Shriek: An Afterword (5 page)

Luckily for Duncan, the darling {and daring!} Antechamber’s excellent imitation of a froth-mouthed dog during his proclamation so embarrassed the more practical administrative branch of the Truffidian Church—“them what pay the bills,” as an artist friend of mine once put it—that they neglected to impose a sentence or a penalty. Neither did the Truffidian Church exhort its members to “stone, pummel, or otherwise physically assault” Duncan, as occurred some years later to our soon-to-be editor Sirin, who had decided to champion a book on the “cleansing merits of interreligious romantic love.” {Sirin, alerted by a sympathetic typesetter, managed to change both the decree and the flyers created by it, causing the designated Truffidian Voice, the Antechamber standing by his side, to read a decree in front of the famous porcelain representation of the God Truff and all others in the Truffidian Cathedral that called for the Antechamber’s stoning, pummeling, and much worse. I teased Bonmot about this event many times.}

The ban led to the predictable upswing in sales, lofting the book into the “rarefied air” that distinguishes an almost-bestseller from a mediocre seller. {F&L took advantage of the ban to an uncanny degree, I must say, but it is not true that they had ten thousand copies of a new edition printed two nights before the announcement with “Banned by the Antechamber!” blaring across the cover in seventy-two-point bold Nicean Monk Face.}

Suddenly, Duncan had something of a reputation. Newspapers and broadsheets, historians and philosophers, decried and debated, lauded and vilified both the book and Duncan—on unusually obscure elements of Duncan’s argument {for example, whether or not the Water People of the Lower Moth Delta had ever been exposed to the teachings of Truff}. Meanwhile, the Court of the Kalif denied it still held the monks who had written the original
The Refraction of Light in a Prison
and declared the new book to consist of a vast, sprawling fiction built on the foundation of
another
vast, sprawling fiction. {The Kalif also revoked father’s prize, an action I never forgave.}

But no matter what position a particular commentator took, it was always with the underlying assumption that
On the Refraction of Light in a Prison
contained ideas of substance and scholarship. Duncan was asked to contribute articles to several major and minor historical journals. Inasmuch as the fate of the monks had become a political issue, and thus one of interest to many people, he was invited to more parties peopled by the Important than he could have stomached on his most extroverted day…and yet did not reply to a single invitation.

What made him reluctant to savor his new-found notoriety? The fear of the consequences of the ban did not make him a recluse, nor did his innate distress in social situations. The true answer is hinted at in his journal, which I have beside me now for verification purposes. Scrawled in the margin of an entry from this era, we find the words “Is this how Dad felt?” Remembering the fate of our father, dead at the zenith of his happiness, Duncan truly believed he too would die if he partook of too much joy—if not by heart attack, then by some other means. {Your theory may be correct on a subconscious level, but on the conscious level, I was merely obsessed and somewhat paranoid. Obsessed with the possibilities of the next book. Paranoid about how people would continue to receive my studies. Worried about how I would do on my own, so to speak, without Dad’s research notes to prop me up.}

Of course, I did not understand this until much later. At the time, I believed his shyness had led him to squander perhaps his only opportunity to take up a permanent place in the public imagination. On this, I turned out to be wrong. Debate raged on for a while regardless, perhaps fed by Duncan’s very absence.

Then, to compound the communal mystification, Duncan disappeared from sight—much as he would several decades later in the week before Martin Lake’s party. His rooms in Morrow {which the Institute had let me keep for a year following graduation} were untouched—not a sock taken, not a diagram removed from the walls…. Duncan simply wasn’t there.

I walked around those rooms with the school’s dean, and it struck me as I stared at the crowded walls that Duncan’s physical presence or absence meant nothing. Everything that comprised his being had been tacked or glued or stabbed to those walls, an elaborate mosaic of obsession.

Clearly, the school understood this aspect of Duncan, for they made a museum out of the rooms, which then became the physical location for discussions of Duncan’s work. Much later, the “museum” became a storehouse, crumbled over time into a boarded-up mess, and then a broken-down safety hazard; such is the staying power of fame. {I never expected it would last as long as it did, to be honest.}

As we walked together, the Dean made sympathetic sounds, expressed the hope that Duncan would “soon return to his home.” But I knew better. Duncan had emerged from his cocoon. The wallpaper of plans, photographs, diagrams was just the husk of his leaving, the remains of his other self. Duncan had begun to metamorphose into something else entirely.

That is, assuming he was still alive—and without the evidence of a dead body, I preferred to believe he was. {I was. As you know. Such melodrama!}

Now I should start again. Now I should skip six months of worry. Now I should tell you how I came to see Duncan again. This is such a difficult Afterword to write. Sometimes I am at a loss as to what to put in and what to leave out. Sometimes I do not know what is appropriate for an Afterword, and what is not. Is this an Afterword or an afterwards? Should I massage the truth? Should I maintain an even tone? Should I divide it all into neat, easily digestible chapters? Should I lie? {Dad, in his notes on writing: “A historian is half confidence artist and half stolid purveyor of dates and dramatic re-creations.”}

Duncan reintroduced himself to me six months later with a knock on my door late one night in the spring. The prudent Ambergrisian does not eagerly open doors at night.

