The Red Tree

CHAPTER ONE

I’m almost awake now, starting in on my second cup of coffee, sitting here at the kitchen table, and writing this in the spiral-bound notebook I purchased down in Coventry, a little over a week ago. I only bought it as an afterthought, really, with some vague notion that I might begin keeping a diary, or maybe scribble down a list of the birds and wild animals and snakes I see around the house, something of the sort. Until this morning, I’d not even taken it out of the brown paper bag from the pharmacy. There were thunder-storms last night, and this morning there’s a heavy, lingering mist, but, even so, from this window I can see all the way north to the flooded gravel quarry the locals call Ramswool Pond. The pond is about a hundred yards from the house, I’m guessing, past two of the ubiquitous dry-stack fieldstone walls. I’ve not yet bothered to walk down that way, because I haven’t noticed a trail, just a lot of poison ivy, wild grapes, and greenbriers. From here, the water is the color of slate, that same flat charcoal gray, framed in shades of green branches and yellow-brown grass and the leaden sky hanging overhead. The way it shimmers, I can tell that the wind is whipping up tiny wavelets on the surface. I was told, by the landlord — whose name is Sam Blanchard — that the pond used to be a granite quarry, dating from the twenties until sometime in the 1950s or 1960s. It was abandoned, then, and flooded as groundwater gradually seeped up and filled in the great, ugly wound scraped into the earth over all those decades by men and their digging machines. I have no idea how deep it might be, but I’m guessing pretty deep. I suppose that on hot summer days it might become a swimming hole, and maybe someone’s bothered to stock it with fish. Again, I’m just guessing. And this is not a hot summer day. This is a chilly, misty morning in early May. I imagine deer come down to the pond to drink, deer and raccoons and skunks; the woods around the old farm are full of deer, and I’ve heard there are even bobcats and black bears in these woods.

I have written nothing, nothing at all, since leaving Atlanta and coming to Rhode Island, and the truth is I have not tried to write anything. And before that, I suppose I’d written nothing worth mentioning since finishing that last short story, which means it’s been a good seven months or so. More than half a year, come and gone. So much time, flowing up to fill in those empty, wasted days the way the slate-colored water has filled in an old quarry. I haven’t even unpacked my pens, so I’m using a yellow No. 2 pencil I found in one of the kitchen cupboards. I have always hated writing with pencils, ever since grammar school, and the heel of my hand is already smudged with graphite. What’s left of the pink eraser hardly even makes a decent stub, but lazy women take whatever they can find, I suppose.

The coffee is bitter and good, but I wish I had a cigarette. Sitting here, looking out at the dense tangle of weeds and saplings behind the old farmhouse, looking away towards Ramswool Pond, the dream is already starting to disintegrate, breaking apart and fading, burning off the way this mist will do in only another hour or so. And I won’t lie. I’m glad for that. Hell, I would even be thankful, if there were anyone or anything I believed in enough to offer up my thanks. I rescued the notebook from the drugstore bag and found the pencil and sat down at the table to write out all I could recall of the dream, and now I am glad that all I can recall are fleeting glimpses and impressions. More how it made me feel, than whatever actually happened in the nightmare. Yes, of course, the dream was a nightmare. They are all nightmares now. It’s been a long, long time since I had any other sort of dream, even longer than it’s been since I’ve written anything worth reading.

Sometimes, in the mornings and evenings, the deer come out of the trees to graze near the house, and I sit here and watch them. They amaze me, I think. I’ve lived most of my life in the cement sprawl and jumble of Southern cities, places where pigeons and squirrels and maybe the occasional opossum pass for wildlife. Watching them, the deer, I feel, constantly, that they are conscious of my scrutiny, of the attention of alien eyes. They are nervous, wary beasts, seeming always on the verge of bolting back into the cover of the oaks and pines and the tall straw-colored grass, back to those shaded, secret places where I cannot watch them. This morning, though, there are no deer, though I saw a fat groundhog earlier, before I started writing, trundling along near the barn. There are rabbits here, a veritable plague of rabbits, it seems, and I’ve seen hawks and bluebirds. I saw a rafter of turkeys a few days back. I had no idea that one refers to a flock of turkeys as anything but a flock of turkeys, that there was a collective noun for turkeys, until I looked it up online. A bouquet of pheasants, a murder of crows, a lamentation of swans, and a rafter of turkeys. Oh, unless the turkeys are immature, in which case they are a brood.

Here I am, three pages into this notebook, the heel of my right hand smudged silvery gray, and I have hardly said a word about the nightmare. Am I stalling, or do I simply not care enough to trouble myself with it? Has it faded to the point where I couldn’t remember enough of it to put down, anyway? It was nothing remarkable, one of the regulars, some alternate version of the night that Amanda finally walked out on me. I think I have dreamt at least a thousand permutations of that night. Sometimes, she doesn’t leave. Sometimes, she doesn’t tell me where she’s going is none of my business. Sometimes, she doesn’t die. And yet, somehow, even those dreams are nightmares. Perhaps because, subconsciously, I know that they are lies. There is one truth to the matter, just one truth, and all the rest is only my silly fucking regret trying to make it play out some other way.

While I’ve been sitting here, writing all my nothings in-particular, the mist has thinned a bit, but it has also drifted out across the nearer end of Ramswool Pond. I can no longer clearly make out the wavelets rippling across the surface of the flooded quarry. But, I see the wind rustling the leaves and the weeds, so know that they’re still there, those small waves. And now, I think, I know what I am going to write here, instead of the bad dream. I’ll write the bad dream after its next inevitable permutation, possibly. It can wait. The pond has reminded me of something I don’t think I’ve thought about in a very long time, and that’s what I’m going to write. After I get my third cup of coffee.

