Despite John Doe not appearing as a ghost, I’d often see him, prowling around the lake, or when bad weather distorted the landscape and blurry penumbras that had been hiding in it for centuries revealed themselves. The first time I noticed John Doe, who’d in the meantime become John Doolittle, it was pouring with rain.
I’d been up since dawn, what with Humpty Dumpty deciding I’d slept enough, and went out to sit on the porch hoping the rain and westerly wind battering the cottage would dispel the images bogging me down. And this is, in fact, what the rain did, thus proving to me that our hopes don’t always die like rats. The rain washed my face, soaked my sweatshirt, my ancient hole-ridden cotton pants covered in Jeff’s golden hair — a bit gross now that the rain was plastering it to the fabric — and then the sandals in which my feet made a heavy squishing sound each time I flexed my toes. It was a reassuring sound, really, and brought me back to the reality of the day, opaque and grey, the pleasing cool of August dawns. Finally it soaked into me, a creature of little faith whose life in retirement was sinking into a daily torment of unexpected ennui, so far from the battlefield where men shoot each other at point-blank range.
I had barely reintegrated myself into the pain of daily life, which was not in the least bit preferable to pain of the dream, if less abstract, when I saw a dark shape on the lake that seemed to be approaching the shore. If the John Doe incident had not happened, I’d have taken this dark shadow for what it no doubt was: a tree trunk ripped from the beach by the waves, except that the doubts I was entertaining concerning the truth about John Doe immediately put me on the alert and I leapt to my feet, only to notice that my legs were trembling and my heart was drumming out a jerky beat, maybe a rumba or a samba, as it had on one of the few nights in my twenties when I’d taken cocaine and tried to be part of the chic, fashionable world living life in the fast lane. I remembered nothing of this dead time, not even the one or two bit of flesh I’d savoured on a Garouste and Bonetti couch to the tribal rhythm of my atavistic impulses, though I did recall the whip-crack of the coke almost sending me to an early grave while the entire continent of Africa thrashed out a pulse beneath my sternum. I felt the same thing that morning by the lake, shaken as I was by the sudden rush of adrenaline that made me leap to my feet and able to see my heart’s wild somersaults lifting the fabric of my soaked sweatshirt. Jeff was also on the alert and looking in the same direction as me, his ears pricked up and ready to race over to the intruder the second he detected a note of exasperation in my breathing. We stayed like that until the blurry shape disappeared, or was once more swallowed up by the lake’s restless swells, and I rushed to the beach, legs shaking and Jeff at my heels, begging Mirror Lake to release the dark shape and give it back up to the rainy light of this August dawn, but all that animated the lake now were a few white crests, in which I was naively convinced I’d spotted the hypothetical John Doe several times, his face foaming with drool that was quickly whisked away, along with his face, by the lake’s uncharacteristic turbulence.
After conceding that the dark shape I’d mistaken for John Doolittle was nothing more than a figment of my imagination, I went back into the cottage telling myself that if not all hopes die like rats, certainly the majority of them do — that people are swimming in a sea of dead rats, this hardly improving the opinion I had of my fellow humans, the company of dead rats being all they deserve. Then I shut the door abruptly and intimated to Jeff that he should stay on the carpet. That’s actually the verb that went through my mind, intimated, when I said, “Carpet, Jeff, stay there,” in English to make it clear I wasn’t joking, then I undressed next to him and, stark naked, went to stand by the window, observing the rats accumulating on the beach from there, as I pondered the supposed magnificence of my nudity. Only women can be said to possess such “magnificence,” I decided, remembering Anita’s opulent flesh that I’d not seen again, but had dreamed of enough for her to sense, even from miles away, the lewd waves incited in me by her body, which was soft enough to lose a hand in without its being swallowed up. Then I realized I was bored, which was not part of my retirement plan, and that the rain was simply reinforcing this boredom.
