Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  “There is no New Art anymore,” Sybel said, and then was gone, leaving me in my empty gallery, wondering what to do.

  What could I do? I needed to find my brother—and find him I did, amid the tinkling rustle of the frozen willow trees outside of Blythe Academy. I think he knew I was coming. I think he knew I was looking for him. There he was in a long coat, sitting at a stone table and smiling at me. {Grimacing, actually. I experienced a lot of pain during the early days of my transformation. I was still changing.} He had regained his customary thinness.

  “Hello, helpless helping brother,” I said, smiling back as I sat down across from him. Behind him, the Academy was just waking up. It was a beatific morning—the sun lit the snow and ice into a fractured orange blaze.

  “Hello, suicidal sister,” he said, his gaze clear, focused on the present, on me.

  “You should use more careful language,” I told him. “I could do it all over again, and you’d have to send me on another tour of the world.”

  Duncan grinned. His teeth revealed an underlying rot, despite his apparent health: they were stained a gray-black along the gums.

  “Not likely,” he said. “I’ve already sent you to every head doctor within three hundred miles. If you were going to do it again, you would have done it while listening to the seventh or eighth as he droned on about your disturbed dream life.”

  “But I am fragile,” I insisted. “I’ve been without drugs for weeks. I’ve been getting lots of sleep. I’ve been eating well. I could suffer a mental collapse at any moment.”

  {To see you that way, tired but whole, made me happy. A few months before I had had no idea if you would survive, or if you’d be the same person afterwards. It didn’t matter that you were thin or drawn, just that you seemed sane once more.}

  “The city is falling apart, not you. The snow. Look—it’s snowing again.”

  He was right—thin, small flakes had begun to drop out of the sky.

  “It hasn’t really stopped snowing,” I reminded him.

  “I think the gray caps…”

  I rolled my eyes to cut him off. “You think they’re responsible for everything.” {Because they are, Janice!}

  He shrugged. “Aren’t they?”

  “Actually, no,” I replied. “I brought the snow with me from Morrow—the most heartless, boring, terrible place you could possibly have sent me to.”

  Anger, rising up. It felt good. It felt right. It was the only thing I’d felt besides pain and sorrow in a long time.

  “I saved your life,” he said. “You’d be dead otherwise.”

  “Maybe I wanted to be dead,” I replied. “Did you ever think of that?”

  “No,” Duncan said, shivering, “I don’t think you wanted to be dead. I think you didn’t want to feel. There’s a difference. And I know all about not wanting to feel.”

  All the air went out of me with a single sigh. The truth was, it took too much energy to talk about such things.

  A thought occurred to me. “How did you know I’d be here?”

  Duncan grimaced, as if from some physical pain. {As if? Every time I moved, I could feel them all over me, burrowing into my skin.}

  He looked away. “I have…friends…who tell me things. That’s all. It’s the same reason I found you in time.”

  I laughed, said, “Friends! I can only guess what kinds of friends. Do they have legs or spores? Do they walk or do they float?”

  Duncan stared down at the snow. Now I could see, where the light caught his cheek, the side of his neck, that a faint black residue, insubstantial as smoke, had attached itself to his skin.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked me.

  I stared at him, the anger boiling over. What could I say to him? Why should I say anything to him?

  “What kind of answer would you like?” I asked him. “Would you like me to say the pressure was too much? That I couldn’t handle it? Do you want me to say I was under the influence of drugs? Do you want me to say my relationships all failed and I was lonely?”

  My voice had risen with each new question until I was shouting. I stopped. Abruptly. While Duncan stared at me, concerned.

  I realized I didn’t know why I had done it. Not really. Every reason I could dredge up seemed ridiculous. I had written lots of notes about it, true. All the doctors wanted me to write things down, as if they could pull it out of me through ink applied to paper. I wrote nonsensical sentences, pompous things like:

  I have finally figured it out. We are redeemed, if at all, by love and by imagination. I had imagination enough to realize I was not receiving enough love, and so I allowed myself to be seduced by those who did not love me, and whom I did not love. And then convinced myself, in my imagination, that I did love them, and that they did love me.