I suffered through the better part of my childhood and my teenage years in a stunted little town about fifteen miles east of Birmingham, Alabama. Back in the seventies, that place was still clinging rather resolutely to the forties and fifties, I suspect. Hanging on for dear fucking life as the world rushed forward without it. I’ve given interviews where I made jokes about The Andy Griffith Show and such, calling my “hometown” things like Hooterville or Dog-patch or Mayberry on crack. Not so very far off the mark, no matter how snarky it might sound. I’m told that the town’s public library removed my books from its shelves after I said something to that effect in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Whatever. Fuck them if they can’t take a joke. or face the truth. But, I digress. Always, I digress. It’s my superpower. Some asshole at the New York Times Book Review once said that my novels would benefit tremendously from “an editor willing to rein in my unfortunate propensity for digression.” Or something along those lines. I suppose I shouldn’t use quotation marks when paraphrasing from an unreliable memory.

Anyway, a couple of miles from my house, there was an old chert pit, long since abandoned and flooded, just like Ramswool Pond out there. I used to go to that old pit — which had no name that I was ever aware of. Most often, I went alone, sometimes to hunt the trilobite and crinoid fossils you could find there, sometimes to chuck rocks into the water or sneak cigarettes or shoot BB guns, sometimes just to get the hell away from my mother and father and my kid sister for a while. There were all sorts of local stories and folktales about the place. Supposedly, bootleggers had run a still out there during Prohibition, and it had ended badly with a shoot-out between the moonshiners and Revenue men. Careless swimmers were said to have drowned in the greenish, murky waters. Some claimed that the pit was connected to an underground river, and that giant, man-eating salamanders and bullhead catfish and fuck knows what else were swimming around down there. Car thieves were reputed to dump the carcasses of the automobiles they stripped into the pit, and I tended to believe that part, because here and there you could spot the rusted hood of a pickup truck or the roof of a car just below the water. I don’t recollect all of the stories. There were so many, but this is, I think, the first time that I have ever told my own.

It was the end of the summer of 1977, and in a couple weeks more I’d be starting high school. Wait. I have to find a knife and sharpen this damn pencil again. Okay, pencil sharpened. So, summer of ’77, and the radio was awash with the Eagles’ “Hotel California” and the Bee Gees “How Deep Is Your Love” and “Blinded by the Light” by Man-fred Mann’s Earth Band. all that crap, though mostly I was listening to Pink Floyd and David Bowie back then. Carter was president.The Bionic Woman and The Rockford Files were my favorite TV shows. I knew I was going to hell, because I had a bitch of a crush on Lindsay Wagner.

And here I go, digressing again. Regardless, I’m pretty sure that on the August day in question, I was out looking for trilobites, because I’d sent some of mine off to the state geological survey in Tuscaloosa, and I’d gotten back a letter asking if I could please send more. Which meant I had to find more. Years later, a paleontologist in Birmingham described my trilobites as a new species, and I hope I spell this right—Griffithidesc roweii,naming them after me. That was my first brush with fame, I suppose, though I doubt anyone at “home” even knew. By then, I’d left Mayberry and was living with a girlfriend up in Nashville, but the paleontologist tracked me down, and she sent me a copy of the scientific paper. Her name was Matthews, Esther Matthews, I think. I still have it somewhere, that paper. I still have one of the trilobites, too. It’s about as big as my thumbnail, a shiny copper-tinted bug stretched out on a bit of brownish-orange chert. As I have admitted, in two or three interviews now, I’d have gone into geology or paleontology, instead of becoming an author, if only I’d been any good with math. If I ever had a “calling,” that was it. I took a few courses in college, and, to this day, a sizable portion of the nonfiction I read is books on paleontology and earth history. I often dream of fossil hunting, which, I suppose, is my subconscious mind working through regret. But, hey, at least I have the trilobite.

The rain is starting again. I suppose this may keep up all damn day.

So, that particular August afternoon in 1977, thirty-one years ago, it must have been about a hundred and two in the shade. I was clambering about the steep, crumbly edges of the quarry, turning over chunks of the hard stone, cracking it open with a brick hammer that had once belonged to my grandfather, but not finding much of interest — seashells, corals, crinoid stems, no trilobites — and probably wishing I had a cold Coca-Cola or a Mountain Dew or something. I might have been thinking about stripping off my jeans and risking the giant catfish of legend for a swim or perhaps giving up, calling it a day, and walking back through the kudzu to the place where I’d left my bicycle.

My bicycle, by the way, was a lot like that town. It had actually belonged to my mother when she was a girl, back in the fifties. It was a mottle of rust and flaking blue paint, and the seat tended to fall off anytime you hit a pothole or went over a curb. I have no idea whatever became of it.

But, anyway, there I was, crouched right down at the waterline, on this narrow, mossy ledge surrounded by cattails and whatnot, sweating like a pig and trying to keep a weather eye out for copperheads and trilobite fossils at the same time. I must have heard something, maybe the sudden splash of a frightened, fleeing bullfrog that I’d disturbed, or maybe something else, and I looked up. And way over on the other side of the pit, directly across from me, which would have been at least a good forty or fifty feet away, I saw this girl standing in the rushes, naked as the day she was born, the muddy water up to her knees. She was staring back at me, and I just froze, the way the deer around here freeze when they get spooked, just before they dash back into the woods. I remember that she had the blackest hair I think I’d ever seen, hair like ink, and I wasn’t so far away that I couldn’t tell she was pretty. I mean, fucking unearthly pretty, beautiful, not what passed for pretty in that little Alabama town. There I was, fourteen years old and just beginning to suspect I might be a dyke, and there she was, and all I could do was stay very, very still and watch. I was thinking,Why don’t I know you? Why haven’t I ever seen you before?because everyone in that town knew everyone else, at least by sight. And if I’d ever seen her, I sure as shit would not have forgotten her. She might have been smiling at me, but I couldn’t be sure. My mouth was so dry, I still recall that, the dry mouth and parched throat, and my heart pounding like a goddamn kettledrum in my chest. And then she took a step or two towards me, the water rising up to her waist, hiding the ebony thatch of her sex, and she held her arms up and out like maybe she wanted to give me a hug or something.

Back then, I had blessed few points of reference, but now I’d point to any number of the Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian painters.They knew women with faces like hers, knew them or invented them. They set them down on canvas. In particular, I’d point to Thomas Millie Dow’s The Kelpie,which I first saw in college, years after that afternoon at the chert pit, and which still makes me uneasy.

