Already a lump was forming in my throat. My apartment looked unbearable. My leg was heavy and inert and aching.
I rarely tell any reporter what I remember—to them I give platitudes, clichés, spirals of brave words that mean nothing. Because it’s painful. Because we lost so much during the war.
“No one makes it out.” Those were among Samuel Tonsure’s last written words, according to what Duncan had uncovered at the fortress-monastery of Zamilon, and it’s a good piece of life advice: No one makes it out. Enjoy what you can while you can.
I was tempted to repeat Tonsure’s wisdom to the reporter, but I had already begun to feel self-conscious, and irrelevant. Besides, he had a question.
“And what about the opera?”
I smiled and leaned forward, staring into his pretty face and untroubled eyes.
“What I remember about the War,” I said, “is that right in the middle of it near the very epicenter of the conflict, when hundreds of men, women, and children might be blown up or turned to spores in the next week, the creative powers that be in Ambergris decided to stage the most ridiculous folly in the city’s entire ridiculous history: an opera.”
And what an amazing enterprise that was, the opera described in advertisements as:
In hindsight, no matter what happened, the opera would be the one great success of the war, the only sign that there might still be a city called Ambergris afterwards.
The city at that time—after more than two years of conflict—had begun to tear itself apart, like a beast that hates itself with a passion born of long familiarity. Every night, the deafening thunder of bombardment, the lights in the sky—the purple, red, or green of fungal bombs—the continuous, monotonous noise, so febrile, soaking into the very ground so that even the strange new flocks of crows, come to peck at our dead, became married to it, their cries the perfect mimic of fungal mortar fire. {No one knew whether they were about to duck death or bird shit.} And in the morning: the self-inflicted wounds, buildings sliced in half or crumbled into dust, the great, slashing scars in the earth…
In the weeks before the announcement of the opera—ragged hand-lettered posters nailed to charred posts and crumbling walls—a fear had begun to overcome many of us: a fear that Ambergris, as a place or an idea, could not last, that it might fall for the first time, and fall forever. With the fear came a terror of our own mortality that we had put aside through the first years of the war. With the evidence all around us that the city itself might die, we could no longer ignore thoughts of our own individual fates. Now we all seemed to shine with a clarity that imbued our forms with a figurative kind of light, a light we had not had before. It shone out through our eyes, our mouths, our movements. It made us all noble, I suppose, this fatalism, in a disheveled, unwashed way. {Such a lovely way to put it, but all I saw was grime and dirt and blood and death. The only real beauty lay underground, and it was a deadly beauty. How strange to be caught between such extremes.}
When Hoegbotton & Sons and Frankwrithe & Lewden came together at Borges Bookstore the week before the opera to announce a ceasefire, we all relaxed a little. We all let down our guard. If they could call a ceasefire for an opera, then perhaps they might one day call a ceasefire for more important things.
It had been a hard {not to mention dangerous} two years for Duncan and me, chasing after this or that story. We needed the rest. We needed the comfort. {The opera occurred, I felt later, almost out of the collective consciousness of the city—an impulse toward a remembered harmony Ambergris had never really known. When I heard the rumors of the opera’s impending production, I thought of them as horrible lies, intended to make us hope. It never occurred to any of us that one night House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe & Lewden would find themselves entangled in a temporary peace, and we would find ourselves in front of the Trillian Opera House.}
The night of the opera, we formed a party of five: me, Sybel, our employer James Lacond in the middle, Duncan, and Mary. Sybel, Lacond, and my brother served as an impregnable barrier to any potential unrest involving myself and the Lady Sabon. Sybel had recently reentered my life as a runner for Lacond and sometimes stayed at my apartment, just like old times.
“An opera?” Sybel had said when I told him. “Is there a building left standing to stage it in?”
Miracle of miracles, the Trillian Opera House stood conspicuously intact between two mounds of red fungi—seething rubble that had once been a bank and a restaurant. Granted, a huge wedge-shaped gouge {the classic indication of a fungal bomb} broke the opera house’s skin, running from the roof down to the second floor and exposing the rough-hewn timbers that formed the building’s skeleton. Such a minor wound, compared to so many buildings that had collapsed, unable to withstand the insidious veins of invading fungus.
