The Drowning Girl

by Caitlín R. Kiernan

There’s always a siren, Singing you to shipwreck. “THERE THERE (THE BONEY KING OF NOWHERE),” RADIOHEAD

In the forest is a monster. It has done terrible things. So in the wood it’s hiding, And this is the song it sings. “WHO WILL LOVE ME NOW?” PHILIP RIDLEY

Caroline turned on the gas and shut all the windows and doors and went to sleep, and in her suicide note she thanked my mother and my aunts for not sending her away to a hospital for the mentally insane, where she’d have been forced to live even after she couldn’t stand it anymore.

When I was a girl, I used to lie awake in bed at night, imagining awful ways my father might have met his demise, all manner of just deserts for having dumped us and run away because he was too much of a coward to stick around for me and my mother.

I also didn’t tell them about the day, a month before she choked on her tongue, that she gave me a letter quoting Virginia Woolf’s suicide note: “What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that—everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.” I keep that thumbtacked to the wall in the room where I paint, which I guess is my studio, though I usually just think of it as the room where I paint.

there’s no point doing this thing if all I can manage is a lie. Which is not to say every word will be factual. Only that every word will be true. Or as true as I can manage.

“No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their fundamental nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a convenient construct in the mind of man. Lives are messy, and when we set out to relate them, or parts of them, we cannot ever discern precise and objective moments when any given event began. All beginnings are arbitrary.”

Ghosts are those memories that are too strong to be forgotten for good, echoing across the years and refusing to be obliterated by time.

Too often, people make the mistake of trying to use their art to capture a ghost, but only end up spreading their haunting to countless other people.

I’ve never actually met an innocent person. Everyone hurts someone eventually, no matter how hard they try not to be hurtful.

It comes from an essay in defense of fairy tales, written by Ursula K. Le Guin, titled “Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?” She might just as well have asked, “Why Are Americans Afraid of Ghosts, Werewolves, and Mermaids?” Anyway, she writes, “For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. And that is precisely why many of them [Americans] are afraid of fantasy.”

Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother are both eaten by the wolf, and no one comes to save her, and there’s no happy ending. This is, I think, the truer incarnation of the story, though, even as an adult, I really don’t care for either. Anyway, even with the happy ending, the story terrified me. For one thing, I never pictured the wolf as a real wolf, but as something that walked upright on two legs, and looked a lot more like a man than a wolf. So, I suppose I saw it as a werewolf.

No one ever said you have to be dead and buried to be a ghost. Or if they did, they were wrong. People who believe that have probably never been haunted. Or they’ve only had very limited experience with ghosts, so they simply don’t know any better.

“Duality. The mutability of the flesh. Transition. Having to hide one’s true self away. Masks. Secrecy. Mermaids, werewolves, gender.

The reactions we may have to the truth of things, to someone’s most honest face, to facts that run counter to our expectations and preconceptions. Confessions. Metaphors. Transformation. So, it’s very relevant. Not just a random breakfast conversation. Don’t leave out anything relevant, no matter how mundane it might feel.”

My ghost story is filled with significant moments that I would only become aware were significant moments in hindsight. Perhaps this is always the way of it. I can’t say, because I’ve only ever lived my one haunting. I have a single data point. Still, I would stress mine’s not a simple haunting, obviously. The sort you usually read about or hear around a campfire. I didn’t merely feel a sudden and inexplicable chill in a dark room. I didn’t wake to the sound of rattling chains or moaning. I was not shocked at an ectoplasmic woman drifting down a corridor. Those are only cartoons, caricatures of phantoms, invented by people who’ve never suffered (or been graced by) an actual, true, factual haunting. Of that I’m very certain.

she told me about l’Inconnue de la Seine. “The dummy had a very distinctive face, didn’t it?” she asked me, and I had to think about the question for a moment. “Not just any old generic face,” Caroline added. “Not like a face someone made up, but a face that must have been the face of a real human being.” In hindsight, I realized that she was right, and I told her so. “Well, that’s because it wasn’t a made-up face,” she said. And then she told me the story of a drowned girl who’d been found floating in the river Seine in the 1880s or 1890s. The body was discovered near the quai du Louvre, and taken to the Paris Morgue.

could never stand to be a writer. Not a real writer. It’s entirely too awful, having thoughts that refuse to become sentences.

“Nothing is ever straightforward,” Imp typed, “though we lose a lot of the truth by pretending it’s so.”

Katharine Hepburn said something like, “Do what interests you, and at least one person is happy.”

A story is, by necessity, a sort of necessary fiction, right? If it’s meant to be a true story, then it becomes a synoptic history.

history is a slave to reductionism.

the Sea of Trees is also known as the Suicide Forest. People go there to kill themselves. Lots of people. I have a February 7, 2003, article from the Japan Times (a Japanese newspaper published in English). It reports that in 2002 alone police recovered from Aokigahara the bodies of seventy-eight “apparent” suicides, and that they stopped another eighty-three people intent upon taking their lives who were found in the forest and placed in “protective custody.”

