I want that kind of joy, that epiphany, or a chance at it, at least, even if it kills me. (Must I echo to you your own words? That we are all connected by lines of glimmering light. How many times those words kept me alive, made me see approaching light in unending darkness? As Bonmot used to say in his sermons: “We are vessels of light—broken vessels, broken light, but vessels nonetheless.” Fragments across the void. It’s time to find you, Janice, and see what you’ve gotten yourself into.)

But you’re free now, regardless of what this was—after word, afterward. I release you to return to what you were before. If you can.

As for me, it is time to abandon even this dim green light for the darkness. I’ve put as many words between myself and this decision as I can, but it hasn’t worked. There’s a space between each word that I can’t help but fall into, and those spaces are as wide as the words and twice as treacherous.

A shift of attention. Another place to go. That’s all it is. I’m not afraid anymore. I’m not frightened. Everyone is dead or disappeared or disappointed. I ask you, who is left to be afraid of? This is After Dad Died. This is After Mom Died. This is an entirely new place.

I think it is time for one last walk outside. One last look at this crazed, beautiful, dirty, sad, glorious city. Sybel and Bonmot and my mom and all the rest are waiting for me out there in some form or another—a whisper on the breeze, the rustle of the branches, a shadow across a wall, and, perhaps, there will be time for one last lunch under the willows, my glasses safely in my pocket. Then I’ll come back and decide whether or not to seek out Duncan, whether to put on these glasses and face whatever Mary saw.

No one makes it out, Samuel Tonsure once said.

Or do they?

A (BRIEF) AFTERWORD BY SIRIN

My role in all of this is complicated and compromised because I know or knew almost all of the people mentioned in Janice’s manuscript, not least of whom was Janice herself. I was always fond of Janice, perhaps more than I should have been, but confronted with her typewritten manuscript, I felt much as I had felt several years before when confronted by Duncan’s six hundred pages of early history: overwhelmed, irritated, fatigued, intrigued, and perplexed. I’ve always thought Janice had the best intentions, but also that her biases and her own obsessions sometimes led her to suspect conclusions. Many of these suspect conclusions had made their way into the afterword she left behind, and this explains, or helps to explain, my actions with regard to it. I hope.