Shortly after the publication of Vagaries of Circumstance and Fate Amongst the Clans of the Aan, Hoegbotton announced that Duncan had been dropped from their stable of writers. Gaudy must have been laughing from behind his rosewood desk in Morrow. No other publisher of note would prove interested in Duncan’s sixth book. None of his books would long remain in print. For all practical purposes, Duncan’s career as a writer of historical books had come to an end, along with any hopes of serious consideration as a historian. At the age of thirty-three.
It would only get worse after he met Sabon, who would spend much of her time chipping away at Duncan’s respectability, so that his books no longer contained anything but metaphorically shredded pages.
* * *
Odd. It strikes me for the first time that Duncan has been preparing me for this moment all of my life. There’s a green light shining upon the typewriter keys, and maybe it’s the light that allows me to see so clearly. Must we always be blind to those we are close to? Must we always fumble for understanding? Duncan never mistrusted me. He just didn’t want me to implode from the information he had—he wanted to dole it out in pieces, so that it would not be such a shock to my system. And yet it would have been a shock, no matter how gradual. I don’t see how it could be otherwise.
If Duncan feared losing me, he must have also feared losing his audience.
Which reminds me. I should ask: Am I losing you? Have I lost you already? I hope not. There’s still a war to come, for Truff’s sake.
Maybe the only solution is to start over.
Should I? Perhaps I should.
3
We don’t see many things ahead of time. We usually only avoid disaster at the last second, pull back from the abyss by luck or fate or blind stupid chance. Exactly nine years before Mary Sabon began to destroy my brother like an old house torn down brick by brick, Duncan sought me out at my new Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. How he found me there, I still don’t know (a mundane story, involving broadsheet adverts and luck). I had just bought the gallery—a narrow place off Albumuth Boulevard (I remember when it was a sweets shop that also sold mood-altering mushrooms—a much more honest trade)—with the help of a merchant loan against our mother’s property along the River Moth. (That took some persuading!)
Outside, the sky was a blue streaked with gold, the trees once again threatening to release their leaves, turning yellower and yellowest. The smell of burning leaves singed nostrils, but the relief of slightly lower temperatures added a certain spring to the steps of passersby.
Half the proposed gallery lay in boxes around my feet. Paintings were stacked in corners, splashes of color wincing out from the edges of frames. Piles and piles of papers had swallowed my desk.
I was happy. After years of unhappiness. (It’s easy to think you’d been unhappy for years, but I remember many times you were invigorated, excited, by your art, by your studies. The past isn’t a slab of stone; it’s fragmented and porous.) By now I had given up my dream of a career as a painter. Rejection, rejection, rejection. It had made the part of me that wanted to paint wither away, leaving a more streamlined Janice, a smoother Janice, a less creative Janice. I had decided I would do better as a gallery owner, had not yet realized I was still traveling toward remote regions marked on maps only by terms such as “Art Critic” and “Historian.” (You were traveling toward me, Janice. That’s not such a bad thing.) Only later did I come to see my initial investment in the gallery as a form of self-torture: by promoting the works of others I could denigrate my own efforts.
* * *
This time, Duncan had a haunted look about him, the joy of his previous underground adventures stripped away, leaving behind only a gauntness akin to death. The paleness that had taken over his features had blanched away any expression, any life, in his limbs, in his movements. He:
Beard like the tendrils of finely threaded spores.
Swayed in the doorway like a tall, ensanguinated ghost, holding the door open with one shaking, febrile arm.
Shoes tattered and torn, as if savaged by a dog.
Muttered my name as if in the middle of a dream.
Clothes stained everywhere with spores, reduced to a fine, metallic dust that glittered blackly all around him.
Trailed tiny obsidian mushrooms, trembling off him at every turn.
Eyes embedded with black flecks, staring at some nameless vision just beyond me.
Clutched something tightly in his left hand, knuckles pale against the dark coating of spore dust.
* * *
He staggered inside, fell to the floor amid the paintings, the curled canvases, the naked frames vainglorious with the vision of the wall behind them. The gallery smelled of turpentine, of freshly cut wood, of drying paint. But as Duncan met the floor, or the floor met Duncan, the smells became one smell: the smell of Duncan. A dark green smell brought from deep underground. A subtle interweaving of minerals and flesh and fungus. The smell of old water trickling through stones and earth. The smell of lichen and moss. (Flesh penetrated by fungus, you mean—every pore cross-pollinated, supersaturated. Nothing very subtle about it. The flesh alive and prickly.) The smell, now, of my brother.
I locked the door behind him. I slapped his face until his gaze cleared, and he saw me. With my help, he got to his feet and I took him into the back room. He was so light. He might as well have been a skeleton draped with canvas. I began to cry. His ribs bent against my encircling arm as I gently laid him down against a wall. His clothes were so filthy that I made him take them off and put on a painter’s smock.
I forced bread and cheese on him. He didn’t want it at first. I had to tear the bread into small pieces and hold his mouth open. I had to make him close his mouth. “Swallow.” He had no choice. He couldn’t fight me—he was too weak. Or I was, for once, too strong.
Eventually, he took the bread from my hands, began to eat on his own. Still he said nothing, staring at me with eyes white against the dust-stippled darkness of his forehead and jutting cheekbones.
“When you are ready, speak,” I said. “You are not leaving here until you tell me exactly what happened. You are not leaving here until I know why. Why, Duncan? What happened to you?” I couldn’t keep the anguish from my voice.
Duncan smiled up at me. A drunkard’s smile. A skeleton’s smile. My brother’s smile, as laconic as ever.
“Same old sister,” he said. “I knew I could count on you. To half kill me trying to feed me.” (To help me. Who else would help me back then?)
“I mean it. I won’t let you leave without telling me what happened.”
He smiled again, but he wouldn’t look at me. For a long time, he said nothing as I watched him.
Then the flood. He spoke and spoke and spoke—rambling, coherent, fragmented, clever. I began to grow afraid for him. All these words. There was already less than nothing inside of him. I could see that. When the last words had left his mouth, would even the canvas of his skin flap away free, the filigree of his bones disintegrate into dust? Slowly, I managed to hear the words and forget the condition of the one who spoke them. Forget that he was my brother.
He had gone deeper into the underground this time, but the research had gone badly. He kept interspersing his account with mutterings that he would “never do it again.” And, “If I stay on the surface, I’m safe. I should be safe.” At the time, I thought he meant staying physically aboveground, but now I’m not so sure. (Be sure.) I wonder if he also meant the surface of his mind. That if he could simply restrain himself from the divergent thinking, the untoward analysis, that had marked some of his previous books, he might once again be a published writer. (Who knows? I might have given up on myself if forced to listen to my own ravings. I might have even become a respectable citizen.)