. That was all we had in there to chart our creativity.
‘I know,’ I told him. ‘I know. You want to go underground. Like my brother. My brother’s been underground. Trust me. You don’t want to go there.’
Chirp, chirp, whistle. Huge eyes glistening from beneath his hat and his cowl.
‘No, no – trust me, Edward. The world above ground holds more than enough for you, if you give it a chance,’ I replied, even though I didn’t believe a word of it.
Some days I made fun of Edward. Some days I thought he was more in love with the whole idea of the gray caps than my brother. Some days I thought he was my brother. (I was never crazy, just committed.)
One day, on an impulse, I silenced his chirping with a hug. I held him tight, and I could feel his body shudder, relax, and melt into that embrace. I heard him whisper a word or two. I could not understand the words, but they were human. He did not want to let go. Something inside of him didn’t believe in his own insanity. And suddenly, I found myself holding him tighter, and crying, and not believing in my insanity, either.
Soon enough, though, the guards pulled us apart, and we each returned to our separate madness.
OVER TIME, the days took on a sameness in that place. A crushing gray sameness. The only relief came in the form of Sybel, who visited two or three times. He let me know how my reputation fared in the outside world – not well – and brought with him ‘get well soon’ cards from Sirin, Lake, and several others. Sirin had written his using letters cut from the wings of dead butterflies, while Lake had scrawled a sketch and an indecipherable message that appeared to be an attempt at a pun that had gone horribly wrong.
Startling proof of my former life running a gallery for unstable artist types, and yet that whole life seemed unreal, as if I had never lived it. I felt as if I were receiving messages from foreign lunatics.
‘When are you coming back?’ Sybel asked as he held my hand. I could see real sympathy in his eyes, not just pity.
I shrugged. ‘It depends.’
‘On what?’ he asked.
‘On when Duncan’s money runs out. Where is Duncan anyway?’
‘I don’t know. I think he’s gone underground.’
The truth was, Duncan never visited me. I never asked him why. I didn’t want to know. (I was too angry with you. And I had pressing matters to attend to underground.)
‘How’s the gallery?’ I asked Sybel.
‘As well as can be expected with Lake gone and you . . . recovering.’
‘Recovering. A nice word for it.’
‘What word would you like me to use?’ Sybel asked. A glint of anger showed in his expression. It was the only time I angered him, or the only time I saw his anger.
‘Any other word, Sybel,’ I said. ‘Any word that conveys just how fucked-up I am.’
Sybel laughed. ‘Just look at your sympathy cards. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last.’
I STAYED IN that place for five months, until it became clear that I needed additional help, the kind that could not be provided at the hospital. At least they realized I would not try again. That madness was over with, although I had nightmares: their hunger was savage. They ate like wild animals, ate mushrooms and worse, drank and drank, fornicated in front of me, all against the backdrop of a city mad with fire.
Two days before I left that place for a succession of other places, Edward told me he loved me as we played another ludicrous game of lawn bowling in the tiny interior courtyard around which the building curled like a half-open fist – me unable to hold the ball because of my traitorous wrist, him short-sighted and uncoordinated. Our legendary games lasted for brutal hours of incompetence while Martha, Daniel, the Nameless Writer, and Sandra watched with a kind of disinterested interest. This was the first time Edward had used recognizable human speech.
Applying the doctor’s advice like a universal salve for any ill, I told Edward the truth: at the moment, I had no capacity for any kind of love. I did not love him back. I didn’t love anyone back. I wouldn’t have loved myself back if I’d walked past myself on a deserted street . . .
The day before I left, Edward used a variation on the Janice Shriek Method to try to kill himself. He stood in his corner as usual, his hands hidden as he cut at his wrists with a piece of metal he’d loosened from the underside of one of the deck chairs. He slowly rubbed the skin and flesh off his wrists until the blood came and his body trembled with the anticipation of stillness.
He stood there for at least half an hour, propped up by the wall, the blood hidden by his gray robes. He must have been very determined. I imagine the blood sang softly to him, comforting him. So I imagine. The truth must have a harder, sharper edge. It certainly did for those of us who had not noticed him in his corner, killing himself.
Luckily, or unluckily, an attendant discovered Edward’s sin before it could claim him.
