Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

“When I was a kid, Sarah, I always wanted a Lite-Brite,” she whispered in my ear, and not one single syllable was lost to the jealous, wailing storm, “but it never happened.”

“You are a thief,” I replied, not whispering. “You are a thief of memories that were never yours,” and she laughed at me. There was nothing cruel in the laugh, nothing spiteful. It was more the way you might laugh to lighten a tense mood, to put someone at ease, to make a moron feel less like a moron because she or he is so goddamn dense they can’t see whatever obvious truth is staring them in the face. And it only just this second occurred to me — presumably waking me — that it did not occur to the dreaming me that Constance could have learned these things simply by reading the journal I’ve been keeping on Dr. Harvey’s typewriter. So, is this the subconscious expression of some unsuspected paranoia on my part? Is my sleeping mind fretting that I’ve never made any attempt to hide these pages where no one else can see them, or over my having written all this down in the first place?

“Two billion trees died in that storm,” she said. “Think about it a moment. Two billion trees.” Before I could ask her which storm she was talking about, if maybe she meant the blizzard that brought her into this world like a lion, I saw that she was crying. Only, she wasn’t crying tears, but, rather, diluted streaks of oil or acrylic paints bled from the corners of her eyes, paint in all the shades of that awful storm, as though it had somehow gotten into her and now was leaking out again.

She wiped at her face, smearing the paint across her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. Then Constance was not speaking, but singing to me, and while the music was a mystery, I knew the words at once—“ ‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied. ‘There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.’ ”

And because this is a dream, and because dreams appear even less fond of resolution than waking life, I woke. I woke horny and covered in sweat and gasping, nauseous and my chest aching, any number of panicked thoughts rushing through my mind — a heart attack? Another seizure? Maybe the seizure to come along and end all my fits once and for all. And too, I had not yet passed so completely beyond the borders of the dream that I did not still fear that hurricane bearing down upon me, bearing down to scrub away the shingle and me and Constance and two billion fucking trees. But, no need to worry, right? Because there is another shore, you know, upon the other side.

I’ve got to end this and get up off my fat ass and make some coffee. It’s almost nine, and I think I hear Constance thumping around upstairs. The typewriter probably woke her, regardless of what she’s been saying. Hopefully, we’ll get our postponed walk in today, out to “the red tree,” if the weather is not too hot and we’re not both too delirious from sleep deprivation.

I’m admittedly at a loss how to write all this down — the events of the past twelve or thirteen hours — but I’m also determined that I will write it down. Some part of me is genuinely frightened, reluctant to put the experience into words, and, still, I find myself driven to compose some account of it. Are we back to writing as an act of exorcism? Wait, don’t answer that question. In fact, no more questions requiring answers, no more questions, just what I am left to believe occurred this afternoon when we tried to visit the tree. We talked about what happened over dinner, which Constance fixed because all I could do was sit here and smoke and stare out the kitchen window at twilight dimming the sky. We talked, but it was an indirect, guarded conversation punctuated with lengthy, uncomfortable silences. I asked her if she’d ever read Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, specifically the scene where Eleanor and Theodora get lost just outside the house and stumble upon a ghostly picnic. She hasn’t, and asked if I’ve read Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths.” I have. Of course, I have. We ended up talking about The Blair Witch Project, though that seemed to come uncomfortably near the bald facts of the matter, and so I brought up Joseph Payne Brennan’s short story “Cana van’s Back Yard,” precisely because I had a feeling Constance hadn’t read it. Inevitably, by fits and starts, we came to Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, both the novel and Peter Weir’s film, to Miss McCraw and Mrs. Appleyard and her charges, Irma, Miranda, Edith, and Marion.

Constance said, “The girl who wasn’t allowed to go on the picnic, because she hadn’t memorized the assigned poem. The one who had a crush on Miranda? Wasn’t her name Sara?”

I didn’t answer the question, and, thankfully, she didn’t ask it again.

Yes, I know it’s sort of twisted that we had to resort to fictional metaphors and parallels because we were both too goddamned scared to talk about the thing straight on. But I suppose that’s what I’m trying to do now, talk about the thing straight on. Just write it down. Make it only words. Sticks and stones can break my bones, but. I’m starting to think maybe our dear departed Dr. Harvey figured out that words can do more harm than we generally give them credit. You’re stalling, Sarah.

Yes, I am.

We didn’t get out of the house until almost noon, and I’m not writing all that. Neither of us had slept very much, and we kept finding little chores that needed doing, little distractions. Hindsight can create all manner of illusions, and here, hindsight might suggest some prescience. You know, the man who misses his flight because he needs new shoelaces or Starbucks takes too long with his frap puccino or what the hell ever, and then he finds out the plane crashed, so surely some extrasensory force or guardian spirit was at work? That sort of thing. But the truth is we were bleary and distracted by exhaustion, and neither of us was really up to it. She didn’t get much more sleep than I did.

And she was still worried about me, because of last night’s seizure, and that kept coming up, and whether I was actually well enough for the walk. But the day was much, much cooler than yesterday, and the humidity quite decent, and I assured her that I would be fine. She pointed out that I couldn’t possibly know that, and I reluctantly conceded and told her that I’d learned I couldn’t let this condition turn me into a shut-in. I have no means of predicting these episodes, but I have to live my life, regardless. What I didn’t say was, Constance, please mind your own goddamn business, although, by then, that’s what I was thinking. She’d asked me twice about my medication, had I taken it, should we carry it with us, what sort of side effects do I experience from it, do I tire easily, shit like that.

“We’re not even going a hundred yards from the back door,” I told her. And there’s the single most damning fact of this thing, right there, the undeniable that I wish I could find some way to deny. We were not going even a hundred yards from the back door.

“Sarah, it’s just that I need to know what to do, if something happens,” she said, packing a canvas tote bag with bottled water and a couple of apples and the sandwiches she’d made. “And I don’t . I don’t know what’s myth, and what’s for real.”

“You saw what happened last night,” I replied. “What else is there you need to know?”

“Yeah, but that was only a little one, you said. Right? So what if there’s a really bad seizure? What then? I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to help you. I mean, should I take along a spoon or something, to keep you from swallowing your tongue?”