Shriek: An Afterword (39 page)

Eventually, on that first morning after the war, I found myself at Blythe Academy. I had hopped and hobbled my way there after an hour or two, my journey aimless and funereal. An ache and an emptiness had begun to gnaw away at me. A glimpse of the familiar acted like an anchor.

For some reason, I had assumed that the desecration of the Truffidian Cathedral would have extended to Blythe Academy as well, but this was not the case. I saw a few broken windows, two overturned benches, an area of burnt grass, and a singed section of roof, but the willow trees remained the same as always. Priests and teachers bustled across the lawn, cleaning up the debris. The air of activity, of honest labor, gave me hope.

I sat down on a bench, hoping that somehow the memory of those long-ago conversations that had so calmed me then might calm me now.

Instead, a shadow fell across me. I looked up, and there stood Bonmot, staring down at me with a grim smile upon his lips. His face was grimy with soot or dirt. He had a long, shallow cut running down his left cheek. Bonmot, in that moment, looked invincible, even though he had become more vulnerable than I could then know. {Whose faith wouldn’t falter for at least a moment in the midst of such inexplicable carnage?}

His grim smile softened to concern as he saw the condition of my foot—or, rather, the lack of a foot.

“You’re alive,” I said, in wonder. By now, the lack of sleep, the terror of what I had gone through, had taken me somewhere else entirely.

“You need to see a doctor,” Bonmot said. He crouched down beside me, gently cupped his hand under my calf to better examine the wound.

“Not really,” I said. “There’s nothing to be done now. It’s mostly cauterized. I washed the rest of it. The flesh is clean. I spent all night with a mob of corpses in the Truffidian Cathedral. You may wish to investigate.”

He bowed his head, looking at my stump. “I know. I’ve heard. You were there?”

“Yes,” I said. “Pretending to be dead. Please, don’t worry about the leg.”

He stared at me. “Janice, you need to have it looked at anyway.”

I laughed, an edge of bitterness in my voice. “I suppose,” I said, “but who will look at it? I’ve been limping around this broken old city of ours all morning. And I’ve seen little that isn’t mangled, mashed, cracked, twisted, or dead.”

“It won’t take long to rebuild,” he said. “You’ll be surprised. All of this will be behind us someday.” A pause. “Have you heard from Mary?”

This, then, was the closest he could come to asking about Duncan.

“No, I haven’t,” I said.

{And you wouldn’t, not for a few days. I had returned Mary to our apartment, which had been ransacked but not ruined, and we took up again the unhealthy non-bliss of our domestic lives together—a little more silent around each other, a little more reserved, a little more distant. She became fond of saying I was “suffocating” her in those first few days after the war. I had no response. I needed comfort from her. I
needed
her.}

I started to cry. I was still talking, my face still set in a half-grimace, half-smile, but I was crying. “Sybel’s dead,” I said.

And then, even though he had a thousand responsibilities that day, Bonmot pulled me to him and held me as, sobbing, I told him about all of the dead.

The losses kept piling up. When I visited my gallery, I found the inside had been gutted by fire. All of my inventory had disappeared yet again, taken by looters or flames. The artists blamed me, even though I was convinced some of them had stolen their own work off my walls. I wasted time. I wasted money. I thought I could resurrect the gallery, but without Sybel, I was lost. I did not have the requisite number of “friends with money,” as he had liked to call them. I reopened for a short time, but I could no longer attract even mediocre talents. I was left with a half-dozen elderly landscape oil painters as clients. Clearly, I was doomed.

Looking back, the war signaled the end of so many things that the dying throes of my gallery must be considered no more than a buried footnote in the history of that period. For example, the war certainly ended my right foot—there’s no doubt about that. I’m tempted, whenever someone asks me what I remember about the war, to point to my grainy toes and say, “Ask my foot.”

As a hidden perk of so many people having lost limbs, the art of wooden limb construction had reached new heights. I personally picked out the wood for my replacement from the very best strangler figs on the west side of the River Moth, near where Sybel had grown up. My foot might even have been made from a tree Sybel had once climbed. Maudlin, I know, but I don’t care about the sentimentality of that thought.

I had Judith Aquelus, a sculptress, collaborate with the wooden limb experts at Similian’s Arm & Leg Shop, to create the unique artifact that is my right foot. I had Judith carve a miniature, stylized version of the opera house stage on it on which the Kalif’s soldiers could be seen, making their acting debut.

No amputee should be seen in public without a Judith Aquelus creation. A foot and a cane: the perfect accessories for such necessary tasks as walking to the grocery store for a loaf of bread! With my cane and my new wooden foot, I have attained a whole new level of eccentricity. Why, I’ve become my own work of art—my only option, considering that creating art and selling art had proven so unprofitable for me.

