Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Also by Andrée A. Michaud

  (in translation)

  Back Roads

  Boundary (The Last Summer)

  The River of Dead Trees

  Copyright © 2006 Éditions Québec Amérique, Inc., et Andrée A. Michaud, 2006

  English translation copyright © 2021 by J. C. Sutcliffe

  First published as Mirror Lake in 2006 by Éditions Québec Amérique

  First published in English in 2021 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to students and readers with print disabilities.

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  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Mirror Lake / Andrée A. Michaud ; translated by J.C. Sutcliffe.

  Other titles: Mirror Lake. English

  Names: Michaud, Andrée A., 1957– author. | Sutcliffe, J.C., translator.

  Description: Translation of: Mirror Lake.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200368761 | Canadiana (ebook) 2020036877X | ISBN 9781487005832 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487005849 (EPUB)

  | ISBN 9781487005856 (Kindle)

  Classification: LCC PS8576.I217 M5713 2021 | DDC C843/.54—dc23

  Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

  House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Action Plan for Official Languages — 2018–2023: Investing in Our Future, for our translation activities.

  For Pierre, who entrusted me with his lake.

  While men believe in the infinite,

  some ponds will be thought to be bottomless.

  — Henry David Thoreau,

  Walden; or, Life in the Woods

  Mirror Lake’s opaque surface conceals hollows that some people say are bottomless, though I believe I have sounded its depths. The lake’s name is derived from the smoothness and serenity of its waters and the way they reflect the surrounding mountain peaks. In certain silent moments, their motionless mass makes the blackness of the water cleaving beneath the hull almost frightening, shot through with iridescence that comes not from the colours of the sky but from the deepest of chasms into which the victims of Mirror Lake have fallen, innocent people whose boat capsized one day. Nobody knows why they never reappeared, nor into what fascinating landscapes their bodies sank. But these are not the true motives that compelled men to give this lake the only name that suited it, so long ago that their testimony is lost in the rumours of unwritten history. After walking its shores on a thousand occasions, I have learned Mirror Lake is so called because gazing into its treacherous waters forces you to look yourself straight in the eyes and ask who you are and who you could have been, even as the image blurs and you conclude there is no answer to these questions.

  After spending many years in the mountains’ shadow, I have stopped asking myself who was that weary man whose mirror image followed me, step for step, along the beach. I would have liked, though, when the voices of the past quietened down inside me, to get to know this reflected figure that looked like me, and to discover what fate drew me to Mirror Lake, to this place where, in the wake of all those innocent boaters, I would lose myself in the lake’s darkness. No question, I would have tried to carve out a path to the light through the hot sand, had Mirror Lake not led me to understand that all attempts we make to thwart fate are as futile as the distraught buzzing of the fly that has fallen into a honey jar; if experience had not shown me how fate’s determinations have no equal but death’s velocity.

  Before settling by Mirror Lake, I believed, naively, that fate could be summarized as the squeal of tires on the wet road, or the spurts of blood an engine malfunction might cause to spatter onto dirty walls as machines roared. I had filed it under the category of time’s indiscriminate acts, the sort of catastrophe that renders men silent at the village bar as news of the inexplicable drama starts to make its way from table to table. I didn’t believe it could be organized or have a precise plan. In truth, I never realized that fate might take control of the way a life unfolded and determine its path — not even when the accumulation of chance events was such that I needed to find another name for this mechanism that was producing order out of chaos. And I did not suspect that the forces of destiny had been set in motion the day I arrived at Mirror Lake.

  Somewhere on the other side of the lake, a set of bells gently chimed its bittersweet melody, a loon began its lament, an oar sliced through the water’s clear surface with a shushing sound that evoked the indifference of slowness, and voilà, the dice was thrown, a domino had been positioned, the first in a series that, due to a clumsy movement, would then topple over one by one. And yet, I existed in a cloud of unknowing and thought myself free. The hallucinatory chiming had already bewitched me, as those pieces of music I think of as mad always do, the endlessly repeated monotonous motifs of their melancholy refrains causing the wounds of some incurable and distant ennui to start vibrating in me. Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Ry Cooder’s Paris, Texas, or Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies; just about any one of Thomas Newman’s less immortal compositions, and that Arvo Pärt piece, Für Alina, which just that morning had slipped into the soft pealing of the chimes, a word I prefer to bells first of all because of its sonority and then for the mystery it harbours, its quasi-homonymity with the word charms, in which the evil powers of seduction are contained.

  I’d discovered Für Alina not long before I made the move to Mirror Lake, in a Gus Van Sant movie that was just as hallucinatory as the music. Two men are walking in a desert and doing nothing else — just walking in Alina’s exhausted sorrow. For days, I too had been walking in a desert, followed by the spare piano notes of Alina and the feeling that I would never again find the way out of the sand path warming my bare feet. And then a piece of music from another movie broke the spell, permitting me a measure of respite from Alina’s pain.

