Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Hoegbotton & Sons, with their customary twinned avarice and industry, had unearthed vast coal deposits in the mountainous western reaches of the Kalif’s empire, waged a private war to wrest the disputed area from the control of the Kalif’s generals, and then, through a crippling act of sheer will, ripped the old steam engines from their deathlike slumber in Ambergris’ metal graveyards, refurbished them, straightened and derusted by various unarcane means, and set them back on track. Like me, they had been resurrected. Like me, they resented it.

  The view from the pretty paneled windows reminded me of a thousand respectable landscape paintings laid side by side and brought to sudden life. I amused myself by rating each landscape against the next until my vision blurred—sobbing uncontrollably and staring down at the rewelded floors of the compartment while wondering what rats and hobos had lived there before the exhumation, what myriad battles over bread or scraps of clothing or glints of loose change had taken place, and how much dried blood had been painted over, and was that a scar the workmen had been unable to remove in the shape of the gray caps’ favorite symbol, and what was that stain/vein of green along the lower right side of the seats opposite—some fungus, some mold, some rot—and so just generally composing a long sentence in my head to keep out the emptiness, the sadness, and the plain old ordinary human embarrassment of what had occurred: waking up from my attempt to find Duncan and Sybel looking down at me with a mixture of pity and sorrow. {My look was not pitying—I was furious with you. Perhaps that is why I sent you to so many specialists. Here we had helped save you, and all you could do was scowl and scream at us. Do you wonder why we didn’t visit much?}

  In Morrow I nearly died of boredom and the cold. Morrow is such a dry, dead town, a city of wooden corpses that talk and move about, but quietly, quietly. Morrow could never kill a soul with casual flair, as could Ambergris. Not instantly, snuffed out with a cruelty akin to the divine. No, Morrow would grind you down between its implacable wooden molars and create out of the resulting human-colored paste an acceptable, placid citizen who would marry, settle down, have children, retire, and die without a flicker of a flame of passion to warm/warn you on a cold winter night. In Morrow, a noise amongst the sewer pipes could never inspire fear, only conjure up a plumber. In Morrow, Duncan would have had to build tunnels or go mad and, sent to Ambergris to recuperate, have fallen in love with Her. No wonder Morrow was one of Mary’s favorite cities; you’re more than welcome to it, Mary—it deserves you.

  Menite Morrow had always been—eternal heretics in the eyes of the Truffidians—and I soon discovered that the goal of the great, frozen Menite soul was to trudge on toward some ill-defined transition from unaccountable boredom to the responsible boredom of a transcendental bliss that would be enjoyed in the next life. Every doctor there was sensible to a fault, and not a one could help me because none of them had ever been where I had been. Relief came only in small doses; the bracing sense of embarrassment when Cadimon Signal, one of Duncan’s more ancient former instructors, visited me: I could feel real warmth flood my face.

  “Good,” Cadimon said. “Shame is a good thing. It means you are alive, and you care what other people think.”

  Funny, I thought it was an involuntary reaction.

  Another thaw quickly followed my bout of embarrassment: my curiosity returned as well, mostly due to frequent glimpses of the minions of Frankwrithe & Lewden from the window of my guarded room in an ice block of a hotel. With their sinister red-and-black garb, their aggressive sales tactics, their posters pounded into posts with straight nails, proclaiming forbidden books for sale—and their practiced street fights, their marching in closed ranks—they seemed better suited for Ambergris. As indeed they were destined, in time. They were preparing for the war—first with the ruler of Morrow and then anyone farther south who might get in their way.