I swear I felt no guilt over the incident. It hurt terribly. No, it didn’t. I cried for hours. No, I couldn’t. He had bright, wide eyes, and he had a mind inside his body, a mind that could feel. I didn’t have anything inside me. My troubles looked so trivial next to his. Would it have hurt so much to say I loved him when I didn’t? I couldn’t even feel anger. Or despair. No despair for me today, thank you. Just an endless cool desert inside, and a breeze blowing and the sun going down, and this sense of calm eating at me. I only knew him for a few months and yet it hurt me terribly that memories of me would most likely be triggered every time he saw the scars on his wrists. (Do you get away with it that easily, Janice? Don’t I have to forgive you, too? I was mad at you for a long time after that. There I was, lost in the tunnels under the city for days at a time, risking my life, and yet I never gave up the hope you abandoned all too easily.)
As it was, I never saw Edward again, or learned what happened to him or any of the other patients in that place. I had just been passing through.
SO I LEFT the hospital, but not for home – oh no. Duncan seemed to feel mental illness could only be cured by a great deal of travel at the disembarkation from which various ‘experts’ poked and prodded various parts of your brain, only to prescribe more travel for the cure. From one end of Ambergris to the other, with Sybel my unwilling steward (you have no idea how much I was paying him – he should have been willing) I spun like some poor gristle-and-yarn shuttlecock in a lawn-tennis game.
Let me try to remember them all. Dr Grimshaw tried some gentle water-shock treatment that left me with a nervous tic in my left eye. Dr Priott hypnotized me, which only made my tongue feel dry. Dr Taniger tried night-aversion therapy, but this only made me sleepy. Dr Strandelson tried to make me believe that a life of severe and perfect nudity held the answer to my problems. Some tried religion, some science. None of them convinced me for even a moment. I rarely said anything. When I did, it was just to talk about Edward, the pretend gray cap.
When my brother had exhausted the restorative talents of over two dozen Ambergrisian quacks, he and Sybel contrived to transport my morbidly bored carcass to Morrow by the reincarnation of the locomotive engine: Hoegbotton Railways.
Hoegbotton & Sons, with their customary twinned avarice and industry, had unearthed vast coal deposits in the mountainous western reaches of the Kalif’s empire, waged a private war to wrest the disputed area from the control of the Kalif’s generals, and then, through a crippling act of sheer will, ripped the old steam engines from their death-like slumber in Ambergris’ metal graveyards, refurbished them, straightened and de-rusted them by various un-arcane means, and set them back on track. Like me, they had been resurrected. Like me, they resented it.
The view from the pretty panelled windows reminded me of a thousand respectable landscape paintings laid side by side and brought to sudden life. I amused myself by rating each landscape against the next until my vision blurred – sobbing uncontrollably and staring down at the re-welded floors of the compartment while wondering what rats and hobos had lived there before the exhumation, what myriad battles over bread or scraps of clothing or glints of loose change had taken place, and how much dried blood had been painted over, and was that a scar the workmen had been unable to remove in the shape of the gray caps’ favourite symbol, and what was that stain/vein of green along the lower right side of the seats opposite – some fungus, some mould, some rot – and so just generally composing a long sentence in my head to keep out the emptiness, the sadness, and the plain old ordinary human embarrassment of what had occurred: waking up from my attempt to find Duncan and Sybel looking down at me with a mixture of pity and sorrow. (My look was not pitying – I was furious with you. Perhaps that is why I sent you to so many specialists. Here we had helped save you, and all you could do was scowl and scream at us. Do you wonder why we didn’t visit much?)
IN MORROW I nearly died of boredom and the cold. Morrow is such a dry, dead town, a city of wooden corpses that talk and move about, but quietly, quietly. Morrow could never kill a soul with casual flair, as could Ambergris. Not instantly, snuffed out with a cruelty akin to the divine. No, Morrow would grind you down between its implacable wooden molars and create out of the resulting human-coloured paste an acceptable, placid citizen who would marry, settle down, have children, retire, and die without a flicker of a flame of passion to warm/warn you on a cold winter night. In Morrow, a noise amongst the sewer pipes could never inspire fear, only conjure up a plumber. In Morrow, Duncan would have had to build tunnels or go mad and, sent to Ambergris to recuperate, have fallen in love with Her. No wonder Morrow was one of Mary’s favourite cities; you’re more than welcome to it, Mary – it deserves you.
