Shriek: An Afterword

by Jeff VanderMeer

  Even then, I think he wanted to stay with her. I don’t believe he ever understood that he might actually lose her. {I couldn’t, back then, imagine a tolerable moment without her—and, in all honesty, tolerable moments since I lost her have been fewer and less intense.} After all, he’d never been through a breakup before—unlike me, who had been through dozens. I had become an expert on broken relationships. It had become ritualized with me, each battle with its own histories, its own decorum, and its own rules of disengagement.

  Duncan and Mary managed to stay together in their little apartment for a few more months, but like the starfish that rapidly became brittle, their love had died long before they acknowledged the fact. The bond between them had broken, snapped, and although Duncan was still in love with her—even though I don’t know if he liked her anymore—she was not in love with him. Their situation frayed, unraveled. They had screaming arguments, tearful reunions. Duncan would seek refuge at my apartment, only to go back, over my objections.

  He wrote in his journal at some point near the end:

  I feel as if she is made of clay or wood or stone. There is no longer any of the lovely fluidity that made me lust for her, although I lust for her still. I keep thinking that it will just take time—that, in time, she will reconcile herself to that night and to what she saw. That she will understand the strange beauty of it. That her understanding of it will lead her to an understanding of me. Until then, she complains about the amount of time I spend away from her, with Lacond and “that stupid society,” as she calls it, and then, when I do spend time with her, she complains that I smother her. She cringes in distaste when my fungal disease flares up. I must keep myself wrapped in a bathrobe, away from her critical eye, when I feel it coming on. I cannot relax around her. My love for her is making me old. I keep thinking back to that night. The rush of joy I felt because she would finally see what I had seen, that we could finally share it. And I wonder how I could have been so naïve.

  Duncan never thought of disavowing his findings, of putting the underground behind him, denying what he had found. He was, however, capable of self-blame:

  How could I expect her to believe what I myself scarcely comprehended at times? Sometimes I wish I had been able to find another way. Sometimes I wish I could undo it all, start over. But I don’t think she will let me.

  Soon, they barely talked to each other…then, one day, he came home from Lacond’s offices and she was gone. He thought that she had just stepped out for a moment, until he found the note. He left it with his other notes. It is right here beside my festering typewriter. It reads:

  My Love:

  I do love you, but I am not in love with you anymore. You want me to see things that aren’t there. You want me not only to see the impossible—you want me to think it beautiful, a revelation. That night was a terrifying experience for me, Duncan. And with your insistence that I believe, you have begun to frighten me.

  There’s no way to rescue us. I can’t keep living with you. I hope that in time we can become friends, but for now we must be apart. Besides, we both have books to write, and neither of us can be creative in this situation.

  Do you know how hard it is for me to leave not only my lover but my teacher? But I have no choice.

  Thank you for everything you have taught me, everything you have shown me about history and about the world. I’ll never forget that.

  I’ll end here, for now, because, as you know, too many words can be a trap.

  Love,

  Mary

  P.S. I’m leaving you the apartment until you can find your own place.

  The difference between what we need and what we want can be an abyss. For example, I want more light in this accursed room, but I need lunch because my stomach is grumbling. Duncan would always want Mary, but did he need her? In a way, he didn’t. In a way, like the writer who pursues his art above all else, Duncan did not need anything other than access to the underground. {You make me out to be a theorem in search of expression, rather than a human being.}

  Next to Mary’s note is a letter she wrote to a friend. I don’t know how Duncan came by it. I don’t like to guess in this instance. {It was a low point for me, intercepting her mail. It was a brief insanity, a madness created by love. I only did it once or twice. I’m still ashamed of it.} The letter explains the situation much more baldly, and must have driven Duncan a little crazy when he read it.

