Besides, I was distracted. By then, I had ascended to the very height of my powers. I led a council of gallery owners. I wrote withering and self-important reviews for Art of the Southern Cities. I had lunch with Important People like Sirin and Henry Hoegbotton at such upscale restaurants as The Drunken Boat.
For two years running, my stable of artists had received more critical attention and created more sales than the rest of the city’s galleries combined. A word from me could now cripple an artist or redeem him. Utterance of such words became almost sexual, each syllable an arching of the back, a shudder of pleasure. Even when Martin Lake moved his best paintings to his own gallery, leaving me only his dregs, I told Sybel not to worry, for surely a thousand Lakes waited to replace him.
“Are you sure?” he asked me. “I expected the world to leave Lake behind, which hasn’t happened. That we could deal with. But his leaving you behind could cause you damage.”
I dismissed his concerns with a wave of my hand. “There are more where he came from.”
I should have taken heed of his astonished look. I had yet to realize that my power had limits—that it could recede like the River Moth during drought.
The sheer opulence of my life disguised the truth from me. Not content with attending parties, I had begun to host parties. I entertained like one of Trillian’s Banker-Warriors from the old days, my parties soon so legendary that some guests were afraid to attend. Legendary not just for the food or music or orgies, but how all three elements could be artfully combined in new and inventive ways. Outside of the incessant, unceasing rumors that they were “squid clubs” {a euphemism for the more sadomasochistic sex parlors, so named for the old squid-hunter habit of tying up their catch and delivering it alive to the buyer}, nothing could diminish the allure of my parties.
Sybel was a great help in this arena—he took to party planning as if he had found his true calling. Under his artful administration, we staged many delightful debacles of alcohol and drugs. Each weekend, we would move to some new, more exotic, location—the priests of the Religious Quarter, in their greed, would rent to me their very cathedrals. Or Sybel would hire “party consultants” to scout the burnt-out Bureaucratic Quarter for suitable locations. Then, to the surprise of the homeless and the criminal element, some blackened horror of a building—say, the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs—would, well after midnight, erupt with light and mirth and the loud confusion of alcohol-aided conversations. The artists so elsewhere that they stood in corners talking to statues, coat racks, and desks. Morning revealed as grainy light touching pale bodies that in turn touched each other casually amongst the random abandoned divans and couches and makeshift beds crusted with cake and cum.
I remember waking up once, in the middle of the night, my cold sweat moistening the bedsheets, my skin crawling with a nameless dread. Sybel sat in a chair beside my bed, snoring.
I woke him up in a complete panic, chest tight, lungs heavy. I couldn’t bear to be alone with my thoughts. “How long can we keep this up? How long can we keep going like this?”
Poor, beautiful, sly Sybel rubbed his eyes, looked up at me, smiled a sleepy smile, and said, “As long as you tell me to.”
I hit him in the shoulder. The smile never left his face. “What does that mean?” I asked.
Sybel’s gaze sharpened and he sat up in the chair. “Forever, Janice. Or close enough. This is just the beginning.”
Poor stupid me. I believed him.
