Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  2) Sabon has written 16 books…Alas, the number continues to rise, each new eviscerating tome kept in print by a necromancy beyond my understanding, and each leading to a more complete flesh necklace. What is Sabon’s appeal to readers? Why is she always more popular than Duncan? {And why should the answer interest us? Get on with the underground adventures.} In page after page of exquisite prose, much of which I cannot bring myself to read, Sabon has, over the years, reassured her readers, made them feel intelligent, offered rational commonsense explanations for even the most miraculous and profound of events. {Although even she cannot explain away the Silence!} It doesn’t seem to matter if her answers are wrong or incomplete. It does not matter that her answers often diminish the complexities of the world—leach it of its sorrow and its joy in favor of a comforting numbness, a comforting sameness: the husk of a starfish, not its living body. {And yet, you must admit, Sabon enlivens the corpses with wit and glamour.}

  Duncan, conversely, liked to provoke his readers, poke them with a sharpened stick, to emphasize the supreme unknowable irony of the world and then, in marching toward the truth, unearth new mysteries, so that every so-called solution begged a hundred questions. The reader left Duncan’s books shaken and unmoored from what he or she had always taken for granted.

  In short, if reduced to a single point of punctuation, Sabon’s work would have been a period {sometimes an emphatic exclamation mark!}, Duncan’s a question mark. Closed doors. Open doors. All shrouded, all revealed. {It could just be that I wrote bad books.} The average reader likes to return home after a long journey, not be left stranded in the middle of nowhere, with dark coming on and the printed pages a desert devoid of comfort. {You make my books sound like mirthless lumps of coal hidden at the bottom of a dry well, Janice! I refuse to believe you didn’t see the humor, the enthusiasm, in my books. Replace “desert” with “a mysterious foreign land,” with all the danger and excitement that entails.}

  3) …over her distinguished twenty-year career. Unfortunately, this number also continues to rise, although riddled with inaccuracy. Seven years after Sabon graduated from Blythe, the author’s note read “ten.” Ten years after her graduation, the note read “fifteen.” Regardless, I’m sure Bonmot was always glad to see a mention of Blythe Academy bereft of any hint of scandal.

  4) The Influence of Pig Cartels on Ambergrisian History…The most unintentionally humorous book I have ever read. At its core, Sabon’s atrocity is based on Duncan’s observation in an article for the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society’s Real History Newsletter that Trillian the Great Banker fell from power due to his battle with the leader of a powerful pig cartel over the favors of a woman {you can’t be sure my mention sparked her book—the anecdote is, more or less, common knowledge}, which prompted Sabon to devote a 175-page book to the futile task of trying to convince the reader that pig cartels have wielded immense power throughout Ambergrisian history—and all the sentences that I read at least, are as breathlessly long as this one. {I admit, the book did bewilder me, as did its popularity. But we’re all entitled to one bad book. I’m sure the pig cartels were flattered, at the very least.}

  5) The Gray Caps’ Role in Modern Literature: The Dilemma of Dradin, in Love…The only dilemma, to my way of thinking, being how to dignify as “literature” such a collection of angst, stupidity, and old wives’ tales. At least Sabon left my brother out of this one.

  6) Cinsorium: Rethinking the Myth of the Gray Caps…I don’t feel up to addressing this book for now. It requires more explanation than I have the strength to give it. Besides, Nativism was born from it, and that’s too horrible to contemplate at the moment.

  7) At the age of 47…Thankfully, this number also continues to rise. One day it, and she, will pass on to the Infinite. {As will we all, without a little bit of luck or planning. And then none of this will matter to anyone, not that it matters to many people at the moment, anyway.}

  8) Sabon remains… “Remains” best describes the current content of her books: the remains of Duncan’s theories, devoured and spat out by Sabon. {That’s the way it often happens, although usually, I think, the author stolen from is already dead or senile. Still, the sting of it is there, I cannot deny it.}

  9)…shedding light on history and her fellow historians alike… This latest addition to the Sabon Canon {or cannon} at least begins to acknowledge that most of her books feast off of the carcasses of other historians.