  Duncan has become ever more himself. I left him because I couldn’t take any more of his ravings about the gray caps. Everything is focused on the gray caps. Even if he did love me, I’d never be more than ancillary to those damn gray caps. It didn’t help that my parents hated him for, as they saw it, spoiling the innocence of their little girl. And because he was impossible to live with, and because he was like a child—he always wanted to be in love, so when he wasn’t in love with me, he was in love with his studies. He wore me out. He was so intense. How can anyone be so intense all of the time? I couldn’t breathe, or think. And his opinions on my research! Always picking at it, always so sure he was right and I was wrong. I don’t think that I would ever be more than a student in his eyes, so I had to get away from him. Yes, I loved him, but, sometimes, as I am discovering, you need more than love.

  {A mental shudder. A sudden moment of self-awareness—was I like that? Yes, I probably was. But I don’t know if Mary ever understood the great strain I was under, how what I sought was of the utmost importance. That it meant nothing more or less than safeguarding the fate of everyone who lives in this city, perhaps in the world. And still. And yet. I knew she had taken something from me, that I had been valuable to her. I had given nearly as much as I had taken. I’d been her mentor and she’d been my student, no matter what grief I had caused her. I took some small comfort from that.}

  And that was the end of it. Or so I thought. For although Mary was free of Duncan, Duncan would never really be free of her, or her flesh necklace.

  As Duncan’s romantic fortunes waned, his fortunes as a historian waxed again: a flowering in miniature, given the heights he had ascended to in his youth. Although those who did speak a kind of truth about the gray caps and Ambergris’ past were condemned to the fringes, they did have their own organization: the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society. Most of Duncan’s postwar hopes of self-expression reached fruition through AFTOIS.

  AFTOIS had once again become Lacond’s passion—and in its limited way, it flourished for a time after the war—so that the Broadsheet, which paid the rent, often suffered from his neglect. {Indeed. It never quite failed when he was in charge, but some years after I took over production of the Broadsheet, I would have to put it out of its financial misery, much to the delight of our many enemies.}

  “The important thing,” Lacond said to me once, “is that we get the truth out in some form, that we document what is happening. So that at the very least, there will be a record that someone knew about it.”

  This struck me as an absurd statement. “Why?” I replied. “So that when the abyss opens up you can stand on the edge and shout down, ‘I told you so!’?”

  Lacond looked at me as if I hadn’t understood anything he’d said.

  When I told Bonmot about this exchange, he said, “Yes, but without Lacond, how much more mischief would Duncan get into?”

  A good point, I had to admit. Because Lacond spent much of his time in those years after the war making Duncan his second-in-command. Without Lacond, the loss of Mary might have hit Duncan harder than it did. {How much harder could it have hit me? I hardly left my apartment for months. Lacond had to drag me out of my bed to get me to work for him. For years afterwards, I would feel this hollow space in my stomach, in my lungs. Sometimes, I would think of her and I couldn’t breathe.}

  Lacond had a perverse effect on Duncan. Lacond made Duncan want something he thought he had given up on long ago: the restoration of a measure of legitimacy. {I might have reconciled myself to living without respect, but that didn�
��t mean I didn’t fight hard against it. Years would pass between a chance at even the most minor legitimate publication opportunity, but I never gave up.} Lacond kept telling Duncan that if he published enough essays in the AFTOIS newsletter, he would eventually get noticed again.

  “Enough essays in a marginal journal read by a couple thousand fellow crackpots?” I said to Duncan when he told me. “A path to greater glory? I don’t think so, Duncan. I really don’t. You should attempt another book—you might find a publisher.”

  Duncan shook his head. “Not now, not yet. I can’t even think about a book—my thoughts are too fragmented. But essays—yes, I could do essays. And Lacond might be right, you never know.”

  Ridiculous! Yet Duncan believed it. As he wrote in his journal:

  Sometimes I read through the letters I kept from my glory days, when readers could acquire my books easily and in quantity. There were people back then who understood me, who realized I told the truth. I can’t imagine that all of them have died in the twenty years since, or that there aren’t new readers who might appreciate my books. I just need to find a way to reach them again. And if I can’t reach them, perhaps I can reach Mary again. It’s easy for Mary to dismiss Lacond, or AFTOIS, but it might alter her perception of me if…but it is too much to hope for, to think about.