This is just the beginning. And so it was. But the beginning of what? The beginning of the end, really. The one time Janice Shriek’s life significantly impacted Duncan Shriek’s life. I became addicted to hallucinogenic mushrooms. Little purple mushrooms with red-tinged gills. So tiny. So cute. They magnified the minute and humbled the magnificent, and I couldn’t get enough of them. I’d have a meeting with Sirin while on them and watch as his head became bigger and bigger, eclipsing his body. I would eat one while in the middle of another all-night drunken escapade and suddenly the noise and confusion around me would: stop. I would see the glittering detail of a streetlamp light shining off of the water in the gutter, and that sudden moment would become as large as the world. A comfort, really. A solace. {A plague. A way for you to escape the world.}
Sybel called them Tonsure’s Folly, and I can’t really complain, because I asked him to get them for me. And I can’t even blame the mushrooms for everything that happened next. I was wandering further and further from the golden threads of my note to Duncan. I was becoming more and more unhappy, even though I was filling myself with so many substances and preying off of enough new people, new experiences, that my distress was for the longest time just an echo of an ache in my belly. {No, you can’t blame the mushrooms. But those mushrooms, over time, make the user more and more depressed. And you were already in a fragile state. I’m afraid I’d lost the thread of your life, caught up in my own problems, or I would have insisted that Sybel intervene.}
The parties I still remember with fondness, although the only one I’ve really come close to describing happened ages afterward—the Martin Lake party I was asked to help organize recently. The first party I’d been to for years, and haunted by the ghosts of other, grander parties. These ghosts lingered long enough to laugh at the staid properness of Janice Shriek in her old {c}age. No guests rolling naked over the carpet. No fruit served from the delicious concavities of the lithe bodies of young men and women. Not even the simple pleasures to be found in bowls of mushroom drugs. Just guests, music, light dancing, and lighter punch, not even spiked. Oh, what humiliation!
“Do you think she can see us from in there?”
“Naw—she’s busy.”
“She’s deep in thought, she is—but what could she be thinking about, do you think?”
“About the next word she puts her hard finger to.”
Distractions abound. Sometimes they become part of the story. Anyway:
The careful reader will remember that when I last left off the story of my final confrontation with Mary Sabon and her necklace of flesh—which, if you will remember, consisted, before the metaphor came to life and lurched forward, of two dozen of those social climbers who had become convinced she was the best historian since my brother—I was walking down the marble stairs in their direction.
I descended to the foot of the stairs. The marble shone like glass; my face and those of the others reflected back at me. The assembled guests slowly fell apart into their separate bead selves. Blank-eyed beads wink-winking at me as they formed a corridor to Sabon. Smelling of too little or too much perfume. Shedding light by embracing shadows. A series of stick-figures in a comedy play.
“What can she be typing so furiously?”
“How long’s she been in there?”
“At least five days. I bring her food and drink. I take it out again. She’s enough paper in there to last another week.”
“Do they mind?”
“What? They? Haven’t seen them here for weeks. They’ll not be around again.”
Mary Sabon. We are approaching Sabon now. Or I am, now that I’ve made it down the marble staircase. I suppose I must conjure her into existence before I can banish her…. Red hair. Massive long locks of red hair, forest-thick and as uncivilized. Emerald eyes—or, perhaps, paste pretending to be jewel. A figure that. A voice which. A smile of.
I’m afraid I cannot do her the justice Duncan did in his journal entries, so I will stand aside to let him speak, even if he does stutter, enraptured by a schoolgirl-smell, white-socks fantasy with as much reality to it as a paper chandelier.
Mary Sabon. Sabon, Mary. Sabon. Mary. Mary. Mary Sabon. Sabon. Sabon. Sabon. The name burns like a flame in my head like her hair burns like her name burns like a flame in my head. She burns in my head. She burns in my head. I am delirious with her. I am sick with her. Blessed infection. I think of nothing but her. Walking home today, I could sense that the trees lining the boulevard contained her. I see her features when I stare down at t
he pavement upon which I tread. She is half-formed in the air. The faint smell of Stockton pine needles and incense. As of her. As of an echo of her. Her form a flame in the world that burns through everything, and there is nothing in the world but her—the world revealed as paper that burns away at the first hint of her. Above and below, a flame in my head. I cannot get her out. I am not sure I want to get her out. Rather banish myself from myself than to banish her from me.
“Does she tip well?”
“Well enough. I don’t mind her. She’s no trouble. Not like you lot.”
“That’s a rough thing to say.”
They are beginning to annoy me. I cannot keep them out of the text. Everything around me is going into the text—every dust mote, every scuff upon the floor, the unevenness of this desk, the clouded quality of the windows. I cannot keep it out right now.
Flame or not, at my party, Mary Sabon wore dark green. She almost always wore dark green. She might as well have been a shrub or a tree or a tree trunk.
