And the night carried on like that, careening between whiskey, Isabella Rossellini, and the Virgin Mary. We also discussed Anita, it goes without saying, the wound still too raw for the alcohol to be able to mitigate its burning pain. Our inebriation was such that Winslow was almost able to convince me there hadn’t been a conspiracy at all, and that if there had been a conspiracy, neither he nor Anita were mixed up in it. “It’s no longer a conspiracy,” I said, “if half the people are not involved.” Winslow took advantage of my proposition to inform me he was right, that there hadn’t been any scheming, “No fucking plot, Robert.” I think they call this kind of reasoning a petition principii, but I was too tipsy to start analyzing what he was saying. Instead, I tried to explain to Winslow that the omnipresence of Humpty Dumpty in my life was something we could no longer ignore. “Coincidence,” he said, “pure coincidence. Don’t let a fucking potato ruin your life,” and those were his last words, as soon as he’d finished he started snoring, comfortably ensconced in his chair. I managed to say, “Humpty Dumpty is not a fucking potato, Bob, he’s an egg,” and then I too fell asleep.
I was dragged out of my slumber in the early hours by a knocking at the door, still in the same position I’d been in an hour or two earlier, sitting squarely on my chair, head down and my chin touching my chest. In my dream it was Winslow, disguised as Humpty Dumpty, who was knocking on the door, but when I opened my eyes there he was snoring in front of me, chin on his chest and a thread of drool hanging down, so it couldn’t have been him outside playing the fool or pretending to be a monster. A great shiver ran through me when I realized Humpty Dumpty himself might be waiting on the other side of the black glass, but I pulled myself together and called myself every name under the sun, from drunkard to idiot, because I was ashamed that I’d knocked back too much and that my fear was irrational, if I have to spell it out. It could only be one of two people: Anita or Robbins. I kicked Winslow, who fell out of his chair whining, “No! No! Humpty Dumpty is not a potato, he’s an egg,” words that made me tremble again, dreading that my particular anxieties had penetrated Winslow’s dreamscape. But, not having the time to dwell on it, I gave the fool’s flabby flesh another kick and told him we had company. Mired in his sleepy fog, he initially begged me not to open the door, saying it was Humpty Dumpty, but then, following the same reasoning I myself had pressed into service, he smoothed his meagre hair against his head and sheepishly agreed it could only be Anita or Robbins. Nevertheless, I was a little nervous as I staggered to the door, you never know what life has in store — and I was right, I was right a hundred times over, for life is a fabric of disturbing and macabre surprises.
It was Jack Picard.
No need for me to identify him. Right off the bat, grinning, he introduced himself. “Jack Picard,” he said in a hoarse, sonorous murderer’s voice forged deep in the mysterious, hazy reaches of the underworld—such as you’d imagine, and correctly, a murderer’s voice to sound like. Civility demanded that I introduce myself in turn, though right then it seemed a little too much to ask. I stood there petrified, as had been happening a lot over the past week or two, and during the time I stood there petrified, a few questions — highly pertinent in the circumstances — crossed my mind.
Am I still asleep or am I having a major episode of delirium tremens? That was the first, the question of course launching me into a dizzying reflection on the nature of true and false, of the plausible and the burlesque, dreams and nightmares, antimatter and bosons, all concepts I’d studied. And as I couldn’t answer the first question, which contained innumerable and prickly sub-questions, my mind, in a state of high alert, bifurcated and started to consider the murderer’s manners. Since when do murderers knock before coming in, or to put it another way, since when do murderers knock on the door before knocking you off, behaviour not exactly helping their cause, because if you announce you’ve come to knock someone off by knocking at the door, the would-be knocked-off person has time to respond and surreptitiously knock off the first, so from this I deduced that Jack Picard had no intention of doing us in, or at least not immediately, because otherwise he wouldn’t have knocked before he knocked us off, or he would have knocked us off without knocking, which is basically the same thing.
It’s ridiculous, the things that run through your head when you’re terrified. While Picard stood waiting on the threshold, I wracked my brain contemplating the possibility of an immaterial being migrating from one dimension to another, or, to put it simply, about the chances of an abstraction materializing. But since when do characters from the pages of a novel leave them and move out into the tainted, volatile air of a reality whose existence nothing authenticates, thus hazarding their disappearance forever? From the time I’d entered into Mirror Lake’s gravitational field, I could see no other explanation, which brought me back to the first question and its corollaries but also to one of my recent conversations with Winslow. “What am I doing in this mess?” I sighed, and then, “Am I still asleep, am I drunk, or maybe both: am I sleeping while drunk?”
It was only when the spiral started eating its tail, and my questions started tripping each other up, that I came out of my ossified mineral state and rejoined the land of the living, the latter really no more than a figure of speech, because the more you advance in age and wisdom, the less you have any idea what wisdom means. The only person in the room who seemed to be genuinely alive was Picard. As for Winslow, he had the same expression as the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, which led my mind down another question-track. I started to wonder if this rock, and therefore any rock, had feelings, if the universe’s fate worried it, and if it was tempted to bang its head on something soft when things were going badly, me basing this postulation on the fact that rocks, not in the least frightened by hardness, must feel some kind of revulsion toward soft things. Which answered my earlier question: yes, rocks also suffer angst.
During this time, Picard was waiting, the fact of which prompted me to observe my own position in the light of our frequent propensity to assume that murderers are impatient. Actually, as far as murderers go, Picard seemed quite high up the pecking order of values regulating social relations, so I invited him to come in — as if I had a choice — and this led to Winslow opening his eyes wide in surprise, his face still petrified in the inorganic magma of the four-hundred-million-year-old rock his features had taken on.
What followed was kind of confusing, because I still hadn’t yet absorbed the fallout of the second-most memorable bender in the history of Mirror Lake. When Picard showed up, I was floundering in the muddy waters of one of those moments in which your environs alert you to their disequilibrium, in which the sight of the tiniest breadcrumb, jam stain, or morsel of potato left on a plastic tablecloth by a carelessly handled tea towel makes you resolve never to eat again. In short, I wasn’t feeling too good and, to be frank, needed a drink, which, it seemed from the evidence, was also the case for both Winslow, whose stare seemed to be fossilizing, and Picard, who was a little pale.
I found a clean glass for Picard, sat Winslow back down on his chair, signalled to Picard to have a seat, and waited stoically for him to get out his gun and tell us that we were now hostages. But he didn’t have a gun, and he wasn’t thirsty, although he was definitely hungry, hence his looking a little pale, so I told him to help himself, but that I wasn’t his maid — crazy how bold nausea can make you. If I were a hero, I’d have attacked him from behind while he was rummaging in the fridge, then tied him to his chair and phoned Robbins. Which reminded me that I hadn’t yet asked Winslow how he’d got a hold of my phone number. There’d been too much happening, I hadn’t had time to concentrate on the basics. But I wasn’t a hero, and I didn’t want to make Robbins happy — and, more germane, had no idea how to lock him in a camel clutch, bear hug, or any other fighting technique that allows you to overpower an opponent.
When I was young, around nine or ten, I’d been a pretty big wrestling fan. And then
I’d grown old, but that’s another story. Every Sunday after mass, good weather or bad, I’d sit in front of the television with my brother and watch All-Star Wrestling, featuring the Rougeau brothers, Little Beaver, Tarzan “The Boot” Tyler, Édouard Carpentier, Sky Low Low, the entire gang of cheerful lunatics knocking chairs on each other’s heads while the audience yelled for the referee to crack down on moves that threatened to ruin the show. I can still hear the shouting as the commentator started speaking. “Ladies and gentlemen, in the right corner, Jaaaaacques Rrrrrougeau!” And the crowd would go wild, my brother and I whistling and yelling, “This is awesome!” or “Ho-ly shit!” — indifferent to the anxious sighs of our mother making dinner in the next room. After the show, we started wrestling each other, which our mother didn’t like either, even if it was a ritual without which the harmony of our Sunday mornings would have been disrupted. Since I was already too stupid to stand up for myself, it was always my brother who acted the part of the good guy, and three times out of four he got to be Jacques Rougeau, nicknamed Jack, which sounded more manly, like in a Western where the real men are all identified by short, sharp monikers: Bill, Bob, Will, Jeff, Jack, Joe.
