But it hadn’t killed me physically—not as Duncan was being killed physically. That second year of his romance with Mary Sabon coincided with a definite worsening of his fungal disease. Sometimes it left him so weak and drained that he could not teach his classes—although this did not mean that if his disease went into remission by nightfall he would not take the Path of Hypocrisy right up to Mary’s window. These symptoms varied with the seasons, as shown by a brief examination of the “symptom lists” he kept:
SPRING
Vomiting
Diarrhea
Cramps
Dry mouth
Shortness of breath
Violent mood swings
SUMMER
Dizziness
Blurred vision
Shivering
Profuse sweating
Excessive salivating
Violent mood swings
FALL
Vomiting
Diarrhea
Cramps
Violent mood swings
WINTER
Delirium
Blurred vision
Nausea
Violent mood swings
Duncan was convinced he had contracted these symptoms as a result of his encounter with the Machine. I was convinced the “violent mood swings” had nothing to do with his fungal affliction and everything to do with a malady known as “Mary Sabonitis.”
Luckily for their relationship, which otherwise might have been punctuated by episodes more suited to a madhouse or a sick house than an institution of learning, the symptoms came and went like the summer storms that had always plagued Ambergris. (Ironic, that. Because now there is no slower turning to the world than with this disease, this gift in flux, in flow. I might as well be turning into a tree, putting down roots. The yearning in my flesh calls out to the yearning in the ground. Nothing can be made that is not a part of me, that will not eventually become me. “I want for nothing and hunger naught,” as some crackpot old saint named Tonsure once said before they buried him underground.)
Admittedly, his disease sometimes brought with it great joy, no doubt also caused by the fungi. An episode during the second year of his affair with Mary best describes the extremity of effects that his body could force from him:
I felt a slight disorientation that morning when I woke in my teacher’s quarters. A kind of half-hearted dizziness, a prickling in the skin: a harbinger of encroaching symptoms. However, the sensation faded, so I went to my classes anyway. I remember seeing Mary in the back row of my “Famous Martyrs” class at the exact second that my mouth went as dry as the blackboard. I remember thinking it was just her presence that had affected me. For the first twenty minutes I was fine, livening up my lecture by telling some old jokes about Living Saints that Cadimon Signal had related to me at the religious academy in Morrow. Then, suddenly, I could feel the spores infiltrating my head, my limbs—they clambered over my sinuses, got between me and my own skin. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. The spores began to seethe across my eyes, bringing a stinging green veil over my sight. I did the only thing I could do, the thing I have learned to do, still the hardest thing. I relaxed my arms, my legs, my neck, my head, so that I entrusted my balance to the fungi … and damned if I didn’t stay up. Damned if I didn’t continue to live, although I felt like I was drowning. I sweated from every pore. I felt nauseous, disoriented, dizzy. I felt as if the gray caps were searching for me across a vast distance—I could feel their gaze upon me, like a black cloud, a storm of eyes … and still the tendrils spread across my vision, blinding me … and then, as soon as they had finished their march from east and west, meeting somewhere around the bridge of my twitching nose, all of the discomfort faded and I could … breathe again. Not only could I breathe, but I was flying, soaring, my body as light as a single spore, and yet so powerful that I felt as if I could hold up the entire Academy with one hand. A fierce joy leaked into me, sped from my feet to my waist to my arms, my head. I could not have been happier had I been the sun, shining down on everyone from on high. And in that happiness, I did not even really exist, except as a connection, a bridge, an archway, linked with a hundred thousand other archways that extended up and down my body in a perfect crisscrossing pattern of completeness. And I cannot help feeling, even as the spores just as suddenly relinquished their hold and left me gasping and white, that what radiated into me was a thank-you from the thousands that comprise the invisible community that has become my body. (Later, Mary told me that I had kept talking through the entire episode, albeit with slurred speech.)
Do I believe him? I’ve seen too much not to. But, then, Sabon saw exactly what I saw, and she couldn’t be bothered to take the leap. She decided, somewhere along the way, to ignore, to miss, to go blind, to see through.
After Duncan had recounted some of these “episodes” to me, it was hard to laugh when he began to sign his infrequent postcards, “Your Brother, the Fungus Garden.” (But I was—I was a transplanted fungal garden torn from the subterranean gardens of the gray caps. As the seasons came and went, I was the end of the journey for a great exodus, a community of exiles that colonized me and tried to observe the same seasonal rituals—to bloom and ripen and die in accordance with their ancestry. They were homesick, but they made do with what they had: me. And I, poor sap, was in turn able to experience with each season some new explosion of fertility, selfish enough in my pleasure to endure the counterbalanced pain—and to only hope that when in remission my affliction was not contagious. In this way, I remained connected to the underground even though absent from it. One day I will dissolve into the world, will become a gentle spray of spores, will settle on the sidewalk and on trees, on grass and soil, and yet still be—watchful and aware.)
Perhaps more disquieting was that, unknown to me, each week brought Sabon’s flesh necklace, and thus Duncan’s final humiliation, closer.
I had an intimation of the future when, two years into her relationship with Duncan, Sabon finally visited me at my gallery, probably at Duncan’s request. (No—she decided to do that on her own. You were my only family besides Mom. She was curious. It’s your guilt showing through here—that you weren’t supportive, that you were so negative despite never having met her. It strikes me now, Janice, that as much as we talked over the years perhaps we never talked about the right things.) You might well ask why she waited so long, why I waited so long, but I think she must have realized how deeply I disapproved of my brother sleeping with a student. (I’ll grant you this now: you seem to have a sixth sense for impending tragedy. At the time, it just seemed like pettiness on your part.)
By then, I had begun to shed even my less respectable artists. But my gallery still maintained an aura of the respectable. I kept it Morrow-clean and replaced each departed painting with some admirable imitation. After that strange cold winter, the weather in Ambergris had been near-perfect for more than eighteen months. Good weather meant more walk-ins, and more walk-ins meant more sales. A few more tourists and I might again be as green as mint-scented, tree-lined Albumuth Boulevard.
So at first I saw Mary Sabon as only another potential buyer. Besides, from Duncan’s feverish descriptions, I would have expected someone taller, wiser, more voluptuous. She was short but not slight, her frame neither fat nor thin, and from her shiny red hair to her custom-made emerald-green shoes, from the scent of perfume to the muted red dress that hung so naturally off her shoulders, she radiated a sense of wealth and health. (She dressed up for you, Janice, in her Truffidian Cathedral best.)