Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  What strange creatures we are, I thought as I stood there. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, excitement and boredom, each mind as individual as a fingerprint, and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.

  I stood there, mourning the death of that place, even though it had not really died, even though it had since spawned a thousand stories to join the millions of stories that comprised the city, and then I walked back here, to the typewriter, to continue my epic, my afterword, so consumed by what? By emotion. That my hands are shaking. They are shaking right now. What shall stop them? Perhaps a dose of the dead past.

  At Bonmot’s funeral, some twelve years ago, men and women who would not have dared visit him while he was alive circled around the polished oak coffin like impatient iridescent flies. The day held a hint of rain in the gravel sky, the air moist and cool. The smell of mold was everywhere.

  Outside the Truffidian Cathedral, Martin Lake dourly limped about on his polished cane, stopping to mutter grim Lakeisms to friends such as Merrimount and Raffe, all of whom avoided me as if I embodied a disease they might one day become. That’s how far I had fallen. I limped like Lake by then. I had a cane like him. But I was not enough like him, especially now that he had passed from “successful” to that ethereal realm where one’s fame will always outlive the fading mortal body.

  The Morrow ambassador to the House of Hoegbotton—newly renamed to reflect the aftermath of war—presented a dapper sight in slick black tuxedo and tails, at least until he managed to slide in a patch of mud created by overzealous grave diggers and groundskeepers. A general from the Kalif’s army, a supposed friend of Bonmot’s in his youth, looked out of place in turban and gold-and-red glittery uniform, his presence barely tolerated by a city that so frequently had been bombarded by his masters.

  Dozens of priests arrived from the Religious Quarter, from orders as diverse as the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star and Manziism. They all wore variations of black-on-white and somber stares. They all had guards with them. Ever since the War of the Houses, no one trusted anyone else. Hoegbotton’s men were out in force as well, armed with guns and with knives. Some of them stood in motored vehicles, in well-heeled clumps, staring.

  Business leaders also arrived to pay their bemused respects. The newly ascendant Andrew Hoegbotton, a weaselly stick figure of a man with large, liquid eyes, shared uneasy space with Lionel Frankwrithe, a smug middle-aged man who kept snapping out his pocket watch in sudden motions that kept wretched Andrew flinching. Truces between House F&L and House H&S rarely lasted very long anymore.

  At the edges, surrounding these dim luminaries, stood beggars, prostitutes, and the working poor, all of whom Bonmot had helped at some period in his life, whether as Antechamber or as the Royal of Blythe Academy. As The Ambergris Daily Broadsheet noted:

  Every element of Ambergrisian society turned out yesterday to grieve the death of a man most had abandoned in his exile and which, happy coincidence, they now remembered as the hour of heartfelt high-profile memorial speeches grew near. {Janice, you know I wrote this.}

  The procession from the cathedral to Bonmot’s final resting place was silent. The flags of the Religious Quarter lay limp against the breezeless sky. As we walked, our procession grew larger and more diverse. More and more people left their homes or temples to join us. I remember thinking that this wasn’t just a funeral for Bonmot—it was a funeral for the city. So much uncertainty faced us now. We’d been shaken out of our preconceptions by the War and its aftermath. We’d been roused from our blindness—or so we hoped.

  The procession ended with an interminable parade into and through Trillian’s cemetery. They say Trillian populated the cemetery with the victims of his bloody merchant wars. But within its walls, I have always felt a theme of renewal and peace rather than death. Its massive oak trees, its giant, curling green ferns, its elegant stone houses for the departed—they all conspired to make the visitor think of woodland walks and primordial forests rather than decay. That day, the graveyard seemed more alive than the insensate, gangrenous city surrounding it.

  The trio of violinists abruptly stopped playing. The coffin was lowered into its final resting place, a headstone to be added later. The grave diggers who would fill in the dirt stood leaning on their shovels next to the mound of earth, their stares flat and steady. In front of them, the current Antechamber began to give the final speech of the afternoon, a few hollow words about his predecessor, couched in platitudes and numbing repetition.

  “Give back to this earth this good man, O Lord,” he said, much to the grumbling dismay of several Manziists present, who missed their traditional rat-festooned funeral ceremony. “Give back to this good man the earth, O Lord,” he said again, like a man who, having missed his memorized mark, has to start over in the correct order. “And let you, O Lord, serve as a light to him, for we are imperfect vessels and we platitude simile extended metaphor with barely any pauses followed by more repetition. Period. Comma. Stop. Start. Here I go again about God and the dirt and wait: another platitude, quote from the Truffidian Bible everyone’s heard a thousand times before, and even though I once actually knew Bonmot when I was a junior priest, not a single personal anecdote about the man because the scandal of his long-ago departure as Antechamber might somehow still cling to me like a fetid stench. Amen.”

  While they buried our friend, I watched a glossy emerald beetle, carapace age-pocked and mossy, fend off an attack by a dozen fuzzy ants, their red thorax glands releasing tiny jets of bubbly white poison. This drama took place in a leafy alcove while storks flew against the rapidly darkening sky and moth wings muttered on mottled tree trunks, the world in constant rebellious motion against the stark silence within the coffin.

  Duncan came, of course, his face ever more deeply lined with the weight of secret knowledge {or maybe I had just stayed out too late the night before}, his gaze settling upon the assembled rabble in search of one perfect, elusive face…but Mary did not come. Parties, lecture series, concerts, readings, she attended, even during wartime. Funerals, however, never made Mary’s agenda. She did not like funerals. People, for her, did not die, and places never became disenfranchised from those moments that made them important. Both became entombed in her books and, until placed there, never failed to behave as less than caricature or puppetry.

  “Duncan,” I said. “She’s not coming. She never was going to come. Not for you. Not for Bonmot.” She would be writing, or doing something equally destructive to Duncan’s {lack of a} career.

  He would not answer me. He would not look at me. As the Antechamber tossed a clot of earth on Bonmot’s coffin, Duncan stared at it, too downcast at Sabon’s absence to utter a word.

  Time had made no difference. Whether minutes after the dissolution of their relationship or years after, Duncan was the same. Even when increasingly attacked and hounded by the words like knives from her various books, he allowed her to control his heart.

  As we left the funeral, Duncan was still searching the crowd for any sign of Mary.

  {Janice, I accepted your dressing down, which you conveniently dilute and misremember, because I knew you hurt from Bonmot’s death as much as I did. But please do not mistake my silence for agreement with your reading of my thoughts. If I surveyed the crowd, it wasn’t to search for Mary. I knew she wasn’t coming. My gaze was blind—I saw nothing, but always looked inward to my memories of Bonmot. While the procession lurched toward the cemetery, while the Antechamber gave his depressing speech, even while you lashed out at me, I was nowhere near that place. I was where you should have been—in the courtyard, sitting on a bench beside Bonmot and talking. Besides you, our mother, and Lacond, Bonmot was one of the only people keeping me aboveground. I never really bought into religion, but I believed in Bonmot, and because he had faith, I had f
aith through him. And I was heartbroken for missed opportunities, because it had been so many years since I’d had a personal conversation with him.

  {You congratulate yourself on being sensitive to my thoughts, but you barely knew them at times. It stung that you saw what no one else could—that the fungus had continued to colonize my skin, that even as I stood there and watched them pour dirt over Bonmot’s coffin my body fought a thousand battles more vigorous than those between beetle and ants—and yet you could not understand why I might be distracted. That my mind was consumed by another attempt to stand firm against the invasion of my own body on the most basic levels, like pissing black blood or sweating out green liquid fungus.}

  Duncan and Mary. For a time, long before that horrible day in the graveyard, they were inseparable. And yet: Never a more unlikely couple, a pair less paired, less suited for suitability. Would that I could provide a complete chronicle of the misshapen event. Alas, I cannot tell this part of the story through Duncan’s journal. I am embarrassed to report that Duncan’s journal entries on these matters prove nearly incomprehensible in their extremes of love, despair, lust, and, yes, love again, repetitious and maudlin. I will spare the reader the full scope of their sexual senility by only providing excerpts. I suggest you fill in any blanks with applicable entries from your own diary….

