Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Spring

  Vomiting

  Diarrhea

  Cramps

  Dry mouth

  Shortness of breath

  Violent mood swings

  Summer

  Dizziness

  Blurred vision

  Shivering

  Profuse sweating

  Excessive salivating

  Violent mood swings

  Fall

  Vomiting

  Diarrhea

  Cramps

  Violent mood swings

  Winter

  Delirium

  Blurred vision

  Nausea

  Violent mood swings

  Duncan was convinced he had contracted these symptoms as a result of his encounter with the Machine. I was convinced the “violent mood swings” had nothing to do with his fungal affliction and everything to do with a malady known as “Mary Sabonitis.”

  Luckily for their relationship, which otherwise might have been punctuated by episodes more suited to a madhouse or a sick house than an institution of learning, the symptoms came and went like the summer storms that had always plagued Ambergris. {Ironic, that. Because now there is no slower turning to the world than with this disease, this gift in flux, in flow. I might as well be turning into a tree, putting down roots. The yearning in my flesh calls out to the yearning in the ground. Nothing can be made that is not a part of me, that will not eventually become me. “I want for nothing and hunger naught,” as some crackpot old saint named Tonsure once said before they buried him underground.}

  Admittedly, his disease sometimes brought with it great joy, no doubt also caused by the fungi. An episode during the second year of his affair with Mary best describes the extremity of effects that his body could force from him:

  I felt a slight disorientation that morning when I woke in my teacher’s quarters. A kind of half-hearted dizziness, a prickling in the skin: a harbinger of encroaching symptoms. However, the sensation faded, so I went to my classes anyway. I remember seeing Mary in the back row of my “Famous Martyrs” class at the exact second that my mouth went as dry as the blackboard. I remember thinking it was just her presence that had affected me. For the first twenty minutes I was fine, livening up my lecture by telling some old jokes about Living Saints that Cadimon Signal had related to me at the religious academy in Morrow. Then, suddenly, I could feel the spores infiltrating my head, my limbs—they clambered over my sinuses, got between me and my own skin. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. The spores began to seethe across my eyes, bringing a stinging green veil over my sight. I did the only thing I could do, the thing I have learned to do, still the hardest thing. I relaxed my arms, my legs, my neck, my head, so that I entrusted my balance to the fungi…and damned if I didn’t stay up. Damned if I didn’t continue to live, although I felt like I was drowning. I sweated from every pore. I felt nauseous, disoriented, dizzy. I felt as if the gray caps were searching for me across a vast distance—I could feel their gaze upon me, like a black cloud, a storm of eyes…and still the tendrils spread across my vision, blinding me…and then, as soon as they had finished their march from east and west, meeting somewhere around the bridge of my twitching nose, all of the discomfort faded and I could…breathe again. Not only could I breathe, but I was flying, soaring, my body as light as a single spore, and yet so powerful that I felt as if I could hold up the entire Academy with one hand. A fierce joy leaked into me, sped from my feet to my waist to my arms, my head. I could not have been happier had I been the sun, shining down on everyone from on high. And in that happiness, I did not even really exist, except as a connection, a bridge, an archway, linked with a hundred thousand other archways that extended up and down my body in a perfect crisscrossing pattern of completeness. And I cannot help feeling, even as the spores just as suddenly relinquished their hold and left me gasping and white, that what radiated into me was a thank-you from the thousands that comprise the invisible community that has become my body. {Later, Mary told me that I had kept talking through the entire episode, albeit with slurred speech.}

  Do I believe him? I’ve seen too much not to. But, then, Sabon saw exactly what I saw, and she couldn’t be bothered to take the leap. She decided, somewhere along the way, to ignore, to miss, to go blind, to see through.

  After Duncan had recounted some of these “episodes” to me, it was hard to laugh when he began to sign his infrequent postcards, “Your Brother, the Fungus Garden.” {But I was—I was a transplanted fungal garden torn from the subterranean gardens of the gray caps. As the seasons came and went, I was the end of the journey for a great exodus, a community of exiles that colonized me and tried to observe the same seasonal rituals—to bloom and ripen and die in accordance with their ancestry. They were homesick, but they made do with what they had: me. And I, poor sap, was in turn able to experience with each season some new explosion of fertility, selfish enough in my pleasure to endure the counterbalanced pain—and to only hope that when in remission my affliction was not contagious. In this way, I remained connected to the underground even though absent from it. One day I will dissolve into the world, will become a gentle spray of spores, will settle on the sidewalk and on trees, on grass and soil, and yet still be—watchful and aware.}

  Perhaps more disquieting was that, unknown to me, each week brought Sabon’s flesh necklace, and thus Duncan’s final humiliation, closer.

  I had an intimation of the future when, two years into her relationship with Duncan, Sabon finally visited me at my gallery, probably at Duncan’s request. {No—she decided to do that on her own. You were my only family besides Mom. She was curious. It’s your guilt showing through here—that you weren’t supportive, that you were so negative despite never having met her. It strikes me now, Janice, that as much as we talked over the years perhaps we never talked about the right things.} You might well ask why she waited so long, why I waited so long, but I think she must have realized how deeply I disapproved of my brother sleeping with a student. {I’ll grant you this now: you seem to have a sixth sense for impending tragedy. At the time, it just seemed like pettiness on your part.}

  By then, I had begun to shed even my less respectable artists. But my gallery still maintained an aura of the respectable. I kept it Morrow-clean and replaced each departed painting with some admirable imitation. After that strange cold winter, the weather in Ambergris had been near-perfect for more than eighteen months. Good weather meant more walk-ins, and more walk-ins meant more sales. A few more tourists and I might again be as green as mint-scented, treelined Albumuth Boulevard.