My friends and I, we were cowboys too. Real ones, right out of Hollywood studios, which was why we gave ourselves dude names that rolled off the tongue more naturally if we were brandishing our plastic revolvers or playing war — which was allowed in the old days, our parents unconsciously recognizing the value of catharsis. My name was Bob, obviously; Raynald Bolduc — Rosie’s cousin — was Ron, preferring that to Ray; Denis Bélanger was Bill, because of his father’s suspect admiration for Billy the Kid; and Yvan Lapierre was Jim, in honour of Jim Bradley, alias Jungle Jim, Yvan being his biggest fan after Ginette Rousseau, who liked to imagine herself Goddess of the Lions. I forget who the others were, but one thing is certain: we’d already been influenced by American culture. Otherwise we’d have been called Ti-Bob, Ti-Ron, Ti-Bill, Ti-Jim, according to the traditional Quebec habit of diminutives. A government proud of its linguistic heritage might have commissioned a study on the subject, but it must have been done already, everything’s been done, including the atomic bomb and Phentex slippers. We were still got called Ti- anyway, my friends and I, especially once we’d taken off our gangster costumes, our Heroes of the Wild West disguises, and returned to being friends — proof that, despite the influence of American cinema, we’d been formed in Quebec from scrap pieces of a quilted bedspread made to the sound of fiddle tunes.
All this to say that after mass and the Sunday wrestling, I fought my brother in an unfair fight in which I was invariably a bad guy like Abdullah the Butcher, Killer Khan, and others. Of course, my brother won, because he was the good guy and I was bigger and for that reason alone needed to let myself be slaughtered — this is what is known as justice — and because I really sucked at games where you let yourself be punched in the mouth without protest. And as I never gave a toss about learning how to trip somebody up, I wasn’t all that keen on the idea of attacking Jack Picard this morning. All I wanted was to find out Picard’s story so I could resolve some of the paradoxes in the questions puzzling me.
But let’s get back to Picard, who’d sat down on the other side of the table and was eating the leftover roast chicken he’d found in the fridge while I was emerging from the past. When I saw it, I quickly turned away, not wanting to suffer through the spectacle of any food being eaten — especially disgusting to someone who’s abused a liquid diet the previous night. And I noticed that Winslow had a hand in front of his mouth and was also trying to find some clean surface to look at, a sign that he was de-fossilizing but not feeling well. The problem, though, is that the human being, as is true of pretty much every other animal on the planet, has five senses, and not looking at Picard was fairly pointless as we could still hear him. Besides, the penetrating odour of cold chicken must have spread as far as Bangor, Maine, and it took all my strength to hold back the surge of bile burning my esophagus.
The most important thing to do in such circumstances is to think about something else and stay calm and still, particularly to be still. I quickly tried to find a topic to reflect on, but in vain. Usually all I need is something tiny, a little flower looking sad, a spot on the carpet, a word that sounds nostalgic, and I’m off, propelled miles away from the scene taking place in front of me. It’s a mechanism of self-defence of a kind, though it only works reflexively, thanks to an automatic internal trigger system. Try to activate it yourself and it just doesn’t work. So, given the dearth of something to think about, I diminished my expectations and reflected on precisely that — about the fact that you can think in order to avoid thinking, just as you can talk without saying anything, and do this with the nuance that thought without a subject can attribute to something that deserves to be articulated on the occasions when you actually want to speak, and if a non-thought does not become thought each time you want to express it. But nine times out of ten, the person thinking about nothing would prefer to keep quiet and focus on the void out of which he is trying to make some sort of cogitatum arise. It’s very Zen.
