The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  In the dream, I think the deer are being called to you, the deer and those other animals. But you do not raise your head to greet them, do not make any sign whatsoever to acknowledge their approach. And I think, Maybe she knows that would only scare them away. The movie has a soundtrack, though I think I only become aware of it as the animals approach. I can hear their feet crunching softly in the grass, can hear wind, and what I think might be you singing very softly to yourself. All this time my girlfriend could sing to deer, and I had no idea. How crazy is that? And before much longer, those nervous, long-leggedy beasts and their damp noses would be pressing in all about you, and in that instant you seemed to me some uncanon ized Catholic saint. Our Lady of the Bucks and Does and Fawns. And here, I think, I am grown quite certain that I am dreaming, but it hardly seems to matter, because there you are, so perfect, and I need to see you, and I need to know what is about to happen.

  And here, too, the dream shifts again, canvas and plywood backdrops swapped and costumes changed in a seamless, unmarked segue. Now it is some other evening, and I am not in the kitchen of the rented farmhouse off Barbs Hill Road, and I am not in that anonymous theater, either. Amanda is with me now, and we are no longer divided by windowpanes or silver screens or time. I am telling her how sorry I am, how it’ll never happen again, and she’s on her knees, huddled on a sidewalk washed in the sodium-arc glow of a nearby streetlight. She holds a stick of chalk gripped tightly in her left hand, drawing something on the concrete at my feet. By slow degrees, I scrape up enough comprehension to see that what she’s making resembles the squares of a child’s hopscotch game, only instead of numbers, each square contains a line from the magpie rhyme, with the first square marked Earth. In the second she has written “One for anger,” and in the third “Two for mirth.” She is only just beginning to fill in the fourth square, the chalk loudly scratching and squeaking against the pavement, and as I talk she shakes her head, no, no, no. She will not listen, will not hear me, and it does not matter whether I am a liar or sincere, for we have already come to a place where actions have forever eliminated even the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation.

  “Three for a wedding,” she says.

  And all the things that I said, I’ve lost those words, had forgotten them by the time I awoke. But in the dream I speak them with such a wild desperation that I have begun to cry, and still she shakes her head—No, Sarah, no.

  “Four for a birth,” she says, and doesn’t look up at me. There are enormous, rumbling vehicles rushing and rattling by, neither trucks nor cars, precisely, but I only catch fleeting glimpses of them from the corners of my eyes, for I know they are abominable things that no one is meant to gaze upon directly. The air smells like exhaust and something lying dead at the side of the road, and “Five for rich,” Amanda says and laughs.

  Her chalk breaks, splintering against the sidewalk, and again I am only sitting in the kitchen, in this same chair. Again, I am watching her as the deer and other animals approach from the cover of trees and lengthening shadows. Head bowed, she is still singing, her voice calling out clearly across the dusk. Every living thing perks its ears to hear, and the sky above is battered black with the wings of owls and catbirds and seagulls. And it is here that I realize, too late, that the deer are not actually deer at all. Their eyes glint iridescent green and gold in the failing day, and they smile. Those long legs, so like jointed stilts, pick their way through brambles and over stones, and your song invites them. Perhaps, even, Amanda’s song has somehow created them, weaving them into being from nothingness. Or no, not from nothingness, but fashioning them from the fabric of my own fear and remorse and guilt. Maybe they are only shards of me, stalking towards her in the gloom. I rise to shout a warning, but no sound escapes my throat, and my fists cannot reach the glass to pound against the window. They smile their vicious smiles, these long-leggedy things, and the house murmurs, and she is still singing her summoning, weaving song when, one by one, they fall, merciless and greedy, upon her.

  Fuck it. Fuck it all to hell.

