Shriek: An Afterword (24 page)

Mary Sabon. Sabon and her necklace of liars. Where to start?

Sybel was right—the New Art was dead. But it wasn’t just the New Art that had died.

Before my “accident,” I had lived almost exclusively within the secret history of the city—a history of moments, not events, a history that vanished as it came and lived on only in the shudder of remembered ecstasy. This secret history descends {transcends} through the bedrooms of a hundred thousand houses, in the dark, through the tips of our fingers as we learn that our bodies have a thousand eyes to feel with, a thousand ways to learn the true meaning of
touch.
From foreplay to orgasm, from first touch to last, everything we know is in our skins—this secret history that so few people will be part of. We don’t talk about this history, although it made us and will make us and is the only way to get as close as we can to each other: an urgent coupling to close the space, to experience a pleasure that—excuse me as I stumble into this rapturous gutter {can we stop you?}—is on one level being filled or filling, but is also so much more. This is where I was and what I lived for before the accident. Afterwards, I gave it all up, even though it wasn’t the problem.

I traded my secret history for another type of history altogether. I saw the backs of a lot of heads, sang a lot of songs, and had my fundament put to sleep by the hard wood I was sitting on on more than one occasion. Chanting, reading ancient books, fingering beads on a necklace much more humble than Sabon’s. Always worried that this new dependency might end as the old one had, but willing to take the chance anyway.

But, in some great confluence of chance and destiny, as my erotic star fell, Duncan’s rose, and shone all the more passionately, as his ardor—unlike mine—was directed toward one person: Mary Sabon.

I already knew Mary, although I did not realize it at the time. Duncan had talked about her for several months before the details of his attraction to her became clear. There was a potentially brilliant student in his class, he told me at lunch one day while Bonmot stared at both of us from beneath his bushy eyebrows. A student who absorbed theory like a sponge and immediately applied it to her own interests. A student who could, moreover, write, and write well. It was so obvious that this student should be in a more advanced class that at first he was undecided as to whether to let her go to some other school, but, finally, could not bring himself to suggest it.

“She does not have the necessary social maturity,” I remember him saying. “She’s still young. To go to the Religious Academy in Morrow, with much older students,” he said, shaking his head. “She needs more time. Extraordinary student.”

Bonmot frowned at that, gave Duncan a look that I didn’t understand.

“Sometimes,” he said to Duncan pointedly, “it’s better to let them go. Better for the student and better for the teacher.”

Duncan shook his head again. “No. She needs more time.”

I should have known from the way he refused to use her name. Thank God I missed the courtship. Thank God I was trying to die.

For Duncan had, while hounding me from hospital to ward, ward to doctor’s office, been displaying all the conjoined lust and random stupidity of a rabbit. He “succumbed to temptation,” as he put it in his journal, when, one afternoon while tutoring Mary privately after class, his hand crossed that space between how-it-is and how-it-might-be…and found purchase on the other side.

“Tell me you don’t love me and I will be glad to escape this fever, this vision,” he wrote in his journal, and much else I cannot tell from the torn pages. “I’ve never been more naked,” he tells her, apparently forgetting the night I scraped the fungus from his body, surely his most naked moment.

She did not leave him alone in his nakedness, for as he succumbed, and kept succumbing, without thought of the link between bliss and torment, she reciprocated, and continued to reciprocate. {Truly the driest account of making love I’ve ever read.} What promises they made to each other in those first few sweet, fumbling hours, I cannot tell you. Duncan has ripped those pages from his journal in such brutal fashion that even the pages surrounding that night are shredded—mangled words, mutilated phrases, quartered sentences. No one can read between lines that no longer exist.

Did he tear them out from anger later, or love before? {I’m not telling.} Did he premeditate their slaughter, or was it a crime of passion? For that matter, why would he rip out
those
pages as opposed to—for example—the pages about the gray caps’ infernal machine? With the pages lost, and Duncan with them, we can only guess. {And yet, dear sister, here I am, editing your work, even after “death.” Some things never change.}

All I have left as proof are a few short, unintentionally humorous letters from Sabon to Duncan, and from Duncan to Sabon—shaken out of Duncan’s journal like dead moths.

