The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And it’s not as if I could have told Abalyn. I was too amazed that she was there, and too afraid she’d leave. I had every reason to suppose it was just me being crazy little Imp, daughter of crazy Rosemary Anne, granddaughter of mad Caroline. I assumed exactly that, and I wouldn’t risk Abalyn going away and never coming back again over a bout of white noise that, sooner or later, would get bored of humming, crackling, sizzling, popping in my ears, and stop. It always stops. Dr. Ogilvy had taught me ways to turn the volume down. And I had my pills, my beeswax.

  I’m not clever. Clever women don’t pick up naked strangers late at night. Clever women are honest with themselves and their lovers, and they do something before it’s too late to do something.

  I wasn’t a virgin. I lost my virginity in high school, before I thought better of sleeping with boys. Before I started listening to my libido and set aside my misgivings and stopped listening to the expectations of my peers. Anyway, even though I wasn’t a virgin, every time I made love to Abalyn, she handled me as if I were a virgin. As though I were a china doll that might crack and shatter unless she was always, always mindful of frailty, an imagined brittleness. It seemed to me she thought you have to fuck crazy women with kid gloves. But it’s not as if I took any of this as an insult. I suppose it amused and flattered me. In our bed (for the short time it was our bed). Lying in her arms, or grasping the headboard while her long arms encircled my waist and her tongue gently probed the most intimate recesses of my body, it was difficult for me to imagine this beautiful woman had ever been a boy. I mean, that she’d ever been caught inside the body of a boy, of a man. I’m not being sexist. Sure, men can be considerate, easy lovers. At least, I’m sure I’d be a chauvinist if I allowed my own more or less unfortunate and unremarkable experiences with them to lead me to conclude otherwise. What I’m trying to say is, the way she made love to me, it was clear that Abalyn understood my body, what it needed. She grasped the nuances and attended to my most minute longings. I would say she played me like a musical instrument, but she probably played me more like a video game. My clit and labia, my mouth and nipples, my mind and my ass, the nape of my neck, the space between my shoulder blades, all 1.5 square meters of my skin—perhaps, had I asked, she might have said my body was the controller with which she manipulated the game of my flesh.

  I hope I’m not sounding like one of those trashy paperbacks you see on the racks at a Shaw’s or Stop & Shop. If I am, I’ve not done Abalyn justice. It’s not as though I’ve never written about sex before, in those odd bits of fiction I sometimes feel compelled to write. But that’s different, even if I don’t feel like taking the time just now required to explain how it’s different.

  On a morning almost a week after I thought I saw Eva Canning watching me in Wayland Square, Abalyn and I lay on top of sweaty sheets, sheets left sweaty from fucking. Our best sex was usually in the morning, as though it were some natural bridge between dreaming and wakefulness. We lay together, the sun through my bedroom window splashed across our breasts and bellies. It was one of my days off, and we pretended we’d just stay in bed all day. We both knew we wouldn’t, that we’d eventually get bored and do other stuff, but it was nice to tread the boards, as Caroline used to say when she meant someone was putting on an act.

  “Am I better than she was?” I asked, tangling my fingers in coal-black hair. Blonde roots were starting to show, but I did my best not to notice, not wishing to spoil the effect.

  “Better than who was?” Abalyn replied.

  “You know. Better than her. Better than Jodie.”

  “Is there a contest?”

  “No, there’s not a contest. I’m just curious about how I measure up, that’s all.”

  She turned her head and looked at me and sort of scowled, making me wish I hadn’t asked. It was a dumb, insecure question, and I wanted to steal it back. Erase it from the space between us.

  “Jodie’s Jodie,” Abalyn said. “You’re you. I don’t have to like oranges better than I like apples, do I?”

  “No,” I whispered, and kissed her forehead.

  “Jodie’s into all sorts of kinky shit, which is cool. But sometimes it gets tiresome.”

  “You mean like spankings and being tied up?”

  “Something along those lines,” Abalyn sighed. “I’m hungry. I’m going to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. You want one?”

  “No,” I told her. “I should take a shower. I want to spend the day painting. I’ve been negligent.”

  “What’s the rush?” she asked me. “Do you have deadlines?”

