Of course, Poe’s narrator, marooned on that ghostly black galleon as it sails the south polar seas, is a man bereft of the capacity for fancy and imagination. As he says, “. . a deficiency of imagination has been imputed to me as a crime. .” And here I am, a woman afflicted since childhood with far too great a proclivity for fancy. At least, this is the judgment that was passed upon me at a very early age. All those elementary schoolteachers and aunts and my parents and whoever the hell else, those wise adults in Mayberry who fretted about and pointed at my “overactive imagination.” But I suppose that I’ve shown them. Well, then again, considering the lousy sales of my books, maybe they get the last laugh, after all. And maybe it is just those sorts of minds, closed as they are to the corrosive perils of fantasy, that are most suited to encounters with the uncanny. I can only say that Poe’s words ring true. Here is another passage from the same story:
To conceive the horrors of my sensations is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions, predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge — some never-to-be-imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction.
Not long after I made that last entry, as I was beginning “The Cask of Amontillado,” Constance knocked at my bedroom door. I said that I was busy, that I didn’t wish to be disturbed. It was a lie, on both accounts, but, still, those are the words that came out of my mouth.
“I heard the typewriter,” she said, her voice only slightly muted by the wood through which it had to pass to reach my ears. “So, I was surprised when I came downstairs, and saw you weren’t in the kitchen. I was surprised that the typewriter wasn’t on the table. Are you okay, Sarah? Is something wrong?”
I almost asked if she’d noticed the plastic spool lying near where the typewriter used to sit, the empty 150-yard spool of McCoy “Mean Green” Super Spectra Braid. But I didn’t. If I was meant to find that line and follow it to the oak, then we are playing a game now, the sort where one does not show her hand. And if I was not,it would have been an odious thing to say. There’s the worst of this, right there. Not knowing if I am consciously being led down these abominable and numinous roads. Or if we are both adrift on the same black galleon, in the same icy sea. Are we now damned together, or might I be the oblation that will set her free? Has she struck a deal with the tree, her life in exchange for something more substantial than a gutted rabbit? And if that’s the truth of it, was the fishing line an attempt to warn me?
“I’m worried about you,” she said.
The door wasn’t locked, and I told her she could open it, if she wanted. She opened it partway, and peered in.
“There’s no need to be worried,” I replied. “I’m fine.”
I was sitting on the floor at the foot of the bed, and she was standing in the doorway. I was wearing only my bathrobe and a T-shirt and panties underneath it. She was wearing black jeans and one of her black smocks, and her hands and arms and face were a smudged riot of yellows and browns, crimson and gold, orange and amber and a vacant, hungry shade of blue, as though she’d begun, prematurely, to bleed autumn. Dr. Harvey’s antique Royal was (and still is) parked on the dressing table.
“Sarah,” she said, “has something happened? After the seizure, or because of it? Something I should know about? Or maybe when we were in the basement—”
“Do you remember it now, the basement?” I asked, and she stared at me a while before answering.
“Nothing I haven’t told you already.”
“Irgendwo in dieser bodenlosen Nacht gibt es ein Licht,”I said, not meeting her eyes. “Has that part come back to you?”
“Sarah, I don’t even remember what that means, what you told me it means.” And she took a step or two into the room, though I’d only given her permission to open the door, not enter.
I shut my eyes and listened to the rain peppering the windowpanes, the one in front of me and the one on my right, south and west, respectively. I wished that she would leave, and I was afraid that’s exactly what she was about to do. I could hardly bear the thought of being alone, so near to the oak, but her company had become almost intolerable. So, there’s me between a rock and a hard place. Scylla and Charybdis. The devil and the deep blue sea. The fire and the frying pan.
“If you need to talk, I can listen,” Constance said.
“But you’re so busy,” I told her, and if I’d had my eyes open, I think I would have seen her flinch. “So much canvas, and so little time, right? That muse of yours, she must be a goddamn slave driver.”
“Sarah, are you pissed at me? Have I done something wrong?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” I answered. “Is there something I might have missed?” I opened my eyes, then, and I smiled at her. I wanted to shut the fuck up and not say another single word, and I wanted to take back what had been said already. I was sitting there — detached, dissociative— watching Constance, listening to the madwoman who’d hijacked my voice. In that fleeting instant, it seemed so perfectly crystal clear that I’d entirely lost my mind. But then the comforting certainty dissolved, and I could not dismiss the possibility that the madwoman — despite, or because of, her madness — might be wholly justified in her apprehensions.
“Not that I’m aware of,” Consytance replied. Her voice had become wary, and she glanced over her shoulder, back towards the hallway and the kitchen. And the cellar door, of course, which lies in between the two. When she turned to face me again, the corners of her mouth were bent downwards in the subtlest of frowns.
“You must miss Amanda terribly,” she said. There was not even a hint of anything mocking or facetious in her voice. There was no sarcasm. But, still, there was that wariness.
“Didn’t I already tell you that Amanda is none of your concern?” I asked her. Or what I asked was very similar. Typing this, I am once more forced to admit that much of these recollections are approximations. Necessary fiction. My memory does not hold word-for-word, blow-by-blow transcripts. Very few minds are capable of such a feat, and mine doesn’t number among them. To again quote Poe (from The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket):
I’ve had more than one heated “discussion” with readers and other writers regarding the use of unreliable narrators. I’ve seen people get absolutely apoplectic on the subject, at the suggestion that a book (or its author) is not to be faulted for employing an unreliable narrator. The truth, of course, is that all first-person narrations are, by definition, unreliable, as all memories are unreliable. We could quibble over varying degrees of reliability, but, in the end, unless the person telling the tale has been blessed with total recall (which, as some psychologists have proposed, may be a myth, anyway), readers must accept this inherent fallibility and move the fuck on. Have I already mentioned the crack someone at the New York Times Book Review made about my apparent fondness for digression? Consider the preceding a case in point.