Ignoring my presence—something she would have done at her peril in the old days—she said, “Duncan Shriek? Why, Duncan is not a human being at all, but composed entirely of digressions and transgressions. Assuming he is still alive, that is.”
As she said this, she turned and looked right at me.
I stared at her for a moment. I let her receive the venom in my eyes. Then I walked up to her and slapped her hard across the face. The impact shone as red as her hair, as flushed as the gasp from the necklace of flesh. It lit up her face in a way that made her look honest again. It spread across her cheek, down her neck, swirled between the tops of her breasts, and disappeared beneath her gown.
If the world is a just place, that mark will never leave her skin, but remain as a pulsing reminder that, at some point in the past, she hurt someone so badly that she hurt herself as well.
But I was not done. Not by half. I had just begun.
What did I do? You’ll find out soon enough. Jump pages. Jump time. Skip through the rest as if it were a park pathway on a Sunday afternoon, and you eager to feed the ducks at the far end, in Voss Bender Memorial Square. But I haven’t written the path yet, and you’d get lost without it—and, paper cuts aside, I’ll find ways to make you wait. Waiting is good. I’ve been waiting for over five days now. I know something about waiting. And afterwords.
“I say again: What’s she typing in there? Clack-clack-clack—it’s disturbing my peace of mind.”
“Wasn’t her brother the writer?”
“Obviously not the only one in the family.”
“You must be new to this conversation.”
“What’s she writing, do you think?”
“The story of your life, Steen. A history of the Cappans. How should I know?”
“Whatever it is, it must be important. To her.”
Pickled eyes in pickled light. A glimpse of cheddar-wedge nose.
“Funny. It’s like an echo. It falls away when we stop talking.”
…
“See. No typing. Do you think she’s…?”
She’s what? Typing your inane speech, perhaps? Why not? You’ve become my companions after a fashion. Although I’ve never talked to them, I’ve shared this place with them for days now. I ought to feel grateful for their interest. I ought to get out of this dank back room and go over and suggest a game of darts.
“Naw—she’s not typing us. Hasn’t got anything to do with us.”
I think I’ll go for a walk. I’m going to go for a walk. My hands are cramping. My stomach growls. The clock on the wall tells me I’ve been here much longer than I thought.
Even ghosts can take a walk, so why not me?
6
I was beginning to sound like a character in a book. I had to escape the relentless pressure of the words. I had to get away. From the typewriter keys. From my wrinkled hands, which prove my brain lies to me about my age. From the faces staring through the green crack where the corridors synchronize into a fracture of seeing. From the feeling that I had begun to parrot on these pages, blandly resuscitating facts. {Janice, once you start a project like this, it’s impossible to tell what is truly important or who will find what the most interesting, so it’s no use second-guessing your decisions, no matter how I may have protested against some of them.}
I went for a hobbling walk, leaning heavily on my cane every step of the way. But when you’ve lived in a place this long, no walk can occur solely in the present. Every street, every building, appears to you encrusted with memories, with perspectives that betray your age, your cynicism, your sentimentality, or your lack of feeling where you should feel something. Here, the site of a quick fuck, a fumbling moment of ecstasy. {“Lover’s tryst,” Janice, is, I believe, the preferred term; once again your style slips from Duncanisms to gutterisms.} There, a farewell to a departing friend. A fabled lunch with an important artist. The dust-smudged window of a rival gallery, still floundering along while you are forever out of business. A community square, where once you held an outdoor party, strung with paper lanterns. And if this were not enough—not relentless enough, not humbling enough—that unspeakable vision overlaying all of it, had you only the glasses to see: the mark of the gray caps on the city in a thousand secret signs and symbols.
It is not an easy thing for me to walk through Ambergris these days, but there is also comfort: why, she said, her heart breaking a little, there are so many friends to visit, even if they are all in the ground.