It was dusk and the blood clot of a sun sawed through the opera house’s wound, lit the street with a deep orange light that I had never seen before. We waded through this light, our party and many others approaching the opera house. A smell permeated the street that made us anxious to get inside—the all-too-familiar stench of mold, afterbirth of some fungal weapon, fired a week ago or a day ago or an hour ago. One could never tell.
The doors, unharmed, swung open on their rusty gilded hinges, ready to receive us all, whether Hoegbotton, Lewden, or neutral. No one would be turned away who wanted a seat, even though certain seats would require more bartering than others. {Tickets in such a context would have been too specific a madness. It was such an odd experience to enter the opera house that night, in that context, after so many years of stealing away at lunch for a performance, or taking students there for an assignment, or going with you, Janice.}
As I recall, Mary and I looked magnificent in our sequined dresses, perfumed and powdered. I had taken from a safe place the finest of my outfits from the height of the New Art’s popularity. A curving neckline. An audacious black hat. Shoes made from lizard and mole skin. A handbag of a texture and design rare in any but the most southern of the Southern Isles. My hair was still a bit of a mess—that could not be helped; scarcely a mirror survived in the city, most fragmented by bombardment or wrinkled by filaments of fungi. For me, wearing such clothes reminded me of what had been, which made me sad—but also made me stand taller, for back in my glory days I had practically owned the opera house. I cannot remember what Mary wore, but whatever she wore, it could only presage future glory.
Mary and Sybel and I had one thing in common: none of us had succumbed to any of the fungal diseases that had so ravaged the general population as a side effect of the ceaseless bombardments. The same could not be said for many of those who surrounded us as we jostled our way through the door.
Toadlike James Lacond, ever-present cigar between his lips—his usual Nicean Reserve—had a patch of tendrils, a brilliant green, growing off the left side of his balding head. Nothing in his sour demeanor, however, revealed even the slightest discomfort. {As always, for a fat man he moved with surprising grace.} “Lie down with the gray caps,” he was fond of saying, “and you make your peace with them, in one way or another.”
My brother, however, tight-lipped and nervous {because I expected, with no truce yet spoken or implied, that you and Mary would fight the entire evening; why, the war was at times the least of my worries, even though I could sense the gray caps in the floorboards, their symbols and signs everywhere}, showed more of the strain. A silvery-purple “birthmark” writhed upon his forearm like a living tattoo. Who knew if his clothes hid some greater embarrassment? {They didn’t. I could now maintain control, at least for a while. Had I manifested in my full fungal state, it would have cleared out the opera house.}
Some of those around us had even incorporated their misfortunes into their costumes. As we walked into the antechamber, stairs on left and right leading up and down, the gold-painted walls and somber red curtains unable to hide the gouges in the floor, the gutted, silent bar awash with signs of flame, we encountered these fashion marvels. The ful
l extent of Ambergrisian ingenuity or insanity became clear. One woman had actually created a body-length trellis over which to cultivate the deep blue fungi ravishing her, the fronds forming a full dress, complete with train. Others had fashioned earrings or other accessories from their symptoms. {It says something that we had come far enough not to be shocked by what we saw that night. How quickly people adapted to such extremes; and how, secretly, I was glad of it, for it made me normal for a time, no more or less afflicted than anyone else, especially in Mary’s eyes. Later, of course, it would help me not at all, once the “ordinary” citizens of Ambergris conveniently forgot the strangeness, the surreal quality, of the city during wartime.}
Mary gasped when she saw the woman with the trellis. Sybel and Lacond turned withering expressions of contempt toward her that she pretended not to see. Sybel had never been underground, but he had a way of adapting to each new situation as it presented itself. Lacond, meanwhile, had not gone as far belowground as Duncan, nor for as long, but he was marked for life by it, nonetheless: an encrusted blackness sometimes shone through his pores.
“You’d all better get used to it,” Lacond muttered. “There’ll be much more than that to get used to before the end.”