So I did what all bored people do who are lucky enough not to have a television so they can’t fool themselves into thinking any old junk will help them escape the emptiness: I looked for someone to call, headed to the phone and called Anita’s pimp, no doubt irritable because of the rain. That bandit sent me packing, saying that if I wanted to pay for a whore in this weather, I was going to have to go out. He didn’t actually use the word whore, but that’s the word I heard in the go-to-hell tone of the jerk’s voice, which made me want to retort that Anita wasn’t a whore, but I let it go, lacking any convincing arguments, and went back to the window and noticed that I couldn’t even make out Bob Winslow’s cottage on the far shore.
I was alone, like any one of the thousands of dead rats the tide was bringing up, and this wasn’t quite the feeling of solitude I’d been hoping to experience in Mirror Lake’s forest, far from the harrowing pressures of a more gregarious society. It was a kind of solitude that renders you bitterly conscious of the burden of existence and leads you to understand why men sometimes seek out the company of others. I would never have believed it possible, but I was actually starting to miss Bob Winslow, whom I hadn’t seen since John Doe had arrived at Mirror Lake, though I suppose boredom can make you irrational. I even considered stashing a bottle or two of bourbon in my new boat, the other one having been turned into firewood, and paying Bob Winslow a surprise visit. But the voice of Anita’s pimp, yelling at me that he wouldn’t even make a dog go outside in weather like this, was still ringing in my ears. “It’s raining cats and dogs,” he’d berated me, though instead I heard It’s raining tarts and dogs. So I got drunk all by myself. Well, no, with Jeff, even opening a beer for him — just this once wouldn’t hurt, and besides, he doesn’t care for bourbon. And then I tried to wait for the storm to blow itself out.
To kill time (which is just an expression, because if there’s one thing you can’t kill it’s time — time is unkillable, absolutely immortal), I leafed through some of the magazines my generous predecessor had left behind. But I would have preferred Anita’s hot, living presence, so my heart wasn’t in it any more than the rest of my anatomy was. Nevertheless, I embarked on a little sociological analysis, and what surprised me most was that a good number of girls from the fifties looked like housewives, or like ordinary girls whose clothes had somehow evaporated just as they were getting ready to make a trip to the post office or put a chicken in to roast, and this depressed me, because I couldn’t help thinking of my aunt Jeanne, whose Himalayan chest had always held such fascination for me. As I have more of a propensity to guilt than to incest, the magazines suddenly seemed soiled to me, but I carried on flicking through the pages just for the sake of it. My ennui was depriving me of ideas, and then I came across Anita Ekberg — the real Anita, the one and only — tanning herself in a studio setting above a text box about Sophia Loren. Talk about la dolce vita! I may be a little paranoid but I’m not a masochist, so I set that particular magazine aside, and things went from bad to worse. It was as though all the stars of the fifties and sixties, from Jayne Mansfield to Kim Novak via Gina Lollobrigida and Jane Russell, were in league against me. When I came across Marilyn Monroe reclining across a double-page spread singing “Do-be-do, do-be-do!” I thought, Whoa, that’s enough! and stuffed the whole lot into the closet and got dressed.
I’d not managed to kill time, but had given it a little shake. Outside, night was falling, the sky was still discharging its overflow onto the thirsty natural world below, but my boredom hadn’t evolved in the least. Over on the other side of the lake, I could now make out the light of a lantern moving in the fog, a sign that Winslow was walking along the bank. This reminded me of John Doolittle, whom I’d put on the back burner under the wily influence of alcohol and Anita Ekberg. Maybe Bob Winslow had also noticed a dark
shape appearing at the crest of a wave, and he was searching for the body that the storm had scraped up from the bottom of Mirror Lake? What else could he be doing out in the rain, swinging a lantern like that in the fog? Maybe it was a message, or a distress signal. I was absolutely clueless about signalling with a lantern, but Bob Winslow didn’t know that, and maybe he was desperately trying to get in touch and translating the rudiments of Morse code into a language unknown to me.
This was the pretext I’d been waiting for since morning to dispel the atmosphere of gloom covering the landscape in opaque grey. I didn’t hesitate for a moment, fetched Jeff, a flashlight, and two lifejackets and put them onto the boat, which was as ostentatiously new as Marilyn Monroe was showily beautiful. I did forget the bourbon, but that was no big deal, since I was already drunk and Winslow had a stock of De Kuyper and Gritty McDuff’s in his cellar. And then I set off astride the waves, ready to brave the hostile swells.