  One time, I even imagined I saw L. Gaudy watching his underlings from the shadow of an awning, smoking a pipe, nodding wisely. I wondered as I watched them at work if the town irritated them in the same way it irritated me. It made sense that they had to acquire Ambergris, if for no other reason than to escape Morrow. {Even then, I am sure, the emissaries of Hoegbotton & Sons haunted the streets, gliding through anonymously, eager for details, gossip, and trade.}

  After two weeks of this foolishness, Duncan’s attention wandered, no doubt due to Sabon’s soft charms. The details of his well-intentioned plans for my imprisonment and rejuvenation became fuzzy and indistinct—as blurry as windows weighed down with sleet. I escaped from between the bars of a logic suddenly lost or nonexistent: doctor’s bills unpaid, a nurse given no follow-up orders, a forgotten key languishing in a ready lock…

  …and stepped out into the miserly heat of Morrow’s sunrise, savoring and favoring my freedom. I had a sharp ache in the right wrist to remind me of my iniquities, and not a sign of a ticket home from my dear darling brother. {The nurse stole it, as I’ve told you dozens of times since.}

  As I was lost, so too the light that lingered seemed lost as it stole gingerly across the snow in tones of dappled gold. It crept up my legs, purred its warmth across my face. Revealed: fir trees, two-story wooden houses, belching factories, thoroughfares full of hard-working hard-living quack psychologists. Morrow. I tried to love her in that last glance before I set off for the docks, a pathetic suitcase in hand. But failed. The light had revealed two truths: I was free, and rather than return directly to my former life, I had decided to visit my mother….

  Here’s a tale for you….

  Once upon a time, a woman decided to tell a story about how she tried to kill herself. Her brother saved her at the last second—and then sent her north to be dissected by various disciples of empirical religions. Until one day, when her brother’s attention wandered, she escaped, and made her way south, back to her mother’s home in the fabled city of Ambergris. She felt so hollow inside that she could no longer bear to think of herself as “I.”

  The bitter cold of the north followed her south to Ambergris. She could see her breath. The drone of insects faltered to an intermittent click of surprise, a sleep-drenched distress signal.

  She first saw her mother’s house again through a flurry of snow, flakes sticking to the windshield of the hired motored vehicle. As they lurched down the failed road that led to the River Moth and her mother, the driver cursing in a thick Southern accent scattered with Northern cold, the dark blue muscles of the river came into view, and then three frail mansions hunched along the river bank amongst the tall trees. The river was silent with cold and snow.

  The mansions were silent, too: Three weary debutantes at a centuries-long ball. Three refugees of a bygone era. Three memories.

  The force and pull of the past glittered from the wrought-iron balconies, from the hedge gardens sprinkled with snow. The faded appeal of the weathered white roofs that disappeared as the vehicle drove nearer, even the slender, hesitant windows reminding her of the tired places she had just left, with their incurable patients, their incurable boredom…the same lived-in appeal as the unstarched dress shirts her father used to wear, the white fabric coarse and yellow with age.

  They drove through the remnants of faeryland—the frozen fountains in the brittle front yards, the pale statuary popular decades ago, the ornately carved doors with their tarnished bronze door knockers—until the vehicle came to a rest half-mired in snow, and for a heartbeat they watched the quiet snow together, she and the driver, content to marvel at this intruder: a strange incarnation of the invasion the Menites had long promised the lascivious followers of Truff.

  Then, the moment over, the woman who had undergone a reluctant resurrection, exhumed while still living, paid the driver, picked up her suitcase, opened the door to the sudden frost, and trudged up the front steps of her mother’s house. The driver drove away but she did not look back; she had no inclination to make him wait. She had resolved to stay in that place, and in her present state of mind she could not hold alternatives in her head with
out her skull breaking loose and rising, a bony balloon without a string, into the fissures of the cold-cracked sky. What if? had frozen along with the rose bushes.

  Her mother’s house. What made the middle mansion different from the other two aside from the fact that her mother lived there? It was the only inhabited mansion. It was the only mansion with the front door ajar. Icicled leaves from the nearby trees had swept inside as if seeking warmth, writing an indecipherable message of cold across the front hallway.

  An open door, the woman thought as she stood there, suited her mother as surely as a mirror.

  She stepped inside, only to be confronted by a welter of staircases. Had she caught the house in the midst of some great escape? Everywhere, like massive, half-submerged saurians, they curled and twisted their spines up and down, shadowed and lit by the satirical chandelier that, hanging from the domed ceiling, mimicked the ice crystals outside as it shed light that mingled in a delicate counterbalance with the frozen leaves.

