Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I’m sorry. I’ve tried so hard to stick to a sophisticated style, something I thought Duncan would recognize and appreciate, even if he is gone forever. But the truth is, I can’t keep on this way. Not all the time. The green glass glares at me. The hole in the floor is opening. I defy anyone under these circumstances to smile and dance and prattle on as if nothing had gone wrong.

  We die. We die. It shrieks at me from an empty cage. Let my future editor, strange beast that he is, earn his wages and edit me. Edit all of me. Edit me out if necessary. By then I won’t care. The flesh necklace can glitter with its scornful laughter and, laughing, shiver to pieces.

  But where was I? It feels strange to type the words “But where was I?” but it helps orient me when I am truly lost. There’s a loud gaggle of musicians—some might call them a “band,” but I wouldn’t—out there now, and although I glimpse only frenetic slices of them, the sound distracts me. Sometimes, I wonder if the lyrics infiltrate my own words, change them or their meaning. Sometimes, I wonder if my words fly off the page and into their mouths, to infiltrate their lyrics, change them as they are changing me. Surely this is how Duncan became misunderstood. {No, my dear sister—I became misunderstood because everyone was terrified of understanding me.}

  So if you can hear me through all of this noise, lean close, listen, and I will tell you a kind of truth that once made sense to me and may again, in time, undergo that startling transformation from madness to the purest form of sanity: If you are feeling low. If you are so full of poison that you can find no light within you. If everywhere you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt. No matter what the so-called experts might say, a suicide attempt will clean you right out. True, it will also squeeze from your body the last remnants of the last smile, the last laugh, the last scrap of hope, of any small, shy, but still-bright part of you that ever cared about anything. Nothing will remain. Not religion. Not friends. Not family. Not even love. A carcass picked clean and lying forgotten by the side of Albumuth Boulevard. A hollowed-out statue. A wisp of mist off the River Moth.

  But that doesn’t last—how could it?—and at least it drains the poison so that even in your isolation from yourself, you feel…gratitude. Which fades in turn because at the end you don’t even feel numb, because to feel numb implies that at some point you were not numb, and so you feel like you don’t really exist anymore—which is the truest sort of truth: after a suicide attempt, you don’t really exist anymore, just the images of you in other people’s eyes.

  Later, as I stared at the blood welling up from an accidental pen puncture {how could they let you have a pen, with all the money I was paying them?!}, absent-minded and remote from the pain, I was amused at how concerned doctors get about such things; one would have thought a gardening convention had blossomed around the fertile flower bed of my body for all the quick consternation they displayed at this pinprick.

  Which belonged to a different world than my poor wrist, sliced to the bone. I could see the bone wink through at me the night I did it, as if it shared the joke in a way the blood could not. The blood wanted only to escape, but the good, solid bone—it ground against the knife, made me reconsider, if only for a moment, the bravery, the honesty, of pain. Craven, quivering flesh. Foolish blood. And the bone winking through. I wish I could remember what it said to me. I remember only fragments: the roar of blood as it raced away, drowned out the murmur of the bones. Besides, I was preoccupied: I was laughing because my hand flopped off the end of my wrist in a way I found hilarious. I was shaking so hard that I could not hold the knife to cut my other wrist. This was simply the most stunning miscalculation I had ever made! I flopped around like a half-dead fish, unable to finish what I had started, but had no one to help me out. Even funnier—and I almost tore myself apart with laughter over this one—I was not enveloped in a warm hum of numbness. Not so lucky, no. The pain blazed through me as intensely as if my blood were boiling as it left me. So intense my laugh became a scream, my scream something beyond even the vocal cords of an animal. Death, it seemed, wasn’t all that much fun after all, especially when I became vaguely aware that someone had smashed in the door and was carrying me out of the apartment, and he was weeping louder than I was…. {That was me, Janice. When I saw you like that, your eyes so blank, blood everywhere, I couldn’t take it. Nothing affected me like that. Not the underground. Not the disease taking over my body. But you, crumpled in the bathtub, half-dead. You looked as though, without ever going underground, you had suffered all the terrors to be found there.}

  So you can imagine my amusement over the doctor’s concern about my thumb prick. The pricks should have been more concerned about where I found the pen—and where they had made me stay, and whose company I’d been keeping.

  For you see, the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital is not what I would call the most hospitable of accommodations. I will not be recommending it to my friends and family. I will not be tipping generously. Indeed, I will not even be stealing the bath towels or the little soaps from the shower. {I did think about putting you in Sybel’s care—having him take you to live with the Nimblytod Tribes amid the thick foliage of tall trees. You would drink rainwater from the cups of lilies and feast on the roasted carcasses of songbirds. But then I remembered the casual nonchalance with which Sybel provided anyone who asked with the tinctures/powders/substances of their choice, and knowing of your addictions, I could not take the chance. Thus, you wound up in the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital instead.}

  Strange light, strange life, to end up in a place like that: an ivy-shrouded fortress of cruel stone and sharp angles, and gray like the inside of a dead squid, gray like a gray cap, gray like a thunderstorm, but not as interesting. Little windows like crow-pecked eyes, not even round or square sometimes, but misshapen. Had former inmates chiseled at them, attempting to escape? If you looked at the gray stone up close, you could see that it wasn’t just stone—a type of gray fungus had coated those walls. It fit over the stone like skin; you could almost see the walls breathing through their fungal pores.

  Smells? Did I mention smells? The smell of sour porridge. The smell of rotting cheese. The smell of unwashed others. Stench of garbage, sometimes, wafting up from the lower levels. Oil, piss, shit. All of it covered by the clean smell of soap and wax, but not covered well enough.

  Intertwined with the echo of smells came the echo of sounds—screams so distant behind padded walls that I sometimes thought they came from inside my own head. The panting of inmates like animals in distress. A low screeching warble for which I could never find a source.

  The hallways were like corridors to bad dreams. They rambled this way and that with no order, no coherence. You might find your destination, or you might not. It all depended on luck. I remember that once I turned a corner, and there was a dandelion growing out of a clump of dirt on the floor. After that, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the lower levels were vast swamps or brambles, through which inmates thrashed their way to open space. Once, I swear I even saw a gray cap in the distance, running away from me, toward a doorway. But I was not particularly stable; who knows what I really saw. {You’re exaggerating. It wasn’t that bad. I wouldn’t have sent you there if it was a torture chamber.}

  All of this—this grand design, this palace—was run by a man they called only Dr. V, as if his last name were so hideous or so forbidden that even saying “Dr. V” aloud might lead to some arcane punishment. I had the impression that the man’s name was very long. All I know is, I never saw him, not once, during my stay in those glorious apartments, those rooms fit for a king, or at least a rat king.

  But as bad as the facilities might have been, I found my fellow inmates more disturbing. My new best friends were, predictably, all depressed, suicidal people. If you want to make a suicidal person even more depressed, keep them cooped up with several other suicidal people, that’s what I always say.

&nb
sp; My friends included Martha of the Order of Eating Disorders, who looked like a couple of wet matchsticks sewn together with skin; a writer who would not give his name and thought he had created all of us; Sandra, who suffered through experimental treatments, involving street lamps and an engine from a motored vehicle, that could have cooked a couple of hundred dinners; Daniel, who had reason to be devoid of hope—his deformity had fused his two legs into one stump that fed into his head, which had stuck to his shoulder in an unattractive way—and, of course, Edward.

  Edward was different from the rest, and he stayed away from us. I would see him in the mornings, hunched in a corner. Short, dressed all in gray, with a large felt hat. Bright, dark eyes that peered from a pale, slack face. His hands had long dirty nails that looked as if they might snap off at the slightest suggestion of a breeze. A stale, dull, rotting smell came from his general direction, which I later discovered was due to the mushrooms he kept about his person. Sometimes, he made little chirping sounds, kin to the cricket that sang to me from outside my cell when the moon was full.

  Edward, according to the experts, thought he was a gray cap. His misfortunes included losing his job as a bookbinder for Frankwrithe & Lewden; falling in love with a woman who could not love him back; the recent death of his grandfather, his only living relative; and not being taken seriously. {This last the fate of many of us.} He’d swallowed whole handfuls of poisonous mushrooms. The landlady had found him in time, but only because she stopped by to inquire about the lateness of the rent. He should have been grateful, but he was not.

  In Edward, I seemed to have found someone who was distant cousins with Duncan. {I’d have been much like Edward if I’d let my obsession eat me. But I didn’t want to be a gray cap, Janice—I wanted to learn about them.} I told Edward—with dull sunlight seeping through the dusty fungal filigree of the dull windows, in that dull common room with dull faded carpets and dull faded paint covered with lichen, while we and the other dull inmates sat in our stupid dull deck chairs—pulled off a Southern Isles vacation ship? or a Moth River ferry?—waiting to start another dull hopeless session of rehabilitation with a woman so cheerless and uninteresting that I cannot even conjure up a shadow of her name—I told him about the singing of the blood, the murmuring of the bone, and he agreed it sounded like a much superior method for a suicide attempt. The mushrooms he had taken had just made his body fall asleep. A knife wound, on the other hand, spoke to you in a myriad of voices. It told you how you really felt. He nodded like he understood. I nodded back as if I knew what I was talking about.

  Edward only spoke to me using his chirps and whistles, and the occasional drawing. He always drew tunnels—crisscrossing tunnels, honeycombing tunnels, tunnels without end. He used black chalk or charcoal on butcher’s paper. That was all we had in there to chart our creativity.

  “I know,” I told him. “I know. You want to go underground. Like my brother. My brother’s been underground. Trust me. You don’t want to go there.”

  Chirp, chirp, whistle. Huge eyes glistening from beneath his hat and his cowl.

  “No, no—trust me, Edward. The world above ground holds more than enough for you, if you give it a chance,” I replied, even though I didn’t believe a word of it.

  Some days I made fun of Edward. Some days I thought he was more in love with the whole idea of the gray caps than my brother. Some days I thought he was my brother. {I was never crazy, just committed.}

  One day, on an impulse, I silenced his chirping with a hug. I held him tight, and I could feel his body shudder, relax, and melt into that embrace. I heard him whisper a word or two. I could not understand the words, but they were human. He did not want to let go. Something inside of him didn’t believe in his own insanity. And suddenly, I found myself holding him tighter, and crying, and not believing in my insanity, either.

  Soon enough, though, the guards pulled us apart, and we each returned to our separate madness.

  Over time, the days took on a sameness in that place. A crushing gray sameness. The only relief came in the form of Sybel, who visited two or three times. He let me know how my reputation fared in the outside world—not well—and brought with him “sympathy” cards from Sirin, Lake, and several others. Sirin had written his using letters cut from the wings of dead butterflies, while Lake had scrawled a sketch and an indecipherable message that appeared to be an attempt at a pun that had gone horribly wrong.

  Startling proof of my former life running a gallery for unstable artist types, and yet that whole life seemed unreal, as if I had never lived it. I felt as if I were receiving messages from foreign lunatics.

  “When are you coming back?” Sybel asked as he held my hand. I could see real sympathy in his eyes, not just pity.

  I shrugged. “It depends.”

  “On what?” he asked.

  “On when Duncan’s money runs out. Where is Duncan anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I think he’s gone underground.”

  The truth was, Duncan never visited me. I never asked him why. I didn’t want to know. {I was too angry at you. And I had pressing matters to attend to underground.}

  “How’s the gallery?” I asked Sybel.

  “As well as can be expected with Lake gone and you…recovering.”

  “Recovering. A nice word for it.”

  “What word would you like me to use?” Sybel asked. A glint of anger showed in his expression. It was the only time I angered him, or the only time I saw his anger.

