Shriek: An Afterword (42 page)

And others, still others, whose faces blur even as I conjure up their names. Why did I invite them? Because I had to—Lake demanded it. Even as I condemned them with my gaze, I found that I was surprised—surprised that they should have so disliked my brother, surprised at the fear rising from their faces like steam. {Some of them have been scoundrels at times, but most of the rest of them have caused me no harm, even as they continue to send Mary to her triumph.}

At first, I received updates on Mary’s progress through Bonmot.

“Mary has sold her second book,” Bonmot told me one fall, the willow trees impervious to the change of seasons even as, across the street, oaks became an indignant red-and-orange, and then bald, and a strange whisper of flame spread through the city.

“Her second book,” I said.

It was almost unbearable to receive such information from Bonmot, when every day I could hear the creak and shift of timber above me as Sirin walked between his desk and his precious butterflies. {Worse, worse—I found she had taken up with another man, her own age, the son of her father’s best friend, someone she had known for years. Someone comfortable. Someone safe. Someone with a “III” in his name. I could tolerate the books, because I knew they contained a little piece of me in them, but I could not tolerate that relationship.}

“Yes. It’s called
The Inflammation of Aan Tribal Wars.
I’ve had a look at it, and it’s excellent. Very well researched. She’s a credit to the school.”

As Duncan was not, went the tired old, silent old refrain. {Bonmot never forgave me, not even at the end. I couldn’t understand that. I’d have forgiven him had our situations been reversed, but, then, I am not a priest. I did see him sometimes, in the last few years before he passed on. When I took walks in Trillian Park, I would discover him sitting on a bench as I turned a corner. He would look up, and our eyes would meet before he could turn away. Those few times, I would see a peace within him that faded as he recognized me. I wouldn’t stop to talk—it was too painful, too maddening, to understand that he could not move past my lapse of judgment. Later, back in my apartment overlooking Trillian Square, I would sit on my balcony drinking wine, analyzing the moment in the park, searching my memory of our brief encounter for some hint of recognition on his part that did not include bitterness or rancor. Sometimes I convinced myself, sometimes I did not.}

Bonmot—to his credit, or perhaps not to his credit—never realized that I might prefer not to hear such details, such confirmation of Mary’s success. Later, when he better understood the humiliation of having to stand outside of her various residences and tell tourists about her, Bonmot stopped telling me. He must have realized by then that her ascent was self-evident.

“That’s nice,” I mumbled. “I am sure it is a very interesting book she has written.” Through a mouthful of my chicken sandwich, looking out of the corner of my eye for my bumbling tourist charges, to make sure they had not gotten into too much trouble.

We studied Truffidian religious texts at lunch sometimes as well. I found them soothing.
My God, keep my tongue from evil, my lips from lies. Help me ignore those who slander me.
Although I could no longer bring myself to attend services in the newly renovated Truffidian Cathedral or any other enclosed space, I took some measure of comfort from the hymns and sayings.
Guardian of happiness, in whose presence despair flees, with Your great compassion grant me the ability to welcome what may come with calm and grace, to experience happiness and joy.
When I read them aloud before sleep, the nightmarish images would recede, the red mist of Sybel’s death dissipate.
May You find delight in the words of my mouth and in the emotions of my heart.
The sensation, when I went to bed, of lying down amongst a row of corpses would lessen, become tolerable.
The wise must die, even as the foolish and senseless, leaving their possessions to others.

“Do you like being a tour guide?” Bonmot asked me at one lunch.

“I do,” I said, before I could think about it. If I’d thought about it, I would have said no.

“Why?” he asked, no reproach in his voice, just a genuine curiosity. He had hinted more than once that he could find me a comparable job with the church, but turning my religion into a daily chore, complete with choir, didn’t interest me.

“Why?” Why did I like working as a tour guide? In those early years: “Because I get to be outside a lot. I get to see the city afresh, from the perspective of those unfamiliar with her.”

Because it took me away from Duncan’s world. Because it allowed me to relive, in daydream reveries, my past successes week after week. Because I met interesting people, some of them men, though I had learned to be more discerning than in the past. Because those who I guided saw me not as a failure but as part of the heritage, the history, of Ambergris. And there was something to be said for not trying quite so hard. I arrived in the same place, I had begun to notice, regardless of the amount of effort.