  Even there, in the foyer, the woman could tell the mansion’s foundations were rotting—the waters of the Moth gurgled and crunched in the basement, the river ceaselessly plotting to steal up the basement steps, seeping under the basement door to surprise her mother with an icy cocktail of silt, gasping fish, and matted vegetation.

  Having deciphered the hollow, grainy language of the staircases, the woman strode down the main hallway, suitcase in her hand. The hallway she knew well, had seen its doppelganger wherever her mother had lived. Her mother had lined both sides with photographs of the woman’s father, father and mother together, grandparents, uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, cousins, friends of the family, followed by paintings in gaudy frames of ancestors who had not had the benefit—or curse—of the more modern innovations. Most relatives were dead, and the others the woman hadn’t seen for years.

  She could feel herself progressing into a past in which every conceivable human emotion had been captured along those walls, frozen into a false moment. {The predominant expression, her brother would later point out, whatever the emotion behind it, was a staged smile, the only variation being “with teeth” or “without teeth.” Perhaps, he would say to her later, parenthetically, outside the boundaries of frozen fairytale-isms, that she should understand the main reason he didn’t like to visit their mother: he had no wish to draw back the veil, to exhume their father’s corpse for purposes of reanimation; wasn’t it bad enough that he died once?} Soon, it was difficult not to think of herself as a photograph on a wall.

  The woman found her mother on the glassed-in porch that overlooked the river, her back to the fireplace as she sat in one of the three plush velvet chairs she had rescued from the old house in Stockton. The view through the window: the startling image of a River Moth swollen blue with ice, flurried snowflakes attacking the thick, rise-falling surface of the water, each speck breaking the tension between air and fluid long enough to drift a moment and then disintegrate against the pressure from the greater force. Disintegrate into the blue shadows of the overhanging trees, leaves so frozen the wind could not stir them.

  Her mother watched the river as it sped-lurched and tumbled past her window, and now, from the open doorway, her daughter watched her watching the river as the flames crackled and shadowed against the back of her chair.

  The daughter remembered a far-ago courtyard of conversation, a question posed by a gravelly-voiced friend of her brother: “And how is your mother? I know all about your father. But what about your mother?” The glint of his eye—through the summer sun, the crushed-mint scent from the garden beyond, and she, with eyes half-closed, listening to his voice but not hearing the question.

  Her mother. A woman who had collapsed in on herself when her husband died, and was never the same happy, self-assured person again. Except. Except: She had provided for them. She just hadn’t cared for either of them.

  The woman had not seen her mother for five years, and at first she thought she saw a ghost, a figure that blurred the more she focused on it. Wearing a white dress with a gray shawl, her mother sat in half-profile, her thin white hands like twin bundles of twigs in her lap. Smoke rose from her scalp: white wisps of hair surrounding her head. The bones of her face looked as delicate as blown glass.

  The daughter could see all of this because she was not actually in that room in the past, but in another room altogether, and as she typed she could see her own reflection in the green glass of the window to her left, since she had always been the mirror of her mother, and now looked much as her mother had looked, sitting in a chair, watching the river tumble past her window.

  The daughter stood there, staring at her mother, clearly visible, and her mother did not see her….

  Dread trickled down the woman’s spine like sweat. Was she truly dead, then? Had she succeeded and all else been a bright-dull afterlife dream? Perhaps she still lay on the floor of her bathroom, a silly grinning mask hiding her face and a bright red ribbon tied to her right wrist.

  She shuddered, took a step forward, and the simple touch of the wooden door frame against her palm saved her. She was alive, and her mother sat in front of her, with delicate crow’s-feet at the corners of her wise pale blue eyes—the mother she had known her whole life, who had tended to her ills, made her meals, put up with youthful mistakes, helped her with her homework, given her advice about boys and men. Somehow, the sudden normalcy of that revelation struck her as unreal, as from a land more distant than Morrow or the underground of Ambergris.

