Shriek: An Afterword (40 page)

AFTOIS had once again become Lacond’s passion—and in its limited way, it flourished for a time after the war—so that the
Broadsheet,
which paid the rent, often suffered from his neglect. {Indeed. It never quite failed when he was in charge, but some years after I took over production of the
Broadsheet,
I would have to put it out of its financial misery, much to the delight of our many enemies.}

“The important thing,” Lacond said to me once, “is that we get the truth out in some form, that we document what is happening. So that at the very least, there will be a record that someone knew about it.”

This struck me as an absurd statement. “Why?” I replied. “So that when the abyss opens up you can stand on the edge and shout down, ‘I told you so!’?”

Lacond looked at me as if I hadn’t understood anything he’d said.

When I told Bonmot about this exchange, he said, “Yes, but without Lacond, how much more mischief would Duncan get into?”

A good point, I had to admit. Because Lacond spent much of his time in those years after the war making Duncan his second-in-command. Without Lacond, the loss of Mary might have hit Duncan harder than it did. {How much harder could it have hit me? I hardly left my apartment for months. Lacond had to drag me out of my bed to get me to work for him. For years afterwards, I would feel this hollow space in my stomach, in my lungs. Sometimes, I would think of her and I couldn’t breathe.}

Lacond had a perverse effect on Duncan. Lacond made Duncan want something he thought he had given up on long ago: the restoration of a measure of legitimacy. {I might have reconciled myself to living without respect, but that didn’t mean I didn’t fight hard against it. Years would pass between a chance at even the most minor legitimate publication opportunity, but I never gave up.} Lacond kept telling Duncan that if he published enough essays in the AFTOIS newsletter, he would eventually get noticed again.

“Enough essays in a marginal journal read by a couple thousand fellow crackpots?” I said to Duncan when he told me. “A path to greater glory? I don’t think so, Duncan. I really don’t. You should attempt another book—you might find a publisher.”

Duncan shook his head. “Not now, not yet. I can’t even think about a book—my thoughts are too fragmented. But essays—yes, I could do essays. And Lacond might be right, you never know.”

Ridiculous! Yet Duncan believed it. As he wrote in his journal:

{I did believe this then, perhaps naïvely, but over time my emphasis would shift. I no longer thought books would be my salvation. I no longer thought in terms of publication, really, but more in terms of accumulating knowledge and making as much of it public as the public could stand.}

Didn’t Duncan see that Lacond had been trying for years—decades—with less success than my brother? Not any more than he saw that, for all the time he spent in the shadow of the huge oak tree outside her parents’ house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, Mary was traveling along a very different path. How could someone so smart be so foolish? But Duncan persisted. {I had no choice. I thought Mary and I could eventually be friends. I justified my hauntings of her by telling myself that I was watching over her, protecting her. The truth? My heart, caught between hope and pain, could not bear never seeing her, even if seeing her meant only the slightest glimpse of her through a window—a silhouette that, for many months, could still transfix me.}

Bonmot used to say that “The limits of our imagination are the limits of our free will.” Duncan could not imagine a life that did not include Mary and the gray caps. I sometimes wonder how different it would have been if he could have wrenched himself free of Ambergris and set sail for the Southern Isles, lost himself in the waves and the wind, adopted a different obsession.

{Janice—
all
obsessions are the same. They vary little in the essential details. You refuse to believe that my search for knowledge wasn’t so much personal, wasn’t so much for myself, but out of a fear for the future of our city. I pursued Mary out of a fear for the future of Duncan Shriek. There wasn’t much holding me to the city besides Mary, to be honest. As I continued to change, I needed to make up reasons why I shouldn’t just venture underground and stay there. I could have planted myself in a dark, moist corner of the gray caps’ world and taken root. I could have allowed the fungi to colonize me, taken in the breath of their sleep and woken in a thousand years to a far different fate. So was it love, after a certain point in time? Probably not. It was probably just a grasping for some kind of normal life. But can you blame me?}

If only Duncan could have apologized to Bonmot in a way that Bonmot would have accepted. But he wouldn’t. I think Bonmot was more fragile in his faith than he let on—I think he believed that if he let Duncan back into his life, it would affect his character, would erode his integrity. Duncan could have used Bonmot for balance during those times. He could have used someone other than a sister with one foot who had nightmares about being buried alive in a pile of corpses. Because Lacond really did have him convinced—they’d go to those lunatic meetings of their lunatic society, and Duncan would think that because three hundred people showed up and listened to him he was making progress. {Lacond was enough for me. Lacond never made me feel as if I were damaged or deranged, the way Bonmot could even during the best of our conversations. There’s a whiff of righteousness in the most humble servant of Truff that is a terrible, terrible thing. But Lacond taught me confidence and endurance. Every year of his adult life, he had written down his bizarre, unpopular theories and, through his society, made them available to the public. And every year, most people rejected his work, or feigned indifference, or found his theories an unkind reflection or comment on the man himself. Yet he never stopped, never gave up. It’s more than I could have done.}

