The Red Tree

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  I probably laughed very loud then. Maybe beer even squirted out my nostrils. Maybe my sinuses burned all night.

  “I got those questions about your book from Tracy,” and she pointed into the constantly shifting crush of bodies. Tracy, by the way, was the girl in the band, whom I’d been dating back when I was writing The Ark of Poseidon, and she’d even helped out proofreading the galley pages. I felt set up and relieved at the same time.

  “Cute,” I told her, though I didn’t think it the least bit cute. Mostly, I was wondering what the hell Tracy was playing at, if she thought I was so pathetic I needed her sending fish my way (which, at that point, I probably was), or if she was just messing with my head.

  “You think so?”

  “No, but it’s more pleasant than if I tell you what I’m really feeling right now.”

  Her eyes dimmed and her smile faded a bit then, and I started to feel like maybe I was, by dint of her confession, regaining the upper hand. This assumes I ever had the upper hand, that I’d enchanted her with my fib of a dead sea turtle on a Grecian shore. I stared at the crowd, at that place where Tracy might be, observing her handiwork, and took a couple of swallows of the cold beer.

  “Well, I hope I haven’t pissed you off,” Amanda said, after a minute or so.

  “Nah, you haven’t pissed me off,” I assured her. “When you’re a writer, you learn to live by dirty tricks, or you don’t last very long.”

  “You think that was a dirty trick?”

  “Near enough,” I replied, and then, changing the subject, because I was still a lot hornier than I was angry, I said, “So, it depends on what I consider art. Whether or not you’re an artist.”

  There was a brief pause, long enough that I had time for another swallow of beer, before she nodded her head. “Photography,” she said. “Well, it’s sort of photo-montage, lots of compositing, Photoshopping, image manipulation. You know, that sort of thing.”

  “And that’s not art?” I asked, having more than half expected her to tell me she was into body modification (despite any visible evidence to that effect) or flash mobs or action poetry, something more along those lines.

  “I think it’s probably my subject matter that gets me into trouble,” she said. “Too dark, I think. Too dark for most people, anyway. I used to do a little freelance magazine illustration, but now I mostly just do commissions.”

  I nodded, trying to think of what I would say next, as I knew almost nothing about photography or photo-montage. And, finally, trying to sound interested, I asked, “Is it lucrative, the commissions?”

  Amanda seemed to perk up a little then, so I guess I’d said the right thing, or at least avoided saying the wrong thing. Six of one, half dozen of the other. She set her glass down on a cocktail napkin.

  “It pays the bills, most of the time. Mainly, I have clients, private collectors who are into what I do, and I take requests. They ask for some specific image, and I create it. Images you can’t get with just a camera, but that they carry around in their heads. And there’s some pretty dark stuff in people’s heads. They bring me their sick shit, and I make it visible.”

  “Perverts?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Some of them, sure. But not all. Some of them are just . . .” And she paused, frowning and stirring her drink with a swizzle stick. “Some of them just need to see with their eyes these images that they’ve already seen in their mind’s eye. Sometimes, it seems like I’m a sort of therapist, or a midwife. They might want a photorealistic unicorn, or a woman might want a photo of herself, naked, riding a unicorn, or—”

  “A photo of herself fucking that unicorn,” I said.

  “Pretty much,” she nodded. “It can get sexually explicit, and intense, and most times it’s a lot grimmer than unicorns and fairies and mermaids and what have you. But that’s the way I happen to lean, anyway. A true disciple of Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Goya, Sidney Sime, of the Mütter Museum, Eighteenth-Century anatomical and obstetric wax models, and so forth. I’ve actually been to the Josephinum in Vienna, and, dude, that was like I’d died and gone to fucking heaven.”

  The way she said Josephinum, coupled with that line about dying and going to heaven, I could tell that I should be impressed—or at least that she hoped I’d be impressed—so I made some appreciative sound, then, and apparently did a decent enough job of feigning whatever she needed to see. Truth is, though, she’d lost me after Goya.

  “If I had my laptop with me, I could show you some of my work,” she told me, still using the swizzle stick to rearrange the ice cubes in her glass.

  “A shame,” I said, more than half meaning it, because she’d managed to pique my interest, even through the obscuring haze of alcohol and horniness.