Menite Morrow had always been – eternal heretics in the eyes of the Truffidians – and I soon discovered that the goal of the great, frozen Menite soul was to trudge on towards some ill-defined transition from unaccountable boredom to the responsible boredom of a transcendental bliss that would be enjoyed in the next life. Every doctor there was sensible to a fault, and not a one could help me because none of them had ever been where I had been. Relief came only in small doses; the bracing sense of embarrassment when Cadimon Signal, one of Duncan’s more ancient former instructors, visited me: I could feel real warmth flood my face.
‘Good,’ Cadimon said. ‘Shame is a good thing. It means you are alive, and you care what other people think.’
Funny, I thought it was an involuntary reaction.
Another thaw quickly followed my bout of embarrassment: my curiosity returned as well, mostly due to frequent glimpses of the minions of Frankwrithe & Lewden from the window of my guarded room in an ice block of a hotel. With their sinister red-and-black garb, their aggressive sales tactics, their posters pounded into posts with straight nails, proclaiming forbidden books for sale – and their practised street fights, their marching in closed ranks – they seemed better suited for Ambergris. Where indeed they were destined, in time. They were preparing for the war – first with the ruler of Morrow and then anyone further south who might get in their way.
One time I even imagined I saw L. Gaudy watching his underlings from the shadow of an awning, smoking a pipe, nodding wisely. I wondered as I watched them at work if the town irritated them in the same way it irritated me. It made sense that they had to acquire Ambergris, if for no other reason than to escape Morrow. (Even then, I am sure, the emissaries of Hoegbotton & Sons haunted the streets, gliding through anonymously, eager for details, gossip, and trade.)
After two weeks of this foolishness, Duncan’s attention wandered, no doubt due to Sabon’s soft charms. The details of his well-intentioned plans for my imprisonment and rejuvenation became fuzzy and indistinct – as blurry as windows weighed down with sleet. I escaped from between the bars of a logic suddenly lost or non-existent: doctor’s bills unpaid, a nurse given no follow-up orders, a forgotten key languishing in a ready lock . . .
. . . and stepped out into the miserly heat of Morrow’s sunrise, savouring and favouring my freedom. I had a sharp ache in the right wrist to remind me of my iniquities, and not a sign of a ticket home from my dear darling brother. (The nurse stole it, as I’ve told you dozens of times since.)
As I was lost, so too the light that lingered seemed lost as it stole gingerly across the snow in tones of dappled gold. It crept up my legs, purred its warmth across my face. Revealed: fir trees, two-storey wooden houses, belching factories, thoroughfares full of hard-working hard-living quack psychologists. Morrow. I tried to love her in that last glance before I set off for the docks, a pathetic suitcase in hand. But failed. The light had revealed two truths: I was free, and rather than return directly to my former life, I had decided to visit my mother . . .
HERE’S A TALE FOR YOU . . .
Once upon a time, a woman decided to tell a story about how she tried to kill herself. Her brother saved her at the last second – and then sent her north to be dissected by various disciples of empirical religions. Until one day, when her brother’s attention wandered, she escaped, and made her way south, back to her mother’s home in the fabled city of Ambergris. She felt so hollow inside that she could no longer bear to think of herself as ‘I’.
The bitter cold of the north followed her south to Ambergris. She could see her breath. The drone of insects faltered to an intermittent click of surprise, a sleep-drenched distress signal.
She first saw her mother’s house again through a flurry of snow, flakes sticking to the windshield of the hired motored vehicle. As they lurched down the failed road that led to the River Moth and her mother, the driver cursing in a thick southern accent scattered with northern cold, the dark blue muscles of the river came into view, and then three frail mansions hunched along the river bank amongst the tall trees. The river was silent with cold and snow.
The mansions were silent, too: three weary debutantes at a centuries-long ball. Three refugees of a bygone era. Three memories.
The force and pull of the past glittered from the wrought-iron balconies, from the gardens sprinkled with snow. The faded appeal of the weathered white roofs that disappeared as the vehicle drove nearer, even the slender, hesitant windows reminding her of the tired places she had just left, with their incurable patients, their incurable boredom . . . the same lived-in appeal as the unstarched dress shirts her father used to wear, the white fabric coarse and yellow with age.
They drove through the remnants of fairyland – the frozen fountains on the brittle front yards, the pale statuary popular decades ago, the ornately carved doors with their tarnished bronze door knockers – until the vehicle came to a rest half-mired in snow, and for a heartbeat they watched the quiet snow together, she and the driver, content to marvel at this intruder: a strange incarnation of the invasion the Menites had long promised the lascivious followers of Truff.