When the water was as high as her chest, she must have reached a drop-off. The pit was at least a hundred feet deep, and the submerged walls were very steep. Most spots, it got deep fast. She took another step forward and just sank straight down, like a rock. There was a little swirl of water where she’d been, and then the surface grew still again. I crouched there, waiting, and I swear to god (now, there’s a joke) I must have waited fifteen or twenty minutes for her to come up again. But she never did. Not even any air bubbles. She just stepped out into the pit and sank. vanished. And then, suddenly, the stifling summer air, which had been filled with the droning scream of cicadas, went silent, and I mean completely fucking silent. It was that way for a few minutes, maybe. no insects, no birds, nothing at all. That’s when I realized I was scared, probably more scared than I’d ever been in my life, and a few seconds later the whippoorwills started in. Now, back then, growing up in bumblefuck Alabama, you might not learn about Pre-Raphaelite sirens, but you heard all about what whippoorwills are supposed to mean. Harbingers of death, ill omens, psychopomps, etc. and etc. Never mind that you could hear whippoorwills just about any summer evening or morning, because the old folks said they were bad fucking juju. And at that particular moment, waiting for the naked, black-haired girl to come up for air, with what sounded like a whole army of whippoorwills whistling in the underbrush—“WHIP puwiw WEEW, WHIP puwiw WEEW, WHIP puwiw WEEW”—I believed it. I just started running — and this part I don’t really remember at all. Just that I made it back to my bicycle and was at least halfway home before I even slowed down, much less looked over my shoulder. But I never went back to the chert pit, not ever. It’s still there, I suppose.

So there, that’s my only “true-life” ghost story or whatever you want to call it. My Wednesday morning confession to this drugstore notebook. No doubt, I must have come up with all sorts of rationalizations for what I’d seen that day. Maybe the girl was from another town — Moody or Odenville or Trussville — and that’s why I’d never seen her before. Maybe she was committing suicide, and she never came back up because she’d tied concrete blocks around her ankles. Maybe she did come back up, and I just missed it, somehow. Possibly, I was suffering the effects of hallucinations brought on by the heat.

And it’s raining even harder now. I can hardly see the slaty smudge of Ramswool Pond anymore. It’s lost out there somewhere in this cold and soggy Rhode Island morning. Days like this one, I have a lot of trouble remembering why the hell it was I left Atlanta. But then I remember Amanda and all the rest, and this dreary goddamn weather seems a small price to pay to finally be so far and away from our old place in Candler Park. Yes, I am running, and this is where I have run to, thank you very much. I put out a housing-wanted add on Craigslist, and one thing led to another, connect the fucking dots, and here I am, crappy weather, sodden groundhogs, and all. No regrets. Not yet. Boredom, yeah, and nightmares, and a dwindling bank balance, but life goes on. And now I have a hand cramp, so enough’s enough. Maybe I’ll just stick this notebook back in the bag from the drugstore, dump it in the trash, because right now, I truly wish I’d been content to sit here and drink my coffee and wait for the deer to come out.

The thing I can’t seem to get around is the boredom. Or maybe I mean the solitude. Perhaps I am not particularly adept at distinguishing these two conditions one from the other. I didn’t have to plop myself down in the least populated part of the state. I could easily have found something in Providence or some place near the sea, like Westerly or Narragansett. Coming here was, I suppose, an impulse move. Seemed like a good idea at the time. And there’s TV and the internet (by way of two different satellite dishes, I’ll note), and I have stacks of DVDs and CDs, my cell phone and the books I brought that I’ve been meaning to read for. well, some of them for years. But I’ve been here two weeks, and mostly I just wander about the property, never straying very far from the house, or I drink coffee and stare out the windows. Or I drink beer and bourbon, even though that’s a big no-no with the antiseizure meds. I’ve taken a couple or three long drives through South County, but I’ve never been much for sightseeing and scenery. Last week, I drove all the way out to Point Judith. There’s a lighthouse there and picnic tables and a big paved parking lot, though, fortunately, it’s early enough in the season that there weren’t tourists. I understand they are like unto an Old Testament plague of locusts, descending on the state from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, other places, too, no doubt. The siren song of the fucking beaches, I suppose. I saw a bumper sticker during one of my drives that read “They call it ‘tourist season,’ so why can’t we shoot them?” And yet, I expect that all of South County and much of this state has, sadly, become dependent on the income from tourism. The curse is the blessing is the curse. But, yeah, I sat there at one of the tables at Point Judith, and I watched what I suppose were fishing boats coming and going, fishing or lobster boats, a few sailboats, headed into the bay or out to sea or down to Block Island. The gulls were everywhere, noisy and not the least bit afraid of people, and that made me think of Hitchcock, of course. The tide was out, and there was a smell not unlike raw sewage on the wind.

Yesterday, I drove up to Moosup Valley, which is a little ways north of here, much closer than either Coventry or Foster. I saw the library, but only went in long enough to grab a photocopied flyer about its history. I don’t like being in libraries any more than I like being in bookstores, and I haven’t liked going into bookstores since my first novel came out fourteen years ago. Here’s a bit about the library from the flyer: “The History of the Tyler Free Library began when the people of Moosup Valley acquired Casey B. Tyler’s private collection of about 2000 books and therefore needed to build a structure to house it. The Tyler Free Library was formally organized in January of 1896, and a Librarian was hired. The Library opened and fifteen cards were issued on March 31, 1900. Local residents organized the books and the Library was open on Saturday afternoons.” The flyer goes on to say that the rather austere whitewashed building was moved from one side of Moosup Valley Road to the other, north to south, in 1965. And why the hell am I writing all this crap down? Oh yeah, boredom.

