Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  I wasn’t unconscious for long, because when I opened my eyes the arm had only moved a few inches, this enough to show me that it was attached to Winslow’s shoulder, which was emerging, dishevelled, from behind the rocky outcrop. “Baptême, Winslow, what the fuck are you doing there?” I cursed, careful to speak softly, and entirely in French, because moaning in English was beyond my abilities at that moment, and then I fell back to sleep to the delightful image of Bob Winslow throwing up our crème d’ectoplasme.

  On my third and final wake-up, the sun was setting behind the mountains, a light breeze was ruffling Jeff’s golden fur, the dog was licking my face with bona fide love — eternal, doggy love — the lake had settled to its proper place, and I’d not moved one iota. As for Winslow, he was still stretched out near the rocks, wearing the grey sweater that had almost belonged to John Doe, giving off spectral vapours from the night before, and sporting an enormous bruise on his forehead that might have made me laugh had I not been afraid of the effect it would have on the extremely fragile, quarter-inch surface covering the entirety of my skull, which was saturated with deadly alcohol.

  “Fuck,” I heard him murmur, and that was the only word he uttered, except for “black” when I asked him how he wanted his coffee, and then I took to the lake with Jeff again, floating on top of the last of the pink clouds the calm water was absorbing, and all the while trying not to think of pink flamingoes or Boris Vian, with whom I was seriously annoyed, concentrating instead on the sweetness of the remaining cirrostratus disappearing beneath the boat.

  Over the next three days Winslow and I kept to ourselves, this for the best, as otherwise we’d not have been able to avoid seeing the extent of our stupidity in the other one’s puffy demeanour, the periwinkle blue of our eyes striated with red. I also needed to come to terms with Winslow’s significant and disconcerting resemblance to me, looking as if he could be my brother, congenital flaws included, with the result that I’d never know who John Doolittle, as for him, looked like.

  I was still entertaining a glimmer of hope when Tim Robbins and Indiana Jones came back on the third day, bringing a couple of photos of a guy who’d disappeared into thin air the day John Doolittle drowned. They showed up shortly after lunch in a cloud of dust, tires squealing and the handbrake pulled with a crunch, stepping out of their 4×4 in perfect synchrony. As the dust settled, these two unblinking figures called to mind Arnold Schwarzenegger’s impressive physique as he rises up out of the debris in Terminator. “I’ll be back,” I heard him say over the scene’s gentle music, and then Robbins started walking over, gravel squeaking under his spurred boots. As he approached, he took some photographs out of his pocket and threw them on the steps, where I was sitting and not bothering to get up, in a gesture that was theatrical to say the least.

  “Ever seen this man around here?” he asked as he chewed on a toothpick, and for a few seconds I could see Humphrey Bogart lurking behind his features, though he disappeared along with Schwarzenegger when I realized that the Ray-Bans were waiting for an answer.

  The photographs showed a guy of around fifty, unsmiling and not wanting to smile — just like Robbins, apparently, in whom the ability to do so seemed to have atrophied when he was young. The man in the photograph had the ravaged face of a man who’s lived hard and feels proud of it, which describes pretty much all the men I’d met in Maine, but his face was unfamiliar to me.

  “No,” I said to Robbins.

  “Sure?” he barked, looking me up and down with the sort of disdain you would display for something contemptible or vaguely repulsive.

  “I’m sure,” I replied, letting it be understood that that would be my last word on the subject — and that I found the man repellent, too. He packed the photos away and told me that this shifty-looking character had disappeared the same day John Doe drowned in my boat, and he emphasised the “your” — your boat — so maybe he could be the drowned guy or, worse, there could be one guy who’d drowned and another who’d gone missing. That was all I needed on this beautiful sunny day — two John Does instead of one or, worse again, a real John Doe and a fake John Doe, since there was nothing to prove there even was a drowned man. And if that was the hypothesis we started with, then the cheerful fella staring at the photographer through the lens as if he wanted to slit his throat might still be running around the countryside on the loose. “Oh great,” I muttered to myself, spitting on the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, which had done nothing to me and didn’t deserve it, except that the whole point of scape-goats is to suck up other people’s spontaneous angry gestures.

  Before leaving, Robbins handed me a scrap of crumpled paper with the number where I could reach him should my memory come back. That’s not what he said, but it’s what he thought, so mentally I told him to take a hike, va chier, Robbins, though I smiled his way, because suddenly I had an irresistible desire to taunt him but also to see if the mimetic effect of my smile had the power to make him unlock his face muscles. But no, Robbins had something of the icon or statue about him — or more prosaically, a plastic doll that only closes its eyes when you tilt it. His sinister expression valiantly resisted my charm, so I didn’t bother tiring myself out by smiling any more.

  As he left with Indiana Jones, who’d been miraculously absent from the scene, I knew we’d see each other again. I’ll be back, I heard again in the cloud of dust that also evoked John Wayne and the Wild West, the words a sinister warning that the mountains repeated as an echo at the very same moment that I rose from the steps and a bird, a single one, flew past and relieved itself in the immensity of the blue sky. “Shit!” I exclaimed, an interjection that seemed especially apt, before taking my clothes off and, pride to the wind, proceeding stark naked to the beach, where I slowly immersed myself in the cold water and washed off the minuscule chickadee or sparrow shit shining in the silver of my hair. I tried telling myself it was no big deal, that dust returns to dust just as bad luck follows the unlucky around, this and other ineluctable truths it’s as pointless to try to avoid as it is to attempt to stop a bird from flying, a fish from swimming, a grasshopper from hopping, or a man, let’s say, from running to his ruin. Which, incidentally, is precisely what I felt I’d been doing ever since I’d come to Mirror Lake. Heading slowly toward the precipice, I was helpless to put a halt to the movement because the machinery had been set in motion the day I’d hit the road believing I’d left everything behind me when in reality everything was clinging to me the way a duckling sticks close to its mother’s butt.

  Ever since John Doe’s hypothetical drowning, I’d not ventured out on the lake much at all. I’d cut my swims down to quick dips, or made do with getting my bottom half wet at the edge of the beach, and now I’d had enough of that. But the lake would soon disgorge multiple John Does, so better to behave as if everything was normal and rub their heads in the mud should they bother me or hinder my movements. I inhaled a big gulp of air and dove into the clear water, eyes wide open and taking in the muddy rocks of all different sizes carpeting the bottom of the lake, and then the specks of quartz in the sand glinting in the sun in the places where the water was shallower. Finally, I was able to breathe, three feet below the surface, carried by some dark liquid mass that I had always thought of as the element between elements, liberating and purifying, that ensures both joy and redemption. Here I was free again, regardless of all the John Does in the world, in the cool amniotic spaces that give me back my life, washing me clean of the grime blocking my pores and the filth growing in my brain like mushrooms — not poisonous enough to kill me, but rotten enough to make me sick. In short, I was in waters ridding me of all the dirt corrupting my life.

  I must have been swimming for a good half-hour, alternating between periods of breaststroke, diving underwater, floating on my back, and doing frogs and swans. I had to keep pushing Jeff off, because he was constantly trying to bring me back to shore and becoming hysterical anytime I disappeared for a few seconds
, because he loved me unconditionally, this dog. I hadn’t felt such lightness of being since the day of my confessing to all possible sins merely to have a few months’ respite, and now I didn’t want anything to impinge on my happiness — not even a dog’s unconditional love, which exists to warn you of the world’s innumerable threats. That’s what love does, that’s its job. Don’t go on the rocks, don’t run in the storm, don’t cry in the dark, the kind of love that makes you suffer by tearing at your heart, like in the song “Avec le temps,” when Léo Ferré sings, “Don’t stay out too late, don’t catch cold.” Every time I hear the song my emotions are laid bare, which is why I absolutely did not want Jeff to start humming Ferré’s lyrics about the pitiful that morning.

