I thought back to Duncan’s account of the Machine and the underground. To him, it was another aspect of his quest, his obsession, no matter where it led. For me, it looked like a way out, a door, as Duncan had described it, or an open window into blue sky. What had it looked like to Tonsure, I sometimes wonder.
6
I fell asleep for a while. I couldn’t help it. I’ve been pushing myself to the end ever faster, taking fewer breaks.
I dreamt while I slept. Edward was in my dream. Neither of us had really ever left the insane asylum. We sat there in matching straitjackets in uncomfortable chairs, facing each other. We were surrounded by huge orange-red-and-black mushrooms. The sight of their amber gills above us, slowly breathing in and out in a sussurating mimicry of conscious life, was strangely calming to me.
“Where have you gone?” I asked him.
“Underground,” he said.
“What did you find there?” I asked.
“Acceptance, everlasting life, and mushrooms,” he said, and smiled. It was a lovely smile. It radiated outward to suffuse his entire face in a golden light.
“Is that all?” I said. “Was it worth it? Did you have to give up anything?”
“My fear. My consciousness. My former life.”
“What was that like?”
“Do you remember those trust exercises they made us do? Where one of us would fall into the arms of the others, and you just had to fall and keep falling and believe that they would catch you?”
“It was like that?”
“It was like that. Except imagine falling for a hundred years before you’re caught, looking at a black sky full of cold dead stars in front of you, and the abyss at your back.” {I think you were absorbing a line or two from my journal entries in your sleep.}
“You’re dead,” I said. It wasn’t an accusation.
“Probably,” he replied.
By then, we had shed our straitjackets and we stood in the lonely dull courtyard that the asylum had swallowed whole. At the far end, twelve elegant emerald mushrooms on long stalks were being guarded by two round rolling puffballs that glistened with sticky sea-green spores in an odd approximation of the asylum’s lawn bowling facilities.
“I’m sorry,” I said, although I didn’t know what I was saying sorry for.
“It’s okay, Janice,” he said.
Then he walked away from me down the alley, getting smaller and smaller until he disappeared into the cluster of mushrooms.
Isn’t that odd? I remember thinking in my dream. Isn’t that odd? And I don’t even know what it means.
When I woke, I thought I saw Sybel standing over me, but I was wrong. I was quite alone in my cot, in this dismal back room.
I have left out so much, and yet there is no time now to go back and put it in its proper place. I’ve had no time to explore my {brief } conversion to Truffidianism under Bonmot’s guidance after my unfortunate accident. I’ve not dwelt on my two miscarriages. Or that I was a drug addict for most of my adult life. That I loved Sirin, for many years, in secret, and that we slept together a few times four or five years ago. That—and I am so sorry for this—that I am the one who told Bonmot about Duncan’s relationship with Mary. {I suspected. At the time, I would have been beyond furious; I never would have talked to you again. But now I see that that isn’t what destroyed my relationship with her.} That I stole Duncan’s journal from his apartment months before he left for the underground, long before I acquired the trunk. {Again, I had a suspicion it was you.} That there are definitely things walking up and down the tunnel at my back. That not everything I have told you is the truth as Duncan saw it. That my typewriter glows so brightly that I no longer need a lamp to see. That Duncan’s glasses are in my shirt pocket, dormant, waiting for me to put them on.
None of that is important next to what I do have time to share with you, because I think I finally made Mary Sabon see—really see. It wasn’t Duncan. It was me who did it.
How? A stroke of good fortune, and Truff knows I deserved one. About two months before Duncan’s final disappearance, I led a group of insufferable snobs around the city—the type who sneer at anything genuine and delight in the false; the less truthful the better. Yet they turned out to be falsely snobbish themselves, once I saw them in another light—one was Martin Lake’s new agent, David Frond, and two were his friends, visiting Ambergris for the first time. It was truly a miraculous intervention. When David found out who I was, the look he gave me made it clear he had thought I was dead. The thrill rising in my chest was because he knew my name at all.
After we talked for a while, David offered me a job rounding up Lake’s old artist friends and getting them to display their work at a gallery show doubling as a party for Lake’s fiftieth birthday. With any luck, he’d let me coordinate the party as well, he said. It was certainly a better offer than anything Sirin had brought my way in quite some time.
“It will be a regular parade of ghosts from Martin’s past,” he said, smiling.
It would be a parade of ghosts from my past, too, and I wasn’t sure I liked the thought of that. Still, I needed the money if I wanted to keep my apartment. The tour guide business had been bad of late.
And, oh, the dead, the ghosts, catalogued but never accounted for among the living. The people I have known who thought they knew me. Each astonished face I tracked down vied more seriously for the winner of the most-startled-Janice-is-alive contest. Each astonished face would be a way to shore up Lake’s ego by showing what a mediocrity Insert First & Last Name had turned out to be.
Most of them were people who had been oddly absent whenever I’d been in any kind of real trouble, coincidentally enough. During the ceremonial slitting of the wrists. During the gallery’s financial woes. While I was in the hospital reconciling myself to the empty space where once five toes had cavorted like penned-up rutting pigs.
