Indeed, the blue had been cleansed of any green or yellow taint.
“This compass saved me more than once when I was lost,” he said.
I stared at my ungainly, stacked frames. “I’m sick of wonders, Duncan. This is just a color to me, just a trick. The true wonder is that you’re still alive. No one could have expected that. You suffer what may have been a mental breakdown, go down below, return with a living compass, and expect me to say … what? How wonderful that is? How awed I am by it all? No. I’m appalled. I’m horrified. I’m angry. I’ve failed at one career after another. I’m about to open my own gallery. I haven’t seen you in almost ten years, and you shamble in here, a talking skeleton—and you expect me to be impressed by a magic show? Have you seen yourself lately?”
I can’t remember ever being so furious—and out of nowhere, out of almost nothing. My hands shook. My shoulders had become rigid blocks of stone. My throat ached. And I’m not even sure why. (Because you were scared, and because you were my sister, and you loved me. Even when you were mad at me, I was your family.) I almost want to laugh, typing this now. Having seen so many strange things since, having been at peace lying on a floor littered with corpses, having accepted so much strangeness from Duncan, that starfish seems almost mundane in retrospect, and my anger at Duncan self-indulgent.
He scooped up the starfish, held it in his hands. It lay there as contentedly as if in a tidal pool. “I don’t expect anything, Janice,” he said, each word carefully weighed, wrapped, tied with string before leaving his mouth. “I have no one else to tell. No one else who saw me the last time. No one else who might possibly believe anything I saw. Starfish or no starfish.”
“Tell Mom then. Mom would listen. If you speak softly enough, Dad might even pick up a whisper of it. Did you meet him down there?”
He winced, sat back against the wall, next to a leering portrait by a painter named Sonter. The shadows and the sheen of black dust on his skin rendered him almost invisible.
Coated by the darkness, he said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I didn’t realize … But you know, Janice, you are the only one who won’t think me crazy.”
The starfish had begun to explore the crook of Duncan’s arm. Its rejuvenated cilia shone wetly, a thousand minute moving jewels among the windless reeds of his arm hairs.
“It’s so hard,” he said. “Half of what you see seems like a hallucination, or a dream, even while you’re living it. You are so unsure about what’s real that you take all kinds of stupid risks. As if it can’t hurt you. You float along, like a spore. You sit for days in caverns as large as cities, let the fungi creep up and devour you. The stars that can’t be stars fall in on you in waves. And you sit there. An afternoon in the park. A picnic for one.
“Things walk by you. Some stop and stare. Some poke you or hit you, and then you have to pretend you’re in a dream, because otherwise you would be so afraid that nothing would stop you from screaming, and you’d keep screaming until they put a stop to you.”
He shivered and rolled over on his side. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” he whined, the starfish on his shoulder a golden glimmer.
“Was it worth it?” I asked him, not unkindly. “Was it?”
“Ask me in fifty years, Janice. A hundred years. A thousand.” (It didn’t take that long. Within five years, I began to recognize that my sojourn underground was akin to one more addict’s hit of mushrooms. It took ten years of these adventures for me to realize that I could only react to such journeys, never predict. Always absorbing, but mostly in the physical sense.)
He twisted from side to side, holding his stomach.
“I thought I could get it out of me if I talked about it,” he said. “Flush it from my brain, my body. But it’s still in there. It’s still in me.”
Again, he was talking about two things at once, but I could only bear to talk about what I might be able to help him with right then.
“Duncan,” I said, “we can’t wash it off of you this time. I think it’s inside of you, like some kind of poison. Your pores are clogged with black spores. Your skin is … different.”
He gasped. Was he crying? “I know. I can feel it inside of me. It’s trying to change me.”
“Talk about it, then. Talk about it until you talk it all out.”
He laughed without any hint of humor. “Are you mad? I can’t talk it out of my skin. I can’t do that.”
I joined him along the wall, moving Sonter’s portrait to the side. The starfish had splayed itself across the side of his neck like an exotic scar.
“You’re due north,” I said. “Its arm is blue. And you’re right, Duncan. It’s beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
He moved to pull it off, but I caught his arm. “No. Don’t. I think it’s feeding on the spores embedded in your skin.” It left a trail of almost-white skin behind it.
“You think so?” His eyes searched mine for something I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to give.
In that moment before he began to really tell me his story, to which all of this had been foolish, prattling preamble—in that moment, I think I loved my brother as much as I ever had in all the years since his birth. His face shone darkly in my doomed gallery, more precious than any painting.
* * *
We lay side by side, silent in the semi-darkness of the back room, surrounded by dead paint. The now-reluctant glare from the main room meant the sun had begun to fade from the sky. The starfish flinched, as if touched by the memory of light, as it continued its slow migration toward the top of Duncan’s head.
I could remember afternoons when Duncan and I would sit against the side of the house in Stockton, out of the sun, eating cookies we’d stolen from the kitchen while we talked about school or the nasty neighbor down the street. The quality of light was the same, the way it almost bent around the corner even as it evaporated into dust motes. As if to tell us we were never alone—that even in the stillness, with no wind, our fingers stained by the grass, we are never really outside of time.
Duncan began to talk while I listened without asking questions or making comments. I stared at nothing at all, a great peace come over me. It was cool and dark in that room. The shadows loved us.
But memory is imperfect, incomplete, fickle. It tells us the exact shade of our mother’s blouse the day our father died, but it cannot accurately recall a conversation between siblings decades after that. Thus, I resort, as I already have through most of this afterword, to a much later journal entry by Duncan—clearly later because it is polluted by the presence of Mary Sabon; so polluted that I could not easily edit her out of it. (You can’t erase the past just because you wish it hadn’t happened.)
Does it make any difference now to Duncan who sees it? None. So why not steal his diary entry and spill his innermost thoughts like blood across the page, fling them across the faces of Sabon’s flesh necklace in a fine spackle of retreating life. I’ll let Duncan tell us about his journeys underground. (Do I have a choice? But you’re right—it doesn’t matter anymore. I will not edit it, or anything else, out, although I may protest from time to time. I haven’t decided yet if you’re a true historian or one step removed from a gossip columnist.)