Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  If I hadn’t been afraid of shattering Jeff’s joy, I’d have melted. I’d have let Alina open up the floodgates and watched my tears drown in the lake after cutting a little channel through the sand, sufficiently sinuous to show they were serious. Not wanting to inflict upon Jeff the peculiar manifestation of my joy, I shrugged it off and cried, “Hurry up, Jeff!” But Jeff had no need of me telling him to get a move on and certainly wasn’t interested in helping me unload the car. Dutifully, he cocked an ear in my direction but then went back to staring at a frog that had probably never seen a dog in his life and was no doubt wondering if he shouldn’t maybe move to a swamp in South Carolina. I understood the frog’s train of thought, but wasn’t about to go back to town just to make him happy. To each his period of suffering. Discreetly, I advised him to push off: “You’d better scarper, frog,” I said, and headed over to the car.

  Since the cottage was furnished, I’d only brought essentials — a few boxes of books, clothes, food, a case of beer, and four bottles of bourbon to see me through the first month. The beer was part of my regular diet, the bourbon more about nostalgia. I’d been drinking it since my early twenties in memory of Ned Beaumont, one of the Dashiell Hammett heroes I’d discovered at the same time as I did the day-for-night technique in cinema. When I realized that a good half of Hammett’s private eyes drowned their sorrows in bourbon, it became my own melancholic habit, as I’d have liked to be one of those characters brooding over the world’s sorrows in dive bars in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, cities where day-for-night worlds had firmly established residence. I winked at Ned, who was never far away whenever the smell of alcohol hit my nostrils, and I carried the bag of bottles into the cottage with my battered old boiled-leather suitcase, belting out “Freedom” by Richie Havens so that the melancholy couldn’t get a hold. Since I didn’t know any of the words other than “freedom, freedom, freedom,” that heady chant of Woodstock and the lost youth to which I belonged at the time, I quickly became tired and moved on to Dylan, given that several of his songs were engraved on my memory like prayers, albeit imbued with a hint of regret for that time when I used to have faith.

  By the beginning of the evening, I’d almost finished settling in and went out onto the porch with a beer and a frozen pizza, traditional moving-day food, which Jeff had equal right to, as it was our party, the first day of our new life. On the other side of the lake, the chimes were still sounding, and the loon that had welcomed me was greeting the twilight accompanied by a robin warbling near the cottage. The sun was setting gently and the lake was taking on all the colours of the sunset: it was a perfect moment. I wanted to find the right words to describe its sweetness, to formulate some unforgettable phrase about the magnificence and glory of it all, but the only words that came to mind were incredibly simple. “Damn, it’s beautiful,” I murmured as I sank comfortably into my chair. I had nothing to add. Simple as that. It was beautiful, we were home. And then, along with the robin singing and the tinkling of the chimes, came the creaking sound of a rowboat being dragged along the sand, and I watched as my neighbour opposite climbed into it. A few seconds later, the ambient noise was compounded by the soothing sound of an oar slicing through the water as the little green rowboat moved slowly across the pink-dappled water. This idyllic image could have featured on a postcard, in a tourist guide, or in an old yellowing calendar, the kind you see pinned to the dirty wall of a gas station and which nobody has ever considered replacing even if it’s been hanging there since the Second World War or the giddy years afterwards, because time has no vintage and I don’t know what it is about immortal pictures but, like first loves, they never disappear. Moved by the purity of the tableau presenting itself to me, I repeated, “Damn, it’s beautiful,” as I took a slow glug of beer, letting the flavours soak into my palate, and then nearly choking on it when I realized that the tiny boat was heading straight toward us and that the man in it, wearing a cap the same shade of green as the boat, was raising his hand to us in greeting.

  “Baptême,” I muttered, catching my breath. That’s a swear word I only use in grave situations of imminent catastrophe, like when neighbours turn up. If I’d been as brutal as the world in which we live I’d have fetched a Kalashnikov and sorted it out then and there, but apart from the fact that I don’t own a gun, I don’t like blood in any form — blood sausage, a drop of blood pearling on the skin after an injection or a vampire bite, a dried scab in the middle of a knee, a little rivulet cooling as it trickles down a forehead. I hate it. I thought sneakily of strangulation, but by the time I had my hands on a piece of rope the attacker would have invaded my land and planted his flag, which he was going to do anyway, though I didn’t know that yet. “We’re done for,” I whispered in Jeff’s ear as a new creaking echoed off the mountains, a sign that the enemy had just touched land. But since Jeff was not only a pacifist dog but a pacifist dog who gets a bit silly after drinking, he raced off to the beach wagging his tail to welcome our visitor with great joyous barks. “Good dog,” said the idiot, manoeuvring out of his boat and panting like a dog. “Fuck,” the man added as he put his massive boot in the water, and we were off. The barbarian invasion had begun.

  A few moments later, the man who’d just soiled the virginity I’d been a bit too quick to assign to Mirror Lake ascended onto my porch without an invitation, moving with the joviality of a simple man who fails to see the world is a place of suffering and that he is one of the principal elements fanning the flames of this hell.

  “Hi, I’m your new neighbour,” he said cheerfully. As if I didn’t know. As if I hadn’t lived long enough to recognize the multiple faces calamity can wear. Then he corrected himself, saying that in fact he wasn’t the new neighbour, I was, which set him off on an endless narrative about anteriority and posteriority, and the chicken and the egg and the cock. The cock! — the piece of the anteriority–posteriority puzzle that is always forgotten — and then the jerk started rambling on about the importance of expressing oneself precisely, even quoting Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux and then spouting Wittgenstein’s “Everything that can be said can be said clearly.” All to point out that actually I was the one who was the new neighbour.

  In one way he was right, except if you think too much about what newness itself is, about newness’s essence, for he was just as new to me as I was to him. On the basis of that argument, you could deduce that there were two new neighbours around the lake, one who was there before and one who wasn’t; one who seemed happy to be new and one who would have preferred not to be anything at all, would have preferred to return to a larval state or the innocence of a sperm; one who, without warning, believes he has the right to launch into a discourse about logic and one who, all of a sudden, has a headache.

  He must have noticed that I didn’t really feel like chatting, because, trying to be friendly, he finished up with “Never mind, you’re here, I’m here,” though his words had the ring of an eternal condemnation. “Bob Winslow,” he added, holding out his hand.

  “Robert Moreau,” I replied reluctantly, putting my hand in his. If I’d had the requisite presence of mind, I’d have kept my hands in my pockets and told him my right hand had been amputated, that I had a contagious disease, or that I was Howard Hughes’s grandson and had inherited his germaphobia. But by the time the idea occurred to me, it was too late: Bob Winslow’s germs were frolicking all over my hand and even venturing up my forearm. Noticing my silence and the slight awkwardness that had settled over us, Bob Winslow followed up with a “hmm-hmm,” a sniff, and then a “So, do you like this place?”

  How can you answer such a question when the person asking it is none other than the sordid vandal, the profaner who has just destroyed your childish illusion that there are still a few havens of peace left on this overpopulated planet?

  “I liked it,” I replied somewhat dryly, and Winslow, who wasn’t as stupid as he looked and knew how verb tenses worked, understood that I wasn’t very sociable.
Nonetheless, he offered the greeting “Welcome to Mirror Lake, stranger,” and then an ingratiating, cheeky wink — I can’t think of any other way to describe it — before walking back to the lake hollering, “See you soon, raccoon,” the phrase confirming the death sentence he’d already pronounced. As he was getting back into his rowboat and Jeff was barking a joyful goodbye, the moron actually thought it would be a good idea to carry on the nursery rhyming by calling out, mockingly, “See you later, alligator.”

  See you later, alligator! All that was needed for a radiant smile to stretch across my tense face and light up this glorious evening. Then I realized that it was getting dark and I’d missed the apogee of my first sunset over Mirror Lake’s peaceful waters, which only made me hate Bob Winslow all the more. I remained outside admiring the stretch of dark, strangely luminescent blue sky still lingering behind the mountains that the night would rapidly consume. As Bob Winslow’s rowboat, a small black speck in the middle of the shadow, proceeded calmly over the oily surface of Mirror Lake, an “In a while, crocodile” emanated from it just as the little speck was eaten by the penumbra. Dile, dile, dile, repeated the mountains’ enchanting voice, echoing beneath my brilliant retort, “Don’t count on it, you piece of shit,” as well as various other spontaneous rhyming gems I’d have written down if I had a notebook. After which, what with Winslow having removed all possibility of my mood being anything other than murderous, I called Jeff back inside.