  {I did believe this then, perhaps naïvely, but over time my emphasis would shift. I no longer thought books would be my salvation. I no longer thought in terms of publication, really, but more in terms of accumulating knowledge and making as much of it public as the public could stand.}

  Didn’t Duncan see that Lacond had been trying for years—decades—with less success than my brother? Not any more than he saw that, for all the time he spent in the shadow of the huge oak tree outside her parents’ house, hoping to catch a glimpse of her, Mary was traveling along a very different path. How could someone so smart be so foolish? But Duncan persisted. {I had no choice. I thought Mary and I could eventually be friends. I justified my hauntings of her by telling myself that I was watching over her, protecting her. The truth? My heart, caught between hope and pain, could not bear never seeing her, even if seeing her meant only the slightest glimpse of her through a window—a silhouette that, for many months, could still transfix me.}

  Bonmot used to say that “The limits of our imagination are the limits of our free will.” Duncan could not imagine a life that did not include Mary and the gray caps. I sometimes wonder how different it would have been if he could have wrenched himself free of Ambergris and set sail for the Southern Isles, lost himself in the waves and the wind, adopted a different obsession.

  {Janice—all obsessions are the same. They vary little in the essential details. You refuse to believe that my search for knowledge wasn’t so much personal, wasn’t so much for myself, but out of a fear for the future of our city. I pursued Mary out of a fear for the future of Duncan Shriek. There wasn’t much holding me to the city besides Mary, to be honest. As I continued to change, I needed to make up reasons why I shouldn’t just venture underground and stay there. I could have planted myself in a dark, moist corner of the gray caps’ world and taken root. I could have allowed the fungi to colonize me, taken in the breath of their sleep and woken in a thousand years to a far different fate. So was it love, after a certain point in time? Probably not. It was probably just a grasping for some kind of normal life. But can you blame me?}

  If only Duncan could have apologized to Bonmot in a way that Bonmot would have accepted. But he wouldn’t. I think Bonmot was more fragile in his faith than he let on—I think he believed that if he let Duncan back into his life, it would affect his character, would erode his integrity. Duncan could have used Bonmot for balance during those times. He could have used someone other than a sister with one foot who had nightmares about being buried alive in a pile of corpses. Because Lacond really did have him convinced—they’d go to those lunatic meetings of their lunatic society, and Duncan would think that because three hundred people showed up and listened to him he was making progress. {Lacond was enough for me. Lacond never made me feel as if I were damaged or deranged, the way Bonmot could even during the best of our conversations. There’s a whiff of righteousness in the most humble servant of Truff that is a terrible, terrible thing. But Lacond taught me confidence and endurance. Every year of his adult life, he had written down his bizarre, unpopular theories and, through his society, made them available to the public. And every year, most people rejected his work, or feigned indifference, or found his theories an unkind reflection or comment on the man himself. Yet he never stopped, never gave up. It’s more than I could have done.}

  I went to one AFTOIS meeting. That was enough for me—one glance at the agenda handed out by a portly woman with a purple scarf wound endlessly around her neck, as though a purple constrictor had a choke hold on her—one glance convinced me I would not be coming back:

  THE AMBERGRISIANS FOR THE ORIGINAL INHABITANTS SOCIETY

  WEEKLY MEETING NO. 231

  – As Presided Over by Society President James Lacond –

  – Minutes Taken by Linda Pitginkel –

  – Incidental Music Provided by “George the Flutist” –

  – Refreshments Baked by Lara Maleon –

  Order of Events

  (1) Recital of the Society Motto: “In pursuit of truth, for the truth, by the truth. Against inertia, against ease, against the false.”