  Or, on another scrap of paper I saved as a testament to my foolishness:

  I spent my youth gripped in the fear of a sudden exit—like that of my father. I too might run across the sweet, strange grass only to fall prematurely inert at someone’s feet. {“Sudden exit”? “prematurely inert”? For someone who wanted to die you have a real aversion to the word death.} And yet as an adult I have tried my best to run to meet that exit anyway, despite all of those careful steps. Driving my gallery into ruin. Driving my relationships into ruin with excess and promiscuity. Overindulging in drugs and sex.

  And, finally, dredging up the distant past:

  My dad was a hard man to love. He lived for his work, and anyone who did not live for that work would receive very little love. Not a bad man, or a man who could be intentionally cruel. Not a man like that, no, but a man who could ignore you with an imperiousness that could burn into your soul. Duncan rarely saw that side of our father. Duncan was protected by his interest in the mysteries of history. Me, I couldn’t have cared less about history growing up. I was interested in many things—painting, reading, singing lessons, boys; in that order—but not history. I never could see the personal side to history until I started living it. Until Mary and Duncan showed me what history could mean. And by then it was too late: Dad was dead, and nearly me as well.

  The doctors had made me do it—had made me feel like a political prisoner of the Kalif, forced to recant my beliefs and spout pseudo-personal parody to regain my freedom. {And yet, Janice, some of it rings true. I wish I could say it didn’t.}

  “I don’t need an answer,” Duncan said quietly. “I just thought I’d ask.”

  But I needed an answer, so I could stop it from happening again. Why had I done it?

  I don’t recall what I said to Duncan next, sitting in the freezing cold outside of Blythe Academy, students beginning their groggy paths across the courtyard to their classes. I don’t remember any of the rest of our conversation. {We talked about the past, Janice. We talked about what Bonmot had been up to at the Academy. You told me about Mom and the condition of that old mansion. I told you about the research I had my students doing on Zamilon. Nothing you needed to remember.} I’m sure it didn’t satisfy him. It didn’t satisfy me.

  I could remember, however, the night of the attempt—a night that seemed to epitomize the parties, the drugs, the lack of direction, the stretched, unreal quality of my existence. The late, late nights merging into days, the black of the sky, the hunt for yet another bar.

  I had blown half of my remaining money on what I now realize was a suicide banquet—so much food, so many bodies, so little restraint. The pale white of people in a corner of the room, in a writhing orgy of legs and arms and torsos. The leering smiles of the onlookers. The smell of wine, of rot, of decay, of sex. But it wasn’t enough for me, even then. We kept going elsewhere.

  We were in a café. We were inside a burned-out building. We were on the street, giggling under a streetlamp. It was all merging together into one place, one time. I didn’t know where I was. Sybel was there, then he wasn’t there, then he was.

  Finally, we came to the steps of an abandoned church. Sybel stood on one side and David, the cipher I was
sleeping with at the time, stood on the other. I floated between them, staring at the huge double doors of the church, the old oak bound in iron and carved with flourishes. I could hear people talking loudly inside.

  “Did I pay for this?” I asked. It had become my standard question over the past few months.

  “No,” Sybel said. “You didn’t pay for this. You didn’t like your own party.”

  “You wanted us to take you somewhere else,” David said, an arm around my shoulders.

  “From what I paid for?” I said.

  Sybel laughed. “Yes, to something you didn’t pay for. And you definitely didn’t pay for this—this is a party sponsored by one of the new galleries.”

  “And somewhere else is something I paid for?”

  “We thought it might be fun to spy,” David added, ignoring me.

  “In a church?” I said, incredulous, forgetting all of the blasphemous functions I’d sponsored inside even holier buildings.

  David said, “It used to be for the Church of the Five Pointed Star, but they don’t really exist anymore.”

  Obviously. The grass was high and the steps cracked with vines. The door was beginning to rot on its hinges.

  “Lead the way,” I said, giving up.

  Sybel pushed open the door and we walked inside, the two of them practically carrying me—into the cacophony of music, the swirl of lights. We blended in perfectly. Same clothes. Same attitude. Within minutes, while Sybel and David looked on, I was carrying on a conversation with a young male artist who had the kind of pale waif look I find irresistible. It was crowded. I had to shout. I didn’t know what I was shouting. I didn’t know who I was rubbing up against. Sybel and David tried to act as my bodyguards; I ignored them. I was babbling.

  At some point, I lost focus and stopped talking, trying unsuccessfully to nod as the young artist who I really didn’t give a damn about rambled on about “the inspiration for my art.” I was standing on a stool by then. I don’t know who had provided the stool, but it gave me enough height to survey the crowd.

  Off to the side, I could see the rival gallery owner, John Franghe, chatting up a couple of my clients, oblivious to my presence. I recognized darling Franghe’s hand gestures. I recognized his body language. The odd combination of fawning flattery and absolute authority. He had a glass in his hand and was obviously drunk. He kept putting his hand on the arm of the prettier of the two artists and squeezing it, giving her a quick glance to catch her eye. There was nothing artful about it.

  At some point while watching, I fell off my stool. My head was full of nails. My thoughts were coiled and frightened. David and Sybel came to my aid, set me down at a chair beside a table, beside two old veterans of the art movement. Bodies were swirling around me. The texture of the table even seemed to swirl, to become a whirlpool of wooden grain. I could smell the beer, the drugs, the sweat of all of those bodies in such an enclosed space.

  At some point, I realized that none of it mattered, that none of it meant anything. I hated what I saw—the corrosion of fame, the accretion of falseness, the misuse of sex and desire. A strange dread came over me. I was alone in that church. I did not know who I was, or how I had come to this. I had become an observer in my own life.

  I sent David and Sybel off on a mission to ask the hosts to find more of my favorite mushrooms. As soon as they had been swallowed up by the crowd, I stood up and snuck out of the church, through those rotting oak doors.

  Stumbling, drunk out of my mind, I made my way down to a dirty little club at the dock-end of Albumuth Boulevard. Through the murmurous sounds of the River Moth, right outside, I listened to an old singer that someone said had once been famous.

  As one will, I quickly became close friends with everyone at the bar, but even as I sat there joking and drinking with them, in the dark, I knew I was all alone. I knew the singer realized this, too. He seemed to sing for me and me only. No one else paid attention to him. It was horrible and wonderful at the same time. He would never reach the heights he had once known. One day, the people in the bar might not even recognize his best-known songs. But he sang them with a kind of terrible defiance. It wore me out to watch him. The empty laughter of the bar wore me out. All of it wore me out.

  I sat there smoking a mushroom someone had given me and looking at the singer, but really staring past him into the distance, the foreground a blur, with not a thought in my head other than the melody of the song, the voice of the singer.

  You become what you pretend to be. I could pretend that I was pretending when it came to the New Art, but eventually I had begun to believe the lies that justified the excesses.

  Slowly, over time, a thought snuck past the music and the voice: that I could never be as brave as that singer, that I could never sing old songs to people who didn’t care. {Though, ironically enough, some would say that is what you’ve wound up doing with this account.}

  Is that a good reason? Would that have satisfied the doctors?

  Because nothing else did.

  I lied earlier, though. I do remember something else from my conversation with Duncan in the frozen courtyard. I remember that I smelled perfume on him. It brought me up short, changed the subject forever.

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  He smirked and said, “Mary Sabon.”

  Mary Sabon. Sabon and her necklace of liars. Where to start?

  Sybel was right—the New Art was dead. But it wasn’t just the New Art that had died.

