“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 fuck, 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.