And Zen, that’s something to reflect on too; I might have dawdled there for a while had Winslow not fallen off his chair again when he tried to get up to go to the bathroom. Winslow didn’t have the resources I had, and evidently was unable to think about thinking nothing. I helped him stagger to the bathroom before he soiled the floor, and that’s when Jeff and Bill showed up, attracted by the smell of cold chicken, because dogs have five senses too, and I’d actually add a sixth: the good sense not to get hammered. What with everything so topsy-turvy I’d forgotten them, and I deduced from their sudden appearance that only a few tiny seconds had elapsed between the moment the fridge light clicked on and Winslow’s toppling over. I also realized that Jeff was getting older and his age was rubbing off on Bill, subsequently suffering from early-onset senility, given that neither of them had barked when Picard came into view, like a killer at dawn, behind the black glass. Looked like I needed to have a little chat with Jeff before something bad happened, and Winslow needed to talk to Bill too, to teach him not just to repeat everything Jeff said, and particularly not to keep quiet about everything Jeff didn’t say.
Jeff appeared not to want to chat, and was pretending to Picard that he was a starving dog whose master hadn’t fed him. He’s incredible in the role of beaten, neglected child. He feigns expressions that would break anyone’s heart, even a murderer’s, because murderers have hearts too, whatever people say. Otherwise they’d be zombies and incapable of killing people, unless you live in Haiti, where you’re better off not hanging out with zombies. The difference between a murderer’s and a non-murderer’s heart is that the first is a little blacker because it contains more mortal sins than other people’s. I have to say I’ve never understood the notion that all sins merit the same punishment, so that God forgives the murderer and the adulterer equally, this always striking me as particularly hard on the one who’s bumped off. As for the cuckold, well, too bad for him, all he has to do is kill his wife’s lover and then rise up to heaven to be forgiven.
But maybe God, who’s been around for an eternity, no longer takes offence at the infinite difference between good and bad. Perhaps this is where his mercy comes from, from his having seen so much and knowing we are nothing, that we are no more than the minuscule droppings of a chickadee or a sparrow. And one of the six billion bits of bird shit populating the planet was sitting in front of me, at my table, feeding my dog with my chicken, and giving me the stink-eye as though I was the asshole. “Jeff is a happy dog,” I spat in Picard’s face, and a long moan came from the bathroom to confirm it, immediately followed by a sound that was half liquid, half solid, like the sound of vegetable soup being thrown carelessly into a bowl.
You can’t spend the whole day staring each other down so, what with Picard being so phlegmatic, I was the one who lashed out.
“What do you want?” I asked.
In reply, he lifted with one hand the chicken bone he’d gnawed clean, which might have meant he’d come to flay us alive or, more simply, to eat. So I attacked from a different angle. “I know who you are,” I said, in the tone of a guy who’s seen it all before, which made him put on a smile which could have meant two things: that he didn’t care, or that my claim amused him, because do we ever really know anyone, including ourselves? If the latter, it also meant that he was something of a philosopher — like the Jack Picard of Morgan’s novel.
While I was thinking about this, a third hypothesis snuck into my mind, where, like all sneaky hypotheses, the impression it left was slight but refused to disappear completely. Could it be, this hypothesis suggested, that Jack Picard’s tendentious smile means that he takes me for an idiot and isn’t Jack Picard at all but, let’s say, John Doolittle?
This possibility made me a little nervous, because I had no way of checking who he really was short of asking to see his photo ID, which is hardly the done thing in these situations. Yet somehow I still dared to say, “Do you have an identity card with your picture on it?” The ferocious glare he gave me could have been interpreted in numerous ways, but I was sick and tired of splitting hairs, and whistled “Ode to Joy” until Picard finally opened his mouth to tell me he needed a weapon.
“I need a gun,” he said, throwing it out there as if this was the most natural thing in the world, as if he was telling me how nice the day was or that he liked grapefruit juice. If he’d said “I need a woman,” I’d have been annoyed but would have understood. Same thing if he’d said “I need a car,” “I need a boat,” or “I need a credit card.” Really, the only thing that would have disturbed me more than “I need a gun” would have been “I need you.” I should have kept to my state of non-thought because, before I was even able to open my mouth, he said it, “I need you . . .” To change the subject, I started to laugh, a nervous little laugh, jerky and nerve-grating, so that I didn’t hear the end of Picard’s sentence. Trying to control my laughter I blurted out, “Jeff is a happy dog,” which had nothing to do with the matter at hand but I needed to say something in order not to look foolish and that’s all that came to mind, along with thoughts of grapefruit juice I had no idea how to shoehorn in.
Mirror Lake Page 14
