Shriek: An Afterword

But I remember most the smell, or lack of it. Suddenly, the ever-present rot-mold-rain scent was missing from the air, replaced by the clean, boring smell of Morrow. It was as if Morrow had colonized a vital element of the city, presaging the war.

{Not to mention the fungi, which adapted almost as if the gray caps had planned the change in the weather. There was something unreal about seeing mushroom caps in jaunty bright colors rise through the snow cover, unaffected by the cold.}

Sybel forced me to go back to the gallery. I would have stayed in my apartment for weeks, if I’d had the choice, conveniently ignoring a few bloodstains my brother had missed when cleaning up. I no longer felt hollow, but I did feel weak, sluggish, indecisive. I didn’t have any of the normal props that used to stop me from thinking about…everything.

Sybel looked like he always looked—a faint half-smile on his face, eyes that stared through you to something or somewhere else, presumably his future.

On the way to the gallery, walking through the frozen streets, Sybel turned to me, and said, “You don’t know who your friends are, do you?”

I stared at him for a second. “What are you trying to tell me?”

We were only a few minutes from the gallery at that point.

“You gave keys out to people,” he said.

“Gallery keys.”

“Yes.”

“And I shouldn’t have.”

“No. How could I stop them when they had keys of their own?”

I sighed. “Let me guess.”

Inside the gallery, the only element that remained the same was my desk, with its two dozen bills, five or six contracts, and a litter of pens obscuring its surface. The rest had been stripped bare. Those paintings least popular, hung for several months, had left the beige shadow of their passing, but otherwise, I might as well have been starting up a gallery, not losing control of one. Everyone had abandoned me, as if I were whirling so fast toward oblivion that, at some point, they were simply flung clear by my momentum.

“When did this happen?”

“Gradually, over months,” Sybel said, throwing the gallery keys on the desk and sitting in a chair. “They were pretty thorough, weren’t they?”

“They?”

“The artists. I’m fairly certain it was the artists.”

I looked around. The gallery had, in its emptiness, taken on aspects of my life. What was I to do?

“I couldn’t be here day and night,” Sybel said. Unspoken: I had parties to plan. I had a suicidal boss to worry about.

A sudden anger rose up inside of me, though I had no reason to be angry at Sybel. What could he have done?

“You just let them take all of their art?”

He shook his head. “David let them in. David’s the one who started it….”

David. Former boyfriend. A not-unpleasant memory of David and me escaping into the gallery’s back room to make love.

“Oh.” The anger left me.

Sybel stared up at me. “There’s nothing left to manage, Janice. There’s no gallery. I wish there were. But,” and he stood, “there’s nothing here for me to do. I’m not a rebuilder, I’m a manager. If you need help in the future, let me know.”

I would need help in the future. A lot of help, but he couldn’t know that now. He couldn’t know how quickly everyone’s fortunes would change.

“What will you do now, Sybel?”

Sybel shrugged. “I’ll take some time off. I’ll climb trees. I will enjoy the feel of the sun on my face in the morning. I will swim in the River Moth.” {Right. And after about thirty minutes, when he was done gamboling about in the sunlight, Sybel would go on providing people with whatever they most desired. Specifically, providing me with what I most desired—whatever could get me through the night.}

I smiled and put a hand on his shoulder. “Take me with you.”

“You wouldn’t like it,” Sybel said, somewhat wistfully, I thought. “You would be bored.”

I nodded. “You’re probably right.”

At the door, Sybel turned to me one last time and said, “I’m glad you made it back. I really am. But you’ll find it’s changed out there. It’s no longer the same place.”

“What do you mean, it’s changed?”

“There is no New Art anymore.”

Later, a short investigation would prove Sybel right. While everyone’s attention had been on the New Art, real innovation had been occurring outside of our inbred, self-congratulatory little circle. Real imagination meshed with real genius of technique had been bypassing and surpassing the New Art, sometimes with a chuckle and a condescending nod. This was the era during which Hale Jargin first displayed his huge “living canvases,” complete with cages for small creatures to peep out from shyly. Sarah Frayden began to create her shadow sculptures, too. But neither of these qualified as New Art, in part because the galleries they showed in had no connection to the New Art.

By the time those of us associated with the New Art realized New Art was Old Art—my only excuse being my forced absence from the scene—the only one who had the option of escaping the death of the term was the only one who had never uttered the words in the first place: Martin Lake.

If they hadn’t fled my gallery, I would have been stuck with a long line of has-beens who, squinting, had emerged from their corridor of tunnel vision to realize that, far from being on the frontier, they’d been in a backwater, as obsolete as the first generation of Manzikert motored vehicles the factories had trundled out over a hundred years ago.

“There is no New Art anymore,” Sybel said, and then was gone, leaving me in my empty gallery, wondering what to do.

What could I do? I needed to find my brother—and find him I did, amid the tinkling rustle of the frozen willow trees outside of Blythe Academy. I think he knew I was coming. I think he knew I was looking for him. There he was in a long coat, sitting at a stone table and smiling at me. {Grimacing, actually. I experienced a lot of pain during the early days of my transformation. I was still changing.} He had regained his customary thinness.

“Hello, helpless helping brother,” I said, smiling back as I sat down across from him. Behind him, the Academy was just waking up. It was a beatific morning—the sun lit the snow and ice into a fractured orange blaze.

“Hello, suicidal sister,” he said, his gaze clear, focused on the present, on me.

“You should use more careful language,” I told him. “I could do it all over again, and you’d have to send me on another tour of the world.”