Sybel scowled; I knew Lacond’s pronouncements sometimes struck him as both vague and pretentious.
But you may wonder how, even with so great and ponderous a weight as James Lacond between us, Mary and I could walk so calmly into the opera house as members of the same group. The circumstances of war, as well as her keeping her distance and being eclipsed by the mushroom moon known as Lacond, didn’t hurt, but you must also remember that the two semesters of Bonmot’s ban had long since passed into history. The ban, along with much else from before the war, had become so remote that sometimes I could not find these details in my memory, or could not find them with a sharpness that made them real.
So I had, for the duration of the conflict, suspended my judgment of many things, including Mary. I had even become reconciled to the idea that Duncan and Mary might make a life together. Indeed, you might say that the war, for a time, created another kind of excitement for Duncan and Mary, an urgency to replace what they had lost now that they could no longer sneak around Blythe Academy. {Yet you were still so tense, your smile so forced, your politeness so impolite.} I did not speak to her, but we both laughed at Duncan’s jokes, and made comments to each other indirectly, through Duncan or Lacond. Sybel, for his amusement, tried to create situations in which Mary would have to talk to me, or vice versa, but was never successful.
Through the sweat-stained, boot-scuffed antechamber we walked, all of us crowded together as we climbed the stairs to the balcony, having to ignore our own sour smell.
Then, a rush of stale air in our faces, followed by another, even staler, blast, as we walked onto the balcony and beheld the opera house!
We stared down at row upon row of worn gilt seats, rapidly being filled by the people sitting in them, saw the orchestra pit filled with the febrile scratchings of musicians tuning their instruments, and beyond that, the plain wooden stage, half-hidden by burgundy curtains that had great, gaping holes in them, revealing the scurrying singers behind the veil, the grunt and nudge of set pieces moving into place.
The more we looked, the more small details came into focus, the grandeur fading upon closer inspection. Plaster cherubim placed at the corners of the balcony, framing our view, had grown old, fissures of wrinkles aging them to appear wiser, and more malevolent than innocent. Every seat had a sweat stain from years of use. Every filigree and swirl of decorative paint on the walls or ceiling had a crack, a dent, a fault line. It had always been that way, and the familiarity of it comforted me.
Then Duncan gasped.
“Look,” he said, pointing toward the ceiling. Only Lacond did not make a sound when he saw it. Even Sybel swore, under his breath.
It seems odd now that we had not seen it before all else, as if we wanted at first to deny its existence.
Looking up, as we walked forward to the edge of the balcony seats, we slowly came to recognize the source of the clear, clean, but undeniably green light that served as our illumination. {The rational mind can absorb only so much of the strange without damage.}
“What is it?” Mary whispered.
“The remains of a fungal bomb,” Lacond replied.
“Half-exploded,” Duncan said. “Fused to the ceiling.”
The wound we had seen from the outside of the opera house had provided scant evidence of the damage suffered by the building. The center of its mosaic dome—a stylized scene of Morrow cavalry riding to Ambergris’ defense during the Silence—had disappeared, the shards of its dissolution having simply vanished, assimilated, replaced by an intense green that shed its light in waves upon the stage. The green had eyes, or so it seemed, for it manifested itself as a series of circles or nascent fruiting bodies.
My breath caught in my throat. My neck grew sore from staring up at it. You could see through the green to the stars in the sky beyond, as if the green were no more substantial than gauze, than fog, and yet it sparkled and spun, each particle of it, as it shed the light that allowed us to see as we found our seats.
Lacond noticed that I could not look away from it, even as I sat down.
“Nothing you haven’t seen from the outside in,” he said as kindly as he could. His bulbous eyelids twitched, the cigar working up and down between his teeth, caught in his grouperlike lips. The sweet spicy smell of the cigar calmed me. “A fungal bomb that misfired, like we said. It hit the glass and stone of the dome and formed a substance…well, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. An interesting effect. And stable. It’ll stay there for a long time, or at least for the next four hours.” He laughed.
“Almost a piece of New Art all by itself,” Sybel said, grinning.
