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.