Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Anyway, after pointlessly accelerating the ageing of the skin around my eyes, I returned to the cottage to look for a pair of binoculars.

  “Why?” Winslow wanted to know as he put away a dishcloth, annoyed that I’d made him do the dishes all by himself.

  “Because there’s something close to my dock, some dark shape, Winslow, a dark figure I can’t quite make out.”

  On top of the irritation he was feeling, he didn’t like me saying “dark shape, Winslow, a dark figure,” and I put my hand over his mouth before he could say the words I dreaded hearing every bit as much as I was afraid of seeing what his unuttered words would have designated.

  “Where are your binoculars?” I said again, and off he went to find them before heading with me and Bill to the spot on the beach where Jeff was waiting for us. I let him look first, and after I did we looked at each other, taking it in turns to mumble, “John Doe, baptême, it’s John Doe, dammit.”

  Never believe the dead won’t come back and visit you one day.

  “What should we do?” one of us said.

  “Let’s haul him in before the lake swallows him up again,” said the other.

  Two minutes later, we were rowing like mad toward the north shore, busting a gut and screeching out “Po’ Lazarus” — I’d taught Winslow the lyrics I don’t even know when — horror-struck at the thought that Mirror Lake could play such a dirty trick on us. Galvanized by our excitement, the dogs were barking at both ends of the boat, Bill in the direction of his shore and Jeff toward ours, prow figures eagerly protecting us from evil spirits and danger.

  At the dock, we all rose to get out at the same time and the boat tipped over, Winslow and I landing flat on our bellies in the water the corpse had occupied. We dragged ourselves to the bank, and quickly turned when we saw the state of the dark mass. Bill and Jeff, who reveled in stinky things, tried to get closer, but Winslow and I forbade them in perfect synchrony, pas touche, Jeff, don’t touch, Bill, which, uttered together, sounded like pon’t toche, Jilf, but the dogs understood, especially as the dark shape, that we would need to rename, was not emitting the sort of rotting stink that appeals to dogs.

  Winslow was the first to risk a proper look, I guess because he’s more humane than me, and told me the corpse was really ugly. “I’ll find some branches,” he said, scampering off.

  “I’ll get a couple of scarves,” I shouted, running away just as hastily, creating a situation that baffled the dogs completely, but no matter, Winslow and I were on the same thunderous wavelength, and we already knew what to do without needing to articulate our intentions in intelligible words. Four minutes later, once we’d found what we were looking for, we were back at the lake, scarves around our noses, branches in our hands, and screwing up our eyes so as not to see too much as we used the sticks to try to hoist the body out of the water without it breaking apart.

  Once this hideous task was done, one of us asked what we should do now that John Doe had been pulled to safety.

  “We should phone Robbins,” said the other, surely not me. No, I was the one who suggested we call for divers, divers were courteous, meticulous, and not too chatty, or maybe the cia, the fbi, or nasa. At any rate, this case stunk too much to leave it all up to a county cop. But Winslow wasn’t listening. He went into the cottage to deal with the matter his way, oblivious to the dangers he might be exposing us to. When he surfaced again, I asked the question that had been burning on my lips for so long. Might as well clear it up while we waited for Robbins and all the hassle he was sure to bring with him.

  “Who gave you my phone number, Bob?”

  He didn’t cotton on, and snapped back, “I wasn’t phoning you.” His periwinkle eyes added, “You idiot, I was phoning the police.”

  Then I explained that I’d been fretting for ages over the ruse he’d used to learn my phone number, and I wanted it out in the open, but I might as well have conserved my saliva, he could no longer remember, he said, and didn’t see how any of this would help us, suggesting another hole in my story, though it was a benign hole that would close up by itself because, after all, how important was it that Winslow got a hold of my number? Not at all.

  “Fine, so what shall we talk about as we wait for Robbins to arrive and destroy what little beauty remains in this prematurely withered day?”

  “Do we really have to talk?” Winslow retorted.

  No, nothing was forcing us to, but it would have helped calm me down somewhat. So we sat down on the beach, diagonally across from John Doe, and perused the lake and mountains that had suddenly lost their appeal. Even the scent of apples had disappeared, the faculties of memory having their limits. Our silence lasted exactly seven minutes — I counted — before Winslow felt compelled to try and shake off the gloom weighing down on our heads.

  “Poor guy,” he murmured.