No, if it were to be a party of my peers {of veneers and sneers, more like}, then it would just be my luck that I uncovered “acquaintances” or “not quite friends” or outright enemies. Most of my lovers had vanished during the war—they’d survived me, but, still, somehow, the sight of bloodshed scared them—seeking out less eventful lives in Stockton, Morrow, or Nicea. Bonmot and Sybel had both died, of course, and Sirin—through his writing—had ascended to a place where he was, in a way, untouchable. Sybel, of course, was by my side throughout all of the planning for the party; how could I possibly plan a party without him?
When I think of the people I knew back then, I realize that each of us had such private, personal, and immediate experiences that discussion with anyone about them, let alone achieving some kind of joint catharsis, would be meaningless—like a Blythe Academy reunion that invited only strangers from different years. The jargon used might have some kind of similarity, but beyond that, an aching void. That had been the whole point of the New Art—pour all of that empathy into the work, leaving only the surface as a connection to other people. I wonder now if any of it was worth it to any of us.
Still, despite reservations—and, trust me, I had reservations about many of them—I managed to exhume enough of Lake’s long-dormant, sleep-tinged, hibernating friends and their dusty, packed-in-storage-for-decades artwork to earn my salary and be kept on for the party.
My main duty at the party? To herd the ruminant artists, to keep them happy. In the background, I would also help with the invitations, and in return, I would not only receive more money, but a promise of a position at a gallery—a promise I’m sure I must have known would never be kept, no matter what happened at the party. I was beyond that kind of respectability, and some part of me may even have been proud of that.
Four artists showed up for the party that night—any more and I wouldn’t have been able to handle them, or their egos. After all, I was getting close to an age when women of much greater strength than I had retired to an early dotage on some pleasure barge or houseboat sailing idyllic down the River Moth. I was also worried about my b
rother, and therefore not in the best of moods. I cannot say that I cared that much about party preparations or “reparations,” as I used to joke in the days before the party—with the cook, a sardonic man of my age who lifted my spirits and tried to lift my blouse on more than one occasion.
Lake had decided that the party should be held at the refurbished and renovated Hoegbotton Hotel. It had previously served as a glorified safe house, most active during Festival days, and thus had to be taken apart almost brick by brick to become a “hotel.” For example, such features as iron bars on guest room windows did not convey the right message. Nor, for that matter, did the “safety crawl spaces” that led to tunnels, that led to the River Moth. No, it had all been stripped away as if the gray caps and the Festival were now some remote happening—remote in time and space and even remotely unbelievable, from some period of ancient history that could not be verified by even the most reckless historian. A kind of silly rumor—a scary story told to children before bedtime by unenlightened parents. {I blame such innovations as the telephone. Such prosaic devices make it difficult for people to believe in the other until it stares them in the face and takes a swipe at them.}
To replace such outdated structures came wide staircases of marble bought from the Kalif at ridiculous prices and large glass windows that any lout with a plank of wood would find irresistible come Festival time. They had scented candles and handmade bedsheets made by the few Dogghe tribesmen who hadn’t been slaughtered by our ancestors, and chairs and tables crafted by carpenters from the Southern Isles. Every floor had its own telephone on a pedestal, conveniently located near the staircase. The smell of new stone, new furnishings, and clean sheets was so un-Ambergrisian that as soon as I stepped into the place, I knew no locals would be checking in for a night’s rest and relaxation.
The party would take up the ground floor, centered around the banquet hall, while the artists’ gathering/gallery would be located on the second floor, in a smaller room.
That night was calm but for a steady drizzle and drip of rain, the moon missing, but the street lamps making up for it. A breeze blew into the reception area. It felt cool as I waited for the Four Ghosts of Lake’s Past to arrive for the party.
I stood in the doorway, smoking a Smashing Ted’s Deluxe cigar and nursing a glass of cheap red wine from the kitchen staff ’s stock. I intended to enjoy my evening by indulging myself early on, so if things went hideously wrong, I would still have a memory to look back on with fondness.
I watched the night as it passed by me on Albumuth Boulevard, one of the last times I had a chance to just relax and observe, as it turned out. And yet, a feeling of peculiar intensity came over me. I saw it all with such precise detail, in a way that I cannot put into words. It was not that the world slowed down or that I saw anything hidden in it, although I knew there was more in front of me than I could see—I had the glasses in my pocket to remind of that. It was more that my gaze lingered for once. It lingered and held, as if I was parched for that little glistening of light off water in the gutter as a motored vehicle rumbled past. As if I was hungry for the exact way a street vendor cocked his head while rattling off a list of his offerings. The quiet syncopation of conversation half-heard and then gone as people walked by. The lamppost opposite the hotel, illuminating the facade of a closed bank door. The quick-low cry of a nighthawk circling somewhere above. The feel of the street through my shoes. The grit of the doorway against my shoulder as I leaned on it. The bliss of the cigar’s trembling surge of flavor, the biting smoothness of the wine.
I think I already knew then that I was not long for such sights.
The four artists arrived on time—two by an old-fashioned carriage, another by hired motored vehicle, a fourth on foot. Sonter, Kinsky, Raffe, and Constance were their names: a motley rabble of ragtag talent, and none of them had ever so much as scaled a small mountain of acclaim except through the long-ago benevolent influence of Lake’s hand upon them.
