Excerpt from Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword
By Daniel Kaysen
21 July 2003
Finally I stood there, in front of what had once been my Gallery of Hidden Fascinations. A flower shop and a bakery stood to either side, but the part of the building that had housed the gallery, as if cursed, lay empty. The shadow where the hand-painted sign had once hung had been branded into the wall by years of hard weather. Beyond the cracked windows lay dust, moldy frames, and darkness. No paintings. No paint not peeling. Just seasons and seasons of neglect. The smell of stale bread and fungus. Layers of purple fungus had taken root in the closest wall. Passersby hardly spared the place a second glance. It should have been a monument or at least a memorial. It had housed dozens of famous paintings and painters. Conversations about all aspects of the arts had taken place there. Much of the art mentioned in the Hoegbotton tourist guides, the descriptions of the New Art movement -- it had mostly started with my gallery. I had started there. Everything I was since had come from the gallery. This dump. This husk of broken timbers. Even my memories of it -- saturated in the marinade of all five senses and as sharp as yesterday -- could not bring it to sudden life.
I headed into the Religious Quarter, immediately calmed by the sound of bells -- bells from steeples and cathedrals, from alcoves and altars, which I could never quite find the source of, which lingered at the edges of hearing. I disturbed a boy in the act of lighting a candle in the recess that marked the northern-most corner of the Church of the Seven-Edged Star. He looked up at me, his face whiter even than his white robes against the tousle of black hair, his eyes a glistening green, his mouth forming a half-conscious "o," the long match held with divine grace in his slightly upturned right hand. The white of his revealed wrist sent a shudder through me, but he smiled and the image of grace returned.
He was right to light the candle, for the Quarter at that hour had not only distant bells but distant light, the dusk so strong it might as well have been a smell, a musk, that slid over the unprotected surfaces of cobblestones, windows, and walls, leaving behind the murky chaos of rippling illuminations that remain in the Quarter after dark. Priests shuffled past, murmuring with mouths and bare feet. Truffidians, Manziists, Menites, Cultists? Doubtless Duncan would have known.
Moving on, I walked to the edge of the Religious Quarter, just past the stern-looking Truffidian Cathedral, and by way of a flurry of alleys, soon found myself in front of the Blythe Academy. The dark covered the academy comfortably, content to linger at the outskirts of lamps and torches. Even from the street I could see directly into the courtyard, and beyond the courtyard into the student apartments, here and there a window illumined with golden light. In the foreground, the pale willow trees rustled in the breeze. The stone benches and tables were solid, dark, strangely-comforting masses. A monk strode across the courtyard. Another followed, cowl hiding his face. The sweet, pungent scent of honeysuckle wound itself around me.
I do not know how long I stood there, remembering the long ago conversations I had had in that place, but as I did a sweet and unbearable sadness came over me. Nothing I can type on these pages can convey --truly -- what I felt as I stood there looking into the darkened courtyard where Duncan, Bonmot, and I had sat and talked. And, if I am truthful, that place I stood in front of, which meant so much to me, no longer had any more to do with me than the Borges Bookstore. The moment, the spirit, had passed out of it and it was just a place once more. Duncan no longer taught there. Bonmot no longer sat behind the desk in his office, listening to the imagined miseries of yet another homesick student. Duncan had disappeared. Bonmot had died ten years ago, Duncan's hand in his, weeping with fear despite the comforts of his religion.
What strange creatures we are. We live, we love, we die with such random joy and grief, each brain as individual as a fingerprint and just as enigmatic. We make up stories to understand ourselves and tell ourselves that they are true, when in fact they only represent an individual impression of one individual fingerprint, no matter how universal we attempt to make them.
I stood there, mourning the death of that place even though it had not really died, even though it had since spawned a thousand stories to join the millions of stories that comprised the city, and then I walked back here, to the typewriter, to continue my epic, my afterword, so consumed by what? By emotion. That my hands are shaking. They are shaking right now. What shall stop them? Perhaps a dose of the dead past. . . .
Copyright © 2003 Jeff VanderMeer