She wasn’t that much taller than me, really. Not as tall as she’d seemed while I was coming down the stairs. And not as young as she had seemed, either. My hand came away covered in makeup.
The imprint shone as red as her hair, as flushed as the gasp from the necklace of flesh. It lit up her face in a way that made her look honest again. It spread across her cheek, down her neck, swirled between the tops of her br**sts, and disappeared beneath her gown. If the world is a just place, that mark will never leave her skin, but remain as a pulsing reminder that, at some point in the past, she hurt someone so badly that she wound up hurting herself as well.
“Once upon a time,” I said, “no one knew your name. Someday no one will again.”
The wide O of the mouth, the speechless surprise, the backward step, the hand raised toward her cheek, the fear in her eyes as if she saw herself already as dust. That slap would tease a thousand tongues in a dozen cafés that week, until even the swift-darting swallows that so love our city repeated it in their incessant, insect-seducing song.
To her credit, she waved back the guards. She waved back the onrush of beads from her flesh necklace. They retreated, gleaming and muttering.
“What is it you really want, Janice?” she said, smiling through her pain. “Would you like the past back? Would you like to be successful again? Would you prefer you weren’t a washed-up has-been with so few prospects you had to agree to assist to help out with a party for an artist you used to agent?”
But I had nothing to say to her.
Instead, I turned to look at the assembled fawners and sycophants, the neophytes and the desperate, to make sure they were watching. Then I took the glasses from my pocket—and flung them at Mary’s face. I didn’t know I was going to do it until the instant it happened, and then it was too late to un-wish it.
In midair, the glasses opened up and, like some aerial acrobat of a spider, attached themselves perfectly to her face, the arms sliding into position around her ears, the bridge settling on her nose.
Mary was staring at me as the scales of the lenses filled with that amazing blackness—and she began to scream as soon as the top half of her pupils disappeared, a scream that grew deeper and more desperate as it continued, and continued. It was as if she had forgotten she could close her eyes. All she had to do was close her eyes, and, after a time, I began to hope she would close her eyes.
She stumbled, caught herself, blinked twice, stopped screaming—but, no: she was still screaming, it was just soundless. A look had come over her that destroyed the unity between mouth, eyes, forehead, cheekbones. Before me, she became undone looking through those glasses.
She fell to her knees, now grappling with the glasses, but they did not want to come off. Her precious flesh necklace didn’t know what to do—it dithered, came forward, retreated, unable to reconcile this moment of Sabon’s life with the last.
Raffe and Sonter were the first to recover from their shock, pushing through the crowd to come to Mary’s aid. Sabon was slack-jawed, moaning, and saying a word over and over again. It sounded suspiciously like “No.” Sonter tried to pry the glasses off while Raffe comforted Mary. But they still wouldn’t come off.
Finally, mercy flooding back into me, I stepped forward and plucked the glasses off from her face; they scurried across the floor and rolled up into a ball. Sabon’s face went slack, and I saw a momentary flicker of pain—the ghost of regret, perhaps?—and then it was gone. Her eyes rolled up into her head and she fainted.
The flesh necklace, now adding their cries to the growing cacophony, parted to let Raffe and Sonter carry Mary away, Sonter cursing my name. Even in unconsciousness, a look of utter terror and helplessness marred her face.
No one else wanted to pick up the glasses, so I did. After all, they were mine. I folded them and put them back in my pocket. They were still warm.
I was trembling and exhausted; watching Mary struggle had taken all of my energy. I still cannot decide if it was relief or horror that drained me. I still can’t decide if what I did was right or wrong.
What had Mary seen? I don’t know. I had stopped wearing the glasses more than two weeks before. Released from Duncan’s expert guidance, they had become stranger and stronger somehow, as if they now pierced through layers of reality deeper than even the gray caps were meant to see. But whatever she saw, it was the truth—in one massive dose.
I’ve thought about whether I should put them on again—I’ve thought about it the entire time I’ve been typing up this account. Might I see all the way through? Might I see through the golden threads, if they exist, to something else entirely? Or would I just fall, and keep falling?
I do know this—sometimes, afterwards, I’ve had a daydream in which I seek Mary out once the glasses come off, and I find her weeping in a corridor in the bowels of the hotel, and I sit down beside her and I hold her close and I say, “Please—forgive me.” But sometimes in the daydream I’m also saying, “I forgive you, Mary. I forgive you.”
7
I bought a few newspapers after I came here, but all they can tell me is that “Sabon is recovering from a bout of exhaustion.” None of them mentions my role in her exhaustion.
And that is all I know, and all I want to know.
I halted on the edge of an abyss when I left Mary, I think. I halted on the edge of a kind of Silence. I needed to write it down, try to make some sense of it outside of my own head. Draw the poison.
But I’ve shed my last skin. I’ve no more skins to shed. I can’t start over again—I’ve started over too many times before. You won’t believe me. I won’t believe me, either.
Maybe all of this was prevarication and excuses and not an afterword at all. Not an essay. Not a history. Not a pamphlet. Just an old woman’s ramblings. Maybe I don’t want to think about that hole in the ground behind me and the decision I have to make. But if so, at least it’s over now. I have told you everything I meant to tell you, and more.
As I sit here in the green light and review these pages, I see what Duncan saw when he wrote in this room—the sliver, the narrowness of vision, the small amount we know before we’re gone—and I realize that this account was a stab in the dark at a kind of truth, no matter how faltering: a brief flash of light against the silhouette of dead trees. This was the story of my life and my brother’s life, my brother and his Mary. {How could you think to tell such a story without me by your side, Janice?}