I have made Mary Sabon, deservedly so, as much of a villain in this afterword as the gray caps, and yet I could as easily have offered her an escape—even a fragile excuse could have absolved her for the way my heart feels right now. If only she had offered up something of herself. But she never has: you could pore over her books for a hundred years and never find anything personal. Whether Duncan had a better idea of her true nature is debatable. It is debatable that Sabon knew her own heart. (No—she knew. She knew who she was more perfectly than anyone I have ever met. I think that is why I loved her, and why she did what she did.)
At the party, after I had slapped her—even then she did not offer anything personal. All she did was wave back those who would have otherwise taken me away. She waved back the onrush of beads from her flesh necklace. They retreated, gleaming and muttering.
“What is it you really want, Janice?” she said, smiling. “Would you like the past back? Would you like to be successful again? Would you prefer you weren’t a washed-up has-been with so few prospects she had to agree to help out with a party for an artist she used to agent?”
I had an answer, but it wasn’t what Sabon expected. No, it was far more than Sabon expected.
* * *
But I should probably start over, even here, and step back into the role of brittle chronicler of that which I would have liked to influence …
Dry facts, as dry facts will, have mushroomed and moistened in recent years, along with the popularity of her books, so that now I can enter any bookstore or library and discover information about her childhood—inspiration, education, perversions, diversions, etc.
Her books, their titles like curses—The Inflammation of Aan Tribal Wars, The Limited Influence of Gray Caps Upon Ambergris, A Revisionist History of the City—parrot each other when opened to the biographical note, with selective information added to the end of successive notes like the accretion of silt in the Moth River Delta. Why, I happen to have a couple of her books right here. Imagine that.
The notes from her third book, Reflections on Ambergris History, and her latest, Confessions of a Revisionist: The Collected Essays of Mary Sabon, differ only by degree. I have combined them below for ease of dissection.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Mary Sabon has lived in Ambergris for her entire life. During the War of the Houses, she received her history degree from the Blythe Academy, where her teachers included author Duncan Shriek. (1) Sabon has written 16 (2) books over her distinguished twenty-year (3) career, including The Role of Chance in the History of the Southern Cities; Trillian as Reformer: The Influence of Pig Cartels on Ambergrisian History; (4) Magical Ambergris: The Legacy of Manzikert IX; Nature Studies with My Father; The Gray Caps’ Role in Modern Literature: The Dilemma of Dradin, in Love; (5) and Cinsorium: Rethinking the Myth of the Gray Caps. (6) At 47, (7) Sabon remains (8) the most vital and beloved of Ambergris’s many historians, shedding light on history and her fellow historians alike. (9) Her early interest in nature studies no doubt arises from her parents David Sabon and Rebecca Verden-Sabon, the former a noted naturalist best known for having coined the term “Nativism,” and the latter a gifted nature illustrator. (10)
Perhaps my annotations can be of help regarding this reeling litany of Mary’s accomplishments:
1) … Blythe Academy, where her teachers included author Duncan Shriek. Over the years, Sirin has decided whether to include Duncan based on two factors: (1) To what extent the book guts Duncan’s theories, and (2) The level of Duncan’s limited notoriety at the time of publication. If the book openly attacks a theory or theories in Duncan’s work—at least half have—and makes that aggression its thesis, the phrase disappears from the sentence, a phantom limb waiting to be reattached. As for notoriety, now that Duncan has disappeared, possibly for good, I imagine he will magically reappear in the author’s biography, trapped there for all time. (Or magically reappear right here.)
2) Sabon has written 16 books … Alas, the number continues to rise, each new eviscerating tome kept in print by a necromancy beyond my understanding, and each leading to a more complete flesh necklace. What is Sabon’s appeal to readers? Why is she always more popular than Duncan? (And why should the answer interest us? Get on with the underground adventures.) In page after page of exquisite prose, much of which I cannot bring myself to read, Sabon has, over the years, reassured her readers, made them feel intelligent, offered rational commonsense explanations for even the most miraculous and profound of events. (Although even she cannot explain away the Silence!) It doesn’t seem to matter if her answers are wrong or incomplete. It does not matter that her answers often diminish the complexities of the world—leach it of its sorrow and its joy in favor of a comforting numbness, a comforting sameness: the husk of a starfish, not its living body. (And yet, you must admit, Sabon enlivens the corpses with wit and glamour.)
Duncan, conversely, liked to provoke his readers, poke them with a sharpened stick, to emphasize the supreme unknowable irony of the world and then, in marching toward the truth, unearth new mysteries, so that every so-called solution begged a hundred questions. The reader left Duncan’s books shaken and unmoored from what he or she had always taken for granted.
In short, if reduced to a single point of punctuation, Sabon’s work would have been a period (sometimes an emphatic exclamation mark!), Duncan’s a question mark. Closed doors. Open doors. All shrouded, all revealed. (It could just be that I wrote bad books.) The average reader likes to return home after a long journey, not be left stranded in the middle of nowhere, with dark coming on and the printed pages a desert devoid of comfort. (You make my books sound like mirthless lumps of coal hidden at the bottom of a dry well, Janice! I refuse to believe you didn’t see the humor, the enthusiasm, in my books. Replace “desert” with “a mysterious foreign land,” with all the danger and excitement that entails.)
3) … over her distinguished twenty-year career. Unfortunately, this number also continues to rise, although riddled with inaccuracy. Seven years after Sabon graduated from Blythe, the author’s note read “ten.” Ten years after her graduation, the note read “fifteen.” Regardless, I’m sure Bonmot was always glad to see a mention of Blythe Academy bereft of any hint of scandal.
4) The Influence of Pig Cartels on Ambergrisian History … The most unintentionally humorous book I have ever read. At its core, Sabon’s atrocity is based on Duncan’s observation in an article for the Ambergrisians for the Original Inhabitants Society’s Real History Newsletter that Trillian the Great Banker fell from power due to his battle with the leader of a powerful pig cartel over the favors of a woman (you can’t be sure my mention sparked her book—the anecdote is, more or less, common knowledge), which prompted Sabon to devote a 175-page book to the futile task of trying to convince the reader that pig cartels have wielded immense power throughout Ambergrisian history—and all the sentences that I read at least, are as breathlessly long as this one. (I admit, the book did bewilder me, as did its popularity. But we’re all entitled to one bad book. I’m sure the pig cartels were flattered, at the very least.)
5) The Gray Caps’ Role in Modern Literature: The Dilemma of Dradin, in Love … The only dilemma, to my way of thinking, being how to dignify as “literature” such a collection of angst, stupidity, and old wives’ tales. At least Sabon left my brother out of this one.