Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  But this is not the only kind of love we can have—it’s not the only kind of passion. What we have is a flame like your hair, but there’s another kind of excitement in the freedom to admire each other in public, without fear. There is a charge that comes from sharing our lives through more than just midnight trysts and frantic letters like this one. And this is why, finally, having lost everything tonight, I am still oddly hopeful, Mary. Mary. Your name is still such a revelation to me, your body always reminding me of the first time so that your touch makes me weak with the miracle of this thought: I am with Mary Sabon. I am loving Mary Sabon.

  I am writing this by lantern light in my office. As dawn begins to gray the city, I can almost see your window from where I sit. The air is sweet and cool. I have two cases full of books and other personal belongings. In a few minutes, I will leave this academy, perhaps forever. I will leave only two things behind me: in my desk, for you to take when you will, that copy of Cadimon Signal’s Musings on the Many Faces of Ambergris that you so much wanted—it was supposed to be a birthday present—and this letter, protected by our favorite hiding place. Please, if you have read this far, don’t cry. Everything will be okay. I promise.

  Please do not abandon me.

  Love,

  Duncan

  Please do not abandon me, he writes in this journal entry that awkwardly transitions into a letter that could have been written by a nineteen-year-old, which he rips out of his journal, signs, and leaves for her—only for it to return to him four years later to be reunited with its fellow pages. He did not tear out related pages and send them to her. He did not send her the page right after his tearful but triumphant farewell, the one that contained this passage: “I have lost one of my best friends. I have lost a friend because of my own stupidity. Who will understand now? Who will I be able to talk to?”

  Who will understand now? Here’s the heart of it, what began to eat at Duncan. He told Bonmot so many things—sometimes in abstract, sometimes nonspecific, but still with enough detail that Bonmot could respond with all of his training and intellect. Me, I was neither historian nor priest, neither artist nor subject of art. Mary? Too young, he must have known on some level. Fine for the physical, but not to discuss such mysteries with. {Not true, and unfair, and judgmental, and unworthy behavior, even from you. I did not discuss the underground, the gray caps, my disease with her to protect her. And, yes, because she was young, but not because I didn’t think she could understand—but because I was afraid I would scare her. That she would think me a crackpot, a false prophet, a madman.}

  In fact, he did not tear out the first draft of his second page, which is identical to the second draft, except for the speech he attributes to Bonmot:

  There are no more lunches under the willow trees for us. You are no longer a teacher at this academy. I expect you to gather your things now and be gone before dawn. As for Mary, she’s just a child. She is as much your victim as this academy. Have you ever thought how this might hurt her? And I don’t mean your status as her teacher, but you, Duncan, you in particular. How many obsessions can you sustain in your life? How many masters can you serve? Survive?

  Did he suppress this part to save Mary from hurt, to protect Bonmot from her resentment? Or to make himself look better? {It doesn’t really matter now, does it? One would think you were more intent on defending Mary than destroying her. You should decide what your purpose is.}

  I thought writing all of this down would help me place events in their proper order and context. Instead, the sequencing grows hazy. I stand at the base of the stairs at Martin Lake’s party, the scarlet imprint of my hand still warm on Mary’s face, about to respond to her careless words. What did I say? I’m not sure it matters anymore. The harder I focus, the faster the sharpness I desire and deserve dissipates, as if it all happened at the same time, or backwards, and we only now approach a beginning.

  Is there any real reason, other than bad luck and ill-timing, that Mary and Duncan could not still be together? Is there any reason it could not have been Mary and Duncan that I walked toward down the stairs, the flesh necklace/noose undone before it ever formed, its pieces resolved into smiling, appreciative faces? The imprint of my hand on Mary’s face transformed into the loving touch of a sister-in-law? I might not be here now, the darkness of the ceiling muted only by the purple tiers of fungus that encroach at such speed. {No purple fungus ever grows with good intent in this city, Janice. You must have known that. It is a breed bred for spying, the source of myriad fragmented reports collected in the depths of the city’s underground passages.}

  But words will never persuade the past. Bonmot did fire Duncan. It did signal the beginning of the end {in one sense, but only in one sense} for my brother and Mary.

