As she said this, she turned and looked right at me.
I stared at her for a moment. I let her receive the venom in my eyes. Then I walked up to her and slapped her hard across the face. The impact 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 hurt herself as well.
But I was not done. Not by half. I had just begun.
What did I do? You’ll find out soon enough. Jump pages. Jump time. Skip through the rest as if it were a park pathway on a Sunday afternoon, and you eager to feed the ducks at the far end, in Voss Bender Memorial Square. But I haven’t written the path yet, and you’d get lost without it—and, paper cuts aside, I’ll find ways to make you wait. Waiting is good. I’ve been waiting for over five days now. I know something about waiting. And afterwords.
“I say again: What’s she typing in there? Clack-clack-clack—it’s disturbing my peace of mind.”
“Wasn’t her brother the writer?”
“Obviously not the only one in the family.”
“You must be new to this conversation.”
“What’s she writing, do you think?”
“The story of your life, Steen. A history of the Cappans. How should I know?”
“Whatever it is, it must be important. To her.”
Pickled eyes in pickled light. A glimpse of cheddar-wedge nose.
“Funny. It’s like an echo. It falls away when we stop talking.”
…
“See. No typing. Do you think she’s…?”
She’s what? Typing your inane speech, perhaps? Why not? You’ve become my companions after a fashion. Although I’ve never talked to them, I’ve shared this place with them for days now. I ought to feel grateful for their interest. I ought to get out of this dank back room and go over and suggest a game of darts.
“Naw—she’s not typing us. Hasn’t got anything to do with us.”
I think I’ll go for a walk. I’m going to go for a walk. My hands are cramping. My stomach growls. The clock on the wall tells me I’ve been here much longer than I thought.
Even ghosts can take a walk, so why not me?
6
I was beginning to sound like a character in a book. I had to escape the relentless pressure of the words. I had to get away. From the typewriter keys. From my wrinkled hands, which prove my brain lies to me about my age. From the faces staring through the green crack where the corridors synchronize into a fracture of seeing. From the feeling that I had begun to parrot on these pages, blandly resuscitating facts. {Janice, once you start a project like this, it’s impossible to tell what is truly important or who will find what the most interesting, so it’s no use second-guessing your decisions, no matter how I may have protested against some of them.}
I went for a hobbling walk, leaning heavily on my cane every step of the way. But when you’ve lived in a place this long, no walk can occur solely in the present. Every street, every building, appears to you encrusted with memories, with perspectives that betray your age, your cynicism, your sentimentality, or your lack of feeling where you should feel something. Here, the site of a quick f**k, a fumbling moment of ecstasy. {“Lover’s tryst,” Janice, is, I believe, the preferred term; once again your style slips from Duncanisms to gutterisms.} There, a farewell to a departing friend. A fabled lunch with an important artist. The dust-smudged window of a rival gallery, still floundering along while you are forever out of business. A community square, where once you held an outdoor party, strung with paper lanterns. And if this were not enough—not relentless enough, not humbling enough—that unspeakable vision overlaying all of it, had you only the glasses to see: the mark of the gray caps on the city in a thousand secret signs and symbols.
It is not an easy thing for me to walk through Ambergris these days, but there is also comfort: why, she said, her heart breaking a little, there are so many friends to visit, even if they are all in the ground.
But at first I just hobbled down Albumuth Boulevard in the late afternoon light, letting my path be decided by the gaps between supplicants and pilgrims. Happy that everything appeared normal, that evidence of the Shift was hidden, or so minute that I didn’t notice it. {Or maybe you didn’t notice it because you had become so used to it.}
I took deep breaths, to catch all the smells in this most beautiful and cruel of all cities: passionflower and incense, lemon trees and horse flop, rotting meat and coffee grounds. For a few minutes I tried to pretend to be a tourist, a passerby, an incidental part of the city. It didn’t work. How could it? I am Janice Shriek.
My leg was already beginning to ache, but I thought I might feel more optimistic if I headed for the site of my greatest triumphs. I hadn’t visited it in ages, so I went despite the discomfort. After a good half hour, I finally stood in front of what had once been the 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 lay empty as if cursed. 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, rotting wood. 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 that shaped all aspects of the art world had taken place there. Much of the art mentioned in the Hoegbotton tourist guides, the descriptions of the New Art movement, had started with my gallery. I had started there. Everything I have been since came from my 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 might as well have never left the typewriter. I was still trapped in an afterword.
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 edge of hearing.
I disturbed a boy in the act of lighting a candle in the recess that marked the northernmost 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.