Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  I’m sure that blaming Nativism for anything will be seen as blasphemy by many readers, but then, you’ve made it this far—you can’t give up now. So, if you haven’t become irrevocably jaded, perhaps even revolted {or revolting}, by the preceding pages, I dare say you’ll hardly even twitch when I say: I blame Nativism. Not the specific form of insanity displayed by Sabon’s father—not that brand of Nativism. No, I refer to the form that Duncan called “the final outcome of the war”: an attempt to become blind, deaf, and dumb as a most peculiar and pathetic method of semi-survival. {It allowed people to function in their day-to-day lives, rather than boarded up, gibbering in fear, in their homes. I’ll give it that much.}

  As Sabon’s kind of Nativism spread throughout the Southern cities by way of her books and essays, it infected the tourists who subjected themselves to my tours. Over time, I no longer needed Bonmot to give me updates on Mary’s progress. Instead, her flock of black crows feasting on the carcasses of Duncan’s investigations could be clearly seen in the eyes of the visitors I guided from one banal site to another.

  I can’t say I minded these intrusions into rote routine at first. As I told Sybel when he accompanied me on these jaunts—and he was always there in some form—each recital of the same information became more stale than the last, until I was like some crippled, half-senile goat or sheep, chewing and rechewing the same yellowing stalks of grass. It was a relief when the replies to my jaded bleatings began to change from polite nods or the obvious questions or the occasional attempt at wit, to observations such as “Mary Sabon wrote about this place in her book on Nativism. You should mention that next time.”

  “What a good suggestion!” I would reply. “I’ll be sure to do that,” and try to carry on as if nothing offensive had been said, if they would let me.

  Sometimes they also came seeking wish fulfillment: “Do you think we might see Sabon on this tour?”

  To which I would reply in a clipped but neutral tone, “Not on this tour.” Not even if we stood for a week in the shade of the large oak tree outside her ancestral home.

  Even more jarring, though, were the questions out of nowhere—broadsides I was in no position to absorb, meant to torment me—that opened a door where no door should exist.

  “Are you any relation to the Duncan Shriek mentioned in Sabon’s books?”

  Most of the time, my interrogator exuded a naïve good humor as natural as sweat when asking the question—wanted only to know that I was not just an expert but intimately involved with the information I imparted, whether we stood inside the old post office or outside of some tavern with “Spore” in the title.

  I had no problem providing graceful answers in such cases, although each time it did surprise me—and more than surprise me, it changed the world so that I saw my brother’s influence in everything.

  “Nativists are like Manziists or Menites or any other religion,” Duncan said once. “Just as righteous, just as right.” No wonder their questions changed my worldview.

  As Nativism conquered the city and the entire South, I found the door to my misery widening and darkening, so that a belligerent quality entered the voices of those asking the questions.

  One particularly grueling and hot summer afternoon a few years before the Shift began in earnest, I heard the words, “Are you Duncan’s sister?” delivered in a tone somewhere between fervent eagerness and bloodlust.

  My surroundings, which had faded to the usual blur—my mouth spewing a stream of familiar words while my mind went elsewhere—came back into sharp focus.

  The tour group and I stood in the middle of Voss Bender Memorial Square, in front of a fountain depicting Banker Trillian’s victory over the rival banker-warriors of Nicea. Around the square stood the ancient buildings that had once served as Trillian’s headquarters. In between, a pleasing and aromatic mixture of green-and-red blossoms signaled not only the arrival of the summer’s wildflowers but House Hoegbotton’s crass attempt to memorialize the struggle that followed Voss Bender’s death. I had set the tour group loose on the square for a few minutes, and they currently wandered here and there, staring at everything with a freshness I could not understand.

  I faced my interrogator, who doubled in an instant. A woman had spoken, but her husband stood beside her, just as resolute and nervous. Both of them had reached the far end of their fifties, the woman gray-haired and stuffed into a formless flower-print dress, matched to white stockings and blocky wooden shoes.

  “I can’t say I much cared for the mad glint in her eyes, or the thick red smile she gave me,” I told Duncan later, relaxing in his apartment.

  In fact, I looked at her as if she were a huge mushroom that had erupted through the courtyard tiles.

  “That was no mad glint,” Duncan replied. “That was the spark of righteous purpose.”

  Her husband, stocky muscle half-turned to fat, wore spectacles and, bizarrely, the kind of trousers and tunic that had gone out of style long before Old Fart had capitulated to New Fart—close to the kind of museum pieces I spoke about during the tour.

  Helpfully, their jaunty name tags, affixed to the continents of their chests, disclosed not only names but locations. Mortar and Pestle, as I came to think of them, hailed from my birthplace of Stockton. Somehow, this did not reassure me.

  “Are you Duncan’s sister?” Pestle asked again. This time it felt as if she’d poked me in the ribs with her finger.

  “And what if I am?” I asked.

  Mortar remained impassive while Pestle gave me a blank look, as if she hadn’t expected a question in return.

  “We’d have a message for him if you were his sister,” Mortar said in a gravelly baritone, shifting uneasily. I could tell that this conversation hadn’t been his idea, but that he’d decided to make the best of it.

  “Really? You’d do that?” I said. It wasn’t really a question, and I’d like to report that I delivered those words with the appropriate amount of withering scorn, but that’s not true. I was truly caught wrong-footed by the idea that two tourists could walk up to me and presume in such a way.

  Mortar balanced on one leg for a second while Pestle hesitated; she definitely hated being asked questions.

  “Absolutely. Absolutely that’s what I’d do,” Pestle said, finally.

  “And what would the message be?” I asked her. I shouldn’t have bothered. I could have ignored her. I could have moved on to the next part of the tour.

  Pestle frowned and her face achieved a certain narrow intensity. “Why, I’d ask you to tell him that he’s wrong and that the Nativists are right.”

  “And that he should stop trying to scare people with his theories,” Mortar added.

  Mortar and Pestle stood there, waiting for my response while the sun baked us all. My gaze fled to two swallows chasing insects through the searing blue sky, and I wondered how it had come to this. Had I misjudged how far I had fallen, and was falling still? Where will it end? Can it end? Should it end? My fingers are green with spores. That cannot be a good sign.

  I could have told old Mortar and Pestle—for whom I now feel a mounting affection where no such affection should exist—that Duncan was closer than they might have thought, and perhaps they would like to meet him? But I don’t think they really would have wanted to meet him. That the person they had pictured in their minds actually existed would probably have confounded them. Unlike Nativism, which existed precisely so people could avoid being confounded.

  Nativism, to my mind, had become the next “phenomenon,” like the New Art before it, except in a different discipline. You didn’t have to paint anything or enjoy art to join it. You didn’t have to react or interpret or express yourself. Nothing so active. You just had to believe in a theory and mindlessly recite it to others with any minor variations you might have added to it in the meantime. {Not much different from the chants some of the imprisoned Truffidian monks used to drive the fear from their hearts.}

  Nativism would become so popular that not long a
fter Mortar, Pestle, and I had our enlightening conversation in Bender Square, the Ambergris Tourism Board, against my sole and emphatic “No—hell, no,” vote, added a Nativism tour to my busy schedule.

  What did this new tour consist of? Our standard “Gray Cap Oddities” tour combined with a few extras, like a view of Sabon’s family home, Blythe Academy, and some carefully selected and cultivated fungus-infested walls—“Ooh, very pretty, very awe-inspiring,” most tourists would coo—and a lot of extra propaganda that made my teeth hurt. I never thought that I would ever be required to repeat the name “Sabon” so many times to so many strangers.

  “Am I Duncan’s sister?” I finally replied. “Yes, I am. Do you know him?”

  “We know of him,” Mortar said, almost cleverly.

  “But you don’t know him?”

  “No, not personally,” Pestle replied.

