Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  “Why?” I remember shouting, turning pale as I did so and wondering where the blood goes once you’ve taken on the pallor that comes to anyone when the body has been emptied of the liquid circulating in your veins since birth; it’s unbelievable when you think about it, all this old blood continuing to make its way through our bodies’ arterial networks for decades without ever letting up.

  “Why?” I repeated.

  “Because you’re dangerous,” Winslow answered slowly, as his blood flowed back to that undetermined part of the human anatomy where anxiety holds it until things settle.

  “Hang on, Bob, you can’t throw me out like an old shoe just because Anita’s been deranged by this Victor Morgan stuff. Morgan wasn’t even dead when I was born — no, I mean he was dead when I wasn’t born or, if you prefer, he died before I was even born, which is to say he was absolutely dead, right, so couldn’t have possibly known that I’d be born, unless he knew my mother when she was at school and learned from her that she’d become pregnant with me. Are you crazy, Bob?!”

  “Writers are visionaries,” he replied gravely, unaware that he was passing the time by contradicting himself vis-à-vis the power of fiction and the relative freedom of those who create it. “Read it for yourself,” he added, holding the book out to me. At first I refused to look at a single page of that garbage, promising myself that as soon as this was all over, I’d round up all existing copies of the novel, copies of a book that was sick and deserved to be destroyed, and make an enormous bonfire out of them — a howling pyre, an auto-da-fé of all the demons, like in Fahrenheit 451, the difference being that I would be justified in reducing to ashes such a heap of deceitful flights of fancy generating dissension, tit-for-tat misunderstandings, and putting outrageous ideas into the heads of reasonably normal people,.

  “I said you were dangerous,” Winslow repeated, having read my thoughts again. The blood that had taken refuge in a clandestine pocket of my circulatory system rose up to my face like a tide that could no longer be contained, and I turned as red as a peony. I know I did: red as a hot peony, a stewed tomato, a brand-new Christmas stocking. I’d let myself get carried away, Winslow was right. But be that as it may, I too was right, because if my brain really was coming up with dangerous ideas, then wasn’t this the fault of Morgan’s novel? No, my brain answered, you haven’t even read the damn book. It’s simply ambient madness sending you off the rails: calm down, control yourself. So I did, I controlled myself like a defeated poker player gathering up sticky cards on a dirty, grimy table and opened the novel, first of all to page 94, to prepare myself, then to page 122, and then to page 205, so I could take a breath before diving in. But I cracked, I wasn’t brave enough, and asked Winslow to tell me what happened on page 216.

  “It’s simple, Robert, you will kill me,” he said, no more animatedly then if he were letting me know it was about to rain. “You’ll kill me tomorrow,” he added. “It’s written, it’s my destiny.”

  So, according to Morgan I would at last decide to murder Winslow on the following day. A good idea — and a crime Anita had apparently wanted to warn me of so that I might rethink this good idea. How absurd! Anita and Winslow were hardly stupid enough to believe that a novel — one written before I was even conceived, or even thought about, let alone born, not even at the planning stage — could presage my future. So, fundamentally, I was being asked to believe that when I was no more than a vague hope, when my mother didn’t even know what my name was going to be, or even if I was going to be called anything one day, that a novel could describe my future. “It’s my destiny,” Winslow repeated wearily, while in the background Darth Vader appeared in all his diabolical majesty, spitting under his iron or tungsten mask, whatever, then raising his fake black-gloved hand and proclaiming, “It is your destiny, hrchch, khhhchrch.”

  The situation was grave and I needed to do something, provide proof of my own self-determination, for instance. I grabbed the novel out of Winslow’s hands, opened it again to page 205, to give myself a few stretching exercises, and then took the plunge. When, on page 217, I closed it again — because you need to read a little further than page 216 to understand it — I’d turned white again. I knew it, I felt like a sock that had been soaked in bleach and abandoned in the snow, and wanted to get the fuck out of Winslow’s house.