  The woman dropped to her knees, facing her mother, saw that flat glaze flicker from the river to her and back again.

  “Mother?” she said. “Mother?” She placed her hands on her mother’s shoulders and stared at her. As if a thaw to spring, as if a mind brought back from contemplation of time and distance, her mother’s eyes blinked back into focus, a slight smile visited her lips, her hands stirred, and she wrapped her arms around her daughter. Her light breath misted my cold ear.

  “Janice. My daughter. My only daughter.”

  At my mother’s words, a great weight dropped from me. A madness melted out of me. I was myself again as much as I ever could be. I hugged her and began to sob, my body shuddering as surely as the River Moth shuddered and fought the ice outside the window.

  {What is it about distance—physical distance—that allows us to create such false portraits, such disguises, for those we love, that we can so easily discard them in memory, make for them a mask that allows us to keep them at a distance even when so close?}

  It would be nice to report that my mother and I understood each other with perfect clarity after that first moment of affection, but it wasn’t like that at all. The first moment proved the best and most intimate.

  We talked many times over the next two weeks, as she led me up and down the rotting staircases in search of this or that memory, now antique, in the form of a faded photograph, a tarnished jewelry case, a brooch made from an oliphaunt tusk. But while some words brought us closer, other words betrayed us and drew us apart. Some sentences stretched and contracted our solitude simultaneously, so that at the end of a conversation, we would stand there, staring at each other, unsure of whether we had actually spoken.

  I fell into rituals I thought I had abandoned years before, arcs of conversations in which I chided her for not pursuing a career—she had rooms full of manuscripts and paintings, but had never tried to sell them. For me, to whom creativity came so hard—each painting, each sculpture, each essay a struggle, a forced march—the easy way in which our mother created and then discarded what she created seemed like a waste. {Which begs the question, Janice: why didn’t you sell her paintings in your gallery? It wasn’t just because she didn’t want you to have them; they also weren’t very good.} She, meanwhile—and who could blame her?—chastised me for my lifestyle, for abusing my body. She had not missed the blue mottlings on my neck and palms that indicated mushroom addiction, although I had inadvertently kicked the habit in the aftermath of my attempt.

/>   And so I slowly worked my way toward talking about the suicide attempt, through a morass of words that could not be controlled, could not be stifled, that meant, for the most part, nothing, and stood for nothing.

  One day, as we watched the River Moth fight the blocks of ice that threatened to slow it to grimy sludge, we talked about the weather. About the snow. She had seen snow in the far south before, but not for many years. She sang a lullaby for the snow in the form of a soliloquy. At that moment, it would not have mattered if I were five hundred miles away, knocking on the doors of Zamilon. Her gaze had focused on some point out in the snow, where the river thrashed against the ice. The ice began to form around my neck again. I could not breathe. I had to break free.

  “I tried to kill myself,” I told her. “I took out a knife and cut my wrist.” I was shaking.

  “I know,” she said, as casually as she had commented about the weather. Her gaze did not waver from the winter landscape. “I saw the marks. It is unmistakable. You try to hide it, but I knew immediately. Because I tried it once myself.”

  “What?”

  She turned to stare at me. “After your father died, about six months after. You and Duncan were at school. I was standing in the kitchen chopping onions and crying. Suddenly I realized I wasn’t crying from the onions. I stared at the knife for a few minutes, and then I did it. I slid down to the floor and watched the blood. Susan, our neighbor—you may remember her?—found me. I was in the hospital for three days. You both stayed with a friend for a week. You were told it was to give me some rest. When I came back, I wore long-sleeved shirts and blouses until the marks had faded into scars. Then I wore bracelets to cover the scars.”

  I was shocked. My mother had been mad—mad like me. {Neither of you were mad—you were both sad, sad, sad, like me. I didn’t know Mom tried to take her own life, but thinking back, it doesn’t surprise me. It just makes me weary, somehow.}