I called out, “Who is it?” and received, in such a jubilant tone that I could not at first place the voice, the response, “Your brother, Duncan!” Shocked, relieved, perplexed, I opened the door to a pale, worn, yet strangely bulky brother wrapped in an old gray overcoat that he held closed with both hands. Comically enough, a sailor’s hat covered his head. His face was flushed, his eyes too bright as he staggered past me, pieces of debris falling from him onto the floor of my living room.

I locked the door behind him and turned to greet him, but any words I might have spoken died in my throat. For he held his overcoat open like the wings of some great bird, and what I saw I could not at first believe. Just brightly colored vest and pants, I thought, but protruding, like barnacles on a ship’s hull. How unlike my brother to wear anything that outlandish. I took a step closer….

“That’s right,” Duncan said, “step closer and really
see.
”

He tossed his hat onto a chair. He had shaved off his hair, and his scalp was stippled and layered in a hundred shades of blue, yellow, green, orange.

“Mushrooms. Hundreds of mushrooms. I had to wear the overcoat and hat or every casual tourist on Albumuth Boulevard would have stared at me.” He looked down at his body. “Look how they glow. What a shame to be rid of them.” He saw me staring unabashedly. “Stare all you like, Janice. I’m a dazzling butterfly, not a moth…well, for another hour or two.” {A butterfly could not compare. I was magnificent. Every part of my body was
receiving.
I could “hear” things through my body, feel them, that no human short of Samuel Tonsure could understand.}

He did not lie. From the collar of his shirt to the tips of his shoes, Duncan was covered in mushrooms and other fungi, in such a riot and welter and rash of colors that I was speechless. I walked up to him to examine him more closely. His eyelashes and eyebrows were lightly dusted with purple spores. The fungi had needled his head, burrowed into the skin, forming whorls of brightness that hummed with fecundity. I took his right hand in mine, examined the palm, the fingers. The palms had a vaguely greenish hue to them. The half-moons of his fingernails had turned a luminous purple. His skin was rubbery, as if unreal. Looking up into his eyes, I saw that the spark there came from pale red ringing the pupil. Suddenly, I was afraid. {To be honest, to dull the pain a bit, I’d had a few drinks at a tavern before stumbling to your door. That might have contributed to the condition of my eyes.}

“Don’t be,” he said. “Don’t be afraid,” scaring me even more. “It’s a function of diet. It’s a function of disguise. I haven’t changed. I’m still your brother. You are still my sister. All of this will wash away. It’s just the layers added to me the past three months. I need help scraping them off.”

I laughed. “You look like some kind of clown…some kind of mushroom clown.”

He took off his overcoat, let it fall to the floor. “I agree—I look ridiculous.”

“But where have you been? How did this happen?” I asked.

He put a finger to his lips. “I’ll answer your questions if you’ll help me get rid of this second skin. It itches. And it’s dying.”

So I helped him. It was not as simple as having him step out of his clothes, because the mushrooms had eaten through his clothes and attached themselves to his poor pale skin. A madness of mushrooms, mottling his skin—no uniform shape or variety or size. Some pulsed a strobing pink-blue. Others radiated a dull, deep burgundy. A few hung from his waist like upside-down wineglasses, translucent and hollow, the space inside filled with clusters of tiny button-shaped green-gold nodules that disintegrated at the slightest touch. Textures from rough to smooth to rippled to grainy to slick. Smells—the smells all ran together into an earthy but not unpleasant tang, punctuated by a hint of mint. The mushrooms even made noises if you listened carefully enough—a soft
pough
as they released spores, an intermittent whine when left alone, a
pop
as they became ghosts through my rough relocations.

“Remember BDD when you three had to wash all that mud and filth off of me?” he asked, as we worked with scrubbing implements and towels in the bathroom.

“Of course I do,” I said.

Before Dad Died, BDD, a grim little acronym meant to help us remember when we had been a happy family. If we had arguments or bouts of depression that threatened to get out of control, one of us would remind the others that we had all behaved differently before Dad died. We held BDD time in our heads as a sanctuary whenever our anger, our loss, became too great.

Once, Duncan, his usual mad, exploring, BDD self, had managed to get stuck in a sewer pipe under our block and we had had to pull him out after a frantic half hour searching for the source of his pathetic, echoing voice. Then Mom, Dad, and I spent another three hours forcing the black-gray sludge off of him, finally standing back to observe the miracle we had wrought: a perfectly white Duncan, “probably as clean as he’s ever been,” as Dad observed.

I wonder, Mary, if Duncan ever shared memories like this with you, while the lights flickered outside his apartment windows?

“Remember BDD….”