Shriek: An Afterword

We die. We die. It shrieks at me from an empty cage. Let my future editor, strange beast that he is, earn his wages and edit me. Edit all of me. Edit me out if necessary. By then I won’t care. The flesh necklace can glitter with its scornful laughter and, laughing, shiver to pieces.

But where was I? It feels strange to type the words “But where was I?” but it helps orient me when I am truly lost. There’s a loud gaggle of musicians—some might call them a “band,” but I wouldn’t—out there now, and although I glimpse only frenetic slices of them, the sound distracts me. Sometimes, I wonder if the lyrics infiltrate my own words, change them or their meaning. Sometimes, I wonder if my words fly off the page and into their mouths, to infiltrate their lyrics, change them as they are changing me. Surely this is how Duncan became misunderstood. {No, my dear sister—I became misunderstood because everyone was terrified of understanding me.}

So if you can hear me through all of this noise, lean close, listen, and I will tell you a kind of truth that once made sense to me and may again, in time, undergo that startling transformation from madness to the purest form of sanity: If you are feeling low. If you are so full of poison that you can find no light within you. If everywhere you look you see only bitterness or despair. If all of these conditions and situations apply to you, I recommend a refreshing suicide attempt. No matter what the so-called experts might say, a suicide attempt will clean you right out. True, it will also squeeze from your body the last remnants of the last smile, the last laugh, the last scrap of hope, of any small, shy, but still-bright part of you that ever cared about anything. Nothing will remain. Not religion. Not friends. Not family. Not even love. A carcass picked clean and lying forgotten by the side of Albumuth Boulevard. A hollowed-out statue. A wisp of mist off the River Moth.

But that doesn’t last—how could it?—and at least it drains the poison so that even in your isolation from yourself, you feel…gratitude. Which fades in turn because at the end you don’t even feel numb, because to feel numb implies that at some point you were not numb, and so you feel like you don’t really exist anymore—which is the truest sort of truth: after a suicide attempt, you don’t really exist anymore, just the images of you in other people’s eyes.

Later, as I stared at the blood welling up from an accidental pen puncture {how could they let you have a pen, with all the money I was paying them?!}, absent-minded and remote from the pain, I was amused at how concerned doctors get about such things; one would have thought a gardening convention had blossomed around the fertile flower bed of my body for all the quick consternation they displayed at this pinprick.

Which belonged to a different world than my poor wrist, sliced to the bone. I could see the bone wink through at me the night I did it, as if it shared the joke in a way the blood could not. The blood wanted only to escape, but the good, solid bone—it ground against the knife, made me reconsider, if only for a moment, the bravery, the honesty, of pain. Craven, quivering flesh. Foolish blood. And the bone winking through. I wish I could remember what it said to me. I remember only fragments: the roar of blood as it raced away, drowned out the murmur of the bones. Besides, I was preoccupied: I was laughing because my hand flopped off the end of my wrist in a way I found hilarious. I was shaking so hard that I could not hold the knife to cut my other wrist. This was simply the most stunning miscalculation I had ever made! I flopped around like a half-dead fish, unable to finish what I had started, but had no one to help me out. Even funnier—and I almost tore myself apart with laughter over this one—I was not enveloped in a warm hum of numbness. Not so lucky, no. The pain blazed through me as intensely as if my blood were boiling as it left me. So intense my laugh became a scream, my scream something beyond even the vocal cords of an animal. Death, it seemed, wasn’t all that much fun after all, especially when I became vaguely aware that someone had smashed in the door and was carrying me out of the apartment, and he was weeping louder than I was…. {That was me, Janice. When I saw you like that, your eyes so blank, blood everywhere, I couldn’t take it. Nothing affected me like that. Not the underground. Not the disease taking over my body. But you, crumpled in the bathtub, half-dead. You looked as though, without ever going underground, you had suffered all the terrors to be found there.}

So you can imagine my amusement over the doctor’s concern about my thumb prick. The pricks should have been more concerned about where I found the pen—and where they had made me stay, and whose company I’d been keeping.

For you see, the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital is not what I would call the most hospitable of accommodations. I will not be recommending it to my friends and family. I will not be tipping generously. Indeed, I will not even be stealing the bath towels or the little soaps from the shower. {I did think about putting you in Sybel’s care—having him take you to live with the Nimblytod Tribes amid the thick foliage of tall trees. You would drink rainwater from the cups of lilies and feast on the roasted carcasses of songbirds. But then I remembered the casual nonchalance with which Sybel provided anyone who asked with the tinctures/powders/substances of their choice, and knowing of your addictions, I could not take the chance. Thus, you wound up in the Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital instead.}

Strange light, strange life, to end up in a place like that: an ivy-shrouded fortress of cruel stone and sharp angles, and gray like the inside of a dead squid, gray like a gray cap, gray like a thunderstorm, but not as interesting. Little windows like crow-pecked eyes, not even round or square sometimes, but misshapen. Had former inmates chiseled at them, attempting to escape? If you looked at the gray stone up close, you could see that it wasn’t just stone—a type of gray fungus had coated those walls. It fit over the stone like skin; you could almost see the walls breathing through their fungal pores.

Smells? Did I mention smells? The smell of sour porridge. The smell of rotting cheese. The smell of unwashed others. Stench of garbage, sometimes, wafting up from the lower levels. Oil, piss, shit. All of it covered by the clean smell of soap and wax, but not covered well enough.

Intertwined with the echo of smells came the echo of sounds—screams so distant behind padded walls that I sometimes thought they came from inside my own head. The panting of inmates like animals in distress. A low screeching warble for which I could never find a source.

The hallways were like corridors to bad dreams. They rambled this way and that with no order, no coherence. You might find your destination, or you might not. It all depended on luck. I remember that once I turned a corner, and there was a dandelion growing out of a clump of dirt on the floor. After that, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the lower levels were vast swamps or brambles, through which inmates thrashed their way to open space. Once, I swear I even saw a gray cap in the distance, running away from me, toward a doorway. But I was not particularly stable; who knows what I really saw. {You’re exaggerating. It wasn’t that bad. I wouldn’t have sent you there if it was a torture chamber.}