I also stopped at an old store on Plain Woods Road, to buy cigarettes and a few other things. I’m smoking again, and that wouldn’t make my doctor back in Atlanta any happier than would all the whiskey and bottles of Bass Ale. Like just about everything else around here, the store is ancient, and like the library, it, too, bears the name of Tyler. I always heard all that stuff about how closemouthed and secretive New Englanders are, especially when you get way out in the boonies like this, and especially towards outsiders, but either the stereotype is false or I keep running into atypically garrulous Yankees. There was an old woman working in the Tyler Store, and she told me it was built in 1834, though the west end wasn’t added on until 1870. Most of what she said I don’t recall, but she did know (I don’t know how, some local gossip’s grapevine, I suppose) that I was the “lady author boarding out at the old Wight place.” And then she said it was such a shame about the last tenant, and when I asked her what she meant, she just stared at me a moment or two, her eyes huge, magnified behind trifocal lenses.

“You don’t know?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

“Then it’s not for me to tell you, I suspect. But you ask Mr. Blanchard. You got a right to know.”

I told her that Blanchard, the landlord, is away on some sort of farm-related business, a fertilizer convention or sheep-dippers’ conference or something of the sort, and that I wouldn’t be seeing him again for at least a week, and probably longer than that (he lives up in Foster and hardly ever comes out this way). But, no dice. She wouldn’t say more, and returned, instead, to the history of the old store, and a cider mill that used to be somewhere nearby, and something about the cemetery where her father is buried, and all that sort of thing. Local color. And I listened politely, deciding I shouldn’t press her regarding the former tenant, whatever it was about him or her I should know, that she felt I had a right to know. All Blanchard ever said was that a professor from URI rented the place before I came along, but I know it’d sat empty for more than two years.

Not long after I got back to the house, there was a phone call (because I forgot to turn off my damned cell), Dorothy wanting to know if I was settled in, how I was getting on out here, was I homesick, and, finally, when she could no longer put it off, had I made any progress on the novel. I almost hung up, because she knows I have not even started the goddamn novel. But, Dorothy is a good agent, and those don’t grow on trees, and I might still need her someday. She reminded me, tactfully, but unhelpfully, that publishers who have paid out sizable portions of sizable advances eventually expect manuscripts in return, no matter how much money I might already have made for them on my previous books. I could have lied and said the writing was going well and not to worry. But where’s the fucking point? The deadline is only six weeks off now, and that’s not the original deadline. That’s the extension on the original deadline, and so then we talked about the feasibility of a second extension, say six or eight months. Dorothy gets this tone in her voice at times like that, and I feel like I’m a kid again, talking to my mother. But she said she would call my editor next week. At least she didn’t ask about my health. At least that’s something.

Oh, I finally unpacked my Waterman pens. I’m using the “diamond-black” Edson I bought in Denver last year. I have consigned the yellow pencil stub to a drawer. On a whim, I seriously considered burying the damned thing, but then I started worrying over whether the graphite (a form of carbon, I believe) would be bad for the earthworms and moles and such. I think I read somewhere that residual graphite is harmless, but I’ve already got enough on my conscience without having to worry about whether I’ve poisoned the grubs. I’ll do my best to keep making entries in this notebook. The pens make it much easier, and it’s not like I’ve got a hell of a lot else to do, is it?

I have been awake maybe twenty minutes, and the nightmare is still buzzing about my skull like a hungry swarm of mosquitoes. Nothing, though, that I can conveniently swat away. Also, I have misplaced my glasses, and, no matter how hard I squint, the blue college-ruled lines on this page shift and sway, grudgingly resolving for a few seconds at a time before they fade and blur again. Still, fuck the coffee, I’m going to get this down before I lose it. Last night, I read back over my two previous entries, and hell, they don’t even sound like me. They sound like some pale ghost of my voice. Not even a decent echo. What does a writer become when she can no longer write? What’s left over when the words don’t come when called? What did Echo become after she was slaughtered for spurning Pan, or after her collusion with Zeus was discovered and so she was punished by Hera, or after her rejection by Narcissus? Those pages seem, at best, my own echo, a waning, directionless cry in this wilderness to which I have exiled myself. But, the dream. Write down the dream and save the rest for later. Write down what you can recall about the dream.

I was at the kitchen table, just as I am now, smoking and staring out at the shadows gathering as the sun set, the afternoon melting into twilight. I could see the dark smudge of Ramswool Pond, and the low, rocky hills around the farm, the trees pressing in, new-growth trees where once there were fields for grazing sheep and apple orchards and whatever else. I was sitting here, smoking, and the longer I watched, the more unnerving the shadows became, as the coming night drew them ever sharper. I felt as though they were becoming substantial, corporeal things, and that the sun’s retreat westward was releasing them from unseen prisons, below the ground or from out of unseen dimensions which exist, always, alongside this visible world. There were no lights on in the house, I think, and it had already fallen into darkness around and behind me, and that darkness seemed inhabited, populated by dozens of muttering men and women. I would try to make out what they were saying, but always their words slipped away from me. And all the while, I suspected the murmuring was meant to distract me from all that lay outside the kitchen window. With hindsight, I might even be so reckless as to guess that this intent was merciful. But, since I could not make head nor tails of the murmurers’ attempts at communication, I watched the window, instead. I realized here that I was not sitting in the kitchen of Mr. Blanchard’s old farmhouse, but in a small screening room, a movie theater, and the window was, in truth, a screen. It’s a cheap fucking trick, the kind of unimaginative, low-budget legerdemain at which dreaming minds seem to excel or in which they only compulsively indulge. I sat in my theater seat and stared out the window, which was now, of course, merely the projected image from concealed mechanisms hidden somewhere behind me, flickering moments fused to celluloid. The muttering voice had become other members of the audience, though I could not actually see any of them (and I am not certain that I tried). I don’t often go to the movies. But Amanda liked to, so she usually went without me. That was something else we might have shared, but I couldn’t be bothered.

On the screen, I see the kitchen’s window frame, and the fallow, overgrown land beyond, and I see the shadows growing bolder. And then I see you,Amanda, and you’re standing with your back to me, but, still, I know it’s you. You’re standing at the first of the stone walls, staring out towards the flooded granite quarry. Your shoulders are slumped, your head down, almost bowed, and you’re wearing a simple yellow dress, and even though you are too far away for me to make out such details, I can see that the fabric has been imprinted with tiny flowers of one sort or another, a yellow calico. Your long hair hangs down as though you wear a veil, and it’s matted and tangled, as if you haven’t combed it in days and days. That’s so unlike you, and I began, here, to suspect I was only dreaming, because you’d never be out with your hair in such a dreadful state, not out where someone might see you.

And then the deer are coming out of the shadows gathered beneath the trees, and there are other animals, though it’s hard for me to be sure what they are. Animals. Things smaller than the deer, things that move swiftly, mostly creeping along nearer to the ground. I think the deer are all coming to you, that possibly you have called them somehow, and I think, for a second or two, I am delighted at the thought and wonder why you never told me you knew how to call deer. I think back on the stories you told me about your childhood in Georgia, that your father was a hunter, so I consider that maybe it was a talent you learned from him. And it occurs to me now that, a page or two back, I shifted fucking tense, past to present. I fucking hate that, but I’m still so asleep and afraid I’ll forget something important — that I have already forgotten — if I wait and try to wake up before putting this down.

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. Iwon’tdrive 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?

Can it actually be as simple as a few words spoken into a cell phone?

I just read back over that last entry, the dream of Amanda and the animals and the game of hopscotch. I’m really not so glad I wrote it down. If I hadn’t, most of the damned thing would have faded by now. I’d recall very little beyond the mood that it evoked, that almost smothering sense of dread, and I wouldn’t be sitting here gnawing it over. Or sitting here while it gnaws at me. Have I come all the way to this musty old house at the end of the world to be whittled away by nightmares and obsession? Merely running from ruin to dissolution? I can picture those nightmares and memories as termites, or maggots, or some cancerous growth, slowly consuming me, bit by bit. And maybe I’ve done nothing but make myself more palatable.

I met Amanda Tyrell on Friday the 13th, at a party I didn’t want to attend, where I hardly knew anyone else in attendance. And it wasn’t just any Friday the 13th, but Friday the 13th in October 2006. For the first time since January 13th, 1520, four hundred and seventy-six years earlier, the digits in the numerical notation for the day added up to thirteen (1+1+3+2+6=13). By the way, there’s a tradition that on January 13th, 1520, Ferdinand Magellan reached the banks of the Rio de la Plata and proclaimed,“Monte vide eu!”It’s probably apocryphal, and I only know it because of the goddamn internet, which makes historians of anyone with enough motivation and intelligence to tap at a computer keyboard. But it all sounds rather prophetic, right? Sounds like I should have done the math, read the signs, and then wisely looked the other way. It’s easy to say shit like that in retrospect. Hell, at the time, all I knew was that it was Friday the 13th, and I found most of the people who’d shown up for this CD-release thing to be utterly loathsome. I knew a girl in the band, had once dated her, in point of fact, and that’s the only reason I was there. I didn’t even particularly care for the music, sort of a countrypolitan revival thing, the whole business trying much too hard to sound like Patsy Cline and Skeeter Davis and Jim Reeves. I was drunk, nothing unusual there (except that I was drunk on free booze), and kept wondering if maybe I’d wandered onto the set of a David Lynch film, circa Lost Highway. Cowboy hats and twangy guitars and some stripper who could not only drink from a Budweiser can held between her grotesquely artificial breasts, but could then crush the can with those same great mounds of flesh and fat and silicone.“Monte vide eu,”indeed.

I sat there, brooding in the smoke and honky-tonk roar, the din of all those chattering voices and laughter, and Amanda was sitting on the other end of the sofa from me. She said she knew who I was, that she’d read The Ark of Poseidon and, what’s more, she hadn’t really liked it. And nothing gets me wet like literary rejection. And, too, I probably hadn’t been laid in the last six months. She was wearing this skimpy wifebeater A-shirt and jeans, and there was nothing the least bit artificial about her breasts. Though, honest to fucking god, it was the talk that got me, at least at the start. I mean, she just sat down and started telling me how I’d screwed up that novel, like I’d asked her opinion or something. She was smoking clove cigarettes and drinking Jack and Coke, and it amazes me now that I can remember either of those details, given it’s been two years, and I was very, very drunk at the time.

“I wouldn’t go so far to say that it’s overwritten,” she said. Well, no. I don’t remember precisely what she said, but that was the sentiment. “But it could have been a lot less wordy.” I do recall that she said wordy,and that she laughed afterwards.

“Is that a fact?” I might have asked, and maybe she nodded and took a drag off her cigarette.

“Also,” she said, “the shell in Titian’s Venus Anadyomene is most emphatically not an oyster shell, but a scallop. And the painting was owned by John Sutherland Egerton, who was the 6th Duke of Sutherland, not by the 5th Duke of Sutherland.” And no, that’s not really what she said. I have no idea what she really said, but it was exactly that pedantic and irrelevant to both the theme and plot of the novel.

“Yeah? So, sue the copy editor,” I replied, and she laughed again.

“You ever even been to Greece?” she may have asked next, and I may have replied, “You’re an audacious little cunt, aren’t you?”

“Audacity,” she said (or let’s say she did). “Yeah, I am audacious. But, as Cocteau said, ‘Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.’ ”

“I think I must have missed the tact.”“Then you aren’t paying attention.”

I finished a bottle of Michelob and set the empty on the table beside the sofa. And she just sat there, smoking and watching me with those fucking gray-green eyes of hers, eyes like lichen clinging to boulders on Rocky Mountain tundra or alpine meadows, like something unpleasant growing in the back of the fridge, eyes that were cold and hard, but very much alive.

“Sorry about that,” I said. “I’m drunk. Drunk and confronted with tactless audacity.”

And then she smiled at me and said, “In every artist there is a touch of audacity, without which no talent is conceivable.”

“Oh, so you’re an artist?”

“Depends.”

“On what? On what does it depend?”

“On how one chooses to define art.”

I glanced towards the bar, wanting another beer, but lacking the requisite motivation to walk that far. Besides, she might leave if I got up.

“Who the hell said that, anyway?” I asked her. “ ‘In every artist there is a touch of audacity,’ I mean.”

“Disraeli,” she replied. “But you still haven’t answered my question, Miss Crowe.”

