And now the paranoid woman was yammering from someplace inside my head, intimations of seduction and guile, insincerity and head games. I silently told her to shut the hell up and leave me alone, but, I admit, I also hung on every word she said. Constance wanted something. Probably, Constance had wanted something all along, and I was getting tired of waiting to find out what it might be.
“I know that I shouldn’t be shutting myself away up there,” she said and pointed a finger towards the bedroom ceiling and the attic. “But it wasn’t so bad . . . I mean, maybe I didn’t quite realize what I was doing, until you shut yourself up in here.”
“Not room enough in one house for two reclusive mad-women?” I asked, and she didn’t laugh.
“Is that what you think, Sarah? That we’re insane?”
“Don’t you? I mean, isn’t it preferable to the alternative?” And I stopped staring at the window, then, and stared at her, instead. “Oh, wait. You’re the one who opened a wormhole to 1901 and reached through space and time to stop that woman from shooting herself. I nearly forgot that part. So, for you, I guess this isn’t so strange at all, is it?”
Constance stared back at me for a second or two, then let her eyes stray to the floorboards. She laid both her paint-stained hands palms down on the varnished wood and took a very deep breath. The paranoid woman smiled with my mouth, no doubt quite entirely pleased with herself.
“We can be cunts about this,” Constance said, and it sounded as though she were choosing her words now with great deliberation. “If it’s what you want, we can each retreat to our respective corners of the cage, and cower there in our own private misery and fear. We can be alone while we wait to see what happens next, if that’s how you think it ought to be. But it’s not what I want, and you need to know that.”
“What do you want?” I asked, crushing my cigarette out on the floor. “What do you expect me to do? I’ve already told you I don’t have the money to leave this place, to find somewhere else to live. So, will it really be so much better if we cower in the same corner? Is that what you want, Constance, someone to hold your hand while we wait for whatever came for Charles Harvey, and all those other people, to come for us? Or is it just the sex? Is the fear starting to make you horny?”
Constance shook her head very slowly and licked anxiously at her lips, which I noticed were very raw, chapped, like she’d been gnawing at them.
“You won’t even try to listen,” she said. “I can leave here, Sarah. If I’m willing to leave you alone with that . . .” and she glanced towards the north wall, but I understood that she was really glancing towards the red tree. “All I have to do is pack my shit and make a phone call or two, and I could be somewhere else.”
“Then that’s what you should do,” I told her, and used an index finger to wipe at the ashy gray-black smear I’d left on the floor. “In fact, that would probably be for the best, don’t you think?” And I said those things. I know perfectly well I said those things, or something similar. There seemed no possibility of reaching all the way down to the solid bottom of my anger, the bedrock bottom of the well of spite and bitterness and resignation that’s opened up in me after my last visit to the oak. It just goes on and on, that great invisible wound, like the cavern below this house goes on and on. It didn’t matter one iota that what I wanted was to put my arms around Constance, to beg her not to leave, to tell her how much it terrified me even to think of being alone. The paranoid woman spoke from the wound the tree has left in me, and I simply could not summon the will to silence her and deny her and permit the day to take some other, less self-destructive, route.
“Yes, you should go,” I said.
“Sarah, I’ve told you already that I’d never leave you here. I couldn’t do that. I won’t.” I glanced at Constance from the corners of my eyes, and she looked like she was about to start crying. Seeing that pleased the paranoid woman no end, and the wound in me grew wider by some terrible, immeasurable increment.
“Don’t you dare start crying,” I sneered. I could say “the paranoid woman” sneered, but I’m not letting myself off the hook so easily. I sneered, and I balled one hand tightly into a fist. “It makes me sick to my fucking stomach, the sound of a woman crying.”
“Is this how you talked to Amanda?” Constance asked, covering the lower half of her face and turning away from me. “When she needed you, is this the way you treated her?”
“We’re not talking about Amanda,” I said, and clenched my hand so tightly that my short nails dug bloody half-moon grooves into the flesh of my hand.
“No,” Constance replied. “No, I don’t guess we are.”
“It’s only a tree,” I said through gritted teeth, full in the knowledge that I’d never told so great a lie in all my life, and would never find one to top it. “And if you think differently, I believe there’s an ax in the basement. Or Blanchard would probably loan you a chain saw, if you think you’re up to it.”
Constance wiped at her nose, and quickly stood up. It wasn’t hard to see that I’d frightened her, or, to be more precise, that I’d added another dimension to her fear. At the time, it seemed like I’d only evened the score.
“I’ll be in the attic,” she said, and left me in the bedroom, easing the door shut behind her. When the lock clicked, I went back to staring at the window, at the rainy day outside, and tried not to think about the tree. Later, though, I took the piece of human jawbone I found in my jeans pocket yesterday and tossed it out the back door, into the high grass and weeds.
I’m going to stop typing now. I don’t think I can bring myself to say anything more.
August 4, 2008 (9:17 a.m.)
“The images produced in dreams are much more picturesque and vivid than the concepts and experiences of their waking counterparts. One of the reasons for this is that, in a dream, such concepts can express their unconscious meaning. In our conscious thoughts, we restrain ourselves within the limits of rational statements—statements that are much less colorful because we have stripped them of most of their psychic associations.”
Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (1964)
August 4, 2008 (10:01 a.m.)
The house is so awfully quiet this morning. Maybe Constance took my advice and left in the night. I would almost believe this, the house is so quiet. There is no sound of her footsteps from upstairs. I am dressed, but have spent most of the last hour sitting on my bed, watching the south-facing window, and the trees, and the sky. Occasionally, I have heard a bird or an insect, but these noises seem to be reaching me from someplace far, far away, and are muffled by distance. I am unaccustomed to there being such a profound silence in this house. You can always hear the birds, the cicadas, the wind, the creaking of venerable timbers still settling after hundreds of years, whatever. This is a new sort of quiet.
So, yes, I would think that Constance Hopkins has gone, and I am alone; that she left in the night, only I hardly slept. My body seems to have found some way around the meds. The Ambien has ceased to work. I don’t know. But I was awake, save maybe half an hour between three and four, and then an hour (at most) between about seven-thirty and eight-thirty. Both these intervals are plainly far too brief to have accommodated her departure. I feel certain of this. She couldn’t have gotten out of here that quickly. Constance wouldn’t have dared to go on foot, not after her talk of coyotes or wild dogs on the property, and a car or truck would surely have awakened me.
Am I alone? It should be a simple enough question to resolve. Leave my room, and learn whether or not I am alone in the house. I did leave once already, but only long enough to go to the bathroom. I didn’t try to find Constance, because, honestly, the possibility that she’s gone had not yet occurred to me. The profundity of this silence had not yet occurred to me. I figured she was sleeping, and then I realized that I couldn’t hear her window unit chugging away up there. That’s not so unusual, early in the day, but it started me thinking, I suppose. It would serve me right, after what I said to her
yesterday. I am well enough aware of that. It’s nothing I wouldn’t have coming.
I’ll go looking for her when I finish this entry. I’ll go upstairs and knock on the door to her garret, and she’ll tell me to get lost, or we’ll make nice, or she’ll ignore me, but there will be some minute sound to betray her presence. I’ll press my lips to the keyhole and whisper apologies, and assure her that I wasn’t myself yesterday. I wasn’t. But I think that I’m getting better now.
There was a dream this morning, and I want to write it down, all of it that I can recall. I know it was the honesty that comes in sleep, that it was me trying to get through to me. I started to write it earlier, but didn’t get any farther than that quote from Jung. I suppose I intended it as some sort of an abstract or preface, a deep breath before diving headlong into icy waters. Then, as I was typing the last few words of the excerpt, there was a sudden rustling in the bushes below my window (the west window), and I had to stop and try to see what it was. But I couldn’t see anything out there, nothing that could have caused the commotion, and I’m going to assume it was only a rabbit, or a bird, or an errant breeze.
I have never been comfortable writing out my dreams. That used to mystify Amanda. Or she claimed that it did. I know that I’ve included only a handful of dreams since I began keeping this journal, back in May. I had a therapist, years ago, who insisted that I keep a dream journal as part of our work together. I reluctantly acquiesced, but made at least half of it up. She never knew the difference, and reading back over it, later, I discovered that I had a great deal of trouble distinguishing between the real dreams and the counterfeits. That bothered me at the time. What more intimate lie can a person possibly tell herself? I would suppose forgetting which was which was me getting some sort of cosmic comeuppance, if I believed the universe worked that way. My forty-four years have yet to reveal any consistent, compelling evidence of justice woven into the fabric of this world.
I’m digressing. I’m stalling.
In the dream, Amanda and I were on the road in the same sky-blue PT Cruiser that brought Constance here from Gary, Indiana. Amanda was driving, and I was sitting in the backseat. At first, I didn’t know where we were. I’d been listening to her talk, watching as we passed an unremarkable procession of woods, pastures, houses, farms, roadside convenience stores, and gas stations. Then I remembered Amanda’s funeral, and I assumed the whole thing—her death—had been some sort of misunderstanding. I didn’t bring it up, but there was an indescribable sense of relief, that we’d all clearly been mistaken in thinking that she’d died of the overdose, or of anything else. I know that these sorts of dreams are not uncommon, encountering a loved one who has died and “realizing,” in the dream, that the person never actually died. But, to my knowledge, this is the first time I’ve had such a dream about Amanda.
She was talking about a difficult client, a bisexual woman with a thing for horses and centaurs and Kentau rides and so forth. The client wanted some elaborate set of photographs done, but hated the idea of photo manipulation and was insisting that as much be done with makeup and prosthetics as possible, because she wanted pictures of “something real, not fake.” In the dream, this was the last client that Amanda had before she killed herself. Or, rather, the last one before I’d only thought that she killed herself. In the dream, this was the woman she slept with, and then lied to me about having slept with. And, in the dream, I clearly remembered having written “Pony,” in our apartment in Candler Park though, now, awake, I recognize that those memories were false. Also, the woman that Amanda was fooling around with wasn’t a client. She owned a sushi restaurant in Buckhead.
“It’s all fake,” Amanda said. “I told her that. Either way, it’s all pretend. But that only seemed to make her more determined to have her way.”
And then we were walking together along a narrow wooded path, though I don’t recall our having stopped and gotten out of the car. It was very hot, and the air was filled with mosquitoes and gnats. I remember shooing away a huge bluebottle fly that had lighted on my arm. The path was familiar, even though it was someplace I’d not been since I was a teenager. It was the trail leading down to the flooded quarry in Mayberry where I used to collect trilobites, where I discovered Griffithides croweii in 1977. I was very excitedly explaining all this to Amanda, and I said that maybe we’d get lucky and find another one of the trilobites before we had to leave. I was talking about crinoids and brachiopods, horn corals and blastoids, all the sorts of sea animals preserved in the hard yellow-brown beds of cherty limestone. There was a tropical ocean here then, I told her, three hundred and fifty million years ago, aeons before the coming of the dinosaurs, in an age when hardly anything ventured onto the land.
“Dear, you’re not paying attention,” she said.
And I realized then that we weren’t approaching the nameless chert quarry in Alabama, but the granite quarry that is now Ramswool Pond. Soon, we were standing at the edge, staring down into what looked a lot more like molten asphalt than water. It was that quality of black, pitch black, and seemed to my eyes to have the same consistency as hot tar. When I picked up a stone and threw it in, it didn’t vanish immediately, but lay on the surface for a moment before slowly sinking into the substance. There were no ripples. There was no splash, either. The surface of that pool was perfectly, absolutely smooth.
“I don’t think we should be here,” I told Amanda, but she sat down on a boulder and pointed into the morass spread out before us.
“Well, it wasn’t exactly my idea,” she said. “Isn’t this where you saw that girl drown herself?”
That’s something I never told Amanda about, the naked girl I’d seen (or thought I’d seen) that summer afternoon thirty-one years earlier. The beautiful girl whose hair I recall being as black as tar.
“Wasn’t her name Bettina?” Amanda asked. “The girl you saw drown, I mean. Didn’t it come out, that her name was Bettina. Wasn’t she also some sort of an artist?”
And then I saw something lying in a clump of weeds not far from us. Clearly, it had crawled out of the pool. It was still alive, but seemed to be in a great deal of pain, its skin entirely coated in the black goop from Ramswool Pond. Amanda said something, but I can’t remember what. I couldn’t take my eyes off the writhing thing on the shore. It had been a woman once. I could see that now—a female form discernible through the glistening, tarry ooze—but any finer features were obscured. She was dying as I watched, because the black stuff was very slowly eating her alive. It was corrosive, I think, like digestive fluids, and an oily steam rose from the body and lingered in the air.
“You don’t want to see this,” I told Amanda.
“My name is not Amanda,” she protested.
“No, but it’s what I call you when I write about you. You wouldn’t want me to use your real name, would you?”
“You use hers,” she replied, and pointed at the writhing mass in the cattails and reeds. “What the fuck’s the difference, Sarah?”
And then the thing in the weeds began to scream—a scream that gave voice to both pain and fear—as the black water ate deeper into its flesh. I took Amanda’s hand and tried to pull her to her feet. “We’re not supposed to be here,” I said.
She looked up at me, surprised, a guarded hint of a smile on her lips. And she said, “Turn not pale, beloved snail, but come and join the dance.” And before I could reply, the sun had gone down, and risen again, and set a second time. We were no longer at the edge of Ramswool Pond, but standing at Hobbamock’s altar stone with the red tree towering above us. And the moon was so full and bright I could see everything, and, too, there was a roaring bonfire somewhere nearby.
I know the ugly faces the moon makes when it thinks No one is watching.
I could smell the woodsmoke, and I could hear the hungry crackling of the flames. And all about the tree, but farther out from it than the place where Amanda and I stood, there was a ring of wildly capering figures. She told me not to look at them, just a
s I’d told her not to look at the dying thing from the pool, but I stole a glance. Just a glance, but it was enough to see that they weren’t exactly human. In the firelight, their hunched silhouettes were vaguely canine, and I said something to Amanda about the coyotes that Constance thought she’d been seeing hanging around the garbage cans. Then Amanda was reciting Edgar Allan Poe, and her voice was as fervent, as fevered, as the swirling, whooping, careening dancers:And the people—ah, the people—
They that dwell up in the steeple,
All alone,
And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,
In that muffled monotone,
Feel a glory in so rolling
On the human heart a stone—
They are neither man nor woman—
They are neither brute nor human—
They are Ghouls:—
And their king it is who tolls:—
And he rolls, rolls, rolls,
Rolls
A paean from the bells!
And if I’m to believe anything that Charles Harvey wrote in his unfinished book, the serial killer Joseph Fearing Olney became obsessed with these same lines, writing them over and over in his journals and on the walls of his jail cell. He even wrote them on slips of paper that he would place inside the mouths, beneath the tongues, of the decapitated heads he buried at the base of the red tree. Beneath the tongues he had forever silenced.
In my dream, there was no wind. The air was as stagnant as whatever vile black vitriol had seeped up from the earth and filled in Ramswool Pond. But, even so, the branches of the ancient, wicked oak moved, swaying, creaking, scraping against one another, leaves rattling like dragon scales, as though a hurricane were bearing down upon the land.
“Two billion trees died in that storm,” Amanda said. “Think about it a moment, Sarah. Two billion trees.”
The Red Tree Page 27