Then, the moment over, the woman who had undergone a reluctant resurrection, exhumed while still living, paid the driver, picked up her suitcase, opened the door to the sudden frost, and trudged up the front steps of her mother’s house. The driver drove away but she did not look back; she had no inclination to make him wait. She had resolved to stay in that place, and in her present state of mind she could not hold alternatives in her head without her skull breaking loose and rising, a bony balloon without a string, into the fissures of the cold-cracked sky. What if? had frozen along with the rose bushes.
Her mother’s house. What made the middle mansion different from the other two aside from the fact that her mother lived there? It was the only inhabited mansion. It was the only mansion with the front door ajar. Icicled leaves from the nearby trees had swept inside as if seeking warmth, writing an indecipherable message of cold across the front hallway.
An open door, the woman thought as she stood there, suited her mother as surely as a mirror.
She stepped inside, only to be confronted by a welter of staircases. Had she caught the house in the midst of some great escape? Everywhere, like massive, half-submerged saurians, they curled and twisted their spines up and down, shadowed and lit by the satirical chandelier that, hanging from the domed ceiling, mimicked the ice crystals outside as it shed light that mingled in a delicate counterbalance with the frozen leaves.
Even there, in the foyer, the woman could tell the mansion’s foundations were rotting – the waters of the Moth gurgled and crunched in the basement, the river ceaselessly plotting to steal up the basement steps, seeping under the basement door to surprise her mother with an icy cocktail of silt, gasping fish, and matted vegetation.
Having deciphered the hollow, grainy language of the staircases, the woman strode down the main hallway, suitcase in hand. The hallway she knew well – had seen its doppelgänger wherever her mother had lived. Her mother had lined both sides with photographs of the woman’s father, father and mother together, grandparents, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends of the family, followed by paintings in gaudy frames of ancestors who had not had the benefit – or curse – of the more modern innovation. Most relatives were dead, and the others the woman hadn’t seen for years.
She could feel herself progressing into a past in which every conceivable human emotion had been captured along those walls, frozen into a false moment. (The predominant expression her brother would later point out, whatever the emotion behind it, was a staged smile, the only variation being ‘with teeth’ or ‘without teeth’. Perhaps, he would say to her later, parenthetically, outside the boundaries of frozen fairytale-isms, that she should understand the main reason he didn’t like to visit their mother: he had no wish to draw back the veil, to exhume their father’s corpse for purposes of reanimation; wasn’t it bad enough that he died once?) Soon, it was difficult not to think of herself as a photograph on a wall.
The woman found her mother on the glassed-in porch that overlooked the river, her back to the fireplace as she sat in one of the three plush-velvet chairs she had rescued from the old house in Stockton. The view through the window: the startling image of a River Moth swollen blue with ice, flurried snowflakes attacking the thick, rise-falling surface of the water, each speck breaking the tension between air and fluid long enough to drift a moment and then disintegrate against the pressure from the greater force. Disintegrate into the blue shadows of the overhanging trees, leaves so frozen the wind could not stir them.
Her mother watched the river as it sped-lurched and tumbled past her window, and now, from the open doorway, her daughter watched her watching the river as the flames crackled and shadowed against the back of her chair.
The daughter remembered a far-ago courtyard of conversation, a question posed by a gravelly voiced friend of her brother: ‘And how is your mother? I know all about your father. But what about your mother?’ The glint of his eye – through the summer sun, the crushed-mint scent from the garden beyond, and she, with eyes half-closed, listening to his voice but not hearing the question.
Her mother. A woman who had collapsed in on herself when her husband died, and was never the same happy, self-assured person again. Except. Except: she had provided for them. She just hadn’t cared for either of them.
The woman had not seen her mother for five years, and at first she thought she saw a ghost, a figure that blurred the more she focused on it. Wearing a white dress with a gray shawl, her mother sat in half-profile, her thin white hands like twin bundles of twigs in her lap. Smoke rose from her scalp: white wisps of hair surrounding her head. The bones of her face looked as delicate as blown glass.
The daughter could see all this because she was not actually in that room in the past, but in another room altogether, and as she typed she could see her own reflection in the green glass of the window to her left, since she had always been the mirror of her mother, and now looked much as her mother had looked, sitting in a chair, watching the river tumble past her window.
