Shriek: An Afterword (26 page)

She smiled, as if forgiving me for something. The simplicity of that smile charmed me for only a moment. Simplicity, where no simplicity should exist. She would always be complex, complicated, devious, in my mind.

“I want to buy a painting,” she said.

I had a feeling this was her last-ditch effort to make nice. She would buy my friendship.

“A painting,” I echoed as if I were a carpenter, a butcher, a priest, anything but a gallery owner.

“Yes,” she said. “What do you recommend?”

This was a good question. I wanted to recommend that she never see Duncan again. That she leave Duncan alone before she hurt him irrevocably. That she never return to my gallery because…because…Did I say these things? No. I did not. I held my tongue and pointed out the most expensive items in my gallery: the two squid sketches by Lake called, perversely, “Gill” and “Fin.”

She nodded, smiled, looked at them, then looked at me. “They’re very nice. I’ll take them,” she said, and, turning, blanched as she noticed the price.

I let her buy them, although I could see they were too expensive even for her. {She didn’t have much money. You made her spend two months’ allowance on those paintings. I bought them from her afterwards so she’d have money to live on.}

We exchanged minor pleasantries. At the door, purchases in hand, she turned back to me, smiled, and said, “Maybe someday I can join you and Duncan for lunch with Bonmot.”

For lunch. Under the willow trees. Just the four of us. How comfortable. How perfect. We would eat our sandwiches in the glare of the summer sun and talk of flesh necklaces and how they form and do not form in this forlorn city by the River Moth. Just now, even in remembering this suggestion, I feel that I am drowning.

A blackness grew inside of me, or the fungus overcame me, or any of a number of conditions or situations that you may, reading this, imagine for yourselves, and I said:

“I wonder. What route will Duncan take tonight? The Path of Remembering You or the Path of Forgetting You.”

The painting of the Voss Bender Memorial Post Office actually looked quite striking in the light that pierced the windows and gave my humble gallery a golden hue. The details of that painting became etched in my memory as I stared at it until I could no longer feel the reproach of her gaze and I knew she had gone.

My gallery was empty again. I was alone again. And that was as it should be.

Although I
saw
Mary on Duncan’s arm a dozen times after that, the next time I
spoke
to her directly was at the party where she stood waiting for me at the foot of the staircase, the dagger of her comment about Duncan held ready.

Ironic, really. I have reached out across time and space to construct a mosaic of her in a harsh light, only to find that now, when she shares a room with me, that light fails and finds her nearly…harmless.

Perhaps I have never really understood Sabon. Perhaps she remains the type of cipher who seems more remote the more words I devote to her. Fading into the ink, untouchable.

The fungus in this place has eaten into the typewriter ribbon. I’m typing in sticky green ink now, each word a mossy spackle against the keys. If I could turn off the light, no doubt my sentences would read themselves back to me in a phosphorescent fury—the indignation of creatures uncovered from beneath a rock. {Equipment failures should never be part of your narrative. That’s the first lesson Cadimon Signal ever taught me.} My ink has defected to the cause of the gray caps; not so my blood.

I have made Mary Sabon, deservedly so, as much of a villain in this Afterword as the gray caps, and yet I could as easily have offered her an escape—even a fragile excuse could have absolved her for the way my heart feels right now. If only she had offered up something of herself. But she never has: you could pore over her books for a hundred years and never find anything personal. Whether Duncan had a better idea of her true nature is debatable. It is debatable that
Sabon
knew her own heart. {No—she knew. She knew who she was more perfectly than anyone I have ever met. I think that is why I loved her, and why she did what she did.}

At the party, after I had slapped her—even then she did not offer anything personal. All she did was wave back those who would have otherwise taken me away. She waved back the onrush of beads from her flesh necklace. They retreated, gleaming and muttering.

“What is it you really want, Janice?” she said, smiling. “Would you like the past back? Would you like to be successful again? Would you prefer you weren’t a washed-up has-been with so few prospects she had to agree to help out with a party for an artist she used to agent?”

I had an answer, but it wasn’t what Sabon expected. No, it was far more than Sabon expected.

But I should probably start over, even here, and step back into the role of brittle chronicler of that which I would have liked to influence….

Dry facts, as dry facts will, have mushroomed and moistened in recent years, along with the popularity of her books, so that now I can enter any bookstore or library and discover information about her childhood—inspiration, education, perversions, diversions, etc.

Her books, their titles like curses—
The Inflammation of Aan Tribal Wars, The Limited Influence of Gray Caps Upon Ambergris, A Revisionist History of the City
—parrot each other when opened to the biographical note, with selective information added to the end of successive notes like the accretion of silt in the Moth River Delta. Why, I happen to have a couple of her books right here. Imagine that.

The notes from her third book,
Reflections on Ambergris History,
and her latest,
Confessions of a Revisionist: The Collected Essays of Mary Sabon,
differ only by degree. I have combined them below for ease of dissection.

Perhaps my annotations can be of help regarding this reeling litany of Mary’s accomplishments:

Duncan, conversely, liked to provoke his readers, poke them with a sharpened stick, to emphasize the supreme unknowable irony of the world and then, in marching toward the truth, unearth new mysteries, so that every so-called solution begged a hundred questions. The reader left Duncan’s books shaken and unmoored from what he or she had always taken for granted.

In short, if reduced to a single point of punctuation, Sabon’s work would have been a period {sometimes an emphatic exclamation mark!}, Duncan’s a question mark. Closed doors. Open doors. All shrouded, all revealed. {It could just be that I wrote bad books.} The average reader likes to return home after a long journey, not be left stranded in the middle of nowhere, with dark coming on and the printed pages a desert devoid of comfort. {You make my books sound like mirthless lumps of coal hidden at the bottom of a dry well, Janice! I refuse to believe you didn’t see the humor, the enthusiasm, in my books. Replace “desert” with “a mysterious foreign land,” with all the danger and excitement that entails.}