“Do not call me Miss Crowe. Jesus, I’m not that much older than you, am I?” Only later would I learn that I was (get this) thirteen years older than Amanda, and that we shared the same birthday.

“Have you ever been to Greece?”

“Yes,” I lied. “Two years before I wrote the book,” and then I began ticking off what I could recall of Greek geography on my fingers. “Athens, Lamia, Crete, Pelo ponnese, Thessaly. did the whole tour. I never write about a place unless I’ve spent time there. And you know what I recall the most — I mean besides the ouzo and legal prostitution?”

She said that she didn’t, of course, and by this point I’d forgotten all about wanting another beer and was in full-on tall-tale mode.

“I was out walking on a beach one morning, and don’t ask me where because I don’t remember exactly. Maybe Thessaloniki. Maybe Kavala. But I was out walking off a bull bitch of a hangover, and I came across this enormous dead sea turtle on the sand. It had this awful gash in its shell, and I figured that was probably from a propeller blade. Figured that’s what killed the poor fucker.”

“You went to Greece, and what you remember most is a dead turtle?” she asked, and those gray-green eyes flashed skeptically. “Besides the ouzo and the whores, that is.”

“Yes,” I said, jabbing a finger at her for emphasis. “Yes, that’s what I remember most. That poor, dead fucking sea turtle, spread out there on the beach. It was big, like something from dinosaur times, bigger than any turtle I’d ever seen. It was, I learned later on, a loggerhead, an endangered species. And there it was, fucking murdered by some asshole’s outboard motor, and I just sat down in the sand beside it and cried.”

I stopped talking, and she sat staring at me a moment. I stared back, mostly at her breasts. And then she said, “So, Sarah, you went all the way to Greece, and then you wrote a book about it. But you left out that thing that made the greatest impression upon you?”

“Irony,” I replied, without missing a beat. “Besides, I thought putting the turtle in the book would cheapen it. The novel, I mean. Not the sea turtle. Matter of fact, hell, I’ve never told anyone but you that story.”

“See where audacity gets you?” she asked. “Anyway, the novel you wrote before that one, it was much better.”

“A Long Way To Morning?”

“Yeah, that’s the one. I remember now, because it sounds like an Ernest Hemingway title.” And then she asked if I wanted anything else from the bar, because she’d just finished her Jack and Coke and was sucking on an ice cube.

“I can go,” I offered. “I’m not so drunk I can’t walk.”

“No, I’ll go,” and she glanced at the bottle on the table. “Michelob?”

“Michelob Amber Bock,” I said, and she nodded, standing up, vanishing into the crowd, all those hipster idiots in cowboy boots and rhinestone-studded shirts. I thought sure that was that, all she wrote, and I’d never see her again. But, still, I did congratulate myself on the improvised sea-turtle yarn, thinking it might make a halfway decent short story one day. But she did come back, maybe ten minutes later. I was sitting there peeling the label off my empty bottle, trying to decide if I’d endured enough of the party that it wouldn’t look too bad if I left. There were tattered scraps of foil all over the floor at my feet, on my shoes, a few on the table. I set the empty down and accepted the fresh bottle when she held it out to me.

“Thanks,” I said, and Amanda Tyrell just smiled and shrugged and sat down again, but this time she sat down quite a bit closer to me than before. And then I broached The Question, because, even sober, I’d made The Embarrassing Mistake too many times in the past. Never assume. Never, ever fucking assume.

“You are a lesbian,” I said, and that earned more laughter.

“Is that an inquiry or a command?”

“That’s a question,” I said, sipping my beer, “because I think I’m getting signals here, and I don’t want to make a goddamn fool out of myself if you’re straight.”

She stared at me a moment, just long enough, I think, that she knew I’d be getting nervous. And then she nodded.

“Guilty as charged,” she told me. “A lesbian is what I am. Last time I screwed a guy — first and last time, by the way — I was fourteen.”

“Well, then, that’s a relief,” and I laughed, probably for the first time since we’d begun talking.

“But, I have a confession to make,” Amanda continued, so I’m thinking, yeah, here comes the other shoe. She’s in a relationship. Or she’s celibate, or I’m just not her fucking type. Something of the sort surely, but then she says, “I haven’t actually read The Ark of Poseidon. Or anything else you’ve ever written.”

I probably laughed very loud then. Maybe beer even squirted out my nostrils. Maybe my sinuses burned all night.

“I got those questions about your book from Tracy,” and she pointed into the constantly shifting crush of bodies. Tracy, by the way, was the girl in the band, whom I’d been dating back when I was writing The Ark of Poseidon, and she’d even helped out proofreading the galley pages. I felt set up and relieved at the same time.

“Cute,” I told her, though I didn’t think it the least bit cute. Mostly, I was wondering what the hell Tracy was playing at, if she thought I was so pathetic I needed her sending fish my way (which, at that point, I probably was), or if she was just messing with my head.

“You think so?”

“No, but it’s more pleasant than if I tell you what I’m really feeling right now.”

Her eyes dimmed and her smile faded a bit then, and I started to feel like maybe I was, by dint of her confession, regaining the upper hand. This assumes I ever had the upper hand, that I’d enchanted her with my fib of a dead sea turtle on a Grecian shore. I stared at the crowd, at that place where Tracy might be, observing her handiwork, and took a couple of swallows of the cold beer.

“Well, I hope I haven’t pissed you off,” Amanda said, after a minute or so.

“Nah, you haven’t pissed me off,” I assured her. “When you’re a writer, you learn to live by dirty tricks, or you don’t last very long.”

“You think that was a dirty trick?”

“Near enough,” I replied, and then, changing the subject, because I was still a lot hornier than I was angry, I said, “So, it depends on what I consider art. Whether or not you’re an artist.”

There was a brief pause, long enough that I had time for another swallow of beer, before she nodded her head. “Photography,” she said. “Well, it’s sort of photo-montage, lots of compositing, Photoshopping, image manipulation. You know, that sort of thing.”

“And that’s not art?” I asked, having more than half expected her to tell me she was into body modification (despite any visible evidence to that effect) or flash mobs or action poetry, something more along those lines.

“I think it’s probably my subject matter that gets me into trouble,” she said. “Too dark, I think. Too dark for most people, anyway. I used to do a little freelance magazine illustration, but now I mostly just do commissions.”

I nodded, trying to think of what I would say next, as I knew almost nothing about photography or photo-montage. And, finally, trying to sound interested, I asked, “Is it lucrative, the commissions?”

Amanda seemed to perk up a little then, so I guess I’d said the right thing, or at least avoided saying the wrong thing. Six of one, half dozen of the other. She set her glass down on a cocktail napkin.

“It pays the bills, most of the time. Mainly, I have clients, private collectors who are into what I do, and I take requests. They ask for some specific image, and I create it. Images you can’t get with just a camera, but that they carry around in their heads. And there’s some pretty dark stuff in people’s heads. They bring me their sick shit, and I make it visible.”

“Perverts?” I asked.

“Yeah. Some of them, sure. But not all. Some of them are just. ” And she paused, frowning and stirring her drink with a swizzle stick. “Some of them just need to see with their eyes these images that they’ve already seen in their mind’s eye. Sometimes, it seems like I’m a sort of therapist, or a midwife. They might want a photorealistic unicorn, or a woman might want a photo of herself, naked, riding a unicorn, or—”

“A photo of herself fucking that unicorn,” I said.

“Pretty much,” she nodded. “It can get sexually explicit, and intense, and most times it’s a lot grimmer than unicorns and fairies and mermaids and what have you. But that’s the way I happen to lean, anyway. A true disciple of Francis Bacon, Diane Arbus, Goya, Sidney Sime, of the Mütter Museum, Eighteenth-Century anatomical and obstetric wax models, and so forth. I’ve actually been to the Josephinum in Vienna, and, dude, that was like I’d died and gone to fucking heaven.”

The way she said Josephinum,coupled with that line about dying and going to heaven, I could tell that I should be impressed — or at least that she hoped I’d be impressed — so I made some appreciative sound, then, and apparently did a decent enough job of feigning whatever she needed to see. Truth is, though, she’d lost me after Goya.

“If I had my laptop with me, I could show you some of my work,” she told me, still using the swizzle stick to rearrange the ice cubes in her glass.

“A shame,” I said, more than half meaning it, because she’d managed to pique my interest, even through the obscuring haze of alcohol and horniness.“It’s not all that far from here, my apartment, which is also my studio. Just down in Grant Park, on Ormewood, not too far from the zoo. I mean, if you’d really like to see. If you’re not just saying that.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked Amanda Tyrell. “Women screwing unicorns? Unicorns exchanging the favor? How often does a girl get an opportunity like that? Besides, this fucking music,” and I pointed to a huge speaker mounted on the wall.

“Yeah, I don’t like it much, either,” she said. “But the open bar, you know. An open bar and those little Swedish meatballs on toothpicks, they get me every time.”

And right about then, suspecting I’d lucked out and hit the jackpot, I was wondering if I could find Tracy the fucking busybody, wherever she was tucked away in that noisy, faux-cornpone crowd to thank her and buy her a goddamn drink or maybe a line of cocaine, if that was still her deal. And then, hoping I didn’t seem too eager,too obvious, I asked Amanda if she had a car, and no, she said, she’d come with a friend, and, by the way, if we were going to leave the party, she needed to find said friend and tell her, so she wouldn’t worry. Fine, I said, sipping my beer.

“I’ll be waiting right here,” I promised. “Sure as hell got nowhere else to go.”

“I won’t be long. She’s here somewhere. And, yeah, it’ll be cool, you’ll see.”

The party was in some East Atlanta dive, the sort of place that works hard at being a dive, and we would have taken Moreland Avenue down to Ormewood Avenue SE, I suppose. I don’t recall, precisely. I was too drunk to be driving in the first damn place, but my old Ford truck was a stick, and when she saw it, Amanda informed me that she could only drive automatics. Later, I would learn this was a lie, but, let’s save later for later. And that was much later. Not too many concrete memories about our conversation on that drive. I was trying too hard to focus on the road and the street signs and not getting pulled over by the boys and girls of the APD.

Turned out Amanda lived in a huge old Victorian that had been converted into three apartments — first floor, second floor, and the attic. She had the attic, of course. The drive from the club to that house, it’s all a blur of street-lights and traffic lights, stop signs and yellow center lines. The great jungle of urban squalor and gentrification south of I-20. Yuppie condos and million-dollar flip jobs rubbing shoulders with ghetto pawnshops, fast-food restaurants, crack dens, and gangbangers. The neighborhood got a little bit better after we turned onto Ormewood, approaching that great swath of sculpted urban wilderness known as Grant Park. In 1890, a mere twenty-six years after Sher man ordered his troops to burn the city to the ground, the Olmsted Brothers of Brookline, Massachusetts — sons of the great Frederick Law Olmsted — were hired to design Grant Park. But I digress.

Always, I digress. I may have mentioned that already.

So, I followed Amanda up wobbly back stairs and into her apartment. It was small, but nicer than what I’d expected. She complained about roaches and her downstairs neighbors, whom she said were Scientologists. She also claimed they abused their dog, a golden Lab named Shackelford. Amanda said they frequently beat the dog, and that she’d called the cops about it a couple of times. She offered me coffee, and I gladly accepted, wanting to be sober. I sat in a kitchen chair (she had no table), and I suppose we talked about nothing in particular until the coffee was done. I asked for milk, no sugar, and when she wanted to know if half-and-half would do, I said sure. Half-and-half would do just fine.

I followed her down a short, narrow hallway, then, into the room where she said she did most of her work. The walls were painted a deep cranberry shade of red, and there was an assortment of Macintosh computers, scanners, a light table, several expensive-looking cameras (both digital and the old-fashioned analog sort), and so forth. She said she used another room, farther down the hallway, for her clients’ photo shoots, and that the bathroom doubled as her darkroom.

“Where do you sleep?” I asked, sipping my coffee, aware that I was asking another question entirely.

“I don’t sleep,” she replied. “Not much, anyway. But there’s a futon in the front.”

“Insomnia?”

“Not exactly. I go to sleep just fine, when I let myself. My psychologist calls it an NREM parasomnia, an arousal disorder that takes place between the third and fourth stages of NREM sleep. Same thing as night terrors. You’ve heard of that, yeah?”

“Yeah,” I told her. “I’ve heard of that.”

“Moderately rare in adults. Maybe three percent or so suffer from it as badly as I do. Oh, and I also grind my teeth. You should see my dental bills. Fucking brutal. I’ll have dentures by forty at this rate.”

And then she sat down in front of one of the big iMac G5s and flipped it on. It hummed to life, and her desktop image, near as I could tell, was a color photograph of a dissected cat. There wasn’t another chair anywhere in the room, so I stood while she explained that she had printouts, of course, hard copies of everything, but that she really preferred the way her art looked on an LED screen.

“When I was a kid, I always wanted a Lite-Brite, but it never happened. These babies here”—and she paused to kiss the white monitor—“are my inner child’s vengeance against unresponsive parents.”

And then she started opening files, one after another, the pale plastic bulb of her mouse clicking icons to reveal impossible creatures engaged in unspeakable acts. And for a while I forgot about pretty much everything else but those sublime, grotesque, and beautiful images. Centaurs and satyrs, dryads, a host of dragons and merfolk, Siamese twins, men and women so completely undressed that every muscle, every tendon, was clearly visible. There were were-wolves, wereleopards, weretigers engaged in acts of feeding and copulation, and sometimes both at once. There were women tattooed from head to toe, endless debaucheries of fairies and trolls and goblins, genderless beings and hermaphrodites, alabaster-skinned vampires, and rotting zombies. Women with the serrate teeth of sharks and men with blind, toothsome eels where their cocks should have been. There were unnamable masses of tentacles and polyps and eyes, escapees from a Lovecraft story or a John Carpenter film, their human elements all but obscured. I’d honestly never thought of myself as much of a deviant, beyond the way that my upbringing had trained me to view my lesbianism, of course. But standing in that cranberry room, seeing all those fabulous beasts, those impossible, exquisitely rendered hybrids born from the melding of Amanda’s skill and imagination with the secret fantasies of her “clients,” I found myself growing light-headed with excitement, sweating, my heart beating too fast, too hard, my mouth gone dry. And if, at the time, my reaction disturbed me (and often the hybrids and the things they were doing were undeniably disturbing), it hardly mattered to my libido.

“Most of the compositing is done from photographs,” she said, opening a new file, something that was more machine than woman, “but I also work with a couple of local makeup artists, from time to time.”

I said something, and maybe it made sense, but more likely it didn’t. Regardless, she didn’t seem to notice.

“For some, it’s just a kink. You know, a fetish. For some others, there really isn’t much of a sexual component involved. But I do get some pretty serious cases, from time to time. The self-described therianthropes, for example. The Otherkin. The Transhumanists and parahumanists. The occasional necrophile. But, when you come right down to it, they’re all auto-voyeurs. They’re all Narcissus staring into that damn pool, you know.”

“Frankly,” I said, and I think my voice was trembling, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Amanda, but, right now, I’d really like to fuck your brains out. If the futon’s good for that, I mean.”

“If not, there’s always the floor,” she said, and there was no change in her expression or the tone of her voice, no change whatsoever. She closed Photoshop, then shut off the computer, and led me to a room near the front of the attic apartment. The walls were lined with bookshelves. There was a television and VCR and an X-Box (even through the lust clogging my higher brain activities, the X-Box surprised me). There was an assortment of animal skulls, set on the shelves or hung above them on the walls: coyote, horse, antelopes with spiraling horns, the fully articulated skeleton of a monkey of some sort. There was a single window — no blinds or curtains — looking down on Ormewood Avenue. We didn’t bother with the futon. Because, just like she’d said, there was always the floor.

“Take your clothes off,” she said, and while I struggled with the zipper of my jeans, she took a very realistic dildo out of a box beneath the futon, the dildo and the leather harness she fitted it into. I stopped fighting with the disagreeable zipper and the buttons on my shirt and watched, speechless, while she undressed, letting her clothes fall in a pile at her feet. Her nipples were erect and the color of walnut shells. Maybe I can’t remember what we talked about on the way from the club to her apartment, but I recall the exact shade of brown of Amanda’s nipples. They looked almost hard enough to slice me.

Maybe that’s all I ever actually wanted from her, for those walnut nipples to cut me open. Make me bleed. Maybe, Amanda, that’s the one thing you were never able to understand, because I was never able to articulate the desire.

She fastened the leather harness firmly about her small waist, the molded silicone phallus drooping obscenely between her thighs, and then she undressed me herself. I do not know how many times I came that night, or how many times she came. It seemed to go on forever, our lovemaking, the hammering of our sweaty bodies one against the other, even if there was no love there anywhere. Finally, towards dawn, I slept, and awoke hours later, hungover and disoriented, staring out that attic window at the sky above Grant Park. She was still sleeping there on the floor beside me, snoring very softly. And that was the night I met Amanda Tyrell. October 13th, 2006. Never mind if I don’t genuinely recollect even half the shit I’ve written down here, if I’ve just made stuff up to fill in the gaping mnemonic crevices. Whatever. A necessary fiction, and if the facts are compromised by my lousy memory, I don’t think the truth is any worse for it.

You want words, Dorothy? Well, you could have these. Maybe they’re not Shakespeare or Updike or Stephen goddamn King, but they are sincere and sincerely unexpected. Jesus fuck, how long’s it been since I’ve written this much at one sitting? I don’t even know. My wrist has stopped aching and is going numb. And there are pages and pages and pages. I didn’t notice the sun go down, and that was almost two hours ago.

Here you are, Amanda, like a wasp sealed in a hard, translucent nugget of Baltic amber, like a pearl, like a splinter wedged beneath a fingernail. Here you are, recorded for future demonologists to summon or puzzle over or merely fear. I need food. I need a goddamn drink.