Shriek: An Afterword

4

Afterwords. Afterwards. Afterwar.

The war had been jarring, numbing, senseless. In its aftermath, the balance of power remained much as it had before all of the bloodshed. The Hoegbottons controlled Ambergris and F&L controlled Morrow and Sophia’s Island but lacked the military and political will to enforce their ridiculous tariffs. The Kalif’s mauled troops retreated across the River Moth even as their merchants advanced to secure deals with the Hoegbottons to rebuild the city and import new products. {Oddly enough, the Kalif’s troops could be said to have ultimately achieved their goal, if not in the preferred way. For, after all, hadn’t they liberated the citizens of Ambergris from chaos and tyranny through their sacrifice?}

After the war, Ambergris forgot the real enemy—Hoegbotton & Sons still railed against Frankwrithe & Lewden or the Kalif, but provided no warning against the gray caps. People gratefully went along with this mass denial. Wasn’t it easier to blame F&L than an amorphous, faceless enemy that hid underground and attacked seemingly at random? {To be fair, the still unknown way in which F&L had acquired fungal weapons confused the issue—F&L did look like the sole instigator. After all, didn’t the gray caps periodically erupt from their hidey-holes during the Festival anyway?}

The terrible, cold beauty of the truth appealed to no one. Every few weeks, for several years, one or two, or three or four, people were killed by a left-over fungal bomb or a new one planted by someone—the gray caps or F&L, I assume, but who could tell the difference? H&S did nothing to prevent this, and tried hard to stop Lacond from reporting it. We were a city and a people unable to face our coming annihilation, incensed over an enemy that posed not a quarter of the threat. In a way, we lived in a fairy tale, convinced that someone else’s actions or inactions might save us. As day after day passed without Ambergris being invaded, we flinched less and less, let down our guard. No one was going to destroy the city—only rumors could do that, the thinking went, only idle talk. If we pretended otherwise, the enemy could not creep out at night and make us all disappear. Permanence had become a thing from the past.

{I didn’t think much had changed, but if it had, it had changed for the reason most eloquently put by the historian Edgar Rybern: namely, that barbaric institutions and individuals can benefit society, while “civilization” can, in its most benign forms, prove barbaric. This led me to two conclusions germane to the war. First, that the very act of F&L coming into contact with the gray caps and then into contact with H&S had irrevocably changed all three parties; and second, that stated goals aside, all three of these institutions have been thrown off-kilter by the war. Now, whether they realize it or not, each new decision pulls them slightly further away from their original purpose. What effect this might have, I could not tell you.}

For Duncan personally, the end of the war meant two things: that Lacond was available to help him limp back into a shadow career in print—it became apparent at war’s end that Lacond could only keep one of us on, and, even if I had wanted to stay, it wasn’t going to be me—and that Mary’s patience with him was almost at an end.

The slow withdrawal, the retreat from love, went on at the same time Lacond began recruiting Duncan for his eccentric obsessions. {No more eccentric than my own obsessions, Janice. Lacond and I understood each other in a way that made me no longer feel quite so alone.}

How did Mary withdraw? Let me count the ways. She no longer tolerated my brother’s erratic schedule. She no longer found his eccentricities endearing. She no longer found his fungal diseases tragic, his endurance of them brave. {I’m not sure she ever felt that way about my fungal diseases. It was more that she put up with their side effects to be with me.} The small apartment they shared became claustrophobic. Duncan’s journal skirts the reason behind the feelings:

I cannot find my inspiration in this place—I have to go down to the Spore or Lacond’s apartment to write, or I just stare at the page. I don’t know why my apartment has become so stifling, but it has. There’s nothing in it to spur me on to create. Except Mary, of course.

But Mary spent more and more time with friends. Sometimes she even stayed at her parents’ house. Duncan had no chance, no choice. How could he? He didn’t have the experience to combat it, to see the signs. To Duncan, sadly enough, the only way to get her back was to keep showing her the truth, even though it was clear to anyone with any sense that he’d need to start lying to her if he wanted to keep her. {A cynical view that would only serve as a short-term solution. And I was neither so naïve nor Mary so experienced as you make out.} Every time he showed her the truth, she pushed him farther away. Duncan wrote in his journal:

I feel as if I am living by myself again. She isn’t really here anymore. She’s a husk or a shell. Her eyes are dull. Her hair is dull. Her words are weighted and slow. She doesn’t listen to me. I am killing her.

But the truth also meant accepting that the day-to-day domesticity didn’t suit him either, especially for long periods of time. I will spare you the contrast between the journal entries that detail with a silly kind of joy the beauty of her snores early in their relationship and the dull snarl of his comments on those self-same snores near the end. Or, take this terse entry only a month before disaster: “another night of odd smells.” Sometimes he would be almost apologetic: “She could easily have complained about the frequency with which I spored. Or how I tracked in strange green mud from time to time. But she didn’t.”

Even then, I think he wanted to stay with her. I don’t believe he ever understood that he might actually lose her. {I couldn’t, back then, imagine a tolerable moment without her—and, in all honesty, tolerable moments since I lost her have been fewer and less intense.} After all, he’d never been through a breakup before—unlike me, who had been through dozens. I had become an expert on broken relationships. It had become ritualized with me, each battle with its own histories, its own decorum, and its own rules of disengagement.

Duncan and Mary managed to stay together in their little apartment for a few more months, but like the starfish that rapidly became brittle, their love had died long before they acknowledged the fact. The bond between them had broken, snapped, and although Duncan was still in love with her—even though I don’t know if he liked her anymore—she was not in love with him. Their situation frayed, unraveled. They had screaming arguments, tearful reunions. Duncan would seek refuge at my apartment, only to go back, over my objections.