The daughter stood there, staring at her mother, clearly visible, and her mother did not see her . . .
Dread trickled down the woman’s spine like sweat. Was she truly dead, then? Had she succeeded and all else been a bright-dull afterlife dream? Perhaps she still lay on the floor of her bathroom, a silly grinning mask hiding her face and a bright red ribbon tied to her right wrist.
She shuddered, took a step forward, and the simple touch of the wooden door frame against her palm saved her. She was alive, and her mother sat in front of her, with delicate crow’s feet at the corners of her wise pale blue eyes – the mother she had known her whole life, who had tended to her ills, made her meals, put up with youthful mistakes, helped her with her homework, given her advice about boys and men. Somehow, the sudden normality of that revelation struck her as unreal, as from a land more distant than Morrow or the underground of Ambergris.
The woman dropped to her knees, facing her mother, saw that flat glaze flicker from the river to her and back again.
‘Mother?’ she said. ‘Mother?’ She placed her hands on her mother’s shoulders and stared at her. As if a thaw to spring, as if a mind brought back from contemplation of time and distance, her mother’s eyes blinked back into focus, a slight smile visited her lips, her hands stirred, and she wrapped her arms around her daughter. Her light breath misted my cold ear.
‘Janice. My daughter. My only daughter.’
(What is it about distance – physical distance – that allows us to create such false portraits, such disguises, for those we love, that we can so easily discard them in memory, make for them a mask that allows us to keep them at a distance even when so close?)
At my mother’s words, a great weight dropped from me. A madness melted out of me. I was myself again as much as I ever could be. I hugged her and began to sob, my body shuddering as surely as the River Moth shuddered and fought the ice outside the window.
IT WOULD BE NICE to report that my mother and I understood each other with perfect clarity after that first moment of affection, but it wasn’t like that at all. The first moment proved the best and most intimate.
We talked many times over the next two weeks, as she led me up and down the rotting staircases in search of this or that memory, now antique, in the form of a faded photograph, a tarnished jewellery case, a brooch made from an oliphaunt tusk. But while some words brought us closer, other words betrayed us and drew us apart. Some sentences stretched and contracted our solitude simultaneously, so that at the end of a conversation, we would stand there, staring at each other, unsure of whether we had actually spoken.
I fell into rituals I thought I had abandoned years before, arcs of conversations in which I chided her for not pursuing a career – she had rooms full of manuscripts and paintings, but had never tried to sell them. For me, to whom creativity came so hard – each painting, each sculpture, each essay a struggle, a forced march – the easy way in which our mother created and then discarded what she created seemed like a waste. (Which begs the question, Janice: why didn’t you sell her paintings in your gallery? It wasn’t just because she didn’t want you to have them – they also weren’t very good.) She, meanwhile – and who could blame her? – chastised me for my lifestyle, for abusing my body. She had not missed the blue mottlings on my neck and palms that indicated mushroom addiction, although I had inadvertently kicked the habit in the aftermath of my attempt.
And so I slowly worked my way towards talking about the suicide attempt, through a morass of words that could not be controlled, could not be stifled, that meant, for the most part, nothing, and stood for nothing.
One day, as we watched the River Moth fight the blocks of ice that threatened to slow it to grimy sludge, we talked about the weather. About the snow. She had seen snow in the far south before, but not for many years. She sang a lullaby for the snow in the form of a soliloquy. At that moment, it would not have mattered if I were five hundred miles away, knocking on the doors of Zamilon. Her gaze had focused on some point out in the snow, where the river thrashed against the ice. The ice began to form around my neck again. I could not breathe. I had to break free.
‘I tried to kill myself,’ I told her. ‘I took out a knife and cut my wrist.’ I was shaking.
‘I know,’ she said, as casually as she had commented about the weather. Her gaze did not waver from the winter landscape. ‘I saw the marks. It is unmistakable. You try to hide it, but I knew immediately. Because I tried it once myself.’
‘What?’
She turned to stare at me. ‘After your father died, about six months after. You and Duncan were at school. I was standing in the kitchen chopping onions and crying. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t crying from the onions. I stared at the knife for a few minutes, and then I did it. I slid down to the floor and watched the blood. Susan, our neighbour – you may remember her? – found me. I was in hospital for three days. You both stayed with a friend for a week. You were told it was to give me some rest. When I came back, I wore long-sleeved shirts and blouses until the marks had faded into scars. Then I wore bracelets to cover the scars.’
