Starring: Various & Sundry Talents—as available
A Wicked “Mutual Satyricon” of Both Parties to the Current Conflict, whilst Containing a “Poignant Love Affair” Stolen Whole from The Distant Past, by way of Subterfuge and Subplot. An Opera—with what Music can be Spared From The War Effort—Overseen by Sarah Gallendrace, the Genius Behind the Production of Voss Bender’s Opera Trillian.
Price of admission negotiable at the door.
* * *
In hindsight, no matter what happened, the opera would be the one great success of the war, the only sign that there might still be a city called Ambergris afterward.
The city at that time—after more than two years of conflict—had begun to tear itself apart, like a beast that hates itself with a passion born of long familiarity. Every night, the deafening thunder of bombardment, the lights in the sky—the purple, red, or green of fungal bombs—the continuous, monotonous noise, so febrile, soaking into the very ground so that even the strange new flocks of crows, come to peck at our dead, became married to it, their cries the perfect mimic of fungal mortar fire. (No one knew whether they were about to duck death or bird shit.) And in the morning: the self-inflicted wounds, buildings sliced in half or crumbled into dust, the great, slashing scars in the earth …
In the weeks before the announcement of the opera—ragged hand-lettered posters nailed to charred posts and crumbling walls—a fear had begun to overcome many of us: a fear that Ambergris, as a place or an idea, could not last, that it might fall for the first time, and fall forever. With the fear came a terror of our own mortality that we had put aside through the first years of the war. With the evidence all around us that the city itself might die, we could no longer ignore thoughts of our own individual fates. Now we all seemed to shine with a clarity that imbued our forms with a figurative kind of light, a light we had not had before. It shone out through our eyes, our mouths, our movements. It made us all noble, I suppose, this fatalism, in a disheveled, unwashed way. (Such a lovely way to put it, but all I saw was grime and dirt and blood and death. The only real beauty lay underground, and it was a deadly beauty. How strange to be caught between such extremes.)
When Hoegbotton & Sons and Frankwrithe & Lewden came together at Borges Bookstore the week before the opera to announce a ceasefire, we all relaxed a little. We all let down our guard. If they could call a ceasefire for an opera, then perhaps they might one day call a ceasefire for more important things.
It had been a hard (not to mention dangerous) two years for Duncan and me, chasing after this or that story. We needed the rest. We needed the comfort. (The opera occurred, I felt later, almost out of the collective consciousness of the city—an impulse toward a remembered harmony Ambergris had never really known. When I heard the rumors of the opera’s impending production, I thought of them as horrible lies, intended to make us hope. It never occurred to any of us that one night House Hoegbotton and House Frankwrithe & Lewden would find themselves entangled in a temporary peace, and we would find ourselves in front of the Trillian Opera House.)
* * *
The night of the opera, we formed a party of five: me, Sybel, our employer James Lacond in the middle, Duncan, and Mary. Sybel, Lacond, and my brother served as an impregnable barrier to any potential unrest involving myself and the Lady Sabon. Sybel had recently reentered my life as a runner for Lacond and sometimes stayed at my apartment, just like old times.
“An opera?” Sybel had said when I told him. “Is there a building left standing to stage it in?”
Miracle of miracles, the Trillian Opera House stood conspicuously intact between two mounds of red fungi—seething rubble that had once been a bank and a restaurant. Granted, a huge wedge-shaped gouge (the classic indication of a fungal bomb) broke the opera house’s skin, running from the roof down to the second floor and exposing the rough-hewn timbers that formed the building’s skeleton. Such a minor wound, compared to so many buildings that had collapsed, unable to withstand the insidious veins of invading fungus.
It was dusk and the blood clot of a sun sawed through the opera house’s wound, lit the street with a deep orange light that I had never seen before. We waded through this light, our party and many others approaching the opera house. A smell permeated the street that made us anxious to get inside—the all-too-familiar stench of mold, afterbirth of some fungal weapon, fired a week ago or a day ago or an hour ago. One could never tell.
The doors, unharmed, swung open on their rusty gilded hinges, ready to receive us all, whether Hoegbotton, Lewden, or neutral. No one would be turned away who wanted a seat, even though certain seats would require more bartering than others. (Tickets in such a context would have been too specific a madness. It was such an odd experience to enter the opera house that night, in that context, after so many years of stealing away at lunch for a performance, or taking students there for an assignment, or going with you, Janice.)
As I recall, Mary and I looked magnificent in our sequined dresses, perfumed and powdered. I had taken from a safe place the finest of my outfits from the height of the New Art’s popularity. A curving neckline. An audacious black hat. Shoes made from lizard and mole skin. A handbag of a texture and design rare in any but the most southern of the Southern Isles. My hair was still a bit of a mess—that could not be helped; scarcely a mirror survived in the city, most fragmented by bombardment or wrinkled by filaments of fungi. For me, wearing such clothes reminded me of what had been, which made me sad—but also made me stand taller, for back in my glory days I had practically owned the opera house. I cannot remember what Mary wore, but whatever she wore, it could only presage future glory.
Mary and Sybel and I had one thing in common: none of us had succumbed to any of the fungal diseases that had so ravaged the general population as a side effect of the ceaseless bombardments. The same could not be said for many of those who surrounded us as we jostled our way through the door.
Toad-like James Lacond, ever-present cigar between his lips—his usual Nicean Reserve—had a patch of tendrils, a brilliant green, growing off the left side of his balding head. Nothing in his sour demeanor, however, revealed even the slightest discomfort. (As always, for a fat man he moved with surprising grace.) “Lie down with the gray caps,” he was fond of saying, “and you make your peace with them, in one way or another.”
My brother, however, tight-lipped and nervous (because I expected, with no truce yet spoken or implied, that you and Mary would fight the entire evening; why, the war was at times the least of my worries, even though I could sense the gray caps in the floorboards, their symbols and signs everywhere), showed more of the strain. A silvery-purple “birthmark” writhed upon his forearm like a living tattoo. Who knew if his clothes hid some greater embarrassment? (They didn’t. I could now maintain control, at least for a while. Had I manifested in my full fungal state, it would have cleared out the opera house.)
Some of those around us had even incorporated their misfortunes into their costumes. As we walked into the antechamber, stairs on left and right leading up and down, the gold-painted walls and somber red curtains unable to hide the gouges in the floor, the gutted, silent bar awash with signs of flame, we encountered these fashion marvels. The full extent of Ambergrisian ingenuity or insanity became clear. One woman had actually created a body-length trellis over which to cultivate the deep blue fungi ravishing her, the fronds forming a full dress, complete with train. Others had fashioned earrings or other accessories from their symptoms. (It says something that we had come far enough not to be shocked by what we saw that night. How quickly people adapted to such extremes; and how, secretly, I was glad of it, for it made me normal for a time, no more or less afflicted than anyone else, especially in Mary’s eyes. Later, of course, it would help me not at all, once the “ordinary” citizens of Ambergris conveniently forgot the strangeness, the surreal quality, of the city during wartime.)