Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

But sitting here, watching the day coming on — a morning pregnant with the promises of yet another scorcher — it occurs to me that perhaps I should consider passing Harvey’s manuscript along to someone. I really don’t know who. Perhaps URI would want it, some former colleague or his department or the library or something, if his daughter in Maine truly has no interest. I surely do not need this new source of morbidity. I brought more than enough here with me. Maybe today I’ll try to call the university. I could drive it over, the manuscript, if there’s anyone there who wants it. If no one at the school is interested, maybe I’ll contact Brown or the Providence Athenaeum. At this point, I’d appreciate what I could deem a valid excuse to blow a tank of gas on the road trip and get away from this place for a day. And I can’t imagine that Blanchard would mind my getting rid of the manuscript. Not that I’ll bother to ask him, not after the way he’s foisted this new impending upstairs neighbor upon me. I googled her, by the by, and got nothing at all.

I suppose I could even try to track down the daughter; I doubt it would be very hard to do. I have her name from the obits. But there’s something, I think, inherently creepy and stalkerish about doing that. Unless Blanchard’s lying, she had a chance to claim her father’s work and passed. Who knows what that relationship was like? Maybe she’s glad the old man croaked himself, and maybe she even has a right to be. Maybe he was a complete bastard, and the last thing she needs is some stranger butting in. It just seems somehow wrong that this manuscript has languished in the basement of a farmhouse for half a decade. Then again, this all supposes there’s something here worth saving. But I suspect I’m hardly qualified to make that call, and the same is likely true of Dr. Harvey’s disinterested daughter.

I need coffee. I need coffee, and I need to drive into Coventry for groceries. I’m down to my last can of Campbell’s Chicken and Stars soup and a little bit of peanut butter. And I’m awake now, and the sun is shining. I’m bleary as hell, and maybe the slightest bit drunk, but at least the damned dream has stopped feeling like anything more than another permutation of the Nightmare.

The first bad seizure yesterday since leaving Atlanta. In Which Our Heroine is Lulled into a False Sense of Security. Yes, I’ve been drinking since I got here, a little, but I’ve been religious about my meds, and I think I had actually allowed myself to believe that shit was over and done with. Then, yesterday evening, after I got back from the market, after the trip to Coventry, I was washing dishes and. it occurs to me, now, I’ve never tried to describe one of these things. Vincent van Gogh, my favorite fellow epileptic, wrote in a letter to his brother, Theo:

“In my mental or nervous fever, or madness — I am not too sure how to put it or what to call it — my thoughts sailed over many seas. I even dreamed of the phantom Dutch ship and of Le Horla, and it seems that, while thinking what the woman rocking the cradle sang to rock the sailors to sleep, I, who on occasions cannot sing a note, came out with an old nursery tune, something I had tried to express in an arrangement of colours before I fell ill, because I don’t know the music of Berlioz.”

Hell, that makes it seem almost a desirable experience. Me, I have nothing so romantic nor pleasant to report. I was standing at the kitchen sink, setting the coffee cups out to dry on a dish towel, and then I was lying on the floor, staring up at the ceiling. Maybe ten minutes had passed. There was a small cut on my left hand from a broken cup, and I’d bitten my lip pretty badly, so my mouth tasted like blood. I lay there for a while, because sometimes they come in clusters. Sometimes it’s BAM — BAM — BAM. I lay there feeling sick and hungover and disoriented, dazed, stupid. I lay there, thinking about the first time, the first time to my knowledge, at least, and how badly it scared Amanda. I think it scared her a whole lot more than it scared me. She cried. It wasn’t the only time I saw her cry, but it was one of the few times. She told me she thought that I was dying, and then there were all the goddamn specialists and tests I didn’t have health insurance to cover, and that’s what she should have cried over. I spent most of the evening on the sofa, feeling Not Quite Right. I watched television and tried to read. I fell asleep and woke hours later with a crick in my neck, but feeling somewhat less strung-out.

Anyway, enough about that, the raging electrical storms behind my eyes. I thought maybe I had something to say here, something to match the grand dreamquest of Mon sieur Vincent van Gogh, but I don’t. I have a broken cup, a bandage on my hand, a swollen lip, a few bruises. missing time. I have the knowledge that this thing is still with me, this shaking malady, my tarantella, and I can sit here all night long wondering what part it played in Amanda’s death, and what part it is playing now in my inability to write anything more than these meandering entries on the typewriter of Dr. Harvey. For the first time since coming to this house, I wish there were someone else with me. Right now, for whatever reason, I don’t want to be alone. It’s not so much the fear, though I’d be lying if I said I’m not scared. I’m sick of my own company. I am weary of my own voice, of talking to myself, of talking and there being no one to answer me, but me. Then again, it’s really nothing I haven’t earned.

I spent the better part of the morning on the phone, mostly with people at URI, trying to find a final resting place for the manuscript. After being passed from one office to another to another and back again, from one secretary or administrative assistant or grad student or professor to another, round and round the goddamn mulberry bush, I finally found someone in the Dept. of Sociology and Anthropology interested in the manuscript. Only, she’s leaving for a vacation tomorrow and won’t be back in until after the Fourth, but I don’t suppose that matters a great deal. The box sat in the dank and the dark on that chifforobe for five years. Another week’s hardly going to make much difference. And it gives me time to finish reading the thing, even if Dr. Harvey couldn’t been bothered to finish writing it before stringing himself up. It’s grimly fascinating stuff, as promised by that first page I found, the bit about the “bloody apples.” Oh, sure, it’s grim stuff I no doubt shouldn’t be reading, out here with only the woods and the deer and my fits for company, but if I pretend it’s only fiction, how does it differ from any number of the novels in that stack I have not yet managed to read? I’m tempted to have it photocopied at the library in Moosup, just so I’ll have a record. I’m certainly not going to sit here and retype the whole damned thing. But I will transcribe the following passage, from Chapter One, because it gets straight to the heart of the matter, and I’ll confess it’s made me start thinking about looking for some other place to live (though the Coming of the Attic Artist already had me thinking along those lines). Harvey writes (on page 8 of the manuscript):

I will admit, since taking up residence here, I have considered on more than one occasion simply cutting the damned thing down myself. There is a chain saw at my disposal. I have thought of burning the tree, or salting the earth at its roots. But itisonly a tree, I remind myself, and these are only stories. There are days and nights when I have given my imagination freer rein than is healthy, evenings when I’ve spent too long trying to tease history from legend, truth from fancy. Is it only the power of suggestion, having read these letters, diaries, and newspaper accounts, that leave me lying awake at night, listening (though for what I cannot say)? Is it only having so submerged myself in the native lore surrounding the oak that repeatedly draws me down to sit on the wall nearest it and contemplate the seemingly purposeful interweave of those monstrous roots?