Now I knew she was sleeping with Robbins, I had somewhat less desire to rub up against her. To be honest, I had absolutely no desire whatsoever to do so. But as I was not the sharpest knife in the block after a night’s sleep that should have been restorative but wasn’t, I experienced a moment of distraction during which Anita caught me unawares and moved her lush lips toward my frightened ones. I had no choice, and pushed her away just as her tongue was trying to find a route between my sealed lips, and I got up claiming to have dog breath, wondering as I did so where Jeff had gone now that he’d been expelled from the bed by Bambi and Bamboo, which would not be happening again. The news of Anita and Robbins’s lovemaking was still fresh, I couldn’t see myself kissing Anita as if nothing was up. It would have been the same as kissing Robbins, as a lot of his mouth bacteria must still have been in Anita’s mouth. Those little beasties live longer than rocks, cockroaches, prejudices, popes, and other indestructible creatures, and it was out of the question that I would eat that asshole’s microbial flora, even if unconsciously I had already done so more than once. The prospect was every bit as horrifying as the bloodiest scenes of my worst nightmares, and sent me rushing to the bathroom to glug down half a bottle of minty-fresh Scope. Then I took a super-long shower for the same reasons that had me stripping off the lining of the inside of my mouth.
When, eventually, I resurfaced from the bathroom there was a nice smell of fresh coffee in the air, and I noticed that Anita had used whatever she could find to make the kind of breakfast you’d only put together if you’re feeling particularly good, as all around you the opening notes of classic songs about a love you’d like to be equally lasting hang in the air. This state of affairs told me things were bad, very bad: I would have to take action before finding myself permanently stuck with not only a woman in the house but a host of elated Bambis and Bamboos too — and, who knows, a couple of ragamuffin kids I would have to properly educate as Anita washed the diapers and Winslow bounced the smaller of the two brats on his knees and tried to teach it the words to “Yankee Doodle.”
As this further vision of horror was appearing on the green and beige walls of the cottage, whose hideousness I hadn’t noticed before, Anita was humming “La vie en rose,” humming most of it and just a word or two popping up here and there, since nobody had taken the trouble to sit Anita on their lap and teach her the words. I wasn’t about to do so either, since there was nothing dolorous about her lack of knowledge. I even went the other way and started to belt out, “Bleu, bleu, l’amour est bleu,” just to annoy her; “Bleu comme le ciel qui joue dans tes yeux,” which was completely stupid, because I hate that song as much as I do the Trenet ditty where the sun meets the moon, alongside all the other drivel oozing out of a miserable genre that could actually lead Anita to believe that love had bored a hole in my stony heart, though I don’t understand at all how you can hope to convince someone that you love them while reeling off such meaningless nonsense. Why not “Blue like the sea lapping at your feet,” while you’re at it, or “like the swallow enfolding you in its wings,” and other stylistic phrases so depressing that you wonder what it would take for the person who wrote them to finally decide to kill themselves.
This particular song did, however, have the benefit of putting me in a foul mood — in other words, into a suitable frame of mind for me to tell Anita what I had to communicate to her. “Anita,” I began, biting into a piece of toast lovingly spread with jam and immediately dropping it onto my plate because the smile Anita wore as she watched me bite into the lovingly jam-spread toast lodged in my throat. But I wasn’t going to be intimidated or let myself be distracted by a sentimentalism that had no place in my life, I wasn’t about to sacrifice my emancipation from a love that wasn’t mutual, nor lasso the rope around my own neck simply to stop Anita from hanging herself with it. At the end of the day, there are limits beyond which I am not prepared to go.
“Anita,” I said again, “don’t you think, since you have a boyfriend, that it might be better to stop seeing each other?”
I’d chosen the right angle, because exactly the same thing had occurred to Anita, who didn’t think it at all moral to have two boyfriends, suggesting I was one of hers.
