The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Isn’t that how I found you?” I countered, growing indignant. “Isn’t it?”

  Abalyn looked back at me, that expression of incredulity increasing. I believe she was almost speechless, but only almost, because then she said, “You really think it’s comparable?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Not exactly. But I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t leave her standing there.”

  “Standing naked, at the side of the road,” Abalyn said, as if checking to be sure she’d heard me correctly. “Jesus, Imp. She’s probably on something. No telling what’s wrong with her.”

  “You might have been a serial killer,” I said, unhelpfully, understanding I was making the situation worse, but unable to keep shut up. “I didn’t know you weren’t, now, did I? I didn’t know you weren’t a crack addict. I didn’t know anything about you, but I brought you home with me.”

  Abalyn shook her head, and laughed—a dry, hollow, exasperated sort of laugh. She said, “I need a smoke. I’m going for a walk.” When we met, Abalyn had almost given up smoking, and when she did want a cigarette, she always went outside. I never asked her to; Caroline and Rosemary Anne, and even my aunt Elaine had been smokers, and it hadn’t much bothered me.

  “Will you be gone long?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied, then jabbed a thumb at the bathroom door. I could hear the sound of the shower. “Is she staying?”

  “Honestly, I haven’t thought about that. I don’t know if she has anywhere else to go.”

  “For fuck’s sake, Imp. Didn’t she tell you anything at all? She must have said something.”

  “Not much. She said, ‘Who are hearsed that die on the sea?’” I told Abalyn. “It’s from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ right?”

  Abalyn went to the coat hook and reached into a pocket for her cigarettes and lighter. “No, Imp. It’s not. It’s Moby-Dick.”

  “It is?”

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said again. “Unless you’d rather I didn’t,” and here she glanced at the bathroom door again.

  “No, I’m fine. I wish you wouldn’t get angry. I didn’t know what else I was supposed to do.”

  “I’m not angry,” Abalyn said, but I could tell she was lying. Whenever she lied, the corners of her mouth twitched. “I need a cigarette, that’s all.”

  “Be careful,” I told her, and she laughed again, that same laugh devoid of any trace of humor. She didn’t slam the door, but her footsteps as she descended the stairs sounded heavier than usual. And I was alone in my apartment with the mystery woman who said her name was Eva Canning, and, belatedly, the weirdness of it all was starting to sink in. I sat down on the sofa and stared at the image on the television screen. It was some sort of big Japanese monster frozen in the act of stomping a toy army. I tried to find the remote control, but couldn’t, and wondered if maybe Abalyn had taken it with her, and if so, whether or not she’d done so on purpose. When I heard Eva shut off the shower, I stood up again and switched off the television. I went to my bedroom and got her a T-shirt, underwear, and a pair of pants that were a little too big for me. And some socks. Eva was taller than me. Not as tall as Abalyn, but taller than me. I figured the clothes would fit her.

  I didn’t know what to do about shoes.

  When I came back from the bedroom, she was sitting naked on the floor near a window, drying her long hair with a towel. I hadn’t realized, until that moment, how very pale she was. Her skin was almost like milk, it was so pale. That probably comes across like an exaggeration, and possibly it is. My memory could easily be exaggerating her paleness, as it exaggerates so many things so often. It would probably be more factual to say that there was about the whole of Eva Canning a peculiar, arresting paleness. I might mean a paleness of soul, if I believed in souls. Regardless, I might indeed mean that, but since it’s easier to remember someone’s skin than the hue of her soul, I can’t rule out having unconsciously misattributed the milky complexion to her skin.

  “I have some clothes for you to wear,” I said, and she thanked me. This was the first time I comprehended how musical her voice was. I don’t mean it was lilting or singsong or…never mind. I’ll come up with the right word later. I hope I will, because it’s important. Also, whereas back by the river, Eva’s voice had been sleepy, almost slurred—the unfocused voice of a somnambulist who’s just been rudely awakened—now she spoke with a quiet, alert confidence.

  “It’s all been very kind of you,” she said. “I don’t mean to put you out.”

