Laird Barron’s weird short story “Occultation” is a dark, humorous, and jarring work that viscerally demonstrates a woman attempting to mentally process the unknown. Occurring over a tequila-and-pills-rife late night in a roadside hotel room somewhere in the desert, a woman experiences a sequence of fears, each obscuring the last with its weight. This sequence calls back to the piece’s title, “Occultation,” a delightful and underutilized term.
occultation
noun oc·cul·ta·tion ˌä-(ˌ)kəl-ˈtā-shən
1 : the state of being hidden from view or lost to notice
2: the interruption of the light from a celestial body or of the signals from a spacecraft by the intervention of a celestial body, especially : an eclipse of a star or planet by the moon
First, the woman and her male companion play a game they call “Something Scary,” after which she becomes obsessed with a mark on the wall she’s convinced wasn’t there before. A ghost, or something occult, has created it. Just a little deeper into the piece, we’re told about her complicated relationship with fear.
She enjoyed being frightened, savored the visceral thrill of modulated terror, thus Something Scary, and thus the What If Game (What if a carload of rednecks started following us on a lonely road? What if somebody was sneaking around the house at night? What if I got pregnant?), and thus her compulsion to build the shadow, the discolored blotch of wallpaper, into something sinister.
As the story continues, the reader’s trust in her enjoyment of being frightened starts to feel tenuous. There’s a long discussion of a huge spider emerging from the toilet paper holder and running down the sink. The potential for desert cannibals. An abandoned atomic testing range nearby. Howling coyotes punctuate their discussion.
Finally, she goes out for more cigarettes, to calm herself, one assumes, and outside encounters some type of cosmic tortoise, which appears to be consuming stars “like peanuts” as she watches it through the length of three full cigarettes. When she returns to the room, the man tells her that a talking worm has crawled up his butt, which terrifies her to tears before she realizes he’s joking. The shadow on the wall, however, has disappeared. Late in the night, she awakens hearing noises, and in the final line of the piece, we learn about a real bump-in-the-night element that ought to scare her (and the reader) more realistically.
But by the time we reach this ending, we (the reader and the woman) are basically wrecked. Especially her, with all the tequila and pills. The portrayal of the cosmically horrifying tortoise was so much of a mental imagery investment that the possibly real threat concluding the piece feels like it either doesn’t matter anymore or is totally imagined.
We’re left with an uncomfortable choice: which, if any, of the scary elements of this story can be believed? Personally, I don’t want to give up on the cosmic tortoise, and I trust that once you read that section, you won’t either. So we end on ambiguity and obscurity, on one type of fear being blocked by another—occulted—in the desert night.