Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Afterwards Anita yelled at me. Not because I didn’t come, she didn’t care about that, but because I’d rushed her.

  “I’m not a whor —” she started, but stopped after the first four letters, aware that the denial, in her mouth, was not entirely plausible. She was right, though. Outside her hours of work, she wasn’t a whore. Some people’s work lives do spill over into their private lives, they carry on evaluating increases in mortgage rates while they’re watching TV, or trying to find a solution to a plumbing problem or to a grammar puzzle even after turning the lights off, bringing their preoccupations into their dreams, cereal bowls, or the shower, but I could see Anita wasn’t like that. As soon as she closed shop, so to speak, she was a woman, plain and simple, no more or less annoying than any other, if a little less content, and after closing time she was free to behave like women in more ordinary walks of life, as was her wont. But her job still coursed through the heads of men writing dirty scripts, even in the shower, which was effectively useless because it didn’t erase the words.

  I was a complete idiot and didn’t have the right to make Anita uncomfortable, not here, not now — never, really, whore or not — and it took me a little while to be forgiven, but I managed to get there a little duplicitously by using Bambi and Bamboo, asking which was which, because nothing looks more like a Bambi than a Bamboo, and seeming interested in their story. “What part of Mozambique did you say, again?” And when I asked her about their names, she opened her eyes wide and looked at me, as if to say, Bambi and Bamboo, you dunce, so I specified, “Their surname, Anita, I’d really like to know their surname, and your real first name too, if possible.”

  A little signal flashing Danger! Danger! Danger! started blinking in her suddenly less-open eyes, the tension of the swollen eyelid signalling fear, the fear of getting too involved, of entering too deeply into the deadly territory of intimacy. She was ready to offer up her body and a piece of her past in the guise of Bambi and Bamboo, but showing me the ordinary girl, the Rose Bolduc or Ginette Rousseau hiding behind her pseudonym, was more difficult, more compromising, so I left her in peace.

  A half-hour or so later, as she mechanically twirled a lock of hair around her index finger, she murmured “Jeanne” in her thick Maine accent. “Jeanne Picard.”

  I was thinking of other things at the time, about the solitude of big spaces, maybe, about herds of caribou grazing in the Labrador tundra, about polar bears sunning themselves on ice floes while they can because the ice floes are melting as we watch, hurricanes raging out of control, and the ozone layer has decided to mosey off somewhere else altogether. I did actually envy those bears. I’d have liked to be one, terrifying people in order to be left in peace — let me eat my damn fish without telling me about the levels of mercury or any other nasty things working their way up the food chain to poison our existence! But that worried Anita, and I heard “Jeanne,” a quiet, softly spoken little “Jeanne,” as I was watching a polar bear travelling, its flesh swaying in the dull silence of a whiteness we used to think was eternal.

  “Jeanne Picard,” she carried on, and the polar bear disappeared into a gap in the Arctic ice. “Jeanne Picard, it’s a shitty name, no one pronounces it right.” It was because of her mother, or really her grandmother who left Quebec when she was four, when her father, the grandmother’s father that is, thumped the table and announced they were moving to the States, where he thought hell would be less forbidding.

  “A shitty name,” she repeated, staring at her big toe. Which I was also staring at, thinking that big toes and small toes are the weirdest part of women’s bodies. Hers reminded me of my third sister Viv’s big toe. According to Lou, my second sister in descending chronological order, Viv’s big toe looked like Céline Dion. She’d noticed the resemblance shortly before I left Quebec, and ever since I had been unable to contemplate Céline without seeing a big toe, which I found depressing, just like her songs, because to my mind she has a big toe for a head. But what was worrying me most under the Mirror Lake skies was the accumulation of coincidences I’d been puzzling over and failing to explain. It was definitely strange that Anita had the same surname as Jack Picard, the protagonist in Morgan’s novel, The Maine Attraction, a detail I’d almost forgotten. Maybe he was a great-uncle or a distant cousin, I thought, before deciding I was being stupid. How could Jeanne have any relationship whatsoever with a character from a novel? Be that as it may, I didn’t like coincidences of that kind, not here at Mirror Lake. “Jeanne Picard,” I repeated, looking her straight in the eyes, even if I had trouble seeing anything but the swelling around one of them, less mauve and more green than the day before, and she nodded, adding quietly that she would prefer it if I carried on calling her Anita, Anita Swanson, which henceforth would be Bambi and Bamboo’s surname too: Bambi and Bamboo Swanson.

