She stumbled, caught herself, blinked twice, stopped screaming—but, no: she was still screaming, it was just soundless. A look had come over her that destroyed the unity between mouth, eyes, forehead, cheekbones. Before me, she became undone looking through those glasses.
She fell to her knees, now grappling with the glasses, but they did not want to come off. Her precious flesh necklace didn’t know what to do—it dithered, came forward, retreated, unable to reconcile this moment of Sabon’s life with the last.
Raffe and Sonter were the first to recover from their shock, pushing through the crowd to come to Mary’s aid. Sabon was slack-jawed, moaning, and saying a word over and over again. It sounded suspiciously like “No.” Sonter tried to pry the glasses off while Raffe comforted Mary. But they still wouldn’t come off.
Finally, mercy flooding back into me, I stepped forward and plucked the glasses from her face; they scurried across the floor and rolled up into a ball. Sabon’s face went slack, and I saw a momentary flicker of pain—the ghost of regret, perhaps?—and then it was gone. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she fainted.
The flesh necklace, now adding their cries to the growing cacophony, parted to let Raffe and Sonter carry Mary away, Sonter cursing my name. Even in unconsciousness, a look of utter terror and helplessness marred her face.
No one else wanted to pick up the glasses, so I did. After all, they were mine. I folded them and put them back in my pocket. They were still warm.
I was trembling and exhausted; watching Mary struggle had taken all of my energy. I still cannot decide if it was relief or horror that drained me. I still can’t decide if what I did was right or wrong.
What had Mary seen? I don’t know. I had stopped wearing the glasses more than two weeks before. Released from Duncan’s expert guidance, they had become stranger and stronger somehow, as if they now pierced through layers of reality deeper than even the gray caps were meant to see. But whatever she saw, it was the truth—in one massive dose.
I’ve thought about whether I should put them on again—I’ve thought about it the entire time I’ve been typing up this account. Might I see all the way through? Might I see through the golden threads, if they exist, to something else entirely? Or would I just fall, and keep falling?
I do know this—sometimes, afterward, I’ve had a daydream in which I seek Mary out once the glasses come off, and I find her weeping in a corridor in the bowels of the hotel, and I sit down beside her and I hold her close and I say, “Please—forgive me.” But sometimes in the daydream I’m also saying, “I forgive you, Mary. I forgive you.”
7
I bought a few newspapers after I came here, but all they can tell me is that “Sabon is recovering from a bout of exhaustion.” None of them mentions my role in her exhaustion.
And that is all I know, and all I want to know.
* * *
I halted on the edge of an abyss when I left Mary, I think. I halted on the edge of a kind of Silence. I needed to write it down, try to make some sense of it outside of my own head. Draw the poison.
But I’ve shed my last skin. I’ve no more skins to shed. I can’t start over again—I’ve started over too many times before. You won’t believe me. I won’t believe me, either.
Maybe all of this was prevarication and excuses and not an afterword at all. Not an essay. Not a history. Not a pamphlet. Just an old woman’s ramblings. Maybe I don’t want to think about that hole in the ground behind me and the decision I have to make. But if so, at least it’s over now. I have told you everything I meant to tell you, and more.
As I sit here in the green light and review these pages, I see what Duncan saw when he wrote in this room—the sliver, the narrowness of vision, the small amount we know before we’re gone—and I realize that this account was a stab in the dark at a kind of truth, no matter how faltering: a brief flash of light against the silhouette of dead trees. This was the story of my life and my brother’s life, my brother and his Mary. (How could you think to tell such a story without me by your side, Janice?)
And, somehow, I have kept separate, hidden away in my mind, one single image of joy before disaster: my father, running across the unbearably green grass. And not what occurred after. Not what happened after.
I want that kind of joy, that epiphany, or a chance at it, at least, even if it kills me. (Must I echo to you your own words? That we are all connected by lines of glimmering light. How many times those words kept me alive, made me see approaching light in unending darkness? As Bonmot used to say in his sermons: “We are vessels of light—broken vessels, broken light, but vessels nonetheless.” Fragments across the void. It’s time to find you, Janice, and see what you’ve gotten yourself into.)
But you’re free now, regardless of what this was—after word, afterward. I release you to return to what you were before. If you can.
As for me, it is time to abandon even this dim green light for the darkness. I’ve put as many words between myself and this decision as I can, but it hasn’t worked. There’s a space between each word that I can’t help but fall into, and those spaces are as wide as the words and twice as treacherous.
A shift of attention. Another place to go. That’s all it is. I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not frightened. Everyone is dead or disappeared or disappointed. I ask you, who is left to be afraid of? This is After Dad Died. This is After Mom Died. This is an entirely new place.
I think it is time for one last walk outside. One last look at this crazed, beautiful, dirty, sad, glorious city. Sybel and Bonmot and my mom and all the rest are waiting for me out there in some form or another—a whisper on the breeze, the rustle of the branches, a shadow across a wall, and, perhaps, there will be time for one last lunch under the willows, my glasses safely in my pocket. Then I’ll come back and decide whether or not to seek out Duncan, whether to put on these glasses and face whatever Mary saw.
No one makes it out, Samuel Tonsure once said.
Or do they?
A (BRIEF) AFTERWORD BY SIRIN
My role in all of this is complicated and compromised because I know or knew almost all of the people mentioned in Janice’s manuscript, not least of whom was Janice herself. I was always fond of Janice, perhaps more than I should have been, but confronted with her typewritten manuscript, I felt much as I had felt several years before when confronted by Duncan’s six hundred pages of early history: overwhelmed, irritated, fatigued, intrigued, and perplexed. I’ve always thought Janice had the best intentions, but also that her biases and her own obsessions sometimes led her to suspect conclusions. Many of these suspect conclusions had made their way into the afterword she left behind, and this explains, or helps to explain, my actions with regard to it. I hope.
* * *
I found the original typewritten pages in the back room of the Spore of the Gray Cap. I had gone there searching for Janice, as she had not shown up for her job in over a month. Since we had a professional history, I felt an obligation to find out what might be wrong. In fact, given our personal history, I felt more than an obligation—I was worried about her.
Given the events that had taken place at Martin Lake’s party—events accurately described in Janice’s account—I thought it likely she was “hiding” from a sense of shame or embarrassment. I never realized she might be writing a highly inflammatory, perhaps even actionable, history of her life and her brother’s life.