  “They didn’t even know you, Duncan,” I told him later. “Hadn’t met you even once. And yet it was as if they thought they did know you—personally.”

  “Oh, I see. I thought perhaps, given your use of his first name, that you were old friends of his.”

  “The price of reflected fame, I guess,” Duncan said, staring out the window into the courtyard. “It’s enough to have read about you.”

  At least I got the courtesy of an embarrassed look from old Mortar. Pretty Pestle, though, went right on pounding away.

  Eventually, I managed to rescue myself from the Nativism tour, but it took almost a year. People liked the irony of a Shriek, any Shriek, narrating that tour—at least the ones who had read Mary’s book, and too many of them had read Mary’s book. {Even me. I’m surprised you make no mention here of the time I took your Nativism tour. I’ve never seen anyone have to hold in so much irritation for such a long time. I only did it because for a time I contemplated joining the fray. If they wanted to use my life for their mass hallucinations, then I should at least have made a little extra money off of it. Can you imagine the furor if Duncan Shriek had become a tour guide?}

  Cinsorium: Rethinking the Myth of the Gray Caps was a book we needed during those reactionary rebuilding years as much as we’d needed Sabon’s pig cartel book a few years before. It was the book that made the rift between Duncan and Mary permanent. As Duncan wrote in his journal after reading it, “For the first time, my body understands what my mind accepted long before: Mary is never coming back to me.”

  In her book, Sabon alternately refuted Duncan’s theories about the gray caps and cribbed from them—as if she had ground Duncan’s ideas down to specks of glitter and then used them to decorate her own creations. {Perhaps it wouldn’t have hurt so much if I hadn’t given her a copy of my own Cinsorium when we were at Blythe, inscribed “My dearest Mary—here’s the heart of me. Treat it gently. Love, Duncan.” She couldn’t have treated my Cinsorium more ruthlessly in her Cinsorium if she’d honed the book’s boards to a fatal sharpness and then stabbed me with them repeatedly. I can forgive her for most things, but not that.}

  “So that is the message you would like me to relay to Duncan?” I asked Pestle, to make sure.

  A triumphant look from Pestle. “Yes, thanks. That would be wonderful. But we have more to tell him.”

  “I rather thought you might.”

  As everyone knows, Nativism consists of two major ideas, but most people do not realize that only one of them is unique. The other has been around for centuries. Sabon’s innovation consisted in how she put the two together and then slapped her father’s crowd-pleasing title of “Nativism” on top of it all like the final slice of bread on a particularly messy sandwich.

  What was the first part of this magnificent theory? To start with, Sabon floated the thought—I can’t even credit it with the term “idea”—that the gray caps were the degenerate descendents of a local tribe similar to the Dogghe or the Nimblytod {without asking either tribe how they felt about being lumped in with the gray caps, and without consulting their extensive oral histories}, but a tribe that had been colonized and then subjugated by several variations of fungus found in both above- and belowground Ambergris. She claimed that the mighty city that had existed before Manzikert I razed it had housed a Saphant-type civilization predating the gray caps. She even went so far as to suggest that the gray caps had been a servant class to this hypothetical other race. {I found it highly ironic, given the fate of my books at the hands of reviewers, that by postulating this “other race” and leaving that question as the book’s central mystery, she so captured readers’ imaginations that no one thought to cry out, “Where’s the proof?”}

  Pestle said, “Tell Duncan that he doesn’t need to worry about the gray caps.”

  “They say you don’t need to worry about the gray caps, Duncan.”

  “Ah, but I know that they worry about us, and that worries me.”

  Duncan did a rather unconvincing imitation of a shuffling gray cap. If I hadn’t seen him do it before, I wouldn’t have known what he was trying to do.

  “Half-wit.”

  “Unappreciative pedant. But what else did they say?”

  “Also tell him,” Mortar added, without a hint of threat, “that he might want to go into another line of work.”

  “Ho ho! Haven’t you said the same to me sometimes, Janice? So how can you complain?”