Sonter looked ancient and creaky, like a narrow, withered boat with bad caulking—on the verge of a watery death, perhaps. A decade spent on an island in the middle of the River Moth had done him no favors. Kinsky had become broad and looked defeated but brave, the gray circles under his eyes negated by an animation lacking from the others. Constance maintained a look of perpetual outrage that made me roll my eyes before I could help myself. Only Raffe, though aging—and, I realized with a shock, probably my own age—appeared in any way serene or accepting of Fate.
I greeted them. They were polite. That was all I expected from them.
Raffe said to me, “You look tired. Can we help with anything?”
Which comment, for some reason, made me want to cry.
I took them upstairs to the temporary gallery—a room converted from its original function as a bar. The lighting was all wrong and I hadn’t been able to hang the paintings the way I would have liked due to an incompetent helper, but at least a small throng had gathered there already. I don’t remember my welcoming speech, I just know that, for a moment, an emotion welled up in my throat that came close to affection for those I was introducing. After all, they were survivors just like me. They were also artists, and for twenty years of my life all I had done was introduce artists. Was there a sad twinge for my lost gallery? Of course, but these days there is a sad twinge about everything—to the point that I begin to wonder if it’s my heart that’s gone bad, rather than anything to do with my memories.
Besides, it can’t be avoided. Bonmot once told me, “If you don’t feel a certain sadness toward the past, then you probably don’t understand it.”
After my introduction and short speeches by the artists, the adoring if small-in-numbers public pushed forward to engage the Obscure, Sonter somehow evading the crush and coming up to me.
“I heard Mary Sabon will be here tonight,” he said. “Is that true?”
The peace I had been experiencing left me.
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I didn’t see her on the guest list.”
That had been my one petty triumph—I’d managed through sleight of hand to get Mary Sabon uninvited from Lake’s party, said sleight of hand involving an unmailed invitation and a sidewalk gutter leading to the nether depths. Somewhere down there a gray cap might be clutching that invitation as I write this account. It might be its most treasured possession.
So I hope you will understand in advance that my later actions were spontaneous, perhaps even unplanned. I did not go to the party, as some claimed in muttering whispers afterwards, to confront Mary. I had done my best to make sure she would not be there at all. {I believe you.}
Sonter opened his mouth to question me further, but I shut it with a well-aimed appetizer delivered on raised foot, the appetizer rescued from a passing waiter’s tray with an ease I almost never experience. Sonter turned away immediately.
There may have been an expression on my face that made him turn away. It may have had nothing to do with the appetizer. I would not rule it out if I were you.
For the next two hours, I attended to the artists, explaining their paintings to those who required an explanation. It was hard work. Some of the paintings came from the kind of obscure symbolism that either baffles me or brings out my inventiveness, but the old potent phrases from the past came back to me from the void of memory soon enough.
“Vibrant use of color.”
“Brave application of the oils.”
“The composition accentuates the face, for nicely subtle symbolic effect.”
This part I enjoyed, I admit. It made me feel free. For a brief time, while pointing out the detail of a sudden azure thrush in the dull emerald undergrowth at the bottom of one of Raffe’s paintings, I could pretend Lake was still my client, that my gallery still served as the nexus of the New Art. I even caught the eye of a former lover from across the room, and he smiled. You could say I was happy.
Then they pressed me into duty helping downstairs, in the banquet hall. David Frond’s idea of
a menu included lark’s tongues and frog’s legs, fish eggs and lemon pie, squid soup and oliphaunt kidneys. It was quite an ambitious spread, worthy of the obese gastronome Manzikert III himself. It wasn’t hard to imagine another time, another place, in which this would have been a party for Duncan, had luck been on our side. A string of alternate scenarios in which we rose to the top and stayed there, instead of being diminished by time and our own enemies. {Would it have been so much better that way, Janice?}
Ill-suited for such work, I hobbled back and forth past the extravagantly costumed guests as they cavorted across the dance floor—half hunter, half flushed rabbit—escorting notables with polite conversation about the weather—there was quite a drumming of rain outside by then—or about the history of the fluted archways in the lobby that the Hoegbottons had stolen from some ruin down south.
Some of the people I escorted, I remembered coming into my gallery as children or young adults, but none of them remembered me. Scions of Hoegbotton’s mercantile empire, officials from foreign cities, even a nervous-looking emissary from Frankwrithe & Lewden {more than likely a hostage}. I don’t know why I had to escort them, and I didn’t much care. {Lake’s agent probably feared they would get drunk and cause a scene.}
Then followed a period of rest for this old woman, where I just stood in the gallery room on the second floor and smiled at patrons of the arts as they glided by, drinks in hand. The artists had all joined the reverie on the ground floor, but I welcomed the respite by then.
The party had reached that unfamiliar point where, in contrast to past events, I stood outside of it, looking in. I was far away, and very tired, remembering with regret the cigar I had had to abandon when the artists showed up. Remembering that my brother was missing and feeling powerless to do anything about it.