“Aren’t you?” she added, half questioningly, half coyly, looking at me out of the corner of her colourful eye, a half-question that I didn’t answer, her faux smile still lodged deep in my throat. Whatever the truth of it, in order to solve her moral dilemma, she’d decided to leave Robbins, and to tell him as much as soon as she saw him. I hadn’t chosen the right angle after all.
And the skies must have heard, or figured that her desire to renounce her adulterous ways could use a little aid, because this was the moment Robbins’s 4×4 chose to careen out of the verdant pines at full pelt, and now the vehicle was framed in the kitchen window in a cloud of dust as menacing as it was imbued with purpose. “Fuck,” we stammered in unison, gripping the table. “Fucking shit,” was our reprise, as Anita gathered up Bambi, Bamboo, her purse, the underwear that had been lying on the leatherette couch for two days, an orphaned shoe, and a tube of L’Oréal Cheetah lipstick. I have no idea how, with my jangling nerves, I clocked it all. Then she rushed into the bedroom while I cleared up her plate, her cup, her lovingly jam-spread toast, and chucked it all in the garbage, hang the expense, and attempted to appear impassive.
The two of us made a handsome couple working in perfect synchrony, I thought, as I moved around trying not to look as if I was in a hurry. I needed at all costs to prevent Robbins from setting foot in the cottage, filled as it was with Anita’s womanly scents, and now the time had come, because Robbins was approaching the bottom of the steps to the porch and clicking his spurred boots as he did so, like Clint Eastwood about to pepper someone with holes in a Sergio Leone movie.
“What’s going on?” I said, both to say something and to appear at ease, as I leaned in a relaxed pose on the porch railing.
Before answering, Robbins looked me straight in the eyes, or at least I assumed he did, because he was still wearing those damn Ray-Bans, and twirled the toothpick around in his mouth seven times. I envisaged the thousands of identical bacteria from his mouth that Anita had cloned and which had then immediately descended into the petri dish of my throat, where all the stomach-turning organisms were dying and multiplying, and where Anita’s smile was still lodged. Then he hitched his pants up so I could see he had balls and where they were.
It was going badly, very badly, but I tried not to show it. I leaned over the railing and nonchalantly spat on the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, to which I mentally apologized, explaining that the circumstances required some sort of manly gesture from me. After clearing his throat, which added to the nausea I was having trouble suppressing, Robbins opened his mouth full of little creatures racing around in all directions to tell me someone else had gone missing in the area and that the disappearance might have something to do with the drowned man or the dead man, depending on whether you subscribed to the thesis of one or two John Does. The second option no longer held up, given that Winslow had told me the possible second John Doe was named Jack Picard, but Robbins, unaware of my being up to speed, was nurturing what he figured was my innocence by playing up the possibility of two. Regardless, if there really was another missing man, then we were dealing with two John Does and one Jack Picard, and it all seemed a bit much. There must be some kind of rift around Mirror Lake, some kind of spatio-temporal vortex or nebulous zone, a twilight zone, and it was causing so many people to go missing that even Robbins was tempted to call it an epidemic; I could see it in the nervous way he was wiggling the toothpick.
If Winslow had been around, I’d have asked him to help me over to my rock, because I was already imagining what my nights would be like now that there was potentially one dead man and two prowlers around the lake. Or one dead man and two other dead men, since missing people have a statistically high chance of becoming dead people. Or
maybe we were dealing with one living John Doe, one dead John Doe, and one Jack Picard at large, a man capable in his ferocious dysfunction of making the Mirror Lake mortality rate shoot straight up like an arrow. But Winslow was never there when I needed him, so I gripped the handrail more tightly and asked what the police were playing at, for fuck’s sake, along with a few other clarifications. At which point Robbins revealed that the second missing person was actually a woman, a woman in her early thirties who looked like Anita Ekberg and was called Jeanne Picard . . .
“Picard . . . what a nice name . . . Picard. Hmmm, I don’t know her,” I replied, filing down the end of a fingernail on one of the porch posts. Then, prompted by nerves, I embroidered my lips with an idiotic smile, with the sole aim of keeping down the little tremors of hysterical laughter convulsing my stomach, jerky spasms like tickling. The top-left corner of my right eyelid started twitching and I covered it up by putting a hand over my face, in the pose of a guy determined not to laugh, but when hysteria comes on, you can’t control it and I was wondering how I was going to get out of the situation when young Indiana Jones ambled over and came to my rescue.
“Found nothin’, boss,” he said to Robbins nasally, and I realized Robbins had been keeping me talking as Indiana walked around the cottage in the hope of gathering clues proving Anita had passed through, but he hadn’t found anything. For once I was relieved to see him, and incredibly relieved that Robbins had been stupid enough to leave the task of searching the place to his deputy, because there were no doubt dozens of traces of Anita around the extinguished campfire alone, but Jones had espied nothing, which showed that imbecility hadn’t been invented for no reason, the planet needing its fair share of cretins to ensure social balance and the survival of the fittest.
In the moment, however, I was focusing not on Jones’s stupidity but the bag of chips he was holding, a blue and yellow bag, the Humpty Dumpty brand, that had caught my eye. It occurred to me that it had been a while since Humpty had shown up, and I realized I’d never made the link between the nursery rhyme character and the one whose smiling face, day after day for at least fifty years, had adorned thousands upon thousands of chip bags travelling across Canada and the United States of America, the moronic face penetrating the collective subconscious and insidiously invading the territory. But what shook me the most, infuriated me, was that what was taking place here was a usurpation, an appropriation of identity, a false representation, because the idiot face in question was not a potato but, as my mother said often enough, an egg, a rotten fucking egg, and yet, without anyone objecting, here he was playing the mascot of tens of thousands of pounds of sliced potatoes that every year fed the obesity of who knows how many unfortunates glued to their television screens.
As I was unable to drag my eyes away from the halfwit’s mug crumpled up on the bag of chips, Jones must have thought I was hungry. He held the bag out to me, but Robbins grabbed it on its way past, which didn’t surprise me, because Robbins would have sold his mother for the pleasure of annoying me, though it didn’t bother me because the fact of the matter is I wasn’t hungry. I was merely shaken by Humpty Dumpty’s omnipresence, which would no doubt extend into my next nightmare — unless I was already in it, what with there being no difference between nightmare and reality. But at least I wasn’t trembling any longer, which was something, so much so that I was able to answer Robbins’s bygone question: “No,” I said, “never saw this woman around here.” Robbins took a photo of Anita out of his wallet anyway, a pretty photo in which she was smiling and projecting that air of lightness I’d witnessed just a few minutes earlier, the lightness of love, so full of promise and which causes a person to see everything through a slight mist, and from this I concluded the photo was old, though this didn’t stop Anita’s contagious smile imprinting itself on my own face. “Nope, never saw her,” I repeated, Robbins wondering why I was smiling like a lunatic. “’Cause she’s pretty,” I said, forcing my smile and Anita’s down my throat, where they could stay warm, and waiting for Robbins to beat it.
Then I was the target of barely veiled threats, in the vein of “If you touch this girl, I’ll murder you,” which might have led to two dead and one missing person by the lake, or one dead and two missing, since Anita had to be removed from the list. But by this point I was only listening with one ear, because as he was promising me a terrible end, Robbins was brandishing another threat — Humpty Dumpty’s squashed, smiling face — at me, and it was clear he and I weren’t done yet. “I’ll be back,” he hollered, confirming my fears and making my nausea rise up again, because there were three or four soggy chip crumbs on his tongue, over which the innumerable tiny starving creatures living in his mouth were undoubtedly scampering back and forth, and then he left, followed by young Jones, without noticing Anita’s other orphaned shoe, camouflaged like a Maine leopard in a patch of ferns.
I waited until the 4×4 disappeared behind the greenery of the pines, muttered “Oof,” and then, in English, “Humpty Dumpty is not a fucking potato, he’s an egg,” letting all the nervous impulses racing through my body have free rein. When, finally, I was calm again, my stomach hurting from having laughed a laugh that wasn’t a laugh, I thought of Winslow, because Robbins and Jones were almost certainly going to drop by his place to show him the photo of Anita, and I shouted at her not to leave the bedroom because danger was still surrounding us. I really needed to stop Winslow from opening his great trap, but had no idea how to accomplish this. I couldn’t jump in my boat and head over to warn him, because Robbins would immediately see what I was up to. I could have tried signalling with my arms, or drums, or smoke, but given that I didn’t have a drum to hand and knew nothing about signalling, that wasn’t a great idea. Which was when the phone rang.
“Oh, the telephone!” as the cuckold in a Broadway farce would have said, but as I wasn’t the cuckold and was, for the first time, hearing the impassable mountains of Mirror Lake echo a ringing sound that belonged to another stage of my life, I thought maybe I was dreaming, because dream and reality . . . But the ringing was insistent and amplified by the mountains’ barrier, and I needed to come to: the phone, fuck! There were only three real possibilities: either it was a pollster wanting to speak to the housekeeper, i.e. the person who washes the floors and buys all the products necessary to do a bang-up job of polluting the environment, or somebody wanting to offer me a credit card that would make me rich and happy, or it was Fate calling to give me bad news. I ran inside, grabbed Anita’s hand before she could pick up the receiver, which I then picked up and put back down. If it was Fate, she’d call back. If it was everyday life at its worst — Congratulations, you’ve won a million dollars! — they would also call back, though in a few hours, which would give me time to change the number or come up with a counterstrategy.
It was Fate, because the insistent brrrring-brrrring had started again and was even louder.
“You’re not answering?” Anita asked.
“It’s Fate,” I replied. “Destiny. I have to prepare myself.” I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, picked up the receiver and said hello in French, because if it was the Fate I suspected, she would be calling direct from Quebec, her voice jerky with sobs, announcing the death of someone close to me. I’d heard Fate’s sad voice before, and from its opening sigh it numbs you from your feet to your head. I knew I would hear from Fate again, it was inevitable, really, unless I died before everyone else — make that immediately, so as not to take any chances — but I didn’t want to hear it that morning, and as I was saying “allo” I think I was praying. Actually, I don’t think, I know. Behind my deferentially shut eyes, I said, “I beg you God,” this with genuine sincerity, which is what agnostics like me do when they were brought up Christian, a yearning for God returning any time they are made to feel infinitesimally small.
“Fuck, Robert,” I heard on the other end of the line. “Don’t you answer your phone?” and God, his angels, Fate, and Misery all
disappeared under the spell of Winslow’s voice. When I look back on it today, I still think it was Fate calling, but that Winslow was the voice of my destiny, the body Fate had decided to work through. But at the time it didn’t occur to me. Relief was foremost in my mind, followed immediately by amazement: I didn’t know Winslow had a phone, so hadn’t given him my number, which I kept for emergencies. And even if I had known he owned a phone, I still wouldn’t have given him my number. But right then I was extremely happy he had it, as it meant that Fate’s despairing voice wouldn’t have to travel optical fibres from Mirror Lake to Quebec, dematerializing and rematerializing its pain and announcing to my loved ones that I’d taken the inevitable road to the void before them, sent there by an angry cop.
By this point I was pretty well dead to my loved ones anyway, since I’d taken off without a word, like a fucking asshole, leaving behind me the impression of a man incapable of facing reality, because when I refer to the pain of living, I believe in reality, it’s too painful not to be real. All this is to say they wouldn’t find the news at all surprising, and it would do no more than allow them to begin the mourning process with a body to huddle over, let their tears flow over, a bier to lower into the earth and an epitaph to write. But I could no longer really figure out what they would be able to write about me. “Robert Moreau, 1951–2004, died in a novel,” perhaps, since that’s where they always saw me fleeing love or stupidity, taking shelter in a novel, in a movie — in fiction, which they believed was different from reality, which in that instant was being channelled through Winslow’s voice bellowing into my ear, and I hadn’t even had a chance to express my surprise because Bobby was all shaken up.
Mirror Lake Page 11
