by Jay Hosking
I squeeze the grass gently in my hands and stand up.
Buddy climbs down the front of my coat and drops to the ground. Without his tapping, I had forgotten he was on my shoulder. He scurries so fast that I lose him immediately with the light. I take a few steps to follow him and tall trunks of trees appear in the beam of the flashlight. Dead branches and leaves make a crisp sound under my feet.
This is a forest. My knowledge of natural things is terrible but I can tell it’s nothing like the temperate rainforest I saw near Vancouver. I imagine most of these trees have names like oak or birch. Very little grows along the forest floor and so it’s open enough to walk.
Wherever I am, this place has rules I recognize. It is night. There are trees and stars and earth and air. The ground below the trees has a steady incline in one direction and a steady decline in the other. I may be lost but these rules are consistent with my reality. That suggests there is a way out.
“Buddy?” I call. My voice doesn’t carry in these woods. I whistle. I make kissing sounds. I have no idea how to summon a rat.
He hasn’t gone far. The arc of my flashlight eventually lands on two reflective green beads on the forest floor. It’s amazing how a black and white animal can be so camouflaged on a green and brown surface. I bend forward to pick him up but he runs out of my reach. I take a step toward him and he runs ahead again. We repeat this process a few times more before I recognize the pattern.
I am being led.
“Point taken,” I tell him. “Let’s go.”
The decline is subtle but in my legs I can feel us gradually moving downhill. I walk slowly and with an arm outstretched to avoid branches and tree trunks. Buddy stays always a few feet in front of me, his short legs busy, his fleshy tail trailing behind him. John once told me that in the wild, rats can run for kilometres a night.
And this is wild. The number of trees is uncountable. There is no sign of human life. This place is unspoilt.
Buddy leads for so long that the scene begins to change. A deep green appears in the sky and soon running water is trickling nearby. There is nothing to precisely measure time but I imagine we’ve been stumbling through these woods for an hour or so. I’m beginning to grow accustomed to my surroundings, less fearful of them.
And then branches and leaves snap behind us. I freeze and listen. The water is closer now but that is all I can hear. Buddy has wandered almost out of sight. Then I hear it again, something at least as big as a man, but strong, forcefully making its own path through the woods. It’s coming from the direction in which we started. It is the sound of something following us. The hunter.
“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” I say to Buddy.
Faster than before we make our way through the forest. Now I can hear water on either side of me and it drowns out any noise of our pursuit. The sky is changing from a green to a greyish blue. The air is dewy. Buddy dips under fallen branches, around mounds of earth, between old and dying trunks. Day is almost here and I turn off my flashlight to save batteries.
We race through the woods, down the slope of the hill, until I can see nothing in the distance. The trees seem to be swallowed up by an impenetrable white background. Buddy rushes ahead. I trust him. I follow.
The dense white gets closer and closer, the trees end, and my feet lose their traction. I slide but don’t fall. The ground is now stones, slippery and small. The sound of water is everywhere but the white presses in and makes it impossible to see more than an arm’s length away.
Fog. A morning fog, billowing off a body of water. A few more cautious steps and waves are lapping at my feet. I crouch and can see water rolling over the stone shore. I dip my fingers in and then taste them. Not salty. Buddy stands next to me with his paws in the water.
Behind us, the hunter is snapping branches with its feet, nearing the edge of the forest, about to break onto the shore.
Buddy looks back toward the trees. He sniffs and his whiskers dance in the air. He doesn’t give me a glance or warning, simply bolts back toward the woods like a soldier heading to battle.
I hold my breath. I wait. I want to run but I can’t leave him behind. The forest is now silent.
Then for a moment it is blinding white. The sun has risen above the forest and fog. Still I crouch and listen but there’s no longer anything except the gentle sloshing of freshwater onto the shore. The fog dissipates until I can see ten, then twenty feet around me. There’s still no sign of Buddy. Nor of the hunter.
Near me is a wooden pole plunged vertically into the ground, and tied around, hanging from it, it is a heavy rope. This is the first thing I’ve seen resembling human activity.
I can see now that this body of water is very large, certainly not a pond or even a small lake. The narrow shoreline goes off straight in both directions to where the fog crawls into the trees and back out across the surface of the water. The sun is to my left, making the lake to the south.
Out on the lake, there is a repetitive, gentle splash against the water. Ripples spread out across the surface and something dark emerges from the fog. I see the front of a small wooden boat, then a paddle criss-crossing from one side to the other, then finally its pilot.
Officer 2510.
—
“Well, son of a bitch,” she says. She pulls the boat to shore and the bottom of it scratches against the stones. “You made it. Get in.”
“I need to find my rat,” I tell her, almost a whisper. “There’s something in the woods.”
“Can’t do anything about Buddy, for the moment.” Her hair is longer again, tied back, and her clothes are simple, dark, and fitted. “Got to trust me on this one. Now get in.”
I take one last look toward the fog around the tree trunks and push the boat back into the water. As it glides off the rocks, I hop in and nearly upset its balance. Officer 2510, or whatever her name is, uses her paddle to keep steady and turns us around. I sit in the front and face her as she propels us into the lake, back to wherever she came from.
