Shriek: An Afterword (12 page)

If Duncan had, in the gallery that afternoon, told me about the machine with the calm madness of that journal entry, a silence would have settled over us. Our conversation would have faded away into a nothingness made alive and aware by his words. Thankfully, Duncan told his story with less than brutal lucidity. He used stilted words in rows of sentences crippled by fits and starts—a vagabond, poorly-rehearsed circus of words that could not be taken seriously. He focused on the front of the machine with its marvelous visions of far-distant places. He dismissed the back of the machine with a single sentence. Somehow, I could not reconcile his vision with my memory of the spores floating out of my apartment window.

Even so, an element of unreality entered the gallery following his revelation. I remember staring at him and thinking that his face could not be composed of flesh and blood, not with those words coming from his mouth. The light now hid his features, but his hands, lit by the starfish, glowed white.

“The door in the machine never fully opens,” Duncan said in a distant tone.

“What would happen if it did?”

“They would be free….”

“Who?” I asked, although I knew the answer.

“The gray caps.”

“Free of what?”

Pale hands, darkened face, gray speech. “I think they care nothing for us one way or the other, Janice. They have only one purpose now. The same purpose they’ve had for centuries.”

“In your unconfirmed opinion, brother,” I said, and shivered at the way the mushroom dust on his face still glittered darkly.

“What do you know about the Silence?”

“The gray caps killed everyone in the city,” I said.

He shook his head. Forgetting the starfish in his hands, he stood abruptly. The starfish fell to the floor and began to curl and uncurl in a reflexive imitation of pain. Now Duncan was stooped over me. Now he was crouched beside me. If there were ever a secret he truly wanted to tell me, this was the secret. This was the cause of it. We had returned to the last survivor of his sixth book, alive amid all of the suicides: the truth. As my brother saw it.

“You learned it wrong,” he told me. “That’s not what happened. It didn’t happen like that. I’ve seen so many things, and I’ve thought a lot about what I’ve seen. They disappeared without a single drop of blood left behind. Not a fragment of bone. No. They weren’t killed. At least not directly. Try to imagine a different answer: a sudden miscalculation, a botched experiment, a flaw in the machine. All of those people. All twenty-five thousand of them. The men, the women, the children—they didn’t die. They were
moved.
The door opened in a way the gray caps didn’t expect, couldn’t expect, and all those people—they were
moved
by mistake. The machine took them to someplace else. And, yes, maybe they died, and maybe they died horribly—but my point is, it was all an
accident.
A mistake.
A terrible, pointless blunder.
”

He was breathing heavily. Sweat glistened on his arms, where before the black dust had suppressed it.

“That’s crazy,” I said. “That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life. They’ve killed thousands of people. They’ve done terrible things. And you have the nerve to make apologies for them?!”

“Would it be easier to accept that they don’t give a damn about us one way or the other if we hadn’t massacred them to build this city? What I think is crazy is that we try to pretend they are just like us. If we had massacred most of the citizens of Morrow, we would expect them to seek revenge. That would be natural, understandable, even acceptable. But what about a people that, when you slaughter hundreds of them, doesn’t even really notice? That doesn’t acknowledge the event? We can’t accept that reaction. That would be incomprehensible. So we tack the idea of ‘revenge’ onto the Silence so we can sleep better at night—because we think, we actually have the nerve to think, that we understand these creatures that live beneath us. And if we think we understand them, if we believe they are like us in their motivations, then we don’t fear them quite as much. If we meet one in an alley, we believe we can talk to it, reason with it, communicate with it. Or if we see one dozing beneath a red flag on the street during the day, we overlook it, we make it part of the scenery, no less colorful or benign than a newly ordained Truffidian priest prancing down Albumuth Boulevard in full regalia.”

“You’re crazy, Duncan. You’re unwell.” Anger again burned inside of me. The idea of the Silence reduced to a pathetic mistake enraged me. The idea that my own brother might utter the words that made it so seemed a betrayal of an unspoken understanding between us. Before this moment, we could always count on sharing the same worldview no matter what happened, even when we saw each other at wider and wider intervals.

“It’s more complicated than you think,” he said. “They are on a journey as much as we are on a journey. They are trying to get somewhere else—but they can’t. It doesn’t work. With all they can do, with all they are, they still cannot make their mirror, their glass, work properly. Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that kind of sad?”

I slapped him across the face. My hand came away black with spores. He did not move an inch.

“Sad?” I said. “Sad? Sad is twenty-five thousand lives snuffed out, not a broken machine. Not a broken machine! What is happening to you that you cannot see that? Regardless of what happened. Not that I believe you. Frankly, I don’t believe you. Why should I? For all I know, you’ve been in the sewers for the past few weeks, living off of rats and whatever garbage you could get your hands on. And all you’ve seen is the reflection of your own filthy face in a pool of scummy water!”

