DEAD BRIGHT STAR (JULY 1987)

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

I dislike coming here. But that’s no secret. Dr. Knowles is well enough aware exactly how much I dislike coming to see her, or at least she knows as much as I’ve told her. I’ve said, “I’d rather be doing almost anything else.” I’ve said, “It was never my idea, starting this. I wouldn’t have, not if I’d have had a choice.” I’ve spent entire fifty-minute sessions staring out her office window at the parking lot, counting the cars that come and go instead of talking, noting their make and model and color and the faces of their drivers rather than puking up any more of my soul to this woman. And she sits there in her swivel chair, infuriatingly patient, watching me, watching me as if even when I’m intentionally doing nothing I’m inadvertently doing something, as if saying nothing is saying everything she wants to hear. And that makes this seem all the more like a trap. Inaction is action. Someone said that to me a long time ago, but I can no longer remember who. Someone I went to bed with. Someone I fucked because I had nothing better to do, so I forgot his face or her face and got on with my life and didn’t look back. Except to not forget that line, Inaction is action. In one corner of Dr. Knowles office there’s a small Swiss cheese plant in a terra-cotta pot. And I’ve been staring at it for fifteen minutes now, not talking just staring at that damn plant, but I can tell that she’s about to say something. I don’t want her to be the first to speak. I’d rather that be me, if anyone has to say anything, I’d rather it be me. So, I say “Did you know that the Latin name for that plant is Monstera deliciosa?”

“No,” says Dr. Knowles, “I didn’t know that.” And she doesn’t smile or frown or anything. Except she pretends to be interested in what I’ve asked her. I can always tell when she’s only pretending.

“Well, it is,” I say.

“How do you know that?” she asks.

Instead of answering the question, I shrug and I tell her that the name means delicious monster. Or monstrous and delicious, depending what order you translate it in.

“Did you study botany in college?” she wants to know.

“No,” I tell her, and that’s the truth. I’ve told Dr. Knowles a lot of lies, just to keep her happy and pass the time, but that isn’t one of them. I stare at the strange glossy leaves, and I just say, “My mom had a big one when I was a kid. Lots bigger than that one,” and that’s enough about the stupid Swiss cheese plant. Dr. Knowles has gotten pretty good at being able to see when I just want to let something drop, and she doesn’t push. She doesn’t push, but she does prod.

I’m quiet again for almost five minutes, and then she decides to prod.

“What you told me about the attic,” she says, “was that one of the true things?”

Yes, she knows that I lie to her sometimes. She’s known that almost from the very beginning, almost from the first time I came here to this tiny office and had to sit in the waiting room and then had to sit on this sofa and watch the clock or the parking lot or the Swiss cheese plant until my time was up and I could leave.

“Mostly,” I tell her, and mostly that’s not a lie.

“Could we talk about that some more?” she asks. “We still have thirty-five minutes today. We won’t if you don’t feel like it, but I wanted to ask, just in case.”

“We won’t what?” I ask her, asking just to be difficult. “We won’t what if I don’t want to?”

“We won’t talk about the attic. If you don’t want to.”

“It was just a goddamn attic. What’s there to talk about?” And I decide to stare out the window at the parking lot for a little while instead of staring at the Swiss cheese plant. There’s a white volkswagen Bug, and I’ve always wanted one of those, even if they were invented by the Nazis. When I was a little girl, when I was in elementary school, my mom had one. It was the color of rust, because it mostly was rust, and in places the floorboard had rusted out and there were pieces of plywood covering the holes. And that’s twice today my mom has come up, but I don’t let myself pause to think about that. What could be more fucking cliché than thinking about your mother in a psychiatrist’s office? Almost nothing, that’s what. Almost nothing.

“Fine,” I say. “We can talk about the attic, if that’s what you want.”

“Okay,” says Dr. Knowles. “Can we talk about Mistral, too?”

And now I’m quiet again for a little while, because she’s caught me off my guard, though I don’t know why. Why did I think she’d want to talk about the attic if not because of Mistral? Otherwise, the attic was just an attic, just a place where people put things that were in their way and that they probably never wanted to see again. Never wanted to have to see again. Isn’t that what attics are for?