“When did you last see me?” she asks.
I’ve heard this sort of question before. “About a month ago. November, 2008. How long has it been for you?”
“Definitely longer than that. You’re getting scrawny. But hard to say how long, exactly.” She dips the paddle into the dark water on one side, then the other. “Tricky question for creatures like me.”
“ ‘Creatures’? Not ‘people’?”
“Not as you know them, no.”
I consider that for a moment. “Where are we?”
Her eyes are grey stones and fixed on our path through the water. The fog is pulling farther back and it’s clear the lake is enormous. She says, “ ‘The place where the water meets the trees.’ ”
Somewhere deep in me I knew this already. “Toronto. This is the city, only there’s no city. Is this the past?”
She says, “Just another present.”
“And how many are there?”
“You can’t count that high.”
She paddles quietly for a few minutes. I look back to the shore and think of Buddy facing down the hunter, whatever it may be. I turn forward in the boat and look south. The last of the fog has cleared and the Toronto Islands are a few hundred metres in front of us. They’re covered in trees, same as my reality, but there are also small wooden buildings along the islands’ shore. There is no smoke or sign of human activity. It looks like a ghost town.
Officer 2510 steers us slightly to the east and asks, “Don’t you want to know about us?”
“I didn’t come here for you or your friends.”
“No need to be pissy.” She gives me a lopsided grin. “I get it. John and Grace. But don’t you remember what I told you?”
“I heard you just fine. This is a bad idea, I should quit, et cetera. But here I am.” I point to the simple settlement on the islands. “Now is that where John and Grace are?”
“No. We have a no trespassing rule, not that we get many visitors. You three exc
luded, we’ve had only a handful of trespassers to the facilities. And we’ve been coming here for a very long time.”
“If they’re not at your facilities, then why are you taking me there?”
“Who says I am?” Her shoulders and arms have a smooth, curving rhythm and her movements with the paddle are precise and elegant.
“No trespassing,” I say. “You realize there’s an irony to that, right? Who says we shouldn’t come to your version of Toronto and harass you?”
“My version.” She shakes her head, grins again. “We’re not from here any more than you are. Just one of our junctions, a place to build entrances, windows.”
Entrances. She’s talking about the dead end.
I ask, “Why?”
“Because we’re not shaped like you,” she tells me. “We’re not little skinny tubes of consciousness. Need to force part of ourselves into your shape before we go to your side, anybody’s side.”
“No, I mean why come to our side at all?”
“What do you mean?” For an instant she looks genuinely confused. “Because we can.”
I shake my head. “Not good enough. From the sounds of it, you’re capable of plenty of things. So why bother with us ‘skinny little tubes’? Why follow us around?”
Her strokes remain even, disciplined. “Why put rats in little boxes and make them work for sugar pellets? Why implant little pieces of plastic and metal in their bellies? Why bother finding empirical ways to answer your great philosophical questions?”
They are scientists. Physicists, biologists. Tinkerers. I say, “You’re no less foolish than Grace and John, then.”
“There are better and worse ways of doing science,” she says. “Ways of asking questions without compromising some other creature’s dignity. Ways of celebrating and respecting truth without exploiting every kernel of data. Even some of your scientists have a vague glimmer of that.”
“It still doesn’t explain why you’d play a gig with some band at the Fortress.”
Her steel eyes lock on me. “Your behaviours make a lot more sense when viewed from the ground level. Call it cultural immersion. Or, like some of my colleagues, call it a waste of time.”
So she is an anthropologist, too.
There is no wind and the water barely ripples under the boat. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen Lake Ontario so calm. Sure enough we are veering farther around the eastern edge of the islands. From here I can see that the buildings are very simple and without windows. There is no activity or signs of life. I look down the shore to the gap between the land and the islands. Officer 2510 speaks up from the rear of the boat.
“This all used to be a spit, a peninsula. Hundred years ago a big storm wiped out the sandbar between the mainland and the islands. Consider yourself lucky it didn’t happen only in your Toronto.” She stops paddling for a moment and takes in her scenery. Her features are soft and her expressions are hard. Even if she isn’t police, she looks like one. “Does it feel like the island’s farther from the mainland? Your Toronto laid down a bunch of landfill and made an artificial waterfront.”
“O.K.,” I say. “Enough. Where the hell are you taking me, officer?”
She smiles at the title and resumes her paddling. “Look, let’s just say I admire you. Doomed to fail, completely out of your element, and yet you just take it all in stride. No pretension, no illusion of control. You just persist.”
“I think you referred to me as ‘dopey’ before.”
She laughs quietly. “Now, I wouldn’t mind showing you a few things, stretching out your self-awareness into a more fitting shape. Maybe even blowing your mind a little.”
She might be flirting with me but I’m not sure what sort of desires a woman, creature, like her would have.
She says, “I’d be willing to show you around and have a little fun. This is not an insubstantial offer. But I’m guessing you’d say no. In fact I know what you say already.”
We’re both silent.
“So instead I’m getting you on your way to John and Grace,” she continues. “Way I see it, you’ve got two problems. First, John is fifty kilometres from here.”
It’s an easy guess. “Oshawa. The dead end.”