  It was, as they say, a beautiful spring day when Duncan first recorded his utter surrender. Outside, the willow trees breathed gently from side to side under a merciful sun, and street vendors danced joyously in anticipation of Duncan’s ardor, and the birds stopped in midair to witness the innocence that was Duncan’s lust, and the gray caps came aboveground to gift all citizens of the city with garlands of sweet-smelling fungus, and I must stop before I make myself sick. {I’m already sick. This whole section will make me sick, I think.}

  Inside the Academy, Duncan breathed gently on the neck of the woman child {she was already twenty-one!} he had kept after class for “further instruction”:

  Today Mary wore a white blouse, and as I pointed out a relevant passage in Tonsure’s journal, she stood next to me, our clothes just touching. I felt a pressure between us, as if she held me up or I held her up, and if the tension was broken, one of us would fall. I turned my head into the blindness of that endless white as she stood beside me, and every inch of my body knew the certainty of her generous hips where the blouse disappeared into her skirt and the reckless knowledge of her soft neck above the blouse, the face shining above the neck. All of these elements destroyed me more than what I saw, which was just the blouse, filled with her. The stitching on the blouse. The texture of the fabric itself. The soft curving caress of her breast beneath. So near. The nearness of her made me tremble. The smell of her, the smell of clean, firm skin. All I would have had to do was incline my head forward a fraction of an inch and my lips would have kissed her through the fabric. Time was extinguished by the tension between giving in, feeling her breast against my mouth for what might be only a second before her mutiny, and staying in position, forever teased by the possibility. Teetering on the edge of an abyss, where to fall was to fall was to fall into bliss, bliss, bliss; but torment, too…. And yet what if the action met not with outrage or rejection, but with a sigh of acceptance? Would that not be worth the risk? Would it not be worth the cost to remove the torment by attempting to consume it? To extinguish the flame by joining it?

  For all of his wretched fumbling for words—I hope he didn’t fumble that way with her bra strap!—I could have defined his condition for him with one word: lust. Why, I had become a world-renowned expert on lust by then, seeing the problem firsthand from several dozen different positions. I could have helped Duncan, except he didn’t ask my advice; instead, he wrote it all down in his journal. {Not fair. I knew you would have advised me against it, and this I could not bear the thought of. I must say—I do appreciate you baring my soul in your afterword.}

  I was destroyed by this. Destroyed. How can I describe the heaviness of her body next to me? The rich physicality of her, the smell of her skin, the way her body eclipsed my senses. She annihilated my dream of her—even flame too light a metaphor. Confronted by the reality of her, I was tormented by the urgency of a choice I could not make. I shuddered and drew back, so overcome with desire that I shivered and said nothing, even though an awkward pause had descended over our conversation, her gaze upon me.

  Had Duncan taken lovers before Sabon? Rarely. He had no time for love with so much mucking about in underground tunnels ahead of him. I’ll tell you the distasteful truth: he lost his virginity to a prostitute the night he graduated from the Religious Institute in Morrow. {One begins to wonder if you really have my best interests in mind.}

  I remember it quite well. She arrived at the Institute much earlier than Duncan intended, before I had left for my own quarters. He made her wait in the cloakroom while he finished getting dressed; I felt like asking him why he bothered.

  She and I had nothing to talk about, although I looked her over as thoroughly as if she had been meant for me. She seemed as respectable as anyone from Sabon’s necklace of flesh, which is to say: not at all. Her blond hair had streaks of brown in it, and her face was too pale. Her hastily applied makeup encircled her eyes with too much blue. She looked ghostlike, waiflike, her dress a size too big. She wore it bravely nonetheless, struggling not to be lost in the greens of it.

  Duncan came out then, his entrance accompanied by an expression of such utterly pathetic excitement that I found myself forgiving him, almost envying him. How could I pass judgment knowing how alone he had been?…But that wasn’t all: as I closed the door, I saw them standing there in front of his wall of oddities, and the stare of recognition that passed between them, the alone meeting the lonely, carried with it a level of comprehension much deeper than anything I ever saw between Duncan and Mary; as deep as if they had been lovers for twenty years {the truth was, you spent about as much time with that prostitute as you did with Mary over the years, so how could you know?}.

  The deliciousness of that moment, my intent almost exposed to Mary by my silence, lingers with me still, and I wonder if the consummation of this feeling could ever compare to the sheer, excruciating sweetness of this tension that binds me to her and her to me in this enclosed space of memory—my mouth so close to her blouse, which I must either kiss or tell her how I burn, and yet can do neither. There is no time in such a place, only thoughts and flesh transposed. The white of her blouse. The white of her beneath the white. And in my thoughts, where I can enslave everyone and everything, I cross the space between our bodies. I place my mouth upon her breast. She expresses neither surprise nor shock, but only sucks in her breath, moans, and slowly places her soft hands behind my head, drawing me into her, her hands so cool on my hair, her body soft soft soft.

  I think I am going mad.

  Mad? What did my poor, deluded brother know about going mad? I find it somewhat pathetic that my brother, the great historian, could not tell the difference between going mad and falling in love. The difference, as I know from bitter experience, is that when you go mad, you go mad utterly alone. Quite perfectly alone. That is the only difference.

  How do I know this? I know this because one afternoon, while Duncan wrestled with an entirely different sort of madness, I entered my apartment, turned on the lights, and went into the bathroom, never intending to come back out again….

  7

  Start again. Start over. How am I supposed to get through this part? I could ignore it, I suppose, but it wouldn’t go away—it would be a huge, gaping hole in this afterword. A few snapped golden threads. An unrealized opportunity. Did I become more of Duncan’s life then, or did I become a shadow to him?

  Release my breath. Breathe in again. Imagine a courtyard with stone benches and willows and the scent of honeysuckle and sweet, good conversation.

  I remember Bonmot asked me about death once when Duncan was off grading papers. I don’t recall the context, or who had broached the subject
.

  “Are you afraid of death?” he asked me.

  “I’m afraid of not knowing,” I said. “I would like to know. I would like to know when I am going to die.”

  Bonmot laughed. “If you knew, you might relax too much. You might think, ‘I’ve got twenty years. Today, I don’t need to do a thing.’ Or you might not. I don’t know.” He took a bite of his sandwich.

  “Duncan’s not afraid of death,” I said.

  Bonmot looked at me sharply. “What makes you think that?”

  “The way he courts it. The way he puts himself in the path of death.”

  Suddenly, I felt as if Bonmot was angry with me.

  “Duncan is afraid of death, trust me. Sometimes, I think he is more afraid of death than anyone I’ve ever met. Do you understand why I say that?” {I’m not afraid of death—I’m afraid of dying too soon.}

  At the time, I didn’t. I didn’t understand at all. Now, I do understand. It is all too clear now.

  A courtyard. Stone benches. Willow trees. Honeysuckle.

  Bonmot: “You needn’t be afraid of death. If you believe, you will come back.”

  Me: “Believe in what?”

  Bonmot: “Anything. It doesn’t matter what.”

  But I’m not there. I am here, and I know that we die. We die and we don’t come back. Ever. Why should it matter that I tried to hasten the process—to go further than Duncan, to beat him to the beginning of the race, to fall between the glistening strands and keep on falling through the darkness? {I had my watchers on you by then. I would never let you fall between the strings—me, yes, but not you.}