“Maybe,” I said, knowing the real trick would be to get Duncan to agree to change even one comma of it. {How little you understood me, Janice.}
I met Duncan at the Spore again, in this room. As I approached the door, the flickering light within played a trick. I thought I saw his shadow, impossibly vast, curled around the edges, snap into a more human shape. A gurgle and whine that coalesced into a human voice.
“Janice,” came a throaty greeting, then, “Janice,” in my brother’s true voice.
I hadn’t entered the room yet. He couldn’t have seen me. {Not with my own eyes.}
When I did enter, I found him pale and shrunken, folding and unfolding his arms.
“You’ve come from Sirin,” he said. It was not a question.
“Yes.”
“So you’ve seen…you’ve seen my early history?”
“Yes.”
“And he has read it.”
“Yes.”
He looked up at me, his gaze suddenly desperate.
“Does he like it?”
“Does he like it?” I echoed. “No, Duncan—he loves it. He absolutely loves it. He asked for a travel guide version of an early history of Ambergris and you gave him a tome large enough to contain every Truffidian hymn ever sung—and half of it in footnote form. He absolutely despises it.”
Duncan began to mutter to himself. It was a habit he’d developed in the years after the war. It did not endear him to many people.
“But I’ve finally gotten it right,” he said. “I’ve finally documented all of it.”
Sirin had let me read some of the manuscript in his office. It was riddled through with strange symbols, strange characters. It contained much that was personal to Duncan’s life. It rambled. It made sense only in spurts. I felt, reading it, that several different people had collaborated to write it, only two or three of whom were sane or had consulted with the other writers. {I agree. It was a bad time. I could not control my shape. I could not get my bearings. Keeping myself cooped up in that room, working on the essay, I let other parts of me infiltrate the text with their opinions. From hour to hour, my body changed, making it hard to concentrate on my task. In the end, it all seemed right to me, but there were so many of me then.}
Duncan frowned and looked away {to hide a mushroom blossoming on my cheek}. “So he doesn’t want it.”
“Duncan,” I said, “I’m not sure even AFTOIS will want it. It doesn’t make all that much sense.”
Duncan stood, pasted a smile onto his face, kept to the darkness.
“What about you, Janice?” he said. “You could edit it. You could give Sirin what he wants. At least some of what he wants. And I’ll save the rest for something else.”
This response shocked me. The old Duncan—or at least a Duncan who wasn’t this vulnerable—would have taken his manuscript back from Sirin. But I remember making excuses for Duncan as I stood there. The times had passed us by. Duncan needed money to pay for his tiny apartment and his space at the Spore, so we had to take what we could get. But I never really understood why he didn’t fight for himself more, why he gave in so easily. I’m not sure I ever will. {Because, Janice, I was becoming what I believed in. I was becoming it. And it might have been strange and unknown, never to be recognized, but it meant more to me than words on a page by then.}
“I can try,” I said.
“Thanks! Thanks,” he said, so pathetically grateful he even gave me a hug. “That’ll work out fine then. Go tell Sirin,” he said. “Go tell Sirin. Make Sirin happy.” {I needed you to leave. I was getting ready to change again, and sometimes now when I changed, I would assimilate things around me.} So I went to tell Sirin.
What had taken Duncan two months to write took me three days to edit. I simply discarded anything that didn’t make sense and tried to keep anything that hinted of a chronological history. Duncan read over the result mournfully, added a few more footnotes, changed some of my line edits, and gave me his approval in such an offhand way that I was even madder at him for the ease with which he had given up.
Perhaps I should have been more empathetic, though. In his journal from the time, I find this entry:
How will I die? Not that way, not me. For me it will be the slow decay, the failure of my senses, the graying of the world, the remaindering and misunderstanding of my books, followed by the very forgetting of my words, the pages wiped clean of all marks, and so too the wiping clean of me, my brain sinking into slow senility, utterly alone, no vestige of past family and friends left to me until, finally, when I am dust, I shall unleash a sigh of forgetfulness and leave not a trace of my existence in the world…. But until then, if the black bough taps against the windowpane, I shall ignore its brittle invitation—and in all ways and in all things I shall not dignify the name of that which will one day take me.
