Shriek: An Afterword (27 page)
Read Shriek: An Afterword Online
Authors: Jeff VanderMeer
I saw her with her parents at Blythe Academy once, surrounded by the controlled chaos that is the start of the spring semester. A spray of sudden greenery from the trees, the clatter of shoes on walkways and stairs as students—nervous and excited—tried to find their classes. As I passed by on my way to visit Duncan, one family caught my eye by their very stillness. They stood in the center of the courtyard and also at the center of a kind of calm. The girl stood, legs slightly apart, staring down at the ground, schoolbooks held carelessly in one hand, a pensive look on her face. Her parents stood like towers to either side of her, the space between them containing a daughter not quite belonging to the same world.
Their unlined, unremarkable faces expressed no great joy or sorrow, or none that I could discern, and yet I could feel a tension there; the presence of some overwhelming emotion. I almost felt as if I were a witness to some kind of ritual or ceremony. Was the girl’s head bowed in prayer? As I walked away, I turned to watch them, and it seemed as if they were receding from me at a glacially slow pace.
That must have been Mary’s first year at the Academy, and I find it interesting that even then I noticed her, before Duncan ever pointed her out to me, before I even knew who she was.
When I read Sabon’s biographical note in her various books, what I envision when I come across the sentence beginning “Her early interest in nature studies…” arises not from her gallery visit, but from that first glimpse: of twinned parents standing guard on either side of a daughter whose face is tilted toward the ground. Something about their wary stance still worries me now, even after my research has made of them more than silent statues.
In fact, my research has somehow lessened their pull on my imagination, for the facts do not particularly impress. {They impressed me!}
Given that David Sabon’s most important contribution to natural history consists of helping to edit a revised edition of Xaver Daffed’s classic
A History of Animals,
perhaps it would be best to simply note his presence and move on. However, his peculiar {dangerous!} attitude toward the gray caps, delivered in the form of speeches to many a meeting of the Ambergris Historical Society {smoky, jaundiced events punctuated by coughs, grunts, and unintelligible murmurings from octogenarian senilitians}, should be documented somewhere. Where better than an afterword?
David Sabon preached a
strain
of Nativism {otherwise known as “a good way to get yourself killed”}, although not quite the same one later popularized by Mary. David Sabon not only believed that gray caps possessed “no more natural intelligence than a cow, pig, or chicken” but that they should be treated “much as we treat other animals.” As the transcript for one memorable speech reads, “Gray caps should be used to support our labors, for our entertainment, and for meat.”
Although David Sabon later claimed that “and for meat” had appeared in the speech by mistake {transposed from a speech on the King Squid}, the cutthroat Ambergris newspapers had no qualms about printing headlines like
DAVID SABON RECOMMENDS SNACKING ON GRAY CAP BEFORE DINNER
and
NEW
“
ARCHDUKE OF MALID
,”
DAVID SABON
,
LIKES A NICE BIT O
’
GRAY CAP BEFORE BED
. Surely Mary Sabon, lone seed of a loon’s loins, became indoctrinated with her father’s attitudes at a very early age, setting the stage for her own irresponsible theories. {Perhaps so, but Mary always seemed embarrassed by her father’s activities.}
While David Sabon’s forebears included no one more distinguished than a barber in Stockton and a minor judge in Morrow, Mary’s mother, Rebecca Verden-Sabon, came from newly minted stock. Her father, Louis Verden, began his career as a jeweler but went on to illustrate a number of scientific texts, although his best work appeared in
Burning Leaves,
a creative journal he eventually art directed and to which I sometimes contributed when I had no work from Sirin. Verden also illustrated a series of paranoid {not paranoid enough} Festival pamphlets for Hoegbotton & Sons, including
The Exchange, Bender in a Box, Naysayer Mews, In the Hours After Death,
and
The Night Step
{all in collaboration with the darkly humorous, underrated writer Nicholas Sporlender, whom I once bumped into by mistake—underground, oddly enough}.
