Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  As for the rest of us, we stayed fixed to the spot, as though we were on a postage stamp — or, more accurately, in a film still — and we waited for the 4×4’s roaring to die away before we moved. It was actually Picard who started the movie rolling again by coming out of the bedroom with Anita’s orphaned shoe, the other one still waiting for its parent or Prince Charming in the ferny copse near the cottage. Picard wanted to know where the woman whose perfume permeated the closet was hiding because, he said, he needed a woman.

  “I need a woman,” he groaned lustily, words I’d have made him take back had Anita been there, but she wasn’t any longer, which I told him. She was gone forever, I said, looking down upon the miserable memories stirred in me by the abandoned shoe, no doubt deliberately forgotten due to some sort of Freudian slip.

  When I was lifted out of my reverie, I heard Winslow, the traitor, murmuring, “. . . in love with her,” while Artie’s eyes got damp. I protested, saying I was no more in love with Anita than with Artie, walking over to plant the two kisses I owed him on his cheeks. My deed contradicted my words, but in truth I wasn’t contradicting myself, which everyone understood, including Artie.

  “What’s going on now?” someone said. “I’m getting out of here,” answered Picard, gathering up his things and my car keys, which I tried to get back despite the Magnum’s sinister maw pointing at me. “I need a car,” he declared, in a voice that brooked no refusal.

  I refused anyway, telling him Robbins would catch him before he’d even buckled his seatbelt. “Robbins suspects something, and he’s keeping an eye on us.” No doubt Robbins was lying in wait at the top of the road for Picard to show. “And what about Artie,” I added. “How am I going to take him back to the three Jacks if I don’t have a car?” I was pretty sure they’d not be pleased seeing him arrive on foot three days later.

  “I can stay,” said Artie quickly. He would have liked to change his life and move to the lake with dogs, friends, and birds, but was unaware just how wild nature was, how deceptive her gentleness.

  All of which had no effect on Picard and the plan he had in mind: Artie would drive, and he’d hide in the trunk. It was yet another crazy scheme bound to fail, but I stayed mum, as doing otherwise would have been a waste of saliva. Artie said his goodbyes to Ping and told him to behave, patted Jeff’s big head, Bill’s middle-sized head, and then left with his shoulders bowed, haunted by the images of a dream snatched away as soon as he’d sketched it.

  “And don’t forget, you’re mute,” I reminded him, in case they met Robbins, as they most certainly would, and to show me that he’d understood — I could see as much in the subtle smile playing in the corners of his chestnut eyes — he didn’t answer. I have to confess, I would miss Artie. I didn’t recognize myself anymore. Even though I had, since time immemorial, resolved to hate the entire world, it had only taken a few hours for me to grow attached to a brute with the blood of two kids on his hands, and whose feet were no doubt soaked in the brains of a few other strangers. I was getting soft, just like Jeff, and needed to have a serious word with myself.

  After they’d left, the cottage seemed empty and sad — like after a party, when all that’s left in a messy house is women’s fickle perfume and the memory of laughter, of a congenial voice and the clinking of glasses. So I offered Winslow one last drink, because he was a little gloomy as well and needed a pick-me-up. Whatever guilt I may have been feeling about my mild alcoholism would abate by morning. We sat back down at the table with Ping and the cold chicken, Bill and Jeff at our feet, and threw them a few scraps of the brown meat because Picard had eaten all the white, and took stock of the never-ending day.

  “In Morgan’s novel, what happened next?” I asked Winslow. Nothing. He didn’t know, he said. The first part finished like that, with Picard’s departure, and he couldn’t remember what happened next because he’d read it one morning after a night before and needed to reread it when he was sober. For a moment I was afraid this would be the end for us too, that nothing lay ahead of us, the lights were going out, the cottage was disappearing, the lake emptying, and the mountains flattening out and transforming the landscape into a long, arid purgatory. But we weren’t in a novel, we were in a nightmare, as I kept repeating to myself.

  Winslow was irritated. “Stop asking me about the novel, Robert, we’re not in a fucking novel.”

  The dawn rose on his wise words, because it was time, and, because it has to rise at some time or other, a cuckoo woke up, and a loon started its lament as beautiful as the beginning of the world, as desirable as the end of time.