  That worked out well. I had nothing against the Picards generally speaking, but Swanson seemed more attractive to me, more poetic, and I liked the relationship the name established between all the Swansons of the world and the oversized white birds singing of death on misty ponds. “Anita Swanson,” I murmured, imagining the heavy rustling of the wings of a cygnet taking off from the twilit waters, and then I went out for a walk, followed by the echo of all the real and imaginary names proliferating on Mirror Lake’s overpopulated shores: Jeanne, John, Bob, Bill, Jeff, Jack; Jeanne, John, Bob, Bill, Bobby, Jeff, Jack . . .

  It took Winslow’s arrival, as he cheerfully rowed himself over in his green boat, for me to decide Picard must be a more popular name than I’d imagined south of the 49th parallel. There could be no other explanation. The coincidence was due to either immigration or blind chance. I preferred immigration because chance, when it occurs too often, usually means the devil, and I didn’t want the devil to be behind all this, absolutely not. I didn’t want to talk to Lucifer, Beelzebub, or any one of their descendants. I would much rather talk to Bob Winslow, who was hauling his fat carcass out of his boat and asking me, with a wink, if I’d had a good night.

  “It wasn’t a night,” I replied dryly. “It was a day, we went to bed at dawn and it was fucking good, thank you.”

  Then I noticed that another night was about to fall, that another sky speckled with the unknown was going to overwhelm us and we couldn’t do anything about it, we couldn’t do anything about anything, Winslow then proving this to the power of ten by announcing that he’d discovered the missing man’s identity in a newspaper, “the man from the photos, you know.” It turned out he was a prison escapee named Jack Picard, explained Winslow as he waved the newspaper article at me.

  I don’t know why, but the news barely surprised me. I could see it without reading the article, Jack Picard’s name in capital letters, his jovial killer’s mug with his prisoner number underneath, and all of it seemed normal, in the regular order of things. What disconcerted me was the fact that Winslow wasn’t incredibly surprised.

  “Don’t you realize this man, this missing person, this Jack Picard, has the same fucking name as one of Morgan’s characters?” I pointed out.

  “Yes,” answered the moron moronically.

  “Don’t you realize either,” I said, more emphatically, “that this man is also a fucking inmate, Bob, a fucking criminal, like Morgan’s Jack Picard?”

  “Yes, but so what?” he replied, with stunning naivety. “Coincidence. Such is life.”

  “Coincidence?” I said, and my voice must have gone up at least sixteen octaves.

  “Yes.” The moron shrugged, as if he thought it totally normal that the bloodthirsty mother-killer Jack Picard had come out of Morgan’s novel to take a trip to Mirror Lake.

  “Coincidence, you said?” And this time I was screaming. “Don’t answer again, it’s not a question, post hoc ergo propter hoc.” I must admit I was starting to get annoyed, and when I’m annoyed, I don’t know why — maybe teenage trauma — the rudiments of Latin I learned from the Brothers of the Sacred Heart ha
ve a tendency to surface. Unlike normal people, I don’t lose my Latin, I find it, but all scrambled and disordered, without any respect for syntax, punctuation, or the logic of the words, and I say any old thing. “Sapiens nihil affirmat quod non probet,” I threw out at Winslow, challenging him to prove to me what he was saying, then “Quis, quid, ubi, quomodo, quando, eh?” which shut him up as I carried on with a sincere “Audi alteram partem,” and then Winslow replied that I could yell all I wanted in a dead language, he was sure he’d seen this man before.

  “But you can’t have seen this man, Bob! Jack Picard is a character from a novel, and a character from a novel has no face, no substance, like a ghost.”

  “How would you know?” he demanded.

  “How would I know? How would I know? I’ve never written a novel, but I’ve read enough of them to know that a formulaic phrase like ‘the deep black of his slanted eyes in the oval of his youthful face’ is no indication the author used a living model. How would I know that you’ve never seen this man before, Bob? There are no pictures in a novel, Bob, not a damn one!”

  And to this, the idiot answered, “So what?” and proceeded to give me a treatise on metaphors. According to him, Morgan was a fucking good writer, good enough to evoke faces, landscapes, atmospheres, stratospheres, rivers, oceans, volcanic eruptions, earth tremors, love troubles, and other states of mind in the attentive reader simply by using words. And as this was the case, Morgan would certainly have been able to paint a portrait that looked very much like Picard. “Isn’t that what literature’s all about?” he concluded definitively, scrutinizing me like a little lawyer.

  “Stop, Bob,” I said. “Whoa, on arrête right there.” The entire ridiculous conversation was resting on a flawed argument, I said, trying hard to prove it to him. “Victor Morgan died more than fifty years ago, Bob, he can’t possibly have known the Jack Picard in the photographs. And characters from books stay in them, they don’t leave. They can go in but can’t come out, baptême!”

  I must have shouted a bit too loudly, that or offended her beliefs, because Anita came out onto the porch just then, with Bambi in one arm and Bamboo in the other, or maybe it was the other way around, to see what was going on. We quickly brought her up to speed, Winslow with his frankness, me with my recent headache, and explained we were talking about a man who’d gone missing in the area, a prisoner on the run. Someone who might be distantly related to her, I said, but she stopped us with a little wave, which was one of her habits, held Bambi and Bamboo up to her left breast, and told us she knew all about it, her boyfriend was a cop and sometimes let her in on a few details about current inquiries.

  A cop?! . . . I widened my eyes and turned to Winslow, hoping to convey to him that I needed the crutch of a log or a rock, quick, that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to stay standing, and he led me to the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, with which I was immediately going to make up, hoping its Devonian wisdom would allow me to keep my calm. “So,” I said slowly, after reassuring myself that the rock was up to the task and swallowing the little bit of saliva left in my mouth, tucked in that little pocket between gum and cheek, “your boyfriend is a cop?”

  “Yes,” she said. “So what?”

  There wasn’t actually any problem, no big deal and nothing to quibble over, though I was sure to chew in half with my very own teeth the next person who said “So what?” to me. Be that as it may, I was becoming irritable for no reason, everyone knows dirty cops always have a whore within reach so they can be paid in kind for all the petty law-breaking they overlook. And everyone knows cops, and especially dirty cops, learn to hit without leaving any marks. It’s not John, it’s Jack, everyone knows it, everyone knows the archetype, why was I even irritated by it?

  At this point in my deep reflections, I still had no idea if Anita’s boyfriend was a cop in Arkansas or whether he was Robbins or the priceless Indiana Jones. If I’d had a choice, I’d have preferred to keep on being in the dark, but I didn’t have a choice: I had to find out.

  “Don’t tell me your boyfriend is Tim Robbins,” I muttered between a pair of deep breaths, and the suggestion made Anita burst out laughing because she too thought her boyfriend resembled Tim Robbins a bit. So there we go, that made three of us who thought so. What a marvellous litany of unexpectedly interwoven connections. All of which confirmed either that John Paquette, since that was his real name, really did look like Tim Robbins, or that the latter was just a really good actor, which I couldn’t give a flying fuck about, even though I didn’t know what a flying fuck was and didn’t want to.

  I went to bed to sleep on it, accompanied by my headache really making itself at home, and by Jeff, who hadn’t said a word all day. I left Winslow and Anita’s shadows to disappear into the night, along with that of Jack Picard, who was prowling around the woods of Mirror Lake, and John Doe, who might well be called Jack Picard and was no longer prowling. Fuckety fuck and turlututu.

