Shriek: An Afterword (35 page)

Still, it could not go on forever. The city was in real danger of becoming less than a city, of becoming rubble and black smoke and piles of bodies—of becoming twenty different cities that only loosely formed a country called “Ambergris.”

Duncan sensed this, but could not really articulate it. {I anticipated it as a feeling deep in my ever-changing body, but could do nothing about it.}

“We’re near the end,” he said one evening eighteen months into the war, as we sat in the smoldering remains of the Café of the Ruby-Throated Calf. It was more or less neutral ground now that most of it had been destroyed by mortars. At least we could count on no one trying to kill us as we sat there, protected by overturned tables and a few strategically placed shrubs. The service was terrible, but, then, all the waiters were dead.

Duncan was pale but whole, face dark with dirt, a flurry of cuts rubbed red. We were drinking a couple of bottles of Smashing Todd’s Wartime Stout, which we had found—miraculously whole under a fallen, splintered door—in an abandoned store.

“Near the end?” I prompted.

“Yes,” he said, and took a long pull on his beer. “We’re near the end. Something has to give. Someone has to blink. To change. It can’t go on this way. It can’t.”

“It’s done a fine job of going on this way for a while now, Duncan,” I reminded him. I took a sip of ale. It was warm, almost hot, but the bite of it still tasted good.

“Maybe I mean
I
can’t go on this way,” he said.

“You mean, being paid in eggs, cauliflower, and milk?” I said.

He laughed, but I knew he was thinking about Mary, always Mary.

How to express the overlap between war and blissful domesticity? For this was the time of Duncan’s purest happiness—when, for those few months before they began to tear each other apart, he had Mary’s body, her mind, and the little apartment they shared. Mary had come free of her Academy obligations a couple of months before and graduated with honors. Bonmot had no hold over her anymore, except for the hold created by her gratitude. She and Duncan moved into an apartment off of Albumuth Boulevard. A nice little arrangement. In his journal he wrote of a contentment that served as a welcome respite from his aboveground and underground adventures, almost as if Manzikert had confessed to enjoying sewing.

It was almost as if he had lost his mind. Didn’t he know the Family Shriek is condemned to wander above and belowground like the most transient of Skamoo nomads? Or like the foraging armies of the doomed infidel Stretcher Jones? {No, I most certainly did not know this, Janice. Until Dad died, we were most assuredly stay-put people. Nothing fated us for a lack of domestic bliss. Besides, without that fragile calm, I don’t think we could have survived the war. It’s odd what stays with you.
I still
remember the tracery of ivy on those plates she stole, and the pleasure she got from the theft, and the tiny and not-so-tiny cracks that those plates acquired over time from the constant echo of bombardment.}

What for me had always been like quicksilver, the intense heat of a caress that faded from my memory over time, was for him long, and drawn-out, never far from his thoughts. Another typical entry, from several weeks later, read:

{That’s a nice entry, if atypical for more than a short while. I almost feel as if I was trying to convince myself with that entry, considering the horrors of the world around us. I went home to her every night after hours of hard, dangerous work. Under even the best of circumstances, I would hardly have made what you would call a stable lover. But with bombs exploding everywhere, screaming shells digging into the street only blocks away, and the random violence of the militias, I was very unstable. There were times when the danger brought us close together, when we didn’t need words or other constraints, like it had been back at Blythe. And then it was good. But the rest of the time, I struggled to love her despite the tense, closet-like atmosphere. I admit it—there was no way to preserve the allure of the forbidden, of having to sneak into her room at night. Now I was the man who snored at night and sometimes, choking on the spores in my throat, woke gagging. I think I began to scare her almost from the beginning. This was everything she hadn’t seen yet. She wasn’t ready for me. She was brave in many ways, but not in that way. And I can’t blame her.}

We sat there in the café and watched as, across the street, six Hoegbotton irregulars took up positions behind a stand of trees and began firing into the buildings, from which came spiraling the distinctive crimson bullets that had become known as “Lewden Specials.” Two of Hoegbotton’s men went down writhing and clutching their chests. An F&L supporter fell from the third story of one of the buildings and landed with a wet thud on the pavement below in a confusing welter of blood and bone.