I went to one AFTOIS meeting. That was enough for me—one glance at the agenda handed out by a portly woman with a purple scarf wound endlessly around her neck, as though a purple constrictor had a choke hold on her—one glance convinced me I would not be coming back:

THE AMBERGRISIANS FOR THE ORIGINAL INHABITANTS SOCIETY

WEEKLY MEETING NO. 231

– As Presided Over by Society President James Lacond –

– Minutes Taken by Linda Pitginkel –

– Incidental Music Provided by “George the Flutist” –

– Refreshments Baked by Lara Maleon –

Order of Events

I think the agenda alone should give some insight into the kinds of buffoons with which Duncan had aligned himself. He had gone from writing legitimate books to writing legitimate articles to teaching at a legitimate school to scandal and heartbreak, and now lived a sad existence at the very fringe of his chosen field.

{Again, unfair. I appreciate your protectiveness, but the truth is often so strange that one cannot, at the outset, discard even the most ridiculous of theories, the silliest of suppositions. Remember how I let my students do my research for me? This was a similar situation—I was always searching for the sliver of truth in the outlandishness presented at those meetings. Even the most absurd theory might have in its core details, its foundation, some hint of information about the gray caps, something to be salvaged or redirected. I attended those meetings for that reason, not because I
believed
everything I heard, or even wanted to be associated with all of them. But who else, Janice, would publish my “crackpot theories”? No one after the war except, ultimately, Sirin. And even
he
didn’t do it properly, as you—my benign, self-chosen executioner—well know.}

Certainly, I was used to dealing with strange people—I’ve never met an artist who wasn’t at some level a deeply strange or estranged person. But this was different. These were people on the edge of the edge of sanity. Oddities. Carpenters who, in their spare time, developed paranoid theories about House Hoegbotton that grew to full fruition in the dark, glistening spaces of their imaginations. Stay-at-home wives who, bored, had bought into the more lurid broadsheet headlines. Self-hating bank clerks making a pittance who had curdled inside and defended the gray caps because they would have cheered if the gray caps had risen up and taken over the city. People who believed they were the reincarnation of historical figures like Tonsure. And, on the fringes of those fringes, homeless people who used the meetings to take shelter. The mentally challenged who had been discharged from the now-destroyed Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital. I even thought I spied a gray shape that resembled my former fellow inmate Edward at one point, although when I looked again, he was gone.

And those were just the audience members.

How the spittle flew during the meeting I observed! The sour taste of vitriol! The sad, lonely, pathetic, nervous, neurotic, psychotic, exposed underbelly of the city.

“In my opinion, Tonsure was a gray cap disguised as a priest.”

“The grace with which the fungus leapt from tree to tree astounded me.”

“I didn’t realize I had the gift to channel ghosts until I was twelve.”

“In the vast, empty spaces beneath the city, this huge fungus has taken over and means to envelop us in its clammy grasp.”

“Being a woman, I am more attuned to the feelings of inanimate objects.”

And Duncan wanted to become their leader: the Lord of the Disinclined. Disinclined to work. Disinclined to hold a job. The Disenchanted who had never been enchanting, except, perhaps, as children. No wonder Mary hated that group.
I
hated that group. We could have taken an oath of solidarity on that much, at least. {And yet, they, and I, are much closer to the truth than those who scoffed at our organization, regardless of the sometimes illegitimate evidence provided at those meetings. I sense a certain amount of snobbery in your remarks, Janice, as if the only people worth a damn are artists or writers or playwrights—but look back on your own description of the New Art and the New Artists. Were they really any different, except that the results of their obsessions and imagination were more forcefully inflicted upon the world? Sometimes a theory or idea is as strangely beautiful as that expressed by any painting, even when it’s articulated by those who are not articulate.

{Let me tell you what I saw that day, at that meeting. I saw a woman trying to come to terms with the death of her sister by inexplicable means. She did so by taking what facts she knew about Samuel Tonsure and bending them to a theory that attempted to reconcile the irreconcilable. In that forced assimilation of fact and fancy, Janice, there might have been a fragment of truth, even if only a psychological truth. Perhaps by seeing Tonsure in a different light than I, she advanced my understanding of him one tiny increment.

{Sara Potent’s diatribe about the truth, taking as her basis Stretcher Jones’s rebellion against the Kalif and expanding it to include many of the unanswered questions about Ambergris’ past—wasn’t she, in disguised form, asking the same questions we all have asked from time to time? Does she deserve vilification for trying to think her way through all of this?

{Could you have missed the beauty of Frederick Madnok’s theory that Ambergris is “shadowed” from below by a giant fungus, wide as the city and deep as the city is tall, through which catacomb the tunnels of the gray caps? Could you not see the utter precision and craftsmanship of his many diagrams? The humor of the labeling—a sense of humor that tells the reader that Madnok
knows
how outlandish his theory may sound.

{There is an art, Janice, to being an outsider, a skill to being a good crackpot. Some people decide to become writers of fiction and this is considered a legitimate endeavor. Others decide to make their expressions of the imagination more personal. I, for one, gained more from that meeting than from any novel I have ever read!}