  “Sort of. I mean, I have my paintings, the ones that I really love and care about, the ones that are just for me. And with those I can take as long as I need, right? But then there are my Mystic and Newport paintings.” She asked me what I meant, and so I explained how I did seascapes that I sold to the summer people, the tourists. Sometimes I sit out on the hot sidewalk and sell them myself. Other times, I let galleries sell them, but then they take a commission. They’re pretty cheesy, my summer-people paintings, and I think of them as my paint-by-number pictures. But they bring in enough money to cover the cost of my paints and brushes and canvas and what have you for the rest of the year. I hardly ever sell the paintings that are just for me, which means I have an awful lot of them hung on the walls and leaning against the walls of the apartment.

  So, Abalyn went to make her sandwich. I took my shower, then had a cup of tea and a bowl of Maypo with sliced banana. Abalyn parked herself on the sofa, her laptop already open and signed into one of her MMORPGs (I’d picked up the lingo pretty quickly), the one with orcs and two sorts of elves and space goats with Russian accents.

  That day, the canvas on my easel was one I’d been working on for a month or so. The paintings that are just for me, they always take a long time. Almost always, coming in their own sweet time, like Abalyn said they needed to do. So far, it was hardly more than a mottled interplay of ebony and reds so deep they were almost the color of currents. I wasn’t even sure yet what I meant it to be. I put on my smock and sat and stared at it. I sat and breathed the comforting aroma of linseed oil and paints, turpentine and gesso. The smells that are always present in the room where I paint, and that I imagine will remain long after I’ve moved somewhere else (assuming I ever do move somewhere else). I sat and stared, listening to the muted sounds from the parlor, Abalyn killing pixel monsters. Abalyn tends to curse a lot when she plays her games. So, the muted sounds of her game and her cursing.

  At some point, I picked up a pad and began sketching in charcoal. At first, I must have meant the sketches to be studies for where the canvas might be headed. I’m almost certain that’s what I meant to do. Down on the street, I could hear a car stereo, Mexican pop music blaring from a car stereo. You hear that a lot in the Armory. It doesn’t annoy me the way it did when I first moved here. I sat and listened to Abalyn and the music and filled page after page after page with my hasty sketches. Down on the street, men shouted in Spanish. I licked my lips and tasted sweat and thought how I ought to get up and open a window, switch on the old box fan sitting on the floor.

  I sketched until Abalyn knocked at the door to tell me that she was going out for a smoke.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Okay,” I said, speaking so quietly I’m surprised she heard me. Maybe she didn’t.

  “Won’t be gone long,” she said. “Might walk down to the corner store. Anything you need?”

  “No,” I told her. “Thanks, but I don’t need anything.”

  Then she was gone, and I sat staring at the drawing pad open in my lap. I’d torn each page out once I was done with it, and the floor around my stool was littered with paper. It made me think of fallen leaves. I saw then what I was sketching, what I’d sketched again and again and again for almost two hours. Eva Canning’s face. There was no mistaking it for anyone else. I sat for a long time, just staring at those sketches. It was Eva, but it was also the wryly smiling face of l’Inconnue de la Seine. In every one of th
e sketches her eyelids were shut.

  And each and every one of them was so alike each and every other they might almost have been photocopies. I’d gotten her face right the first time, and then I’d repeated myself twenty or twenty-five times.

  “Is that what you saw on those pages, Imp? Are you absolutely certain that’s what you saw?”

  I am. Later, Abalyn saw them, too.

  There were water stains on some of the sketches, splotches made by sweat dripping from my face onto the paper. There were the careless smudges left by my fingers and the heel of my right palm.

  “You tried to hide them from Abalyn.”

  No, no, I didn’t. But I gathered them all up before she got back. I rolled them into a tight bundle and put a rubber band around them before placing them on the top of a shelf. My head felt fuzzy and my stomach was sour, but that might have been the heat. I’d let the room get hot, let it fill up with the afternoon sunlight without even having opened a window.

  After I put the sketches away, I took off my smock and went to the kitchen sink to wash the charcoal from my hands. I wasn’t hiding anything from anyone, or I wasn’t aware that I was. But I felt guilt just the same, as sharply as I’ve ever felt guilt, like when Aunt Elaine walked into the bathroom and I was masturbating to pictures in a Penthouse magazine. Like that. I was still washing my hands (though they were clean) when Abalyn got back from the store.

  Thirty-four pages back, I said that the dreams began the night I brought Eva Canning back with me to Willow Street. But I’ve said nothing since then about the dreams. No, wait, I see now that on page 136 I wrote, “I suppose, before Eva, and before Eva, I never had anything more than the usual number of nightmares. It was infrequent that I remembered my dreams, before Eva.” And also, “…Eva Canning changed all that. She brought me bad dreams. She taught me insomnia.” So, there. I haven’t neglected the matter as badly as I was afraid I had. The matter of my own dreams, I mean. I’ve talked about Saltonstall’s dream, and Albert Perrault’s, but I haven’t taken the time to describe any of my own. More evasion, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t at least half-conscious.

  I’ve never liked talking about my dreams. It never seemed to me that different than if I were to talk to people about my bowel movements. Okay, that was, admittedly, a weird analogy. I can’t help but wonder what Dr. Ogilvy would make of it. A mountain from a molehill, I suppose, especially the way it’s followed by the word “analogy,” which I can readily break into [anal]ogy.

  That first night, and every night between that first night and the day I repeatedly sketched her face, the dreams came. They came like camera-bright flashes in my sleep. After I woke up each morning, they left afterimages that I spent the days trying to blink away. I didn’t talk to anyone about them, though anyone would have pretty much amounted to Abalyn. I didn’t see much of anyone else that week, none of my very few friends. Not Jonathan at the coffee shop on Westminster, or Ellen from Cellar Stories (though I did talk with Johnny on the phone that Thursday). I knew that the next time I saw Dr. Ogilvy, I wouldn’t talk to her about them, either. They felt like such private things, messages meant for no one else but me, and messages that would be diminished if I dared to share them with other people. There’s also my continuing—what?—my continuing insistence that one may perpetuate a haunting simply by speaking certain words aloud, even when all you want to do is get rid of them. But I’m alone now. No one’s listening. No one’s reading these pages over my shoulder.

  The dreams were not all the same, so I guess it wouldn’t be accurate to call them recurring dreams. Not the way people usually mean recurring. But there was a sameness about them. Those dreams, they had the same mothers: Eva and I. The union of her touch and my insanity. It’s like Poe said. Well, sort of like that. Passions from a common spring, if dreams may be called passions. I see no reason not to call them passions. Certainly, the dreams that Eva brought me were as ardent as passion, as intense. I awoke from each one breathless, sometimes sweating, disoriented, always afraid I would also startle Abalyn awake (but I never did, as she’s a very deep sleeper).

  Tuesday night and early Wednesday morning—after my drive to the Blackstone River—I began keeping a written record of my dreams for the first time in my life. I was thinking of what Rosemary had said to me on my eleventh birthday: “You might want to remember it someday. When something makes an impression on us, we should do our best not to forget about it. So, it’s a good idea to make notes.”

  This is a haunting within a haunting, the advice of my suicide mother still reaching out to me after thirteen years.

  Dead people and dead thoughts and supposedly dead moments are never, ever truly dead, and they shape every moment of our lives. We discount them, and that makes them mighty.

  Here is my record of the dreams, which I wrote with a ballpoint pen on several blank endpapers in the back of the novel I was reading, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (I’ve always had a thing for Jane Austen, and I’ve read every one of her novels over and over again). This is the first time I’ve copied them from the book, and the first time I’ve looked at them in almost two years:

  Wednesday (July 9th): Dreamed me and Abalyn arguing about Moby-Dick. Her telling me how Vishnu first appeared to mankind in the guise of a gigantic fish that saves all creation from a flood, like Noah and his ark. Said it was the Matsya Avatar. She said that. Outside it was raining hard, very hard. Cats and dogs. And she kept pinting [sic] at a window. It wasn’t a window in my apartment. Don’t know where we were. And then I knew I wasn’t hearing rain, only Eva Canning taking her shower. Told Abalyn repeatedly how I didn’t want to talk about this, and that I haven’t read Moby-Dick, but she wouldn’t let up. She kept telling me how stupid I was, picking up stray dogs and cats and women at the side of the road like that. All so vivid, all of this. All so vivid my head almost hurts.

