Shriek: An Afterword

Of course, nothing lasts forever, least of all desperate, ridiculous sexual melodrama, and Duncan would prove no exception to the cliché. But that day was as yet far off. In the meantime, Duncan reveled in his love for Sabon—you could see it in his distant enthusiasm at our lunches in the courtyard: a brightness to his eyes, a sheen to his skin that was impervious to rainy days or scholarly disappointments {or the more sympathetic interpretation, that it was the effect of the fungi}.

Still, I noticed that Bonmot scrutinized us both with a certain suspicion, no matter how pleasant our conversations. With me, I believe he was just worried—looking for signs of a despair that might lead me to again cut my wrists—and with Duncan, searching for something hidden that Bonmot could not quite, for all of his wisdom, figure out. {I am sure that if not for my secret studies, he would have found out about Mary much sooner. But rumors that I snuck around at night had, to his mind, more the feel of hidden tunnels and underground depths than of secret assignations with students. My prowess, in his eyes, was the prowess of research and obsession.}

I did not meet Sabon until ten months after I returned to Ambergris. Duncan did not seem eager for me to meet her—perhaps he was afraid Mary would know he had confided in me about their relationship, even if inadvertently; perhaps he was afraid something in our conversation might give him away to Bonmot. For whatever reason, for a long time I continued to hear about Sabon secondhand, through the mirror of Duncan’s love for her.

For this first part of their relationship, I cannot bring myself to blame Sabon, not for their mutual seduction. She eventually ruined my brother in many different ways, but at first she made him see a different life—as if all these years there had been another Duncan Shriek, or the possibility of another Duncan Shriek, completely different from the person I knew as my brother. Because they could not be seen together, they devised complex ways of meeting in public. Mary would invite Duncan to one of her parents’ parties along with all her other teachers, and then seek Duncan out for a “fatherly” dance or conversation.

Similarly, Duncan began to make the most of social functions at the Ambergris Historical Society by inviting his students to attend for “educational” reasons. Most students would not show up, conveniently leaving Duncan required to escort Mary for the evening. {You can sneer all you want, Janice, but that was the primary purpose. In fact, I also met other people there who were useful to my career. I remet James Lacond there, for example, long before he broke with the Society. You are suggesting I was not just incompetent, but actively sabotaging myself, which is not the case. It was coincidence that Mary sometimes appeared at those events, which were so public that there could be no chance of an assignation.} It was through his attendance at these events that he had his first real conversations with James Lacond, an active member of most of Ambergris’ cultish “research” collectives—the beginning of a friendship that would affect Duncan in many ways.

Duncan discovered that he didn’t even mind dancing and that, “with a drink or two in me,” as he puts it in his journal, he could “endure chitchat and small talk.” He began to put on some weight, but it looked good on him, and his new beard, prematurely shot through with gray, gave him a scholarly and respectable appearance. He discovered that people liked to hear him talk, liked to hear his opinions, something that had only been true at the very beginning of his career. Suddenly, he saw a future in which he might actually settle down with Sabon.

Duncan’s journal expresses no guilt for his AHS deception, or the many other deceptions “forced” upon him over the next two years. {My journal could not express such guilt—after all, my journal is an inanimate object, although you are doing a fine job of forcing it, by tortuous miscontext, into confessions it would not otherwise make.} Nor does Duncan’s journal offer much in the way of gray cap research over the next two years. Sabon might have inspired him, but she also took up much of his time. {True, but by then I had other professors unwittingly carrying out my research.} Sabon had so altered his perceptions that a journal entry from the time reads:

All my research, even the gray caps themselves, seems remote, unconnected. There might as well not be a Silence, a Machine, an underground. I feel as if I have emerged from a bad dream into the real world. It does not seem possible that one person should be able to lead two such lives at the same time. {And a third life, in a sense. I could not put aside my conversations with Bonmot. I could not find a way to completely discount the spiritual—not when, in some sense, I was becoming so much a part of the world that, in the particles of it that became the particles of me, I sometimes thought I sensed a kind of presence. It maddened me—that I could not be certain of its relevance. That I could not be sure.}

But just because Duncan no longer believed that his life depended on the gray caps did not mean the gray caps no longer believed in Duncan, as he would soon find out.

9

The sounds from the ceiling have stopped. The sounds from the hole leading underground have not stopped. Curiously, I am calm. I’m somehow glad, even though I can see Mary’s necklace of admirers and the marble staircase, can see her books hovering like crows or bats in the green shadows of the ceiling. Age does that to you, I think. It makes it impossible to have a memory that is not colored by the future.

Still, during that time so many years ago, Duncan and Mary’s romance progressed into its second year, randy and light-of-foot, although punctuated by awkward—but not fatal—events, such as a very tense parent-teacher conference during which Duncan almost fainted when Mary’s father jokingly asked, “So what are your intentions with our daughter?”

Meanwhile, my gallery never fully recovered from my absence. Those artists who had not stolen their art from my walls deserted me in more subtle ways: a parade of apologetic or sniveling excuses is how I see them in my mind, usually delivered by proxy, the artist in question too cowardly or embarrassed to tell me in person. My little dance with death had been only one of several extreme actions that year: half a dozen writers and artists had died, either from their excesses, or from being murdered by rivals during the Festival. {Which, mercifully, you’d missed during your travels; I wish I had missed it as well. I had to work devilishly hard to protect the Academy from the gray caps that year.} The authorities, namely the family Hoegbotton, thought it wise to lay the blame for such maladies at the {comatose, oversexed, overdrugged} feet of the art community. Excess was “out,” a new austerity—inappropriate for our great, debauched city, but completely appropriate to my new condition—was “in.”