Rather vainglorious melancholy, and contradictory, too, but clearly indicative of the depression Duncan sometimes fell into during this period. {Janice, that whole quote is from one of the Kalif’s genealogists, who wrote potboilers on the side! Context, Janice, context. Or is my handwriting so bad you couldn’t read the attribution?}
When I brought the revised essay to Sirin, he still didn’t care for parts of it, but with his deadline approaching, he had little choice.
“Besides,” he admitted, “a little eccentricity will probably seem quaint to the tourists.”
Among those eccentricities, in that first edition, were entries in the appended glossary for both Duncan and for Sabon, alluding to what no longer existed:
SABON, MARY. An aggressive and sometimes brilliant historian who built her reputation on the bones of older, love-struck historians. Five-ten. One-fifteen. Red hair. Green, green eyes. An elegant dresser. Smile like fire. Foe of James Lacond. In conversation can cut with a single word. Author of several books whose titles I quite forget at the moment.
SHRIEK, DUNCAN. An old historian, born in Stockton, who in his youth published several famous history books, since remaindered and savaged by critics who should have known better. His father, also an historian, died of joy; or, rather, from a heart attack brought on by finding out he had won a major honor from the Court of the Kalif. I was ten. I never died from my honors, but I was banned by the Truffidian Antechamber. Also a renowned expert on the gray caps, although most reasonable citizens ignore even his least outlandish theories. Once lucky enough to meet the love of his life, but not lucky enough to keep her, or to keep her from pillaging his ideas and discrediting him. Still, he loves her, separated from her by the insurmountable gulf of empires, buzzards, a bad writer, a horrible vacation spot, and the successor to Aquelus/Irene.
…this last bit of cuteness a reference to the entries for the Saltwater Buzzard, Samantha, the Saphant Empire, Scatha, and Maximillian Sharp that lay between his entry and Sabon’s. Even here, toward the end, he could not give up on Mary, no matter how much he should. And no matter how I begged him to delete it—to delete both of them. {I also left numerous clues to the fact that I was fronting Lacond’s various misshapen theories, but I doubt the reading public caught them, butchered as they’d been by the editing process.}
The early history had been saved, but the effect was minimal. Serious journals do not review travel guides and tourists rarely remember who wrote them. More importantly, no new work was forthcoming from Sirin for Duncan or for me. And Duncan, for the first time, I think, clearly understood that there was no way back for him. He would continue to haunt the fringes of his former career, and I would be an apparition that appeared as a warning to travelers and passersby.
It was almost like a joke. Me, living on as a ghost. Do you know how ghosts manifest themselves in Ambergris? They haunt you as travel guides. They lead you to old buildings. They educate you on the history of the places they haunt.
Once I realized I was a ghost, I became much happier.
Sometimes, as I may have mentioned, I go outside at night, just for a break. Night is so different from day for me. I cannot ke
ep the ghosts out as easily at night, and the cot I have had brought in here is somewhat uncomfortable. My leg grows cold from the fungus that enraptures it, but I don’t mind the feel of it.
On a good day, I have been averaging several thousand words. It’s true I return to certain paragraphs and pages and revise, but mostly it’s ever forward. I can’t hope to create something perfect, but perhaps I can create something that’s alive—assuming I can finish it. Right now, I see no reason to imagine I will ever stop typing this afterword. The hours float by so quietly and without event that there seems nothing else worth doing. What would I want to do? And what will I do when I’m done?
But we are getting closer to the staircase, the party, the necklace, with each word. I can almost sense the ending, even if I can’t see it yet. I’m so prolific I surprise myself—I keep filling up pages. I keep creating new sections, new chapters.