But at first I just hobbled down Albumuth Boulevard in the late afternoon light, letting my path be decided by the gaps between supplicants and pilgrims. Happy that everything appeared normal, that evidence of the Shift was hidden, or so minute that I didn’t notice it. {Or maybe you didn’t notice it because you had become so used to it.}
I took deep breaths, to catch all the smells in this most beautiful and cruel of all cities: passionflower and incense, lemon trees and horse flop, rotting meat and coffee grounds. For a few minutes I tried to pretend to be a tourist, a passerby, an incidental part of the city. It didn’t work. How could it? I am Janice Shriek.
My leg was already beginning to ache, but I thought I might feel more optimistic if I headed for the site of my greatest triumphs. I hadn’t visited it in ages, so I went despite the discomfort. After a good half hour, I finally stood in front of what had once been the Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. A flower shop and a bakery stood to either side, but the part of the building that had housed the gallery lay empty as if cursed. The shadow where the hand-painted sign had once hung had been branded into the wall by years of hard weather. Beyond the cracked windows lay dust, moldy frames, and darkness. No paintings. No paint not peeling. Just seasons and seasons of neglect. The smell of stale bread, rotting wood. Layers of purple fungus had taken root in the closest wall. Passersby hardly spared the place a second glance. It should have been a monument, or at least a memorial. It had housed dozens of famous paintings and painters. Conversations that shaped all aspects of the art world had taken place there. Much of the art mentioned in the Hoegbotton tourist guides, the descriptions of the New Art movement, had started with my gallery. I had started there. Everything I have been since came from my gallery. This dump. This husk of broken timbers. Even my memories of it—saturated in the marinade of all five senses and as sharp as yesterday—could not bring it to sudden life. I might as well have never left the typewriter. I was still trapped in an afterword.
I headed into the Religious Quarter, immediately calmed by the sound of bells—bells from steeples and cathedrals, from alcoves and altars, which I could never quite find the source of, which lingered at the edge of hearing.
I disturbed a boy in the act of lighting a candle in the recess that marked the northernmost corner of the Church of the Seven-Edged Star. He looked up at me, his face whiter even than his white robes against the tousle of black hair, his eyes a glistening green, his mouth forming a half-conscious “O,” the long match held with divine grace in his slightly upt
urned right hand. The white of his revealed wrist sent a shudder through me, but he smiled and the image of grace returned.
He was right to light the candle, for the Quarter at that hour had not only distant bells but distant light, the dusk so strong it might as well have been a smell, a musk, that slid over the unprotected surfaces of cobblestones, windows, and walls, leaving behind the chaos of rippling illuminations that remain in the Quarter after dark. Priests shuffled past, murmuring mouths and bare feet. Truffidians, Manziists, Menites, Cultists? Doubtless Duncan the historian would have known. No matter how Ambergris Shifted, we could count on the rituals of the Quarter remaining the same.
Moving on, I walked to the edge of the Religious Quarter—by now an act of will, as my leg really hurt—past the stern-looking Truffidian Cathedral, and by way of a flurry of alleys soon found myself in front of Blythe Academy. The dark covered the Academy comfortably, content to linger at the outskirts of lamps and torches.
Even from the street I could see directly into the courtyard, and beyond the courtyard into the student apartments, here and there a window illumined with golden light. In the foreground, the pale willow trees rustled in the breeze. {As pale willow trees are wont to do.} The stone benches and tables were solid, dark, strangely comforting masses. A monk strode across the courtyard. Another followed, cowl hiding his face. The sweet, pungent scent of honeysuckle wound itself around me.
I do not know how long I stood there, remembering those long-ago conversations, but as I did, an unbearable sadness came over me. Nothing I can type on these pages can convey—truly—what I felt as I looked into the darkened courtyard where Duncan, Bonmot, and I had sat and talked. And, if I am truthful, that place I stood in front of, which meant so much to me, no longer had any more to do with me than the Borges Bookstore. The moment, the spirit, had passed out of it and it was just a place once more. Duncan no longer taught there. Bonmot no longer sat behind the desk in his office, listening to the imagined miseries of yet another homesick student. Duncan had disappeared. Bonmot had died more than twelve years ago.
Shriek: An Afterword Page 13