  This is the way my life has always proceeded, drifting from images to melodies, as music does nothing for me without the scenes I end up believing belong to it. So all I know about music is what I’ve learned from dreams and movies, watching other people’s stories in an attempt to forget my own before falling asleep, back when cathode rays were a part of my daily life. I would get undressed, sit with Jeff in the living room in the light of the television, a beer or a bourbon in hand, and let myself be told any story, whether about star wars or Vietnam, Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, the erotic or pornographic adventures of some girl whose life is determined by her cup size — anything for me to be able to forget that what was happening outside my window simply reflected the boringness of my existence.

  The day I heard the chimes evoking Arvo Pärt for me in the discombobulating tranquility of Mirror Lake, I believed, at last, that reality was taking on the reassuring colours of fiction and gave in to the music’s madness. Something that couldn’t have happened anywhere else, this beguiling could only have taken place in the lost little corner of Maine I’d chosen for its complete isolation. And when I say �
��lost,” I don’t just mean far away from everything, because that’s true of many parts of this state. All you have to do is follow a path through the woods and you’ll stumble on some descendant of Daniel Boone completely unaware the world is at least meant to have moved on since the invention of gunpowder and who doesn’t care anyway, who still hunts martens and beavers even as he curses the dull-witted animals without ever wondering which of them is encroaching on the other’s territory, or who is dumber, him or the animal. No, when I say “lost,” I am thinking more along the lines of being a lost soul, someone in perdition. I see a boat run aground on a stormy cape.

  That day I sat on the north shore listening to the music of the chimes as the twilight colouring the other side of the lake in heartbreaking hues of pink. That’s if you still have a heart to be broken; if life hasn’t erased your ability to marvel at the ephemeral despite the searing pain it engenders in you every time, the sorrow you feel in the face of life’s tenderness passing so quickly, so fast that you cannot but be reminded of your own passing too, and that, all things considered, your heart isn’t what it once was. I suppose one of my reasons for choosing to live on the north shore of the lake was for Jeff and me to be the only ones with a direct view of the sunset, which meant that I wouldn’t be likely when, like an insomniac or a warmed-over corpse, I stepped out onto my porch come breakfast time with a sandpaper mouth, to be whipped right in the face by the cheerful “good mornings” of neighbours completely oblivious to my misanthropic matinal nausea. On this shore, I would only have myself to hate, and would only despair of humankind at moments when I saw my own reflection in the clear water lapping at the end of the dock.

  So, driven by the utterly puerile fantasy that rest was something that might even be possible, and by the urge to get away from people — and the image of myself they reflected back at me — at all costs, I’d hit the road one morning in my old Volvo 2000, windows down and hair blowing in the wind and as free as the hero of a road movie from that golden age before cinema moved on from citizens of no country to psychopaths and lunatics. And, in order to soften the feeling of devastation gnawing at that part of my soul less and less affected by the beauty of a sunset, I needed to go where no one could follow me, where I myself would become a beast in total harmony with the cruelty of my hunger. But, unfortunately, Mirror Lake was not so remote. Rather than providing me with the serenity of soul and mind that in truth exists only in the innocence of hope, it decided instead to gradually reveal my stupidity to me, and though I still believe there are men capable of living in a place without destroying it, I’m not sure this can be said of paradise. Man is heaven’s bastard; I have never felt that more strongly than at Mirror Lake, where all my attempts to turn its Eden into a habitable place and recover what I like to think of as “original purity” turned into catastrophe.

  Today, all that remains to reconcile me with a certain vision of eternity are the stars, illusions among illusions. When thoughts of my own past grow too heavy, I turn toward that of the universe. I go sit on the porch or the dock and gaze at the light of dead stars, propelled from the abyss of an age compared to which we are nothing, no more than an echo on the shore, a tiny piece of chickadee or sparrow shit. That’s when eternity starts spinning, catching me in its whirlpool and dragging me into a vertigo where everything becomes a spiral. The lake, the trees, time, even life, launch with suspect enthusiasm into death’s gaping maw — where everything repeats, where everything becomes spiral. And then, depending on whether my day has been good or bad, this idea that eternity will only ever be a starting over of the same things calms me slightly, allowing me to put the price of life in perspective and stop my hands trembling. Alternately, it plunges me into dark thoughts banishing all possibility of redemption for the simple reason that when life finally manages to bite its own tail, it strangles itself with ferocious irony. When I’m having one of the bad days, I wonder why I came here when it would have been so easy to stay in Quebec on a snowy plot of land with enough clandestine corners to shelter a fleeing man, enough stars to pre-empt the very idea of escape.

  I have no clear answer to that question. I suppose I needed to put the name of a country between me and my past and take refuge under the stars of a flag to which I owe no allegiance. And, given its geographical location, Maine was the ideal place: an elsewhere in which I wouldn’t have to experience the confusion an exile typically feels. With its smugglers’ routes, its diners popping up in the middle of nowhere, its roads bordered with shadows and ravines, Maine had always struck me as the very incarnation of mystery, circumscribed by a winding line of a border that follows that divide in the middle of the water where rivers flowing to the Atlantic turn their back on others depositing their rocks along the Saint Lawrence, and beyond which, in my perception of place clouded by spending too much time in movie theatres, everything differs, even the trees, even the forests. I had needed that — to set off along roads where the slightest of things indicated to me I’d arrived in a foreign territory, at a place where even the trees and forests speak a different language.

  I found names like Bangor, Penobscot, and Chesuncook spiritually impenetrable, ones people like me could not inhabit, and even if time has diminished that impression, Maine still strikes me as a land filled with secrets. It is not so much an extension of Quebec as its dark side, on whose humid slopes the slightest misstep can prove fatal. And yet, for the broken man I was and still am, the spectre of an endless fall holds both a morbid appeal and a feeling of salvation, and I like to abandon myself to the prospect when reality renders my life too stable, as is the case this evening when the dead stars shine and Victor Morgan, Bob Winslow, Jack Picard, Tim Robbins, Anita Swanson, and John Doe, alias Doolittle, appear on the opaque surface of the lake.

  We weren’t so many when I first arrived. Jeff and the birds aside, just one man, one, whose cottage is opposite mine, sometimes churned up the lake’s mirrored surface. The cottage remains, but not long ago the man who lived there left Mirror Lake, leaving me alone beneath the black sky, hands trembling from the sudden chill solitude brought on.

  I.

  New Departure

  But what then pushes the present

  To flow toward the future

  (unless it’s actually the future flowing toward us)?

  — Étienne Klein,

  Chronos: How Time Shapes Our Universe

  I arrived at Mirror Lake in the middle of May, not long after the swallows and the lilacs, at that time of year when garden gnomes, peeing angels and half-naked teenagers reappear in the suburbs. All the usual horrors and temptations, the sight of which I’d no longer have to abide in the paradise awaiting me.

  I’d driven a good two hundred and fifty miles, my windows rolled down. Eyes dazzled by the brightness of the still-young leaves, face screwed up against the freshness of the wind and the persistent smell of earth rising up through the damp undergrowth, I belted out my favourite music, from Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side” to songs from Lucinda Williams’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road via the great Jacques Brel, Johnny Cash, and Robert Charlebois. I could not have chosen a better moment to begin this new stage of my existence, which I felt would be nothing less than a resurrection after the ordeal of the preceding few years spent among those I suppose I must call “people like me.” I’d reached the point where I was so devastated by human company that I almost envied the fate of Gregor Samsa — that unfortunate whom Franz Kafka turned into a beetle, or was it some other repulsive insect, without bothering to ask how he felt about it. But at Mirror Lake I would have no need to metamorphose into a bug in order to feel alive again and I would finally be able to rest, far from the noise and agitation of a time when I felt as if I was permanently holding my breath.

  As soon as I got out of the car, I was able to breathe again and knew I was finally home, a word that had until then denoted a dream I figured I’d never be able to attain, and now here was the dream taking shape a
t the edge of a lake that had been calmly waiting for me ever since streams had dug their furrows through the mountains in order to flow out here. “We’re home, Jeff,” I said, a murmur intended for the big yellow dog who understood right away that we’d arrived at our destination. That we’d found our place in this absurd world, he and I. Jeff was racing around in circles, excited by the luxurious new smells and the bitter perfume of the soaked earth, rushing first to lap water from the lake, then coming to thank me by knocking his big head against my thighs, before turning away and sticking his snout into a bush or a pile of rotting leaves.

  I was finally home, and I was finally free, another word I’d never believed I’d hear without immediately thinking of it as a pure abstraction. Free, free, free, replied the mountains to the shout that spontaneously rose up from my stomach, before I started humming Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the tune coming to my lips reflexively, just like all real things: I’m cold, I’m hungry, I’m in pain. How many years can some people exist, before they’re allowed to be free? I twanged, reflecting on just how many years it had taken me to understand that real freedom is the result of a man being true to who he is, and then I wondered if I’d live long enough to forgive myself for having been so stupid. The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind, Dylan answered. At which point the wind grew stronger, making waves in the lake and clinking the chimes hanging on the porch of the cottage opposite. A loon launched into what sounded like a yodel, its lament followed by a long ululating cry — tourloulou, tourloulou is how I’ve read it transcribed — and then I closed my eyes and wiped away a tear that had managed to break through the barriers I’d long ago erected against the possibility of crying. The soft music of Für Alina travelled out over the lake, so beautiful it made me want to howl in turn, a declaration that my desert wanderings had ended.