The woods are said to be haunted. That’s the important part. At least, to me that’s the important part. Importance is always conditional, relative, variable from person to person. But what’s more important (to me) than the tales of the yurei is the fact that all this trouble in the Sea of Trees didn’t begin until Seichoˉ Matsumoto, a Japanese detective and mystery writer, published a novel, Kuroi Jukai (The Black Forest, 1960). In Matsumoto’s book, two lovers choose Aokigahara as the most appropriate place to commit suicide. And people read the book. And people began going to the forest to kill themselves.

The forest became a siren. Matsumoto wrote his book, and when he did that, Aokigahara on the shores of Lake Sai became the Suicide Forest. Matsumoto sounded the first note in a song that is still singing out to people, still drawing broken, hurting people to take their own lives in that Sea of Trees. And the world is filled with sirens. There’s always a siren, singing you to shipwreck.

She grasped the nuances and attended to my most minute longings. I would say she played me like a musical instrument, but she probably played me more like a video game. My clit and labia, my mouth and nipples, my mind and my ass, the nape of my neck, the space between my shoulder blades, all 1.5 square meters of my skin—perhaps, had I asked, she might have said my body was the controller with which she manipulated the game of my flesh.

“I suppose, before Eva, and before Eva, I never had anything more than the usual number of nightmares. It was infrequent that I remembered my dreams, before Eva.” And also, “…Eva Canning changed all that. She brought me bad dreams. She taught me insomnia.”

She taps her cigarette against the rim of the ashtray and stares at the painting of the mermaid and the lighthouse, and I have the distinct feeling that she’s drawing some sort of courage from it, the requisite courage needed to break a promise she’s kept for seventy years. A promise she made three decades before my own birth. And I know now how to sum up the smell of her apartment. It smells like time.

“She was drowned?” I ask. “Maybe. Maybe she drowned first. But she was bitten in half. There was nothing much left of her below the rib cage. Just bone and meat and a big hollowed-out place where all her organs had been, her stomach and lungs and everything. Still, there was no blood anywhere. It was like she’d never had a single drop of blood in her. He told me, ‘I never saw anything else even half that horrible.’ And, you know, that wasn’t so long after he’d come back to the States from the war in Spain, fighting against the fascists, the Francoists. He was at the Siege of Madrid, and saw awful, awful things there. He said to me, ‘I saw atrocities, but this was worse.…’”

I have the peculiar, disquieting sensation that, somehow, she passed the weight of that seventy-year-old secret on to me, and I think even if the article sells (and now I don’t doubt that it will) and a million people read it, a hundred million people, the weight will not be diminished.

This is what it’s like to be haunted, I think, and then I try to dismiss the thought as melodramatic, or absurd, or childish. But her jade-and-surf-green eyes, the mermaids’ eyes, are there to assure me otherwise.

I laugh as much as I can. I laugh to keep the wolves at bay.”

The stuff that happens to you makes you who you are, for better or worse.

“I’ve always been a woman, Imp. The hormones and surgery, they didn’t change me from one thing to another. That’s why I hate the phrase ‘sex change.’ It’s misleading. No one ever changed my sex. They just brought my flesh more in line with my mind. With my gender. Also, not so sure there really was a choice. I don’t think I’d be alive if I hadn’t done it. If I couldn’t have done it.”

I’ve been thinking about what I wrote earlier regarding the word thing, and how a thing imperfectly defined, only half-glimpsed, has the potential to be so much more fearful than dangers seen with perfect clarity.

It isn’t the known we fear most. The known, no matter how horrible or perilous to life and limb, is something we can wrap our brains around. We can always respond to the known. We can draw plans against it. We can learn its weaknesses and defeat it. We can recover from its assaults. So simple a thing as a bullet might suffice. But the unknown, it slips through our fingers, as insubstantial as fog.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”

One article from the Monterey County Herald and another from the San Francisco Chronicle, a few others, all from April 1991. They connect a woman named Eva Canning to a woman named Jacova Angevine. In one of the articles there’s a photograph of Eva standing beside Jacova Angevine, who was the leader of a cult, a cult that ended in a mass drowning, a mass suicide in the spring of 1991.

Phillip George Saltonstall hadn’t meant to perpetuate a haunting when he painted that picture, and neither had Seichoˉ Matsumoto when he published Kuroi Jukai and changed a forest into a place where people went to die.

Eva taught me the unknown is immune to the faculties of human reason, that something hungry below the water that you can’t see is scarier than a hungry twenty-foot-long shark. Because the unknown is even scarier than a truth so appalling that it breaks your whole wide world apart.

Asking my appalling question out loud doesn’t bring any sort of resolution. I know less than I ever thought I knew. That’s all being able to ask the question means. Except it also means that I can’t stop here.

I am a dead woman. Dead and insane.