Remembering this as I type, I suddenly see not just one trip to Sirin’s office, but many, over several seasons, a pleasant overlay of memories as sensual as any heated groping of bodies in the back rooms of a guest house. I see the perpetual but graceful aging of Sirin, which for him manifested itself solely in his hair, which whitened and receded, while the rest of him stayed exactly the same. I see the constant rush and withdrawal of the papers on his desk. I see the sudden and inexplicable disappearance and reappearance of his legion of secretaries. The blur of colors and motion outside of his windows. The steady permanence of his smile, his desk, his butterflies. {It’s difficult to shake off the feeling, isn’t it, Janice? Difficult because you don’t want to. Neither do I.}
One of the more distinctive aspects of Sirin’s offices, beyond the sheer expansive clutter on his desk {early spring, then, was it?}, and the lingering odor of cigars and vanilla, were the tubular glass enclosures a Morrow glass blower had made for him. They lay clustered on the table behind his desk, near an oval window that overlooked Albumuth Boulevard. Each had tiny holes cut into the glass and contained a caterpillar, chrysalis, or fully formed butterfly. {Certainly, little bound his butterflies to the past, or the present. As they emerged glistening from their tight houses, they knew nothing but the moment. Sometimes I envied them.}
I had often observed Sirin puttering over his charges as his secretary showed me in, but this time he stood there lamenting a dead butterfly. Sirin looked tanned and well-rested beneath his crisp gray suit and burgundy shoes, any graceful effect ruined by a glaring multicolored bowtie that a clown would have been ashamed to wear; it was his only vice, besides tricking people. His hair had by now receded to reveal more and more of his narrow, intelligent face.
I had known him for many years, and yet I knew little or nothing about him, really.
Sirin spun around at my approach. {Butterflies and moths lived inside his head, Janice, just as mushrooms lived inside of mine. This made it difficult to hear.} He fixed me with the famous stare that could pierce walls and bring confessions from even the most hardened Truffidian monk.
“Look at this,” he said, gaze bright but disturbed behind the gold frames of his glasses. “My favorite sapphire cappan has been colonized by the emissaries of the gray caps. It’s a sign, perhaps.” His outstretched hands, smeared with fungal spores and bearing the crumpled corpse of his beloved butterfly, belonged to a piano player, not an editor and writer. {I often thought his piano playing was a step above his editing, to be honest.}
We met halfway between the door and his glass habitats. I stared at the creature in his hands. True enough—the dead butterfly was completely encrusted with an emerald-green fungus. The outstretched wings had sprouted a thousand tendril colonists, topped with red and resembling a confusion of antennae. It looked like some intricate wind-up toy covered with jewels. It looked more beautiful than it could have alive—not just a butterfly choked with fungus, but a completely new creature. Even the texture of its exoskeleton appeared to have changed, become more supple. I stared at it with sudden irrational fear. It was too similar to the process that had begun to claim my brother. {I am neither butterfly nor fungus, and I chose my fate, but I appreciate your concern.}
Sirin’s voice brought me back to the present.
“It’s a shame, Janice,” he said. “A terrible waste. A tragedy of Manzikertian proportions. I should never have left.” He had recently returned from a “vacation” in the Southern Isles forced upon him to avoid the backlash from his role in the Citizen Fish Campaign, about which the less said the better. {Even an aging historian such as I, Janice, must consider that statement a challenge: Senior members of the Hoegbotton clan had suggested Sirin temporarily disappear after it became known through a leak to the city’s broadsheets that Sirin had been behind Citizen Fish, an effort to fill the recently vacated Antechamber position with a stinking, five-day-old freshwater bass.}
“You had no choice,” I said.
A dismissive shrug. “We might have won the election. Anyone would have been better than Griswald. He’ll last a few weeks, perhaps, before they tear him down. Figuratively, one can only hope. A shame.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.” But I wasn’t sure if he meant the butterfly or something more elusive, more dangerous. The distance between us grew with each new utterance.
Sirin turned toward his desk, butterfly still cupped in his hands, and seemed startled by the cacophony of papers, books, pens, manuscripts, newspapers, and contracts that greeted him. Most prevalent were the manuscripts, which had been so thoroughly lacerated with red pen marks that they looked as if they were bleeding out. {Sirin the Invasive, I used to call him. Always trying to put his stink on a poor writer’s immaculate style. Always intimidating people with his little red pen. I used to joke that if he had had to use his own blood to make his marks he’d have been stingier with his criticism.}
“Sit, sit,” he said, gesturing to a chair piled high with books. “Just push those off.”
Bent almost double by the burden, I did as he suggested. As I sat down, I could not help but notice a ragged piece of paper, in his handwriting: “Did the arrival of the Manzikert family in some way trigger a change in the gray caps? Did the arrival of M ruin our chance to understand them?” {That is another thing I will never forget about Sirin: his ragged notes, the emissaries of authorial destruction.}
So Sirin, too, had his finger on the pulse of a mystery {or simply a note mimicking or correcting some book he planned to publish}. I sometimes thought that should Sirin and Duncan ever sit down for a serious talk, all mysteries would be solved, revealed, undone. {No—not true. An altogether uglier scenario comes to mind.}
Sirin laid his tiny burden down on the desk in front of me, then sat back in his chair, arms crossed, and stared at me, an odd smile flitting across his face. Perhaps he was already contemplating his escape, or perhaps it was one last smile of pain for his sapphire cappan. An exotic jewel, the butterfly looked ever more beautiful in the light streaming from Sirin’s window.
“I heard a rumor,” Sirin said, “that Duncan has left Blythe Academy under peculiar circumstances. Is this true?”
“He has left, it’s true,” I said. “There is nothing peculiar about it, however. A difference of opinion, really. Nothing that would get in the way of his being hired by someone else.”
“Janice. Is Duncan determined to destroy every career he makes some progress toward?” {Typical of the bastard.}