Rebecca became her father’s apprentice and eventually took over editorial duties at
Burning Leaves,
although not until my gallery had turned to dust and ash. Before that, she specialized in illustrations for advertisements or to accompany scientific texts. In some ways, it could be argued that Rebecca’s work for her daughter’s first book,
The Inflammation of Aan Tribal Wars,
gave her more exposure than all of her previous work combined.
Duncan’s parent-teacher conferences with David and Rebecca continued for several semesters. I have this rather humorous vision of Duncan in his office, talking solemnly with Mary’s parents and then, once he has smiled reassuringly and guided them out the door, frantically jumping out of his office window, on his way to a tryst with their daughter. {I honestly thought I was protecting her, and that she could make her own choices. After all, she was already a young adult. She knew her own mind.}
Apparently, the famed Naturalist suffered from a peculiar form of blindness: an inability to see anything under his nose unless it crawled or flew or swam or galloped, for that keen observer of the natural world never realized what Duncan and Mary had been up to until he was told by a third party.
“Thank you,” he’d said to Duncan. “Thank you for taking such good care of our daughter.”
And in his way he had, hadn’t he?
10
Mary and Duncan, Duncan and Mary. As with all utopias, especially those based on love, someone thankfully, always comes along to say, “No—this is not right. No—this should end.” Why? Because the true path Duncan always took to Mary’s window was the Path of Denial, a path with which I was familiar. For example, take my current situation. I have begun to run out of money, although the owner of this establishment doesn’t know it yet. He believes I just haven’t had a chance to go to the bank, what with all the typing. {Real life, intruding on the recording of real life. How odd.}
Besides, I’m akin to a curiosity—he makes a healthy living from letting loathsome types peek around the corner at me. “That’s Janice Shriek. She used to be famous.” Some slack-jawed gimp is peering from behind a glossy wooden beam right now. I am ignoring him—he will not receive even a sliver of my attention.
I do like the smell of beer and whiskey and smoke, however. I do like the busy times when they are all chattering away in there, happy as a bunch of click-clacking gray caps holding a half-dozen severed heads, as in “days of yore.”
Duncan only started coming here again in earnest after he fell out with Bonmot. When it all came crashing down, he called the Spore of the Gray Cap his home once more; again became the Green God of the Spore. Many a beer was consumed here. I wonder sometimes if Duncan ever came back during those happy-unhappy hours and sat looking at the corner, where all that can now be seen is a hole.
Now why would Duncan fall out with Bonmot? Could it have been over love? Possibly. If we turn to Duncan’s journal, to the entry where he recounts to Mary Bonmot’s fateful discovery along the Path of Remembering You, we shall soon find out. The ink was not yet dry on his grief when he wrote:
Glimpsed. Detected. Surprised. Held. Ensnared. Ensnarled. Entrapped. Captured. Stricken. No hope of understanding. He’d caught on, grasped, and comprehended, with no hope of acceptance. If I could make a fence of these words to keep him from us, I would, but it’s no use. It’s over. I am no longer a teacher. You are no longer my student. In a sense, we are released from all of it—the hiding, the sneaking around, the lying, the delicious forbidden feel of your lips against mine.
{There I go, romanticizing it—putting words between myself and the hurt. I disgust myself sometimes.}
I took the Path of Remembering You well after dark. I don’t remember anything about my trip, except the absent-minded scratches from a rose bush in the gardens and the frozen position of the stars. It was cold, and I was glad to pull myself up into your open window and into your smooth white arms. Your skin, as always, awakened my senses, and I trembled from the power of your eyes, the soft place at the base of your neck, the soap smell of you, the miraculous hollows on the inside of your thighs.
And, afterwards, intoxicated by the feel and scent of you, the taste of you on my hands, my lips, I swung happily back into the cold, certain I would see you the next night; even the sudden tight prickle on my left arm, my right foot, that presaged spore-pain only added a spark to my mood. The stars swam and spun, and the solid, cold buildings seemed to sway with this happiness in me that was you.
But, my love, no happiness ever went untested. No happiness ever lasted unchanged, untransformed. It doesn’t mean happiness has to end, just that it takes on new patterns, new shapes.
