Shriek: An Afterword (23 page)

Duncan grinned. His teeth revealed an underlying rot, despite his apparent health: they were stained a gray-black along the gums.

“Not likely,” he said. “I’ve already sent you to every head doctor within three hundred miles. If you were going to do it again, you would have done it while listening to the seventh or eighth as he droned on about your disturbed dream life.”

“But I am fragile,” I insisted. “I’ve been without drugs for weeks. I’ve been getting lots of sleep. I’ve been eating well. I could suffer a mental collapse at any moment.”

{To see you that way, tired but whole, made me happy. A few months before I had had no idea if you would survive, or if you’d be the same person afterwards. It didn’t matter that you were thin or drawn, just that you seemed sane once more.}

“The city is falling apart, not you. The snow. Look—it’s snowing again.”

He was right—thin, small flakes had begun to drop out of the sky.

“It hasn’t really stopped snowing,” I reminded him.

“I think the gray caps…”

I rolled my eyes to cut him off. “You think they’re responsible for everything.” {Because they are, Janice!}

He shrugged. “Aren’t they?”

“Actually, no,” I replied. “I brought the snow with me from Morrow—the most heartless, boring, terrible place you could possibly have sent me to.”

Anger, rising up. It felt good. It felt right. It was the only thing I’d felt besides pain and sorrow in a long time.

“I saved your life,” he said. “You’d be dead otherwise.”

“Maybe I wanted to be dead,” I replied. “Did you ever think of that?”

“No,” Duncan said, shivering, “I don’t think you wanted to be dead. I think you didn’t want to feel. There’s a difference. And I know all about not wanting to feel.”

All the air went out of me with a single sigh. The truth was, it took too much energy to talk about such things.

A thought occurred to me. “How did you know I’d be here?”

Duncan grimaced, as if from some physical pain. {
As if?
Every time I moved, I could feel them all over me, burrowing into my skin.}

He looked away. “I have…friends…who tell me things. That’s all. It’s the same reason I found you in time.”

I laughed, said, “Friends! I can only guess what kinds of friends. Do they have legs or spores? Do they walk or do they float?”

Duncan stared down at the snow. Now I could see, where the light caught his cheek, the side of his neck, that a faint black residue, insubstantial as smoke, had attached itself to his skin.

“Why did you do it?” he asked me.

I stared at him, the anger boiling over. What could I say to him? Why should I say anything to him?

“What kind of answer would you like?” I asked him. “Would you like me to say the pressure was too much? That I couldn’t handle it? Do you want me to say I was under the influence of drugs? Do you want me to say my relationships all failed and I was lonely?”

My voice had risen with each new question until I was shouting. I stopped. Abruptly. While Duncan stared at me, concerned.

I realized I didn’t know why I had done it. Not really. Every reason I could dredge up seemed ridiculous. I had written lots of notes about it, true. All the doctors wanted me to write things down, as if they could pull it out of me through ink applied to paper. I wrote nonsensical sentences, pompous things like:

Or, on another scrap of paper I saved as a testament to my foolishness:

And, finally, dredging up the distant past:

The doctors had made me do it—had made me feel like a political prisoner of the Kalif, forced to recant my beliefs and spout pseudo-personal parody to regain my freedom. {And yet, Janice, some of it rings true. I wish I could say it didn’t.}

“I don’t need an answer,” Duncan said quietly. “I just thought I’d ask.”

But I needed an answer, so I could stop it from happening again. Why had I done it?

I don’t recall what I said to Duncan next, sitting in the freezing cold outside of Blythe Academy, students beginning their groggy paths across the courtyard to their classes. I don’t remember any of the rest of our conversation. {We talked about the past, Janice. We talked about what Bonmot had been up to at the Academy. You told me about Mom and the condition of that old mansion. I told you about the research I had my students doing on Zamilon. Nothing you needed to remember.} I’m sure it didn’t satisfy him. It didn’t satisfy me.

I could remember, however, the night of the attempt—a night that seemed to epitomize the parties, the drugs, the lack of direction, the stretched, unreal quality of my existence. The late, late nights merging into days, the black of the sky, the hunt for yet another bar.

I had blown half of my remaining money on what I now realize was a suicide banquet—so much food, so many bodies, so little restraint. The pale white of people in a corner of the room, in a writhing orgy of legs and arms and torsos. The leering smiles of the onlookers. The smell of wine, of rot, of decay, of sex. But it wasn’t enough for me, even then. We kept going
elsewhere.

We were in a café. We were inside a burned-out building. We were on the street, giggling under a streetlamp. It was all merging together into one place, one time. I didn’t know where I was. Sybel was there, then he wasn’t there, then he was.