The funny thing is, the green fungus that has colonized my typewriter and makes it harder and harder to complete this afterword has also begun to infiltrate my wooden foot. I am becoming a rather small forest. In my own way, perhaps I’m experiencing what Duncan went through. {Dead wood does not equal living flesh. There’s nothing to compare to that heart-choking prickle of another life entering your skin and flesh.}

Since that first foot, I have found it hard to resist having more made when I can afford it, or carving them myself. In my more whimsical moments, I’m tempted to leave a trail of feet through the city. One day a foot may be all that is left of me.

“Do you like it?” I asked Duncan the first time I showed it off to him.

“It’s very much you,” Duncan said. {I’d had too many strange experiences with my flesh to be too empathetic. The sloughing off of flesh, the losing and regaining of it, had become too normal an experience.}

“It itches,” I told him. And this is still true now. The foot, with its lithe straps and silver clasps, itches like hell at the oddest times.

“I itch all the time,” Duncan said, not to be outdone.

On that particular day, down by the docks, watching the ships come in, Duncan was very pale. You could see, if you looked closely, that the hair on his head was not really hair ruffled by a breeze, but a black fungus lazily swaying back and forth. There was a further suggestion of movement under his coat. I doubt anyone else saw it—or wanted to see it.

“Do you miss him?” I asked Duncan.

“I miss him terribly,” he replied. {I missed the everyday normalcy Sybel had brought to my life. Dealing with you, Janice, was an up-and-down experience, often full of melodrama. As much as I loved Bonmot, my conversations with him had always had some religious subtext. But speaking to Sybel was so natural and effortless and free of judgment that I didn’t even miss the experience until it was over.}

“If it itches really badly,” he said, “I could probably find a way to grow you a fungal replacement.”

I ignored him and asked, “How’s Mary?”

He didn’t answer.

I had to stop to clean off the typewriter keys. The green fungus had become too insidious. The keys weren’t striking paper, but bunching up in emerald moss, the paper itself reflecting a series of ever more vegetative marks. I couldn’t get it all off, but enough of it is gone that I can continue typing for a while. I’m not sure when I will run out of time; there are so many factors to consider. When will the patience of the Spore’s owner run out? When will I tire of what increasingly seems a pointless exercise? When will something crawl out of the hole in the ground behind me and put an end to my speculations?

I think it’s morning outside, but I haven’t bothered to check. I had thought it was lunchtime earlier, but it turned out that my stomach had it all wrong. If it is morning, the sky is probably gray and undistinguished, flecked with rain. It’s that time of year when sudden showers appear and make of the city stark outlines, robbing it of color and texture. A welter of umbrellas appears on the streets and people walk quickly to their destinations, with no appreciation for anything around them.

Afterwords. Afterwards. Afterwar.

The war had been jarring, numbing, senseless. In its aftermath, the balance of power remained much as it had before all of the bloodshed. The Hoegbottons controlled Ambergris and F&L controlled Morrow and Sophia’s Island but lacked the military and political will to enforce their ridiculous tariffs. The Kalif’s mauled troops retreated across the River Moth even as their merchants advanced to secure deals with the Hoegbottons to rebuild the city and import new products. {Oddly enough, the Kalif’s troops could be said to have ultimately achieved their goal, if not in the preferred way. For, after all, hadn’t they liberated the citizens of Ambergris from chaos and tyranny through their sacrifice?}

After the war, Ambergris forgot the real enemy—Hoegbotton & Sons still railed against Frankwrithe & Lewden or the Kalif, but provided no warning against the gray caps. People gratefully went along with this mass denial. Wasn’t it easier to blame F&L than an amorphous, faceless enemy that hid underground and attacked seemingly at random? {To be fair, the still unknown way in which F&L had acquired fungal weapons confused the issue—F&L did look like the sole instigator. After all, didn’t the gray caps periodically erupt from their hidey-holes during the Festival anyway?}

The terrible, cold beauty of the truth appealed to no one. Every few weeks, for several years, one or two, or three or four, people were killed by a left-over fungal bomb or a new one planted by someone—the gray caps or F&L, I assume, but who could tell the difference? H&S did nothing to prevent this, and tried hard to stop Lacond from reporting it. We were a city and a people unable to face our coming annihilation, incensed over an enemy that posed not a quarter of the threat. In a way, we lived in a fairy tale, convinced that someone else’s actions or inactions might save us. As day after day passed without Ambergris being invaded, we flinched less and less, let down our guard. No one was going to destroy the city—only rumors could do that, the thinking went, only idle talk. If we pretended otherwise, the enemy could not creep out at night and make us all disappear. Permanence had become a thing from the past.

{I didn’t think much had changed, but if it had, it had changed for the reason most eloquently put by the historian Edgar Rybern: namely, that barbaric institutions and individuals can benefit society, while “civilization” can, in its most benign forms, prove barbaric. This led me to two conclusions germane to the war. First, that the very act of F&L coming into contact with the gray caps and then into contact with H&S had irrevocably changed all three parties; and second, that stated goals aside, all three of these institutions have been thrown off-kilter by the war. Now, whether they realize it or not, each new decision pulls them slightly further away from their original purpose. What effect this might have, I could not tell you.}

For Duncan personally, the end of the war meant two things: that Lacond was available to help him limp back into a shadow career in print—it became apparent at war’s end that Lacond could only keep one of us on, and, even if I had wanted to stay, it wasn’t going to be me—and that Mary’s patience with him was almost at an end.