  I know I’ll look back at these pages in a few hours, and all this will sound like nonsense. It’ll sound like utter horseshit. The sun will hang high and brilliant in the sky, and my only clear recollection of the nightmare will be what I have written down here. I’ll laugh at the foolish woman I have allowed myself to become, jumping at these shoddy specters spat up by my sleeping mind, then wasting good ink to consign them to paper. It will fade, and I will laugh. More than anything, I’ll be annoyed at that fucking tense shift. But, Sarah, this raises a question, one that I am still too asleep to have the good sense to avoid. If I can write about Amanda through a child’s allegorical, symbolic horrors, then can I not also bring myself to write about the truth of it? This dream and all those I haven’t written down and likely never will, they are only a coward’s confession, indirect visions seen through distorting mirrors, mere “shadows of the world,” because I do not seem to possess the requisite courage to look over my shoulder and face my own failures. Is that who I have become? And if so, how long can I stand the sour stink of my own fear? And hey, here’s another question. Have I stopped writing, not because I no longer know what to write about, but because I know exactly what I need to be writing? They were always only me, the short stories and novels, only scraps of me coughed up and disguised as fiction, autobiography tarted up and disguised as figment and reverie.

  Maybe I’ll have another long, long drive today. Maybe I’ll get into the car and head back to that lighthouse and those picnic tables overlooking Point Judith and the bay. Or I’ll fill up the tank and hit the interstate and not stop until I’m in Boston. I won’t drive south and west, because that way lies Manhattan, sooner or later, and Manhattan has come to signify nothing to me but looming deadlines and impatient publishers. At any rate, enough of this. Lay down the pen and shut the hell up for a while. Give it a rest, old woman.

  14 May 2008 (3:29 p.m.)

  So, turns out, the poorhouse will be avoided just a little fucking longer. Dorothy called from Manhattan about an hour ago. I was in the bathroom, but heard my cell phone ringing here on the kitchen table. My backlist was just picked up by a German-language publisher, the whole thing, which will make for a tidy little advance. Lucky me. The check from Berlin should arrive just about the same time things start looking genuinely bleak in my bank account. I know she could hear the relief in my voice, because I’m lousy at hiding that sort of thing. No poker face here. Anyway, after the news, there was a moment of awkward silence, then an even more awkward bit of chitchat—how’s the weather, are you feeling well, etc.—before she asked the inescapable question. Never mind she’d just asked a few days back.

  “Any progress with the writing?”

  I’d offer to send her this notebook, but I don’t think that she’d appreciate the humor. What I wanted to ask Dorothy, but didn’t, is when we’re finally going to admit the truth to one another and stop playing this game of wishful thinking. The day will come. I see that now more than ever. The hour will come when she asks, and instead of making my usual excuses or dodging it altogether by changing the subject or making a joke of the whole mess, I’ll just tell her it’s not going to happen. Sorry. The well is dry, and sorry it took me so long to summon the courage to say so. Is that how it happens? How a writer stops being a writer?

  Can it actually be as simple as a few words spoken into a cell phone?

  I just read back over that last entry, the dream of Amanda and the animals and the game of hopscotch. I’m really not so glad I wrote it down. If I hadn’t, most of the damned thing would have faded by now. I’d recall very little beyond the mood that it evoked, that almost smothering sense of dread, and I wouldn’t be sitting here gnawing it over. Or sitting here while it gnaws at me. Have I come all the way to this musty old house at the end of the world to be whittled away by nightmares and obsession? Merely running from ruin to dissolution? I can picture those nightmares and memories as termites, or maggots, o
r some cancerous growth, slowly consuming me, bit by bit. And maybe I’ve done nothing but make myself more palatable.