  10) This mention of Mary’s parents reminds me that I have lied a little for the sake of dramatic tension, I think. There was one time I saw Mary before she visited my gallery. I just didn’t realize it was her.

  I saw her with her parents at Blythe Academy once, surrounded by the controlled chaos that is the start of the spring semester. A spray of sudden greenery from the trees, the clatter of shoes on walkways and stairs as students—nervous and excited—tried to find their classes. As I passed by on my way to visit Duncan, one family caught my eye by their very stillness. They stood in the center of the courtyard and also at the center of a kind of calm. The girl stood, legs slightly apart, staring down at the ground, schoolbooks held carelessly in one hand, a pensive look on her face. Her parents stood like towers to either side of her, the space between them containing a daughter not quite belonging to the same world.

  Their unlined, unremarkable faces expressed no great joy or sorrow, or none that I could discern, and yet I could feel a tension there; the presence of some overwhelming emotion. I almost felt as if I were a witness to some kind of ritual or ceremony. Was the girl’s head bowed in prayer? As I walked away, I turned to watch them, and it seemed as if they were receding from me at a glacially slow pace.

  That must have been Mary’s first year at the Academy, and I find it interesting that even then I noticed her, before Duncan ever pointed her out to me, before I even knew who she was.

  When I read Sabon’s biographical note in her various books, what I envision when I come across the sentence beginning “Her early interest in nature studies…” arises not from her gallery visit, but from that first glimpse: of twinned parents standing guard on either side of a daughter whose face is tilted toward the ground. Something about their wary stance still worries me now, even after my research has made of them more than silent statues.

  In fact, my research has somehow lessened their pull on my imagination, for the facts do not particularly impress. {They impressed me!}

  Given that David Sabon’s most important contribution to natural history consists of helping to edit a revised edition of Xaver Daffed’s classic A History of Animals, perhaps it would be best to simply note his presence and move on. However, his peculiar {dangerous!} attitude toward the gray caps, delivered in the form of speeches to many a meeting of the Ambergris Historical Society {smoky, jaundiced events punctuated by coughs, grunts, and unintelligible murmurings from octogenarian senilitians}, should be documented somewhere. Where better than an afterword?

  David Sabon preached a strain of Nativism {otherwise known as “a good way to get yourself killed”}, although not quite the same one later popularized by Mary. David Sabon not only believed that gray caps possessed “no more natural intelligence than a cow, pig, or chicken” but that they should be treated “much as we treat other animals.” As the transcript for one memorable speech reads, “Gray caps should be used to support our labors, for our entertainment, and for meat.”

  Although David Sabon later claimed that “and for meat” had appeared in the speech by mistake {transposed from a speech on the King Squid}, the cutthroat Ambergris newspapers had no qualms about printing headlines like DAVID SABON RECOMMENDS SNACKING ON GRAY CAP BEFORE DINNER and NEW “ARCHDUKE OF MALID,” DAVID SABON, LIKES A NICE BIT O’ GRAY CAP BEFORE BED. Surely Mary Sabon, lone seed of a loon’s loins, became indoctrinated with her father’s attitudes at a very early age, setting the stage for her own irresponsible theories. {Perhaps so, but Mary always seemed embarrassed by her father’s activities.}


  While David Sabon’s forebears included no one more distinguished than a barber in Stockton and a minor judge in Morrow, Mary’s mother, Rebecca Verden-Sabon, came from newly minted stock. Her father, Louis Verden, began his career as a jeweler but went on to illustrate a number of scientific texts, although his best work appeared in Burning Leaves, a creative journal he eventually art directed and to which I sometimes contributed when I had no work from Sirin. Verden also illustrated a series of paranoid {not paranoid enough} Festival pamphlets for Hoegbotton & Sons, including The Exchange, Bender in a Box, Naysayer Mews, In the Hours After Death, and The Night Step {all in collaboration with the darkly humorous, underrated writer Nicholas Sporlender, whom I once bumped into by mistake—underground, oddly enough}.

