My brother, however, tight-lipped and nervous {because I expected, with no truce yet spoken or implied, that you and Mary would fight the entire evening; why, the war was at times the least of my worries, even though I could sense the gray caps in the floorboards, their symbols and signs everywhere}, showed more of the strain. A silvery-purple “birthmark” writhed upon his forearm like a living tattoo. Who knew if his clothes hid some greater embarrassment? {They didn’t. I could now maintain control, at least for a while. Had I manifested in my full fungal state, it would have cleared out the opera house.}
Some of those around us had even incorporated their misfortunes into their costumes. As we walked into the antechamber, stairs on left and right leading up and down, the gold-painted walls and somber red curtains unable to hide the gouges in the floor, the gutted, silent bar awash with signs of flame, we encountered these fashion marvels. The full extent of Ambergrisian ingenuity or insanity became clear. One woman had actually created a body-length trellis over which to cultivate the deep blue fungi ravishing her, the fronds forming a full dress, complete with train. Others had fashioned earrings or other accessories from their symptoms. {It says something that we had come far enough not to be shocked by what we saw that night. How quickly people adapted to such extremes; and how, secretly, I was glad of it, for it made me normal for a time, no more or less afflicted than anyone else, especially in Mary’s eyes. Later, of course, it would help me not at all, once the “ordinary” citizens of Ambergris conveniently forgot the strangeness, the surreal quality, of the city during wartime.}
Mary gasped when she saw the woman with the trellis. Sybel and Lacond turned withering expressions of contempt toward her that she pretended not to see. Sybel had never been underground, but he had a way of adapting to each new situation as it presented itself. Lacond, meanwhile, had not gone as far belowground as Duncan, nor for as long, but he was marked for life by it, nonetheless: an encrusted blackness sometimes shone through his pores.
“You’d all better get used to it,” Lacond muttered. “There’ll be much more than that to get used to before the end.”
Sybel scowled; I knew Lacond’s pronouncements sometimes struck him as both vague and pretentious.
But you may wonder how, even with so great and ponderous a weight as James Lacond between us, Mary and I could walk so calmly into the opera house as members of the same group. The circumstances of war, as well as her keeping her distance and being eclipsed by the mushroom moon known as Lacond, didn’t hurt, but you must also remember that the two semesters of Bonmot’s ban had long since passed into history. The ban, along with much else from before the war, had become so remote that sometimes I could not find these details in my memory, or could not find them with a sharpness that made them real.
So I had, for the duration of the conflict, suspended my judgment of many things, including Mary. I had even become reconciled to the idea that Duncan and Mary might make a life together. Indeed, you might say that the war, for a time, created another kind of excitement for Duncan and Mary, an urgency to replace what they had lost now that they could no longer sneak around Blythe Academy. {Yet you were still so tense, your smile so forced, your politeness so impolite.} I did not speak to her, but we both laughed at Duncan’s jokes, and made comments to each other indirectly, through Duncan or Lacond. Sybel, for his amusement, tried to create situations in which Mary would have to talk to me, or vice versa, but was never successful.
Through the sweat-stained, boot-scuffed antechamber we walked, all of us crowded together as we climbed the stairs to the balcony, having to ignore our own sour smell.
Then, a rush of stale air in our faces, followed by another, even staler, blast, as we walked onto the balcony and beheld the opera house!
We stared down at row upon row of worn gilt seats, rapidly being filled by the people sitting in them, saw the orchestra pit filled with the febrile scratchings of musicians tuning their instruments, and beyond that, the plain wooden stage, half-hidden by burgundy curtains that had great, gaping holes in them, revealing the scurrying singers behind the veil, the grunt and nudge of set pieces moving into place.
The more we looked, the more small details came into focus, the grandeur fading upon closer inspection. Plaster cherubim placed at the corners of the balcony, framing our view, had grown old, fissures of wrinkles aging them to appear wiser, and more malevolent than innocent. Every seat had a sweat stain from years of use. Every filigree and swirl of decorative paint on the walls or ceiling had a crack, a dent, a fault line. It had always been that way, and the familiarity of it comforted me.
Then Duncan gasped.
“Look,” he said, pointing toward the ceiling. Only Lacond did not make a sound when he saw it. Even Sybel swore, under his breath.
It seems odd now that we had not seen it before all else, as if we wanted at first to deny its existence.
Looking up, as we walked forward to the edge of the balcony seats, we slowly came to recognize the source of the clear, clean, but undeniably green light that served as our illumination. {The rational mind can absorb only so much of the strange without damage.}
“What is it?” Mary whispered.
“The remains of a fungal bomb,” Lacond replied.
“Half-exploded,” Duncan said. “Fused to the ceiling.”
The wound we had seen from the outside of the opera house had provided scant evidence of the damage suffered by the building. The center of its mosaic dome—a stylized scene of Morrow cavalry riding to Ambergris’ defense during the Silence—had disappeared, the shards of its dissolution having simply vanished, assimilated, replaced by an intense green that shed its light in waves upon the stage. The green had eyes, or so it seemed, for it manifested itself as a series of circles or nascent fruiting bodies.
My breath caught in my throat. My neck grew sore from staring up at it. You could see through the green to the stars in the sky beyond, as if the green were no more substantial than gauze, than fog, and yet it sparkled and spun, each particle of it, as it shed the light that allowed us to see as we found our seats.
Lacond noticed that I could not look away from it, even as I sat down.
“Nothing you haven’t seen from the outside in,” he said as kindly as he could. His bulbous eyelids twitched, the cigar working up and down between his teeth, caught in his grouperlike lips. The sweet spicy smell of the cigar calmed me. “A fungal bomb that misfired, like we said. It hit the glass and stone of the dome and formed a substance…well, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. An interesting effect. And stable. It’ll stay there for a long time, or at least for the next four hours.” He laughed.