* * *
“Nativism,” Duncan said to me once, “is like a prolonged case of mass suicide.”
I mention this because History and my reincarnation as a tour guide continued to intersect in a number of ways, against my wishes. For example, evincing a cruel kindness, Sirin managed to finagle me a nonpaying position on the toothless horror that is the Ambergris Tourism Board, in a nod to my past status as an “iconic figure in society in general, etc., etc.,” as one of the other board members greeted me before slumping back into a kind of half-drool, half-reverie that looked quite pleasant.
I joined the board at the perfect time: it seemed to be trying to make itself obsolete. The first day I reported for service, the board decided to mount a rather muddled campaign to discourage tourism in the city because, as one gout-ridden veteran of many a real or imaginary war put it, “These fools. Must protect them. Too many deaths. At Festival time. Darlings deserve better.” I almost pointed out that fewer tourists meant more of a chance, statistically, that local residents would be the targets of violence or “odd events,” as the broadsheets now sometimes termed encounters involving gray caps. But I kept my mouth shut. After all, it was only my first day on the job, and I wasn’t yet sure I wanted to burn any bridges. (If you’d taken your duties more seriously, perhaps some of AFTOIS’s positions would have received a sympathetic hearing from those old bastards. As it was, I can’t recall you doing anything at the public meetings of the board but taking up space.)
As a result, for two years, in the months leading up to the Festival, the board paid for posters to be put up that depicted dead dogs in a variety of unkind and teeth-grimacing positions, complete with titles such as DEAD DOGS. DEAD TOURISTS. IT’S ALL THE SAME TO US. STAY OUT OF AMBERGRIS AROUND FESTIVAL TIME.
The posters appeared to result in insulted—but not fatally insulted—tourists, if the large number of people letting me lead them around the city and babble about dead people and old buildings was any indication. I certainly didn’t mind this change, but posters or no, a more profound and negative transformation had begun to change Ambergris. The invisible yet necessary buffer between the professional and the personal slowly eroded, and for this I blame Nativism.
I’m sure that blaming Nativism for anything will be seen as blasphemy by many readers, but then, you’ve made it this far—you can’t give up now. So, if you haven’t become irrevocably jaded, perhaps even revolted (or revolting), by the preceding pages, I dare say you’ll hardly even twitch when I say: I blame Nativism. Not the specific form of insanity displayed by Sabon’s father—not that brand of Nativism. No, I refer to the form that Duncan called “the final outcome of the war”: an attempt to become blind, deaf, and dumb as a most peculiar and pathetic method of semi-survival. (It allowed people to function in their day-to-day lives, rather than boarded up, gibbering in fear, in their homes. I’ll give it that much.)
As Sabon’s kind of Nativism spread throughout the Southern cities by way of her books and essays, it infected the tourists who subjected themselves to my tours. Over time, I no longer needed Bonmot to give me updates on Mary’s progress. Instead, her flock of black crows feasting on the carcasses of Duncan’s investigations could be clearly seen in the eyes of the visitors I guided from one banal site to another.
I can’t say I minded these intrusions into rote routine at first. As I told Sybel when he accompanied me on these jaunts—and he was always there in some form—each recital of the same information became more stale than the last, until I was like some crippled, half-senile goat or sheep, chewing and rechewing the same yellowing stalks of grass. It was a relief when the replies to my jaded bleatings began to change from polite nods or the obvious questions or the occasional attempt at wit, to observations such as “Mary Sabon wrote about this place in her book on Nativism. You should mention that next time.”
“What a good suggestion!” I would reply. “I’ll be sure to do that,” and try to carry on as if nothing offensive had been said, if they would let me.
Sometimes they also came seeking wish fulfillment: “Do you think we might see Sabon on this tour?”
To which I would reply in a clipped but neutral tone, “Not on this tour.” Not even if we stood for a week in the shade of the large oak tree outside her ancestral home.
Even more jarring, though, were the questions out of nowhere—broadsides I was in no position to absorb, meant to torment me—that opened a door where no door should exist.
“Are you any relation to the Duncan Shriek mentioned in Sabon’s books?”
Most of the time, my interrogator exuded a naive good humor as natural as sweat when asking the question—wanted only to know that I was not just an expert but intimately involved with the information I imparted, whether we stood inside the old post office or outside of some tavern with “Spore” in the title.
I had no problem providing graceful answers in such cases, although each time it did surprise me—and more than surprise me, it changed the world so that I saw my brother’s influence in everything.
“Nativists are like Manziists or Menites or any other religion,” Duncan said once. “Just as righteous, just as right.” No wonder their questions changed my worldview.
As Nativism conquered the city and the entire South, I found the door to my misery widening and darkening, so that a belligerent quality entered the voices of those asking the questions.
One particularly grueling and hot summer afternoon a few years before the Shift began in earnest, I heard the words, “Are you Duncan’s sister?” delivered in a tone somewhere between fervent eagerness and bloodlust.
My surroundings, which had faded to the usual blur—my mouth spewing a stream of familiar words while my mind went elsewhere—came back into sharp focus.
The tour group and I stood in the middle of Voss Bender Memorial Square, in front of a fountain depicting Banker Trillian’s victory over the rival banker-warriors of Nicea. Around the square stood the ancient buildings that had once served as Trillian’s headquarters. In between, a pleasing and aromatic mixture of green-and-red blossoms signaled not only the arrival of the summer’s wildflowers but House Hoegbotton’s crass attempt to memorialize the struggle that followed Voss Bender’s death. I had set the tour group loose on the square for a few minutes, and they currently wandered here and there, staring at everything with a freshness I could not understand.
I faced my interrogator, who doubled in an instant. A woman had spoken, but her husband stood beside her, just as resolute and nervous. Both of them had reached the far end of their fifties, the woman gray-haired and stuffed into a formless flower-print dress, matched to white stockings and blocky wooden shoes.
“I can’t say I much cared for the mad glint in her eyes, or the thick red smile she gave me,” I told Duncan later, relaxing in his apartment.
In fact, I looked at her as if she were a huge mushroom that had erupted through the courtyard tiles.
“That was no mad glint,” Duncan replied. “That was the spark of righteous purpose.”
Her husband, stocky muscle half-turned to fat, wore spectacles and, bizarrely, the kind of trousers and tunic that had gone out of style long before Old Fart had capitulated to New Fart—close to the kind of museum pieces I spoke about during the tour.