And we just sat there, watching and drinking our ale. Really, it was tame next to what we had already seen. Really, it was expected. So we sat there for another half hour and talked while men killed each other across the street.

Then, of course, the Kalif invaded during the night of the opera performance, and we suddenly had a new topic to write about.

KALIF’S MEN SURROUND CITY:
OCCUPATION, PHASE II? ONE MAN’S OPINION
D.J. Shriek

Many of us wondered why Stockton, Nicea, and other Southern cities had not intervened in the conflict—after all, their trade was profoundly affected by this split between merchant houses. Now we knew—they had been calling on a higher power, and although it had taken almost two years for that august entity, the Kalif, to take notice, take notice he had. He would have needed little real pretext; after all, in each Kalif’s heart must burn the desire for revenge upon our city for earlier defeats.

The scream of the Kalif’s mortar fire—often indiscriminate or ill-timed—was a welcome contrast to the whine of fungal bullets, the garrulous chatter of Hoegbotton guns. {As the city was at war, so, by then, was my body. The rumblings of my belly, where fungus fought fungus—much remarked upon by Mary in her less charitable moments—matched the Kalif’s invasion. The sharp pains that sometimes annihilated my chest hurt no more or less than the spiraling flight of bullets through the Ambergrisian air.}

Perhaps more insanely, no one paid the Kalif’s troops much attention once we knew H&S and F&L had united against them. Even the day they came marching down Albumuth Boulevard on a daylight raid in a long, proud column of red, we ignored them. We had suffered through too much war. Either we could not digest this new threat, or we felt no need to.

This, then, is how things stood that year on the threshold of the Festival.

There came a night so terrible that no one ever dared to name it. There came a night so terrible that I could not. There came a night so terrible that no one could explain it. There came the most terrible of nights.
No, that’s not right, either.
There came the most terrible of nights that could not be forgotten, or forgiven, or even named.
That’s closer, but sometimes I choose not to revise. Let it be raw and awkward splayed across the page, as it was in life.

Words would later be offered up like “atrocity,” “massacre,” and “madness,” but I reject those words. They did not, could not, cannot, contain what they need to contain.

Could we have known? Could we have wrenched our attention from our more immediate concerns long enough to understand the warning signs? Now, of course, it all seems clear enough. Duncan had said the war could not continue in the same way for long, and he was right.

As soon as Duncan and I saw Voss Bender’s blind, blindingly white head floating down the River Moth two days before the Festival, we should have had a clue.

“There’s a sight you don’t see very often,” Duncan said, as we sat on an abandoned pier and watched the head and the barge that carried it slowly pull away into the middle of the river. A kind of lukewarm sun shone that day, diluted by swirls of fog.

“It’s a sight I’ve never seen before, Duncan,” I replied.

F&L had cut apart a huge marble statue of Voss Bender that had stood in the Religious Quarter for almost twenty years and loaded it, piece by piece, onto the barge, displaying a remarkably dexterous use of pulleys and levers. There lay the pieces of Bender, strewn to all sides of his enormous, imperious, crushingly heavy head. About to disappear up the River Moth. As vulnerable-looking in that weak sunlight as anything I had ever seen.

“I wonder what the people who live along the banks of the river will think about it,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Duncan asked.

“Will they see it as the demolition, the destruction, of a god, or will they be strangely unmoved?”

Duncan laughed. “
I’m
strangely unmoved.”

In part, we had come to the pier to relax. We were both still a little rattled from a close call the day before, when we had arrived at what was supposedly the scene of a bomb attack only to find the bombs exploding as we got there. My hair was dirty and streaked with black from the explosion. My face had suffered half a dozen abrasions. Duncan had had a thumbnail-sized chunk of his ear blown off. Already, it had begun to regenerate, which I found fascinating and creepy at the same time. {Do you want a glimpse of something even more fascinating? The real problem was: it wasn’t my ear. That had been blown off a long time before.}

“I think it’s sad,” I said. “They’re carting off all of our valuables, like common thieves.”

Until then, F&L had contented themselves with bombing us silly day and night. The steady northward stream of goods, art, and statuary had only started in the past week. It should have been a clear sign that the war was about to change again. After all, F&L, with their fungal mines, bombs, and bullets, seemed to have a direct line to a certain disenfranchised underground group.

“Actually, Janice,” Duncan said, as he dipped his ugly toes in the Moth, “I hesitate to try to convince you otherwise, but I think the sight of Voss Bender’s head floating vaingloriously down the Moth is very funny. So much effort by old F&L, and for what? What can they possibly think they will do with these ‘remains’ when they reach Morrow? Rework the marble into columns for some public building? Reassemble the statue? And if so, where in Truff ’s name would they put it? We hardly knew where to put it ourselves.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, “but that doesn’t mean it can’t be sad, too.”

Did I already say that there came to be the most terrible of Festival nights? It burned down the Borges Bookstore. It stopped the war between F&L and H&S. It stopped the love between Duncan and Mary, too. Snapped it. Was no more. Never again. {It brought an end to many things, this is true. But the Festival had nothing to do with ending my relationship with Mary. I caused that all by myself.} There had never been a Festival like it, except, perhaps, during the time of the Burning Sun. There may never be another like it again. {Why would there need to be? Every week since the Shift began, some part of the city is as raw as during Festival time.}

As far as I can remember, our father had never had anything to say about the Festival. {Not true. In his essay “The Question of Ambergris,” he wrote [I paraphrase from memory]: “At the heart of the city lies not a courtyard or a building or a statue, but an event: the Festival of the Freshwater Squid. It is an overlay of this event that populates the city with an alternative history, one that, if we could only understand its ebb and flow, the necessity of violence to it, would also allow us to understand Ambergris.” Statements like this led me to my explorations of Ambergris. I remember trying to read my father’s essays at an early age, and only understanding them in fragments and glimpses. I loved the mystery of that, and the sense of adventure, of the questions implied by what I
could
understand.} However, he did say one or two things about the gray caps. I recall that at the dinner table he would ramble on about his current studies. He had no gift for providing context. He would sit at the table, looking down at his mashed potatoes as he scratched the back of his head with one hand and pushed his fork through his food with the other. There was always about him at these times a faraway look, as if he were figuring something out in his head even as he talked to us. Sometimes, it would be a kind of muttering chant under his breath. At other times he was genuinely talking to us but was really elsewhere. He smelled of limes back then, our mother having insisted he wear some cologne to combat the smell of old books brought back from the rare book room of the Stockton Library. But since he hated cologne, he would cut up a lime instead and anoint himself with its juice. {I enjoyed that smell of books, though, missed it when it was gone—it was a comfortable, old-fashioned smell, usually mixed with the dry spice of cigar smoke. I came to feel that it was the smell of learning, which provoked the sweat not of physical exertion, but of mental exertion. To me, book must and cigar smoke were the product of working brains.}

At one such dinner, he looked up at us and he said, “The gray caps are quite simple, really. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. So long as what you’re doing doesn’t interfere with their plans, they don’t care what you do—even if you cause one of them physical harm. But if somehow you step across the tripwire of one of their ‘activities,’ why, then, there is nothing that can save you.”

{I remember that, too. “Tripwire.” A word I’d never heard before he used it. Why did he use that word? It fascinated me. While teaching at Blythe, I used the term in connection with the Silence. Had the Silence been caused by some kind of triggering of a “tripwire,” a set of circumstances under which the gray caps thought they could activate their Machine successfully? If so, what particular stimuli might have come into play? Could we predict when another such attempt might be made? And yet, even after the most minute study of ancient almanacs, historical accounts, the works of a number of statisticians such as Marmy Gort, and anything else we could lay our hands on, I still could not divine those finite, measurable values that might have created the ideal conditions. I concluded that the gray caps’ extraordinary ability to collect information, coupled with their additional spore-based senses, made it unlikely that we would ever be able to know. This did not stop me from continuing to try. Or continuing to ask the most important question: why build a Machine? And what—exactly—did it do?}

We were to find out during the Festival of the Freshwater Squid that year just what happened when Ambergris collectively sprung a tripwire. For the bad Festival was like the antithesis of the Silence, sent to convince us that any semblance of law in the city was illusory, that it could not truly exist, whether we thought it resided in the palm of an obese, elderly Hoegbotton, a thin, ancient Frankwrithe, or the wizened visage of a Kalif none of us had ever seen.