“Mistral is one of the eight winds of the Mediterranean,” I say. “It means masterly in French.” That part’s not true. Mistral means masterly in the Languedoc dialect of Occitan, which isn’t the same as French at all. It’s a Romance language, but it isn’t French. Anyway, like I said already, sometimes I lie to Dr. Knowles. Sometimes I just tell her things I know are not true. “It’s one of the eight winds,” I say again. “It’s cold and dry and blows on sunny, bright days. It almost drove Vincent Van Gogh insane. He had to battle the mistral day after day after day when he was living at his yellow house in Arles.”

“But that’s not the Mistral I meant,” says Dr. Knowles, as if I don’t know. As if I don’t know that she already knows that I know. “We were going to talk about the attic, because you said that was okay, so when I asked about Mistral–”

“I know what you were asking,” I tell her, interrupting and not caring that I’m interrupting her.

“So, can we talk about that Mistral, the Mistral from the attic?”

“You really think we’ve got time left for that?” I ask her, still staring out the window at the white Volkswagen. I always thought if I could have one of my own I would want it to be green, grasshopper green.

“I think so,” says Dr. Knowles. “I think we do.”

I stare at the parking lot, the blacktop and white lines and yellow lines painted on the blacktop, and I close my eyes and imagine myself behind the wheel of a grasshopper-green Volkswagen Bug. I imagine myself driving far, far, far away from Dr. Knowles and this whole damn city and everything I have ever known and everything I ever have said. But it doesn’t last, the pictures I’m making in my mind of the car and my getaway, of highways in places I’ve never been, because suddenly I’m thinking about the attic, instead. I’m thinking about the first night in the attic. Or the first day. I have trouble being sure, sometimes, maybe all the time, whether it was night or day. I’ve gone up the stairs again, the stairs leading to the narrow trap door, and I’ve pulled the bit of rope again, the bit of rope that opens the door. And then there’s the smell of dust and mold and spiders and moths and all the stuff that people put in attics and to forget.

“Are you okay?” Dr. Knowles asks me, and I smile. I didn’t mean to smile, I don’t think, but I do smile, and I open my eyes.

“I’m fine,” I tell her. “Why wouldn’t I be fine.”

“I was only asking,” she replies.

“I’m fine,” I say again.

“We don’t have to talk about her today, not if you aren’t feeling up to it.”

“I said I was fine, didn’t I?”

Dr. Knowles is quiet for a moment, and then she nods and says yes, yes, that’s what I’d said, what I’d told her, that I was fine.

“I wouldn’t have said it if it weren’t true.”

“I know,” says Dr. Knowles, pretending she believes what she’s saying, and I listen and pretend I believe it, too.

Dry, cold air that smells like the act of forgetting, the desire to forget.

The need.

I stop turn my head away from the window and the parking lot, deciding it’s better if I look at Dr. Knowles and the Swiss Cheese plant and the clock and the office. There’s no grasshopper-green Volkswagen waiting for me down there or anywhere else. It’s cruel to think how maybe there could be. It’s masochistic.

“I go up the stairs and I open the door. I open the little white door and I climb up into the attic of my mother’s house.”

“Have you noticed that you always say that it was your mother’s house? Wasn’t it your house, too? You lived there.”

“No,” I reply. “I mean yes, I lived there, but it was my mother’s house, and she never let me forget it. Not after I was out of high school. Do you want to talk about my mother or do you want me to talk about Mistral?”

“Well,” says Dr. Knowles, “I want you to talk about what you need to talk about.”

Liar, I think. You are a filthy liar, even if I don’t know why, even if I can’t figure out what you have to gain from telling me lies, and you just want to hear the things I don’t want to tell you.