  II.

  Second Beginning

  During the days that followed Picard’s turbulent irruption, Jeff was able to enjoy a degree of peace, though I was not. I spent much of my time scrutinizing the lake, the gravel road, the endless trees in the forest, certain that at any moment I would see Jack Picard’s hirsute head behind a yellow birch I’d been scrutinizing suspiciously, Artie’s bulging eyes in the trembling shadows, John Doe’s eroded features in the vaporous cloud of mist that rose each morning from Mirror Lake, and then Anita’s black eye in the foliage of a bush just a little more disturbed than you would expect it to be. Basically, if it hadn’t already happened, I went crazy.

  I strode around the lake muttering old-fashioned words like turbulence, turpitude, and tribulation that I’d found in some small compartment of memory where I store things that might be useful during a disaster. These three words epitomized, to my depressed mind, the collapse of the pitiful Eden that my propensity to dream had led me to imagine inhabited the shores of this heaven-cursed lake. If I’d lived in an earlier century, I’d have written tearful letters deploring the torments brought about by prideful man’s foolish desire to return to some kind of original purity he does not merit. It would have been a relief to lament in a style that wasn’t my own, knowing that someone, across the seas or over a border, was waiting for the faded envelope in which my pain burned. But I was born in the wrong epoch, in the era of messages that are coded, laconic, efficient, and stuffed full of mistakes, and which travel at the speed of lightning, without leaving any time to be tempted to mope. So I walked up and down the beach muttering, and wrote words in the sand that nobody — including me — used or understood anymore, if only to alter my thoughts and put out of mind that life was nothing but tribulation.

  “Turpitude,” Winslow said in his Maine accent the first time he came to read my beach. And then, to rattle me a little, he said, “Tut-tut, Robert.” He could see I wasn’t doing well, because you don’t write words like turpitude when your head’s in the right place. But I needed more than a morale-boosting tut-tut for me to regain control of my chaotic life, and this was obvious to Winslow, so he tried suggesting a range of activities from pétanque to Monopoly via ping-pong and water polo. But the whole affair was pointless. Even the Pink Lady game got no reaction from me. Winslow tried with red, mauve, and green, which contained infinite possibilities, but the mechanism had broken after the encounter with the Daltons and Picard. “Green as Graham,” he chortled, proud of his subtlety, in front of his chilly audience. “Green as the magnificent mountains,” he bellowed at the top of his voice, while I sank down into my turpitude in the sand. Tains, tains, tains, responded the green mountains, lending him a hand. But in vain. It didn’t work. I was depressed. On the lookout and depressed.

  If I’d been at all sensible, I’d have made the most of this restful period and nursed myself back to health. I’d have played in the woods with Jeff, raced to the lake for no reason except that the lake was there, the water beautiful, and the summer splendid. Strictly from the viewpoint of temperature, you could say the summer was outdoing itself, proving itself worthy of all the hopes I’d bestowed on it while I’d been shivering through the last months of winter, my nose glued to a window behind which all of Quebec waited, year in and year out, to see if perhaps this time there’d actually be a thaw before the snow re
turned. I can even recall standing behind a window like this and blowing on my reddened fingers and shamefully rejoicing at the prospect of global warming. I know climate change is not a good thing, and of course I don’t want to deliberately contribute to glaciers melting or the triggering of hurricanes and tsunamis but, as some of this has already happened, I’d thought, why not enjoy it a bit before we die? Feeling guilty about a situation whose consequences I couldn’t reverse seemed as futile as refusing to eat Winslow’s fish once it was on my plate. You have to act in advance. When it’s dead, it’s dead. You might as well eat.

  All this to say that since summer was here in all its splendour, I could have made a little effort to behave normally and consume the meal before me while it was still hot. But no: experience and my natural mistrust convinced me the situation was too good to last. Undoubtedly I wasn’t catching the rumbling beneath the blissful silence that had finally fallen over Mirror Lake, its shimmering blue water a screen that was blinding me. I would pay dearly for any lapse in vigilance.

