Shriek: An Afterword

Two days before I left that place for a succession of other places, Edward told me he loved me as we played another ludicrous game of lawn bowling in the tiny interior courtyard around which the building curled like a half-open fist—me unable to hold the ball because of my traitorous wrist, him shortsighted and uncoordinated. Our legendary games lasted for brutal hours of incompetence while Martha, Daniel, the Nameless Writer, and Sandra watched with a kind of disinterested interest. This was the first time Edward had used recognizable human speech.

Applying the doctor’s advice like a universal salve for any ill, I told Edward the truth: at the moment, I had no capacity for any kind of love. I did not love him back. I didn’t love anyone back. I wouldn’t have loved myself back if I’d walked past myself on a deserted street….

The day before I left, Edward used a variation on the Janice Shriek Method to try to kill himself. He stood in his corner as usual, his hands hidden as he cut at his wrists with a piece of metal he’d loosened from the underside of one of the deck chairs. He slowly rubbed the skin and flesh off of his wrists until the blood came and his body trembled with the anticipation of stillness.

He stood there for at least half an hour, propped up by the wall, the blood hidden by his gray robes. He must have been very determined. I imagine the blood sang softly to him, comforting him. So I imagine. The truth must have a harder, sharper edge. It certainly did for those of us who had not noticed him in his corner, killing himself.

Luckily, or unluckily, an attendant discovered Edward’s sin before it could claim him.

I swear I felt no guilt over the incident. It hurt terribly. No, it didn’t. I cried for hours. No, I couldn’t. He had bright, wide eyes, and he had a mind inside his body, a mind that could feel. I didn’t have anything inside of me. My troubles looked so trivial next to his. Would it have hurt so much to say I loved him when I didn’t? I couldn’t even feel anger. Or despair. No despair for me today, thank you. Just an endless cool desert inside, and a breeze blowing and the sun going down, and this sense of calm eating at me. I only knew him for a few months and yet it hurt me terribly that memories of me would most likely be triggered every time he saw the scars on his wrists. {Do you get away with it that easily, Janice? Don’t I have to forgive you, too? I was mad at you for a long time after that. There I was, lost in the tunnels under the city for days at a time, risking my life, and yet I never gave up the hope you abandoned all too easily.}

As it was, I never saw Edward again, or learned what happened to him or any of the other patients in that place. I had just been passing through.

So I left the hospital, but not for home—oh no. Duncan seemed to feel mental illness could only be cured by a great deal of travel at the disembarkation from which various “experts” poked and prodded various parts of your brain, only to prescribe more travel for the cure. From one end of Ambergris to the other, with Sybel my unwilling steward {you have no idea how much I was paying him—he should have been willing}, I spun like some poor gristle-and-yarn shuttlecock in a lawn tennis game.

Let me try to remember them all. Dr. Grimshaw tried some gentle water shock treatment that left me with a nervous tic in my left eye. Dr. Priott hypnotized me, which only made my tongue feel dry. Dr. Taniger tried night aversion therapy, but this only made me sleepy. Dr. Strandelson tried to make me believe that a life of severe and perfect nudity held the answer to my problems. Some tried religion, some science. None of them convinced me for even a moment. I rarely said anything. When I did, it was just to talk about Edward, the pretend gray cap.

When my brother had exhausted the restorative talents of over two dozen Ambergrisian quacks, he and Sybel contrived to transport my morbidly bored carcass to Morrow by the reincarnation of the locomotive engine: Hoegbotton Railways.

Hoegbotton & Sons, with their customary twinned avarice and industry, had unearthed vast coal deposits in the mountainous western reaches of the Kalif’s empire, waged a private war to wrest the disputed area from the control of the Kalif’s generals, and then, through a crippling act of sheer will, ripped the old steam engines from their deathlike slumber in Ambergris’ metal graveyards, refurbished them, straightened and derusted by various unarcane means, and set them back on track. Like me, they had been resurrected. Like me, they resented it.

The view from the pretty paneled windows reminded me of a thousand respectable landscape paintings laid side by side and brought to sudden life. I amused myself by rating each landscape against the next until my vision blurred—sobbing uncontrollably and staring down at the rewelded floors of the compartment while wondering what rats and hobos had lived there before the exhumation, what myriad battles over bread or scraps of clothing or glints of loose change had taken place, and how much dried blood had been painted over, and was that a scar the workmen had been unable to remove in the shape of the gray caps’ favorite symbol, and what was that stain/vein of green along the lower right side of the seats opposite—some fungus, some mold, some rot—and so just generally composing a long sentence in my head to keep out the emptiness, the sadness, and the plain old ordinary human embarrassment of what had occurred: waking up from my attempt to find Duncan and Sybel looking down at me with a mixture of pity and sorrow. {My look was not pitying—I was furious with you. Perhaps that is why I sent you to so many specialists. Here we had helped save you, and all you could do was scowl and scream at us. Do you wonder why we didn’t visit much?}

In Morrow I nearly died of boredom and the cold. Morrow is such a dry, dead town, a city of wooden corpses that talk and move about, but quietly, quietly. Morrow could never kill a soul with casual flair, as could Ambergris. Not instantly, snuffed out with a cruelty akin to the divine. No, Morrow would grind you down between its implacable wooden molars and create out of the resulting human-colored paste an acceptable, placid citizen who would marry, settle down, have children, retire, and die without a flicker of a flame of passion to warm/warn you on a cold winter night. In Morrow, a noise amongst the sewer pipes could never inspire fear, only conjure up a plumber. In Morrow, Duncan would have had to build tunnels or go mad and, sent to Ambergris to recuperate, have fallen in love with Her. No wonder Morrow was one of Mary’s favorite cities; you’re more than welcome to it, Mary—it deserves you.

Menite Morrow had always been—eternal heretics in the eyes of the Truffidians—and I soon discovered that the goal of the great, frozen Menite soul was to trudge on toward some ill-defined transition from unaccountable boredom to the responsible boredom of a transcendental bliss that would be enjoyed in the next life. Every doctor there was sensible to a fault, and not a one could help me because none of them had ever been where I had been. Relief came only in small doses; the bracing sense of embarrassment when Cadimon Signal, one of Duncan’s more ancient former instructors, visited me: I could feel real warmth flood my face.