Duncan smiled and pointed at the starfish. “How do you explain that?”

“Ha!” I said. “It was probably groveling for garbage along with you. It definitely isn’t proof of anything, if that’s what you mean. Why didn’t you bring something substantive, like a gray cap willing to corroborate your statement?”

“I did bring a gray cap,” he said. “Several, in fact. Although not by choice. Take a good look through the doorway, out the front window, to the left. I doubt they would corroborate anything, though. I think they’d like to see me dead.”

“Don’t joke.”

“I’m not. Take a look.”

Reluctantly, I raised myself, my left leg asleep—even less impressed by Duncan’s story, apparently, than I was. I peered around the doorway. Sheathed like swords by the fading light, more sharp shadow than dream, three gray caps stood staring in through the window. They stood so still the cobblestones of the street behind them seemed more alive. The whites of their eyes gleamed like wet paint. They stared at and through me. As if I meant nothing to them. The sight of them sent a convulsive shudder through me. I ducked back, beside Duncan.

“Maybe we should leave by the back door,” I said.

A low, humorless laugh from Duncan. “Maybe they came for your gallery opening.”

“Very funny. Follow me….”

In a pinch, I still trusted my brother more than anyone else in the world.

This is part of a letter I wrote to Duncan—the only attempt following our conversation to express my feelings about the Silence to him. One day I came home to my apartment early to find Duncan gone on some errand. For some reason I had been thinking about the Silence that day, perhaps because two or three new acquisitions had featured, in the background, the shadowy form of a gray cap. I sat down at my desk and wrote Duncan a letter, which I then placed in his briefcase full of papers, expecting he’d come across it in a week or a month. But he never mentioned it to me. I never knew whether he had read it or not until, going through his things after this final disappearance, I found it in a folder labeled simply “Janice.” {I did read it, and I cried. At the time, it made me feel more alone than I had ever felt before. Only later did I find it a comfort.}

Duncan stayed at my apartment for nearly six months. By the fifth month, he appeared to have made a full recovery. We did not often speak of that afternoon when he had told me his theory about the Silence. In a sense, we decided to forget about it, so that it took on the hazy lack of detail specific only to memory. We were allowed that luxury back then. We did not have Sabon’s glittering necklace of flesh to set us straight.

The starfish lasted four months and then died in a strobe of violent light, perhaps deprived of some precious nutrient, or perhaps having attained the end of its natural life cycle. Its bleached skeleton on the mantel carried hardly more significance than a snail’s shell found by the riverbank.

Time to start over. Another dead white page to fill with dead black type, so I’ll fill it. Why not? I’ve nothing better to do, for now anyway. Mary’s still holding court at the bottom of that marble staircase at Lake’s party, but I think I’ll make her wait a little longer.

Especially since it strikes me that at this point in the narrative, or somewhere around here, Duncan would have paused to catch his breath, to regroup and place events in historical context. {If it were me, I would have skipped “historical context” and returned to that marble staircase, since that’s really the only part of this story I don’t know already.}
Years passed. They seem now like pale leaves pressed between the pages of an obscure book.

Oddly enough, I don’t give a damn about historical context at the moment. I can see the sliver of green light becoming dull, indifferent—which means the sun is going down outside. And we all know what happens, or can happen, when the sun goes down, don’t we? Don’t answer that question—read this instead:

The death of composer/politician Voss Bender and the rise of the Reds and Greens, who debate his legacy with knives: a civil war in the streets, which the trader Hoegbotton uses to solidify control of the city. I witness a man die right outside my gallery, hit in the head with a rock until his skull resembles a collection of broken eggshells dripping with red-gray mush. No art to it that I could see. No reason, either. Followed by: defeat of the Reds, disbanding of the Greens, the tossing of Bender’s ashes in the River Moth—only, the wise old river doesn’t want them, according to legend, and blows them back in the faces of the assembled mourners; thus dispersing Bender all across the city when the mourners go home. Scandal in the Truffidian Church—boring as only a Truffidian scandal can be: oh my goodness, the Antechamber Henry Bonmot, whom I still miss terribly, has been caught taking money from the collection plates! At the same time, the River Moth overflows its banks for a season and takes a sizable portion of our mother’s property with it, making us officially heirs of Nothing but an old, rotting mansion. The Kalif of the Western Empire chokes on a plum pit, replaced by another faceless bureaucrat. Meanwhile, infant mortality continues to decline, along with the birth rate, while old people die in droves from a heat stroke that withers even the hardiest southern trees. A slight upswing in the fortunes of motored vehicles due to an influx of oil from the Southern Islands is offset by a plummet in the availability of spare parts. Voss Bender’s posthumously produced opera,
Trillian,
reaches the two-year mark of its first run, its full houses unscathed by the dwindling tourist trade {no one likes to die while on holiday, whether by heat stroke or by gray cap}. Other composers and playwrights, who could really use the Bender Memorial Theater as a venue for their own drivel, gnash their teeth and whine in the back rooms of bars and taverns: Bender, dead, still lives on! Three Festivals of the Freshwater Squid pass by without so much as a pantomime of real violence—what is wrong with us as a people, I ask you, that we have become so passive? Are we not animals? Perhaps this squalid, shameful peace has something to do with the introduction of the telephone, at least for the well off, which allows Ambergrisians to call up total strangers and breathe at them, make funny noises, or vent our rage at the string of flat, bloodless festivals. The telephone: come to us from the Kalif, his empire, a domesticated beast, taken to colonizing through commerce rather than warfare; the ghost of the rebel Stretcher Jones, as Duncan might have put it, would never have recognized this temporarily toothless Empire, slumped back on its haunches. Inexplicably, guns arrive with the telephone. Lots of guns. In all types and sizes, mostly imported through Hoegbotton & Sons. Hoegbotton’s armed importer-exporters, now doing a brisk trade in bandages, tourniquets, and bolted locks, are respected and feared the length and breadth of the River Moth—except by the operatives of Frankwrithe & Lewden, who continue their quiet infiltrations of Hoegbotton territory. More festivals, replete with the sound of gunplay. More years of
Trillian
and its vainglorious blather; will Voss Bender
never
die? Yes, this really is a historical summary of which my brother would be proud. {Not really, but think anything you like.}

Meanwhile, everything Duncan had told me about his underground adventures began to recede into the distance as “real life” took over again, for both of us. A retreat of sorts, you could call it—me from what Duncan had said, Duncan from what he had done. Perhaps he needed time to absorb what had happened to him. Perhaps he had been exhausted by what he had seen, and he couldn’t physically undertake another journey so soon. Whatever the reason, he would become, in a sense, a religious man, while I would take a different path entirely. {I never became any more or less religious than I’d always been, or do you mean this as a joke? What I became was more aware of the world, the texture and feel of it, the way it changed from day to day, minute to minute, and me with it. And I did continue with my work, although I don’t blame you for not noticing.}

If I gave Duncan’s life less attention in those years after the starfish, it was because my fortunes waxed unexpectedly. Martin Lake—an arrogant, distant prick of a man—rose to prominence through my gallery, his haunted haunting paintings soon a fixture next to the telephones in the living rooms of the city’s wealthiest patrons of the arts. {And who can say, in the long run, which was the worthier work—Lake’s bizarre melancholia or the telephone’s febrile ring.}

My gallery sparked a nameless, shapeless, and unique art revolution that soon became labeled {pinned like one of Sirin’s butterflies} “the New Art.” The New Art emphasized the mystical and transformative through unconventional perspective, hidden figures, strange juxtapositions of color. {It would be most accurate to say that the New Art
opened up
to include Martin within its ranks, and that he devoured it whole.}

As soon as I saw the change in Lake’s art—he had been, at best, uninspired before whatever sparked his metamorphosis—I sought out anything similar, including the work of several of Lake’s friends. Within months, I had a monopoly on the New Art. Raffe, Mandible, Smart, Davidson—they all displayed their art with me. Eventually, I had to buy the shop next door as an annex, just to have enough space for everyone to come see my art openings.

I had begun to experience what Duncan had known briefly after the publication of his first book: fame. And I hadn’t even had to create anything—all I had had to do was exploit Lake’s success, and build on it. {You’re too modest. You made some brilliant decisions during that time. You were like one of the Kalif’s generals, only on the battlefield of art. Nothing escaped your attention, until much later. I admired that.}

Suddenly, the local papers asked for my opinion on a variety of topics, only a few of which I knew anything about, although this did not stop me from commenting.

I have some of the clippings right here. In the
Ambergris Weekly,
they wrote, “The Gallery of Hidden Fascinations lives up to its name. Janice Shriek has assembled a group of topnotch new artists, any one of whom might be the next Lake.”
The Ambergris Daily Broadsheet,
which Duncan and I would one day work for, noted, “Janice Shriek continues to build a dynasty of artists who are determining the direction of the New Art in Ambergris.” The clippings are a bit faded, but still readable, still a source of pleasure. {As well they should be—you worked hard for your success.} I can remember a time when I kept such clippings in a jacket pocket. I’d pull them out and make sure they still said what I thought they had said, that I hadn’t imagined it.