  “Do you want to hear the rest or are you going to be difficult?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to M & P, remembering a valuable bit of advice from Sybel about how it’s never too late to correct your course so long as you’ve not yet run aground. {Because Sybel was, of course, an expert on sailing metaphors.} “I’m sorry, but I was joking. I’m not really Duncan’s sister. I just like to claim I am sometimes, you know, because it makes things more interesting. My apologies.”

  I turned to the rest of the tourists, who had regrouped in front of me and had become a little too interested in my conversation with M & P.

  “Now, as we continue, notice the telltale Trillian period details in the building across the square—in particular the fluted archways, the broad columns, the fine filigree. Also note—”

  “I don’t believe you,” Mortar said, with the kind of earnest emphasis that can be interpreted as sternly polite or quietly angry, depending on your inclination.

  Not for the first time, I remember thinking that perhaps it was time to change careers again.

  The second part of Nativism reflected an odd prejudice that Duncan had tried to refute in his own book: most historians {and laypeople} thought of and wrote about the gray caps as if they represented a natural phenomenon, as immutable, faceless, and unpredictable as the weather, and, therefore, best understood in the aggregate, like the change of seasons or a bad thunderstorm. {Would that the Nativists had treated the gray caps like weather and tried to divine, from certain signs—a lowering of the temperature, a particular type of cloud, a strange hot wind—what the gray caps had planned for us.}

  As Duncan wrote in his book so many years ago:

  Looking back at all of Ambergris’ many historical accounts, the answers to three basic yet profound questions are always missing: (1) in the absence of a strong central government, how does Ambergris manage to avoid fragmentation into separate, tiny city-states? (2) What cause could there possibly be for the fluctuating levels of violence and personal property damage experienced during the Festival? (3) Given the presence of members of over one hundred contradictory religions and cults in the city, what prevents occurrences of holy war?

  For Duncan, the answers always returned to the gray caps, who, by use of hidden influence {the first physical manifestation being Frankwrithe & Lewden’s use of fungal weapons} and a multitude of carefully engineered “spore solutions,” kept the population balanced between anarchy and control. To Duncan, this meant that it served the gray caps’ interests for Ambergris to lurch ever forward, never truly disintegrating or cohering, but instead always on the edge, teetering.

  However, Mary and her Nativists refused to believe in
conscious gray cap machinations. In an article for Ambergris Today, Mary wrote:

  Time and again, apologists blame the gray caps for our own follies and misdeeds. Such a position abrogates personal responsibility and is as irresponsible as those religions that attribute deeds to the sun, moon, or sea. We are, ultimately, responsible for our own actions, our own history, and our own happiness. I do not refute any claim that the gray caps are vile and degenerate creatures, or that they have not influenced our city in a negative way. But they have not done so with intent. Their story is not that of an overarching conspiracy, of careful control over centuries, but instead the pitiful tale of a subjugated race that acts with the same instinct and lack of planning as any of the lower animals. For us to confer intent upon them—or to seek intent from them—turns us into victims, unable to fashion our own destinies. I reject such crackpot ideology.

  Mary mercilessly picked away at any attempt to prove that the gray caps had exhibited conscious thought or causality, no matter how minor. For example, in a letter to the editor for a broadsheet, Duncan wrote about what appeared to him to be a side effect of the gray caps’ efforts: {I did not. I considered these effects to be as intentional as all of the overt harm done to us by the gray caps.}

  The very spores that keep the population in thrall also undertake many beneficial tasks. For example, Ambergris has stayed relatively disease-free throughout its history, with no documented plague as has occurred in Stockton and Morrow. Whether intentional or not, these benefits should not be overlooked.

  Mary skewered this idea, writing in a subsequent issue, “Does the absence of disease lead one to the immediate conclusion that some force other than common sense and hand-washing is protecting us?” {I am ashamed to admit that her letter to the editor, in response to my own, sent a little thrill down my spine. I know she wasn’t responding to me personally, but it was still direct communication of a kind.}