Shriek: An Afterword (19 page)

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. As the Antechamber tossed a clot of earth on Bonmot’s coffin, Duncan stared at it, 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 only people keeping me aboveground. 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—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 ardor, and the birds stopped in midair to witness the innocence that was Duncan’s lust, and the gray caps came aboveground 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”:

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 firsthand 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.}

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 blond hair had streaks of brown in it, and her face was too pale. Her hastily applied makeup encircled her eyes with too much blue. She looked ghostlike, waiflike, 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?}.

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….

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 if 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 of 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 anymore—which is the truest sort of truth: after a suicide attempt, you
don’t
really exist anymore, 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?!}, absent-minded 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 thunderstorm, but not as interesting. Little windows like crow-pecked eyes, not even round or square sometimes, but misshapen. Had former inmates chiseled 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 fit 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, toward 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 of 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. 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, kin 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 inquire 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 cousins with 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 deck chairs—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 just 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.