Given that David Sabon’s most important contribution to natural history consists of helping to edit a revised edition of Xaver Daffed’s classic A History of Animals, perhaps it would be best to simply note his presence and move on. However, his peculiar {dangerous!} attitude toward the gray caps, delivered in the form of speeches to many a meeting of the Ambergris Historical Society {smoky, jaundiced events punctuated by coughs, grunts, and unintelligible murmurings from octogenarian senilitians}, should be documented somewhere. Where better than an afterword?
David Sabon preached a strain of Nativism {otherwise known as “a good way to get yourself killed”}, although not quite the same one later popularized by Mary. David Sabon not only believed that gray caps possessed “no more natural intelligence than a cow, pig, or chicken” but that they should be treated “much as we treat other animals.” As the transcript for one memorable speech reads, “Gray caps should be used to support our labors, for our entertainment, and for meat.”
Although David Sabon later claimed that “and for meat” had appeared in the speech by mistake {transposed from a speech on the King Squid}, the cutthroat Ambergris newspapers had no qualms about printing headlines like DAVID SABON RECOMMENDS SNACKING ON GRAY CAP BEFORE DINNER and NEW “ARCHDUKE OF MALID,” DAVID SABON, LIKES A NICE BIT O’ GRAY CAP BEFORE BED. Surely Mary Sabon, lone seed of a loon’s loins, became indoctrinated with her father’s attitudes at a very early age, setting the stage for her own irresponsible theories. {Perhaps so, but Mary always seemed embarrassed by her father’s activities.}
While David Sabon’s forebears included no one more distinguished than a barber in Stockton and a minor judge in Morrow, Mary’s mother, Rebecca Verden-Sabon, came from newly minted stock. Her father, Louis Verden, began his career as a jeweler but went on to illustrate a number of scientific texts, although his best work appeared in Burning Leaves, a creative journal he eventually art directed and to which I sometimes contributed when I had no work from Sirin. Verden also illustrated a series of paranoid {not paranoid enough} Festival pamphlets for Hoegbotton & Sons, including The Exchange, Bender in a Box, Naysayer Mews, In the Hours After Death, and The Night Step {all in collaboration with the darkly humorous, underrated writer Nicholas Sporlender, whom I once bumped into by mistake—underground, oddly enough}.
Rebecca became her father’s apprentice and eventually took over editorial duties at Burning Leaves, although not until my gallery had turned to dust and ash. Before that, she specialized in illustrations for advertisements or to accompany scientific texts. In some ways, it could be argued that Rebecca’s work for her daughter’s first book, The Inflammation of Aan Tribal Wars, gave her more exposure than all of her previous work combined.
Duncan’s parent-teacher conferences with David and Rebecca continued for several semesters. I have this rather humorous vision of Duncan in his office, talking solemnly with Mary’s parents and then, once he has smiled reassuringly and guided them out the door, frantically jumping out of his office window, on his way to a tryst with their daughter. {I honestly thought I was protecting her, and that she could make her own choices. After all, she was already a young adult. She knew her own mind.}
Apparently, the famed Naturalist suffered from a peculiar form of blindness: an inability to see anything under his nose unless it crawled or flew or swam or galloped, for that keen observer of the natural world never realized what Duncan and Mary had been up to until he was told by a third party.
“Thank you,” he’d said to Duncan. “Thank you for taking such good care of our daughter.”
And in his way he had, hadn’t he?
10
Mary and Duncan, Duncan and Mary. As with all utopias, especially those based on love, someone thankfully, always comes along to say, “No—this is not right. No—this should end.” Why? Because the true path Duncan always took to Mary’s window was the Path of Denial, a path with which I was familiar. For example, take my current situation. I have begun to run out of money, although the owner of this establishment doesn’t know it yet. He believes I just haven’t had a chance to go to the bank, what with all the typing. {Real life, intruding on the recording of real life. How odd.}
Besides, I’m akin to a curiosity—he makes a healthy living from letting loathsome types peek around the corner at me. “That’s Janice Shriek. She used to be famous.” Some slack-jawed gimp is peering from behind a glossy wooden beam right now. I am ignoring him—he will not receive even a sliver of my attention.
I do like the smell of beer and whiskey and smoke, however. I do like the busy times when they are all chattering away in there, happy as a bunch of click-clacking gray caps holding a half-dozen severed heads, as in “days of yore.”
Duncan only started coming here again in earnest after he fell out with Bonmot. When it all came crashing down, he called the Spore of the Gray Cap his home once more; again became the Green God of the Spore. Many a beer was consumed here. I wonder sometimes if Duncan ever came back during those happy-unhappy hours and sat looking at the corner, where all that can now be seen is a hole.
Now why would Duncan fall out with Bonmot? Could it have been over love? Possibly. If we turn to Duncan’s journal, to the entry where he recounts to Mary Bonmot’s fateful discovery along the Path of Remembering You, we shall soon find out. The ink was not yet dry on his grief when he wrote:
Glimpsed. Detected. Surprised. Held. Ensnared. Ensnarled. Entrapped. Captured. Stricken. No hope of understanding. He’d caught on, grasped, and comprehended, with no hope of acceptance. If I could make a fence of these words to keep him from us, I would, but it’s no use. It’s over. I am no longer a teacher. You are no longer my student. In a sense, we are released from all of it—the hiding, the sneaking around, the lying, the delicious forbidden feel of your lips against mine.
{There I go, romanticizing it—putting words between myself and the hurt. I disgust myself sometimes.}
I took the Path of Remembering You well after dark. I don’t remember anything about my trip, except the absent-minded scratches from a rose bush in the gardens and the frozen position of the stars. It was cold, and I was glad to pull myself up into your open window and into your smooth white arms. Your skin, as always, awakened my senses, and I trembled from the power of your eyes, the soft place at the base of your neck, the soap smell of you, the miraculous hollows on the inside of your thighs.