But I could never truly escape Duncan, just as Duncan could not escape himself. And ultimately I wouldn’t have wanted to. Except for my father’s writings, Duncan is my only link to my father. Duncan is still here, I hope, in the flesh, while Dad speaks to me in shards of meaning gleaned from the fragments Duncan kept of his journals, his scribblings and essays. All of it is work-related; Dad appears never to have written anything that was not related to work, or, at least, such writings weren’t found when Mom catalogued his things.

I’ve gone through all of it twice before lugging it here along with anything else I wanted to salvage from Duncan’s apartment. Most of Dad’s papers are so dry, so dusty, that I’ve begun to understand that he lived in his own little specialized world. His work galvanized and, perhaps, electrified, other historians with its sense of rarefied knowledge, but there’s nothing for the rest of us to hold on to. Sometimes I think Duncan took it upon himself to “translate” our dad’s work into a form that might be palatable to the public. {I thought maybe he knew, maybe something in the papers would solve my mysteries. It never did.} Sometimes I think that Duncan would have been better off becoming a plumber, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a merchant, a missionary.

Nothing of our personal history made it into Dad’s work, even though that history had some relevance. Some said, not without a hint of mockery, that you could trace our family’s history on my mother’s side all the way back to the founding of Ambergris by John Manzikert—that one of the anonymous, unremarked-upon members of the ship’s crew, George Bliss, had been our distant great-to-the-umpteenth-power grandfather. Over the years, among our shadow relatives—aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, “shadow” because they lived in far-off cities like Nicea and we saw them rarely—an entire mythology had grown up around Bliss. Stories of Bliss fighting off gray caps, of his friendship with Samuel Tonsure before Tonsure disappeared, vague references to the underground—all apocryphal, of course. {Apocryphal? Maybe, but I enjoyed those stories growing up. Those stories reaffirmed my birthright to crawl around in dimly lit places.}

Dad used to joke that he had married Mom as part of his research into the history of the city.

“Your mother, children,” he said once, “figures prominently in my current research. She’s fodder for my essays. Certain experiments, certain experiments cannot be conducted without her—or, if conducted, do not”—and he stared pointedly at Mom and then back at us—“yield the same results.”

Sometimes when he said this, he would hold her close from behind, nuzzle her neck. Mom would give a sly, quick smile then, before pretending to be offended as she pulled away from him, and I remember that smile, because it gave me the first clue that there might be an adult world existing above or on top of the one in which we dwelt as children.

Mom had a problem laughing at herself; she never knew if people were laughing with her or at her, so she never fully gave herself up to it with other people—Dad was the only one who could make her laugh in a way that seemed effortless rather than forced.

As for whether first-generation Ambergrisian blood flows through our veins, I don’t know, but I think our dad believed it did. {And if it didn’t before, Janice, the city probably flows through my veins now, in altered form, whether I want it to or not. An entire world flows through my veins these days.}

While upstairs Sirin worked on making Mary the flavor of the decade and downstairs I labored at scraping out a living, Duncan fleshed out his theories and his articles, which would one day culminate, or dissolve, in his
Early History of Ambergris
tour guide book. {Or at least culminate in the unexpurgated version that has still never seen print.}

In those days, sentences crawled out of Duncan’s skin, paragraphs exhaled with each breath. On a winter’s morning, you could almost see them forming in the white smoke of his speech. {For all the good it did me—most of the sentences and paragraphs didn’t coalesce into longer works, or if they did, I sacrificed them to the AFTOIS newsletter.}

Sometimes I thought the Spore of the Gray Cap made him prolific—that in a space neither above nor belowground, he felt in the most perfect balance—and thus balanced, ballasted, he could write without self-consciousness. Certainly, the owner loved his presence—“fringe” or not, they’d never had a historian use their tavern as a work space. Of course, Duncan brought more business with him than I ever did, in the form of his fellow crackpots. Lacond even indulged for a time, before his illness made that impossible.

The following note in Duncan’s journal exemplifies his approach:

In expressing this theory—a theory that calls for the historian to internalize a selected portion of history as part of his or her life; or, more specifically, to map historical events to personal events—Duncan was deeply influenced by the work of the idiosyncratic Nicean philosopher-historian Edgar Rybern. Rybern believed that the personal politics of each individual distorts their view of history. As Rybern wrote in his book
Approaches to History
{a book Sabon violently disapproved of, even during her days at the Academy}: