Oh, speaking of Constance, she came down about five this afternoon, looking refreshed from her nap, and offered to fix dinner for the both of us. I never turn down a home-cooked meal, so long as someone else is doing the cooking. She scrounged about in the kitchen and somehow came up with the ingredients for a couple of cheddar-cheese omelets, with French fries on the side (I had a pack of Ore-Ida frozen shoestrings). While we were eating, she asked about the manuscript pages scattered all over the floor, and I told her about the “altar” at the base of the tree. I said that I wanted to make a second trip out to the tree, as I didn’t recall seeing the groove and spout mentioned by Harvey, and she asked if I’d mind if she went along. Like I was going to say no, right? So, it’s a date. We’re planning to pack lunch and have a proper picnic on the stone, dubious past or no, bloodthirsty demons or what have you. Okay, so maybe it’s nota date, strictly speaking, but at least it’s not me sitting here on my ass, smoking too much and drinking lousy beer, moping about the novel that I’m not getting written while I obsess over Dr. Harvey’s manuscript.

The best-laid plans of mice and men and bored writers, as they say. Or as they oughtto say. The heat was exceptional today, the sun like a searing hole punched into the sky leading straight up to Hell. By one this afternoon, the mercury had reached 93F, and Constance and I decided to put our plans for a picnic at the red tree off until another, cooler day. The meteorologists (whom I’ve noticed are even less reliable here than back in Atlanta) are promising cooler weather soon. I suppose the proximity to the sea complicates matters, adding a greater degree of uncertainty into that already dubious undertaking of predicting the future course of cold fronts, high- and low-pressure centers, the whims of the polar jet stream. But, the long and short of it, the day was dangerously hot, and, in lieu of our picnic, Constance invited me up into her garret to partake of the air-conditioning. The little window unit was hardly able to keep up, what with the hot air rising from below and the sun blasting down on the roof, but the attic was still a far sight better than being downstairs.

Earlier in the day, before the heat got so bad, I’d gone with her up to Foster, to return the rented PT Cruiser. On the way home, she talked, mostly, and mostly she talked about growing up around here. There were questions I’d wanted to ask, about her painting and California, and about what taking classes from Charles Harvey had been like, but I’d kept them to myself. Then, up in the attic, I saw that she hasn’t yet begun painting, which I suppose is hardly surprising. She hasbegun stretching two canvases (the stretcher bars were Brazilian white pine, she informed me), and the place already smells like oil paints and linseed oil and gesso. She sat on her air mattress, me in a metal folding chair, and we smoked and drank Narragansett and listened to the window unit chug and wheeze and try to keep up with the heat. She has a little portable stereo, and something by Lisa Gerrard was playing on repeat. I can’t now recall everything we talked about, and I won’t try. The stuff two people from different parts of the country talk about. The things two artists working in completely different media talk about. But, there was one thing I wanted to get down here, and as I prepare to do so, I realize that I have developed a certain relationship with this typewriter and the journal I’m using it to keep (instead of writing my novel) — it would appear that I have taken it into my confidence, and I’m going to have to stop leaving these pages lying about where Constance could easily come across them and be tempted to read things I would really rather she didn’t.

“You asked if I believed in ghosts,” she said, and I think maybe we’d been talking about Henry James, for whatever reason, and so it didn’t seem strange to me that she had returned to the unanswered question.

“And you said it was complicated,” I replied, and sipped at my beer.

“I wasn’t trying to be coy. It iscomplicated. The answer, I mean. But, if you’re still interested, I’ll try to explain.”

“I’m still interested,” I said, not adding that I strongly suspected she wasbeing coy. “If you want to tell me, sure, I’m interested.”

“Well, I don’tbelieve in ghosts,” she continued, wiping beads of condensation off her own bottle with a corner of the sheet. “At least, not in any traditional sense. I don’t believe in the soul, or that the mind is capable of surviving death, so a logical consequence is that I can hardly believe in restless spirits and the like. See what I’m saying?” and she scooted a few inches across the air mattress and a little closer to my chair.

“Sure,” I said. “It sounds like maybe it’s not so different from my own reasons. The physicalist approach to monism and the so-called mind-body problem. Thought is merely a function of the brain—”

“—no soul,” she said, cutting in, and I think that, in retrospect, I’m a little embarrassed at how I was trying to wow her with my knowledge of things that I really know very little about (I’m not much better with psychology than I am the weather). Constance tapped at her head with an index finger. “Just my brain, and my mind exists no more independently of my brain than my chewing exists independently of my teeth. Thought, mind, whatever. it’s just what the brain does. The dichotomy between that which we call mental, or spiritual, and those things we call physical, is merely an illusion. It’s allphysical.”

“No arguments here,” I told her, hoping that the conversation was not about to step off into some hard-core philosophical waters much too deep for me to follow. I’d already pretty much used up my bag of jargon with physicalism, monism,and the mind-body problem.

“No soul,” she said. “No spirit, so no ghosts, right? The brain dies and rots, taking its functions, including mind, with it. So, no ghosts.”

“Bingo,” I said, and she laughed.

“ Except—and I know how freaky this is going to sound, so bear with me — maybe there’s a sort of cosmic escape clause that allows for the existence of the set of phenomena that people tend to call ghosts and hauntings. And it’s not that ghosts don’t exist, it’s just that most people are mistaken about what they are, or aren’t.”

I think I blinked and let the metal folding chair rock back on two legs. “Okay, now you’ve lost me,” I admitted, and she laughed again.

“Oh, Sarah, you’re plenty smart enough to keep up,” she said. “Just give me a second. See, maybe it’s not about souls or spirits at all. Maybe it’s actually something that has a lot more to do with physics and how the universe operates. We know that matter distorts space and time, right? Well, what if there are other ways that space and time can be distorted by matter, perhaps not only by the gravity generated by an object’s mass, but by the behavior or experiences or. ” and here she paused, searching for some word.

“It’s an old idea,” I said, letting the chair bump back down to the attic floor. “Events so traumatic that they warp time and space and create what parapsychologists and other crackpots call residual hauntings, I believe. Nonconscious hauntings that work sort of like a loop of videotape.”

I realized that Constance had stopped smiling, and now she was just sitting there, staring at the walls.

“Crackpots,” she said, and took a drink of beer.

I sighed and fought the sudden urge to punch myself in the mouth. “I’m sorry I interrupted you,” I said, instead, but she just shrugged and leaned over the side of the air mattress, setting her bottle on the floor.

“You saidthat you were still interested, or I never would have started in on this. I knowhow it sounds.”