For these reasons (and more, too tedious to, etc., etc.), the arrangement did not last. One day I came to Duncan with an assignment (the abysmal task of creating an “upbeat” listing and description of funeral homes and cemeteries in Morrow; it made me suspicious—had Sirin come up with that to torment me?) and Duncan told me he couldn’t do it. No, Duncan had taken a “regular” job.
My brother, Duncan Shriek, the fearless explorer, had finally accepted everyday reality as his own—just as I had begun to reject it. Joined the humdrum, wash-the-dishes, take-out-the-garbage, go-to-bed-early, get-up-and-go-to-work life shared by millions of people from Stockton to Morrow, Nicea to Ambergris. My shock only amused him. (Actually, dear sister, it was your squinty-eyed, sallow face, the way your pupils seemed ready to rise up into your head as your jaw, as if in balance, dropped. You looked, in short, as if we had traded places, sunshine for the subterranean. At least one of us was taking out the garbage.)
What job had Duncan taken? A teaching job at Blythe Academy, a minor Truffidian religious school. Blythe might have been best known for its longevity—it had been established some years before the Silence, although it had wandered from place to place, finally coming to rest a few blocks from the Truffidian Cathedral. In a bit of irony I’m sure they had thought made good sense, Blythe’s library had been superimposed on the ruins of an old gray cap library. (It wasn’t ever a library. It was more of a marker for the Machine.) In the center of their main reading room, the circular nubs of that former structure remained, looking cold, remote, and threatening.
Blythe had a pointed history of accepting as many students from “artistic” or “creative” parents as possible, especially those of a certain social status—regardless of whether they believed in Truffidianism. I suppose the founders believed that the rote, compulsory weekly religious services in the small chapel behind the school might eventually permeate the brains of their charges—or at the very least instill the kind of guilt that in later years results in large sums of money being sent in to support new buildings, philosophies, or styles of teaching.
Blythe had also had famous teachers from time to time—Cadimon Signal for a few years, and even some of the Gorts who had gained such fame from the statistician Marmy Gort’s controversial findings. Certainly, there was no shame in attending as a student or teaching at the school. However, as Duncan soon found out, greater shame could be found in those serving as headmaster, or Royal, to the school.
Imagine Duncan’s shock the first day, arriving in starched collar and suffocating tie, to find his interviewer, the Vice Royal of Blythe Academy, joined by the Royal himself, who turned out to be none other than the former Antechamber, Bonmot. His features, already naturally condensed into a look of continual bemusement by the circumstances of his fall from grace, had attained a sublime parody of surprise (did anything really surprise him anymore?) as he looked up at Duncan and slowly realized who he was.
“Ironic, isn’t it?” Duncan said with a toothy grin, as Bonmot nodded like a man in dream.
* * *
For a short while, Duncan once again disappeared from my life, although this was a much gentler disappearance: his ghost remained behind. Postcards fluttered into my mailbox with alarming regularity, for him—at least one every two weeks. Duncan wrote in tiny letters, fitting long-winded, philosophical diatribes on them. (Not long-winded. Just, perhaps, impractical for the allotted space.) I would respond with postcards that teased him in the language of fashions and gossip—although, truth be told, sometimes I had Sybel write them when I was too busy. (It was no secret. Sybel told me, and his handwriting was markedly different from yours. He used to apologize to me for you when I collected my remedies from him. It was no secret, but also no sin. Still, I must admit to exasperation at the few times Sybel asked for advice on what he should write to me about!) From the evidence of the postcards alone, we might have been the two most uniquely different people in the world.
But the postcards were a way to remind each other of our existence, and those things most important to us at the time. Could I help it that my mind concerned itself with the ephemeral, the weightless, the surface, while Duncan continued to plunge into the depths?
On the corporeal level, the postcards meant nothing. What is a scrawl of letters next to that infinity of physical details that makes up a face? So I dropped by the Blythe Academy for lunch whenever I could find the time—at least once a month, depending on what demands Sybel and my ever-expanding gullet of a gallery made on me.
* * *
I shared the ghost of Duncan, this Serious Man seemingly more concerned about his students than his life’s work (so it might have seemed, I’ll admit) with Bonmot, for the Antechamber and my brother had become friends. (Good friends? Great friends? I honestly don’t know. The dynamic of our relationship was transformed day by day. On some level, despite our affection for one another, I think there was a certain caution, a certain wariness. He may have felt my obsession with the gray caps would lead me to discoveries that might bring dishonor to his faith in God. I know I was afraid that his religion might somehow infect my studies, change me in a way that I did not want to be changed.)
Without question, these lunches became the high point of my days. Whether in the sleepy cool heat of spring, the hot white light of summer, or the dry burnt chill of fall and winter. By the carp-filled fountain. They laughed so much!
I’d never seen Duncan laugh without bitterness or sarcasm since Before Dad Died. It almost felt like we were huddled around the dinner table in the old house in Stockton again, with Dad telling us some obscure fact he’d dug up in his research. Usually, he would mix in some lie, and the unspoken assumption was that we’d try to ferret it out with our questions. Sometimes, the truth was so outrageous that finding the lie took a while. He would sit back in his chair, eyebrows raised in a look of innocence—something that always made Mom laugh—and answer us with a straight face. (I always knew when Dad wasn’t telling the truth, because the faintest lilt or musical quality would enter his voice—as if the joy of constructing the story was too much for him to contain.)
These lunches with Bonmot formed pockets of time and space separate from the stress and rigor of my responsibilities (or lack thereof). Where everything else blended together in a blur of faces and cafés and alcohol, that sun-filled courtyard with its rustling willows, light-soaked dark wooden benches, and aged gray stone tables riven with fissures still remains with me, even in this place. And Bonmot was one with the benches and tables: weathered but comfortable, solid and stolid both. His hands felt like stone hands, his two-fisted greeting like having your skin encased in granite. He had been a farmer’s son before he found his calling, and his hulking physique remained intact, along with a startling openness and honesty in his light brown eyes. Nothing in him indicated a propensity for clerical crimes. (The honesty didn’t come easily to him. He had earned his reform, and it had transformed him.) His speech rippled out like liquid marble, strong and smooth. He was, in all ways, a comfort.
As for Bonmot and Duncan, they pulled back far enough from the rift that was Duncan’s long-ago banned book to find they shared many interests, from explorations of history and religion to a taste for the same music and art. More than once, I would walk into that blissful place carrying sandwiches bought from a sidewalk vendor to find the two men deep in conversation, Bonmot’s wrinkled face further creased with laugh lines, his melon-bald head bowed and nodding as Duncan hammered home some obscure point, Duncan’s hands heavy with the weight of knowledge being expressed through them. Two veterans of exile, reborn in the pleasure of each other’s company. (Which isn’t to say we didn’t argue—we argued, sometimes viciously. We knew where we stood with one another.)