(When one puzzle piece—and a semester of thirty students might fill in a single puzzle piece, at best—had been locked into position, we would move on to the next. A careful observer might have noticed that my curriculum began to resemble cheesecloth. Much of it was useless, much of it redundant, much of it insanely boring and obscured by lazy or talentless students. But they did receive a relatively full education from me. And keep in mind that I was not their only teacher.
(In time, the game did outgrow its original boundaries. At every opportunity, I would murmur in the ears of my fellow instructors, like an echo of their own desires, hints of scholarship and glory if they only turned their attention to this or that ignored corner of history. “I wonder if anyone has ever compared the version of Nysman’s report on the Silence stored at Nicea with the version stored at Zamilon. I am told they diverge in ways that speak to issues of authenticity in Samuel Tonsure’s journal.” Casually, off-the-cuff, as if it fell outside my area of expertise, but should be pursued by someone, with great rewards for any enterprising scholar. In all of this, Bonmot was an interesting factor. He guessed what I was up to rather early on, I think, but never did anything to stop me. Raised an eyebrow, gave me a penetrating stare, but that was it.
(And so, by the fourth year of my employment at Blythe Academy, I had built my own machine, fully as terrible and far-reaching as the Machine I had encountered underground. You understand now, I hope? I had managed to subvert and divert the resources of an entire institution of higher learning to the contemplation of a single question with many branches. The diagram I drew to exemplify this question was based on Tonsure’s account and deliberately resembled the gray caps’ most recurrent symbol, which had been drawn on walls, on cobblestones, but never explicated.
(Intentionally incomprehensible to outsiders, the diagram helped me see the relationships between various people and concepts in a new way. Manzikert I had triggered the Silence, I felt certain, with his actions in founding Ambergris. Samuel Tonsure had somehow cataloged and explained the gray caps during his captivity underground. Aquelus, a later ruler of Ambergris, had suffered Manzikert’s same fate, but survived to return aboveground. As Zamilon held some answer, so too did Alfar, the ruined tower to which Aquelus’s wife had retired prior to the Silence, thus ensuring her survival. And then there were the Silence and the Machine. How did they connect? And how did it all tie back in to the gray caps? These were the perhaps unanswerable questions I struggled with, and the structure through which I examined them.
(Although this is perhaps the least of what I unearthed during that time, it still represents an impressive experiment in collective unconsciousness, in beehive mentality. Did more than a few of those brains set diligently upon the course plotted for them ever suffer a tremor, a tickle of an inkling of my manipulation? I doubt it. I’m too proud of my work, perhaps, but I did little harm and much good. Several instructors published papers in prominent journals without ever knowing I had color-coded their innocent discoveries into a vast pattern of conspiracy and misdirection. They stood in their sunlit lecture halls turning their ideas over and over in their hands—brightly colored baubles for their students to applaud, confident they had solved a complete puzzle rather than assembled a single piece. The students, meanwhile, became specialists sensitive to the rhythms of synergy, analysis, and synthesis. Tuning forks for knowledge, they vibrated prettily, their shiny surfaces one by one catching the light. I admit, I derived great satisfaction from all of this. To have such a measure of control made me nearly ecstatic at times, fool that I was. And still, I wasn’t gathering enough knowledge fast enough. I felt frustrated, twice-removed from where I needed to be: underground. Ironic that, aboveground, I felt much as James Lacond once described Tonsure underground:
Most of the time [Tonsure] walks in the darkest night. Now and again, a wavering finger of light flutters across the darkness, teasing him with the outline of a path. Hopeful, he runs toward it, only to find himself in another maze. The hope that night must give way to day allows him to continue, and he tries to guess where a more permanent light might break through—a crack, a crevice, a hole—but the end of night never comes.)
Early on, I met these students, Duncan’s unwitting accomplices in esoteric, possibly meaningless, research. They made no particular impression on me: a formless row of fresh-scrubbed faces attached to identical dark blue uniforms. The eyes that populated those ruddy faces sparkled or flared or reflected light according to the intensity of their ambition. Some students stared defiantly at you. Some let you stare through them. Still others looked away, or down at their feet—every foot hidden by proper white socks, sheathed in black, brightly polished shoes. They smelled like soap and sweat. Their voices cracked and buzzed and sang out with equal innocence and brashness. In their uniformed rows, I could not tell the poor from the rich, the smart from the stupid. Thus did Blythe Academy serve as an equalizer of souls.
Never once did I think to challenge that semblance of equality, to search for that one variant, that one mimic cleverly made up to resemble the others, but actually of a different species altogether. (She was just another student in so many ways. You shouldn’t think that she was other, or different. I was the mimic, if anyone was. I threw off the balance in that place.)
* * *
Mary’s presence, when I look back, first resonated as a faint music vibrating through the strings of my golden metaphor: a resonance neither sinister nor angelic. In that respect, she reminds me of a character in a novel by Sirin. She exists on the edges of the pages, in the spaces between the words, her name unwritten except in riddles: a woman’s green-and-gold scarf on Duncan’s apartment desk, sudden honeysuckle in a glass in his school office, a puzzling hint of cologne during lunch. A half-dozen passive yet sensual details a jealous wife might hoard—or that a sibling might half-remember with amusement, but later revisit harshly.
Duncan never mentioned Mary during that time. (She was my student, for Truff’s sake! Why would I mention her? You make this all sound so tawdry yet ethereal. Is it possible she just escaped your myopic powers of observation? Is it possible you were so continually drugged and drunk that you noticed no one? You should strike all of this from the record. There’s no reason for it and no one cares. I don’t even care anymore, except the now-dulled sting that you tried to undermine my relationships rather than support them.) Curiously, though, Duncan’s postcards began to contain more personal information than our lunchtime conversations, possibly because of Bonmot’s presence.
Sometimes the postcards consisted of odd lines that told me he had reopened his investigations well beyond Blythe Academy:
Even the flies have eyes, Janice. Eyes for them. There is no corner of this city they cannot see in some form. But it’s too much information. They cannot review it all at once. I imagine them down there, in the fungal light, reviewing intelligence gathered a decade ago—awash in information, none of it useful to them because it overwhelms them. And yet—why? Why attempt to gather it?
If Dad had actually studied Tonsure’s journal, I wonder if he would have found what I found. Even more important—what would he have done with the knowledge?
Sometimes they gather around my door. Sometimes they burrow up from below. When they get in—which isn’t often; I’ve learned some of their tricks—they watch me. Observe. It is more unnerving than if they were to hurt me.