Shriek: An Afterword (25 page)

Of course, nothing lasts forever, least of all desperate, ridiculous sexual melodrama, and Duncan would prove no exception to the cliché. But that day was as yet far off. In the meantime, Duncan reveled in his love for Sabon—you could see it in his distant enthusiasm at our lunches in the courtyard: a brightness to his eyes, a sheen to his skin that was impervious to rainy days or scholarly disappointments {or the more sympathetic interpretation, that it was the effect of the fungi}.

Still, I noticed that Bonmot scrutinized us both with a certain suspicion, no matter how pleasant our conversations. With me, I believe he was just worried—looking for signs of a despair that might lead me to again cut my wrists—and with Duncan, searching for something hidden that Bonmot could not quite, for all of his wisdom, figure out. {I am sure that if not for my secret studies, he would have found out about Mary much sooner. But rumors that I snuck around at night had, to his mind, more the feel of hidden tunnels and underground depths than of secret assignations with students. My prowess, in his eyes, was the prowess of research and obsession.}

I did not meet Sabon until ten months after I returned to Ambergris. Duncan did not seem eager for me to meet her—perhaps he was afraid Mary would know he had confided in me about their relationship, even if inadvertently; perhaps he was afraid something in our conversation might give him away to Bonmot. For whatever reason, for a long time I continued to hear about Sabon secondhand, through the mirror of Duncan’s love for her.

For this first part of their relationship, I cannot bring myself to blame Sabon, not for their mutual seduction. She eventually ruined my brother in many different ways, but at first she made him see a different life—as if all these years there had been another Duncan Shriek, or the possibility of another Duncan Shriek, completely different from the person I knew as my brother. Because they could not be seen together, they devised complex ways of meeting in public. Mary would invite Duncan to one of her parents’ parties along with all her other teachers, and then seek Duncan out for a “fatherly” dance or conversation.

Similarly, Duncan began to make the most of social functions at the Ambergris Historical Society by inviting his students to attend for “educational” reasons. Most students would not show up, conveniently leaving Duncan required to escort Mary for the evening. {You can sneer all you want, Janice, but that
was
the primary purpose. In fact, I also met other people there who were useful to my career. I remet James Lacond there, for example, long before he broke with the Society. You are suggesting I was not just incompetent, but actively sabotaging myself, which is not the case. It was coincidence that Mary sometimes appeared at those events, which were so public that there could be no chance of an assignation.} It was through his attendance at these events that he had his first real conversations with James Lacond, an active member of most of Ambergris’ cultish “research” collectives—the beginning of a friendship that would affect Duncan in many ways.

Duncan discovered that he didn’t even mind dancing and that, “with a drink or two in me,” as he puts it in his journal, he could “endure chitchat and small talk.” He began to put on some weight, but it looked good on him, and his new beard, prematurely shot through with gray, gave him a scholarly and respectable appearance. He discovered that people liked to hear him talk, liked to hear his opinions, something that had only been true at the very beginning of his career. Suddenly, he saw a future in which he might actually settle down with Sabon.

Duncan’s journal expresses no guilt for his AHS deception, or the many other deceptions “forced” upon him over the next two years. {My journal could not express such guilt—after all, my journal is an inanimate object, although you are doing a fine job of forcing it, by tortuous miscontext, into confessions it would not otherwise make.} Nor does Duncan’s journal offer much in the way of gray cap research over the next two years. Sabon might have inspired him, but she also took up much of his time. {True, but by then I had other professors unwittingly carrying out my research.} Sabon had so altered his perceptions that a journal entry from the time reads:

But just because Duncan no longer believed that his life depended on the gray caps did not mean the gray caps no longer believed in Duncan, as he would soon find out.

The sounds from the ceiling have stopped. The sounds from the hole leading underground have not stopped. Curiously, I am calm. I’m somehow glad, even though I can see Mary’s necklace of admirers and the marble staircase, can see her books hovering like crows or bats in the green shadows of the ceiling. Age does that to you, I think. It makes it impossible to have a memory that is not colored by the future.

Still, during that time so many years ago, Duncan and Mary’s romance progressed into its second year, randy and light-of-foot, although punctuated by awkward—but not fatal—events, such as a very tense parent-teacher conference during which Duncan almost fainted when Mary’s father jokingly asked, “So what are your intentions with our daughter?”

Meanwhile, my gallery never fully recovered from my absence. Those artists who had not stolen their art from my walls deserted me in more subtle ways: a parade of apologetic or sniveling excuses is how I see them in my mind, usually delivered by proxy, the artist in question too cowardly or embarrassed to tell me in person. My little dance with death had been only one of several extreme actions that year: half a dozen writers and artists had died, either from their excesses, or from being murdered by rivals during the Festival. {Which, mercifully, you’d missed during your travels; I wish I had missed it as well. I had to work devilishly hard to protect the Academy from the gray caps that year.} The authorities, namely the family Hoegbotton, thought it wise to lay the blame for such maladies at the {comatose, oversexed, overdrugged} feet of the art community. Excess was “out,” a new austerity—inappropriate for our great, debauched city, but completely appropriate to my new condition—was “in.”

My suicide attempt had only placed an emphatic exclamation point on a year ruinous to all who enjoyed good, clean fun. {You forget the now-pervasive influence exerted by Frankwrithe & Lewden, which led to many of these mishaps. You should, historically, see this as an action by Hoegbotton & Sons against F&L, not against your friends.}

So my gallery stuttered on in an altered state, reduced to selling reproductions of reproductions of famous paintings, and unsubtle watercolors of city life created by people who would otherwise have made honorable livings as plumbers, accountants, or telephone salesmen.

Nearly broke, I had to find other sources of income. From time to time, Sirin still gave me article and book assignments—“My dear Janice,” he would say, “come work for me full-time,” a perilous agreement if ever there were one. I also received the leavings of Martin Lake, who sometimes gave me—as Sybel later put it—“the financial equivalent of a mercy fuck” in the form of preliminary sketches for paintings that Lake’s new gallery, which Sybel had fled to when my fortunes faded, was selling for many times what I’d ever made off him. All in all, my attempt had killed me.

But it hadn’t killed me physically—not as Duncan was being killed physically. That second year of his romance with Mary Sabon coincided with a definite worsening of his fungal disease. Sometimes it left him so weak and drained that he could not teach his classes—although this did not mean that if his disease went into remission by nightfall he would not take the Path of Hypocrisy right up to Mary’s window. These symptoms varied with the seasons, as shown by a brief examination of the “symptom lists” he kept:

Duncan was convinced he had contracted these symptoms as a result of his encounter with the Machine. I was convinced the “violent mood swings” had nothing to do with his fungal affliction and everything to do with a malady known as “Mary Sabonitis.”

Luckily for their relationship, which otherwise might have been punctuated by episodes more suited to a madhouse or a sick house than an institution of learning, the symptoms came and went like the summer storms that had always plagued Ambergris. {Ironic, that. Because now there is no slower turning to the world than with this disease, this gift in flux, in flow. I might as well be turning into a tree, putting down roots. The yearning in my flesh calls out to the yearning in the ground. Nothing can be made that is not a part of me, that will not eventually become me. “I want for nothing and hunger naught,” as some crackpot old saint named Tonsure once said before they buried him underground.}

Admittedly, his disease sometimes brought with it great joy, no doubt also caused by the fungi. An episode during the second year of his affair with Mary best describes the extremity of effects that his body could force from him:

Do I believe him? I’ve seen too much not to. But, then, Sabon saw exactly what I saw, and she couldn’t be bothered to take the leap. She decided, somewhere along the way, to ignore, to miss, to go blind, to
see through.

After Duncan had recounted some of these “episodes” to me, it was hard to laugh when he began to sign his infrequent postcards, “Your Brother, the Fungus Garden.” {But I was—I was a transplanted fungal garden torn from the subterranean gardens of the gray caps. As the seasons came and went, I was the end of the journey for a great exodus, a community of exiles that colonized me and tried to observe the same seasonal rituals—to bloom and ripen and die in accordance with their ancestry. They were homesick, but they made do with what they had: me. And I, poor sap, was in turn able to experience with each season some new explosion of fertility, selfish enough in my pleasure to endure the counterbalanced pain—and to only hope that when in remission my affliction was not contagious. In this way, I remained connected to the underground even though absent from it. One day I will dissolve into the world, will become a gentle spray of spores, will settle on the sidewalk and on trees, on grass and soil, and yet still
be
—watchful and aware.}

Perhaps more disquieting was that, unknown to me, each week brought Sabon’s flesh necklace, and thus Duncan’s final humiliation, closer.

I had an intimation of the future when, two years into her relationship with Duncan, Sabon finally visited me at my gallery, probably at Duncan’s request. {No—she decided to do that on her own. You were my only family besides Mom. She was curious. It’s your guilt showing through here—that you weren’t supportive, that you were so negative despite never having met her. It strikes me now, Janice, that as much as we talked over the years perhaps we never talked about the right things.} You might well ask why she waited so long, why I waited so long, but I think she must have realized how deeply I disapproved of my brother sleeping with a student. {I’ll grant you this now: you seem to have a sixth sense for impending tragedy. At the time, it just seemed like pettiness on your part.}

By then, I had begun to shed even my less respectable artists. But my gallery still maintained an aura of the respectable. I kept it Morrow-clean and replaced each departed painting with some admirable imitation. After that strange cold winter, the weather in Ambergris had been near-perfect for more than eighteen months. Good weather meant more walk-ins, and more walk-ins meant more sales. A few more tourists and I might again be as green as mint-scented, treelined Albumuth Boulevard.

So at first I saw Mary Sabon as only another potential buyer. Besides, from Duncan’s feverish descriptions, I would have expected someone taller, wiser, more voluptuous. She was short but not slight, her frame neither fat nor thin, and from her shiny red hair to her custom-made emerald-green shoes, from the scent of perfume to the muted red dress that hung so naturally off of her shoulder, she radiated a sense of wealth and health. {She
dressed up
for you, Janice, in her Truffidian Cathedral best.}

She nodded to me as she came in and wandered from wall to wall, glancing at the paintings with nervous little turns of her head. Her hands, held behind her back, clutched a purse. She had not yet attained the artful guile of poise and positioning that would someday make her the center of attention. The necklace had not yet begun to form.

“Can I help you?” I asked, half rising from my desk. I remember wondering if I might interest her in one of the pathetic landscapes that had come to fill my walls—indeed, whether the listed prices were high enough to match her wealth. I had, at that time, some masticated and mauled views of Voss Bender Memorial Post Office—popular since Lake’s success—as well as some nicely watered-down panoramas of the docks and the River Moth. All made respectable by the nearby presence and divine quality of two Lake sketches of fishermen cutting apart the carcass of a freshwater squid.

She turned to face me, smiled, and said, “I’m Mary Sabon.” Despite her nerves, she carried herself with an assurance I have never had. It rattled me.

“Mary Sabon,” I said.

She nodded, looked down at her shoes, then up at me again. “And you, of course, are Janice. Your brother has told me a lot about you.” And laughed at her cliché.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” I said, as if surprised to learn my own identity. “So you’re Sabon,” I said.

“Indeed,” she replied, her gaze fixed on me.

I said: “Do you know that what you’re doing could get Duncan fired by the Academy?”

It just came out. I didn’t mean to say it. Ever since the Attempt, I haven’t had any tact. {Ever since? You’ve never had any tact!}

Sabon’s smile disappeared, a look of hurt flashing across her face. In that hurt expression I saw a flicker of something from her past coming back to haunt her. I never found out what it was.

“We love each other, Janice,” she said—and
there’s
a surprise, a shock. Something unexpected brought to the surface by the clacking of keys against paper: she’s just a girl. When we met that first time, she was just a girl, without guile. I am ashamed of something and I’m not sure what. She was young. I was older. I could have crushed her then, but did not know it. {Dead. It’s all dead. It’s all gone. Senseless.}

“We love each other, Janice,” Mary said. “Besides, your brother is a historian. He teaches for now, but he’s working on new books…. And, besides, I won’t be a student forever.”

I think now of all the things I could have said, gentle or cruel, that might have led away from a marble staircase, a raised hand, a fiery red mark on her cheek.

I sat down behind my desk. “You know he’s sick, don’t you?”

“Sick?” she said. “The skin disease? The fungus? But it disappears. It doesn’t stay long. It isn’t getting worse. It doesn’t bother me.”

But I could tell it did bother her.

“Did he tell you how he got the disease?” I asked.

“Yes. He’s had it since he was a boy, when he went exploring. You know—BDD. It comes and goes. He’s very brave about it.”

Never mind the magnitude of Duncan’s lie; it was the BDD that caught me. All the breath left my body, replaced by an ache. Before Dad Died was something between Duncan, my mother, and me. {And yet here you are, sharing it in a manuscript that might be read by any old drunk off the street.}

“Are you all right?” she asked.

There must have been a pause. There must have been a stoppage, a shift of my attention away from her.

“I’m fine,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “As long as you know about it.”

Yes, the fungus left his skin for weeks, sometimes months, but when it returned, it was always more insidious, more draining of his energy. How could I possibly explain to her about Duncan’s obsession with the underground, especially now that he swore it no longer obsessed him?