  16 May 2008 (9:47 p.m.)

  I met Amanda Tyrell on Friday the 13th, at a party I didn’t want to attend, where I hardly knew anyone else in attendance. And it wasn’t just any Friday the 13th, but Friday the 13th in October 2006. For the first time since January 13th, 1520, four hundred and seventy-six years earlier, the digits in the numerical notation for the day added up to thirteen (1+1+3+2+6=13). By the way, there’s a tradition that on January 13th, 1520, Ferdinand Magellan reached the banks of the Rio de la Plata and proclaimed, “Monte vide eu!” It’s probably apocryphal, and I only know it because of the goddamn internet, which makes historians of anyone with enough motivation and intellgince to tap at a computer keyboard. But it all sounds rather prophetic, right? Sounds like I should have done the math, read the signs, and then wisely looked the other way. It’s easy to say shit like that in retrospect. Hell, at the time, all I knew was that it was Friday the 13th, and I found most of the people who’d shown up for this CD-release thing to be utterly loathsome. I knew a girl in the band, had once dated her, in point of fact, and that’s the only reason I was there. I didn’t even particularly care for the music, sort of a countrypolitan revival thing, the whole business trying much too hard to sound like Patsy Cline and Skeeter Davis and Jim Reeves. I was drunk, nothing unusual there (except that I was drunk on free booze), and kept wondering if maybe I’d wandered onto the set of a David Lynch film, circa Lost Highway. Cowboy hats and twangy guitars and some stripper who could not only drink from a Budweiser can held between her grotesquely artificial breasts, but could then crush the can with those same great mounds of flesh and fat and silicone. “Monte vide eu,” indeed.

  I sat there, brooding in the smoke and honky-tonk roar, the din of all those chattering voices and laughter, and Amanda was sitting on the other end of the sofa from me. She said she knew who I was, that she’d read The Ark of Poseidon and, what’s more, she hadn’t really liked it. And nothing gets me wet like literary rejection. And, too, I probably hadn’t been laid in the last six months. She was wearing this skimpy wifebeater A-shirt and jeans, and there was nothing the least bit artificial about her breasts. Though, honest to fucking god, it was the talk that got me, at least at the start. I mean, she just sat down and started telling me how I’d screwed up that novel, like I’d asked her opinion or something. She was smoking clove cigarettes and drinking Jack and Coke, and it amazes me now that I can remember either of those details, given it’s been two years, and I was very, very drunk at the time.

  “I wouldn’t go so far to say that it’s overwritten,” she said. Well, no. I don’t remember precisely what she said, but that was the sentiment. “But it could have been a lot less wordy.” I do recall that she said wordy, and that she laughed afterwards.

  “Is that a fact?” I might have asked, and maybe she nodded and took a drag off her cigarette.

  “Also,” she said, “the shell in Titian’s Venus Anadyomene is most emphatically not an oyster shell, but a scallop. And the painting was owned by John Sutherland Egerton, who was the 6th Duke of Sutherland, not by the 5th Duke of Sutherland.” And no, that’s not really what she said. I have no idea what she really said, but it was exactly that pedantic and irrelevant to both the theme and plot of the novel.

  “Yeah? So, sue the copy editor,” I replied, and she laughed again.

  “You ever even been to Greece?” she may have asked next, and I may have replied, “You’re an audacious little cunt, aren’t you?”

  “Audacity,” she said (or let’s say she did). “Yeah, I am audacious. But, as Cocteau said, ‘Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.’ ”

  “I think I must have missed the tact.”

  “Then you aren’t paying attention.”

  I finished a bottle of Michelob and set the empty on the table beside the sofa. And she just sat there, smoking and watching me with those fucking gray-green eyes of hers, eyes like lichen clinging to boulders on Rocky Mountain tundra or alpine meadows, like something unpleasant growing in the back of the fridge, eyes that were cold and hard, but very much alive.

  “Sorry about that,” I said. “I’m drunk. Drunk and confronted with tactless audacity.”

  And then she smiled at me and said, “In every artist there is a touch of audacity, without which no talent is conceivable.”

  “Oh, so you’re an artist?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what? On what does it depend?”

  “On how one chooses to define art.”

  I glanced towards the bar, wanting another beer, but lacking the requisite motivation to walk that far. Besides, she might leave if I got up.

  “Who the hell said that, anyway?” I asked her. “ ‘In every artist there is a touch of audacity,’ I mean.”

  “Disraeli,” she replied. “But you still haven’t answered my question, Miss Crowe.”

  “Do not call me Miss Crowe. Jesus, I’m not that much older than you, am I?” Only later would I learn that I was (get this) thirteen years older than Amanda, and that we shared the same birthday.

  “Have you ever been to Greece?”

