Shriek: An Afterword

“Give back to this earth this good man, O Lord,” he said, much to the grumbling dismay of several Manziists present, who missed their traditional rat-festooned funeral ceremony. “Give back to this good man the earth, O Lord,” he said again, like a man who, having missed his memorized mark, has to start over in the correct order. “And let you, O Lord, serve as a light to him, for we are imperfect vessels and we platitude simile extended metaphor with barely any pauses followed by more repetition. Period. Comma. Stop. Start. Here I go again about God and the dirt and wait: another platitude, quote from the Truffidian Bible everyone’s heard a thousand times before, and even though I once actually knew Bonmot when I was a junior priest, not a single personal anecdote about the man because the scandal of his long-ago departure as Antechamber might somehow still cling to me like a fetid stench. Amen.”

While they buried our friend, I watched a glossy emerald beetle, carapace age-pocked and mossy, fend off an attack by a dozen fuzzy ants, their red thorax glands releasing tiny jets of bubbly white poison. This drama took place in a leafy alcove while storks flew against the rapidly darkening sky and moth wings muttered on mottled tree trunks, the world in constant rebellious motion against the stark silence within the coffin.

Duncan came, of course, his face ever more deeply lined with the weight of secret knowledge {or maybe I had just stayed out too late the night before}, his gaze settling upon the assembled rabble in search of one perfect, elusive face…but Mary did not come. Parties, lecture series, concerts, readings, she attended, even during wartime. Funerals, however, never made Mary’s agenda. She did not like funerals. People, for her, did not die, and places never became disenfranchised from those moments that made them important. Both became entombed in her books and, until placed there, never failed to behave as less than caricature or puppetry.

“Duncan,” I said. “She’s not coming. She never was going to come. Not for you. Not for Bonmot.” She would be writing, or doing something equally destructive to Duncan’s {lack of a} career.

He would not answer me. He would not look at me. As the Antechamber tossed a clot of earth on Bonmot’s coffin, Duncan stared at it, too downcast at Sabon’s absence to utter a word.

Time had made no difference. Whether minutes after the dissolution of their relationship or years after, Duncan was the same. Even when increasingly attacked and hounded by the words like knives from her various books, he allowed her to control his heart.

As we left the funeral, Duncan was still searching the crowd for any sign of Mary.

{Janice, I accepted your dressing down, which you conveniently dilute and misremember, because I knew you hurt from Bonmot’s death as much as I did. But please do not mistake my silence for agreement with your reading of my thoughts. If I surveyed the crowd, it wasn’t to search for Mary. I knew she wasn’t coming. My gaze was blind—I saw nothing, but always looked inward to my memories of Bonmot. While the procession lurched toward the cemetery, while the Antechamber gave his depressing speech, even while you lashed out at me, I was nowhere near that place. I was where you should have been—in the courtyard, sitting on a bench beside Bonmot and talking. Besides you, our mother, and Lacond, Bonmot was one of the only people keeping me aboveground. I never really bought into religion, but I believed in Bonmot, and because he had faith, I had faith through him. And I was heartbroken for missed opportunities, because it had been so many years since I’d had a personal conversation with him.

{You congratulate yourself on being sensitive to my thoughts, but you barely knew them at times. It stung that you saw what no one else could—that the fungus had continued to colonize my skin, that even as I stood there and watched them pour dirt over Bonmot’s coffin my body fought a thousand battles more vigorous than those between beetle and ants—and yet you could not understand why I might be distracted. That my mind was consumed by another attempt to stand firm against the invasion of my own body on the most basic levels, like pissing black blood or sweating out green liquid fungus.}

Duncan and Mary. For a time, long before that horrible day in the graveyard, they were inseparable. And yet: Never a more unlikely couple, a pair less paired, less suited for suitability. Would that I could provide a complete chronicle of the misshapen event. Alas, I cannot tell this part of the story through Duncan’s journal. I am embarrassed to report that Duncan’s journal entries on these matters prove nearly incomprehensible in their extremes of love, despair, lust, and, yes, love again, repetitious and maudlin. I will spare the reader the full scope of their sexual senility by only providing excerpts. I suggest you fill in any blanks with applicable entries from your own diary….

It was, as they say, a beautiful spring day when Duncan first recorded his utter surrender. Outside, the willow trees breathed gently from side to side under a merciful sun, and street vendors danced joyously in anticipation of Duncan’s ardor, and the birds stopped in midair to witness the innocence that was Duncan’s lust, and the gray caps came aboveground to gift all citizens of the city with garlands of sweet-smelling fungus, and I must stop before I make myself sick. {I’m already sick. This whole section will make me sick, I think.}

Inside the Academy, Duncan breathed gently on the neck of the woman child {she was already twenty-one!} he had kept after class for “further instruction”:

Today Mary wore a white blouse, and as I pointed out a relevant passage in Tonsure’s journal, she stood next to me, our clothes just touching. I felt a pressure between us, as if she held me up or I held her up, and if the tension was broken, one of us would fall. I turned my head into the blindness of that endless white as she stood beside me, and every inch of my body knew the certainty of her generous hips where the blouse disappeared into her skirt and the reckless knowledge of her soft neck above the blouse, the face shining above the neck. All of these elements destroyed me more than what I saw, which was just the blouse, filled with her. The stitching on the blouse. The texture of the fabric itself. The soft curving caress of her breast beneath. So near. The nearness of her made me tremble. The smell of her, the smell of clean, firm skin. All I would have had to do was incline my head forward a fraction of an inch and my lips would have kissed her through the fabric. Time was extinguished by the tension between giving in, feeling her breast against my mouth for what might be only a second before her mutiny, and staying in position, forever teased by the possibility. Teetering on the edge of an abyss, where to fall was to fall was to fall into bliss, bliss, bliss; but torment, too…. And yet what if the action met not with outrage or rejection, but with a sigh of acceptance? Would that not be worth the risk? Would it not be worth the cost to remove the torment by attempting to consume it? To extinguish the flame by joining it?