Since that first foot, I have found it hard to resist having more made when I can afford it, or carving them myself. In my more whimsical moments, I’m tempted to leave a trail of feet through the city. One day a foot may be all that is left of me.
“Do you like it?” I asked Duncan the first time I showed it off to him.
“It’s very much you,” Duncan said. (I’d had too many strange experiences with my flesh to be too empathetic. The sloughing off of flesh, the losing and regaining of it, had become too normal an experience.)
“It itches,” I told him. And this is still true now. The foot, with its lithe straps and silver clasps, itches like hell at the oddest times.
“I itch all the time,” Duncan said, not to be outdone.
On that particular day, down by the docks, watching the ships come in, Duncan was very pale. You could see, if you looked closely, that the hair on his head was not really hair ruffled by a breeze, but a black fungus lazily swaying back and forth. There was a further suggestion of movement under his coat. I doubt anyone else saw it—or wanted to see it.
“Do you miss him?” I asked Duncan.
“I miss him terribly,” he replied. (I missed the everyday normalcy Sybel had brought to my life. Dealing with you, Janice, was an up-and-down experience, often full of melodrama. As much as I loved Bonmot, my conversations with him had always had some religious subtext. But speaking to Sybel was so natural and effortless and free of judgment that I didn’t even miss the experience until it was over.)
“If it itches really badly,” he said, “I could probably find a way to grow you a fungal replacement.”
I ignored him and asked, “How’s Mary?”
He didn’t answer.
* * *
I had to stop to clean off the typewriter keys. The green fungus had become too insidious. The keys weren’t striking paper, but bunching up in emerald moss, the paper itself reflecting a series of ever more vegetative marks. I couldn’t get it all off, but enough of it is gone that I can continue typing for a while. I’m not sure when I will run out of time; there are so many factors to consider. When will the patience of the Spore’s owner run out? When will I tire of what increasingly seems a pointless exercise? When will something crawl out of the hole in the ground behind me and put an end to my speculations?
I think it’s morning outside, but I haven’t bothered to check. I had thought it was lunchtime earlier, but it turned out that my stomach had it all wrong. If it is morning, the sky is probably gray and undistinguished, flecked with rain. It’s that time of year when sudden showers appear and make of the city stark outlines, robbing it of color and texture. A welter of umbrellas appears on the streets and people walk quickly to their destinations, with no appreciation for anything around them.
4
Afterwords. Afterwards. Afterwar.
The war had been jarring, numbing, senseless. In its aftermath, the balance of power remained much as it had before all the bloodshed. The Hoegbottons controlled Ambergris and F&L controlled Morrow and Sophia’s Island but lacked the military and political will to enforce their ridiculous tariffs. The Kalif’s mauled troops retreated across the River Moth even as their merchants advanced to secure deals with the Hoegbottons to rebuild the city and import new products. (Oddly enough, the Kalif’s troops could be said to have ultimately achieved their goal, if not in the preferred way. For, after all, hadn’t they liberated the citizens of Ambergris from chaos and tyranny through their sacrifice?)
After the war, Ambergris forgot the real enemy—Hoegbotton & Sons still railed against Frankwrithe & Lewden or the Kalif, but provided no warning against the gray caps. People gratefully went along with this mass denial. Wasn’t it easier to blame F&L than an amorphous, faceless enemy that hid underground and attacked seemingly at random? (To be fair, the still unknown way in which F&L had acquired fungal weapons confused the issue—F&L did look like the sole instigator. After all, didn’t the gray caps periodically erupt from their hidey-holes during the Festival anyway?)
The terrible, cold beauty of the truth appealed to no one. Every few weeks, for several years, one or two, or three or four, people were killed by a leftover fungal bomb or a new one planted by someone—the gray caps or F&L, I assume, but who could tell the difference? H&S did nothing to prevent this, and tried hard to stop Lacond from reporting it. We were a city and a people unable to face our coming annihilation, incensed over an enemy that posed not a quarter of the threat. In a way, we lived in a fairy tale, convinced that someone else’s actions or inactions might save us. As day after day passed without Ambergris being invaded, we flinched less and less, let down our guard. No one was going to destroy the city—only rumors could do that, the thinking went, only idle talk. If we pretended otherwise, the enemy could not creep out at night and make us all disappear. Permanence had become a thing from the past.
(I didn’t think much had changed, but if it had, it had changed for the reason most eloquently put by the historian Edgar Rybern: namely, that barbaric institutions and individuals can benefit society, while “civilization” can, in its most benign forms, prove barbaric. This led me to two conclusions germane to the war. First, that the very act of F&L coming into contact with the gray caps and then into contact with H&S had irrevocably changed all three parties; and second, that stated goals aside, all three of these institutions have been thrown off-kilter by the war. Now, whether they realize it or not, each new decision pulls them slightly further away from their original purpose. What effect this might have, I could not tell you.)
* * *
For Duncan personally, the end of the war meant two things: that Lacond was available to help him limp back into a shadow career in print—it became apparent at war’s end that Lacond could only keep one of us on, and, even if I had wanted to stay, it wasn’t going to be me—and that Mary’s patience with him was almost at an end.
The slow withdrawal, the retreat from love, went on at the same time Lacond began recruiting Duncan for his eccentric obsessions. (No more eccentric than my own obsessions, Janice. Lacond and I understood each other in a way that made me no longer feel quite so alone.)
How did Mary withdraw? Let me count the ways. She no longer tolerated my brother’s erratic schedule. She no longer found his eccentricities endearing. She no longer found his fungal diseases tragic, his endurance of them brave. (I’m not sure she ever felt that way about my fungal diseases. It was more that she put up with their side effects to be with me.) The small apartment they shared became claustrophobic. Duncan’s journal skirts the reason behind the feelings:
I cannot find my inspiration in this place—I have to go down to the Spore or Lacond’s apartment to write, or I just stare at the page. I don’t know why my apartment has become so stifling, but it has. There’s nothing in it to spur me on to create. Except Mary, of course.
But Mary spent more and more time with friends. Sometimes she even stayed at her parents’ house. Duncan had no chance, no choice. How could he? He didn’t have the experience to combat it, to see the signs. To Duncan, sadly enough, the only way to get her back was to keep showing her the truth, even though it was clear to anyone with any sense that he’d need to start lying to her if he wanted to keep her. (A cynical view that would only serve as a short-term solution. And I was neither so naive nor Mary so experienced as you make out.) Every time he showed her the truth, she pushed him farther away. Duncan wrote in his journal: