If Duncan had, in the gallery that afternoon, told me about the machine with the calm madness of that journal entry, a silence would have settled over us. Our conversation would have faded away into a nothingness made alive and aware by his words. Thankfully, Duncan told his story with less than brutal lucidity. He used stilted words in rows of sentences crippled by fits and starts—a vagabond, poorly rehearsed circus of words that could not be taken seriously. He focused on the front of the machine with its marvelous visions of far-distant places. He dismissed the back of the machine with a single sentence. Somehow, I could not reconcile his vision with my memory of the spores floating out of my apartment window.
Even so, an element of unreality entered the gallery following his revelation. I remember staring at him and thinking that his face could not be composed of flesh and blood, not with those words coming from his mouth. The light now hid his features, but his hands, lit by the starfish, glowed white.
“The door in the machine never fully opens,” Duncan said in a distant tone.
“What would happen if it did?”
“They would be free…”
“Who?” I asked, although I knew the answer.
“The gray caps.”
“Free of what?”
Pale hands, darkened face, gray speech. “I think they care nothing for us one way or the other, Janice. They have only one purpose now. The same purpose they’ve had for centuries.”
“In your unconfirmed opinion, brother,” I said, and shivered at the way the mushroom dust on his face still glittered darkly.
“What do you know about the Silence?”
“The gray caps killed everyone in the city,” I said.
He shook his head. Forgetting the starfish in his hands, he stood abruptly. The starfish fell to the floor and began to curl and uncurl in a reflexive imitation of pain. Now Duncan was stooped over me. Now he was crouched beside me. If there were ever a secret he truly wanted to tell me, this was the secret. This was the cause of it. We had returned to the last survivor of his sixth book, alive amid all of the suicides: the truth. As my brother saw it.
“You learned it wrong,” he told me. “That’s not what happened. It didn’t happen like that. I’ve seen so many things, and I’ve thought a lot about what I’ve seen. They disappeared without a single drop of blood left behind. Not a fragment of bone. No. They weren’t killed. At least not directly. Try to imagine a different answer: a sudden miscalculation, a botched experiment, a flaw in the machine. All of those people. All twenty-five thousand of them. The men, the women, the children—they didn’t die. They were moved. The door opened in a way the gray caps didn’t expect, couldn’t expect, and all those people—they were moved by mistake. The machine took them to someplace else. And, yes, maybe they died, and maybe they died horribly—but my point is, it was all an accident. A mistake. A terrible, pointless blunder.”
He was breathing heavily. Sweat glistened on his arms, where before the black dust had suppressed it.
“That’s crazy,” I said. “That’s the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life. They’ve killed thousands of people. They’ve done terrible things. And you have the nerve to make apologies for them?!”
“Would it be easier to accept that they don’t give a damn about us one way or the other if we hadn’t massacred them to build this city? What I think is crazy is that we try to pretend they are just like us. If we had massacred most of the citizens of Morrow, we would expect them to seek revenge. That would be natural, understandable, even acceptable. But what about a people that, when you slaughter hundreds of them, doesn’t even really notice? That doesn’t acknowledge the event? We can’t accept that reaction. That would be incomprehensible. So we tack the idea of ‘revenge’ onto the Silence so we can sleep better at night—because we think, we actually have the nerve to think, that we understand these creatures that live beneath us. And if we think we understand them, if we believe they are like us in their motivations, then we don’t fear them quite as much. If we meet one in an alley, we believe we can talk to it, reason with it, communicate with it. Or if we see one dozing beneath a red flag on the street during the day, we overlook it, we make it part of the scenery, no less colorful or benign than a newly ordained Truffidian priest prancing down Albumuth Boulevard in full regalia.”
“You’re crazy, Duncan. You’re unwell.” Anger again burned inside of me. The idea of the Silence reduced to a pathetic mistake enraged me. The idea that my own brother might utter the words that made it so seemed a betrayal of an unspoken understanding between us. Before this moment, we could always count on sharing the same worldview no matter what happened, even when we saw each other at wider and wider intervals.
“It’s more complicated than you think,” he said. “They are on a journey as much as we are on a journey. They are trying to get somewhere else—but they can’t. It doesn’t work. With all they can do, with all they are, they still cannot make their mirror, their glass, work properly. Isn’t that sad? Isn’t that kind of sad?”
I slapped him across the face. My hand came away black with spores. He did not move an inch.
“Sad?” I said. “Sad? Sad is twenty-five thousand lives snuffed out, not a broken machine. Not a broken machine! What is happening to you that you cannot see that? Regardless of what happened. Not that I believe you. Frankly, I don’t believe you. Why should I? For all I know, you’ve been in the sewers for the past few weeks, living off of rats and whatever garbage you could get your hands on. And all you’ve seen is the reflection of your own filthy face in a pool of scummy water!”
Duncan smiled and pointed at the starfish. “How do you explain that?”
“Ha!” I said. “It was probably groveling for garbage along with you. It definitely isn’t proof of anything, if that’s what you mean. Why didn’t you bring something substantive, like a gray cap willing to corroborate your statement?”
“I did bring a gray cap,” he said. “Several, in fact. Although not by choice. Take a good look through the doorway, out the front window, to the left. I doubt they would corroborate anything, though. I think they’d like to see me dead.”
“Don’t joke.”
“I’m not. Take a look.”
Reluctantly, I raised myself, my left leg asleep—even less impressed by Duncan’s story, apparently, than I was. I peered around the doorway. Sheathed like swords by the fading light, more sharp shadow than dream, three gray caps stood staring in through the window. They stood so still the cobblestones of the street behind them seemed more alive. The whites of their eyes gleamed like wet paint. They stared at and through me. As if I meant nothing to them. The sight of them sent a convulsive shudder through me. I ducked back, beside Duncan.
“Maybe we should leave by the back door,” I said.
A low, humorless laugh from Duncan. “Maybe they came for your gallery opening.”
“Very funny. Follow me…”
In a pinch, I still trusted my brother more than anyone else in the world.
* * *
Every human being is a puppet on strings, but the puppet half controls the strings, and the strings do not ascend to some anonymous Maker, but are glistening golden strands that connect one puppet to another. Each strand is sensitive to the vibrations of every other strand. Every vibration sings in not only the puppet’s heart, but in the hearts of many other puppets, so that if you listen carefully, you can hear a low hum as of many hearts singing together … When a strand snaps, when it breaks for love, or lack of love, or from hatred, or from pain … every other connected strand feels it, and every other connected heart feels it—and since every strand and every heart are, in theory, connected, even if at their most distant limits, this means the effect is universal. All through the darkness where shining strings are the only light, a woundedness occurs. And this hurt affects each strand and each puppet in a different way, because we are all puppets on strings and we all hurt and are hurt. And all the strings shimmer on regardless, and all of our actions, no matter how small, have consequences to other puppets … After we are dead, gone to join the darkness between the lines of light, the strands we leave behind still quiver their lost messages into the hearts of those other puppets we met along the way, on our journey from light into not-light. These lost strands are the memories we leave behind … Magnify this effect by 25,000 souls and perhaps you can see why I cannot so lightly dismiss what you call a mistake. Each extinguished life leaves a hole in many other lives—a series of small extinguishments that can never be completely forgotten or survived. Each survivor carries a little of that void within them.