  “You’ll sleep here tonight, okay? We’ll figure it out in the morning.”

  She silently watched me for a few seconds, then replied, “No. I have friends nearby. They’ll be glad to see me. You’ve done too much already.”

  Ten minutes later, she was gone. She went barefoot; she left the socks behind. And I was standing by the window looking down at Willow Street splashed with sallow pools of dim street light. But I can’t say it felt like none of it had happened, even though people in ghost stories say that sort of thing all the time, right? It felt very much like it had all happened, every bit of that night, even if the long drive and finding Eva and bringing her home with me made less and less sense the more I played the events over in my head.

  I stood at the window, trying to puzzle it all out, until I saw Abalyn. She had her hands stuffed into the pockets of her jeans and her head was down, as if the sidewalk were far more interesting than it had any right to be. I went to the kitchen and poured milk into a pot, then set it on the stove, hoping Abalyn would want a cup of hot cocoa. Hoping she wasn’t still angry.

  That was also the night the dreams began.

  4

  I suppose, before Eva, and before Eva, I never had anything more than the usual number of nightmares. It was infrequent that I remembered my dreams, before Eva. When I did, they mostly seemed silly and inconsequential. Sometimes I’ve even felt I was letting down this or that therapist or Dr. Ogilvy by not giving them more to work with in that department. No ready, accommodating window into my subconscious mind. That sort of thing. Sometimes, they’ve turned to my art, in lieu of dreams. But yeah, Eva Canning changed all that. She brought me bad dreams. She taught me insomnia. Or maybe both are a sort of intangible disease, bereft of conventional vectors. Which brings me back around to memes, and hauntings. In a moment, a few more lines, it will bring me back around to both.

  Last night, I lay awake, thinking about what I’ve been writing, how there’s a story here, but how I’ve taken very little care to fashion a coherent narrative. Or, if there is a coherent narrative, how it might be getting lost between other things: exposition, memories, rumination, digressions, and what have you. It’s not that all these things aren’t equally valid, and not as if they’re not an essential component to what I’m trying to get out of me. They are. It’s more like, in ten or twenty years, I might look back at these pages, digging them out from wherever I’ve hidden them away, and be disappointed that I didn’t take greater care with the story of Eva and Abalyn and me. Because, by then, when I’m in my forties or fifties, I probably will remember so much less of the details. And I’ll see how I missed an opportunity. I’ll feel as though the me of now cheated the me of then.

  Last night, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Abalyn was standing at the foot of my bed. She wasn’t, of course. It wasn’t even what I’d call a proper hallucination. I think most people fail to see how little difference there is between imagination and hallucination. Sometimes, to me, the two seem divided only by a hairsbreadth. But I listened, and it was easier to listen knowing that Abalyn was probably sound asleep in her apartment in Olneyville. Or maybe she was sitting up playing a video game, or writing a review. Regardless, she wasn’t standing at the foot of my bed, talking to me.

  She mostly asked questions, like “If you ever do show this to someone, or if you die and they find it, aren’t you just as bad as anyone who ever created a haunting? This manuscript, isn’t it an infected document,
just waiting to spread its load of plague?”

  I didn’t answer her, because I knew it wasn’t her. But I did lie there, not sleeping, unable to stop thinking about her questions, and I remembered something I wish I’d written about back in the first “chapter,” because it’s such an excellent example of what I mean by: Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book…

  The Suicide Forest. I have a file here on the table next to me with several articles about the Suicide Forest of Japan. At the base of Mount Fuji, on the shores of Lake Sai, there’s a three-thousand-hectare forest called Aokigahara Jukai, which is also known as the Sea of Trees. The forest is thought of as a national treasure and popular with hikers and tourists; it’s home to two hundred species of birds, and forty species of mammals. The trees are mostly Japanese red pines, Japanese oaks, tiger-tail spruce, boxwoods, beech, bamboo, and himeshara (Stewartia monadelpha: a medium-sized deciduous tree with shiny reddish bark and broad leaves and pretty white flowers). The forest is very dense and dark. In fact, the trees are so dense that they block the winds rushing down the slopes of the volcano, and, in the absence of the wind, the forest is said to be eerily silent. There are more than two hundred caves. There are claims that the soil and stone below Aokigahara is so rich in iron that it renders compasses useless, so it’s easy to get lost inside that maze of trees. That part might be true, and it might not. I don’t know, but it’s probably not important here.