All the same, I’m tired. My prose, I’ve noticed, becomes by turns more plain, more linear, only to jump out into time as if in a desperate attempt to maintain momentum. Even if it doesn’t feel like it, I cannot be far from the end, even if I end too abruptly. It may be that my fatigue will outweigh my momentum, that it will rush the ending and send you, dear reader, out of this riveting true-life account far sooner than necessary or proper. If this should occur, I refuse to apologize. This is an afterword or an afterwards—I can’t remember anymore—and no one reads them. No one cares what they contain. By the time the afterword appears in a book, the story has already ended. Why, if I wanted to, I could write one hundred pages on obscure Truffidian rituals to offset my fear. It is not without precedence. It has happened before.
What’s left to tell? Many years passed, in much the same way as they had passed before. Sabon’s star continued to ascend. I was forgotten, although I continued on as a tour guide and cantankerous member of the Ambergris Tourism Board. On rare occasions, they called upon me to make short speeches at the rededication of certain historical buildings, or to make appearances as one of several fossils at various dinners mummifying the War of the Houses.
Duncan was forgotten, except for Sabon’s continued cruel resurrections. Bonmot died—in the long view of things, one moment he was there and the next he was not—much to my ever-growing sadness. I would sit at the old stone bench with my sandwich at lunchtime and try to conjure up the image of those wonderful conversations, that gravel voice, but it was never the same. Memory may be all we have, but it’s a poor substitute for flesh and blood.
And still, even as he seemed to make little progress regarding his theories, Duncan was changing, becoming other, the process always ongoing. He never recovered fully from Sabon {or AFTOIS, for that matter}, rarely expressed interest in other women, never took enough of a break from his work to notice them, really. Sometimes, Duncan later confessed to me, he would still haunt Sabon from the shadows outside her current house, or her current lover’s house. {I went a little crazy at times. Late in the game, I set traps for Mary in the AFTOIS newsletter, using Lacond’s name for crazy theories that I thought she would be forced to refute, wasting her energy and, at the same time, unknowingly engaging me in a kind of dialogue. It never happened, to my knowledge.} Between his obsession and my tour guide job, we were a veritable team of stalkers, me during the day, him at night. {The only thing that comforted me: she never married. Surely that meant something?}
Somewhere along the way—I don’t know exactly when—we grew old, Duncan and I. Old and yet defiant; if not wise, then wizened, at least. Exactly as we had always been, only more so. No one makes it out.
Even as we stayed the same, the city changed again and again, as it always would, its grime-smeared head, its soiled towers, its debauched calls to prayer the same, and yet always it changed. I grew to love and appreciate it more than I ever had before. It was all I knew, and I knew it almost too well by now. {Yet neither of us ever found out if it loved us back.}
Then, some four or five years ago, the Shift began to affect Ambergris, disrupting the flux and flow of the city. All became unpredictable, save for one constant: as once it had become colder, now the city seethed with heat, even in the winter and spring. With this heat has come the rain, sliding down in oily sheets, or mumbling to itself in little gusts and flurries, or dissipating into a fine gray mist.
In a Broadsheet article Duncan cut out and stuck into his journal, the strangeness of the rain is remarked upon in detail:
This rain behaves oddly sometimes. It forms funnels in the sky. It falls one way on the left side of Albumuth Boulevard and at a different angle on the right side of Albumuth Boulevard. It delivers a puzzling bounty: fish and tiny squid and crabs that are not native here. They lie struggling in piles of seaweed as alien to the city as we are to them while crowds form around them, or do not; many among us try to ignore such happenings.
Over the River Moth, the rain behaves as if with a conscious will, for there it will sometimes form columns on two sides with no rain between, and the air there, as one eyewitness put it, “turns to darkness with a weight and smell unlike the rest of the sky.” {A door, Janice.}
With the rain has come, again, as in the old days, a proliferation of fungus, so that the business of mushroom culling and cleaning is once again very profitable. And yet the gray caps have become absent even during the deep night.
That no one knows what these signs mean may be more troublesome than the signs themselves.
Even House Hoegbotton, in the past three years, has looked askance at the weather, seemed oddly humbled by an enemy it can neither predict nor defeat.
