The Drowning Girl (43 page)
Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
J
UNE
17, 2011
Went in the shop today (they’re always glad to see me, even if I don’t work there anymore). Spoke with Annunziata, who was on her break, and we went into the stockroom, and sat and talked a while. Mostly about…just mostly talked. But as I was about to leave, because she had to get back out front, she said something.
She said, “Strangest thing a couple of days ago. This lady came in, and, at first glance, she was a dead ringer for your old stalker.”
I asked her what she meant by my “stalker.”
And she stared at me a moment, first a blank expression, then confused; then she smiled and laughed.
“Blonde woman, right? Always wore sunglasses? Used to always ask about you when you weren’t here?”
And I didn’t miss a beat. I laughed. No, I pretended to laugh. I pretended to know what she was talking about.
“Wasn’t her,” Annunziata says. “Figured that out pretty quickly. But at first glance, you know.”
I remember her now, from before Eva. My stalker.
Three questions, then:
How long was Eva Canning watching me? And why don’t I remember her coming into the shop, when Annunziata insists we used to laugh about it, make jokes about my “stalker”?
And did Eva somehow know about my late-night drives?
No, four questions. Was
any
of it happenstance?
I think Annunziata saw that I was shaken, and when she rang me up she gave me her employee’s discount, though she’s not supposed to do that.
Jack Bowler said, “I mean, she’d gotten sick swimming in a river that winter.”
“You know now that you’ll never be sure what happened?” Dr. Ogilvy asked me.
“Yeah, I know now,” I told her. “I know that.”
I know that.
J
UNE
21, 2011
Another pernicious meme, or only an urban legend dressed up to look like a haunting. Either way, I wish I’d known about it when I was writing about Aokigahara Jukai, and Seichoˉ Matsumoto, and his novel.
In 1933, a Hungarian pianist, Rezso˝ Seress, wrote a song he titled “Vége a világnak,” which can be translated into English as “End of the World.” A second set of lyrics was written by a Hungarian poet named László Jávor, and the song became known as “Szomorú vasárnap,” or “Sad Sunday.” The original lyrics mourn the destruction of Europe by World War II, and the second mourns the loss of a lover and makes a pledge to commit suicide, in hopes of a reunion in the afterlife. At least, I think that’s how it all happened.
In 1941, retitled “Gloomy Sunday,” the song became a hit for Billie Holiday. Holiday was nicknamed “Lady Day,” though I don’t know why. For many Christians, Lady Day is the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, and I don’t know why that would be Billie Holiday’s nickname, right? Anyway, the song was a hit for her. But it all becomes very complicated, what happened with the song. With this maybe haunting. Online, I’ve found pages and pages devoted to “Gloomy Sunday,” and I won’t bother putting it all down here, just a few points.
By 1936, the song had become known as the “Hungarian Suicide Song,” after it was blamed for a number of suicides (some say seventeen, but the number varies wildly). There are reports the song was banned in Hungary, but I can’t find any evidence this really happened. There are claims that many more people committed suicide
in America upon hearing the Billie Holiday version, maybe as many as two hundred. There are sources that claim the recording was banned from U.S. radio, but the claims are unsubstantiated. I read accounts of suicides found with the sheet music in pockets or gripped in dead hands or playing on gramophones.
Some sources claim Jávor’s version was inspired by his real-life love for a former girlfriend, and that, after hearing the song, she took her life and left behind a two-word suicide note: “Gloomy Sunday.” Again, this only seems to be a rumor. But it is a fact that Rezso´´ Seress took his own life in 1968 by jumping from a building in Budapest; the fall didn’t kill him, but in the hospital he was able to strangle himself with a piece of wire. I can’t help but think of Rosemary Anne, restrained at 345 Blackstone Boulevard, but…
According to Michael Brooks’ liner notes for
Lady Day—the Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia, 1933–1944
, “‘Gloomy Sunday’ reached America in 1936 and, thanks to a brilliant publicity campaign, became known as ‘The Hungarian Suicide Song.’ Supposedly after hearing it, distraught lovers were hypnotized into heading straight out of the nearest open window, in much the same fashion as investors after October 1929; both stories are largely urban myths.”
I cannot say what’s true here, and what isn’t. I can only note the similarity to Japan’s “Suicide Forest,” following the publication of a novel. I can only reiterate what I’ve said about hauntings being especially pernicious thought contagions.
See also Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (2006), which Abalyn played for me, and Blue Öyster Cult’s “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” (1976; Rosemary had this album). Also, maybe, Roy Lichtenstein’s
Drowning Girl
(1963), though eyes, not ears.
J
UNE
29, 2011
A college student from Kingston found Eva’s body, three days after she swam away from me. There wasn’t much left. There was an article in the
Providence Journal
. She was identified by dental records. By her teeth. Sharks had been at her, said the coroner. Sharks and fish and crabs. Like the girl who dies in the beginning of
Jaws
. But the sharks didn’t kill her, the coroner said. She drowned, and then sharks scavenged her body. A week later, a seven-foot shortfin mako shark (
Isurus oxyrinchus
) was caught down near Watch Hill. There was a woman’s hand in its belly, and shreds of a red silk dress.
J
ULY
2, 2011
“Whatever it was, or wasn’t, it’s done,” the girl named India Morgan Phelps typed, “and you’ve written it down. Your ghost story. Yes, you will always be haunted, but it’s done. Thank you. You can go now.”
Good night, Rosemary Anne.
Good night, Caroline.
Good night, Eva.
Abalyn says she’s here to stay. She said she loves me. When she said it, there were no crows or ravens.
