Shriek: An Afterword

He wrote in his journal at some point near the end:

I feel as if she is made of clay or wood or stone. There is no longer any of the lovely fluidity that made me lust for her, although I lust for her still. I keep thinking that it will just take time—that, in time, she will reconcile herself to that night and to what she saw. That she will understand the strange beauty of it. That her understanding of it will lead her to an understanding of me. Until then, she complains about the amount of time I spend away from her, with Lacond and “that stupid society,” as she calls it, and then, when I do spend time with her, she complains that I smother her. She cringes in distaste when my fungal disease flares up. I must keep myself wrapped in a bathrobe, away from her critical eye, when I feel it coming on. I cannot relax around her. My love for her is making me old. I keep thinking back to that night. The rush of joy I felt because she would finally see what I had seen, that we could finally share it. And I wonder how I could have been so naïve.

Duncan never thought of disavowing his findings, of putting the underground behind him, denying what he had found. He was, however, capable of self-blame:

How could I expect her to believe what I myself scarcely comprehended at times? Sometimes I wish I had been able to find another way. Sometimes I wish I could undo it all, start over. But I don’t think she will let me.

Soon, they barely talked to each other…then, one day, he came home from Lacond’s offices and she was gone. He thought that she had just stepped out for a moment, until he found the note. He left it with his other notes. It is right here beside my festering typewriter. It reads:

My Love:

I do love you, but I am not in love with you anymore. You want me to see things that aren’t there. You want me not only to see the impossible—you want me to think it beautiful, a revelation. That night was a terrifying experience for me, Duncan. And with your insistence that I believe, you have begun to frighten me.

There’s no way to rescue us. I can’t keep living with you. I hope that in time we can become friends, but for now we must be apart. Besides, we both have books to write, and neither of us can be creative in this situation.

Do you know how hard it is for me to leave not only my lover but my teacher? But I have no choice.

Thank you for everything you have taught me, everything you have shown me about history and about the world. I’ll never forget that.

I’ll end here, for now, because, as you know, too many words can be a trap.

Love,

Mary

P.S. I’m leaving you the apartment until you can find your own place.

The difference between what we need and what we want can be an abyss. For example, I want more light in this accursed room, but I need lunch because my stomach is grumbling. Duncan would always want Mary, but did he need her? In a way, he didn’t. In a way, like the writer who pursues his art above all else, Duncan did not need anything other than access to the underground. {You make me out to be a theorem in search of expression, rather than a human being.}

Next to Mary’s note is a letter she wrote to a friend. I don’t know how Duncan came by it. I don’t like to guess in this instance. {It was a low point for me, intercepting her mail. It was a brief insanity, a madness created by love. I only did it once or twice. I’m still ashamed of it.} The letter explains the situation much more baldly, and must have driven Duncan a little crazy when he read it.

Duncan has become ever more himself. I left him because I couldn’t take any more of his ravings about the gray caps. Everything is focused on the gray caps. Even if he did love me, I’d never be more than ancillary to those damn gray caps. It didn’t help that my parents hated him for, as they saw it, spoiling the innocence of their little girl. And because he was impossible to live with, and because he was like a child—he always wanted to be in love, so when he wasn’t in love with me, he was in love with his studies. He wore me out. He was so intense. How can anyone be so intense all of the time? I couldn’t breathe, or think. And his opinions on my research! Always picking at it, always so sure he was right and I was wrong. I don’t think that I would ever be more than a student in his eyes, so I had to get away from him. Yes, I loved him, but, sometimes, as I am discovering, you need more than love.

{A mental shudder. A sudden moment of self-awareness—was I like that? Yes, I probably was. But I don’t know if Mary ever understood the great strain I was under, how what I sought was of the utmost importance. That it meant nothing more or less than safeguarding the fate of everyone who lives in this city, perhaps in the world. And still. And yet. I knew she had taken something from me, that I had been valuable to her. I had given nearly as much as I had taken. I’d been her mentor and she’d been my student, no matter what grief I had caused her. I took some small comfort from that.}

And that was the end of it. Or so I thought. For although Mary was free of Duncan, Duncan would never really be free of her, or her flesh necklace.

As Duncan’s romantic fortunes waned, his fortunes as a historian waxed again: a flowering in miniature, given the heights he had ascended to in his youth. Although those who did speak a kind of truth about the gray caps and Ambergris’ past were condemned to the fringes, they did have their own organization: the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society. Most of Duncan’s postwar hopes of self-expression reached fruition through AFTOIS.

AFTOIS had once again become Lacond’s passion—and in its limited way, it flourished for a time after the war—so that the Broadsheet, which paid the rent, often suffered from his neglect. {Indeed. It never quite failed when he was in charge, but some years after I took over production of the Broadsheet, I would have to put it out of its financial misery, much to the delight of our many enemies.}

“The important thing,” Lacond said to me once, “is that we get the truth out in some form, that we document what is happening. So that at the very least, there will be a record that someone knew about it.”

This struck me as an absurd statement. “Why?” I replied. “So that when the abyss opens up you can stand on the edge and shout down, ‘I told you so!’?”

Lacond looked at me as if I hadn’t understood anything he’d said.

When I told Bonmot about this exchange, he said, “Yes, but without Lacond, how much more mischief would Duncan get into?”

A good point, I had to admit. Because Lacond spent much of his time in those years after the war making Duncan his second-in-command. Without Lacond, the loss of Mary might have hit Duncan harder than it did. {How much harder could it have hit me? I hardly left my apartment for months. Lacond had to drag me out of my bed to get me to work for him. For years afterwards, I would feel this hollow space in my stomach, in my lungs. Sometimes, I would think of her and I couldn’t breathe.}