  “It’s not all that far from here, my apartment, which is also my studio. Just down in Grant Park, on Ormewood, not too far from the zoo. I mean, if you’d really like to see. If you’re not just saying that.”

  “Are you kidding?” I asked Amanda Tyrell. “Women screwing unicorns? Unicorns exchanging the favor? How often does a girl get an opportunity like that? Besides, this fucking music,” and I pointed to a huge speaker mounted on the wall.

  “Yeah, I don’t like it much, either,” she said. “But the open bar, you know. An open bar and those little Swedish meatballs on toothpicks, they get me every time.”

  And right about then, suspecting I’d lucked out and hit the jackpot, I was wondering if I could find Tracy the fucking busybody, wherever she was tucked away in that noisy, faux-cornpone crowd to thank her and buy her a goddamn drink or maybe a line of cocaine, if that was still her deal. And then, hoping I didn’t seem too eager, too obvious, I asked Amanda if she had a car, and no, she said, she’d come with a friend, and, by the way, if we were going to leave the party, she needed to find said friend and tell her, so she wouldn’t worry. Fine, I said, sipping my beer.

  “I’ll be waiting right here,” I promised. “Sure as hell got nowhere else to go.”

  “I won’t be long. She’s here somewhere. And, yeah, it’ll be cool, you’ll see.”

  The party was in some East Atlanta dive, the sort of place that works hard at being a dive, and we would have taken Moreland Avenue down to Ormewood Avenue SE, I suppose. I don’t recall, precisely. I was too drunk to be driving in the first damn place, but my old Ford truck was a stick, and when she saw it, Amanda informed me that she could only drive automatics. Later, I would learn this was a lie, but, let’s save later for later. And that was much later. Not too many concrete memories about our conversation on that drive. I was trying too hard to focus on the road and the street signs and not getting pulled over by the boys and girls of the APD.

  Turned out Amanda lived in a huge old Victorian that had been converted into three apartments—first floor, second floor, and the attic. She had the attic, of course. The drive from the club to that house, it’s all a blur of street-lights and traffic lights, stop signs and yellow center lines. The great jungle of urban squalor and gentrification south of I-20. Yuppie condos and million-dollar flip jobs rubbing shoulders with ghetto pawnshops, fast-food restaurants, crack dens, and gangbangers. The neighborhood got a little bit better after we turned onto Ormewood, approaching that great swath of sculpted urban wilderness known as Grant Park. In 1890, a mere twenty-six years after Sher man ordered his troops to burn the city to the ground, the Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts—sons of the great Frederick Law Olmsted—were hired to design Grant Park. But I digress. . . .

  Always, I digress. I may have mentioned that already.

  So, I followed Amanda up wobbly back stairs and into her apartment. It was small, but nicer than what I’d expected. She complained about roaches and her downstairs neighbors, whom she said were Scientologists. She also claimed they abused their dog, a golden Lab named Shackelford. Amanda said they frequently beat the dog, and that she’d called the cops about it a couple of times. She offered me coffee, and I gladly accepted, wanting to be sober. I sat in a kitchen chair
(she had no table), and I suppose we talked about nothing in particular until the coffee was done. I asked for milk, no sugar, and when she wanted to know if half-and-half would do, I said sure. Half-and-half would do just fine.

  I followed her down a short, narrow hallway, then, into the room where she said she did most of her work. The walls were painted a deep cranberry shade of red, and there was an assortment of Macintosh computers, scanners, a light table, several expensive-looking cameras (both digital and the old-fashioned analog sort), and so forth. She said she used another room, farther down the hallway, for her clients’ photo shoots, and that the bathroom doubled as her darkroom.

  “Where do you sleep?” I asked, sipping my coffee, aware that I was asking another question entirely.

  “I don’t sleep,” she replied. “Not much, anyway. But there’s a futon in the front.”

  “Insomnia?”

  “Not exactly. I go to sleep just fine, when I let myself. My psychologist calls it an NREM parasomnia, an arousal disorder that takes place between the third and fourth stages of NREM sleep. Same thing as night terrors. You’ve heard of that, yeah?”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “I’ve heard of that.”