Standard nattering romantic fare, uttered from the lips and pens of a thousand lovers a year, although usually not in such a staccato point-counterpoint of romance/lust, romance/lust. {Not fair! That was early on, Janice! When I remained acutely aware that I was older and she was younger, and she worried that she was too young and I was too mature. So we each tried to shed our age, to reverse the expected. It might have been foolish, but it reflected concern, affection, care, for the other. Besides, we used to hide these letters in dozens of places inside Blythe and on the grounds. Some never reached the intended recipient. Of those that did, I only kept a few of hers, and not all of mine were returned. Sometimes she was lustful and I was loving. Sometimes I would look out across the Academy from my office and see nothing but a world of potentially hidden love letters, all for me or by me.}

Following that first contact and conquest, Duncan offered up a marvelous spectacle to an unsuspecting potential audience of students, teachers, administrators, and five different orders of monks, none of whom would have sanctioned the holiness of lust between teacher and student if they’d been awake to see it. For more than two years, Duncan slunk, sneaked, crept, crawled, climbed, and slithered past various obstacles to be with his beloved. The logistics of these lust-driven maneuvers were perhaps as complex as Duncan’s perilous wanderings belowground, and almost as dangerous. If caught, Duncan would be fired and barred from teaching elsewhere in the city.

Having already exhausted the careers of respectable historian and pseudonymous writer-for-hire, I would have thought Duncan would be wary of ruining a third. And in a way, I guess he was—he took great care to be precise. His meticulousness took the form of a map to guide him in his strategic penetrations of Sabon’s room. Each method of penetration had elements to recommend it. Some involved the excitement of speed, while others, in their lengthy explorations, yielded pleasures of a different kind. All, however, flirted with discovery; there would never be any safe way to enter Sabon’s room. “Neither in the morning nor the night,” Duncan wrote with a kind of unintentional poetry, “neither at noon nor at sunset.” {Bonmot thought it showed a new level of devotion to the Academy, the way I would often trade the comforts of my apartment for a sad barren room on the premises.}

Complicating matters, Academy rules dictated that all students change rooms every semester, presumably to make trysts more difficult, although two or three girls got pregnant every year anyway. Therefore, Duncan had to readjust his perambulations every six months or so.

Duncan used three routes to Sabon’s room during her sixth semester at the school. These routes constitute “love letters” in the purest sense of the term. Indeed, in his madness, in his missives to Sabon he even gave them names:

He alluded to them at the time, even seemed proud of himself, but I didn’t discover the full sad weight of his obsession until I read those descriptions in his journal. My favorite phrase is “rushing through shrubbery as I throb for you” {allow a love-besotted fool
some
latitude}. As Sabon wrote in her response to this letter, “I throb for you, too, dear-heart, especially rushing through the shrubbery.” Sarcasm? Or gentle mockery? When, exactly, did Sabon’s intent become treacherous? {Never, really. It was an incidental treachery.}

All rushing throbbery aside, this was dangerous work for Duncan. He used the paths not according to his mood, but according to the by now well-known and ritualistic bumblings of Simon and Jonathan Balfours, the two sixty-year-old night watchmen, twins of {in} habit{s}. He would also factor in the arrival of guests who might conceivably tour the academy at night and the random nocturnal walks of Bonmot. {However, by far the most dangerous person in all of Blythe Academy was Ralstaff Bittern, the gardener. What a tough old buzzard! Stringy as a dead cat, and twice as ugly. He had it in for me from the day I accidentally stepped on one of his precious rose bushes. He’d lie in wait for me at night, positioned strategically behind a willow tree, where he could see the entire courtyard. Many a night, I dared not brave his gaze.}

Indeed, Duncan came close to discovery every few weeks. The first time, Duncan, using the Path of Naked Necessity and disguised as a priest, rounded a corner and came face to face with a fellow Naked Necessitator: a third-year boy, as petrified as Duncan, the two of them sneaking so noisily through the gravel that neither had heard the other coming.

Duncan wrote later:

What Duncan did, cynically, was volunteer for “tryst duty” as much as possible, which meant that he joined the ceaseless wanderings of the old night watchmen, supposedly on the lookout for those lean and compact boys, their dark wolf eyes shining, who might defy curfew in hopes of bedding a female student. {I performed a valuable service, whether hypocritically or not. And much of the time, frankly, we caught female students sneaking into the boys’ rooms.} This helped, but there were still unwelcome encounters with unexpected teachers or priests at unfortunate times—“Why, I was just checking the window to make sure it was securely locked”—and pricked buttocks from sudden jumps into rose bushes to avoid Bonmot, whom Duncan could not lie to. {The crushed bushes only made the gardener more relentless. Bittern complained to Bonmot several times, but Bonmot was not ready to believe him.} As his fellow history professor Henry Abascond once said to Duncan at a meeting of teachers, “A taste for the night life, have you? A taste for the dark, the shroud?” in typically pompous Abascond fashion. {And he wasn’t joking about it, much as others thought he was referring to my area of study. I thought for one paranoid moment that he and Bittern had formed a conspiracy to ruin me, but there was only one genuine conspiracy: my conspiracy to ruin myself.}