Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“You asked if I believed in ghosts,” she said, and I think maybe we’d been talking about Henry James, for whatever reason, and so it didn’t seem strange to me that she had returned to the unanswered question.

“And you said it was complicated,” I replied, and sipped at my beer.

“I wasn’t trying to be coy. It is complicated. The answer, I mean. But, if you’re still interested, I’ll try to explain.”

“I’m still interested,” I said, not adding that I strongly suspected she was being coy. “If you want to tell me, sure, I’m interested.”

“Well, I don’t believe in ghosts,” she continued, wiping beads of condensation off her own bottle with a corner of the sheet. “At least, not in any traditional sense. I don’t believe in the soul, or that the mind is capable of surviving death, so a logical consequence is that I can hardly believe in restless spirits and the like. See what I’m saying?” and she scooted a few inches across the air mattress and a little closer to my chair.

“Sure,” I said. “It sounds like maybe it’s not so different from my own reasons. The physicalist approach to monism and the so-called mind-body problem. Thought is merely a function of the brain—”

“—no soul,” she said, cutting in, and I think that, in retrospect, I’m a little embarrassed at how I was trying to wow her with my knowledge of things that I really know very little about (I’m not much better with psychology than I am the weather). Constance tapped at her head with an index finger. “Just my brain, and my mind exists no more independently of my brain than my chewing exists independently of my teeth. Thought, mind, whatever. it’s just what the brain does . The dichotomy between that which we call mental, or spiritual, and those things we call physical, is merely an illusion. It’s all physical.”

“No arguments here,” I told her, hoping that the conversation was not about to step off into some hard-core philosophical waters much too deep for me to follow. I’d already pretty much used up my bag of jargon with physicalism, monism, and the mind-body problem .

“No soul,” she said. “No spirit, so no ghosts, right? The brain dies and rots, taking its functions, including mind, with it. So, no ghosts.”

“Bingo,” I said, and she laughed.

“ Except —and I know how freaky this is going to sound, so bear with me — maybe there’s a sort of cosmic escape clause that allows for the existence of the set of phenomena that people tend to call ghosts and hauntings. And it’s not that ghosts don’t exist, it’s just that most people are mistaken about what they are, or aren’t.”

I think I blinked and let the metal folding chair rock back on two legs. “Okay, now you’ve lost me,” I admitted, and she laughed again.

“Oh, Sarah, you’re plenty smart enough to keep up,” she said. “Just give me a second. See, maybe it’s not about souls or spirits at all. Maybe it’s actually something that has a lot more to do with physics and how the universe operates. We know that matter distorts space and time, right? Well, what if there are other ways that space and time can be distorted by matter, perhaps not only by the gravity generated by an object’s mass, but by the behavior or experiences or. ” and here she paused, searching for some word.

“It’s an old idea,” I said, letting the chair bump back down to the attic floor. “Events so traumatic that they warp time and space and create what parapsychologists and other crackpots call residual hauntings, I believe. Nonconscious hauntings that work sort of like a loop of videotape.”

I realized that Constance had stopped smiling, and now she was just sitting there, staring at the walls.

“Crackpots,” she said, and took a drink of beer.

I sighed and fought the sudden urge to punch myself in the mouth. “I’m sorry I interrupted you,” I said, instead, but she just shrugged and leaned over the side of the air mattress, setting her bottle on the floor.

“You said that you were still interested, or I never would have started in on this. I know how it sounds.”

I apologized again and told her to please continue, to finish whatever it was she had been about to tell me. And then she said she blamed the heat, that if the day weren’t so hot, we’d have gone out to the tree as we’d planned, and this conversation would not have happened, and I wouldn’t think she was a crackpot.

“I never said I think you’re a crackpot,” I protested.

She stared at me a few moments, then shrugged and said, “It was fairly implicit, don’t you think?”

I closed my eyes tightly, seeing yellow-white afterimages of sunlight and restraining myself from blurting some smart-ass quip or another—“Do we have to have our first lovers’ spat before I get to fuck you?” Something equally self-destructive.

Instead, I told her, “I’m sorry, Constance. I honestly didn’t mean it that way. I think maybe I’m a little drunk,” and I probably was. I opened my eyes, and she was still staring at me. “No, really, ” I said. “I was not calling you a crackpot. You’re just gonna have to take my word on that, okay?”

And she smiled at me and lay down on the air mattress, and I was glad for the smile, whatever it might mean, and glad that those cinnamon eyes were now trained on the sloping attic ceiling and not on me. “Do you want to hear it or not?” Constance asked.

“I do,” I replied, and she furrowed her brow, making what A. A. Milne might have called a thoughtful face. Only, it was obvious this was a sort of mock -thoughtful face, and I knew this expression was some part of my punishment for having implied she was a crackpot.

“You have to swear that you won’t just use it as an excuse to make fun of me again.”

“I wasn’t making fun of you.”

She squeezed her eyes shut tightly and pointed straight at me with her left index finger. “You have to fucking swear, Sarah Crowe. Otherwise, you’re never gonna hear it.”

“And that would ruin my day,” I muttered, and her brow grew more furrowed, the thoughtful face edging towards an impatient face.

“Fine. I fucking swear,” I said, before she could withdraw the stipulation and any chance I might have of hearing whatever it was she was trying to decide whether or not I should hear.

“Scout’s honor?”

“Sure. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Yeah, that’s better,” she said, smiling again, and the creases wrinkling her forehead began to relax. But she didn’t open her eyes. In fact, she didn’t open her eyes again until she was almost finished telling me her ghost story, as though she needed to try and shut out the sunlight filling up the little attic in order to recall the events in question. I sat in my metal folding chair, smoking, and she lay there on her makeshift bed, while the window unit droned and gurgled wetly to itself. I’ll freely admit, I’ve never been a very good listener, and yet, there was something in the way she stacked the words. and I seemed to hang on every one, every syllable, every pregnant pause. Then again, maybe it was only lust and a peevish libido keeping me focused.

“Back when I was in high school, just after I got my license, I used to drive out to the Cliffwalk in Newport whenever I could. Usually, I went alone. In the summers, I’d try to find the days when the tourists weren’t so bad, but it’s Newport, and so that’s always a crapshoot.”

I exhaled smoke and cleared my throat. “Constance,” I said. “I know I’m interrupting you again, but. I’ve never been to Newport, and I have no idea what this Cliffwalk thing is. Keep in mind I’m just a dumb redneck from Georgia and this will go better.”