I stand in the attic, and now there’s a rectangular hole in the floor at my feet. It would be easy to step into that hole by accident and fall and break my neck. My damn fool neck, my mother would say, but I don’t tell Dr. Knowles that’s what she’d say. I stand there looking at the hole in the floor, and I reach for the light cord. It’s just a frayed length of kitchen twine, the light cord, leading up to a socket and a bare bulb. Nothing fancy in this old house. I find the cord, and when I pull it nothing happens. The bulb’s blown out. It might have been blown a long time, because no one ever comes up into the attic. There’s nothing up here that anyone wants, only things no wants anymore, only things that were put here so no one would ever have to think about them again.

“The light was burned out,” I tell Dr. Knowles.

“I remember,” she says.

“We didn’t go up there. Mom didn’t like for us to go up there. She always said she didn’t like the sound of footsteps in the attic, so we didn’t go up there very much, my dad and me. Not that there was any reason to.”

I don’t just pull the cord once. I probably pull it two or three times, and then I think how I should go back down the stairs and get a new bulb out of the drawer in the pantry where we keep light bulbs. I don’t do that, though. I can’t say why, but I don’t do that. I stand there with my hand on the length of twine, peering into the darkness. There’s a little bit of light getting in from the tiny window all the way down at the other end of the attic. If I’m up there in the daytime, than it’s sunlight sifting through dust and the heavy curtains hung over the window. If it’s night, it’s the streetlight on the corner, cold white light and not warm yellow light.

“Why did you go up there that day?” asks Dr. Knowles. “I don’t think you’ve ever told me why.”

“It was so long ago, I don’t think I remember why anymore,” I tell her, though that isn’t true. But sometimes I have to hold a few scraps of the truth back for myself, even when I’m trying hard not to lie.

Liar. You are a filthy liar, even if I don’t know why, even if I can’t figure out what you have to gain . . .

“My mother wasn’t home,” I say. “She’d gone to the market for something. I don’t remember what, but she’d gone out to the market, so—whyever I’d gone into the attic, whatever I was up there looking for—that was a good time, because she wouldn’t hear my footsteps on the ceiling.”

Standing there beside the hole in the floor and the steps leading back down from the attic, squinting into the gloom, I am surrounded by all those forgotten, castoff things, by cardboard boxes taped shut for decades, by stacks of newspapers from before I was born, by ratty furniture and things that were mine when I was a little kid, things that mattered a lot to me back then, but which I have not thought about in ages. Those things, they’re nearest the attic door. Board games and broken toys, a rocking horse that my grandfather made, a tall can of Lincoln logs. Children’s books in crooked stacks, and I think how they’ve probably been eaten at by silverfish and roaches and mice and whatever else lives in attics and feasts on children’s books.

“You didn’t see her right away,” says Dr. Knowles, not asking but telling me, and I think how a lawyer or a judge on a TV show might say that’s leading the witness, something like that. “I mean, that’s what you’ve said before,” she adds, so I think it must have also occurred to her that there was something untoward about telling me what I saw and when I saw it.

“No,” I reply. “I was too busy wanting to go back downstairs. Or I was too busy looking around at all the junk up there. Or both maybe. So no, I didn’t see her right away.” I say these things to answer her question, but I’m still thinking how sitting on the sofa in Dr. Knowles’ office isn’t so very different than being in court, up on the witness stand, replying to the prosecution and the defense and the judge—but especially to the prosecution. I’m thinking how maybe the difference between lawyers and psychiatrists isn’t as great as most people probably assume it to be (though, if I am to be honest, I can’t claim to understand all that much about how anyone but me sees the world or anyone else but themselves).

I look out at the parking lot again, fringed in leafy-green mimosa and magnolia and whatever else, but even with the shade from the trees the day’s gonna be so hot the asphalt will be soft long before sunset. And that makes me think about the La Brea tar pits and mammoths and ground sloths and whatever else getting mired in the tar and dragged down to their deaths. And that makes me think about Mistral. No, I mean really think about her for the first time since coming into Dr. Knowles’ office today. I rub my eyes and turn away from the window again.

“Did I ever tell you about the time I saw the La Brea tar pits?” I ask her, and she looks confused and leans back in her chair and almost (but only almost) frowns at me.

“No,” she says, apparently deciding to weather without compliant my so suddenly changing the subject like that. “No, you never did.”

“I was ten years old. My dad moved to LA after the divorce, but you know that. He took me to see the tar pits and the museum next to the tar pits with all the bones they’d pulled out of them over the decades. I had nightmares about them for a while afterwards, about what it would be like to get stuck in the tar and slowly pulled down, strangling, suffocating. You know. It must be an awful way for anything to die, even if you are only a dire wolf or only a coyote.”

Dr. Knowles nods her head, and I can see now that she gets the connection, that I hadn’t actually changed the subject after all. She stops almost frowning and her expression goes all non-judgmentally neutral again.

“The first thing I remember in the attic,” I tell her, “the first thing out of the ordinary, was a smell like the tar pits had smelled that day, the sticky, pungent melted tar smell. And the second thing I noticed that was out of the ordinary, or maybe it wasn’t but it seemed that way to me, there was this tidy little pile of dead mice right next to the attic door. Like someone had stacked them there a long time ago. They were just husks, little mouse mummies, as if they’d been there so long they’d desiccated.”

Or as if something had come along and sucked them all dry.

And maybe that’s just what happens to evil little fucking mice that snack on old children’s books.

“It was summer, right?” asks Dr. Knowles.

“Yeah, it was July. Like now. And that was the third strange thing,” I say. “It should have been hot as blue blazes up there in the attic, but it wasn’t. It was cold, like there was an air conditioner running full blast. We didn’t even have AC downstairs, just box fans. But I swear, it was like a meat locker up there. I realized that I could see my breath fog.”

And across all these years and everything that’s happened since, I’m standing in the dark with the rectangle of light at my feet, and there’s the tidy pile of mouse husks, and the tar smell burns my nostrils, and I really can see my breath fogging. Don’t you run, I think. Don’t you dare fucking run. You’ll just have to come back later on and spend all the time between now and then feeling foolish and dreading it. And then I think, Yeah, but I could come back with a fresh goddamn light bulb.

“And that’s when you realized you weren’t alone?” asks Dr. Knowles. I nod my head, and then I answer, “Yeah, that’s when I saw her. She was sitting in an old armchair at the other end of the attic, sort of curled up in it, the way you do in armchairs, just sitting there watching me.”

If it’s nighttime, it’s the streetlight on the corner, cold white light and not warm yellow light.

“How did that make you feel?”

“How do you think it made me feel?” And the words are out before I can think better of them or the annoyed tone in my voice, but Jesus, what a dumb goddamn question. I imagine Dr. Knowles, fifteen years younger sitting through some college lecture, learning how to ask perfectly idiotic questions once she got her own practice.

“I’m sorry,” she says, a little too quickly. “I shouldn’t have—”

But I interrupt her for the second time this session. “Like being stabbed in the gut with an icicle,” I say, wondering if it actually did feel anything like that, what it would feel like to be stabbed in the belly with an icicle, if I’d feel the cold before I felt the pain or if I’d feel both right about the same time or what. “It should have scared the shit out me, especially since I was already jumpy and all. It didn’t though. There was just this sharp coldness in my guts, and I stood there staring back at her. She had bright blue eyes. I could tell even from my end of the dark attic, how bright and blue her eyes were, and it’s not like they were glowing or anything hokey like that, not like something from a monster movie.”

And I can see Dr. Knowles wanting to ask me, And then what happened? What happened next? And how did that make you feel? Even though she’s heard this all once or twice before and has it all written down somewhere. Or maybe it’s just that she sees so many crazy women that she can’t keep us straight or she forgets shit. I don’t know. I’m not even sure if I’m telling this story exactly the same way that I’ve told it to her before, but that’s okay. Dr. Knowles would probably be the first to tell me that any deviations are significant, that what did or did not actually happen that day or night is entirely irrelevant. It’s what I remember, on this particular day, and how, on this particular day, it makes me feel. That’s what’s important. Or maybe I’m just being an asshole. I am my mother’s daughter, after all, and I never rule out that possibility.