We reach the edge of the islands and begin rounding them, out into the expanse of Lake Ontario. At the easternmost tip of the last island is another large wooden pole sticking out of the rocks, and it too has a heavy rope tied around it. The rope leads to a second boat, identical to this one, that bobs in the water.
“You know what Oshawa means?” she asks. “It’s The Crossing Place in Ojibwa, those sly motherfuckers. Now it’s going to be a damn-near perfect day on the water but at your best you’ll paddle only five kilometres an hour. You’ll want to get there before the dark slows you down, on account of the second problem.”
“Wait,” I say. “What about Grace? Where is she?”
Officer 2510 makes a look of distaste. “Oh, the dead end is lousy with her. Not as bad as some of our other entrances, but still.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You will. But right now I don’t have time to explain. Like I said, the second problem.” She’s paddling the boat toward the makeshift dock. She looks at me hard and demands my attention. We’re coasting in the water now. “Second problem is you broke the rules. Our entrances are built with specific considerations in mind. Your little wood-and-mirrors-and-dirt trick, not so much. You forced your way through, caused a fracture, sloughed off some nasty shit. And you left your door open, which was practically an invitation for that nasty shit to follow you here.”
The hunter. “The thing in the woods. The thing that Buddy confronted.”
She nods. “Point is it won’t be more than a couple hours behind you. Now listen to me: if it catches you, it will undo you. And your last moments will be very, very unpleasant.”
The boat wobbles and scrapes onto the rocks. She climbs out onto the island’s shore and gestures for me to sit in the middle of the boat. She hands me her paddle and it’s much lighter than I expected, perhaps not made of wood at all. The handle is lined with cork and feels good in my grip. The end of the paddle has a T-shaped nub for my other hand. I squeeze the two grips and twist.
“Don’t do that,” she says. “Friction is bad. No matter what, you’re going to blister, but if you keep your hands dry and don’t grip too hard, you’ll bleed less.”
She leans forward and grabs me by one shoulder. Her hand is small but strong. “Last chance for you to come with me instead. Why follow through if you already know you won’t succeed?”
I take her hand in mine and lift it off my shoulder. It’s warmer and softer than I expected. I let it go. She gives me one last crooked smirk and pushes the boat out into the water.
I say, “The last time I saw Grace, she said you—all of you—had rejected her.”
“She gets exactly what she wants,” Officer 2510 says from the shore. “She gets her little solipsistic paradise, and she congests a bunch of our entrances in the process. In the end she regrets it all, comes to us all folded in over herself. She demands answers about everything but she’ll never be satisfied with the truth she gets.”
The distance between us is increasing so I have to raise my voice. “Why not?”
“Because it’s too much for her. Beyond her limited comprehension.” Officer 2510 steps back, out of reach of the small waves, and crosses her arms.
I remember the quote verbatim: I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world. Nicole was right.
“Goodbye, officer,” I shout. “Do you have a name?”
“Sure I do.” Her expression is inscrutable. She lifts an arm and claps the hand open and closed, an exaggerated gesture. “Bye, bye.”
With the paddle I take a few awkward stabs at the water. The boat spins and drifts. Thirty feet from the island’s shore, a horrible realization comes to me. I lay down the paddle
and turn toward Officer 2510. She is still standing where the water meets the trees and watching me float away.
I cup my hands to my mouth. “How do I get home? How do I return to my side?”
She doesn’t try to project her voice but the response is unmistakable.
“Oblivion,” she says.
THE CROSSING PLACE
THE INSTRUMENT IS UNFAMILIAR in my hands. For a long time my strokes are inefficient and consume all my concentration. My eyes are focused on the fin at the end of the paddle and on the black water into which I submerge it. I rarely see anything past the front of the boat. I try to cross sides with the paddle in a smooth motion and make my strokes even and perpendicular to the water. I try to keep the lower grip of the paddle dry and the upper T-bar cupped under the non-power hand. But no matter how hard I try, I can’t keep the goddamned boat moving in a straight line and my hands are damp within the hour. The boat traces an infinite Z-shaped path along the coast.
Soon the paddling motion becomes more natural and my attention expands beyond my immediate surroundings. Officer 2510 was right: it is as perfect a day on Lake Ontario as I have ever seen. There is almost no wind and the only ripples on the water come from my idiotic flailing with the paddle. Across the sky there are very few clouds and soon the sun beats down from high above. The air becomes heavy and limp. I strip down to my T-shirt and underwear, piling the rest of my clothes in the back of the boat. Even still I’m covered in sweat before the worst heat sets in. This is undoubtedly a day in late summer, not the December that I left behind.
My little boat never drifts more than a few hundred metres from shore. It’s probably reasonable to call this a canoe but I have no idea how to differentiate one from a kayak or any other kind of boat. Its skeleton is made of a wood so dark it looks burnt, with a coarse grain that runs along the long planks. The outer skin of the boat, the hull, is smoother but still unrecognizable. The shore of the lake, on the other hand, is perfectly recognizable apart from the massive trees that line it. I round the slow bends, stare into the deep woods, and I remember the train to the suburbs, the few brilliant bursts of the lake from the tracks.
