At least I got the courtesy of an embarrassed look from old Mortar. Pretty Pestle, though, went right on pounding away.

Eventually, I managed to rescue myself from the Nativism tour, but it took almost a year. People liked the irony of a Shriek, any Shriek, narrating that tour—at least the ones who had read Mary’s book, and too many of them had read Mary’s book. (Even me. I’m surprised you make no mention here of the time I took your Nativism tour. I’ve never seen anyone have to hold in so much irritation for such a long time. I only did it because for a time I contemplated joining the fray. If they wanted to use my life for their mass hallucinations, then I should at least have made a little extra money off it. Can you imagine the furor if Duncan Shriek had become a tour guide?)

Cinsorium: Rethinking the Myth of the Gray Caps was a book we needed during those reactionary rebuilding years as much as we’d needed Sabon’s pig cartel book a few years before. It was the book that made the rift between Duncan and Mary permanent. As Duncan wrote in his journal after reading it, “For the first time, my body understands what my mind accepted long before: Mary is never coming back to me.”

In her book, Sabon alternately refuted Duncan’s theories about the gray caps and cribbed from them—as if she had ground Duncan’s ideas down to specks of glitter and then used them to decorate her own creations. (Perhaps it wouldn’t have hurt so much if I hadn’t given her a copy of my own Cinsorium when we were at Blythe, inscribed “My dearest Mary—here’s the heart of me. Treat it gently. Love, Duncan.” She couldn’t have treated my Cinsorium more ruthlessly in her Cinsorium if she’d honed the book’s boards to a fatal sharpness and then stabbed me with them repeatedly. I can forgive her for most things, but not that.)

“So that is the message you would like me to relay to Duncan?” I asked Pestle, to make sure.

A triumphant look from Pestle. “Yes, thanks. That would be wonderful. But we have more to tell him.”

“I rather thought you might.”

As everyone knows, Nativism consists of two major ideas, but most people do not realize that only one of them is unique. The other has been around for centuries. Sabon’s innovation consisted in how she put the two together and then slapped her father’s crowd-pleasing title of “Nativism” on top of it all like the final slice of bread on a particularly messy sandwich.