  I remember that Bonmot told me about it during one of our sessions in the Truffidian Cathedral. I didn’t have unbridled sex anymore, so I had, as you may have guessed, turned to “religion.” That didn’t last, either, because it had little to do with faith, but at least it gave me an excuse to spend time with Bonmot. We were standing in the very place where he later died, among the pews closest to the door.

  “Janice,” he said. “I’ve had to do something. I hope you won’t hate me for it.”

  “I don’t think I could hate you, Bonmot.”

  “You might. I’ve had to let Duncan go. Because of Mary. I think you already know what I mean?”

  For a second, it was very quiet. I was shocked. Duncan hadn’t had a chance to tell me. I hadn’t seen him in days.

  “Did you really have to?” I asked. I think I was worried, at first, as much about how it might affect my relationship with Bonmot as about Duncan.

  “Yes. I had to.”

  He bowed his head, and we prayed.

  How did Mary respond to this news? For a long time—for longer than I might have expected—she stood by Duncan. Duncan told me a week later, an echo of passion in his voice, that Mary had smuggled a letter to him through her unsuspecting parents. {Bonmot had left it up to Mary to tell her parents, and she never did.} In it, she begged him to wait for her. Either Duncan’s line of romantic blather had ensorcelled her or she found the general notion of separated lovers, forced to check their desires, tragically romantic.

  “A year and I can be with her,” Duncan told me. “We’ll find an apartment. Settle down.”

  “Have some kids?” I said. “Find a respectable day job? Stop skulking around belowground?”

  A bitter smile twisted his face, but he did not reply.

  {It may have seemed bitter to you, but I was mostly aghast at your lack of faith. I truly thought back then that Mary and I shared the same beliefs about the underground. In my dreams, I led her through those tunnels as if I were still a boy of fifteen, her sense of adventure as acute as my own.}

  Mary might beg him, but Bonmot’s begging days were well behind him; the old priest would never forgive my brother. His superiors in the Truffidian hierarchy used the incident to further humiliate him within the church. Nor would the Academy as a collective of teachers forgive him. Although Bonmot made no attempt to spread the news beyond informing them that Duncan had left the staff, Duncan’s fellow instructors found out. How could they not? Their lack of forgiveness would take many forms, the worst of which would further hound my brother to the outer edge of his chosen field. {I was more concerned about getting from them the data they’d collected while working unwittingly on my many projects.} Many {not so many; certainly not, I thought then, enough to scuttle any future career aspirations} of his former colleagues wrote for history journals, or edited them, or had written books. With them as gatekeepers, with their long memories, it became less and less likely that Duncan’s theories would ever find print in respectable publications again. {Respectable? Disreputable, really. Hundreds of pages of print a year devoted to concealing or sidestepping the truth. They were on the fringe the entire time and didn’t know it.} Thus, Duncan’s excommunication from Blythe further isolated him from anyone b
ut Mary. {Mary and you, which certainly wasn’t my idea of a happy family.} Duncan’s journal reached new levels of bathos {It was genuine sadness at the time, but even proper melancholy is worthy of scorn in retrospect} in listing those who had abandoned him, in pages and pages of affronted pride. I’ll spare you all but a snippet of it.

  Atriarch, Elizabeth—Assistant dean of student affairs, made a mock ritual of me dancing with her at school functions. Next to Bonmot, her support was the most helpful in continuing my underground studies. She had once accompanied the famous Daffed on one of his odd specimen exhibitions into the Southern jungles, and she had learned to love the muck and mire of slogging through vegetation. I fed her a steady diet of harmless but exotic stories about the underground, and in return she looked away as my classes grew more and more esoteric. Now, I might as well be a shadow to her. {Everyone was a shadow to that woman. I should not have taken it personally.}

  Balfours, Simon—One of the guards I used to evade while making my way to trysts with Mary; he liked to joke with me about the Hoegbottons. The one time I saw him in the street since, he barked out my name like a curse, and followed it with real curses. {Since dead, of a heart attack, falling while on duty. I can’t blame him for his response—I made a fool of him.}

