* * *
But I could never truly escape Duncan, just as Duncan could not escape himself. And ultimately I wouldn’t have wanted to. Except for my father’s writings, Duncan is my only link to my father. Duncan is still here, I hope, in the flesh, while Dad speaks to me in shards of meaning gleaned from the fragments Duncan kept of his journals, his scribblings and essays. All of it is work-related; Dad appears never to have written anything that was not related to work, or, at least, such writings weren’t found when Mom cataloged his things.
I’ve gone through all of it twice before lugging it here along with anything else I wanted to salvage from Duncan’s apartment. Most of Dad’s papers are so dry, so dusty, that I’ve begun to understand that he lived in his own little specialized world. His work galvanized and, perhaps, electrified, other historians with its sense of rarefied knowledge, but there’s nothing for the rest of us to hold on to. Sometimes I think Duncan took it upon himself to “translate” our dad’s work into a form that might be palatable to the public. (I thought maybe he knew, maybe something in the papers would solve my mysteries. It never did.) Sometimes I think that Duncan would have been better off becoming a plumber, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a merchant, a missionary.
Nothing of our personal history made it into Dad’s work, even though that history had some relevance. Some said, not without a hint of mockery, that you could trace our family’s history on my mother’s side all the way back to the founding of Ambergris by John Manzikert—that one of the anonymous, unremarked-upon members of the ship’s crew, George Bliss, had been our distant great-to-the-umpteenth-power grandfather. Over the years, among our shadow relatives—aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, “shadow” because they lived in far-off cities like Nicea and we saw them rarely—an entire mythology had grown up around Bliss. Stories of Bliss fighting off gray caps, of his friendship with Samuel Tonsure before Tonsure disappeared, vague references to the underground—all apocryphal, of course. (Apocryphal? Maybe, but I enjoyed those stories growing up. Those stories reaffirmed my birthright to crawl around in dimly lit places.)
Dad used to joke that he had married Mom as part of his research into the history of the city.
“Your mother, children,” he said once, “figures prominently in my current research. She’s fodder for my essays. Certain experiments, certain experiments cannot be conducted without her—or, if conducted, do not”—and he stared pointedly at Mom and then back at us—“yield the same results.”
Sometimes when he said this, he would hold her close from behind, nuzzle her neck. Mom would give a sly, quick smile then, before pretending to be offended as she pulled away from him, and I remember that smile, because it gave me the first clue that there might be an adult world existing above or on top of the one in which we dwelt as children.
Mom had a problem laughing at herself; she never knew if people were laughing with her or at her, so she never fully gave herself up to it with other people—Dad was the only one who could make her laugh in a way that seemed effortless rather than forced.
As for whether first-generation Ambergrisian blood flows through our veins, I don’t know, but I think our dad believed it did. (And if it didn’t before, Janice, the city probably flows through my veins now, in altered form, whether I want it to or not. An entire world flows through my veins these days.)
* * *
While upstairs Sirin worked on making Mary the flavor of the decade and downstairs I labored at scraping out a living, Duncan fleshed out his theories and his articles, which would one day culminate, or dissolve, in his Early History of Ambergris tour guide book. (Or at least culminate in the unexpurgated version that has still never seen print.)
In those days, sentences crawled out of Duncan’s skin, paragraphs exhaled with each breath. On a winter’s morning, you could almost see them forming in the white smoke of his speech. (For all the good it did me—most of the sentences and paragraphs didn’t coalesce into longer works, or if they did, I sacrificed them to the AFTOIS newsletter.)
Sometimes I thought the Spore of the Gray Cap made him prolific—that in a space neither above nor belowground, he felt in the most perfect balance—and thus balanced, ballasted, he could write without self-consciousness. Certainly, the owner loved his presence—“fringe” or not, they’d never had a historian use their tavern as a work space. Of course, Duncan brought more business with him than I ever did, in the form of his fellow crackpots. Lacond even indulged for a time, before his illness made that impossible.
The following note in Duncan’s journal exemplifies his approach:
Should the historian’s personal life happen to coincide in some way with the history he has chosen to write about—if the personal history “doubles” the public history—then an alchemy occurs whereby the historian, in a sense, becomes the history. That is, once rendered in all the signs and symbols at the historian’s command, the history he has written becomes, for him, the story of his own life. This fact may not be obvious to the reader except in flashes and flickers of reflected thought, where the passion of the historian for the story peers out, naked, from the page. There, for a flicker of a moment, we find the historian exposed, if only the world decides to correctly interpret the clues. (I didn’t write this. I was quoting another historian. I can’t even remember which one.)
In expressing this theory—a theory that calls for the historian to internalize a selected portion of history as part of his or her life; or, more specifically, to map historical events to personal events—Duncan was deeply influenced by the work of the idiosyncratic Nicean philosopher-historian Edgar Rybern. Rybern believed that the personal politics of each individual distorts their view of history. As Rybern wrote in his book Approaches to History (a book Sabon violently disapproved of, even during her days at the Academy):
Such a person never merely traces the outline of the past. Texts do not sit side by side on the shelf, but intermingle, entering into conflict and confluence with one another until the probable emerges from the impossible. Reduced to rubble, such sources provide the raw building material for a theory of greater import and durability. However, the story that emerges from this process does not interest such a historian. The tale told is mere preamble to explanation, preamble to a more personal theory. In such a process, the chronology and lineage of the acts depicted in the narrative depend on the prejudices and experiences of the individual’s psyche, and the subconscious impulses embedded therein.
Based on Rybern’s musings, Duncan began to ask himself—in countless articles published in the hapless AFTOIS newsletter, and in countless conversations with Lacond—“Why not consciously distort history by focusing on those portions and patterns that have the most relevance or resonance to one’s own life?”
Such a slant would, presumably, intensify the empathy that the historian has to those particular historical events. For example, I, as a historian, would be most at home describing the history of various mental wards and the effects on the psyche of mass slaughter witnessed up close.
If every individual mind can be said to exist within a lively morass of prejudice and subjectivity, then the pursuit of the objective becomes a futile, laughable goal—in effect, a lie; especially in a field such as history, where every day, every hour, every minute, the historian becomes more distant from the core occurrences under observation. (A simplification, true, but essentially accurate. Not that it matters to anyone anymore. History is about to catch up with us, and what I’ve really learned is that anything connected to the printed page becomes a kind of tombstone, marking the death of the past.)