The End
Never has a novel come easily to me, but never before has one come with such profound difficulty as did
The Drowning Girl: A Memoir
. I was sitting in the South Kingston Public Library (Peace Dale, RI) on August 8, 2009, reading a book on the Black Dahlia murder, when the germ of the story first began to take shape in my mind. Over the subsequent twenty-seven months (to paraphrase Kelly Link’s marvelous observation), it shifted its shape many times. And it was not until the last day of October 2010, after numerous false starts and plotlines devised, then cast aside, that I found my way into the book. In the end, it was as simple as allowing Imp to speak in her own voice.
There are a great number of sources of inspiration I feel I should acknowledge—because this is what we do, writers and madwomen, take apart things and then put them back together again in other ways. Some of these inspirations are quoted or alluded to in the text; others are only echoed, implied, or paid homage. They include (but are not limited to) Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) and
Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There
(1871); the works of Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen; Radiohead’s “There there (The Boney King of Nowhere)” (from
Hail to the Thief
, 2003); Anne Sexton’s
“With Mercy for the Greedy” (from
All My Pretty Ones
, 1962); Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (from
New Hampshire
, 1923); Poe’s album
Haunted
(2000); Elia Kazan and William Inge’s
Splendor in the Grass
(1961), and, by extension, William Wordsworth’s poem “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (
Poems, in Two Volumes
, 1807); David Tibet and Current 93’s
Black Ships Ate the Sky
(2006); a number of paintings—William Bradford’s
Arctic Sunset
(1874), Winslow Homer’s
On a Lee Shore
(1900), Martin Johnson Heade’s
Brazilian Forest
(1864) and
Salt Marshes of Newburyport, Massachusetts
(1875–1878), all from the collections of the Rhode Island School of Design; Dante Alighieri’s
la Divina Commedia
(1308–1321); Peter Straub’s
Ghost Story
(1979); Kelly Link’s “Pretty Monsters” (2008); Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You Into the Dark” (from
Plans
, 2006); the music of R.E.M., especially “Find the River” (1992, which would have been quoted, herein, if lawyers didn’t suck); Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (from
New Poems
, 1867); Charles Wesley’s “Idumea” (1793); Seichoˉ Matsumoto’s
Kuroi Jukai
(1960); Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
(1851); Angela Carter’s “Wolf-Alice,” (1978); Charles Fort’s
Lo!
(1931); Henry Francis Cary’s translation of Dante’s
la Divina Commedia
(1805–1814); and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Doomed City (The City in the Sea)” (1831, 1845). Also, various works by Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, and Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. As for the works and lives, the arts and letters, of Phillip George Saltonstall and Albert Perrault, those are entirely my own invention, with the help of Michael Zulli and Sonya Taaffe.
To a degree, the overall structure of the narrative was suggested by the late Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Op. 36 (
Symfonia pies´ni z˙ałosnych
, 1976), as conducted by David Zinman. Too, the influence of Neil Jordan and Danielle Dax, via
The Company of Wolves
(1984), should be fairly obvious, though I somehow was unaware
of it until I’d finished the book. And the same can be said for another very obvious inspiration, Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” (1970, as reinterpreted by This Mortal Coil and Elizabeth Fraser on
It’ll End in Tears,
[1984]).
I have many people to thank (names will be repeated), because without them, this novel genuinely would never have been written. First and foremost, Sonya Taaffe (above and beyond; and for granting me permission to use her “The Magdalene of Gévaudan”) and Geoffrey H. Goodwin, who sat up with me on several occasions, long past midnight and almost until dawn, discussing where Imp’s story might and might not be. I owe an especially great debt to a number of writers who, during a late-night, dawn-thirty impromptu “workshop” at ReaderCon 21, urged me on and provided many ideas that would become crucial to the shifting shape of the novel: Michael Cisco, Greer Gilman, Gemma Files, Erik Amundsen, and, again, Geoffrey H. Goodwin and Sonya Taaffe. My thanks to Peter Straub, for his brilliance and support, and to my agent, Merrilee Heifetz (Writers House), and editor, Anne Sowards, for their patience as I missed deadline after deadline, and still asked for more time. To Michele Alpern, who has restored my faith in copy editors. To my mother, Susan Ramey Cleveland, to Jeff VanderMeer, and everyone who loved
The Red Tree
. My thanks to Hilary Cerullo, MD, who calmed my mind so I could finally write again, and to Kristin Hersh—the Rat Girl—for showing me it was okay to
write
like I
think
. My gratitude to the staff of the Providence Athenaeum, the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Rhode Island School of Design Museum, S. T. Joshi, Andrew Fuller, Andrew Migliore and the organizers of the 2010 H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival (Portland, OR), and to everyone in Boston, New York City, and Providence who has offered support, but are too numerous to name. Also, thanks to Elizabeth Bear, Holly Black, Dan Chaon, Brian Evanson, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth
Hand, Kathe Koja, Bradford Morrow, Benjamin Percy, Peter Straub, Cathrynne M. Valente, and Jeff VanderMeer, who all read the book while it was still only a manuscript, and to Jacob Garbe and Casondra Brewster for words in perfect order, and to Melissa Bowman for a perfect analogy. And to Radiohead and Philip Ridley for letting me quote their songs. To Vince Locke for the illustrations that appear in this edition of the novel. My gratitude to Kyle Cassidy, for his vision, and to everyone else who helped us turn the book into photos and a Lilliputian film (Brian, Sarah, Dani, and Nicola). Again, all my love to Michael Zulli, who
became
my Saltonstall, and brought the man and his paintings into
this
world, with a sprig of nightshade and black serpentine. But, above all, thanks to my partner, Kathryn A. Pollnac, for putting up with my shit, and reading these words back to me again, and again, and again.
We’re doing the impossible, and this makes us mighty.