  “Any other word, Sybel,” I said. “Any word that conveys just how fucked up I am.”

  Sybel laughed. “Just look at your sympathy cards. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last.”

  I stayed in that place for five months, until it became clear that I needed additional help, the kind that could not be provided at the hospital. At least they realized I would not try again. That madness was over with, although I had nightmares: Their hunger was savage. They ate like wild animals, ate mushrooms and worse, drank and drank, fornicated in front of me, all against the backdrop of a city mad with fire.

  Two days before I left that place for a succession of other places, Edward told me he loved me as we played another ludicrous game of lawn bowling in the tiny interior courtyard around which the building curled like a half-open fist—me unable to hold the ball because of my traitorous wrist, him shortsighted and uncoordinated. Our legendary games lasted for brutal hours of incompetence while Martha, Daniel, the Nameless Writer, and Sandra watched with a kind of disinterested interest. This was the first time Edward had used recognizable human speech.

  Applying the doctor’s advice like a universal salve for any ill, I told Edward the truth: at the moment, I had no capacity for any kind of love. I did not love him back. I didn’t love anyone back. I wouldn’t have loved myself back if I’d walked past myself on a deserted street….

  The day before I left, Edward used a variation on the Janice Shriek Method to try to kill himself. He stood in his corner as usual, his hands hidden as he cut at his wrists with a piece of metal he’d loosened from the underside of one of the deck chairs. He slowly rubbed the skin and flesh off of his wrists until the blood came and his body trembled with the anticipation of stillness.

  He stood there for at least half an hour, propped up by the wall, the blood hidden by his gray robes. He must have been very determined. I imagine the blood sang softly to him, comforting him. So I imagine. The truth must have a harder, sharper edge. It certainly did for those of us who had not noticed him in his corner, killing himself.

  Luckily, or unluckily, an attendant discovered Edward’s sin before it could claim him.

  I swear I felt no guilt over the incident. It hurt terribly. No, it didn’t. I cried for hours. No, I couldn’t. He had bright, wide eyes, and he had a mind inside his body, a mind that could feel. I didn’t have anything inside of me. My troubles looked so trivial next to his. Would it have hurt so much to say I loved him when I didn’t? I couldn’t even feel anger. Or d
espair. No despair for me today, thank you. Just an endless cool desert inside, and a breeze blowing and the sun going down, and this sense of calm eating at me. I only knew him for a few months and yet it hurt me terribly that memories of me would most likely be triggered every time he saw the scars on his wrists. {Do you get away with it that easily, Janice? Don’t I have to forgive you, too? I was mad at you for a long time after that. There I was, lost in the tunnels under the city for days at a time, risking my life, and yet I never gave up the hope you abandoned all too easily.}

  As it was, I never saw Edward again, or learned what happened to him or any of the other patients in that place. I had just been passing through.

  So I left the hospital, but not for home—oh no. Duncan seemed to feel mental illness could only be cured by a great deal of travel at the disembarkation from which various “experts” poked and prodded various parts of your brain, only to prescribe more travel for the cure. From one end of Ambergris to the other, with Sybel my unwilling steward {you have no idea how much I was paying him—he should have been willing}, I spun like some poor gristle-and-yarn shuttlecock in a lawn tennis game.

  Let me try to remember them all. Dr. Grimshaw tried some gentle water shock treatment that left me with a nervous tic in my left eye. Dr. Priott hypnotized me, which only made my tongue feel dry. Dr. Taniger tried night aversion therapy, but this only made me sleepy. Dr. Strandelson tried to make me believe that a life of severe and perfect nudity held the answer to my problems. Some tried religion, some science. None of them convinced me for even a moment. I rarely said anything. When I did, it was just to talk about Edward, the pretend gray cap.

  When my brother had exhausted the restorative talents of over two dozen Ambergrisian quacks, he and Sybel contrived to transport my morbidly bored carcass to Morrow by the reincarnation of the locomotive engine: Hoegbotton Railways.