  What’s important is that the Sea of Trees is also known as the Suicide Forest. People go there to kill themselves. Lots of people. I have a February 7, 2003, article from the Japan Times (a Japanese newspaper published in English). It reports that in 2002 alone police recovered from Aokigahara the bodies of seventy-eight “apparent” suicides, and that they stopped another eighty-three people intent upon taking their lives who were found in the forest and placed in “protective custody.” In 1978, seventy-three men and women (mostly men) committed suicide there in the gloom of Aokigahara. There were one hundred in 2003. Every year has its own grisly tally, and only the Golden Gate Bridge is a more popular suicide destination. Signs have been placed in the forest imploring the people who travel there in order to kill themselves not to do so, to reconsider their decision. There are stories told by Buddhist monks that the forest lures suicides into its perpetual twilight, that it calls out to them. The woods are said to be haunted by ghosts called yurei, the spirits of the suicides, who are lonely and howl at night.

  The woods are said to be haunted. That’s the important part. At least, to me that’s the important part. Importance is always conditional, relative, variable from person to person. But what’s more important (to me) than the tales of the yurei is the fact that all this trouble in the Sea of Trees didn’t begin until Seichoˉ Matsumoto, a Japanese detective and mystery writer, published a novel, Kuroi Jukai (The Black Forest, 1960). In Matsumoto’s book, two lovers choose Aokigahara as the most appropriate place to commit suicide. And people read the book. And people began going to the forest to kill themselves.

  I haven’t read Kuroi Jukai. I don’t even know if it’s been translated into English.

  A book. A pernicious meme that created a haunting, a sort of focal point for people who don’t want to live anymore. Same as with Phillip George Saltonstall and The Drowning Girl, I find it hard to believe that Matsumoto meant anyone harm. I doubt he consciously set out to trigger the haunting of the Sea of Trees. But do his intentions enter into this? Do Saltonstall’s, or Albert Perrault’s? Are they innocent, or do we hold them accountable?

  “What makes you any different?” I imagined Abalyn asking from the foot of my bed last night.

  If I had answered, maybe I’d have said, “Nothing.” Maybe I’d have said, “I’m still trying to figure that out.” Possibly, I would have pointed out that those three, the novelist and the two painters, created something that was meant to be seen, whereas I’m not doing that at all.

  “Write about Eva,” Abalyn told me. “What you brought home that night. Write about what happened to us because of what you brought home that night.”

  I wanted to say, I still love you, Abalyn. I’m never going to stop loving you. I didn’t say that, because I didn’t say anything, but if I had replied to my imagination, I believe Abalyn would have turned away, angry, bitter, lonely as any yurei, but not howling. Determined I wouldn’t see her loneliness.

  Walking through the woods, I have faced it.…

  “You need to get dressed and go to work,” Imp typed.

  I know. I just glanced at the clock. But I needed to get this down first. If I hadn’t, I might have forgotten that I meant to, because I forget so much.

  I have to tell the story, because I forget so much.

  The next morning—the morning after I found Eva Canning by the Blackstone River—I awoke to find that Abalyn was already up and about. That was sort of unusual. She tended to stay up later than me, and sleep later. Sometimes, she slept until two or three in the afternoon, after staying up until dawn. But not that morning. That morning I put on my robe, brushed my teeth, and went out into the parlor to find her flipping through my records.

  “Good morning,” I said, and she probably said “Good morning,” too. Or something of the sort.

  “You’re up early,” I said, and she shrugged.

  “Don’t you have anything recorded after 1979?” Abalyn asked me, frowning. “And you have heard about CDs, right?”

  “Those were Rosemary’s records.”

  “Rosemary? An ex?”

  “No, no. Rosemary my mother.”

