The Drowning Girl (36 page)

I’ve beheld the Sea of Faith, and now I’m left with no choice but to listen closely to the melancholy, long withdrawing roar, which is
a siren’s song on a fogbound night when waves pummel the naked shingles of the world.

Imp typed, “I’m free of the phantoms of Perrault and the Black Dahlia and the wolf who cried girl and the November Eva who never was and never came to me. I have locked them inside a story from which they can never escape to do me harm. I’ve exorcised them.”

But I’m not unhaunted. I’ve already written on the permanence of haunting. I wrote, “Once Odysseus heard the sirens, I find it hard to believe he ever could have forgotten their song. He would have always been haunted by it all the rest of his life.”

However, now I think I have crossed a threshold where my ghost story has ceased to be malicious twins. Now it wears a single face.

Imp typed, “This may, at least, make my ghost story, in some sense, comprehensible.”

I have placed one Eva behind me. I have only July, and Caroline and Rosemary, and
The Drowning Girl
and Phillip George Saltonstall, “The Little Mermaid” and the Siren of Millville. That’s quite enough ghosts for one madwoman.

I really should be out looking for a new job.

All is changed utterly, the gyre still widens here in my night of first ages, and, in the end, I am left with a terrible beauty and a slouching beast. The monster is neither shackled nor is she conquered, and I gaze on her monstrous and free. And this, too, as my head races with Matthew Arnold, Yeats, Conrad, races and tangles, all wanting out at once. All wanting to be done writing of July Eva and my mermaid ghost story:

It’s been a strange day, but I’m going to try hard to relate it coherently, resorting to the sort of linear narrative that has so often now eluded me. I don’t think in straight lines, neat number lines (0–9,-9–0), once upon a time and happily ever after, A–Z, whatever. But I’m going to try hard this time.

I spent the morning putting in applications at places that weren’t hiring, but would be sooner or later. Bill gave me a good reference, and that surprised me, right? Sure, sure it did. But he said he understood it wasn’t my fault, and he would hire me back if not for the owner, and he didn’t want to see me long unemployed. I filled out applications at Utrecht on Wickenden Street, some other shops on Wickenden, shops on Thayer, at Wayland Square (including the Edge, though I know not one jot about being a barista). Ellen told me I should apply at Cellar Stories, so I did. I would love to work
there. I would, though it seems unlikely. Altogether, I filled out fifteen applications. Maybe I’ll be called back for an interview or two.

Abalyn and I arranged to meet at four o’clock p.m. downstairs at the Athenaeum. She said there was something she wanted to look up, which seemed strange to me, as she rarely seems to read anything but her digest-sized volumes of manga (which I confess make no sense to me, and always seemed very silly when I’ve tried to read them). She was seated at one of the long tables across from the tall portrait of George Washington. Her laptop was out and on, and she had her iPod and iPhone. She wasn’t using any of them, but I suspect, for her, they’re like Linus van Pelt’s security blanket. Talismans against the unfriendly, intolerant, misunderstanding world. But she was reading a book. Not a very old book, and she closed it when I spoke to her. She closed it and looked up at me. The cellophane library cover glistened in the sunlight from the windows.

“Any luck with the job hunting?” she asked, and rubbed at her eyes.

“I don’t know yet. Maybe. Probably not.”

I sat down in the chair beside her and dropped my bag to the floor, one of Rosemary Anne’s old shapeless bags. This one was pea-green corduroy.

“What about you? Did you find whatever it was you were looking for?”

She stared at the cover of the book a moment. It wasn’t a very old book, and the cover read
The Lemming Cult: The Rise and Fall of the Open Door of Night
by William L. West. There was a PhD after the author’s name. I turned away and stared at the shelves, instead. Being faced suddenly, unexpectedly, with this book, this particular book, Abalyn’s discovery, I felt like I’d come suddenly upon a gruesome accident. No, that’s not right. But I don’t want to waste time finding a better analogy.

“I won’t tell you, if you don’t want to hear.”

“I don’t,” I replied, still staring towards a shelf of plays and books on theater. “But what I don’t know is worse than what I do.” The unknown
thing
under the water, devouring and unseen, versus the banal danger of a hunted great white shark (
Carcharodon carcharias,
Smith, 1838; Greek,
karcharos
, meaning jagged, and
odous
, meaning tooth; kar-KAR-uh-don kar-KAR-ee-us).

“You’re sure?”

“Please,” I said, and maybe I whispered. But, in the library, my voice seemed very loud (even though, as I’ve noted, it can be a very noisy library).

