I think the agenda alone should give some insight into the kinds of buffoons with which Duncan had aligned himself. He had gone from writing legitimate books to writing legitimate articles to teaching at a legitimate school to scandal and heartbreak, and now lived a sad existence at the very fringe of his chosen field.

(Again, unfair. I appreciate your protectiveness, but the truth is often so strange that one cannot, at the outset, discard even the most ridiculous of theories, the silliest of suppositions. Remember how I let my students do my research for me? This was a similar situation—I was always searching for the sliver of truth in the outlandishness presented at those meetings. Even the most absurd theory might have in its core details, its foundation, some hint of information about the gray caps, something to be salvaged or redirected. I attended those meetings for that reason, not because I believed everything I heard, or even wanted to be associated with all of them. But who else, Janice, would publish my “crackpot theories”? No one after the war except, ultimately, Sirin. And even he didn’t do it properly, as you—my benign, self-chosen executioner—well know.)

Certainly, I was used to dealing with strange people—I’ve never met an artist who wasn’t at some level a deeply strange or estranged person. But this was different. These were people on the edge of the edge of sanity. Oddities. Carpenters who, in their spare time, developed paranoid theories about House Hoegbotton that grew to full fruition in the dark, glistening spaces of their imaginations. Stay-at-home wives who, bored, had bought into the more lurid broadsheet headlines. Self-hating bank clerks making a pittance who had curdled inside and defended the gray caps because they would have cheered if the gray caps had risen up and taken over the city. People who believed they were the reincarnation of historical figures like Tonsure. And, on the fringes of those fringes, homeless people who used the meetings to take shelter. The mentally challenged who had been discharged from the now-destroyed Voss Bender Memorial Mental Hospital. I even thought I spied a gray shape that resembled my former fellow inmate Edward at one point, although when I looked again, he was gone.

And those were just the audience members.

How the spittle flew during the meeting I observed! The sour taste of vitriol! The sad, lonely, pathetic, nervous, neurotic, psychotic, exposed underbelly of the city.

“In my opinion, Tonsure was a gray cap disguised as a priest.”

“The grace with which the fungus leapt from tree to tree astounded me.”

“I didn’t realize I had the gift to channel ghosts until I was twelve.”

“In the vast, empty spaces beneath the city, this huge fungus has taken over and means to envelop us in its clammy grasp.”

“Being a woman, I am more attuned to the feelings of inanimate objects.”