  Binder, David—A stuffed shirt fool, head of Morrow Studies, who used to chatter on endlessly while I was trying to get to my next class. Now he’s gone silent as dumb stone, as useless to me now as he was to my research. {I stand by my assessment, especially now that he, too, is dead, run over by a motored vehicle.}

  Bittern, Ralstaff—The gardener! Even the gardener won’t talk to me, won’t look at me. Although, in truth, he never liked me much. But I thought he at least enjoyed matching wits with me in his efforts to uncover the scope of my midnight perambulations. It seems I was incorrect. {Now he’s the gardener for the grounds around the Truffidian Cathedral, and his attitude is absolutely the same. He spits at me when he sees me.}

  Cinnote, Fiona—Indigenous Tribes Studies. Beautiful in her own way. She used to laugh at my jokes. I used to laugh at hers. There was a world-weariness behind her eyes that made me think she had an interesting history. But she had an affair with Binder, for Truff ’s sake. How dare she judge me! {And how dare I judge her, truly. I actually thought about suggesting lunch, but she quit the Academy and mounted an expedition to the Southern jungles, never to be seen again.}

  …and on, and on…

  When it came to Blythe Academy, all Duncan could think of for several years was how he had been wronged by them. He couldn’t see how he’d hurt the Academy, or his fellow professors. There was nothing in him, then, that was able to accept the guilt of his misdeeds. {Perhaps not on the surface, Janice. But I’ve made up for it since. I think I’ve made up for it thrice over. But I guess no one makes it out, a line Lacond was fond of quoting from Tonsure.}

  Even worse, these were people Duncan had never mentioned to me or hadn’t known while at Blythe. He had never cared about them before, but their features came into sharp relief after he believed himself wronged by them. {I have no comment, no defense.}

  So Duncan became absent from Blythe Academy, no longer roaming its halls, its gardens, its classrooms. The effect of Duncan’s sudden removal on Mary, paradoxically, was an unlikely blossoming. Released from the constant “tutelage” and the equally lustful pressure of Duncan’s ideas, she, Bonmot told me, had become one of the school’s best students. With Bonmot to guide but not smother, Mary began to develop her own theories, the seeds that would eventually lead to disagreement and betrayal. {You find her theories totally without merit, Janice, yet claim that I constricted her intellectual freedom like some monstrous…monster. You can’t have it both ways. I don’t deny I made some mistakes, as I’m sure you’ll soon demonstrate, but I’m not totally at fault. I’m not sure anyone is at fault.}

  I can only guess how no longer having access to the Academy affected Duncan’s studies of the gray caps. I imagine it hurt him to the core, if he could even register that pain above the intensity of his lust for Mary. {Wrong again! Wrong! You are setting new records for presumption in this account. By the time of my expulsion, I had nearly completed my experiments. There was little else I could set my students to doing that would not arouse suspicion. My classes had, by that point, become mockeries of classes, mockeries of studies. The students themselves sensed it. That the results were inconclusive does not mean the experiments were incomplete. I just moved my laboratory and studies to another location—namely, my own body. And quite a schooling that proved! As I began to live with my condition, and then find ways to control it, it became less of a disease and more of a transformation.}

  A week after Duncan told me about his expulsion from Blythe Academy, the late afternoon brought not only rain and the murmur of prayers from the Religious Quarter, but also a knock on the door. Duncan stood on the porch in the rain, his hair plastered to his head and puddles around his booted feet. Gray as a mushroom dweller, and smelling of mildew. Eyes like phosphorescent green circles with dead black centers. For a startled second, I saw him as Mary would later—not of this world, but not having left it. Half-invisible spores, caught by the porch light, formed a hazy halo around his head. His hair had begun to thin and I noticed, with a pang of recognition, the emergence of gray at his temples. And yet, once again, he was fleeing the ruins of a self-made disaster. A part of me could not sympathize.

  “This is becoming routine,” I said.

  “Can you find me a job?” he asked, grinning. “I’m broke.” As matter-of-fact as that. With the old glow of fragile confidence you find in people held together by nothing more substantial than affection {and fungi}.

  “Hello to you, too,” I said, walking back into the apartment to find him a towel, vaguely happy that I would not be asked to scrape mushrooms off of him this time.

  As I threw the towel in his face, I said, “Of course I can find you a job. There are lots of available positions for a paranoid, discredited, fringe historian with a fungal disorder who has recently been laid off for laying his students.”

  Duncan winced. “Student. Singular.”

  “Singular. Plural. Does it really matter?” I turned away from him. “So. Should I go or do you want to?” I asked. “Neither of us really has a choice. It’s not like my gallery is going to pay your bills when it doesn’t even pay mine.”

  “Go?” He stared quizzically at me for a moment, and then he understood. “You should go. What if he disapproves of me now?”

  “You assume he knows.”

  “He knows everything. And what he doesn’t know, he finds out quickly. You should go.”

  So I went. And that was the start of something altogether different.

  Sirin’s office occupied part of the second floor of Hoegbotton & Sons’ headquarters on Albumuth Boulevard. The dull mass of red bricks always smelled of packing sawdust and exotic spices. It had gained a kind of inbred notoriety due to a novel that had used the offices as a prop to its fading plot during its climactic scenes. The building had survived not only that malaprop, but centuries of other challenges—from the Gray Tribes, to Festivals gone bad, to fires set by outraged monks from the Religious Quarter protesting unsavory business practices. {Not to mention the ongoing assault on its editorial domains by a certain pair of increasingly toothless and shrill Shrieks.} “There are only two times not to trust a Hoegbotton: when you’re selling and when you’re buying” was a common saying down at the docks.

  Sirin’s office—a haven for culture within the blunt instrument of greed that formed the building proper—had a seasonal quality to it. In the winter and early spring, Sirin’s rosewood desk would be buried in contracts, manuscripts, proposals, financial information, and related books, all in preparation for publication. {Not then, but soon—perhaps even within three or four years—one of those manuscripts would be Mary’s. She truly was gifted at one point. And prolific—positively fecund—once she got started.} As the year progressed, his de
sk would slough off much of the clutter, until, by autumn, all but the finished books had vanished, and the magazines or broadsheets pregnant with reviews, both bright and dark, had taken their place. Then winter would once again obscure the lovely rosewood of his desk with the weight of things promised and things promising. His office had the most wonderful smell: of parchment pages, of ink, of newly printed books.

  Remembering this as I type, I suddenly see not just one trip to Sirin’s office, but many, over several seasons, a pleasant overlay of memories as sensual as any heated groping of bodies in the back rooms of a guest house. I see the perpetual but graceful aging of Sirin, which for him manifested itself solely in his hair, which whitened and receded, while the rest of him stayed exactly the same. I see the constant rush and withdrawal of the papers on his desk. I see the sudden and inexplicable disappearance and reappearance of his legion of secretaries. The blur of colors and motion outside of his windows. The steady permanence of his smile, his desk, his butterflies. {It’s difficult to shake off the feeling, isn’t it, Janice? Difficult because you don’t want to. Neither do I.}

  One of the more distinctive aspects of Sirin’s offices, beyond the sheer expansive clutter on his desk {early spring, then, was it?}, and the lingering odor of cigars and vanilla, were the tubular glass enclosures a Morrow glass blower had made for him. They lay clustered on the table behind his desk, near an oval window that overlooked Albumuth Boulevard. Each had tiny holes cut into the glass and contained a caterpillar, chrysalis, or fully formed butterfly. {Certainly, little bound his butterflies to the past, or the present. As they emerged glistening from their tight houses, they knew nothing but the moment. Sometimes I envied them.}

  I had often observed Sirin puttering over his charges as his secretary showed me in, but this time he stood there lamenting a dead butterfly. Sirin looked tanned and well-rested beneath his crisp gray suit and burgundy shoes, any graceful effect ruined by a glaring multicolored bowtie that a clown would have been ashamed to wear; it was his only vice, besides tricking people. His hair had by now receded to reveal more and more of his narrow, intelligent face.