“Beautiful,” Duncan said, staring up at it. “Absolutely beautiful.”
“Horrible and shocking, I would have thought,” Mary said—a distant murmur, a whisper lost in a current of air.
“Quite a climb up there that would be,” Sybel said. “I think I could do it, though.”
“You’d climb a rainbow if you could,” I said, earning a halfhearted scowl.
I tore my gaze from the ceiling. I had to. Otherwise my thoughts would have remained up there, trapped, during the entire opera. {It stunned me to see such a thing aboveground. It reinforced a thought that had come to me more and more frequently during the war: if that which belonged belowground came aboveground, why should I remain aboveground? I was like a sailor who falls overboard and reaches for the light, only to find that the light is false, and he has descended into even greater depths.} And yet, haven’t we all seen things much stranger since the beginning of the Shift? Thinking of that ceiling now, I’m oddly unmoved. I’ve been undone by too many miraculous sights, both holy and unholy.
No one had tickets, but that didn’t mean we had good seats. Even during the war {especially during the war!}, there remained hierarchies, and hierarchies within hierarchies. Lacond could have sat in the orchestra area with one guest, but that would have meant leaving the rest of us behind. Guided to the top row, we had to lower our heads for fear of bumping them against the balcony ceiling {a comforting white, that ceiling, at least}. The seats were hard wood—hard indeed for an opera that promised six acts and only one intermission. Above us, the dome; below, the fatal curving lunge down to the ground floor seats {which, from that perspective, seemed to go on forever}, then up and through them to the orchestra pit and the stage. The balcony smelled like old rotten books. No one had cleaned it for ages. That which from afar had looked both smooth and spotless was, up close, tawdry and sad. Only Sybel, with his lithe frame, seemed comfortable.
Perhaps I remember the opera so clearly because it was the last time anyone saw so many enemies occupying the same space without trying to stick a literal or figurative knife into one another. Agents from both sides of the conflict attended the opera that night, caref
ully guided through separate entrances, one of which consisted of a large hole in the wall. Anyone considered neutral had been positioned in the middle section of the ground floor, farthest from the exits. {Which made me laugh—should the two sides lose composure and attack each other, the neutrals in the middle would suffer greatly for their nuanced stance.}
Imperious members of the House Hoegbotton, already resembling scions of Empire in their somewhat presumptuous frocks and pleated trousers—if made a bit cadaverous, cloth sliding off elbows, from having to ration their food—made the forced march to their seats. Fixed stares. A few nervous smiles. Many of them wore medals they had awarded to themselves for wartime bravery.
The Frankwrithe & Lewden side was entirely different. They sidled in, wore mostly black, tried to stay in the shadows—except for their leader, L. Gaudy, who entered in what I can only call a “costume” of bright red, transformed by the green glow of the fungal light to a pulsating, brackish purple. He stood for several minutes, staring over at the Hoegbotton side, hands on his hips. A wide grin had seemingly paralyzed his face. {There was some discussion as to whether this bold figure truly was L. Gaudy, or one of the many actors hired by Gaudy to portray him at official events, the real Gaudy having developed an understandable fear of assassination attempts over the past two years. Regardless of whether it was Gaudy or pseudo-Gaudy, a healthy shiver of fear fled down my spine at his appearance.}
In the neutral section, we saw Martin Lake and his lover Merrimount take their seats, surrounded by the remnants of the New Artists, all looking rather tattered and downcast. {Their day was done. No opera could resurrect them.}
Martin and Merrimount had chosen to wear half evening gown, half formal suit, and I could almost smell the aggressive cologne that had become Martin’s “signature smell,” even though his sponsorship of it gained him no monies during the war. {You make it sound like an actual ceasefire, this opera. Janice, we were all armed to the teeth, like pirates sailing down the River Moth looking for a ripe place to build a city. You couldn’t move through the hallway toward the restrooms without bumping into someone’s concealed bulge of a gun or knife, or worse. And when you did get to the men’s room, it was full of spies exchanging information.}
Shriek: An Afterword Page 24