“Her eyes were bright and blue,” I say again. “Like blue ice, the way ice is blue inside a glacier. That cold blue, like all that freezing air pressing in around me. And I just stood there staring at her, and she just sat there, curled into that old armchair watching me. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t, and I remember wondering if possibly my jaws and tongue had frozen solid. And then she smiled.”

Dr. Knowles is chewing at her lower lip, and I wonder if she’s aware that she’s doing it. I wonder if she’s aware that I’ve noticed.

“Her smile wasn’t as bright as her eyes,” I go on, “but it almost was, and I realized then I wasn’t so much seeing a woman down there at the other end of my mother’s attic. No, I was seeing nothing at all, a hole in reality, and maybe it was shaped like a woman, and maybe it actually had been a woman once, a long, long, long time ago, like how a long time ago all those bones from the tar pits had been parts of living animals. That’s what I was seeing, this hole punched in the world, and only those bright blue eyes and that white smile was any more solid than nothingness.”

And what happened next? Do you remember what happened next? Is that when she told you that her name was Mistral?

No, that’s when she stood up . . .

That’s when she came apart.

And what do you think you really saw?

I glance at the clock and am relieved that there’s only fifteen minutes to go. Then I rub my eyes and remember that scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off when the clock starts running backwards. At least, I think it was in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off; it might have been in some other movie, that scene.

“She wasn’t real,” I say.

“What do you mean by that?” asks Dr. Knowles, and she stops chewing at her lip, and I think she’s probably stopped just a second or two before drawing blood.

“I mean it was dark, and I don’t know what I really saw.”

. . . the most beautiful woman that I ever saw, ever, the most beautiful thing, the most awful thing, the most broken thing, the most utterly irredeemable thing, and she told me that her name was Mistral, and she had a French accent. Or I think it was a French accent. It might have been Occitan, lenga d’òc, like the word mistral, which is a cold, dry wind blowing through the attic of my mother’s house.

“I mean,” I tell Dr. Knowles, “that I might have been imagining things. When I was a kid, my mother said I was bad about imagining things. Or just making things up to get attention, so maybe that’s all I’m doing now.”

Imagining that I saw a hole in the world that called itself Mistral and spoke with a voice like winter. Or lying and inventing her because I’m sick of my life and sick of how one day just keeps coming after another and sick of sitting on this sofa and telling you things I would rather keep to myself.

“I don’t think you’re making it up,” Dr. Knowles says, in that phony way that’s meant to be comforting, that’s meant to assure me that she trusts me and believe every syllable that crosses my lips is gospel.

“But you don’t know that I’m not, do you?”

“Are you a ghost?” I heard myself say, and the hole in the world with bright blue eyes and that guillotine smile replied, “No, dear. I’m not a ghost. I remember dying. In fact, I remember dying twice, but I’m not a ghost. Still, if it’s easier that way, simpler for you to understand, I don’t mind if you think of me as a ghost. Not if that makes it easier on you. I’m not here to cause you any pain.”

“No,” Dr. Knowles admits to me. “I can’t ever be sure that you’re telling me the truth. But I do think that what you’re telling me means something, even if you’re making it all up. Fiction takes the shape it does because there’s something we need to get out, something we need to say, and that’s as important as whatever might have actually happened. I think I told you that once before, when we were talking about your cousin.”

And I almost tell her I think she’s full of shit. But only almost.

I can stand another few minutes, so long as the clock hasn’t started running backwards on me.

“I mean to tell the truth,” I say, but that might just be the worst lie I’ve ever told.

“I know,” says Dr. Knowles, as if she possibly could ever know a thing like that.

“I do mean to.”

“I understand,” she says, and then reaches for her day planner, and I breathe a sigh of relief. “Maybe this would be a good place to stop for the day. We can come back to it next time. Or we can talk about something else. Whatever you need.”

A grasshopper-green Volkswagen Bug, that’s all I need. All I need in the world.

“Okay,” I tell her, and I reach for my purse on the table, and Dr. Knowles smiles and scribbles in her book.