  In summary, page 216 explains to the reader why the character called Robert had been imprisoned, and how his fate is intertwined with that of his victim. Robert, whose last name we don’t find out in the novel, is an ordinary guy like you or me — well, more like me, to be honest — who, weary of life’s depravity, abandons everything to hide out deep in the woods, or more precisely by the edge of a lake, hoping to enjoy the seclusion he has anticipated in peace. Until this point, everything is fine, as was I. But it all becomes a little more complicated when, one fine August 17, when the birds are singing, the sun shining, and the lake reflecting, Robert loses his mind and murders his neighbour under the pretext of his being part of a conspiracy designed to drive him crazy. The neighbourhood cop, accompanied by a young woman with whom Robert is secretly in love, discovers the two of them after the carnage, the neighbour impaled on a fence picket and Robert lying prostrate on the ground nearby with a huge bump on his skull, a result of the fight he and the neighbour have had. That was the end of our story, one frightening Winslow so, and I tried to soothe him by explaining that I understood his fears, given the bizarre events we’d all been experiencing, but, at the risk of repeating myself, The Maine Attraction was a fucking novel. “It’s fucking made up, Bob.” Besides which, there weren’t any picket fences nearby, and even if there had been there’s no way I was strong enough to skewer him with one.

  Evidently my argument didn’t suffice, because Winslow, staring into the distance, kept muttering incoherently about his fate, about the mistakes we make in our interpersonal relationships, and the trust we often confer on strangers too hastily. As he provided a litany of all the things that should have alerted him to the danger of me, I was thinking how correct he was to have declared my arguments unconvincing: I didn’t even believe them myself. The novel had already shown us what it was capable of, and I needed to find some other way of reassuring the two of us, so I thought of Bill and Jeff, who were lying in the lower-left corner of my field of vision, the best corner, and sleeping side by side like a couple of well-behaved children not for a moment deserving the outpouring of violence Morgan had conceived. But I was well aware that violence is not distributed according to whether or not it is deserved, and that pure souls aren’t immune to its devastation. And I knew, too, that I would never engage in any activity that would see two innocent, inoffensive animals suffer. I loved Jeff too much for that. I loved him unconditionally. Which prompted me to ask Winslow what would become of Bill, what would become of Jeff, were he to die and me end up in the slammer.

  I cannot say my query left him indifferent, but certainly Winslow was hoping for something else, maybe for me to suggest that Morgan had made a mistake. So I dug a little deeper in my brain, to the place where it starts to become a big hole, picked the novel back up, leafed through it, read a few short passages, and finally shouted, “Eureka! Bob, Robert kills his neighbour Bob on August 17 — and the 17th isn’t tomorrow, it’s today. So it’s impossible for me to kill you tomorrow, no?”

  Aside from my reasoning not being at all reassuring, I’ll admit that it was also wrong. I suspected Winslow had detected the flaw in my logic, because he looked my way as though he was the one about to kill me, telling me that Morgan’s novel had been written in a leap year, you stupid fool, which is how he’d worked out that August 17, this year, would fall the next day. The man knew how to count, it has to be said. I’d been anticipating a more robust refutation, but his held: the danger that I would kill him tomorrow was still there. Taking the floor again, he decided to ask me where I stood.

  “What’s your position, Robert?” he asked.

&
nbsp; My position . . . my position . . . well, it was pretty complex. I couldn’t just define it off the cuff, my position on a chessboard with a few pieces missing and in a match where the dice were loaded.

  “What do you mean by ‘position,’ Bob?” I replied. Was he referring to my opinion concerning the interaction of reality, nightmare, and science fiction, which I’d already shared, or asking what I thought of the motives for the murder Morgan described? Was he referring to the entirely hypothetical situation of his imminent death, or what?

  “That’s exactly what, Robert,” he shouted. “Have you ever considered killing me?”