  “Moderately rare in adults. Maybe three percent or so suffer from it as badly as I do. Oh, and I also grind my teeth. You should see my dental bills. Fucking brutal. I’ll have dentures by forty at this rate.”

  And then she sat down in front of one of the big iMac G5s and flipped it on. It hummed to life, and her desktop image, near as I could tell, was a color photograph of a dissected cat. There wasn’t another chair anywhere in the room, so I stood while she explained that she had printouts, of course, hard copies of everything, but that she really preferred the way her art looked on an LED screen.

  “When I was a kid, I always wanted a Lite-Brite, but it never happened. These babies here”—and she paused to kiss the white monitor—“are my inner child’s vengeance against unresponsive parents.”

  And then she started opening files, one after another, the pale plastic bulb of her mouse clicking icons to reveal impossible creatures engaged in unspeakable acts. And for a while I forgot about pretty much everything else but those sublime, grotesque, and beautiful images. Centaurs and satyrs, dryads, a host of dragons and merfolk, Siamese twins, men and women so completely undressed that every muscle, every tendon, was clearly visible. There were were-wolves, wereleopards, weretigers engaged in acts of feeding and copulation, and sometimes both at once. There were women tattooed from head to toe, endless debaucher ies of fairies and trolls and goblins, genderless beings and hermaphrodites, alabaster-skinned vampires, and rotting zombies. Women with the serrate teeth of sharks and men with blind, toothsome eels where their cocks should have been. There were unnamable masses of tentacles and polyps and eyes, escapees from a Lovecraft story or a John Carpenter film, their human elements all but obscured. I’d honestly never thought of myself as much of a deviant, beyond the way that my upbringing had trained me to view my lesbianism, of course. But standing in that cranberry room, seeing all those fabulous beasts, those impossible, exquisitely rendered hybrids born from the melding of Amanda’s skill and imagination with the secret fantasies of her “clients,” I found myself growing light-headed with excitement, sweating, my heart beating too fast, too hard, my mouth gone dry. And if, at the time, my reaction disturbed me (and often the hybrids and the things they were doing were undeniably disturbing), it hardly mattered to my libido.

  “Most of the compositing is done from photographs,” she said, opening a new file, something that was more machine than woman, “but I also work with a couple of local makeup artists, from time to time.”

  I said something, and maybe it made sense, but more likely it didn’t. Regardless, she didn’t seem to notice.

  “For some, it’s just a kink. You know, a fetish. For some others, there really isn’t much of a sexual component involved. But I do get some pretty serious cases, from time to time. The self-described therianthropes, for example. The Otherkin. The Transhumanists and parahumanists. The occasional necrophile. But, when you come right down to it, they’re all auto-voyeurs. They’re all Narcissus staring into that damn pool, you know.”

  “Frankly,” I said, and I think my voice was trembling, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Amanda, but, right now, I’d really like to fuck your brains out. If the futon’s good for that, I mean.”

  “If not, there’s always the floor,” she said, and there was no change in her expression or the tone of her voice, no change whatsoever. She closed Photoshop, then shut off the computer, and led me to a room near the front of the attic apartment. The walls were lined with bookshelves. There was a television and VCR and an X-Box (even through the lust clogging my higher brain activities, the X-Box surprised me). There was an assortment of animal skulls, set on the shelves or hung above them on the walls: coyote, horse, antelopes with spiraling horns, the fully articulated skeleton of a monkey of some sort. There was a single window—no blinds or curtains—looking down on Ormewood Avenue. We didn’t bother with the futon. Because, just like she’d said, there was always the floor.

  “Take your clothes off,” she said, and while I struggled with the zipper of my jeans, she took a very realistic dildo out of a box beneath the futon, the dildo and the leather harness she fitted it into. I stopped fighting with the disagreeable zipper and the buttons on my shirt and watched, speechless, while she undressed, letting her clothes fall in a pile at her feet. Her nipples were erect and the color of walnut shells. Maybe I can’t remember what we talked about on the way from the club to her apartment, but I recall the exact shade of brown of Amanda’s nipples. They looked almost hard enough to slice me.

  Maybe that’s all I ever actually wanted from her, for those walnut nipples to cut me open. Make me bleed. Maybe, Amanda, that’s the one thing you were never able to understand, because I was never able to articulate the desire.