The night of the festival, the sun set red over the River Moth. Most of the crepe paper lanterns that people had set out had already been crushed by rubble or by the motored vehicles of opposing forces. The Kalif’s men had stepped up their bombardment of the city from without. They made no pretense anymore of aiming at anything in particular, their bombs as likely to crack open a hospital ward as a Hoegbotton sentry post. Really, it was as random as a heart attack. Why worry about what you cannot defend against? So we walked the streets as calmly as we had before the war, when we hadn’t been hunkered down against threats like a fungal bullet to the brain from some trigger-happy F&L recruit.

No, gunfire couldn’t get to me. What terrified me as I looked out from my apartment at dusk was the proliferation of red flags.

On the way back from our journalistic assignments that day, before we turned in our now infamous “The Kalif Yearns for Every Ambergrisian’s Head” article, the flags of the gray caps had appeared in multitudes—rhapsodies of red that seemed, like the ever-present fungus, always on the verge of forming some pattern, some message, only to fall apart into chaos again.

As we approached Lacond’s offices in the late afternoon, the wind picked up. It rattled the gravel on side streets. It brought with it a strange premature twilight, and a smell that none could identify. Was it a smell come up off the river? It seemed bitter and pleasant, sharp and vague, all at once.

The light, as Martin Lake might have said, had become different in Ambergris.

We left Lacond’s offices tired and ready for rest, Duncan to his and Mary’s apartment, me to my own place much farther down Albumuth Boulevard in the opposite direction. {Not even Lacond could demand we cover the Festival, not that year. The Kalif’s troops were an unknown factor—they made us nervous, as had the uneventful Festival the year before.} Sybel had decided to take me up on my invitation and stay with me that night, just in case. Either we’d celebrate the Festival together or defend ourselves against it. {I left ample protections; I’m sorry they were not enough.} We had all been through many Festivals. We were old pros at it. We knew how to handle it.

I had thought about making the trek to our mother’s mansion, but Duncan had assured me he could keep her safe. {She was quite safe, for several reasons, not least of which was her location: far enough upriver that the Kalif’s men had not requisitioned the house, and far enough from Ambergris that she would come to no harm from the gray caps.}

Dusk had become night by the time Sybel arrived, breathless from running. After I let him in, I bolted the door behind him.

“It’s not good out there,” he said, gasping for breath. “The trees are too still. There’s a silence that’s…like I imagine what the Silence must have been like.”

That was a thought. I felt light-headed for an instant, a conjoined chill and thrill. What if, tonight, we were to experience what the twenty-five thousand had experienced during the Silence, the city to become another vast experiment?

“Nonsense,” I said. “It’s just another Festival. Help me with this.”

We pushed a set of cabinets up against the door.

“That should do it,” I said.

Outside, a few dozen drunken youths passed by, shouting as they stumbled their way past.

“Death to the Kalif!” I heard, and a flurry of cursing.

“They’ll be lucky if they survive the hour,” Sybel said. “And it won’t be the Kalif that kills them, either.”

“When did you become so cheerful?” I asked.

He gave me a look and went back to loading his gun. We had pistols and knives, which Sybel had managed to purchase from, of all people, a Kalif officer. There was a booming black market in weapons these days. Some wags speculated that the Kalif had invaded Ambergris to create demand for inventory.

Meanwhile, the gray caps had spores and fungal bombs, and Truff knew what else.

“Do you think we’re much safer in here?” I asked.