Finally, we came to the steps of an abandoned church. Sybel stood on one side and David, the cipher I was sleeping with at the time, stood on the other. I floated between them, staring at the huge double doors of the church, the old oak bound in iron and carved with flourishes. I could hear people talking loudly inside.

“Did I pay for this?” I asked. It had become my standard question over the past few months.

“No,” Sybel said. “You didn’t pay for this. You didn’t like your own party.”

“You wanted us to take you somewhere else,” David said, an arm around my shoulders.

“From what I paid for?” I said.

Sybel laughed. “Yes, to something you didn’t pay for. And you definitely didn’t pay for this—this is a party sponsored by one of the new galleries.”

“And somewhere else is something I paid for?”

“We thought it might be fun to spy,” David added, ignoring me.

“In a church?” I said, incredulous, forgetting all of the blasphemous functions I’d sponsored inside even holier buildings.

David said, “It used to be for the Church of the Five Pointed Star, but they don’t really exist anymore.”

Obviously. The grass was high and the steps cracked with vines. The door was beginning to rot on its hinges.

“Lead the way,” I said, giving up.

Sybel pushed open the door and we walked inside, the two of them practically carrying me—into the cacophony of music, the swirl of lights. We blended in perfectly. Same clothes. Same attitude. Within minutes, while Sybel and David looked on, I was carrying on a conversation with a young male artist who had the kind of pale waif look I find irresistible. It was crowded. I had to shout. I didn’t know what I was shouting. I didn’t know who I was rubbing up against. Sybel and David tried to act as my bodyguards; I ignored them. I was babbling.

At some point, I lost focus and stopped talking, trying unsuccessfully to nod as the young artist who I really didn’t give a damn about rambled on about “the inspiration for my art.” I was standing on a stool by then. I don’t know who had provided the stool, but it gave me enough height to survey the crowd.

Off to the side, I could see the rival gallery owner, John Franghe, chatting up a couple of my clients, oblivious to my presence. I recognized darling Franghe’s hand gestures. I recognized his body language. The odd combination of fawning flattery and absolute authority. He had a glass in his hand and was obviously drunk. He kept putting his hand on the arm of the prettier of the two artists and squeezing it, giving her a quick glance to catch her eye. There was nothing artful about it.

At some point while watching, I fell off my stool. My head was full of nails. My thoughts were coiled and frightened. David and Sybel came to my aid, set me down at a chair beside a table, beside two old veterans of the art movement. Bodies were swirling around me. The texture of the table even seemed to swirl, to become a whirlpool of wooden grain. I could smell the beer, the drugs, the sweat of all of those bodies in such an enclosed space.

At some point, I realized that none of it mattered, that none of it meant anything. I hated what I saw—the corrosion of fame, the accretion of falseness, the misuse of sex and desire. A strange dread came over me. I was alone in that church. I did not know who I was, or how I had come to this. I had become an observer in my own life.

I sent David and Sybel off on a mission to ask the hosts to find more of my favorite mushrooms. As soon as they had been swallowed up by the crowd, I stood up and snuck out of the church, through those rotting oak doors.

Stumbling, drunk out of my mind, I made my way down to a dirty little club at the dock-end of Albumuth Boulevard. Through the murmurous sounds of the River Moth, right outside, I listened to an old singer that someone said had once been famous.

As one will, I quickly became close friends with everyone at the bar, but even as I sat there joking and drinking with them, in the dark, I knew I was all alone. I knew the singer realized this, too. He seemed to sing for me and me only. No one else paid attention to him. It was horrible and wonderful at the same time. He would never reach the heights he had once known. One day, the people in the bar might not even recognize his best-known songs. But he sang them with a kind of terrible defiance. It wore me out to watch him. The empty laughter of the bar wore me out. All of it wore me out.

I sat there smoking a mushroom someone had given me and looking at the singer, but really staring past him into the distance, the foreground a blur, with not a thought in my head other than the melody of the song, the voice of the singer.

You become what you pretend to be. I could pretend that I was pretending when it came to the New Art, but eventually I had begun to believe the lies that justified the excesses.

Slowly, over time, a thought snuck past the music and the voice: that I could never be as brave as that singer, that I could never sing old songs to people who didn’t care. {Though, ironically enough, some would say that is what you’ve wound up doing with this account.}

Is that a good reason? Would that have satisfied the doctors?

Because nothing else did.

I lied earlier, though. I do remember something else from my conversation with Duncan in the frozen courtyard. I remember that I smelled perfume on him. It brought me up short, changed the subject forever.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

He smirked and said, “Mary Sabon.”