  It was during that first night that, to my great consternation, Humpty Dumpty appeared on Mirror Lake. When I was a child I’d suffered from Humpty Dumpty syndrome, a hitherto unknown neurosis and species of paranoia that was the cause of my having developed an extreme aversion to this character who struck me as the absolute archetype of stupidity. Back then I was certain that the expression bad egg was related to the depressing tale of the bad-tempered, suicidal egg, about whom my mother told me stories to help me get to sleep, not knowing that I wasn’t taking on the morals of Lewis Carroll’s story, or his poetry, but the boundless complacency of this big yellow splotch reeling off whatever nonsense to Alice. Then my aversion became an obsession and I started having nightmares, with Humpty Dumpty in a starring role, any time some new frustration came along to remind me that life wasn’t a beautiful meadow where beautiful girls kissed toads. The syndrome lasted for several years, and then Humpty Dumpty was shoved aside by Godzilla, Goldorak, and Frankenstein, whom I, just like everyone else, confused with his monster, after which my hauntings took on a more human form — in other words, moved closer to what we would think of as mere unhappiness.

  That night, though, a breach opened up in the muddy recesses of my subconscious where the monster lay crouching, and Humpty Dumpty regained his rightful place in the tormented landscape of my dreamworld but wearing the features of Bob Winslow, whose ovoid body lent itself perfectly to such a part. In my dream, he was sitting on Humpty Dumpty’s wall, beating his scrawny legs on it, pompously reciting the speech exactly as he’d delivered to me that evening — but for a few variations regarding the order of appearance and the degree of truth of its constituent elements. “The proposition is the expression of agreement and disagreement with the possibilities of realness of the elementary clauses,” he repeated as he scratched his stomach, so close to his forehead, as I, kneeling at the foot of the wall, prayed silently for Godzilla, foaming at the mouth, to appear behind him and squash the pompous scumbag with an irreversible swipe of his claws.

  I woke up sweating in the small hours of the night, just as the first rays of sun were filtering through the trees, and saw in the mirror the pale face of a man whose nightmares had just killed his last childish dreams. “Baptême,” I murmured, but the mountains didn’t respond, the mountains, like people pretending to be deaf, only answer to shouts, just. Endeavouring to prove that the speed of sound is slower than the speed of light, my reflection, trying to fix its hair, mouthed the word silently before muttering the word “Baptême” after me, and then it went out stage left while I headed to the bathroom, telling myself that, at the end of the day, a man’s freedom is only obtained at the cost of his total brainwashing. As for what was happening on the other side of the mirror, that I would find out later.

  Over the next few days, Jeff managed to play in relative peace, but I couldn’t, because Bob Winslow’s see you soon, raccoon, still lingered in my mind, along with his in a while, crocodile, dile, dile, echoing sinisterly in the ink black night that had left an indelible mark upon my arrival at Mirror Lake. Instead of enjoying the respite, I lived under the burden of imminent threat with my ears on high alert, monitoring Bob Winslow’s comings and goings and reacting to the slightest sound that just might have been the creaking of a rowboat being pushed across the sand. In my increasing craziness, I was starting to imagine the enemy would opt for a stealth attack — one step forward, two steps back — wearing me down and forcing me to capitulate.

  Three days passed, I relaxed my surveillance a little and decided to have a word with myself. “Sit down, I have to talk to you,” I told myself with a degree of weariness. I chose to go sit under the porch on the rock that had, I guessed from a quick glance, been sleeping for three or four hundred million years — since long before there even was a porch, a gravel road, an old garbage can, and other traces of the irredeemable human presence — unless it had been deposited there during the last glaciation. Since the latter hypothesis wasn’t getting me anywhere, and as a few thousand years are neither here nor there in geological terms, I decreed that it was four hundred million years old, doing my best not to think of the dizzying amount of memory recorded in the metamorphic or granitic matter of which it was composed. The rock looked like it would be comfortable, despite its appearance of hardness, which was perfect for what I needed to do. “Hi rock, hi stone,” I said in greeting, before sitting upon it and telling myself that I was an idiot, mentally ill, stupidly paranoid, that my fear of seeing Bob Winslow pop up again was unfounded and I was creating my own hell. If there were products for exterminating vermin, then one really ought to exist for destroying neighbours, and if it didn’t exist, then I needed to invent it and get rich.

