Shriek: An Afterword

We were in a café. We were inside a burned-out building. We were on the street, giggling under a streetlamp. It was all merging together into one place, one time. I didn’t know where I was. Sybel was there, then he wasn’t there, then he was.

Finally, we came to the steps of an abandoned church. Sybel stood on one side and David, the cipher I was sleeping with at the time, stood on the other. I floated between them, staring at the huge double doors of the church, the old oak bound in iron and carved with flourishes. I could hear people talking loudly inside.

“Did I pay for this?” I asked. It had become my standard question over the past few months.

“No,” Sybel said. “You didn’t pay for this. You didn’t like your own party.”

“You wanted us to take you somewhere else,” David said, an arm around my shoulders.

“From what I paid for?” I said.

Sybel laughed. “Yes, to something you didn’t pay for. And you definitely didn’t pay for this—this is a party sponsored by one of the new galleries.”

“And somewhere else is something I paid for?”

“We thought it might be fun to spy,” David added, ignoring me.

“In a church?” I said, incredulous, forgetting all of the blasphemous functions I’d sponsored inside even holier buildings.

David said, “It used to be for the Church of the Five Pointed Star, but they don’t really exist anymore.”

Obviously. The grass was high and the steps cracked with vines. The door was beginning to rot on its hinges.

“Lead the way,” I said, giving up.

Sybel pushed open the door and we walked inside, the two of them practically carrying me—into the cacophony of music, the swirl of lights. We blended in perfectly. Same clothes. Same attitude. Within minutes, while Sybel and David looked on, I was carrying on a conversation with a young male artist who had the kind of pale waif look I find irresistible. It was crowded. I had to shout. I didn’t know what I was shouting. I didn’t know who I was rubbing up against. Sybel and David tried to act as my bodyguards; I ignored them. I was babbling.

At some point, I lost focus and stopped talking, trying unsuccessfully to nod as the young artist who I really didn’t give a damn about rambled on about “the inspiration for my art.” I was standing on a stool by then. I don’t know who had provided the stool, but it gave me enough height to survey the crowd.

Off to the side, I could see the rival gallery owner, John Franghe, chatting up a couple of my clients, oblivious to my presence. I recognized darling Franghe’s hand gestures. I recognized his body language. The odd combination of fawning flattery and absolute authority. He had a glass in his hand and was obviously drunk. He kept putting his hand on the arm of the prettier of the two artists and squeezing it, giving her a quick glance to catch her eye. There was nothing artful about it.

At some point while watching, I fell off my stool. My head was full of nails. My thoughts were coiled and frightened. David and Sybel came to my aid, set me down at a chair beside a table, beside two old veterans of the art movement. Bodies were swirling around me. The texture of the table even seemed to swirl, to become a whirlpool of wooden grain. I could smell the beer, the drugs, the sweat of all of those bodies in such an enclosed space.

At some point, I realized that none of it mattered, that none of it meant anything. I hated what I saw—the corrosion of fame, the accretion of falseness, the misuse of sex and desire. A strange dread came over me. I was alone in that church. I did not know who I was, or how I had come to this. I had become an observer in my own life.

I sent David and Sybel off on a mission to ask the hosts to find more of my favorite mushrooms. As soon as they had been swallowed up by the crowd, I stood up and snuck out of the church, through those rotting oak doors.

Stumbling, drunk out of my mind, I made my way down to a dirty little club at the dock-end of Albumuth Boulevard. Through the murmurous sounds of the River Moth, right outside, I listened to an old singer that someone said had once been famous.

As one will, I quickly became close friends with everyone at the bar, but even as I sat there joking and drinking with them, in the dark, I knew I was all alone. I knew the singer realized this, too. He seemed to sing for me and me only. No one else paid attention to him. It was horrible and wonderful at the same time. He would never reach the heights he had once known. One day, the people in the bar might not even recognize his best-known songs. But he sang them with a kind of terrible defiance. It wore me out to watch him. The empty laughter of the bar wore me out. All of it wore me out.

I sat there smoking a mushroom someone had given me and looking at the singer, but really staring past him into the distance, the foreground a blur, with not a thought in my head other than the melody of the song, the voice of the singer.

You become what you pretend to be. I could pretend that I was pretending when it came to the New Art, but eventually I had begun to believe the lies that justified the excesses.

Slowly, over time, a thought snuck past the music and the voice: that I could never be as brave as that singer, that I could never sing old songs to people who didn’t care. {Though, ironically enough, some would say that is what you’ve wound up doing with this account.}

Is that a good reason? Would that have satisfied the doctors?

Because nothing else did.

I lied earlier, though. I do remember something else from my conversation with Duncan in the frozen courtyard. I remember that I smelled perfume on him. It brought me up short, changed the subject forever.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

He smirked and said, “Mary Sabon.”

Mary Sabon. Sabon and her necklace of liars. Where to start?

Sybel was right—the New Art was dead. But it wasn’t just the New Art that had died.

Before my “accident,” I had lived almost exclusively within the secret history of the city—a history of moments, not events, a history that vanished as it came and lived on only in the shudder of remembered ecstasy. This secret history descends {transcends} through the bedrooms of a hundred thousand houses, in the dark, through the tips of our fingers as we learn that our bodies have a thousand eyes to feel with, a thousand ways to learn the true meaning of touch. From foreplay to orgasm, from first touch to last, everything we know is in our skins—this secret history that so few people will be part of. We don’t talk about this history, although it made us and will make us and is the only way to get as close as we can to each other: an urgent coupling to close the space, to experience a pleasure that—excuse me as I stumble into this rapturous gutter {can we stop you?}—is on one level being filled or filling, but is also so much more. This is where I was and what I lived for before the accident. Afterwards, I gave it all up, even though it wasn’t the problem.