  Had I ever thought about killing him? The question demanded a moment’s reflection, and above all a few lies. Of course I’d wanted to kill the jerk, and more than once, he must have known that by now, but between the idea and reality falls the shadow — there’s a gap, a step I would never have taken, not even in my most incendiary rages. But, if it is, as Hortèse would have said, the intention that counts, then I had already bumped Winslow off several times and was likely to assassinate him again in the nearish future. And that was when my umpteenth genius idea of the morning came to me. That was when I realized that we didn’t have to follow Morgan’s novel to the letter, i.e literally, but could read it as allegory, as a metaphor for the murderous intentions punctuating our dark days. And if Winslow did die tomorrow it would only be figuratively, I quickly explained to him, leaving out a few of the lesser details about my intentions — things were bad enough as it was — and guaranteeing to him that he would live to see the end of August and maybe even the late passing of one or two of the Perseids.

  Ah, the Perseids . . . just the sound of the word gave me a sharp pain in my sternum, as if the narrow blade of a scalpel had cut into the tender flesh covering the muscle that allows our heart to beat until its exhaustion. I looked up to the sky, which was giving nothing away, since we were still in Winslow’s kitchen, although the minuscule fly droppings constellating the ceiling did satisfy my nostalgia for happier days, and prompted my imagination to transform the stains into the dozens of starry bodies in which, in the past, I used to lose myself, when I was still able to gaze at the night sky without being afraid that a meteorite would follow a trajectory aimed directly at me. Perhaps Mirror Lake itself was the result of a meteorite falling, the effects of it still being felt thousands of years later by the people who’d had the audacity to settle on the edges of its crater.

  Too bad: I was one of them and I was staying. I told Winslow not to worry, that we would sit together on the beach this evening and the next, the two of us fully alive. We’d silently gaze at the sky, on the watch for the ephemeral lights coming straight at us from the distant Perseus constellation. If we needed to, we’d invent other families of shooting stars, other constellations — the Winslow Curve or the Moreau Square — simply for the pleasure of thinking only about what doesn’t exist and therefore cannot hurt us.

  I’d moved him, Winslow pleased to see me once more becoming the person he liked, but he was still waiting for an answer to his question. “That’s all well and good,” he said, “but you haven’t answered my question, Robert.”

  So I lied, pushed by a fraternal affection born of the sight of constellations of fly shit. I answered that not the faintest idea of strangling him, impaling him, making him keel over, had ever entered my mind, and certainly none of these things would happen tomorrow. Any more and I’d have said, “I love you, Bob,” but instead I concluded with “I like you,” this due to the invisible stars’ influence, the worst thing being that I meant it. “I like you too,” the big ugly mug said, and, like true friends, we jumped into each other’s arms, slapped each other on the back and called ourselves idiots, all this to Bill and Jeff’s great delight, as they’d been starting to find us dull, but were now able to be lively and participate in our joy.

  And then, to show we were sincere, we took Morgan’s novel down, like true jackasses, to say his story was full of holes, of the unsaid, of contradictions, and whatever tenuous links could be made between his dubious story and our own lives were pure coincidence, as we’d already said many times. If we had to class every novel that bore a passing resemblance to our own lived experience as prescient, then writers would do better to become fortune tellers, which would pay better. But they wouldn’t do so because writers love living in penury, it’s good for inspiration.

  We laughed a lot, collecting all the tiny details of Morgan’s novel that had supposedly become real at Mirror Lake and arranging them in a little heap on the table, next to our plates on which the egg yolk had dried, creating random patterns like a Jasper Johns painting. Jack Picard? Coincidence! Picard’s escape? Coincidence! Anita’s pregnancy? Such is life!

  I was in the middle of blowing my nose on Winslow’s tablecloth when he came up with that. “Anita’s pregnancy, Anita’s pregnancy,” I kept repeating like a damn parrot, slapping my thighs and smoothing down the tablecloth. Then, for a second, the image of Winslow bouncing a little rugrat on his knees and trying to teach him the words to “Yankee Doodle” was reflected in the cafetière in which I could see myself straightening my quiff.

  I stopped. “Whoa, Bob,” I said, “where did you get that from?”