  (2) Introduction of Speakers [James Lacond]

  (3) Rebecca Flange reads an excerpt from her book The Crimes of Tonsure: The Role of Poison

  (4) “What Is the Truth—How Shall We Approach It and Its Importance to Our Understanding of the Gray Caps”—speech by Sarah Potent

  (5) “Channeling the Dead—Its Impact on Our Understanding of the Gray Caps”—speech by Roger Seabold

  (6) “I Am the True Descendent of Samuel Tonsure”—speech by James “Tonsure” Williams

  (7) “Evidence for the Existence of a City-Sized Fungus”—speech by Frederick Madnok [as read by Harry Flack in Mr. Madnok’s absence]

  I think the agenda alone should give some insight into the kinds of buffoons with which Duncan had aligned himself. He had gone from writing legitimate books to writing legitimate articles to teaching at a legitimate school to scandal and heartbreak, and now lived a sad existence at the very fringe of his chosen field.

  {Again, unfair. I appreciate your protectiveness, but the truth is often so strange that one cannot, at the outset, discard even the most ridiculous of theories, the silliest of suppositions. Remember how I let my students do my research for me? This was a similar situation—I was always searching for the sliver of truth in the outlandishness presented at those meetings. Even the most absurd theory might have in its core details, its foundation, some hint of information about the gray caps, something to be salvaged or redirected. I attended those meetings for that reason, not because I believed everything I heard, or even wanted to be associated with all of them. But who else, Janice, would publish my “crackpot theories”? No one after the war except, ultimately, Sirin. And even he didn’t do it properly, as you—my benign, self-chosen executioner—well know.}

  Certainly, I was used to dealing with strange people—I’ve never met an artist who wasn’t at some level a deeply strange or estranged person. But this was different. These were people on the edge of the edge of sanity. Oddities. Carpenters who, in their spare time, developed paranoid theories about House Hoegbotton that grew to full fruition in the dark, glistening spaces of their imaginations. Stay-at-home wives who, bored, had bought into the more lurid broadsheet headlines. Self-hating bank clerks making a pittance who had curdled inside and defended the gray caps because they would have cheered if the gray caps had risen up and taken over the city. People who believed they were the reincarnation of historical figures like Tonsure. And, on the fringes of those fringes, homeless people who used the meetings to take shelter. The mentally challenged who had been discharged from the now-destr
oyed Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital. I even thought I spied a gray shape that resembled my former fellow inmate Edward at one point, although when I looked again, he was gone.

  And those were just the audience members.

  How the spittle flew during the meeting I observed! The sour taste of vitriol! The sad, lonely, pathetic, nervous, neurotic, psychotic, exposed underbelly of the city.

  “In my opinion, Tonsure was a gray cap disguised as a priest.”

  “The grace with which the fungus leapt from tree to tree astounded me.”

  “I didn’t realize I had the gift to channel ghosts until I was twelve.”

  “In the vast, empty spaces beneath the city, this huge fungus has taken over and means to envelop us in its clammy grasp.”

  “Being a woman, I am more attuned to the feelings of inanimate objects.”

  And Duncan wanted to become their leader: the Lord of the Disinclined. Disinclined to work. Disinclined to hold a job. The Disenchanted who had never been enchanting, except, perhaps, as children. No wonder Mary hated that group. I hated that group. We could have taken an oath of solidarity on that much, at least. {And yet, they, and I, are much closer to the truth than those who scoffed at our organization, regardless of the sometimes illegitimate evidence provided at those meetings. I sense a certain amount of snobbery in your remarks, Janice, as if the only people worth a damn are artists or writers or playwrights—but look back on your own description of the New Art and the New Artists. Were they really any different, except that the results of their obsessions and imagination were more forcefully inflicted upon the world? Sometimes a theory or idea is as strangely beautiful as that expressed by any painting, even when it’s articulated by those who are not articulate.