  She fastened the leather harness firmly about her small waist, the molded silicone phallus drooping obscenely between her thighs, and then she undressed me herself. I do not know how many times I came that night, or how many times she came. It seemed to go on forever, our lovemak ing, the hammering of our sweaty bodies one against the other, even if there was no love there anywhere. Finally, towards dawn, I slept, and awoke hours later, hungover and disoriented, staring out that attic window at the sky above Grant Park. She was still sleeping there on the floor beside me, snoring very softly. And that was the night I met Amanda Tyrell. October 13th, 2006. Never mind if I don’t genuinely recollect even half the shit I’ve written down here, if I’ve just made stuff up to fill in the gaping mnemonic crevices. Whatever. A necessary fiction, and if the facts are compromised by my lousy memory, I don’t think the truth is any worse for it.

  You want words, Dorothy? Well, you could have these. Maybe they’re not Shakespeare or Updike or Stephen goddamn King, but they are sincere and sincerely unexpected. Jesus fuck, how long’s it been since I’ve written this much at one sitting? I don’t even know. My wrist has stopped aching and is going numb. And there are pages and pages and pages. I didn’t notice the sun go down, and that was almost two hours ago.

  Here you are, Amanda, like a wasp sealed in a hard, translucent nugget of Baltic amber, like a pearl, like a splinter wedged beneath a fingernail. Here you are, recorded for future demonologists to summon or puzzle over or merely fear. I need food. I need a goddamn drink.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Editor’s Note: A full twenty-six days elapsed between Sarah Crowe’s last entry in that part of the manuscript I’ve labeled “Chapter One” and the first entry in the section I’ve titled “Chapter Two.” Almost all that is known of her activities and experiences during this hiatus—almost a full month—is what she’s chosen to set down on paper. I have confirmed that some of this time was spent at the Tyler Free Library in Moosup Valley, and there were a few emails and phone calls to her agent in New York. Beyond that, we must rely on he
r account. It should be noted that it was not unusual for Sarah to put a manuscript aside for weeks at a time before returning to it, and, in that respect, the gap is not unexpected, however frustrating it might be to the reader approaching this work as a novel, rather than what can more accurately be described as a journal or diary.

  June 25, 2008 (8:37 p.m.)

  A fucking hot day today. Only a fool thinks she’s escaping the heat of summer by coming to New England. There was rain last night, the first rain in days, but it only seems to have made matters worse. Everything outside the kitchen window is soaked in the scalding-white sun, and the humidity must be at least ninety percent. You live and learn, Miss Crowe, you live and fucking learn.

  Two days ago, day before yesterday evening, while trying to escape the heat, I made my first trip down into the cellar of this house. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do so earlier. The cellar door is just off the kitchen, in a sort of alcove near the hallway that leads to the bedroom and bathroom. It’s an exceptionally small doorway, even by the standards of this place. What do you call the top of a doorframe? I know there’s a word for it. I measured it with a yardstick I found in the attic. Just an inch more than five feet, top to bottom, so I have to stoop a bit to keep from smacking my head. The ten steps down to the hard-packed dirt floor are narrow, and the cellar air is (no surprise) rank, as you’d imagine. Still, there’s no air-conditioning in this dump, and Blanchard won’t spring for window units. All I have are two useless box fans I bought in Foster, and, truthfully, it was a waste of good money, because they only manage to stir the hot air round and round. Sweat soup, I would call it. Anyway, I took a chair down there, one of the chairs from the kitchen table, and a flashlight and the book I’m reading. Fortunately, the cellar ceiling is not nearly so low as the doorway down to the cellar, though I’ve never been claustrophobic. I think that cellar would be a claustrophobic’s nightmare. There are shelves heaped and crammed and sagging with the weight with all manner of junk dating back fuck knows how far—decades, more than a century, I can’t yet say. And then there’s the stuff that’s just been piled directly on the floor. I parked my chair near the foot of the stairs and tried not to think about rats, spiders, and toxic mold spores. I’m guessing it was no more than sixty degrees down there, so it was heaven, really, after the broiling oven that this house becomes every afternoon, every night. I ignored the musty air, the stink like dirt and mushrooms and wet newspapers, though it was genuinely cloying.