Caitlin R. Kiernan - The Red Tree

In the dream, I think the deer are being called to you, the deer and those other animals. But you do not raise your head to greet them, do not make any sign whatsoever to acknowledge their approach. And I think, Maybe she knows that would only scare them away. The movie has a soundtrack, though I think I only become aware of it as the animals approach. I can hear their feet crunching softly in the grass, can hear wind, and what I think might be you singing very softly to yourself. All this time my girlfriend could sing to deer, and I had no idea. How crazy is that? And before much longer, those nervous, long-leggedy beasts and their damp noses would be pressing in all about you, and in that instant you seemed to me some uncanonized Catholic saint. Our Lady of the Bucks and Does and Fawns. And here, I think, I am grown quite certain that I am dreaming, but it hardly seems to matter, because there you are, so perfect, and I need to see you, and I need to know what is about to happen.

And here, too, the dream shifts again, canvas and plywood backdrops swapped and costumes changed in a seamless, unmarked segue. Now it is some other evening, and I am not in the kitchen of the rented farmhouse off Barbs Hill Road, and I am not in that anonymous theater, either. Amanda is with me now, and we are no longer divided by windowpanes or silver screens or time. I am telling her how sorry I am, how it’ll never happen again, and she’s on her knees, huddled on a sidewalk washed in the sodium-arc glow of a nearby streetlight. She holds a stick of chalk gripped tightly in her left hand, drawing something on the concrete at my feet. By slow degrees, I scrape up enough comprehension to see that what she’s making resembles the squares of a child’s hopscotch game, only instead of numbers, each square contains a line from the magpie rhyme, with the first square marked Earth . In the second she has written “One for anger,” and in the third “Two for mirth.” She is only just beginning to fill in the fourth square, the chalk loudly scratching and squeaking against the pavement, and as I talk she shakes her head, no, no, no . She will not listen, will not hear me, and it does not matter whether I am a liar or sincere, for we have already come to a place where actions have forever eliminated even the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation.

“Three for a wedding,” she says.

And all the things that I said, I’ve lost those words, had forgotten them by the time I awoke. But in the dream I speak them with such a wild desperation that I have begun to cry, and still she shakes her head— No, Sarah, no.

“Four for a birth,” she says, and doesn’t look up at me. There are enormous, rumbling vehicles rushing and rattling by, neither trucks nor cars, precisely, but I only catch fleeting glimpses of them from the corners of my eyes, for I know they are abominable things that no one is meant to gaze upon directly. The air smells like exhaust and something lying dead at the side of the road, and “Five for rich,” Amanda says and laughs.

Her chalk breaks, splintering against the sidewalk, and again I am only sitting in the kitchen, in this same chair. Again, I am watching her as the deer and other animals approach from the cover of trees and lengthening shadows. Head bowed, she is still singing, her voice calling out clearly across the dusk. Every living thing perks its ears to hear, and the sky above is battered black with the wings of owls and catbirds and seagulls. And it is here that I realize, too late, that the deer are not actually deer at all. Their eyes glint iridescent green and gold in the failing day, and they smile. Those long legs, so like jointed stilts, pick their way through brambles and over stones, and your song invites them. Perhaps, even, Amanda’s song has somehow created them, weaving them into being from nothingness. Or no, not from nothingness, but fashioning them from the fabric of my own fear and remorse and guilt. Maybe they are only shards of me, stalking towards her in the gloom. I rise to shout a warning, but no sound escapes my throat, and my fists cannot reach the glass to pound against the window. They smile their vicious smiles, these long-leggedy things, and the house murmurs, and she is still singing her summoning, weaving song when, one by one, they fall, merciless and greedy, upon her.

Fuck it. Fuck it all to hell.

I know I’ll look back at these pages in a few hours, and all this will sound like nonsense. It’ll sound like utter horseshit. The sun will hang high and brilliant in the sky, and my only clear recollection of the nightmare will be what I have written down here. I’ll laugh at the foolish woman I have allowed myself to become, jumping at these shoddy specters spat up by my sleeping mind, then wasting good ink to consign them to paper. It will fade, and I will laugh. More than anything, I’ll be annoyed at that fucking tense shift. But, Sarah, this raises a question, one that I am still too asleep to have the good sense to avoid. If I can write about Amanda through a child’s allegorical, symbolic horrors, then can I not also bring myself to write about the truth of it? This dream and all those I haven’t written down and likely never will, they are only a coward’s confession, indirect visions seen through distorting mirrors, mere “shadows of the world,” because I do not seem to possess the requisite courage to look over my shoulder and face my own failures. Is that who I have become? And if so, how long can I stand the sour stink of my own fear? And hey, here’s another question. Have I stopped writing, not because I no longer know what to write about, but because I know exactly what I need to be writing? They were always only me, the short stories and novels, only scraps of me coughed up and disguised as fiction, autobiography tarted up and disguised as figment and reverie.

Maybe I’ll have another long, long drive today. Maybe I’ll get into the car and head back to that lighthouse and those picnic tables overlooking Point Judith and the bay. Or I’ll fill up the tank and hit the interstate and not stop until I’m in Boston. I won’t drive south and west, because that way lies Manhattan, sooner or later, and Manhattan has come to signify nothing to me but looming deadlines and impatient publishers. At any rate, enough of this. Lay down the pen and shut the hell up for a while. Give it a rest, old woman.

So, turns out, the poorhouse will be avoided just a little fucking longer. Dorothy called from Manhattan about an hour ago. I was in the bathroom, but heard my cell phone ringing here on the kitchen table. My backlist was just picked up by a German-language publisher, the whole thing, which will make for a tidy little advance. Lucky me. The check from Berlin should arrive just about the same time things start looking genuinely bleak in my bank account. I know she could hear the relief in my voice, because I’m lousy at hiding that sort of thing. No poker face here. Anyway, after the news, there was a moment of awkward silence, then an even more awkward bit of chitchat — how’s the weather, are you feeling well, etc. — before she asked the inescapable question. Never mind she’d just asked a few days back.

“Any progress with the writing?”

I’d offer to send her this notebook, but I don’t think that she’d appreciate the humor. What I wanted to ask Dorothy, but didn’t, is when we’re finally going to admit the truth to one another and stop playing this game of wishful thinking. The day will come. I see that now more than ever. The hour will come when she asks, and instead of making my usual excuses or dodging it altogether by changing the subject or making a joke of the whole mess, I’ll just tell her it’s not going to happen. Sorry. The well is dry, and sorry it took me so long to summon the courage to say so. Is that how it happens? How a writer stops being a writer?