I had a little trouble leaving the bank because the waves kept driving us back to the dock, which was banging into us in turn and pushing us the other way. We were stuck in one spot for long enough that I exhausted my supply of swear words, and as remaining stuck on the north shore wasn’t an option, I jumped out of the boat and pushed it into the lake until I was chin-deep in the water, while Jeff navigated. Then I had to return to shore a little way in order to climb in myself, and promptly found myself face down on the bottom of my spanking-new boat, which I christened Jane as a tribute to Jane Russell and Jayne Mansfield, without even sparing a thought for my own aunt Jeanne, whom I’d relegated to the limbo of my childhood, and I swallowed a wave as Jeff, tossed from one side of the boat to the other, barked hard enough to destroy his vocal cords. When I chanced a look behind us, I noticed we’d been pushed back to the dock again. Another man would have abandoned the entire plan, but I was me and couldn’t help myself. Knowing how useless it is to fight one’s own nature, I picked up the oars, flexed my muscles, and used my biceps to give the boat a big shove, which propelled us a good three feet from the dock, then another shove, accompanied by a manly grunt.
And we were off, I just had to keep the rhythm going, and I maintained it by mangling “Po’ Lazarus” as sung by James Carter & The Prisoners in the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? — by far the best movie I’d seen in the last few years. I’d have liked to identify with George Clooney, playing the movie’s hero, even though he’s not exactly sparklingly intelligent in it, but the waves pushed us ceaselessly to the side, so much so that I felt like a useless idiot and instead identified with John Turturro’s character, who was, as we say in Quebec, as dumb as the moon. I started wondering about why we associate the moon with being not very smart, this bringing the stupid Trenet song about the sun meeting the moon back into my mind, his tune interfering with “Po’ Lazarus,” which I then massacred even more. I set my compass for Winslow’s lantern, Turturro disappeared into the storm — just as he does in the movie, when a big wave of water comes out of nowhere and carries him off — and finally I slipped into George Clooney’s skin, all smiles, teeth white enough to gleam through any fog.
When I set foot on dry land, which reeled a little until my centre of balance regained its bearings, Bob Winslow was completely beside himself. “What the hell are you doing on the lake in such a fucking goddamn storm, Robert? It’s raining tarts and dogs.” He didn’t say “tarts,” but that’s what I heard, because I was happily experiencing an interruption to my boredom, despite Winslow’s obvious anger. “And why the hell are you screaming like a pig? They could hear you in Alabama,” he added, which was appropriate because the Coen brothers’ movie is set in Mississippi, the rotten state next to it. “Wasn’t screaming, Bob, was singing,” I said, but he wasn’t listening to me, so I told him that I’d seen his lantern. “I saw your lantern, Bob,” and I felt sorry that in English there’s no distinction between tu and vous, because he would have felt the warmth of my using tu. Up to that point, I’d been calling him “tu” in my head, but scornfully — go fuck yourself, Winslow, tu me fais chier — though now there was a genuine congeniality to my use of the first-person possessive, as in, if it wasn’t ta lantern, as in a lantern belonging to you, my friend, I’d have stayed put and been condemned to moping wearily at home.
“I saw your lantern,” I started again, “and thought I saw a message in it.” But since he didn’t appear to understand, I told him about the dark shape, about John Doe’s multiple shadows in the storm. That assuaged him somewhat, because Winslow also thought he’d seen the body of John Doe appear — which was the reason, if I wasn’t mistaken, that he’d been surveying the bank with swings of his lantern and hoping to spot the stranger who’d disturbed the peace of Mirror Lake — its eyes bulging and catching the glow of the lantern light like the eyes of a wolf in a patch of pine trees. And that’s when he admitted to me that he’d been keeping a lookout for the dead guy — hunting the deer, so to speak — since dawn on this grey day, speaking with a trembling voice in which I could make out not only the entirely normal fear of someone preparing to fish out a stiff, but also genuine anxiety quickly confirmed by his haggard eyes and slightly dilated pupils.