  “Page 221,” he guffawed before using the tablecloth himself.

  “Does Morgan say who the father is?” I asked with the seeming cheeriness of a swaggerer. “Seeming” because, performed without conviction, my swagger was tepid, without the brass, the big drum, and the hoo-hah.

  “You,” Winslow said in reply, thus destroying all the efforts we’d made to ridicule Morgan’s novel and cease identifying with the characters.

  “You mean Robert,” I corrected him.

  “You, Robert, same thing,” he hiccupped, wiping away the tears his hilarity had elicited. A little more, and he’d be rolling on the floor, which was, would you believe, clean — if you didn’t count the bit of dust from the morning, that is, Winslow being the tidy sort. As for me, everything was suddenly less funny.

  I don’t know why, but I tend to believe more in bad news than good, probably because there’s more of it, and it is usually more credible. I shouldn’t have been anxious, because we had just decreed, by who knows what authority, that The Maine Attraction was nothing but a web of lies, but recent experience had taught me the distinction between true and false is not always as unequivocal as you might like; that transparency is sometimes made of shady elements, and that delusion (or illusion) may be founded on verifiable and verified facts. And then, wasn’t it Anita who had directed our attention to these pages? Perhaps all she wanted to let me know is that latex isn’t a failproof material.

  As the possibility of having been screwed by a manufacturer of condoms was not cheering, I asked Winslow if there was also any good news in the chapter Anita had flagged for us, any positive aspects or some such. He must have thought I was kidding around, because he was seized by another bout of demented laughter, and it threw him to the floor this time, where he rolled around like Ping on the night of the big fight with Picard, and I let him make a fool of himself all alone. I told him I was going out for some air, accompanied by Jeff and leaving Bill to roll around in our breakfast crumbs with Bob.

  As soon as I set foot outside, I was surrounded by a heady smell of apples. There wasn’t an apple tree nearby, it was just my early years asserting themselves before I was too old or senile to admit that childhood, if you are lucky enough to have had one, is the most beautiful thing that can happen to a person. “An appley day,” I murmured, inhaling the redolent air and thanking the heavens that our brains are endowed with this thingamajig that uses ambient odour to invoke the other, more distant, smells with which we have always associated them. In my case, it is the damp August scent that, every time the temperature is perfect, arouses the intoxicating scent of the apples we were planning to steal from Goodwife Cadotte as we walked across fields scattered with dried-ou
t cow pies and yellowed hay.

  “It’s an appley day, Jeff, we mustn’t dishonour it,” I said, and Jeff understood. Jeff always understands when the thing to be understood is too simple for most people to comprehend. Down he went with me to the lake, breathing in the balmy air with his big nose, and we gathered stones to skim across the surface of the water displaying the exquisite clearness that had inspired its name, and we didn’t stop until we’d beaten our record. “Fourteen!” I shouted when the stone finally stopped, and Jeff jumped up on me, barking elatedly. Then we sat down and listened. Somewhere, a woodpecker was pecking for its dinner, a blue jay was squawking at the top of its voice, because who cares if you don’t know how to sing, that’s no reason to be quiet on such an exquisite day; a group of mosquitoes was forming a perfect cloud above an area of the lake that they’d chosen for reasons unknown, and in the distance, near my dock, a dark mass was taking shape.

  I was in a good mood, my head still in the apple clouds, so to speak, so immediately I thought it was the moose, my good-luck moose come to confirm the beauty of the day. With a tremble in my voice, I whispered, “Look, Jeff, it’s our lucky moose,” but Jeff’s indifference made me realize the moose in question had no antlers, and if this dark shape really was a moose, then it would have to be a female. I squinted to get a better look, but all I managed to do was distort my vision — I don’t really know why we stupidly screw up our eyes instead of opening them wide when we want to focus on something, which is surely more logical. Probably it has to do with being myopic, or not actually wanting to see what you would if your eyes were wide open. Obviously short-sighted people are that way because they would rather not have too clear a vision of the world. Short-sighted people are cowards.