With the heat and rain have come the agents of House Frankwrithe & Lewden once again, infiltrating Ambergris, although this time with no discernible gray cap support. And yet, with murder on the rise and rumors of war constant now, our nerves have once again become as frayed as they were on the eve of conflict so many years ago.
None of this has helped the tourist trade. The number of people attending my increasingly rote tours has dropped off. Incidents such as having to walk around a three-foot crimson mushroom suddenly erupting from the pavement near their feet, or ducking a torrent of tiny silver fish delivered by a thunderstorm, has positive novelty value to only a select few.
I know that even these simple statements of fact about the Shift will outrage some readers, most of them Nativists. To them, there has been no Shift. To them, the continued “strange-ification of the city,” as Duncan once put it, has no pattern to it, no rhythm or cause. Some still deny anything odd is happening at all, pitiable fools. I suppose, in our usual way, even those amongst us who admit to the Shift have begun to become accustomed to it. {We shouldn’t become accustomed to anything anymore. We are beginning to live in our own future, and it should feel strange.}
Perhaps this will make it more personal, more real: at the beginning of the symptoms of the Shift, James Lacond fell ill. When I say he fell ill, I mean that his fungal disease finally overwhelmed him, as it had sometimes threatened to overwhelm Duncan. {Alas, he hadn’t traveled far enough underground, or for long enough. Which is worse than going too far. I told him more than once that he needed to experience more, to know more, inside his body, to survive it. He refused the advice.} He was forced to retire to a back room in his own offices while Duncan ran everything in his name, instead of just part of it. After a while, he couldn’t hold on any longer and almost literally faded away.
{No one knew how ill he was until after he passed away. Janice, you should have visited him toward the end. I was there every day, hunched over a chair beside his fungus-riddled bed, trying to pry an intelligible word from between the rotted teeth of the poor feeble wreck, to no avail. “Hmmmm bwatchee thoroughgard stinmarta,” he would say to me with the perfect clarity of those beyond hope. I would nod wisely and continue to work on my own diatribes against Nativism and all the other dangerously deluded theories.
{He smelled of the rum I gave him to soothe his agony. He smelled musty, like rooms not opened to the air since the S
ilence. It’s true I loved him dearly and I helped him as best I could, but you could never say he was a substitute for Bonmot—that would be unfair to both of them. More correctly, when I looked at him, I saw a mirror of my own future self: gray-bearded, addlepated, a half-century’s study of history dribbling out of my brain through a mum-mumbling mouth. I cannot say it comforted me much, and yet how much more tenderly I cared for him because of it!
{There might have been no coherence to his speech, but Lacond could still write at times. Once, he drew me close and showed me some words scribbled on a scrap of paper: “I am concerned that disintegration and ensuing death will blunt my ability to continue to coherently put forth my usual arguments with the customary vigor.” It made me laugh, and that made Lacond smile, as much as he was able. I nodded, to let him know I understood. When he did pass away and I assumed the editorship of the AFTOIS newsletter, it seemed natural to continue, to dig up an almost endless series of “newly discovered” papers by the old rogue, as if he still mumbled nothing-nothing-nothing in my ear.
{Early one morning, I entered Lacond’s room to find a fine misting of glistening black spores clinging to the white sheets, and no sign of a body. The sheets smelled vaguely of lime. I knew what had happened. It had taken so long to happen that I didn’t feel grief in that moment. I just felt a sense of purpose.
{I rolled up the sheets and walked with them down to the River Moth. As I walked, I scooped up black spores in my hand and let them fall. On Albumuth Boulevard. On the cobblestones of the Religious Quarter. Smeared them along the walls in the abandoned Bureaucratic Quarter. Abraded the bricks of H&S headquarters with them. Dropped them on bushes and on park benches.
{When I got to the river, I tossed the sheets into the water and watched them drift and unwind, the last spores, drunk with moisture, disappearing from sight.
Shriek: An Afterword Page 37