Winslow was effectively behaving as if he’d not at all expected the dead man to resurface, from which I deduced that, as I’d suspected, he’d been lying to me about the existence of John Doe, alias John Doolittle, whose existence was becoming more hypothetical by the minute. If Winslow was in fact so concerned, it meant he was afraid of ending up with the cadaver of a man who wasn’t dead — or, more precisely, with one that had never existed in the first place. He was caught in his lie, and the piece of shit certainly hadn’t expected a cloud of phantoms to head over to the south shore and make him pay for his deception.
My anger was giving way to boredom, and I was preparing to leave him marinating in his remorse, rain or no rain, drunk or not drunk, when suddenly he collapsed onto a stump, wailing that he couldn’t remember the colour of John Doe’s clothes and this was haunting him. “I’m haunted, Robert,” the idiot snivelled. He claimed it was bothering him so much that he was wondering if he’d invented the whole thing, if he really had seen a man take my boat and my boat leave the dock and then a man disappear — that is, drown in Mirror Lake’s unfathomable depths. So he’d needed a body, a corpse, just as I had once needed Alfie’s cadaver to prove to me that love had meaning. At which point I said, “Stop, Bobby, whoa, hold on,” because I didn’t understand what was going on anymore. I was the one who had reason to be suspicious, and here he was stealing my role from me. Either Winslow was a born actor or I was the king of fools. As I couldn’t decide one way or the other, I dragged Winslow into the cottage, where we proceeded to get drunker than anyone had ever done in the entire history of Mirror Lake, with him incessantly wailing that he couldn’t remember what colour John Doe’s clothes were — “Maybe it was because he was completely naked, Robert” — and me replying, “Completely naked,” like Anita Ekberg, whom I’d undressed without her permission as I flicked through my magazines.
Then I noticed I was calling Winslow “Bobby.” Alcohol, when mixed with worry, boredom, and loneliness, leads to the unexpected; mostly to fear, in my case, because once again here I was afraid of having fallen into the hands of a crazy man, or of going totally insane myself, which would have made no sense. So it didn’t take much to persuade me when Winslow, after his De Kuyper, got out the crème de menthe, which I called crème d’ectoplasme, given the presence of John Doe’s spectre in the waters and in homage to the Pink Flamingo Sperm cocktail invented by Boris Vian and Louis Barucq, a barman with a fantastic imagination, but a drink we couldn’t concoct with our crème d’ectoplasme because we lacked the necessary ingredients.
We really tied one on, the kind of session that leaves you with a gap in memory as inconsolable as the headache in which the memories have drowned.
The next morning I’d made no progress. You might even say I’d moved backwards. I
woke up around noon underneath Winslow’s porch, off which I figured I’d tumbled, my left buttock hurting as much as my skull, and I wondered why daylight felt the need to be so cruel every morning after the night before. I decided it must be to punish us for being so stupid. When I tried to stand up, the world did a perfect flip-flop, ten out of ten, the lake immediately climbed to the ceiling, and vice versa, and I could no longer tell if it was the water being reflected in the firmament or the other way around. Suddenly I spotted an arm poking out from behind the pile of rocks Winslow had built close to the lake now occupying the space where the sky should be, and then it was my heart’s turn to do a thunderous somersault — John Doolittle!
The storm really had ended up bringing us John Doolittle, who must have been curing by the rocks since the small hours of the morning. I wanted to yell to Winslow that Doolittle had surfaced and was wearing a grey sweater — he wasn’t wrong, he wasn’t crazy and nor was I, but the echoes of my first shout made a bit of my brain jump out, ripping off my uvula as it passed, so I settled with emitting a few curses sotto voce. Painfully, I swallowed the few drops of saliva I’d managed to extract from the little recess between my gums and the back of my tongue, and then, in an unequalled act of bravery, I managed to shout out. When I arrived at the point of sacrilegious moaning, I saw the grey arm moving through the blue sky and simply passed out, fainting being the only means I had of escaping: you do what you can with what you have.
Mirror Lake Page 6