  Rebecca became her father’s apprentice and eventually took over editorial duties at Burning Leaves, although not until my gallery had turned to dust and ash. Before that, she specialized in illustrations for advertisements or to accompany scientific texts. In some ways, it could be argued that Rebecca’s work for her daughter’s first book, The Inflammation of Aan Tribal Wars, gave her more exposure than all of her previous work combined.

  Duncan’s parent-teacher conferences with David and Rebecca continued for several semesters. I have this rather humorous vision of Duncan in his office, talking solemnly with Mary’s parents and then, once he has smiled reassuringly and guided them out the door, frantically jumping out of his office window, on his way to a tryst with their daughter. {I honestly thought I was protecting her, and that she could make her own choices. After all, she was already a young adult. She knew her own mind.}

  Apparently, the famed Naturalist suffered from a peculiar form of blindness: an inability to see anything under his nose unless it crawled or flew or swam or galloped, for that keen observer of the natural world never realized what Duncan and Mary had been up to until he was told by a third party.

  “Thank you,” he’d said to Duncan. “Thank you for taking such good care of our daughter.”

  And in his way he had, hadn’t he?

  10

  Mary and Duncan, Duncan and Mary. As with all utopias, especially those based on love, someone thankfully, always comes along to say, “No—this is not right. No—this should end.” Why? Because the true path Duncan always took to Mary’s window was the Path of Denial, a path with which I was familiar. For example, take my current situation. I have begun to run out of money, although the owner of this establishment doesn’t know it yet. He believes I just haven’t had a chance to go to the bank, what with all the typing. {Real life, intruding on the recording of real life. How odd.}

  Besides, I’m akin to a curiosity—he makes a healthy living from letting loathsome types peek around the corner at me. “That’s Janice Shriek. She used to be famous.” Some slack-jawed gimp is peering from behind a glossy wooden beam right now. I am ignoring him—he will not receive even a sliver of my attention.

  I do like the smell of beer and whiskey and smoke, however. I do like the busy times when they are all chattering away in there, happy as a bunch of click-clacking gray caps holding a half-dozen severed heads, as in “days of yore.”

  Duncan only started coming here again in earnest after he fell out with Bonmot. When it all came crashing down, he called the Spore of the Gray Cap his home once more; again became the Green God of the Spore. Many a beer was consumed here. I wonder sometimes if Duncan ever came back during those happy-unhappy hours and sat looking at the corner, where all that can now be seen is a hole.

  Now why would Duncan fall out with Bonmot? Could it have been over love? Possibly. If we turn to Duncan’s journal, to the entry where he recounts to Mary Bonmot’s fateful discovery along the Path of Remembering You, we shall soon find out. The ink was not yet dry on his grief when he wrote:

  Glimpsed. Detected. Surprised. Held. Ensnared. Ensnarled. Entrapped. Captured. Stricken. No hope of understanding. He’d caught on, grasped, and comprehended, with no hope of acceptance. If I could make a fence of these words to keep him from us, I would, but it’s no use. It’s over. I am no longer a teacher. You are no longer my student. In a sense, we are released from all of it—the hiding, the sneaking around, the lying, the delicious forbidden feel of your lips against mine.

  {There I go, romanticizing it—putting words between myself and the hurt. I disgust myself sometimes.}

  I took the Path of Remembering You well after dark. I don’t remember anything about my trip, except the absent-minded scratches from a rose bush in the gardens and the frozen position of the stars. It was cold, and I was glad to pull myself up into your open window and into your smooth white arms. Your skin, as always, awakened my senses, and I trembled from the power of your eyes, the soft place at the base of your neck, the soap smell of you, the miraculous hollows on the inside of your thighs.