However, the New Art soon became about something other than artistic expression. A kind of tunnel vision set in whereby a painting was either New Art or Not New Art. Those works identified as Not New Art were dismissed as unimportant or somehow of lesser ambition. I admit to participating in this mindset, although for the ethically pure reason that I wanted my gallery to make money. So I would do my best to label whatever I had hanging there as “New Art,” from the most experimental mixing of media to the most hackneyed scene of houseboats floating idyllically down the River Moth.

“That’s an ironic New Art statement,” I would say of the hackneyed houseboats, mentally genuflecting before the latest potential customer. “In the context of New Art, this painting serves as a condemnation of itself in the strongest possible terms.”

I have to say, I loved the sheer randomness of it all—there is nothing more liberating than playing an illogical game where only you understand all of the rules.

My gallery grew fat on Lake’s leavings, even after he left me, while Ambergris continued to prosper even as it headed ever deeper into complete moral and physical collapse or exhaustion. As the city’s fate, so my own—and it took so little time. This is what, looking back, I marvel at—that I could discover so many new appetites, vices, and affectations in so short a time. Four years? Maybe five? Before beginning the inevitable plummet. These things never last—you ride them, you live inside of them, and then, almost without warning, you are flung to the side, spent, used up. {Although you must admit that, in this case, you flung yourself to the side.}

Most nights, I would be at a party until close to dawn. If not a party, then permanent residency at the Café of the Ruby-Throated Calf, drinking. I wore the same clothes for three or four days, no longer able to distinguish between dawn and dusk. It was one continuous swirling spangle of people and places in which to revel in my fame ever more religiously.

I met many influential or soon-to-be-influential people during that time {unsurprising, as you
were
one of those people, Janice}, Sirin being a prime example.

My first memory of Sirin, our enigmatic future editor, has me slouched in a chair at the café and feeling someone slide into the chair next to me. When I opened my eyes, a slender, dark-haired man sat there. He held his head at a slight angle. He smelled of a musky cologne. His mouth formed a perpetual half-smile, his eyes bright, penetrating, and reflectionless. The man I saw reminded me of old tales about people who could shape-change into cats. He looked like a rather smug, perhaps mischievous, feline. {He was the most exasperating, talented, maddening genius I’ve ever met. My initial reaction to meeting him was to want to simultaneously punch him, hug him, shake his hand, and throw him down a dark well. Instead, I generally stayed clear of him and let Janice serve as my intermediary, as she saw mostly his charming side.}

“Janice Shriek,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes?”

“Sirin,” he said. He handed me a card.

Still struggling with context {with alcohol, you mean}, I looked down. The card gave his address at Hoegbotton & Sons, on Albumuth Boulevard.

“I like what you do,” he said. “Come find me. I may have a use for you.”

Then he was gone. At the time, Sirin was a great womanizer, attending parties and cafés just to identify his next victims. I wasn’t sure what “use” he might have for me, and I was skeptical.

Sirin’s fame as an editor and writer had begun to spread by that time. He had, like the mythical beast he took his name from, generic yet universal qualities. He brought to his editing the same sensibilities found in his writing. He could mimic any style, high or low, serious or comedic, realistic or fabulist. It sometimes seemed he had created the city from his pen. Or, at least, made its inhabitants see Ambergris in a different light. That he thought too much of himself was made tolerable by the depth and breadth of his talent. It never occurred to me that he would want me to write for him.

People like Sirin would come out of the haze of lights and nights, and I would receive them with a gracious smile, an arm outstretched, to indicate, “Sit. Sit and talk awhile!” I was very trusting and open back then. {Trusting? Perhaps. But can you be trusting or suspicious when you are not yourself? I came to some of those all-night sessions at the café, Janice, but most of the time you were in such an altered state that you didn’t recognize me. And that conversation you recall so fondly? Your end of it was often, I hate to say it, a garbled warble of slurred speech and mumbled innuendo. Although it probably didn’t matter, because only rarely were the people you spoke to any better off. I don’t mean to reproach, but I must bring a sense of reality to this glorious, decadent age you write of with such wistful fondness. I became so bored that I stopped coming to the café. It wasn’t worth my time. I’d rather be underground, off on the scent of some new mystery.}

Sybel—luminous, short, sweet Sybel—was one of those people I met during this time. He had a thick rush of dirty blond hair exploding off the top of his head like waves of pale flame, clear blue eyes, a grin that at times appeared to be half grimace, and he wore outrageous clothes in the most impossible shades of purple, red, green, and blue. He rarely sat still for very long. In those early years, he had the metabolism of a hummingbird. A coiled spring. A hummingbird. A marvel.