  The difference between dream and nightmare, between nightmare and reality, between reality and fiction, is sometimes small — as thin as a piece of translucent paper darkened by printed characters or not. It’s so small we no longer know what to call that space-time in which we strut and fret while the great cosmic machine continues to breathe to the rhythm of the expansions and contractions of the universe, big-bang, bang-big, and all this without ever being concerned in the slightest with our questions. Because the universe has no concerns, doesn’t ask itself questions, is happy just being — like rocks, clouds, rain — all the things that, fortunately, don’t think, because if they did we might have a little problem.

  What would come to pass if, one day, the rocks decided they’d had enough and inflicted the same mistreatments on us that we’ve been subjecting them to for millennia — like in those movies where Mother Nature decides she’s had a gutful, and a hurricane, an ant colony, or a reptile armada, to give just a few examples, destroys everything in its path with the exception of the heroes. The pure people, in other words. The people who don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t take drugs, aren’t gay, don’t cheat on their wife, and don’t succumb to all those little pleasures of this short life. The rocks movie could be called The Great Stoning or Revenge of the Rocks. If I was given a part in it, I’d be one of the first to die, beaten at full force by a swarm of insanely angry crushed stones. Maybe the four-hundred-million-year-old rock would try to protect me, because the two of us had become friends once we’d got past the initial misunderstandings of any normal relationship, but still I would die pretty early on. I’d be one of those characters who have to be sacrificed so that credibility and morality can stay intact.

  But, after all, I wasn’t in a movie, I was in real life, in a void which was weirdly starting to look like a horror story or science fiction, proof there’s no difference, really, that reality and fiction are the same and that everything is connected, intermingled, mutually destructive, and in a big shapeless jumble. Besides, ever since Jack Picard had emerged from the pages of Victor Morgan’s novel to come prance around the Mirror Lake woods, I’d banished the words reality and fiction from my vocabulary and ceased wondering if what was happening to me was real, or if it all belonged in an endless nightmare. Maybe one spring morning, lying at the edge of the lake amid the heartbreaking lament of the loons and the soft jangling of Winslow’s chimes, I would extricate my stiffened limbs from this nightmare. I wouldn’t even have made Winslow’s acquaintance yet, apart from maybe noticing or inventing him in my dreams, from which he’d rise up with unrelenting joviality and the nightmare would start over and the spiral of time would keep biting its tail, all the while gorging on our shitty little existences and spitting us out into the void before we could even ask what reality is, which is, when all’s said and done, a totally pointless question, given that reality doesn’t exist any more than fiction does. Period. Nothing exists but a muddle of chances, a tangle of probable and improbable causes, and all you can do is work out h
ow to make yourself a life with that.

  In the meantime, I had a few problems to solve, starting with Anita.

  When, the day after the evening when I’d deduced we were all swimming in the same libidinous ocean, I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was Bambi, or was it Bamboo, resting next to Anita on my pillow. Then I discerned one big black eye and a smaller tricoloured one watching me tenderly — another case for nightmare and reality being one and the same, because if there’s something I hate above all else, it’s waking up next to a person staring at me with limpid eyes and appearing, in the silence, to be quietly considering a host of things about the man who, just a few moments before, was hiding behind his shut eyelids and drooling on the pillow.

  A wave of morning exasperation rose inside me, which I managed to hold back by biting my cheeks. What should have been a night of restorative sleep had not relieved my headache at all, and there is nothing worse for an incipient headache than morning irritation. And I was also aware of Anita’s hypersensitivity, highly likely to increase headaches. So I dug my molars deep into the skin inside my cheeks and, trying to approximate a smile, gently placed Bambi or Bamboo above Anita’s head. And given that a genuine smile is impossible when you’re chewing your own flesh, I tried to conceive of a way of getting out of bed without needing to touch her.