  So at first I saw Mary Sabon as only another potential buyer. Besides, from Duncan’s feverish descriptions, I would have expected someone taller, wiser, more voluptuous. She was short but not slight, her frame neither fat nor thin, and from her shiny red hair to her custom-made emerald-green shoes, from the scent of perfume to the muted red dress that hung so naturally off of her shoulder, she radiated a sense of wealth and health. {She dressed up for you, Janice, in her Truffidian Cathedral best.}

  She nodded to me as she came in and wandered from wall to wall, glancing at the paintings with nervous little turns of her head. Her hands, held behind her back, clutched a purse. She had not yet attained the artful guile of poise and positioning that would someday make her the center of attention. The necklace had not yet begun to form.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, half rising from my desk. I remember wondering if I might interest her in one of the pathetic landscapes that had come to fill my walls—indeed, whether the listed prices were high enough to match her wealth. I had, at that time, some masticated and mauled views of Voss Bender Memorial Post Office—popular since Lake’s success—as well as some nicely watered-down panoramas of the docks and the River Moth. All made respectable by the nearby presence and divine quality of two Lake sketches of fishermen cutting apart the carcass of a freshwater squid.

  She turned to face me, smiled, and said, “I’m Mary Sabon.” Despite her nerves, she c
arried herself with an assurance I have never had. It rattled me.

  “Mary Sabon,” I said.

  She nodded, looked down at her shoes, then up at me again. “And you, of course, are Janice. Your brother has told me a lot about you.” And laughed at her cliché.

  “Yes. Yes, I am,” I said, as if surprised to learn my own identity. “So you’re Sabon,” I said.

  “Indeed,” she replied, her gaze fixed on me.

  I said: “Do you know that what you’re doing could get Duncan fired by the Academy?”

  It just came out. I didn’t mean to say it. Ever since the Attempt, I haven’t had any tact. {Ever since? You’ve never had any tact!}

  Sabon’s smile disappeared, a look of hurt flashing across her face. In that hurt expression I saw a flicker of something from her past coming back to haunt her. I never found out what it was.

  “We love each other, Janice,” she said—and there’s a surprise, a shock. Something unexpected brought to the surface by the clacking of keys against paper: she’s just a girl. When we met that first time, she was just a girl, without guile. I am ashamed of something and I’m not sure what. She was young. I was older. I could have crushed her then, but did not know it. {Dead. It’s all dead. It’s all gone. Senseless.}

  “We love each other, Janice,” Mary said. “Besides, your brother is a historian. He teaches for now, but he’s working on new books…. And, besides, I won’t be a student forever.”

  I think now of all the things I could have said, gentle or cruel, that might have led away from a marble staircase, a raised hand, a fiery red mark on her cheek.

  I sat down behind my desk. “You know he’s sick, don’t you?”

  “Sick?” she said. “The skin disease? The fungus? But it disappears. It doesn’t stay long. It isn’t getting worse. It doesn’t bother me.”

  But I could tell it did bother her.

  “Did he tell you how he got the disease?” I asked.

  “Yes. He’s had it since he was a boy, when he went exploring. You know—BDD. It comes and goes. He’s very brave about it.”

  Never mind the magnitude of Duncan’s lie; it was the BDD that caught me. All the breath left my body, replaced by an ache. Before Dad Died was something between Duncan, my mother, and me. {And yet here you are, sharing it in a manuscript that might be read by any old drunk off the street.}

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  There must have been a pause. There must have been a stoppage, a shift of my attention away from her.

  “I’m fine,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “As long as you know about it.”

  Yes, the fungus left his skin for weeks, sometimes months, but when it returned, it was always more insidious, more draining of his energy. How could I possibly explain to her about Duncan’s obsession with the underground, especially now that he swore it no longer obsessed him?

  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.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary Sabon has lived in Ambergris for her entire life. During the War of the Houses, she received her history degree from the Blythe Academy, where her teachers included author Duncan Shriek. (1) Sabon has written 16 (2) books over her distinguished twenty-year (3) career, including The Role of Chance in the History of the Southern Cities; Trillian as Reformer: The Influence of Pig Cartels on Ambergrisian History; (4) Magical Ambergris: The Legacy of Manzikert IX; Nature Studies with My Father; The Gray Caps’ Role in Modern Literature: The Dilemma of Dradin, in Love; (5) and Cinsorium: Rethinking the Myth of the Gray Caps. (6) At 47, (7) Sabon remains (8) the most vital and beloved of Ambergris’ many historians, shedding light on history and her fellow historians alike. (9) Her early interest in nature studies no doubt arises from her parents David Sabon and Rebecca Verden-Sabon, the former a noted naturalist best-known for having coined the term “Nativism,” and the latter a gifted nature illustrator. (10)

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

  1)…Blythe Academy, where her teachers included author Duncan Shriek. Over the years, Sirin has decided whether to include Duncan based on two factors: (1) To what extent the book guts Duncan’s theories, and (2) The level of Duncan’s limited notoriety at the time of publication. If the book openly attacks a theory or theories in Duncan’s work—at least half have—and makes that aggression its thesis, the phrase disappears from the sentence, a phantom limb waiting to be reattached. As for notoriety, now that Duncan has disappeared, possibly for good, I imagine he will magically reappear in the author’s biography, trapped there for all time. {Or magically reappear right here.}