  “Yes,” I lied. “Two years before I wrote the book,” and then I began ticking off what I could recall of Greek geography on my fingers. “Athens, Lamia, Crete, Pelo ponnese, Thessaly . . . did the whole tour. I never write about a place unless I’ve spent time there. And you know what I recall the most—I mean besides the ouzo and legal prostitution?”

  She said that she didn’t, of course, and by this point I’d forgotten all about wanting another beer and was in full-on tall-tale mode.

  “I was out walking on a beach one morning, and don’t ask me where because I don’t remember exactly. Maybe Thessaloniki. Maybe Kavala. But I was out walking off a bull bitch of a hangover, and I came across this enormous dead sea turtle on the sand. It had this awful gash in its shell, and I figured that was probably from a propeller blade. Figured that’s what killed the poor fucker.”

  “You went to Greece, and what you remember most is a dead turtle?” she asked, and those gray-green eyes flashed skeptically. “Besides the ouzo and the whores, that is.”

  “Yes,” I said, jabbing a finger at her for emphasis. “Yes, that’s what I remember most. That poor, dead fucking sea turtle, spread out there on the beach. It was big, like something from dinosaur times, bigger than any turtle I’d ever seen. It was, I learned later on, a loggerhead, an endangered species. And there it was, fucking murdered by some asshole’s outboard motor, and I just sat down in the sand beside it and cried.”

  I stopped talking, and she sat staring at me a moment. I stared back, mostly at her breasts. And then she said, “So, Sarah, you went all the way to Greece, and then you wrote a book about it. But you left out that thing that made the greatest impression upon you?”

  “Irony,” I replied, without missing a beat. “Besides, I thought putting the turtle in the book would cheapen it. The novel, I mean. Not the sea turtle. Matter of fact, hell, I’ve never told anyone but you that story.”

  “See where audacity gets you?” she asked. “Anyway, the novel you wrote before that one, it was much better.”

  “A Long Way To Morning?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. I remember now, because it sounds like an Ernest Hemingway title.” And then she asked if I wanted anything else from the bar, because she’d just finished her Jack and Coke and was sucking on an ice cube.

  “I can go,” I offered. “I’m not so drunk I can’t walk.”

  “No, I’ll go,” and she glanced at the bottle on the table. “Michelob?”

  “Michelob Amber Bock,” I said, and she nodded, standing up, vanishing into the crowd, all those hipster idiots in cowboy boots and rhinestone-studded shirts. I thought sure that was that, all she wrote, and I’d never see her again. But, still, I did congratulate myself on the improvised sea-turtle yarn, thinking it mig
ht make a halfway decent short story one day. But she did come back, maybe ten minutes later. I was sitting there peeling the label off my empty bottle, trying to decide if I’d endured enough of the party that it wouldn’t look too bad if I left. There were tattered scraps of foil all over the floor at my feet, on my shoes, a few on the table. I set the empty down and accepted the fresh bottle when she held it out to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, and Amanda Tyrell just smiled and shrugged and sat down again, but this time she sat down quite a bit closer to me than before. And then I broached The Question, because, even sober, I’d made The Embarrassing Mistake too many times in the past. Never assume. Never, ever fucking assume.

  “You are a lesbian,” I said, and that earned more laughter.

  “Is that an inquiry or a command?”

  “That’s a question,” I said, sipping my beer, “because I think I’m getting signals here, and I don’t want to make a goddamn fool out of myself if you’re straight.”

  She stared at me a moment, just long enough, I think, that she knew I’d be getting nervous. And then she nodded.

  “Guilty as charged,” she told me. “A lesbian is what I am. Last time I screwed a guy—first and last time, by the way—I was fourteen.”

  “Well, then, that’s a relief,” and I laughed, probably for the first time since we’d begun talking.

  “But, I have a confession to make,” Amanda continued, so I’m thinking, yeah, here comes the other shoe. She’s in a relationship. Or she’s celibate, or I’m just not her fucking type. Something of the sort surely, but then she says, “I haven’t actually read The Ark of Poseidon. Or anything else you’ve ever written.”