I was shocked. My mother had been mad – mad like me. (Neither of you were mad – you were both sad, sad, sad, like me. I didn’t know Mom tried to take her own life, but thinking back, it doesn’t surprise me. It just makes me weary, somehow.)
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘it isn’t really that important. One day you feel like dying. The next day you want to live. It was someone else who wanted to die, someone you don’t know very well and you don’t ever want to see again.’
She stood, patted me on the shoulder. ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. You’ll be fine.’ And left the room.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I did both.
Did I believe her? Was it true that you could leave your old self behind so easily? There was an unease building in me that said it wasn’t true, that I would have to be on my guard against it, as much as Duncan was on guard against the underground. (You misunderstand me – I embraced the underground. It fascinated me. There was no dread, only situational dread – the fear that came over me when I clearly did not fit in underground, when I thought the gray caps might no longer suffer my presence.)
AFTER THAT, we avoided the subject. I never discussed my suicide attempt with my mother again. But we did continue to talk – mostly about Duncan. Duncan’s books. Duncan’s adventures. Duncan’s early attempts at writing history papers.
We shared memories we both had of Duncan. Back in Stockton, sometimes, after breakfast, Duncan would sit by Dad’s side and scribble intensely, a stern look on his face, while Dad, equally stern, wrote the first draft of some paper destined for publication in The Obscure History Journal Quarterly. Mother and I would laugh at the two of them, for Dad could not contain the light in his eyes that told us he knew very well his son was trying to imitate him. To become him.
It seemed safe, to talk about Duncan in such a way. Or at least it did, until I discovered my mother had one memory of him I did not share with her.
Something ‘your father would have been able to tell better,’ she said. We were in the kitchen preparing dinner – boiling water for rice and preparing green beans taken from the deep freezer in the basement. Outside, the river stared glassily with its limitless blue gaze.
‘You know,’ she said. ‘Duncan saw one when he was a child – in Ambergris. Your father went there for research and he took Duncan while I took you to Aunt Ellis’ house for the holidays. You can’t have been more than nine, so Duncan was four or five.’ (Yet I remember this trip as if it had happened this morning.)
‘What do you mean he “saw one”?’ I asked.
‘A gray cap,’ she said, snapping a bean as she said it.
The hairs on my neck rose. A sudden warm-cold feeling came over me.
‘A gray cap,’ I said.
‘Yes. Jonathan told me after he and Duncan came back. He definitely saw one. Your father thought it might be fun to go on an Underground Ambergris tour while in the city. They still offered them back then. Before the problems started.’
‘Problems.’ My mother had a gift for understatement. The tours to the tunnels beneath the surface stopped abruptly when the ticket seller to one such event popped downstairs for a second, only to run screaming back to the surface. The room below contained no sign of the tour guide or the tourists – just a blood-drenched room lit by a strange green light, the source of which no one could identify. Much like the light I write by at this very moment. (Apocryphal. Most likely, they closed up shop because they were losing money due to their poor reputation. The gray caps have often been bad for certain types of business.)
‘They bought their tickets,’ my mother continued, ‘and walked down the stairs with the other tourists. Your father swears Duncan held onto his hand very tightly as they went down into a room cluttered with old Ambergris artifacts. They went from room to musty old room while the tour guide went on and on about the Silence and Truff knows what else . . . when suddenly Jonathan realizes he’s not holding Duncan’s hand any more – he’s holding a fleshy white mushroom instead.’
Our Dad stood there, staring at the mushroom, paralyzed with fear. Then he dropped it and began to run from room to room. He was shaking. He had never been so scared in his entire life, he told my mother later. (Where was I? One minute I was holding my father’s hand. The next . . .)
He started to shout Duncan’s name, but then he caught a blur of white from the next room over. He ran into the room, and there was Duncan, in a corner, staring at a gray cap that stood right in front of him, staring right back. (I was staring at a gray cap. Just as my mother said. I wish I knew what happened between those two points in time.)
‘It was small,’ my mother said. ‘Small and gray and wearing some sort of shimmery green clothing. There was a smell, Jonathan said – a smell like deep river water trickling through lichen and water weeds.’ (It smelled like mint to me. It opened its mouth and spores came out. Its eyes were large. I felt a feeling of unbelievable peace staring at it. It immobilized me.)
Our father screamed when he saw the gray cap – and he knows he screamed, because the other tourists came running into the room.
But it was as if Duncan and the gray cap were deaf. They continued to stare at each other. Duncan was smiling. The look on the gray cap’s face could not be read. (Later, I became aware that we had stood there, watching each other, for a long time. At that moment, in that moment, it seemed like seconds. I felt as if the gray cap was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand what it was saying. I don’t know why I thought that – it never made a sound. And yet that’s the way I felt. I also felt as if I had been somewhere else part of the time, even if I could not remember it. Somewhere underground. I had a taste of dirt and mud in my mouth. I felt dirt under my fingernails as if I’d been digging, frantically digging for hours. But, later, when I checked them, my fingernails were clean.)
Then, as the other tourists entered the room, two things happened.
‘First, the gray cap pulled a mushroom out of its pocket. Then it blew on the mushroom, softly.’ A thousand snow-white spores rose up into Duncan’s face. ‘And then the gray cap disappeared.’
The gray cap, my father said, melted into, blended in with, the wall and wasn’t there any more. Although he knew this couldn’t have happened, although he knew there must be something – a secret passageway, a trapdoor in the floor – to explain it . . .
Duncan, awash in the milk-white spores, turned at the sound of his father’s voice – the sound of which he could finally hear – and smiled so broadly, with such delight, that our father, for a moment, smiled back. (It’s true. When the gray cap disappeared, a feeling of utter well-being came over me, and of wonder. Again, I can’t say why. I don’t know why. I was too young to know why. The gray caps and the underground have rarely since provided me with anything approaching a sense of calm.)
‘Jonathan took Duncan to the doctor right away, but he couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Duncan was the same as he ever had been, even if Jonathan wasn’t. Jonathan was shaken by what had happened. It even changed the nature of his research. Suddenly, he became interested in The Refraction of Light in a Prison instead of the rebellion of Stretcher Jones against the Kalif. The Refraction of Light led him to the monks of Zamilon, and from there to the Silence. (Much as it led me there. The key may still be in Zamilon, but not at this time.)
‘I never told you because I didn’t know how to explain it. It sounded absurd. It sounded dangerous.’
They never found anything wrong with Duncan, although they took him to doctors frequently over the next year. Gradually, they forgot about it, buried the memory alongside other memories because, in their hearts, it terrified them. (There were several times I thought about telling you, Janice. I would open my mouth to tell you and the image of the gray cap standing silent in front of me would come to me, and somehow I couldn’t say anything. After a while, it was no longer possible to tell you without it being clear I’d kept it from you. I still don’t know why I felt such a compulsion against telling you. Was I protecting you? Was I protecting myself? I was so young, perhaps I just couldn’t express what I’d seen.)
‘What terrified Jonathan the most,’ my mother said, ‘was not the gray cap, or the spores, but the happy smile on your brother’s face.’
The beans were in the pot. The rice was on the boil.
I asked, ‘So Duncan wasn’t changed by the event? No nightmares? No insomnia?’
My mother shook her head. ‘Nothing like that.’
She paused, put her hand to her throat, her gaze distant. ‘There was one change, although I’m sure it was just that he was growing up. A year after he came back, he began to explore the drain tunnels near the house. Before that, I remember he hated dark places. But then he just . . . lost the fear.’ (Is it possible my encounter had been an invitation? That the point had been to invite me to explore?)
Old mysteries, brought home to me in a new way. I kept thinking back, trying to remember my impressions of Duncan at the age of four or five. There was precious little. I remembered him smiling. I remembered him blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, and the time I made him cry by pinching him because he’d pulled one of my dolls apart.
My mother’s story gnawed and gnawed at me, even though I could not see the greater significance of it. (What were you meant to see, do you think? That somehow I’ve been an agent of the gray caps my entire life? What, exactly, are you trying to say, Janice?)
Suddenly, it no longer seemed so safe to talk about Duncan. For the first time, I felt the urge to return to Ambergris, to my gallery, to my life. So I left the very next day, surprising myself as much as I surprised my mother. Even by then, though, we had slowly grown apart, so that I am sure that she, like me, in that awkward moment by the front door, with the motored vehicle waiting, thought that five years until my next visit might be no great hardship.