The slow withdrawal, the retreat from love, went on at the same time Lacond began recruiting Duncan for his eccentric obsessions. {No more eccentric than my own obsessions, Janice. Lacond and I understood each other in a way that made me no longer feel quite so alone.}

How did Mary withdraw? Let me count the ways. She no longer tolerated my brother’s erratic schedule. She no longer found his eccentricities endearing. She no longer found his fungal diseases tragic, his endurance of them brave. {I’m not sure she
ever
felt that way about my fungal diseases. It was more that she put up with their side effects to be with me.} The small apartment they shared became claustrophobic. Duncan’s journal skirts the reason behind the feelings:

But Mary spent more and more time with friends. Sometimes she even stayed at her parents’ house. Duncan had no chance, no choice. How could he? He didn’t have the experience to combat it, to see the signs. To Duncan, sadly enough, the only way to get her back was to keep showing her the truth, even though it was clear to anyone with any sense that he’d need to start
lying
to her if he wanted to keep her. {A cynical view that would only serve as a short-term solution. And I was neither so naïve nor Mary so experienced as you make out.} Every time he showed her the truth, she pushed him farther away. Duncan wrote in his journal:

But the truth also meant accepting that the day-to-day domesticity didn’t suit him either, especially for long periods of time. I will spare you the contrast between the journal entries that detail with a silly kind of joy the beauty of her snores early in their relationship and the dull snarl of his comments on those self-same snores near the end. Or, take this terse entry only a month before disaster: “another night of odd smells.” Sometimes he would be almost apologetic: “She could easily have complained about the frequency with which I spored. Or how I tracked in strange green mud from time to time. But she didn’t.”

Even then, I think he wanted to stay with her. I don’t believe he ever understood that he might actually lose her. {I couldn’t, back then, imagine a tolerable moment without her—and, in all honesty, tolerable moments since I lost her have been fewer and less intense.} After all, he’d never been through a breakup before—unlike me, who had been through dozens. I had become an expert on broken relationships. It had become ritualized with me, each battle with its own histories, its own decorum, and its own rules of disengagement.

Duncan and Mary managed to stay together in their little apartment for a few more months, but like the starfish that rapidly became brittle, their love had died long before they acknowledged the fact. The bond between them had broken, snapped, and although Duncan was still in love with her—even though I don’t know if he
liked
her anymore—she was not in love with him. Their situation frayed, unraveled. They had screaming arguments, tearful reunions. Duncan would seek refuge at my apartment, only to go back, over my objections.

He wrote in his journal at some point near the end:

Duncan never thought of disavowing his findings, of putting the underground behind him, denying what he had found. He was, however, capable of self-blame:

Soon, they barely talked to each other…then, one day, he came home from Lacond’s offices and she was gone. He thought that she had just stepped out for a moment, until he found the note. He left it with his other notes. It is right here beside my festering typewriter. It reads:

The difference between what we need and what we want can be an abyss. For example, I want more light in this accursed room, but I need lunch because my stomach is grumbling. Duncan would always want Mary, but did he need her? In a way, he didn’t. In a way, like the writer who pursues his art above all else, Duncan did not need anything other than access to the underground. {You make me out to be a theorem in search of expression, rather than a human being.}

Next to Mary’s note is a letter she wrote to a friend. I don’t know how Duncan came by it. I don’t like to guess in this instance. {It was a low point for me, intercepting her mail. It was a brief insanity, a madness created by love. I only did it once or twice. I’m still ashamed of it.} The letter explains the situation much more baldly, and must have driven Duncan a little crazy when he read it.

{A mental shudder. A sudden moment of self-awareness—was I like that? Yes, I probably was. But I don’t know if Mary ever understood the great strain I was under, how what I sought was of the utmost importance. That it meant nothing more or less than safeguarding the fate of everyone who lives in this city, perhaps in the world. And still. And yet. I knew she had taken something from me, that I had been valuable to her. I had given nearly as much as I had taken. I’d been her mentor and she’d been my student, no matter what grief I had caused her. I took some small comfort from that.}

And that was the end of it. Or so I thought. For although Mary was free of Duncan, Duncan would never really be free of her, or her flesh necklace.

As Duncan’s romantic fortunes waned, his fortunes as a historian waxed again: a flowering in miniature, given the heights he had ascended to in his youth. Although those who did speak a kind of truth about the gray caps and Ambergris’ past were condemned to the fringes, they did have their own organization: the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society. Most of Duncan’s postwar hopes of self-expression reached fruition through AFTOIS.