It will sound odd, but I realize now that if I had looked closely enough, I could have seen physical evidence of the beginning of Mary’s attacks on Duncan’s books. Stare long enough, hard enough, with the appropriate intensity, and Duncan’s theories were all there, woven into the brick, the stone, the wood, even inhabiting the wind that came down and whispered through narrow streets backed up with rubble. And, in the sheer remembered violence of bloodstains, burnt wood, crippled brick: Mary’s retort, her refutation of him. As Mary walked through some other part of the city that day, through some other aftermath, what did she see? What could she see but the embodiment of her father’s Nativism theory? Everything cataloged as the most natural of disasters. (Truly a stretch, Janice, if ever there was one!)
I understand now, remembering my walk through the city, that the glittering flesh necklace surrounded a neck that supported a head filled with maggoty ideas. Filled with images that do not connect, and which will always make it impossible for Sabon to recognize the truth in Duncan’s theories. She has found her own personal history; she has written it to drown out the truth.
In a sense, almost every word, every sentence, every paragraph she has written about Ambergris since the war has been an attempt to undo my memories—what I saw during that war, what I saw that night with Sybel beside me, what I saw afterward, walking through the city. And, of course, everything she saw belowground. (This is nonsense. Mary reacted no differently than many other Ambergrisians. A deep sense of denial pervaded the city, but how can you blame any of its inhabitants? They still had to live on in the city. It must have been much worse after the Silence. Imagine your loved ones being spirited away one night and you unable to do anything except go about your daily business and hope that you, too, would not be subject to the same fate.)
* * *
Eventually, on that first morning after the war, I found myself at Blythe Academy. I had hopped and hobbled my way there after an hour or two, my journey aimless and funereal. An ache and an emptiness had begun to gnaw away at me. A glimpse of the familiar acted like an anchor.
For some reason, I had assumed that the desecration of the Truffidian Cathedral would have extended to Blythe Academy as well, but this was not the case. I saw a few broken windows, two overturned benches, an area of burnt grass, and a singed section of roof, but the willow trees remained the same as always. Priests and teachers bustled across the lawn, cleaning up the debris. The air of activity, of honest labor, gave me hope.
I sat down on a bench, hoping that somehow the memory of those long-ago conversations that had so calmed me then might calm me now.
Instead, a shadow fell across me. I looked up, and there stood Bonmot, staring down at me with a grim smile upon his lips. His face was grimy with soot or dirt. He had a long, shallow cut running down his left cheek. Bonmot, in that moment, looked invincible, even though he had become more vulnerable than I could then know. (Whose faith wouldn’t falter for at least a moment in the midst of such inexplicable carnage?)
His grim smile softened to concern as he saw the condition of my foot—or, rather, the lack of a foot.
“You’re alive,” I said, in wonder. By now, the lack of sleep, the terror of what I had gone through, had taken me somewhere else entirely.
“You need to see a doctor,” Bonmot said. He crouched down beside me, gently cupped his hand under my calf to better examine the wound.
“Not really,” I said. “There’s nothing to be done now. It’s mostly cauterized. I washed the rest of it. The flesh is clean. I spent all night with a mob of corpses in the Truffidian Cathedral. You may wish to investigate.”
He bowed his head, looking at my stump. “I know. I’ve heard. You were there?”
“Yes,” I said. “Pretending to be dead. Please, don’t worry about the leg.”
He stared at me. “Janice, you need to have it looked at anyway.”
I laughed, an edge of bitterness in my voice. “I suppose,” I said, “but who will look at it? I’ve been limping around this broken old city of ours all morning. And I’ve seen little that isn’t mangled, mashed, cracked, twisted, or dead.”
“It won’t take long to rebuild,” he said. “You’ll be surprised. All of this will be behind us someday.” A pause. “Have you heard from Mary?”
This, then, was the closest he could come to asking about Duncan.
“No, I haven’t,” I said.
(And you wouldn’t, not for a few days. I had returned Mary to our apartment, which had been ransacked but not ruined, and we took up again the unhealthy non-bliss of our domestic lives together—a little more silent around each other, a little more reserved, a little more distant. She became fond of saying I was “suffocating” her in those first few days after the war. I had no response. I needed comfort from her. I needed her.)
I started to cry. I was still talking, my face still set in a half-grimace, half-smile, but I was crying. “Sybel’s dead,” I said.
And then, even though he had a thousand responsibilities that day, Bonmot pulled me to him and held me as, sobbing, I told him about all of the dead.
* * *
The losses kept piling up. When I visited my gallery, I found the inside had been gutted by fire. All of my inventory had disappeared yet again, taken by looters or flames. The artists blamed me, even though I was convinced some of them had stolen their own work off my walls. I wasted time. I wasted money. I thought I could resurrect the gallery, but without Sybel, I was lost. I did not have the requisite number of “friends with money,” as he had liked to call them. I reopened for a short time, but I could no longer attract even mediocre talents. I was left with a half-dozen elderly landscape oil painters as clients. Clearly, I was doomed.
Looking back, the war signaled the end of so many things that the dying throes of my gallery must be considered no more than a buried footnote in the history of that period. For example, the war certainly ended my right foot—there’s no doubt about that. I’m tempted, whenever someone asks me what I remember about the war, to point to my grainy toes and say, “Ask my foot.”
As a hidden perk of so many people having lost limbs, the art of wooden limb construction had reached new heights. I personally picked out the wood for my replacement from the very best strangler figs on the west side of the River Moth, near where Sybel had grown up. My foot might even have been made from a tree Sybel had once climbed. Maudlin, I know, but I don’t care about the sentimentality of that thought.
I had Judith Aquelus, a sculptress, collaborate with the wooden limb experts at Similian’s Arm & Leg Shop, to create the unique artifact that is my right foot. I had Judith carve a miniature, stylized version of the opera house stage on it on which the Kalif’s soldiers could be seen, making their acting debut.
No amputee should be seen in public without a Judith Aquelus creation. A foot and a cane: the perfect accessories for such necessary tasks as walking to the grocery store for a loaf of bread! With my cane and my new wooden foot, I have attained a whole new level of eccentricity. Why, I’ve become my own work of art—my only option, considering that creating art and selling art had proven so unprofitable for me.
The funny thing is, the green fungus that has colonized my typewriter and makes it harder and harder to complete this afterword has also begun to infiltrate my wooden foot. I am becoming a rather small forest. In my own way, perhaps I’m experiencing what Duncan went through. (Dead wood does not equal living flesh. There’s nothing to compare to that heart-choking prickle of another life entering your skin and flesh.)