  So I kept watch, I was apprehensive, I anticipated the unknown as Jeff chased squirrels, and Winslow, who’d given up on the reappearance of a smile on my face that only blossomed when I was annoyed, tanned his flabby body as he let his fishing rod dangle gently over the edge of his boat, just in case. As for the fish, whose mute cries accompanied my complaints, now would have been the time to act; I could have dismantled his fishing rod, tangled his line up around a branch, and stolen his hooks, but I was too beleaguered about the state of my own pathetic existence to worry over the destiny of other creatures. That’s how catastrophes happen. One minute you’re gazing at your navel and then . . . boom! You’re coshed in the back of the head. By the time you come to, the floor of the oceans has been scraped clean and the Gulf Stream has decided to see what it’s like somewhere else. Too bad for us, and all the worse for the generations who will or will not come after.

  In sum, instead of getting on with things, I waited for the threatening clouds gathering on the horizon of my near future to fall on me with an infernal roar or, more likely, in the form of a disagreeable endless drizzle, the parade of crazies treading the soil around Mirror Lake having given me a taste of this apocalyptic vision. If I’d been clever, for want of being wise — though I do think the two qualities go together — I’d have read Morgan’s novel to see what happened in it. But I was too afraid of discovering I wasn’t who I thought I was, and that I had, in a parallel life, committed some crime I’d completely forgotten. I did try several times to open the wretched book, but every time I came across the words Humpty Dumpty or Robert I closed it again, as if shutting a door to keep hordes of vermin out, and ran to jump in the lake, though without reaping any of the benefits of a healthy swim.

  After having demonstrated all the symptoms of a man in love, now I was presenting those of someone suffering from a raging depression, and who knows what depths I might have sunk to had the future not been hastened by an incidental event. Essentially, I was doing so badly at that time that on the day I heard Robbins’s 4×4 sending the gravel flying on the road I actually felt an enormous sense of relief: the dreaded calamity was finally here, my wait hadn’t been in vain, I could let the tension dissipate.

  I was in the cottage making myself a sandwich and telling Ping the story of Cinderella, into which I’d introduced a few variations by switching the pumpkin for a squash, the stepmother for a food processor, Cinderella for a carrot, and Prince Charming for you-know-who, this after wondering, quite legitimately, whether there were male and female onions. Since I’d not been able to come up with an answer to the question, I resorted to my gastronomic knowledge and decided that any marriage between a carrot and an onion would, by and large, have a good result. I wouldn’t have bet my shirt on the healthy issue of such a union, but I could alter the outcome of the story; two heroes don’t have to procreate in order for us to believe in their happiness. All this deployment of a mad imagination just to try to cheer up Ping, who was looking worryingly pale! He was wasting away day by day — softening, in fact, transforming into something alarmingly limp. I’d even noticed that a tiny green mark had appeared on his golden pelt, near his little onion bum. I didn’t make a fuss, Ping was just an onion after all, and I wasn’t that crazy, but he’d kept me company in my misery and I was attached to him in the way anyone would become attached to a plant that offers its sleepy leaves up to the sun and says hello to you every morning. And, if it made me feel better, why shouldn’t I talk to my onion? Ping did indeed make me feel better. There was something peaceful about him, something marvellously uncomplicated, not to mention that Ping was a wonderful listener who never complained.

  So there I was, telling him the story of Cinderella and not sure if I should hand the role of fairy godmother to a tomato or an asparagus stalk, which would lead, on the one hand, to a chubby, snickering fairy, and on the other to a skinny but rather juicy one. I was vacillating between tomato fairy and asparagus fairy when I heard the squealing of tires I’d have recognized anywhere. Leaving Ping contemplating, in a blissful state, the beauty of a Cinderella that would truly blossom only after a good wash, I went to the window to make sure that my desire for the tragedy to unfold wasn’t playing tricks on me. It wasn’t. The 4×4 was indeed there, its angular form taking shape in the August sun as the cloud of dust it had raised started to settle.

  “We have company,” I whispered in Ping’s direction, but Jeff was the one who reacted, delighted that something was happening at last. He rushed to the door, barking rabidly. “Good dog,” I said in appreciation, opening the door in the hope that he would rush over and assault the intruder. It was a lot to ask, but fine, at least he’d barked, and that was something.