  Before my “accident,” I had lived almost exclusively within the secret history of the city—a history of moments, not events, a history that vanished as it came and lived on only in the shudder of remembered ecstasy. This secret history descends {transcends} through the bedrooms of a hundred thousand houses, in the dark, through the tips of our fingers as we learn that our bodies have a thousand eyes to feel with, a thousand ways to learn the true meaning of touch. From foreplay to orgasm, from first touch to last, everything we know is in our skins—this secret history that so few people will be part of. We don’t talk about this history, although it made us and will make us and is the only way to get as close as we can to each other: an urgent coupling to close the space, to experience a pleasure that—excuse me as I stumble into this rapturous gutter {can we stop you?}—is on one level being filled or filling, but is also so much more. This is where I was and what I lived for before the accident. Afterwards, I gave it all up, even though it wasn’t the problem.

  I traded my secret history for another type of history altogether. I saw the backs of a lot of heads, sang a lot of songs, and had my fundament put to sleep by the hard wood I was sitting on on more than one occasion. Chanting, reading ancient books, fingering beads on a necklace much more humble than Sabon’s. Always worried that this new dependency might end as the old one had, but willing to take the chance anyway.

  But, in some great confluence of chance and destiny, as my erotic star fell, Duncan’s rose, and shone all the more passionately, as his ardor—unlike mine—was directed toward one person: Mary Sabon.

  I already knew Mary, although I did not realize it at the time. Duncan had talked about her for several months before the details of his attraction to her became clear. There was a potentially brilliant student in his class, he told me at lunch one day while Bonmot stared at both of us from beneath his bushy eyebrows. A student who absorbed theory like a sponge and immediately applied it to her own interests. A student who could, moreover, write, and write well. It was so obvious that this student should be in a more advanced class that at first he was undecided as to whether to let her go to some other school, but, finally, could not bring himself to suggest it.

  “She does not have the necessary social maturity,” I remember him saying. “She’s still young. To go to the Religious Academy in Morrow, with much older students,” he said, shaking his head. “She needs more time. Extraordinary student.”

  Bonmot frowned at that, gave Duncan a look that I didn’t understand.

&n
bsp; “Sometimes,” he said to Duncan pointedly, “it’s better to let them go. Better for the student and better for the teacher.”

  Duncan shook his head again. “No. She needs more time.”

  I should have known from the way he refused to use her name. Thank God I missed the courtship. Thank God I was trying to die.

  For Duncan had, while hounding me from hospital to ward, ward to doctor’s office, been displaying all the conjoined lust and random stupidity of a rabbit. He “succumbed to temptation,” as he put it in his journal, when, one afternoon while tutoring Mary privately after class, his hand crossed that space between how-it-is and how-it-might-be…and found purchase on the other side.

  “Tell me you don’t love me and I will be glad to escape this fever, this vision,” he wrote in his journal, and much else I cannot tell from the torn pages. “I’ve never been more naked,” he tells her, apparently forgetting the night I scraped the fungus from his body, surely his most naked moment.

  She did not leave him alone in his nakedness, for as he succumbed, and kept succumbing, without thought of the link between bliss and torment, she reciprocated, and continued to reciprocate. {Truly the driest account of making love I’ve ever read.} What promises they made to each other in those first few sweet, fumbling hours, I cannot tell you. Duncan has ripped those pages from his journal in such brutal fashion that even the pages surrounding that night are shredded—mangled words, mutilated phrases, quartered sentences. No one can read between lines that no longer exist.

  Did he tear them out from anger later, or love before? {I’m not telling.} Did he premeditate their slaughter, or was it a crime of passion? For that matter, why would he rip out those pages as opposed to—for example—the pages about the gray caps’ infernal machine? With the pages lost, and Duncan with them, we can only guess. {And yet, dear sister, here I am, editing your work, even after “death.” Some things never change.}