It happened by the willow trees where I first saw you, that flickering shiver of a glimpse, and yet that red hair like a fire burning through the trees. It was by those trees, along the path where I walked a happy man, that the stone table where I spent my lunch hours came into view. It lay at the very heart of the willows like a black cave, not a stone at all, and the dark green leaves of the surrounding bushes glistened with reflected light. And, my love, someone sat at that table, and even in that uncertainty, I knew who it was and all of the life left my gait. I could tell my happiness was about to change.
Bonmot sat at the table, dressed in his most formal clothes, as a Truffidian priest would on sacrament day at the Cathedral. Glittering robes, with gold thread woven through them. Even in the dark, they glittered.
I looked into that dark and I could not see his eyes. “Bonmot,” I said, “is that you, Bonmot?” Even though I knew already that it was him.
He said nothing, but motioned for me to sit beside him at the table. I didn’t hesitate, Mary—I sat next to him willingly. Any excuses about the cold, the lateness of the hour, would have been crushed by the weight of the stone and that gaze. So I sat and made a joke and remarked on the cold and said, “Should we have a midnight snack, then, instead of lunch?” and trailed off because throughout my nervous monologue Bonmot had said nothing. He stared at me with no expression on his face, the staff leaning against the stone bench, the medallion hanging around his neck on a silver chain. I clutched the table so hard that the stone abraded my fingers.
Now, finally, he spoke, each syllable unbearably clear against the cold night air. This is what he said, my love. I can’t forget it. I can’t sleep tonight because of it. He said, “It’s no use, Duncan. I know. Once I too had a secret that made every breath I drew a lie, and so it’s no use for you to talk of other things. Because
I know.
You have compromised your student, Mary Sabon.”
There was silence for a full ten seconds and then I began to talk. I could not stop talking. Every word was a denial of what he had said. Every word placed such a distance between you and me that it made me physically ill—and yet I did it because I thought it was the only way to save us. And so I babbled on—what was Bonmot talking about? How dare he? Didn’t he know me better than that? I had just been out taking a late walk. Didn’t he know I helped to keep boys
away
from female students? Didn’t he realize I was a colleague, a professional, a person who would never do what he accused me of? After so many talks in the gardens at lunch—so many wonderful conversations—how could he possibly consider—why, it was an outrage—why, I had been a model teacher—why, I was a published historian—I was—I was…and, finally, at some point, I realized that he had heard none of what I had said, and that his look of sorrow had transformed his face from granite to skin and flesh and bone. And I stopped talking. I looked away from him. My body shook. I could already anticipate everything he was about to take away from me, and I thought it meant the end. Really, The End.
He said: “There are no more lunches under the willow trees for us. You are no longer a teacher at this academy. I expect you to gather your things now and be gone before dawn. As for Mary, she will finish out the next two semesters and earn her degree, but if you ever set foot in this place again, she will be expelled in a very public way. I have had my fair share of scandal, Duncan. I will not let friendship or anything resembling it destroy my good works at this school. Good night, Duncan.”
I did not even notice when he left because I thought I had lost you. I thought those words meant not just the end of my career as a teacher, but the end of us. But now, as I tell you all of this, I realize it is not the end—it just signals a change. A change for the good. We’ve been desperate and in love, which can be a great thing. It lends an urgency to all we do and say. It means that we do not take lightly each other’s bodies or our hearts. It means we love each other fiercely and with no artifice between us.
But this is not the only kind of love we can have—it’s not the only kind of passion. What we have is a flame like your hair, but there’s another kind of excitement in the freedom to admire each other in public, without fear. There is a charge that comes from sharing our lives through more than just midnight trysts and frantic letters like this one. And this is why, finally, having lost everything tonight, I am still oddly hopeful, Mary. Mary. Your name is still such a revelation to me, your body always reminding me of the first time so that your touch makes me weak with the miracle of this thought: I am with Mary Sabon. I am loving Mary Sabon.
I am writing this by lantern light in my office. As dawn begins to gray the city, I can almost see your window from where I sit. The air is sweet and cool. I have two cases full of books and other personal belongings. In a few minutes, I will leave this academy, perhaps forever. I will leave only two things behind me: in my desk, for you to take when you will, that copy of Cadimon Signal’s
Musings on the Many Faces of Ambergris
that you so much wanted—it was supposed to be a birthday present—and this letter, protected by our favorite hiding place. Please, if you have read this far, don’t cry. Everything will be okay. I promise.
Please do not abandon me.
Love,
Duncan
Please do not abandon me,
he writes in this journal entry that awkwardly transitions into a letter that could have been written by a nineteen-year-old, which he rips out of his journal, signs, and leaves for her—only for it to return to him four years later to be reunited with its fellow pages. He did not tear out related pages and send them to her. He did not send her the page right after his tearful but triumphant farewell, the one that contained this passage: “I have lost one of my best friends. I have lost a friend because of my own stupidity. Who will understand now? Who will I be able to talk to?”
Who will understand now?
Here’s the heart of it, what began to eat at Duncan. He told Bonmot so many things—sometimes in abstract, sometimes nonspecific, but still with enough detail that Bonmot could respond with all of his training and intellect. Me, I was neither historian nor priest, neither artist nor subject of art. Mary? Too young, he must have known on some level. Fine for the physical, but not to discuss such mysteries with. {Not true, and unfair, and judgmental, and unworthy behavior, even from you. I did not discuss the underground, the gray caps, my disease with her to
protect
her. And, yes, because she was young, but not because I didn’t think she could understand—but because I was afraid I would scare her. That she would think me a crackpot, a false prophet, a madman.}
In fact, he did not tear out the
first
draft of his second page, which is identical to the second draft, except for the speech he attributes to Bonmot:
There are no more lunches under the willow trees for us. You are no longer a teacher at this academy. I expect you to gather your things now and be gone before dawn. As for Mary, she’s just a child. She is as much your victim as this academy. Have you ever thought how this might hurt her? And I don’t mean your status as her teacher, but you, Duncan, you in particular. How many obsessions can you sustain in your life? How many masters can you serve? Survive?
Did he suppress this part to save Mary from hurt, to protect Bonmot from her resentment? Or to make himself look better? {It doesn’t really matter
now
, does it? One would think you were more intent on defending Mary than destroying her. You should decide what your purpose is.}
I thought writing all of this down would help me place events in their proper order and context. Instead, the sequencing grows hazy. I stand at the base of the stairs at Martin Lake’s party, the scarlet imprint of my hand still warm on Mary’s face, about to respond to her careless words. What did I say? I’m not sure it matters anymore. The harder I focus, the faster the sharpness I desire and deserve dissipates, as if it all happened at the same time, or backwards, and we only now approach a beginning.
Is there any real reason, other than bad luck and ill-timing, that Mary and Duncan could not still be together? Is there any reason it could not have been Mary and Duncan that I walked toward down the stairs, the flesh necklace/noose undone before it ever formed, its pieces resolved into smiling, appreciative faces? The imprint of my hand on Mary’s face transformed into the loving touch of a sister-in-law? I might not be here now, the darkness of the ceiling muted only by the purple tiers of fungus that encroach at such speed. {No purple fungus ever grows with good intent in this city, Janice. You must have known that. It is a breed bred for spying, the source of myriad fragmented reports collected in the depths of the city’s underground passages.}
But words will never persuade the past. Bonmot did fire Duncan. It did signal the beginning of the end {in one sense, but only in one sense} for my brother and Mary.
I remember that Bonmot told me about it during one of our sessions in the Truffidian Cathedral. I didn’t have unbridled sex anymore, so I had, as you may have guessed, turned to “religion.” That didn’t last, either, because it had little to do with faith, but at least it gave me an excuse to spend time with Bonmot. We were standing in the very place where he later died, among the pews closest to the door.
“Janice,” he said. “I’ve had to do something. I hope you won’t hate me for it.”
“I don’t think I could hate you, Bonmot.”
“You might. I’ve had to let Duncan go. Because of Mary. I think you already know what I mean?”
For a second, it was very quiet. I was shocked. Duncan hadn’t had a chance to tell me. I hadn’t seen him in days.