  “Hi,” I said to Robbins, almost gaily. “Who disappeared today?”

  Hypnotized by something at the centre of the thicket on which his Ray-Bans were trained, Robbins behaved as if I didn’t exist, poked up a little pile of black earth with the toe of his boot, and dove behind the clump of trees. Irritated that Robbins was ignoring me, but curious to learn what had caught his attention, I called out a bit more loudly, “Hi! What brings you here on such a wonderful day?”

  Mucor ramosissimus, answered the thicket. At first I figured it was the name of the new missing person — a Greek or Slavic name, the sound of it implied, which suggested a change from the roll call of what had been, until now, local missing persons. At least we’d not have a second John Doe who would turn out, later on, not to be an authentic John Doe. But it did occur to me that if Mucor Ramossisimus had died in the thicket, then he must have been a very diminutive Greek, because otherwise his feet would have been visible to one side or the other. I was right on that point — Mucor Ramosissimus was small, but he wasn’t Greek, or so I concluded when Robbins started to brandish a mushroom at me from behind the thicket. I was an idiot, I decided — this preferable to letting Robbins take on the job. I told myself my Latin was a little rusty, as was everything else I’d conceded to whatever fate the passage of time and the seasons had in store for me.

  Which is all it took for an inexpressible sadness to insinuate itself into the blue of the sky, and for the shushing of the little waves lapping at the shore to be tainted with the melancholy of too-clear days when nothing evades the lucid scrutiny of a soul perceiving the vanity — but also fragility — of everything. “The price of depression,” I said, “even if I can’t afford it,” the whole universe then deciding to join in. The little waves were obviously demoralized, the birds seemed as if they had only learned to sing to express the depth of my dejection, and the wind, carrying the plaintive moan of a harmonica afflicted with despair, was clearly in need of something fortifying.

  As for Robbins, he was chomping away on his mushroom with the superior attitude of someone with nothing else to do, and I secretly but violently wished that he would start to convulse and spit up green foam as he succumbed to a terrible suffering. But no, it seemed Mucor
ramosissimus wasn’t poisonous and that Robbins knew what he was doing — or he didn’t know what he was doing at all and had got his mushrooms mixed up. While he was excavating his molars with a toothpick — the man could really be gross — I asked him again what had brought him to my place. If nobody had died, then the tragedy I’d been anticipating had changed and taken on an unfamiliar form.

  “Anita,” he said, as he speared a piece of mushroom with the tip of his toothpick — super gross — “Anita, which is to say Jeanne.” He must have learned from Jeanne that she’d swapped her name for Anita. The day already seemed sad enough without bringing women into it, but apparently I wasn’t the one who got to decide. In principle, and if I’d been smart, I would have told him I didn’t know an Anita and asked, “Anita who? Anita what? Which Anita?” But because I was depressed I burst into tears and whined like a fool that I missed her. By way of consoling me, Robbins grabbed me by the collar and spat in my face, saying that if I ever went within ten feet of her again, he’d kill me. Then he raised his arm in the direction of his 4×4 and Anita, who must have been lying on the back seat, or was maybe hiding behind some sort of scrim that had taken on the colours of its surroundings, got out of the patrol car with her head down, mumbling that she’d just come to pick up a few things she’d left at my place.

  Seeing her, I should have flown into a rage — this woman had betrayed me, for God’s sake. But I was depressed, as I’ve said. I gulped down a last sob and told her to take whatever she wanted except for Ping, the rotting onion sitting on the kitchen counter next to the half-eaten cheese sandwich which would end its days in Jeff’s welcoming stomach or the garbage. Then I went down to sit by the lake, where a boat was gently gliding in our direction, laden with one Winslow, happy as a lark and whistling something like sassessissou, sassessissam, sassili. He’d seen I’d had a visitor and, knowing my mental state was teetering on the edge of suicidal, had decided to come over and keep an eye on me in case I opted to hang out with John Doe at the bottom of the lake once Robbins left with Anita, whom Winslow had somehow spotted behind the scrim where she’d been hiding just two minutes earlier.