  “So, where is your music?” she wanted to know. All this time, she hadn’t looked at me, she just kept flipping through the records. She pulled out Rumours and stared at Mick Fleetwood and Stevie Nicks on the cover.

  “Those are my records, Abalyn. They’re the only ones that I have.”

  “You’re shitting me,” she said, and laughed.

  “No, I’m not. I don’t listen to music a lot, and when I do, I listen to Rosemary’s records. I grew up hearing them, and they make me feel safe.”

  She looked at me then, over her shoulder. She made that face she used to make when she was trying to figure me out. Or when she was having trouble with one of her video games. It was pretty much the same expression, in either case. “Okay,” she said, “I guess that makes sense,” then turned back to the bookshelf (which is where I keep all Rosemary’s records, which are now my records). She slid Rumours back onto the shelf and pulled out Jackson Browne’s Late for the Sky.

  “I especially like that one,” I told her.

  “You have a turntable?”

  “Yeah. It was also my mother’s.”

  “Jodie has a turntable. She collects this stuff. Me, I stick to CDs. Vinyl just gets scratched up, and it’s too much trouble to lug around whenever you move.”

  I yawned, thinking about hot tea and toasted crumpets and strawberry jam. “I don’t know much about music,” I said. “Not about the newer stuff, I mean. Just Rosemary’s records.”

  “We gotta remedy that, Imp. You need a crash course.”

  I asked her what she liked, and her answer didn’t make much sense to me. EBM, synthpop, trance, shoegaze, Japanoise, acid house.

  “I’ve never heard of any of those bands,” I said, and she laughed. It wasn’t a mean-spirited laugh. I don’t remember Abalyn ever making fun of me, or laughing at me the way you laugh at someone when you’re making fun of them.

  “They’re not bands, Imp. They’re genres.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Seriously, we must begin the musical education of India Phelps ASAP.” She did play a lot of her music for me later, and I listened, trying to listen with an open mind, but I didn’t really like any of it. Well, except for a few songs by a British band named Radiohead. One of their songs had something about a siren in it, and ship
wrecks. But in most of what she played for me, the lyrics, when there were lyrics, didn’t seem very important.

  She was looking at the back cover of Late for the Sky, and I asked if she’d had breakfast. She said that she had, and that she’d made a pot of coffee. I reminded her I didn’t drink coffee. And really, I know I’m trying to get back to the story, and maybe this doesn’t seem like part of the story of Eva Canning, but it is. And, anyway, I’m just sort of in the mood to write about Abalyn. I’m missing her more than usual tonight. I even thought about calling her, but chickened out. Verily, I’m an invertebrate. Spineless.

  I pointed at the album cover she was holding and said, “I really do love that one. I always thought Jackson Browne was so cool.”

  “Imp, Jackson Browne doesn’t have a cool bone in his body. Not so much as a goddamned cool mitochondrion. That’s how uncool Jackson Browne is.”

  It felt like an insult—like she was insulting me, I mean—but I knew she hadn’t meant it that way. Obviously she was insulting Jackson Browne.

  “Have you ever listened to that album?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said. “Intend to keep it that way.”

  “Then how can you possibly know?”

  She didn’t answer the question. Instead she asked one of her own. “You’re evening shift today, right?” And I told her yeah, that I didn’t go in until four.

  “Then get dressed. I’m taking you out for lunch.”

  “I haven’t even had breakfast.”

  “Fine. I’m taking you out for breakfast, brunch, whatever. You’ll have to drive, though.”

  So, I got dressed, and we went over to Wayland Square, to a coffee shop she liked that I’d never been to, a place called the Edge, because coffee makes you edgy, I guess. There were big wooden tables and mismatched chairs and lots of people reading newspapers and working on their laptops. Lots of Brown students, I suppose. I thought about ordering a sandwich, but got something called a Cowboy Cookie, instead, and a cup of scalding-hot Darjeeling. Abalyn got an egg-and-cheese sandwich and a huge latte. The tea and coffee were served in great ceramic cups, green cups with red coffee beans painted on them. I told Abalyn I thought the coffee beans looked more like ladybugs.