  To unsettle Jeff, I hummed “Boo-Wah Boo-Wah,” by Cab Calloway, and then went to slump on the sand, out of breath but content, purified, new. This was exactly what I’d come to Mirror Lake for, these moments of pure symbiosis with the self occurring at the heart of a silence in which thought is finally absent. After which I started reflecting on happiness, about how it comes from such ordinary things and we’re too stupid to realize it, too stupid to bend down and gather them up, put them in our pockets, shut our big mouths. So I tackled Jeff head on and started wrestling with him, just as we did in the good old days, despite his being too old for it really. I couldn’t even have said when the good old days had ended, or where I would trace the line marking the border between a life upright and an existence on the skids, but in this blessed moment I was propelled back to a time in my life when all I knew of bitterness was that which I read on the tense faces of people scraping the ground with their clipped wings.

  Carried away by a nostalgia still tinged with innocence, I promised Jeff we’d swim some more even if he was afraid, even if I was afraid, because it was so good after the fear. Effectively, I was offering nothing less than a promise of paradise, because I also loved him unconditionally, the way men do when they have nothing else left but their dog, even if I knew full well a simple rain shower would wash away my promise in a sea of indifference and that I would have to wait until I was senile to start gambolling around in the green and aromatic meadows of the good old days.

  Waiting on senility, which I wouldn’t wish on anyone, I pretended to be young. But youth being too beautiful to last, the rain shower soon arrived in the form of the Robbins-Jones duo, their 4×4 throbbing on the other side of the lake. I lifted my head, what with my being in the position happy men adopt when they’ve been wrestling with their dog — shoulders to the ground, knees wide open, chest panting. And when, in a familiar gesture, Robbins hitched up his pants so you could see he had balls and where they were, a veil of anger stronger than I was briefly passed over me: the guy made me want to kill him.

  This, I think, was the moment Jeff began to hate Tim Robbins as much as I detested him myself, when he realized the game was over and Robbins was the reason for my frivolity’s unexpected demise. He started to groan; I joined in and started muttering, and together we watched the scene unfolding on the other side of the lake, same as the one we’d participated in an hour before, miming Robbins’s responses, which were rather laconic responses, and Bill’s, though he didn’t have much to say, and Winslow’s, whose lip movements didn’t match the script, but admittedly it’s difficult to lip-read at such a distance. What I mean is, I noticed Winslow was gesticulating much too much for him to be answering with words of one or two syllables. After Robbins’s departure and the return of calm, which went hand in hand, even if Robbins always left a lingering stench of late-stage compost behind him, I had to resist the desire to jump in the boat and go see for myself if Winslow knew the guy in the photos, as this might have explained the length of his gesticulations, and so I stopped here, given that my visits to the far shore usually culminated in new irritations.

  As I’d resolved to give in to salubrious euphoria, I rushed to the end of the dock hollering wildly and threw myself noisily into the lake, throwing up around me one of those cavalcades of water I call “atomic” because they’re the same shape as a mushroom cloud, and then I swam, got out and dried off, and then swam again, wrestled with Jeff again, going on like that until a sweet exhaustion took over our play. By the time we were back inside, a fine rain was drizzling on Mirror Lake. We ate in front of the little people starting to panic on the lake, all of them identical, thousands and thousands of minuscule John Does trying to shelter from the rain, not realizing that they themselves were the rain, before sinking one after another down to the depths that terrified them, not realizing they themselves were the depths, and that the darkness of Mirror Lake was nothing other than the accumulation of as many minuscule John Does and John Doolittles as a mirror without a bottom can contain.

  When I went to bed that night, I was fairly certain the minuscule John Does would follow me into sleep, and I was right. After a first act I’ve pretty much forgotten, although it had something to do with flying fish, I found myself in the middle of the lake, where thousands upon thousands of John Does were unceremoniously jostling each other, like in a disaster movie when the panicking crowd flees the aggressor and tramples over children, old people with walking sticks, pregnant women, and the blind who might also be old but don’t carry two canes as a single white one already indicates they cannot see and their trembling demonstrates the other aspect.