  And, afterwards, intoxicated by the feel and scent of you, the taste of you on my hands, my lips, I swung happily back into the cold, certain I would see you the next night; even the sudden tight prickle on my left arm, my right foot, that presaged spore-pain only added a spark to my mood. The stars swam and spun, and the solid, cold buildings seemed to sway with this happiness in me that was you.

  But, my love, no happiness ever went untested. No happiness ever lasted unchanged, untransformed. It doesn’t mean happiness has to end, just that it takes on new patterns, new shapes.

  It happened by the willow trees where I first saw you, that flickering shiver of a glimpse, and yet that red hair like a fire burning through the trees. It was by those trees, along the path where I walked a happy man, that the stone table where I spent my lunch hours came into view. It lay at the very heart of the willows like a black cave, not a stone at all, and the dark green leaves of the surrounding bushes glistened with reflected light. And, my love, someone sat at that table, and even in that uncertainty, I knew who it was and all of the life left my gait. I could tell my happiness was about to change.

  Bonmot sat at the table, dressed in his most formal clothes, as a Truffidian priest would on sacrament day at the Cathedral. Glittering robes, with gold thread woven through them. Even in the dark, they glittered.

  I looked into that dark and I could not see his eyes. “Bonmot,” I said, “is that you, Bonmot?” Even though I knew already that it was him.

  He said nothing, but motioned for me to sit beside him at the table. I didn’t hesitate, Mary—I sat next to him willingly. Any excuses about the cold, the lateness of the hour, would have been crushed by the weight of the stone and that gaze. So I sat and made a joke and remarked on the cold and said, “Should we have a midnight snack, then, instead of lunch?” and trailed off because throughout my nervous monologue Bonmot had said nothing. He stared at me with no expression on his face, the staff leaning against the stone bench, the medallion hanging around his neck on a silver chain. I clutched the table so hard that the stone abraded my fingers.

  Now, finally, he spoke, each syllable unbearably clear against the cold night air. This is what he said, my love. I can’t forget it. I can’t sleep tonight because of it. He said, “It’s no use, Duncan. I know. Once I too had a secret that made every breath I drew a lie, and so it’s no use for you to talk of other things. Because I know. You have compromised your student, Mary Sabon.”

  There was silence for a full ten seconds and then I began to talk. I could not stop talking. Every word was a denial of what he had said. Every word placed such a distance between you and me that it made me physically ill—and yet I did it because I thought it was the only way to save us. And so I babbled on—what was Bonmot talking about? How dare he? Didn’t he know me better than that? I had just been out taking a late walk. Didn’t he know I helped to keep boys away from female students? Didn’t he realize I was a colleague, a professional, a person who would never do what he accused me of? After so many talks in the gardens at lunch—so many wonderful conversations—how could he possibly consider—why, it was an outrage—why, I had been a model teacher—why, I was a
published historian—I was—I was…and, finally, at some point, I realized that he had heard none of what I had said, and that his look of sorrow had transformed his face from granite to skin and flesh and bone. And I stopped talking. I looked away from him. My body shook. I could already anticipate everything he was about to take away from me, and I thought it meant the end. Really, The End.

  He said: “There are no more lunches under the willow trees for us. You are no longer a teacher at this academy. I expect you to gather your things now and be gone before dawn. As for Mary, she will finish out the next two semesters and earn her degree, but if you ever set foot in this place again, she will be expelled in a very public way. I have had my fair share of scandal, Duncan. I will not let friendship or anything resembling it destroy my good works at this school. Good night, Duncan.”

  I did not even notice when he left because I thought I had lost you. I thought those words meant not just the end of my career as a teacher, but the end of us. But now, as I tell you all of this, I realize it is not the end—it just signals a change. A change for the good. We’ve been desperate and in love, which can be a great thing. It lends an urgency to all we do and say. It means that we do not take lightly each other’s bodies or our hearts. It means we love each other fiercely and with no artifice between us.