  After twenty minutes of this therapeutic soliloquy, I felt somewhat better, but it didn’t stop me from glancing across to the other side of the lake just in case. As everything seemed quiet, I let myself slide down the length of the rock, pressing against it and, closing my eyes, noticing the play of sunlight through my eyelids, other suns, comets, galaxies, and yet more comets appearing, these about to land on the concealed face of my ocular globe as they sent their tails spinning. Just as I was starting to lower my guard, telling myself how stupid I was for not enjoying my new retirement, I heard Jeff bolt off, barking and snorting. Then a voice like Humpty Dumpty’s rose up from behind the four-hundred-million-year-old rock and whispered in my ear, “Getting a bit of shut-eye, stranger?”

  This phrase, spoken in a mildly sarcastic tone, could not have been better chosen, because it confirmed that all paranoia has a reason; you just have to close your eyes for thirty seconds and the object haunting you will take advantage of it to surreptitiously insinuate itself into your ear. I decided not to move, to play dead, because surely this was a nightmare. It couldn’t be anything else. It was a nightmare, a terrible nightmare starring Humpty Dumpty as himself, a segue into my dreaming that in fact turned out to be a waking nightmare on a loop, the sort of recurring reminiscence that can be attributed to the vague persistence of a phenomenon long after whatever might have caused it has disappeared. Still, I experienced a measure of doubt when Humpty Dumpty’s voice said “Ahem,” before sniffing and clearing its throat. Just to be sure, I cracked open an eyelid before immediately shutting it again. What had come in through the aperture was actually nightmarish, but also real. Not knowing what to do, I uttered the supposedly magic formula “Abracadabra,” and prayed to the Saint of Lost Objects for him not to have to help me locate my absent serenity.

  When I ope
ned both eyes wide, nothing had changed; hovering over me were Bob Winslow’s gigantic face, Jeff’s big head, and the head of some stranger who, as Winslow would later inform me, was called Bill. Seen from without, it might have all looked a bit ridiculous, and me especially, so I stood up, dusted myself off, and asked Winslow what it was that he wanted, though not before first whistling for the Saint of Lost Objects, who would have some work to do after all.

  “To introduce you to my new friend, stranger,” he said jovially.

  Whether or not I wanted to be acquainted with this moron’s friends, new or not, anterior or posterior, two things about what he said disturbed me. First, there was the word new, which might embroil Winslow in another discussion concerning the meaning of newness; second, the word stranger, the offhandedness of which, like all offhandedness, had a quality I found irritating. The word made me think vaguely of a movie whose plot I couldn’t recall, but that I knew to be key to figuring out which character, in which movie, was calling the other guy “stranger.” And if there’s one thing that irritates me, it’s realizing that memory is flaky and full of holes, cliffs, abysses, and peaceful silences that make you look like an ignoramus. We were going to sort this out right away.

  “My name is Robert, Bob, so you call me Robert, okay, not ‘stranger.’ Never ‘stranger’!”

  I’d opened the floodgates with this permission to use my first name, which I knew full well, but what else could I have done?

  “Okay, Robert,” he said, smiling as he emphasized the bert, which forced me to grate my teeth and smile, what with my face being arranged in such a way that when my teeth grate I smile, and vice versa. I’m not particularly sociable, as I said.

  With this clarification settled, Winslow introduced me to Bill, his new friend, who was yellow. Not the yellow of jaundice, but more like Jeff, with whom he also shared the traits of four legs, a snout, pointy ears, a short tail that will gros longer over time, and so on. In fact, in a few weeks, Bill the puppy would be identical to Jeff the dog in every way. Jeff could have been his father if he’d known Bill’s mother, and, to be honest, I found it pretty annoying. If this guy was not only going to deplete my joie de vivre, but also wanted us to shop for matching underwear together, then the new existence I’d thought awaited me on Mirror Lake’s peaceful shores was going to be a long time coming, since time, in such situations, is linked to a kind of relativity that does no less damage for being relative.