“She was always so distant,” Duncan said, as we stood in the hallway looking at all of the portraits and photographs of family members she had collected over the years. We had an entire constellation of relatives we could seek out—some we’d met at the funeral—but, really, why bother now? It was too late. We’d been taken to a foreign place, and since then all the old bonds had snapped like rotted rope. The people we’d met in Stockton were just polite faces now, and I only resented that a little bit. Part of me was relieved to excuse myself from all the work it would have taken to hold on to those relationships. Better that they remain photographs, vague smiles and handshakes and fondly remembered hugs from childhood. We had been cast adrift by Father’s death, and we had taken to it, in our way.
“She was always so distant,” Duncan said again. It took me a while to hear him, in that empty and cavernous place, surrounded by the images of so many dead people. There were as many tombstones framed on the mantel in that place as puncturing the earth in the Stockton graveyard.
When I did hear him, I turned toward him with a look of irritation on my face.
“She wasn’t distant. We were distant. We were odd and surly and distant. We crawled through tunnels and we didn’t talk much and we were always alone in our own thoughts. Not much of a family, if you think about it. We never knew how to be there for anyone else. So how do we know?” I said, and by now I’d raised my voice. What did it matter in that place? It would just echo on forever, the sound captured in the swirls of the staircase, floating down into the flooded basement. “How do we know it wasn’t us?”
Duncan’s face scrunched up and turned red, and I could tell he was fighting off tears. It was difficult to know, though, because most of the time he couldn’t produce tears anymore—or if he did, they were purple tears, semi-solid, that hurt as they slid out of his tear ducts. It’s a measure of how accustomed I’d grown to Duncan that this didn’t seem odd to me.
“I hardly ever visited her,” he said. (I meant I hardly ever saw her. I did visit her, but I never saw her. I tunneled up through a dry corner of the basement and left her gifts from the underground—things I thought she might appreciate. I’m sure she knew they came from me.)
“She didn’t mind. She was a solitary person. That was her choice.”
Before Dad Died, she had been as sunny and well-adjusted as the rest of us. (We were never well-adjusted, Janice.) But that death had killed us all as surely as it had killed our father. How could we deny that?
Surrounded by the awful weight of Mom’s things—the rugs, the paintings, the sculptures, the books, the bric-a-brac of collecting gone wrong—it seemed all too apparent. While the river, oblivious, gurgled and chuckled to itself outside the window. (Everyone always tells you that you become more alone as you get older. People write about it in books. They shout it out on street corners. They mumble it in their sleep. But it’s always a shock when it happens to you.)
* * *
We couldn’t keep the house. (How could we keep the house? We made all the inquiries, but it was impossible—Mom had been too much in debt, her money so ancient it didn’t really exist except as run-down property.) And we couldn’t keep much from the house (because it wasn’t ours!). But I couldn’t bear to lose the hallway of portraits and photographs. Somehow, to lose the only tenuous connection between ourselves and those people we should have known felt as wrong as seeking them out, trying to enter into a relationship with strangers. (Those polite protestations of “we should make plans to get together,” which no one really ever believes, as we stood there by the gravesite in Stockton. Why did I make that effort for strangers and not for my own mother? I truly don’t know. Unless I had truly believed that she would outlive me. Or that she had died a long time ago.)
“I’m not coming back,” Duncan said as I closed the door behind us and we walked out into the glorious hot spring day, the sun lithe and yellow above us, the River Moth smooth and light and glistening beyond the mansion.
In the sun, he had a diaphanous look to him. He seemed like an avant-garde sculpture, a person from a myth or fairy tale. The light slid through his face. In the sudden glow, I could see the white hairs at his temples, the gray-and-white of his beard, the lines that had sculpted his mouth, his forehead, the way his eyes had sunk a little into the orbits. He was old. We were old. Prematurely.
“Not coming back?” I said. “Back here?”
“I’m not coming back,” he repeated, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze.
And he didn’t. He didn’t come back. I saw him only one more time.
* * *
The owner of the Spore came in here again, muttering about unpaid bills. I gave him a smile and tried to fend him off with a couple of coins I’d hidden in a sock. Apparently, he has realized that he has begun to let me have this room for free. I wonder if he would understand if I told him I am standing vigil for Duncan. There is an old Truffidian ritual where you wait for a dead loved one out of respect. For three days, you wait as if for a resurrection, but what you are really waiting for is your own grief to subside, just a little. But the fact is, Duncan might crawl out of that hole in the ground behind me at any moment. (True enough. But you shouldn’t have waited for me.)
The owner liked Duncan, but if Duncan came crawling out of the underground, the owner and his friends might have set upon him with clubs. I will have to leave soon, one way or another, so it strikes me that now might be a good time to tell you about the last time I saw Duncan. The very last time, three weeks before Martin Lake’s party. Surprise, surprise—this is the last time Mary saw Duncan as well, although she didn’t mention it to her flesh necklace while vilifying my brother at the party. I guess she didn’t think it important. Perhaps her fear had become too great by then.
The reason Mary saw Duncan at all was because Duncan, throughout everything that had happened, had never given up on her. He was still trying, right up to the end—although the end of what, I don’t know, and may never know. (I hardly know myself, Janice—I don’t even know where you are now. I finally “creep out of that hole” as you put it so eloquently, and you’re nowhere to be found—just this profane, infuriating, opinionated account.)
* * *
Dusk of a spring day, and I sat at my desk in the Hoegbotton & Sons building on Albumuth Boulevard. The weather had been strange as usual. The sun shone hazy through a layer of fog: a faint shedding of light through glass doors festooned with flyers and broadsheets proclaiming the restorative virtues of various Ambergrisian tours.
I had put a lamp or two near my desk, and since the weather had scared off my fellow tour guides and, apparently, any potential customers, I was spending my time paying off my bills and writing letters of circuitous regret to the artists who blamed me for losing their artwork during the war. Yes, I still owed money to a lot of people. I don’t believe most of them are going to get anything, though—I’ve given all my money to the owner of the Spore.
I was in the middle of calculating how much I could give to Roger Mandible and also pay my rent, when it dropped from the ceiling, onto my desk. I suppressed a scream, internalizing it as a long, violent shudder, but backed away from the desk, holding my pen like a knife.