Start here. It’s as good a place as any.
Early Monday afternoon, day before yesterday.
I was reading a book I’d brought back from the library. My agent had called, an hour or so earlier, with the usual questions, which I’d avoided answering. But it had put me in a mood, because I’ve been trying so hard not to think about the fact that the novel isn’t getting written. I was sitting in the living room, on the sofa, sweating and drinking beer and reading A Treasury of New England Folklore. I was reading, in particular, about something called the “Moodus Noises” in East Haddam, Connecticut. Strange sounds and earth tremors dating all the way back to the Indians, who had given the place where this was all supposedly happening a name meaning “place of bad noises.” Anyway, I was reading about the Moodus noises when Constance came downstairs.
I’d not seen her since our walk to the mailbox together, and that was on Saturday. So, here it was Monday, and I’d not seen her in almost two days. She’d stopped coming down for meals, or even to use the bathroom, unless it was while I was sleeping. And, probably, that’s exactly what she was doing, sneaking downstairs while I was asleep. Well, no, not sneaking. I should not say sneaking. Merely deliberately choosing to avoid contact. But she finally showed her face, paint-stained, as it always is now, and smiled, and she pretended there was nothing the least bit odd in shutting herself away like that since Saturday afternoon.
She looked like hell, truth be told. Her cinnamon-colored eyes were bloodshot, and she squinted like the sunlight hurt them. It was obvious — whatever else she’s doing up there — she’d not been sleeping. She had a strip of cloth in her hands, a rag, and she was wiping her hands with it, over and over, obsessively, but the rag was so thoroughly impregnated with paint I can’t imagine it was doing any good. She asked me for a cigarette, and I gave her one, lit it for her, and then Constance sat down on the floor, not far away from me. She took the Altoids tin from a pocket of her smock and set it on the edge of the coffee table, opened the lid and tapped ash into it. She asked what I was reading, and I think I showed her the cover of the library book. She might have nodded. I didn’t tell her about the Moodus noises.
I don’t remember the small talk, only that there were ten or fifteen minutes of nothing in particular being said. Nothing of substance or of consequence. And then, suddenly, she laughed, stubbed out her Camel, and snapped the lid of her ginger Altoids tin shut again.
“That day in Jamestown, on the way to Beavertail, when we stopped at McQuade’s because I had to pee,” she said and wiped at her paint-stained nose. “You acted like you didn’t remember having written that story. Why would you do that, Sarah? Why would you lie about something like that?” And it actually took me the better part of a minute to realize that she was talking about “Pony.”
“I wasn’t lying,” I said, finally, and she laughed again and shrugged.
“So. it was like some sort of a blackout? Like alcoholics have? You’re saying you did that, but you don’t remember doing that, so it was like a blackout.”
“I didn’t say that, either.”
“I know, later on, when I gave the story back to you, you pretended like you’d never said there wasn’t a new story. When I gave it back to you, in the kitchen.”
I took a deep breath, and lit a cigarette of my own. She stared at the floor instead of watching me. And it was so hot, on Monday afternoon. The mercury was somewhere in the nineties, and before she came downstairs, I’d been thinking about Constance in her garret, painting, and about an old Twilight Zone in which the Earth’s orbit had changed, bringing it nearer to the sun. There was a girl in that episode who was a painter, trapped in a deserted, doomed city that I think was meant to be New York, and, at the end of the episode, her paintings of the huge devouring sun were all melting, and someone — another woman — was screaming at her to please stop painting the sun. That’s what I’d been thinking about before Constance emerged from her garret; well, besides the mysterious underground noises in Connecticut. Oh, those were blamed on Ol’Hobbamock, too, by the way. Sometimes, the book said, they’d been felt as far away as Boston and Manhattan. Then, in the 1980s, a seismologist explained it all away. Micro-earthquakes. Something like that. Constance, where is our scientist-errant on his white steed, microscope and slide rule in hand to combat the darkness pressing in about us?
“I don’t remember writing it,” I admitted.
“And so you thought I wrote it, like maybe I was trying to make you think you were losing your mind.”
I set my book down, then, wanting so very badly to remain calm, but knowing full fucking well that there was only so long I could keep the anger at bay, only so long I could push down the things I wanted to say to her. It was so close to the surface, and had been since she’d first mentioned the story, that day out on Conanicut Island.
“Why would I do something like that to you?” she asked, sounding hurt, and I told her I had no idea, but pointed out that I’d never actually accused her of writing the story.
“No, but you thought it.”
“You don’t know what I thought.”
“Even if I could write, that doesn’t mean that I could write just like you,” she said, and tapped a fingernail against the lid of the Altoids tin.“I know that,” I replied, straining to keep my voice level, calm. I probably gritted my teeth. “Constance, no matter what I may have thought,I never said that you wrote the story. I don’t think you wrote the story. Clearly,I did. That’s pretty inescapable. I just can’t remember having done it.”
“So, you’re telling me you wrote a whole story during blackouts. Or is this missing time, like those people who say they’ve been abducted by space aliens talk about?”
“I don’t know what this is,” I said, truthfully. “But I don’t remember writing the story, and I have tried. I’ve tried hard, believe me.”
“Usually, I’m the crazy one,” she said, and pocketed her Altoids tin. “Maybe you should see a doctor, Sarah.”
“I don’t have the money to see a doctor. I don’t have insurance. Anyway, when all this started — my fits, I mean — I saw doctors then, and I spent a fortune doing it, and, in the end, they couldn’t tell me shit.”
She nodded, but it was a skeptical nod.
“I keep meaning to read the stuff Chuck Harvey wrote about the tree,” she said, changing the subject. “I suppose I’d better hurry, before you give it to that person at URI.”
And it occurred to me then that I’d forgotten all about the professor in Kingston who’d agreed to take the typescript off my hands. She’d never called back after the Fourth, and I’d never contacted her again. Maybe she was glad. Maybe she’d never wanted anything to do with it, and was only trying to be polite.
“No hurry,” I told Constance. “I don’t think I’ll be turning it over anytime soon. That woman never got back to me, and I never called her, either.”
“You found it in the basement?” Constance asked, even though I’d already told her that I had.
“Yes,” I said. “I probably mentioned that when we first talked about it.”
“People forget things,” she said, and there was no way for me to miss the fact that those three words were meant to cut me. Meant to leave a mark.