  Note: I don’t know all that much about Hinduism. Didn’t then, still don’t. But this is a quote from Wikipedia, regarding Matsya: “…the king of pre-ancient Dravida and a devotee of Vishnu, Satyavrata who later was known as Manu was washing his hands in a river when a little fish swam into his hands and pleaded with him to save its life. He put it in a jar, which it soon outgrew. He then moved it to a tank, a river and then finally the ocean but to no avail.” Farther along, this will seem almost prescient. No, I don’t believe in prescience, clairvoyance, ESP, precognitive people, whatever. It’ll only seem prescient.

  Thursday (July 10th): Another vivid dream. I almost have to squint, thinking about it. Can’t remember everything, but I remember some. I was climbing the stairs leading from front door up to my apartment. Up to the landing. But the stairs just kept going, up, up, up, and every now and then I had to stop and rest. My legs hurt. Knees and calves and thighs, like having walked a long way in very deep snow. I climbed stairs, sat down, got up, sat down, walked, got up. Looked back behind me, and stairs were a spiral I couldn’t see the bottom of. Looked up and same. Felt nauseous, like seasick, and I still do just a little. Went on and on, climbing, trying to get home. Now and then, oddest sense that I wasn’t alone, that someone was walking with me. But when I looked, no one was ever there. Once, water ran down the stairs, but stopped after my feet were wet. I don’t want to think about this all day.

  Note: I did eventually tell Dr. Ogilvy about this dream. It’s one of the only things I’ve told her so far about those months and what happened. But I lied and said I’d only just had the dream, a few days before. She said it reminded her of something, but she couldn’t recall what. At my next appointment, she read me lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a passage about a man walking along a snowy white road and the illusion he was being accompanied by a mysterious third companion, though he could never count more than two. She said Eliot was alluding to a peculiar experience Ernest Shackleton described during or after one of his Antarctic expeditions. I had her write it down for me (Shackleton, not Eliot): “I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-s
ix hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia, it seemed to me often that we were four, not three.” She read that to me, and then she asked, “Do you still feel lost, India? Do you still feel as if no one’s walking beside you?” I’m not in the mood to write down what I said in response. Maybe some other time I will.

  Friday (July 11th): Trying not to wake up Abalyn. She was up later than usual, I think. Does three of these damn dreams a pattern make? Three in three nights, like I’ve never dreamed before. Flashbulb nightmares. Me and Caroline and Rosemary and Abalyn and some other people I knew in the dream, but don’t think I know in real life. Dancing in a circle down on Moonstone Beach, and Eva Canning was standing in the center of the ring holding a violin (not playing, just holding), singing “The Lobster Quadrille” from Lewis Carroll. There were dead crabs, lobster, fish everywhere, all tangled up and stinking in seaweed. And, Eva, you sang to me, “Sail to me.” I was barefoot and dead things under my feet, slippery, slimy, spines slicing the soles of my feet. This is the worst of the three, worse than the stairs.

  Saturday (July 12th): Didn’t sleep much. Not insomnia, just not wanting to go to sleep, more like knowing the dreams would be there. Reluctance to sleep, not inability. Am I making it worse, recoding [sic] them? Abalyn is already up, and too much sun through window. I’m sweating. But the nightmare, almost same as last night. Dancing in a circle on the beach, like “ring around the roses.” There were even beach roses. Dog roses. Caroline and Rosemary weren’t with me this time, I was holding Abalyn’s right hand, and there was a man on my left. I don’t know who he was. We all sang along with Eva, the words to “The Lobster Quadrille.” Dancing, I think, counterclockwise, kicking up sand, dead fish underfoot. Stench. Sun high and white, hot, and maybe that was because the bedroom is hot. Then everyone stopped dancing, and Eva pointed the violin bow at me. She said, “I know an old woman who swallowed a fly,” but didn’t finish with the rhyme. Just that much. I told Abalyn I wanted to go home. I told her I’d left the oven on. She said we’d go home soon, but we didn’t.