SABON, MARY. An aggressive and sometimes brilliant historian who built her reputation on the bones of older, lovestruck historians. Five-ten. One-fifteen. Red hair. Green, green eyes. An elegant dresser. Smile like fire. Foe of James Lacond. In conversation can cut with a single word. Author of several books whose titles I quite forget at the moment.
SHRIEK, DUNCAN. An old historian, born in Stockton, who in his youth published several famous history books, since remaindered and savaged by critics who should have known better. His father, also an historian, died of joy; or, rather, from a heart attack brought on by finding out he had won a major honor from the Court of the Kalif. I was ten. I never died from my honors, but I was banned by the Truffidian Antechamber. Also a renowned expert on the gray caps, although most reasonable citizens ignore even his least outlandish theories. Once lucky enough to meet the love of his life, but not lucky enough to keep her, or to keep her from pillaging his ideas and discrediting him. Still, he loves her, separated from her by the insurmountable gulf of empires, buzzards, a bad writer, a horrible vacation spot, and the successor to Aquelus/Irene.
… this last bit of cuteness a reference to the entries for the Saltwater Buzzard, Samantha, the Saphant Empire, Scatha, and Maximillian Sharp that lay between his entry and Sabon’s. Even here, toward the end, he could not give up on Mary, no matter how much he should. And no matter how I begged him to delete it—to delete both of them. (I also left numerous clues to the fact that I was fronting Lacond’s various misshapen theories, but I doubt the reading public caught them, butchered as they’d been by the editing process.)
* * *
The Early History had been saved, but the effect was minimal. Serious journals do not review travel guides and tourists rarely remember who wrote them. More importantly, no new work was forthcoming from Sirin for Duncan or for me. And Duncan, for the first time, I think, clearly understood that there was no way back for him. He would continue to haunt the fringes of his former career, and I would be an apparition that appeared as a warning to travelers and passersby.
It was almost like a joke. Me, living on as a ghost. Do you know how ghosts manifest themselves in Ambergris? They haunt you as travel guides. They lead you to old buildings. They educate you on the history of the places they haunt.
Once I realized I was a ghost, I became much happier.
* * *
Sometimes, as I may have mentioned, I go outside at night, just for a break. Night is so different from day for me. I cannot keep the ghosts out as easily at night, and the cot I have had brought in here is somewhat uncomfortable. My leg grows cold from the fungus that enraptures it, but I don’t mind the feel of it.
On a good day, I have been averaging several thousand words. It’s true I return to certain paragraphs and pages and revise, but mostly it’s ever forward. I can’t hope to create something perfect, but perhaps I can create something that’s alive—assuming I can finish it. Right now, I see no reason to imagine I will ever stop typing this afterword. The hours float by so quietly and without event that there seems nothing else worth doing. What would I want to do? And what will I do when I’m done?
But we are getting closer to the staircase, the party, the necklace, with each word. I can almost sense the ending, even if I can’t see it yet. I’m so prolific I surprise myself—I keep filling up pages. I keep creating new sections, new chapters.
All the same, I’m tired. My prose, I’ve noticed, becomes by turns more plain, more linear, only to jump out into time as if in a desperate attempt to maintain momentum. Even if it doesn’t feel like it, I cannot be far from the end, even if I end too abruptly. It may be that my fatigue will outweigh my momentum, that it will rush the ending and send you, dear reader, out of this riveting true-life account far sooner than necessary or proper. If this should occur, I refuse to apologize. This is an afterword or an afterward—I can’t remember anymore—and no one reads them. No one cares what they contain. By the time the afterword appears in a book, the story has already ended. Why, if I wanted to, I could write one hundred pages on obscure Truffidian rituals to offset my fear. It is not without precedence. It has happened before.
What’s left to tell? Many years passed, in much the same way as they had passed before. Sabon’s star continued to ascend. I was forgotten, although I continued on as a tour guide and cantankerous member of the Ambergris Tourism Board. On rare occasions, they called upon me to make short speeches at the rededication of certain historical buildings, or to make appearances as one of several fossils at various dinners mummifying the War of the Houses.
Duncan was forgotten, except for Sabon’s continued cruel resurrections. Bonmot died—in the long view of things, one moment he was there and the next he was not—much to my ever-growing sadness. I would sit at the old stone bench with my sandwich at lunchtime and try to conjure up the image of those wonderful conversations, that gravel voice, but it was never the same. Memory may be all we have, but it’s a poor substitute for flesh and blood.
And still, even as he seemed to make little progress regarding his theories, Duncan was changing, becoming other, the process always ongoing. He never recovered fully from Sabon (or AFTOIS, for that matter), rarely expressed interest in other women, never took enough of a break from his work to notice them, really. Sometimes, Duncan later confessed to me, he would still haunt Sabon from the shadows outside her current house, or her current lover’s house. (I went a little crazy at times. Late in the game, I set traps for Mary in the AFTOIS newsletter, using Lacond’s name for crazy theories that I thought she would be forced to refute, wasting her energy and, at the same time, unknowingly engaging me in a kind of dialogue. It never happened, to my knowledge.) Between his obsession and my tour guide job, we were a veritable team of stalkers, me during the day, him at night. (The only thing that comforted me: she never married. Surely that meant something?)
Somewhere along the way—I don’t know exactly when—we grew old, Duncan and I. Old and yet defiant; if not wise, then wizened, at least. Exactly as we had always been, only more so. No one makes it out.
Even as we stayed the same, the city changed again and again, as it always would, its grime-smeared head, its soiled towers, its debauched calls to prayer the same, and yet always it changed. I grew to love and appreciate it more than I ever had before. It was all I knew, and I knew it almost too well by now. (Yet neither of us ever found out if it loved us back.)
Then, some four or five years ago, the Shift began to affect Ambergris, disrupting the flux and flow of the city. All became unpredictable, save for one constant: as once it had become colder, now the city seethed with heat, even in the winter and spring. With this heat has come the rain, sliding down in oily sheets, or mumbling to itself in little gusts and flurries, or dissipating into a fine gray mist.
In a Broadsheet article Duncan cut out and stuck into his journal, the strangeness of the rain is remarked upon in detail:
This rain behaves oddly sometimes. It forms funnels in the sky. It falls one way on the left side of Albumuth Boulevard and at a different angle on the right side of Albumuth Boulevard. It delivers a puzzling bounty: fish and tiny squid and crabs that are not native here. They lie struggling in piles of seaweed as alien to the city as we are to them while crowds form around them, or do not; many among us try to ignore such happenings.