Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  So I had behaved myself, which did me no favours, because when I got home my mother was waiting for me in the kitchen with a look that decreed once and for all that I was a man, and that men desperately wanted flesh. I never forgot that look, nor Rosie Bolduc’s knees, nor Ginette Rousseau’s half-horrified, half-delighted stiffening when my fingers slipped involuntarily from her shoulders to her neck, nor the sheer boredom of the deathly dull evening. Most of all what I remembered was my mother’s expression, traces of which I could now see in Bob, Bill, and Jeff’s gloomy faces as they waited for me by the cottage with unjustified panic.

  “Thank God,” Winslow shouted, rushing over and putting his arms around me, using words and gestures I’d long hoped for from my mother, who was always quicker to reproach than to show tenderness. But Winslow’s relief was not derived from my having escaped my demonic temptations, which wasn’t the case anyway, but from the fact that I was alive, never mind the lapses I might be guilty of.

  “There’s been an accident on the lake, a total fucking drama,” said an out-of-breath Bob, wiping away the sweat running down his face. A man, whom Winslow had naturally thought was me, had got into my boat and taken to the water — and then the boat capsized, the man sank, and there was nothing Winslow could do about it. “I thought you were dead, Bobby, I thought you were fucking drowned,” he repeated, passing a crumpled handkerchief over tears I’d thought at first were sweat, and — confirming that I was alive, that I’d escaped death — the words kept swirling around in my head: dead, drowned, a man in your boat, Bobby. And then I realized Winslow was calling me Bobby, that bonds are forged in drama, and that fear, afterwards, brings people closer.

  I was annoyed by this familiarity and, simultaneously, Winslow’s agitation was irritating me, and yet the feeling that a man was worried about my fate, barely an hour after a woman had sought to relieve my pain, moved me more than I cared to admit. So I put a hand on Winslow’s shoulder — his concern deserved appreciation — assured him I was as right as rain and then added, suddenly realizing the seriousness of the situation, that we should still go and get the cops. Winslow agreed but didn’t budge, so I held out my car keys, pretending that I was suddenly feeling dizzy. This wasn’t very fair of me, I could have asked Winslow to call, but apart from not wanting him to know I had a phone, I hated histrionic displays dragging on, drowning in tears, in snot, swamped in liquid words and ending up making emotion look ridiculous. So I dispatched Winslow before he suffocated me in a resurgence of joy.

  As I waited for his return I sat down with Bill and Jeff by the lake with a man in it, or, more precisely, with the body of a man in it, dead in my stead, wondering if it would resurface or wash up on the bank before the divers arrived and mulling over the identity of the stranger who’d shown up at my place, taken my boat, and disappeared into Mirror Lake’s abyssal depths.

  As I kept an eye out for eddies in the lake heralding the improbable resurfacing of the drowned man — whom I would call at first John Doe, when the need to name him occurred, and then, when came the desire to shun the anonymity of Doe, John Doolittle, then John Doe again, when his anonymity became the thing that characterized him — I started to draw geometric patterns in the sand. I joined them together in an effort to make meaningful shapes: a stick man, a school or a skyscraper (depending on whether you were looking at it vertically or horizontally), a Big Bird costume, then a tin of peas, before erasing all of it and starting again with squares, triangles, rectangles, small circles inside big circles, diamonds inside hexagons. This activity not only allowed me to kill time, but also had the advantage of erasing the image of the man at the bottom of the lake, who wouldn’t have bothered making his bed in the morning had he known he wouldn’t be lying on it again that night. It’s crazy what we would or wouldn’t do if only we knew what was right around the corner. Just as well we don’t.

  To put John Doe and his misfortune out of mind, I abandoned myself to non-thinking, to that delicious feeling of veering close to the void without being driven crazy by it. Then the slam of a door, a salvo of barking, two more doors slamming, and voices talking in short sentences interrupted my meditating on a circle lifting me into nothingness. So I got up, brushed off my pants, and went to meet Winslow, who was flanked by the county sheriff and his deputy. Winslow introduced me to them as the survivor, the man who didn’t die.

  The sheriff, with his Ray-Bans and toothpick, could easily have been mistaken for Tim Robbins in the movie Short Cuts, which for me shows Robbins’s unequalled talent, his ability to take on the appearance of guys who then start to look like him, and I immediately pegged the sheriff as a rotten cop, along with his acolyte, since rot spreads and makes more rot, and, statistically speaking, men rot fast.

  After a quick look around the place, they interrogated me about my comings and goings, about which I lied, failing to mention Lolita’s caress of my forehead, before they asked me if I’d been expecting anyone, if I had visitors often, if I had any ideas concerning the identity of the man who’d borrowed my boat, me answering “no” to every question as I observed my curved reflection in Tim Robbins’s Ray-Bans, which made me look like Humpty Dumpty. Then they inspected my boat, which Winslow had brought back to shore by tying it to his own.

  Which was when things got a little sticky, because there was a hole in the bottom of the boat through which water could have flowed, causing the shipwreck of John Doe, and from that moment I became a suspect, due to a breach that hadn’t been there the night before, I swore, which didn’t help my case. Then Winslow came to my rescue and said the boat must have smashed into a rock as he was hauling it in, which brought us back to the first question: What had made John Doe sink?

  At this point in the interrogation my head was spinning and I would have been perfectly happy to have been absorbed by the nothingness of my circle but, given that the voices around me were occupying the space, I started to ramble. In my mind I’d re-baptized John Doe, who temporarily became Harry, because of the Hitchcock film where people ask who killed Harry, who Harry is, why Harry was wandering around the area, which weapon the fatal missile had come from and other questions pertinent to the discovery of an unidentified body. I asked myself the same questions, and then one thing led to another and I suggested the possibility of suicide: a guy’s out for a walk, he’s in despair, his life’s hell, he sees a boat on a bottomless lake, hears a loon’s heart-rending cry, wonders why he made his bed this morning, and puts his darkest thoughts into action. But Tim Robbins wasn’t only corrupt, he was stupid. Not satisfied just to reject the theory outright, he also interpreted it — as I could see in the reflection of his Ray-Bans — as another way for me to conceal my guilt, no surprise as he was also xenophobic, just like three-quarters of the population of Maine, or of the planet for that matter.

  What happened next is still confused in my mind. I became enraged, I think, and told Tim Robbins that I wasn’t about to shoulder responsibility for the moronic John Doe’s suicidal madness, this guy who’d not only shown up at my house to die but had also trashed my boat. Then I added that if I did want to kill someone, I wouldn’t have chosen such an aleatory method — that’s the word I used, “aleatory,” because I didn’t know how to translate the French word aléatoire. Not that Tim Robbins would have understood the word anyway. I’d said “aleatory” deliberately, remembering that I myself had considered using such a method not so long ago, planning to be rid of Winslow by making a hole in his boat, but then rejected the scheme for its being too aleatory, which wasn’t the issue here. The issue was whether or not Winslow really had damaged my boat on a rock or whether someone — Winslow, for example — had freely elected to put into play the overture of a plan, if I can call it that, not intended for some John Doe randomly appearing at Mirror Lake, but for me, Robert Moreau. But the hypothesis wouldn’t stand up, because why the devil would Winslow have wanted to kill me when he was the irritant and I was the one being irritated — i.e. I wa
s the one with all the reasons for wanting to kill him. Anyway, if Winslow hoped to see me croak, he’d made a good start. He only needed to stay true to himself, a stance that enabled his committing the perfect crime.

  Regardless, I was pretty shaken, this noticed by all three of the idiots looking at me as if I’d just tumbled down from the moon, the pale circle of which shone behind the mountains despite the sun being a long way from setting, and the sight of it reminded me of “Le soleil a rendez-vous avec la lune,” that stupid Charles Trenet song about the sun meeting the moon. It had been a long time since I’d heard it, but I knew it would now be stuck in my head until the next day. Its banal lyrics would leave me fulminating against what some people like to call poetry, when any poem worthy of the name would have alluded to the disaster any meeting of the sun and the moon would cause, described the cataclysm brought about by such a meeting, or maybe make the phenomena related to the refraction of light, the otherness of mirrors, what do I know. A poem like this would have talked about the blindness of the stars colliding with each other, or the influence of the tides on the madness that lacerates the stomachs of people whose chests and throats have already been cut. I must have hummed a few bars of the song in question, because Winslow said “Trainy,” meaning Charles Trenet. I walked back from the edge of the lake in Tim Robbins’s Ray-Bans to where Humpty Dumpty — that is to say, a sadly misshapen reflection of myself — was opening his mouth to say “moon,” which made me realize why, when they turned to look at me, they were all staring so beatifically. Not wanting to make things worse, I pulled myself together, apologized, and stared at my reinforced toecaps so that I’d no longer be looking at the moon, Humpty Dumpty, or Robbins’s deputy’s hand, ready to draw his weapon. I named the deputy Indiana Jones because the greenhorn obviously thought he was Harrison Ford and was just waiting for an outburst of evil in order to become one of those heroes America anoints with glory as fleeting as it is pitiful, a derisory pleasure I was not about to accord him.

  I apologized and then murmured — in French, so they wouldn’t understand — that I wasn’t planning on giving this cowboy his tabloid moment. Besides which, he’d never get over it, because nobody can really withstand fame’s ephemeral aspect. There’s nothing sadder and more pathetic than a man repeating the same story for twenty years and thinking that is enough to earn his father’s respect, impress a classmate, or make a woman love him. It would actually have been a good trick to play, but I wasn’t about to take a bullet in my stomach just to poison the future of a cretin I would not even see grow old, given that I’d have died in the flower of his innocent youth.

  At this point in my ruminations, the slamming of two more doors reverberated around the mountains, and Robbins went to greet a couple of guys pulling diving equipment out of a yellow truck. Then there was some sort of discussion in which I preferred not to involve myself. Winslow walked over and we sat down at the edge of the lake with Bill and Jeff at the spot where I’d been drawing circles and perfect equilateral triangles that Bill’s small paws and Jeff’s big ones had turned into fractals. Then the divers headed out to the middle of the lake in their yellow canoe, which made me think about yellow as the colour of madness, or that’s what the books say. I don’t know why. I’ve never seen a crazy person turn yellow.

  Finally, as I was dwelling on the waxy hue of madness, the yellow stopped moving and the divers toppled backwards out of the boat, crouching like toads, though of course toads don’t dive like that, and I remember thinking that the reason we call divers “frogmen” must be because of the flippers, not the diving. Then one memory led to another and the image of the girl who’d supplanted Rosie Bolduc in my most obscene thoughts came back to me with the divers’ gentle plinks.

  Leslie Bégin, she was — I hadn’t forgotten her name. Her flippered feet made her feel ashamed, so that she never wore sandals, claiming she had a strange skin disease. The first time she showed me her feet, in the shadows of the hangar where we’d taken refuge, I thought of the monster that falls in love with Julie Adams in Creature from the Black Lagoon, and then of the creatures that emerged from the ocean millions of years before Leslie Bégin let out her first scream — of the batrachian, pseudo-batrachian, or archibatrachian line, I didn’t really have a clue, that would lead in time to humans. Leslie seemed to me, then, to be nothing short of an evolutionary mistake, a monster that should not have survived. When she took advantage of my astonishment to stuff her tongue down my throat, I’d had the impression of being invaded by a salt tide and rescued myself before I suffocated. Afterwards, I started sexualizing Leslie’s feet. Leslie became the centre of my fantasies and, when finally she allowed me to strip off her underwear, I traversed the memory of the time.

  “The memory of the time,” I murmured as Leslie Bégin faded away. Then I looked at the mountains, the lake, my own feet, Jeff barking a little for form’s sake and then copied by Bill, who repeated everything Jeff said. But Winslow and I said nothing more than “The memory of the time.” We watched the bubbles rising and disappearing around the canoe as we thought about the dead man. And then we waited by the now-still water for a head to reappear, for the silence of our waiting to be broken.