  To sum up, I was in the middle of the lake, just one John Doe among many, when I spotted Anita Ekberg, whose head was sinking under the water as a result of the stampede of Does. “Help!” she called out in Swedish every time she resurfaced. But her shouts were utterly pointless, what with the Does, who didn’t know who she was and didn’t care, continuing to trample spitefully on her skull. Listening only to my courage, and anticipating the passionate kiss to which I’d be entitled when we washed up half-naked on the beach, I launched toward her, realizing I knew how to walk on water like an amphibious Christ. (This was the dream’s logistical side.) In anticipation of the kiss to come, I grasped her long curly mane, no longer curly because it was wet, and loose hair a foot long is always longer than a braid that would only measure twelve inches if it weren’t in a braid any longer, towing her in to firm ground, where we fell into the same position as Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr did in that torrid, unforgettable scene in From Here to Eternity.

  Just as the violins were getting louder and I was getting ready to enter eternity by putting my tongue in her mouth, Ekberg offering herself up to me with touching abandon, Humpty Dumpty was tossed up onto the beach by an unexpected wave, probably a wave of nausea, which threw me three or four feet away from Ekberg, and he took my place next to her and pressed his big round belly against the curve of hers. How could their lips even meet in such conditions! I have no idea, because at this point of the dream turned nightmare, I was back in the middle of the lake, where a horde of John Does, galvanized by fear, were riding in my direction.

  “Marilyn Monroe,” I whispered, and Anita headed my way from the fan on the bedroom floor that was making her skirt whirl up as in the famous photo of the Monroe, a radiant smile on her raspberry lips. And then she struck Marilyn’s pose, coyly holding her skirt down over her knees and swinging her hips out. That’s when I stopped her; when I said, “Stop, Anita, whoa, stop, change of character.” Irritated by my abrupt tone, Anita switched off her smile, tucked her butt in, and then the fan made her skirt fly up again, revealing her fake-leopard underwear and completely breaking the spell my command had already discombobulated, because I couldn’t imagine Marilyn Monroe wearing underwear like that, unless she was playing a girl in the jungle, a role to which, happily, she’d not been lowered.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Sorry, it’s just your underwear.” So, naturally, she wanted to know what was the problem with her panties, which led to an endless discussion in which I ended up conceding that her panties were perfect, even though I was lying, even though she knew I was lying, and eventually I agreed to start the Marilyn scene over
to make her happy, but my heart wasn’t really in it. I swore to myself that never again — even if the comment in question was measured, subtle, delicate, and nuanced — would I remark on any part of a woman’s anatomy or any item of her dress.

  It was one of the first things I’d learned when I’d starting encountering the fragility of the opposite sex — to shut my mouth, to not point out to a girl impatiently waiting for your positive appreciation that a lock of hair is misbehaving, or that her new dress is maybe a little, oh, just a teensy bit revealing. But spending time with Jeff and Bob, who were less sensitive about their physique, had made me forget this golden rule. The modelling session fizzled out, Marilyn was swallowed up by Anita’s leopard-print underwear, and I proposed other imitations to Anita but in vain; she had turned into a waxwork because she adored Marilyn, she idolized Marilyn, and she’d long been ready to act out the scene which she had, I have to admit, reproduced with a certain amount of talent. I even suggested the greats — Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai, Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder, Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard — but only managed to increase her resentment. I’d tarnished Anita’s sense of her own sex appeal, and this, I took from her silence, was the worst thing you could do to a woman.

  It was the fourth time Anita and I had met up, and we’d invented this game at our second meeting, when we’d discovered a shared love of cinema that had quickly transformed our client-whore relationship into something a little less ornery. Of course, she still expected remuneration, and of course I still always did what I was paying for. But we’d added a playful aspect to our relationship which had led to our becoming better playmates, you might say. Anita was bored stiff in her own backwater, caught between a pimp who was as much of a bastard as a pimp can be, and a boyfriend, if you could call him that, who, fearing reprisals from the impresario’s associates, had found a way of hitting her without leaving marks, the impresario himself unable to beat people up because of his arthritis, and who, in any case, only dirtied his hands beating his girls.