Shriek: An Afterword

I traded my secret history for another type of history altogether. I saw the backs of a lot of heads, sang a lot of songs, and had my fundament put to sleep by the hard wood I was sitting on on more than one occasion. Chanting, reading ancient books, fingering beads on a necklace much more humble than Sabon’s. Always worried that this new dependency might end as the old one had, but willing to take the chance anyway.

But, in some great confluence of chance and destiny, as my erotic star fell, Duncan’s rose, and shone all the more passionately, as his ardor—unlike mine—was directed toward one person: Mary Sabon.

I already knew Mary, although I did not realize it at the time. Duncan had talked about her for several months before the details of his attraction to her became clear. There was a potentially brilliant student in his class, he told me at lunch one day while Bonmot stared at both of us from beneath his bushy eyebrows. A student who absorbed theory like a sponge and immediately applied it to her own interests. A student who could, moreover, write, and write well. It was so obvious that this student should be in a more advanced class that at first he was undecided as to whether to let her go to some other school, but, finally, could not bring himself to suggest it.

“She does not have the necessary social maturity,” I remember him saying. “She’s still young. To go to the Religious Academy in Morrow, with much older students,” he said, shaking his head. “She needs more time. Extraordinary student.”

Bonmot frowned at that, gave Duncan a look that I didn’t understand.

“Sometimes,” he said to Duncan pointedly, “it’s better to let them go. Better for the student and better for the teacher.”

Duncan shook his head again. “No. She needs more time.”

I should have known from the way he refused to use her name. Thank God I missed the courtship. Thank God I was trying to die.

For Duncan had, while hounding me from hospital to ward, ward to doctor’s office, been displaying all the conjoined lust and random stupidity of a rabbit. He “succumbed to temptation,” as he put it in his journal, when, one afternoon while tutoring Mary privately after class, his hand crossed that space between how-it-is and how-it-might-be…and found purchase on the other side.

“Tell me you don’t love me and I will be glad to escape this fever, this vision,” he wrote in his journal, and much else I cannot tell from the torn pages. “I’ve never been more naked,” he tells her, apparently forgetting the night I scraped the fungus from his body, surely his most naked moment.

She did not leave him alone in his nakedness, for as he succumbed, and kept succumbing, without thought of the link between bliss and torment, she reciprocated, and continued to reciprocate. {Truly the driest account of making love I’ve ever read.} What promises they made to each other in those first few sweet, fumbling hours, I cannot tell you. Duncan has ripped those pages from his journal in such brutal fashion that even the pages surrounding that night are shredded—mangled words, mutilated phrases, quartered sentences. No one can read between lines that no longer exist.

Did he tear them out from anger later, or love before? {I’m not telling.} Did he premeditate their slaughter, or was it a crime of passion? For that matter, why would he rip out those pages as opposed to—for example—the pages about the gray caps’ infernal machine? With the pages lost, and Duncan with them, we can only guess. {And yet, dear sister, here I am, editing your work, even after “death.” Some things never change.}

All I have left as proof are a few short, unintentionally humorous letters from Sabon to Duncan, and from Duncan to Sabon—shaken out of Duncan’s journal like dead moths.

Sabon: My love, last night was wonderful. I’ve never talked to anyone the way I’ve talked to you. You teach me so much. You make me understand things so well. You make me feel like I’m floating on a cloud, on a star, so light do you make me feel. Until next time, I am sorrowful and sick. I will not sign this letter, in case it is discovered, but you know who I am.

Duncan: Your skin is so smooth I want to lick it all day long. Your body makes my body hum with pleasure. Your hair, your br**sts, your small hands, your ears, as delicate as the most delicate of fungi, your strong thighs, your elbows, your eyes, your kneecaps, even! I want all of you, again and again.

Sabon: My beautiful love—last night I felt I knew you better than before, if that is possible. In the dark where we could not see each other, I still felt I could somehow see you. {Humorously enough, there was, thinking back, a certain glow to me back then, due to the colonization by the fungi.} The way you talk to me—I don’t know if I’m worthy of the love I hear in your voice. But I will try.

Duncan: It is truly amazing, the way our bodies fit together like some kind of perfect jigsaw puzzle. Yours makes mine feel so good. I hope I make yours feel half as good. Every night I cannot come to you is agony. I can’t think of anything else—even in the classroom when I’m supposed to be teaching. And when you are near me then, I tremble. My hands, my legs, shake, and I cannot hear anyone but you, and I want you there, then. This is a craving I cannot satisfy.

Standard nattering romantic fare, uttered from the lips and pens of a thousand lovers a year, although usually not in such a staccato point-counterpoint of romance/lust, romance/lust. {Not fair! That was early on, Janice! When I remained acutely aware that I was older and she was younger, and she worried that she was too young and I was too mature. So we each tried to shed our age, to reverse the expected. It might have been foolish, but it reflected concern, affection, care, for the other. Besides, we used to hide these letters in dozens of places inside Blythe and on the grounds. Some never reached the intended recipient. Of those that did, I only kept a few of hers, and not all of mine were returned. Sometimes she was lustful and I was loving. Sometimes I would look out across the Academy from my office and see nothing but a world of potentially hidden love letters, all for me or by me.}

Following that first contact and conquest, Duncan offered up a marvelous spectacle to an unsuspecting potential audience of students, teachers, administrators, and five different orders of monks, none of whom would have sanctioned the holiness of lust between teacher and student if they’d been awake to see it. For more than two years, Duncan slunk, sneaked, crept, crawled, climbed, and slithered past various obstacles to be with his beloved. The logistics of these lust-driven maneuvers were perhaps as complex as Duncan’s perilous wanderings belowground, and almost as dangerous. If caught, Duncan would be fired and barred from teaching elsewhere in the city.