  After a few minutes, Winslow declared they would never be able to fish him out, that the lake was too deep, and that if the man did reappear one day it would be because the lake wanted nothing more to do with him and had thrown him out. In the heat of the moment, it never occurred to me there might not be a dead man, that Winslow might have introduced this drowned character into the story in order for me not to see the hole in my boat and its irrefutable proof of his murderous plans for me. All I was thinking was that they had to recover the drowned man; I couldn’t bear the thought of a dead person being at the centre of the lake, a person whose bluish body might rise at any moment and collide with my boat, his belly full of noxious gases rubbing against its hull. If the divers came up empty-handed, I’d be living in constant fear of seeing a face appear at the end of my dock, the face of the man who’d drowned in my place in my ruined boat.

  Then, as the mountains obscured the first quarter of the setting sun, I began to confide in Winslow, something I never thought I’d be capable of. I don’t know if it was the meeting with Lolita, or the atmosphere of tragedy hanging over Mirror Lake, but I suddenly felt as if my entire past was struggling to come back into my mind. I looked down at the ground and told Winslow nothing could be worse than not finding your dead, knowing they were out there somewhere in the world but not where this somewhere was — this essentially the defining feature of “somewhere,” especially when you’ve not had confirmation of death. It was all a bit confusing, so I started to tell him about Alfie, a dog I’d had when I was a kid. I told him about the red car that had run him over and left him crazy, and then about the two men who’d taken him into the woods to put a bullet in his head, because that’s what you do when animals are suffering. When I found out Alfie had gone mad, I told Winslow about the thousands upon thousands of lilac blossoms blooming — told him everything: about the madness of the lilacs, about my own madness, about the sun beating down on our heads, and the silence of the church bells that had scampered off to Rome to mourn Christ and wait for his resurrection. And then I spat the iron taste of my mouth out onto the sand, this happening to me any time I bite my cheeks and the skin breaks. That was the last time I saw Alfie, never saw his body, I said, finishing up with a curse, and with blood in my mouth, and then I squeezed Jeff’s big head against my side, and started to curse again. “Winslow,” I said, “I never saw his corpse, never saw the blood,” and that’s the worst thing, no cadaver to prove the death, no blood to show the pain had a cause.

  So, if the corpse of John Doe doesn’t float back up, we’ll never know, we’ll be asking for the rest of our days if this foutu John Doe (except I didn’t say “foutu,” I said “fucking”), if this fucking John Doe — because Winslow’s obsession was bleeding sadly into me — if this fuck
ing John Doe ever really existed. And that’s when it hit me — just as the head of one of the divers emerged near the yellow canoe, the black rubber hood shining in the sun and his breathing tubes, like long external gills, making me think remorsefully of the silent cries of suffocating fish. That’s when I first wondered if perhaps there was no John Doe. Maybe Winslow had made the whole thing up for reasons I didn’t know and would never know unless Winslow admitted it or John Doe washed up on the beach. Without either John Doe or a confession, I had no way of knowing if the whole thing had been a lie, and I sank down into the sand, inch by inch, just as the other black rubber suit appeared amid the ripples of water and gentle atmosphere of the languid afternoon.

  The divers hadn’t found John Doe and never would find him, because the lake was too deep, because Bob Winslow had lied, or because the fish of the deep had already taken John Doe’s clothes, flesh, and organs and torn them to shreds, in celebration of the light they remembered haloing his body as it fell toward the hellish algae and zigzagged slowly down, like a leaf falling from a tree on a windless day.

  “What colour were John Doe’s clothes?” I asked Bob Winslow as I burrowed into the beach. But Winslow couldn’t remember, hadn’t been paying attention. Grey, maybe? Black? He didn’t know. Why was I asking?

  “No reason,” I lied. “Just preparing myself for the dead man’s return.”

  That evening I didn’t eat with Bob Winslow or even at the same time as him. I stayed under cover of the trees looking out at the lake and for John Doe, for John Doolittle, and wondering, “What, if he does exist, would make a man show up at a stranger’s house, steal his boat, and go capsize in the middle of the lake, except distress, Jeff?” I caressed his big yellow head with its eyes shining out into the dark. “What, except fucking pain?” Then I went back inside and carried on surveying the lake from my window, Victor Morgan’s novel on my knees. But nothing happened to disturb the peace of the starry night. John Doe was sleeping, and if called upon to haunt the lake he wouldn’t do so in the shape of an ectoplasm, or a zombie with its flesh eaten away by maggots, but in the shape of nagging questions.