Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

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.