Bonmot used to say that “The limits of our imagination are the limits of our free will.” Duncan could not imagine a life that did not include Mary and the gray caps. I sometimes wonder how different it would have been if he could have wrenched himself free of Ambergris and set sail for the Southern Isles, lost himself in the waves and the wind, adopted a different obsession.

(Janice—all obsessions are the same. They vary little in the essential details. You refuse to believe that my search for knowledge wasn’t so much personal, wasn’t so much for myself, but out of a fear for the future of our city. I pursued Mary out of a fear for the future of Duncan Shriek. There wasn’t much holding me to the city besides Mary, to be honest. As I continued to change, I needed to make up reasons why I shouldn’t just venture underground and stay there. I could have planted myself in a dark, moist corner of the gray caps’ world and taken root. I could have allowed the fungi to colonize me, taken in the breath of their sleep and woken in a thousand years to a far different fate. So was it love, after a certain point in time? Probably not. It was probably just a grasping for some kind of normal life. But can you blame me?)

If only Duncan could have apologized to Bonmot in a way that Bonmot would have accepted. But he wouldn’t. I think Bonmot was more fragile in his faith than he let on—I think he believed that if he let Duncan back into his life, it would affect his character, would erode his integrity. Duncan could have used Bonmot for balance during those times. He could have used someone other than a sister with one foot who had nightmares about being buried alive in a pile of corpses. Because Lacond really did have him convinced—they’d go to those lunatic meetings of their lunatic society, and Duncan would think that because three hundred people showed up and listened to him he was making progress. (Lacond was enough for me. Lacond never made me feel as if I were damaged or deranged, the way Bonmot could even during the best of our conversations. There’s a whiff of righteousness in the most humble servant of Truff that is a terrible, terrible thing. But Lacond taught me confidence and endurance. Every year of his adult life, he had written down his bizarre, unpopular theories and, through his society, made them available to the public. And every year, most people rejected his work, or feigned indifference, or found his theories an unkind reflection or comment on the man himself. Yet he never stopped, never gave up. It’s more than I could have done.)

I went to one AFTOIS meeting. That was enough for me—one glance at the agenda handed out by a portly woman with a purple scarf wound endlessly around her neck, as though a purple constrictor had a choke hold on her—one glance convinced me I would not be coming back: