Old mysteries, brought home to me in a new way. I kept thinking back, trying to remember my impressions of Duncan at the age of four or five. There was precious little. I remembered him smiling. I remembered him blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, and the time I made him cry by pinching him because he’d pulled apart one of my dolls.
My mother’s story gnawed and gnawed at me, even though I could not see the greater significance of it. (What were you meant to see, do you think? That I’ve been an agent of the gray caps my entire life? What, exactly, are you trying to say, Janice?)
Suddenly, it no longer seemed so safe to talk about Duncan. For the first time, I felt the urge to return to Ambergris, to my gallery, to my life. So I left the very next day, surprising myself as much as I surprised my mother. Even by then, though, we had slowly grown apart, so that I am sure that she, like me, in that awkward moment by the front door, with the motored vehicle waiting, thought that five years until my next visit might be no great hardship.
8
Nothing was the same when I came back.
It’s night here, as I type, and hot, and I don’t know if it’s a normal kind of heat or something related to the Shift. Something is gnawing away at the wood between the ceiling of this place and the roof. I find it almost relaxing to listen to the chewing—at least, I’d rather listen to that than to the sounds I sometimes hear coming from below me. It does not bear thinking about, what may be going on below me. Really, this afterword has been the only thing saving me from too many thoughts about the present. The green light is ever-present, but the clientele is not. It’s late. They’ve gone home. It’s just me and the lamp and the typewriter … and whatever is chewing above me and whatever is moving below me. And I feel feverish. I feel like I should lie down on the cot I had them bring in here. I feel like I should take a rest. But I can’t. I have to keep going on. Despite the heat. Despite the fact that I’m burning up. I have some mushrooms Duncan left behind, but I’m not sure I should eat them, so I won’t. They might help, but they might not. (Good decision! Those are weapons. If you’d eaten them, it would’ve been like eating gunpowder.)
So, instead, to stave off burning up, I’ll write about the snow. I’ll write about all of that wonderful, miraculous snow that awaited me on my return to Ambergris. Maybe the gnawing will stop in the meantime. Unless it’s in my mind, in which case it may never stop.
* * *
I returned to an Ambergris transformed by snow from semitropical city to a body covered by a white shroud. Every street, alley, courtyard, building, storefront, and motored vehicle had succumbed to the mysteries of the snow. Ambergris was not suited to white. White is the color of surrender, and Ambergris is unaccustomed to surrender. Surrender is not part of our character.
At first, the city appeared similar to dull, staid Morrow, but underneath the anonymous white coating lay the same old city, cunning and cruel as ever. Merchants sold firewood at ten times the normal price. Frankwrithe & Lewden, in a hint of the strife to come, raided a warehouse of Hoegbotton books and distributed the torn pages as tinder. Beggars contrived to look as pathetic as possible, continuing a trend that had been refined since before the advent of Trillian the Great Banker. Thieves took advantage of the icy conditions to make daring daylight purse-pinchings on homemade ice skates. Priests in the Religious Quarter preached end-of-the-world hysteria to boost dwindling congregations. Theaters rushed a number of “jungle comedies” and other warm-weather fare into production, finally dethroning Voss Bender’s Trillian, that play’s six acts too long for most theater admirers, frozen bottoms stuck to icy seats. Swans died shrieking in ice that trapped their legs. Lizards shrugged philosophically and grew fur. Sounds once dulled by a species of heat intense enough to corrode even hearing were now bright and brassy.
But I remember most the smell, or lack of it. Suddenly, the ever-present rot-mold-rain scent was missing from the air, replaced by the clean, boring smell of Morrow. It was as if Morrow had colonized a vital element of the city, presaging the war.
(Not to mention the fungi, which adapted almost as if the gray caps had planned the change in the weather. There was something unreal about seeing mushroom caps in jaunty bright colors rise through the snow cover, unaffected by the cold.)
* * *
Sybel forced me to go back to the gallery. I would have stayed in my apartment for weeks, if I’d had the choice, conveniently ignoring a few bloodstains my brother had missed when cleaning up. I no longer felt hollow, but I did feel weak, sluggish, indecisive. I didn’t have any of the normal props that used to stop me from thinking about … everything.
Sybel looked like he always looked—a faint half smile on his face, eyes that stared through you to something or somewhere else, presumably his future.
On the way to the gallery, walking through the frozen streets, Sybel turned to me, and said, “You don’t know who your friends are, do you?”
I stared at him for a second. “What are you trying to tell me?”
We were only a few minutes from the gallery at that point.
“You gave keys out to people,” he said.
“Gallery keys.”
“Yes.”
“And I shouldn’t have.”
“No. How could I stop them when they had keys of their own?”
I sighed. “Let me guess.”
* * *
Inside the gallery, the only element that remained the same was my desk, with its two dozen bills, five or six contracts, and a litter of pens obscuring its surface. The rest had been stripped bare. Those paintings least popular, hung for several months, had left the beige shadow of their passing, but otherwise, I might as well have been starting up a gallery, not losing control of one. Everyone had abandoned me, as if I were whirling so fast toward oblivion that, at some point, they were simply flung clear by my momentum.
“When did this happen?”
“Gradually, over months,” Sybel said, throwing the gallery keys on the desk and sitting in a chair. “They were pretty thorough, weren’t they?”
“They?”
“The artists. I’m fairly certain it was the artists.”
I looked around. The gallery had, in its emptiness, taken on aspects of my life. What was I to do?
“I couldn’t be here day and night,” Sybel said. Unspoken: I had parties to plan. I had a suicidal boss to worry about.
A sudden anger rose up inside of me, though I had no reason to be angry at Sybel. What could he have done?
“You just let them take all of their art?”
He shook his head. “David let them in. David’s the one who started it…”
David. Former boyfriend. A not-unpleasant memory of David and me escaping into the gallery’s back room to make love.
“Oh.” The anger left me.
Sybel stared up at me. “There’s nothing left to manage, Janice. There’s no gallery. I wish there were. But,” and he stood, “there’s nothing here for me to do. I’m not a rebuilder, I’m a manager. If you need help in the future, let me know.”
I would need help in the future. A lot of help, but he couldn’t know that now. He couldn’t know how quickly everyone’s fortunes would change.