I am writing this by lantern light in my office. As dawn begins to gray the city, I can almost see your window from where I sit. The air is sweet and cool. I have two cases full of books and other personal belongings. In a few minutes, I will leave this academy, perhaps forever. I will leave only two things behind me: in my desk, for you to take when you will, that copy of Cadimon Signal’s Musings on the Many Faces of Ambergris that you so much wanted—it was supposed to be a birthday present—and this letter, protected by our favorite hiding place. Please, if you have read this far, don’t cry. Everything will be okay. I promise.
Please do not abandon me.
Love,
Duncan
Please do not abandon me, he writes in this journal entry that awkwardly transitions into a letter that could have been written by a nineteen-year-old, which he rips out of his journal, signs, and leaves for her—only for it to return to him four years later to be reunited with its fellow pages. He did not tear out related pages and send them to her. He did not send her the page right after his tearful but triumphant farewell, the one that contained this passage: “I have lost one of my best friends. I have lost a friend because of my own stupidity. Who will understand now? Who will I be able to talk to?”
Who will understand now? Here’s the heart of it, what began to eat at Duncan. He told Bonmot so many things—sometimes in abstract, sometimes nonspecific, but still with enough detail that Bonmot could respond with all of his training and intellect. Me, I was neither historian nor priest, neither artist nor subject of art. Mary? Too young, he must have known on some level. Fine for the physical, but not to discuss such mysteries with. (Not true, and unfair, and judgmental, and unworthy behavior, even from you. I did not discuss the underground, the gray caps, my disease with her to protect her. And, yes, because she was young, but not because I didn’t think she could understand—but because I was afraid I would scare her. That she would think me a crackpot, a false prophet, a madman.)
In fact, he did not tear out the first draft of his second page, which is identical to the second draft, except for the speech he attributes to Bonmot:
There are no more lunches under the willow trees for us. You are no longer a teacher at this academy. I expect you to gather your things now and be gone before dawn. As for Mary, she’s just a child. She is as much your victim as this academy. Have you ever thought how this might hurt her? And I don’t mean your status as her teacher, but you, Duncan, you in particular. How many obsessions can you sustain in your life? How many masters can you serve? Survive?
Did he suppress this part to save Mary from hurt, to protect Bonmot from her resentment? Or to make himself look better? (It doesn’t really matter now, does it? One would think you were more intent on defending Mary than destroying her. You should decide what your purpose is.)
* * *
I thought writing all of this down would help me place events in their proper order and context. Instead, the sequencing grows hazy. I stand at the base of the stairs at Martin Lake’s party, the scarlet imprint of my hand still warm on Mary’s face, about to respond to her careless words. What did I say? I’m not sure it matters anymore. The harder I focus, the faster the sharpness I desire and deserve dissipates, as if it all happened at the same time, or backward, and we only now approach a beginning.
Is there any real reason, other than bad luck and ill-timing, that Mary and Duncan could not still be together? Is there any reason it could not have been Mary and Duncan that I walked toward down the stairs, the flesh necklace/noose undone before it ever formed, its pieces resolved into smiling, appreciative faces? The imprint of my hand on Mary’s face transformed into the loving touch of a sister-in-law? I might not be here now, the darkness of the ceiling muted only by the purple tiers of fungus that encroach at such speed. (No purple fungus ever grows with good intent in this city, Janice. You must have known that. It is a breed bred for spying, the source of myriad fragmented reports collected in the depths of the city’s underground passages.)
But words will never persuade the past. Bonmot did fire Duncan. It did signal the beginning of the end (in one sense, but only in one sense) for my brother and Mary.
I remember that Bonmot told me about it during one of our sessions in the Truffidian Cathedral. I didn’t have unbridled sex anymore, so I had, as you may have guessed, turned to “religion.” That didn’t last, either, because it had little to do with faith, but at least it gave me an excuse to spend time with Bonmot. We were standing in the very place where he later died, among the pews closest to the door.
“Janice,” he said. “I’ve had to do something. I hope you won’t hate me for it.”
“I don’t think I could hate you, Bonmot.”
“You might. I’ve had to let Duncan go. Because of Mary. I think you already know what I mean?”
For a second, it was very quiet. I was shocked. Duncan hadn’t had a chance to tell me. I hadn’t seen him in days.
“Did you really have to?” I asked. I think I was worried, at first, as much about how it might affect my relationship with Bonmot as about Duncan.
“Yes. I had to.”
He bowed his head, and we prayed.
* * *
How did Mary respond to this news? For a long time—for longer than I might have expected—she stood by Duncan. Duncan told me a week later, an echo of passion in his voice, that Mary had smuggled a letter to him through her unsuspecting parents. (Bonmot had left it up to Mary to tell her parents, and she never did.) In it, she begged him to wait for her. Either Duncan’s line of romantic blather had ensorcelled her or she found the general notion of separated lovers, forced to check their desires, tragically romantic.
“A year and I can be with her,” Duncan told me. “We’ll find an apartment. Settle down.”
“Have some kids?” I said. “Find a respectable day job? Stop skulking around belowground?”
A bitter smile twisted his face, but he did not reply.
(It may have seemed bitter to you, but I was mostly aghast at your lack of faith. I truly thought back then that Mary and I shared the same beliefs about the underground. In my dreams, I led her through those tunnels as if I were still a boy of fifteen, her sense of adventure as acute as my own.)
Mary might beg him, but Bonmot’s begging days were well behind him; the old priest would never forgive my brother. His superiors in the Truffidian hierarchy used the incident to further humiliate him within the church. Nor would the Academy as a collective of teachers forgive him. Although Bonmot made no attempt to spread the news beyond informing them that Duncan had left the staff, Duncan’s fellow instructors found out. How could they not? Their lack of forgiveness would take many forms, the worst of which would further hound my brother to the outer edge of his chosen field. (I was more concerned about getting from them the data they’d collected while working unwittingly on my many projects.) Many (not so many; certainly not, I thought then, enough to scuttle any future career aspirations) of his former colleagues wrote for history journals, or edited them, or had written books. With them as gatekeepers, with their long memories, it became less and less likely that Duncan’s theories would ever find print in respectable publications again. (Respectable? Disreputable, really. Hundreds of pages of print a year devoted to concealing or sidestepping the truth. They were on the fringe the entire time and didn’t know it.) Thus, Duncan’s excommunication from Blythe further isolated him from anyone but Mary. (Mary and you, which certainly wasn’t my idea of a happy family.) Duncan’s journal reached new levels of bathos (it was genuine sadness at the time, but even proper melancholy is worthy of scorn in retrospect) in listing those who had abandoned him, in pages and pages of affronted pride. I’ll spare you all but a snippet of it.