I heard Abalyn open the book, but I didn’t turn back to her. I stared at the tattered spines of antique editions and listened while she quietly read from
Chapter 4
:

“‘One of the more visible outspoken members of the cult was Eva Canning, a native of Newport, Rhode Island. Canning arrived in California in the late summer of 1981, having received a scholarship to attend UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate, she developed a strong interest in Mediterranean archaeology, and received her BS in anthropology in June 1985, afterwards remaining at Berkeley to work towards a PhD in sociocultural archaeology. During this time, she did fieldwork in Greece, Turkey, and on several Aegean islands. However, one of her two coadvisers was Jacova Angevine, and when Angevine left the university in ’eighty-eight, so did Canning. There are unsubstantiated rumors that the two had become lovers. Regardless, Canning would soon become one of Angevine’s most trusted confidantes, and interviews with surviving members reveal that she was one of four women accorded the rank of High Priestess of the Open Door of Night. During the ceremonies at the Pierce Street temple in Monterey, Canning is said always to have been in attendance, and to have been among those responsible for the induction of new members.

Many journalists have extended Canning’s role in the cult’s
swift rise to prominence beyond recruitment. It’s readily evident that it was through Canning’s promotional efforts and acumen that the ODoN attracted so many so quickly. She not only took advantage of the nascent internet but spread the cult’s doctrine via college campuses, the underground zine culture of the late eighties and early nineties, and numerous mentions appear in
Factsheet Five
from 1988 onwards. During this period, articles on ODoN, and two interviews with Canning, appear in zines in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan (for a summation, see Karaflogka, Anastasia, “Occult Discourse and the Efficacy of Zines,”
Religion
32 [2002]: 279–91). Following the events at Moss Landing, her suicide note (one of only four left behind) was printed in many of these homegrown publications.

While at Berkeley, Canning also arranged for the creation of the Usenet group alt.humanities.odon, which saw considerable traffic from 1988 to 1991. One can only imagine how much more damage Canning might have managed if she’d had the World Wide Web at her disposal.’”

Abalyn paused, and I didn’t say anything for a moment. I say “a moment,” but I don’t know how long. And then I asked her, “Is that all?”

“No. That’s not even the most important part. Do you want me to go on?”

“I do,” I replied. “I want you to go on. You’ve begun this. You can’t very well stop now.”

And so she read a little more from
Chapter 4
:

“‘Before Eva Canning departed New England for California, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter. The child was adopted by Canning’s mother and father. I have chosen to omit her name here, as she’s already suffered much unwanted and hurtful attention in connection to her mother’s involvement with Jacova Angevine.’”

Abalyn stopped, and I could hear her turning a page or two.
Then she read, “‘Eva Canning’s body was sent back East, and her badly mutilated and decomposed remains were duly cremated. Her ashes were strewn in the sea from high cliffs at the eastern edge of Aquidneck Island, near Salve Regina College, her mother’s alma mater. However, there was also a modest memorial service at Middletown Cemetery in Newport. A headstone in the Canning family plot marks an empty grave.’”

Again, silence. I could hear footsteps overhead, and the voices of patrons and librarians. I glanced towards the staircase leading to the ground floor, polished oak and worn red carpeting.

“I want to go there,” I said. “I need to go there, Abalyn. I have to see her grave for myself.”

“It’s too late to go today.”

“Then we’ll go tomorrow.”

I don’t have a membership to the Athenaeum, because I can’t afford one. But I had several pages of
The Lemming Cult: The Rise and Fall of the Open Door of Night
by William L. West (New York: The Overlook Press, 1994) photocopied, so I’d have them for later, because of what Rosemary Anne said about remembering significant
things
.

As we left the library and stepped back out into the cold November evening, Abalyn asked if I was all right, and I lied and told her I was fine. “We need to stop by the market on the way home,” I added.

And the next day, it snowed, and the next day, we went to Newport. Bah. Dah. Ba-ba.

Obituary from the
Newport Daily News
(April 11, 1991):

Eva Canning had a daughter. A daughter whose first initial is E. Why is her full name not given here? Anonymity, an effort to protect her from Eva’s Open Door of Night connections and subsequent scandal? And who was the father? The daughter would have had to be born…when, while Eva was still in high school? Was the daughter raised by Eva’s mother? Too many questions, and my head spins and lists with them. Abalyn found this obituary yesterday, and I have added it to my file labeled “Perishable Shippen; Eva Canning.”

To say today has been unsettling doesn’t do it justice by half. And, here, Imp types, “You’ve had stranger. Far stranger, India Morgan Phelps.” And yes, I have. But it was strange, still, and unsettling. That’s the word that keeps coming back to me. Unsettling. Doors have swung open, and doors have slammed shut. Truths (or, rather, facts) I had half convinced myself of have been cast into doubt all over again. One step backwards, as Caroline might have said.