Shriek: An Afterword

Duncan grinned. His teeth revealed an underlying rot, despite his apparent health: they were stained a gray-black along the gums.

“Not likely,” he said. “I’ve already sent you to every head doctor within three hundred miles. If you were going to do it again, you would have done it while listening to the seventh or eighth as he droned on about your disturbed dream life.”

“But I am fragile,” I insisted. “I’ve been without drugs for weeks. I’ve been getting lots of sleep. I’ve been eating well. I could suffer a mental collapse at any moment.”

{To see you that way, tired but whole, made me happy. A few months before I had had no idea if you would survive, or if you’d be the same person afterwards. It didn’t matter that you were thin or drawn, just that you seemed sane once more.}

“The city is falling apart, not you. The snow. Look—it’s snowing again.”

He was right—thin, small flakes had begun to drop out of the sky.

“It hasn’t really stopped snowing,” I reminded him.

“I think the gray caps…”

I rolled my eyes to cut him off. “You think they’re responsible for everything.” {Because they are, Janice!}

He shrugged. “Aren’t they?”

“Actually, no,” I replied. “I brought the snow with me from Morrow—the most heartless, boring, terrible place you could possibly have sent me to.”

Anger, rising up. It felt good. It felt right. It was the only thing I’d felt besides pain and sorrow in a long time.

“I saved your life,” he said. “You’d be dead otherwise.”

“Maybe I wanted to be dead,” I replied. “Did you ever think of that?”

“No,” Duncan said, shivering, “I don’t think you wanted to be dead. I think you didn’t want to feel. There’s a difference. And I know all about not wanting to feel.”

All the air went out of me with a single sigh. The truth was, it took too much energy to talk about such things.

A thought occurred to me. “How did you know I’d be here?”

Duncan grimaced, as if from some physical pain. {As if? Every time I moved, I could feel them all over me, burrowing into my skin.}

He looked away. “I have…friends…who tell me things. That’s all. It’s the same reason I found you in time.”

I laughed, said, “Friends! I can only guess what kinds of friends. Do they have legs or spores? Do they walk or do they float?”

Duncan stared down at the snow. Now I could see, where the light caught his cheek, the side of his neck, that a faint black residue, insubstantial as smoke, had attached itself to his skin.

“Why did you do it?” he asked me.

I stared at him, the anger boiling over. What could I say to him? Why should I say anything to him?

“What kind of answer would you like?” I asked him. “Would you like me to say the pressure was too much? That I couldn’t handle it? Do you want me to say I was under the influence of drugs? Do you want me to say my relationships all failed and I was lonely?”

My voice had risen with each new question until I was shouting. I stopped. Abruptly. While Duncan stared at me, concerned.

I realized I didn’t know why I had done it. Not really. Every reason I could dredge up seemed ridiculous. I had written lots of notes about it, true. All the doctors wanted me to write things down, as if they could pull it out of me through ink applied to paper. I wrote nonsensical sentences, pompous things like:

I have finally figured it out. We are redeemed, if at all, by love and by imagination. I had imagination enough to realize I was not receiving enough love, and so I allowed myself to be seduced by those who did not love me, and whom I did not love. And then convinced myself, in my imagination, that I did love them, and that they did love me.

Or, on another scrap of paper I saved as a testament to my foolishness:

I spent my youth gripped in the fear of a sudden exit—like that of my father. I too might run across the sweet, strange grass only to fall prematurely inert at someone’s feet. {“Sudden exit”? “prematurely inert”? For someone who wanted to die you have a real aversion to the word death.} And yet as an adult I have tried my best to run to meet that exit anyway, despite all of those careful steps. Driving my gallery into ruin. Driving my relationships into ruin with excess and promiscuity. Overindulging in drugs and sex.

And, finally, dredging up the distant past:

My dad was a hard man to love. He lived for his work, and anyone who did not live for that work would receive very little love. Not a bad man, or a man who could be intentionally cruel. Not a man like that, no, but a man who could ignore you with an imperiousness that could burn into your soul. Duncan rarely saw that side of our father. Duncan was protected by his interest in the mysteries of history. Me, I couldn’t have cared less about history growing up. I was interested in many things—painting, reading, singing lessons, boys; in that order—but not history. I never could see the personal side to history until I started living it. Until Mary and Duncan showed me what history could mean. And by then it was too late: Dad was dead, and nearly me as well.

The doctors had made me do it—had made me feel like a political prisoner of the Kalif, forced to recant my beliefs and spout pseudo-personal parody to regain my freedom. {And yet, Janice, some of it rings true. I wish I could say it didn’t.}

“I don’t need an answer,” Duncan said quietly. “I just thought I’d ask.”

But I needed an answer, so I could stop it from happening again. Why had I done it?

I don’t recall what I said to Duncan next, sitting in the freezing cold outside of Blythe Academy, students beginning their groggy paths across the courtyard to their classes. I don’t remember any of the rest of our conversation. {We talked about the past, Janice. We talked about what Bonmot had been up to at the Academy. You told me about Mom and the condition of that old mansion. I told you about the research I had my students doing on Zamilon. Nothing you needed to remember.} I’m sure it didn’t satisfy him. It didn’t satisfy me.

I could remember, however, the night of the attempt—a night that seemed to epitomize the parties, the drugs, the lack of direction, the stretched, unreal quality of my existence. The late, late nights merging into days, the black of the sky, the hunt for yet another bar.

I had blown half of my remaining money on what I now realize was a suicide banquet—so much food, so many bodies, so little restraint. The pale white of people in a corner of the room, in a writhing orgy of legs and arms and torsos. The leering smiles of the onlookers. The smell of wine, of rot, of decay, of sex. But it wasn’t enough for me, even then. We kept going elsewhere.