  At first I thought it was me he was referring to, and I wanted to thank him for the burst of sympathy, but I quickly figured out he was thinking of John Doe, who would probably remain John Doe until the end of time, because how could anyone identify such a decomposed body? I tried to reassure him by saying that nothing could beat forensics, all that was needed was an impression of his teeth, and then they’d be able to find out who this man was through his dentist’s or orthodontist’s records.

  “What if he doesn’t have any teeth?” Winslow said. “What if he has dentures but he lost them in the lake, what will they do then?” And then, to prove the eventuality possible, he removed his own dentures and hurled them into the lake.

  Evidently, Winslow was taking all this more to heart than I would have expected, because of his humanity, which I mentioned, though I did also think he was making too big a deal of it. I was just about to tell him so when Robbins squealed up accompanied by a man in coveralls, clearly a forensics guy. This would relieve Winslow’s worries, surely.

  “Where is he?” Robbins barked before Winslow had the time to retrieve his teeth.

  “On ve beash,” said Winslow.

  “On the beach,” I shouted, to avoid any misunderstanding, although obviously Robbins wouldn’t think we had carried him into the cottage. “And he’s not going to escape,” I added to myself, even though I was conscious that in this terrible place nothing was impossible.

  Robbins headed toward the corpse with the forensic expert I’d decided to call Conan, as we hadn’t been introduced. Conan immediately leaned over what remained of the body while Robbins inspected the surroundings. “He doesn’t have any teeth,” Conan began, at which point Winslow beamed at me with the triumphant expression of his that I truly detested.

  “They’ll just have to use Carbon-14 to date him,” I answered, and then Robbins, who was standing with both feet in the water, called out to Conan that he’d found the dead guy’s teeth.

  “Vove are my teef,” Winslow said quickly, and after a curious exchange in which he came across as a blubbering idiot, he was able to retrieve his possession.

  “I wouldn’t put those in your mouth before cleaning them,” I wanted to warn him, but it was too late. John Doe’s purulent microbes, good for him, were already gnawing away at Winslow’s gums. And what I learned in that moment was that even though Winslow’s house was spotless, his personal hygiene wasn’t so impeccable. As for me, it would take floods of rain and more before I would so much as dip a big toe into the lake where the vile thing Conan was working over had been macerating.

  “I found his wallet,” Conan announced to Robbins. Great, if they had his wallet, and John Doe had plastic, then we’d be able to call him by his name. Robbins picked up the object, crouched on the sand, and started to empty it of its dripping contents as Winslow and I watched him fervently, eyes wide open and impatient to know the identity of the person who’d been haunting us for weeks — whose existence I had doubted, even accusing Winslow of nefarious machinations.

  “So?” Winslow yelled impa
tiently, fed up with Robbins being so terse.

  “So, we have a problem,” Robbins replied.

  What did I say about the mess this guy made?

  “Meaning?” Winslow asked.

  From what I understood of the conversation that ensued, John Doe was a well-known figure, not a John Doe at all, and the announcement of his death would have serious repercussions, so much so that Robbins refused to reveal his famous identity to Winslow. My eyes had been fixed on the body for some time, and I kept thinking the big mug reminded me of someone. There was no way I was about to wait for the local gossip rag to let me know who was my — and I mean my — John Doe, so I took advantage of Winslow and Robbins’s yelling match to sneak behind the cop and pick up the wallet, which was still lying on the ground.

  But as everything was going badly, Mirror Lake had decided to become a circus, and suddenly we saw a dirty pickup pull up near the cottage, and then a big guy, a medium-sized guy, and a small guy get out, the three of them accompanied by Joe Dassin, who was singing, “Tagada, tadaga, voilà les Dalton.” If Artie was also with them, then the only people still missing were Anita, the young Indiana Jones, and Picard, who was surely hiding in some thicket or other, and the whole family would be complete. But Artie wasn’t there. It turns out the three Jacks had been searching for him because he hadn’t set foot in Bangor since he’d gone off with Picard.

  While Joe was recounting all this to me, and Averell was playing with Jeff and Bill, who’d not been barking at all, Robbins had stationed himself behind us, the better to hear what the Mafioso was saying. If Robbins discovered I’d had a hand in Picard’s escape, I was cooked, so I tried to communicate to Joe that he needed to be discreet. “The man’s a cop,” I mouthed to him very clearly, hoping that he knew how to lip-read, but he didn’t. So I tried making faces, winking, and drawing a finger across my throat in a knife’s horizontal line and gagging like I was dead, and then putting a vertical finger to my closed lips. I pretended to be terrified, drew prison bars, feigned distress, but the only result was Joe thinking I was cracked and becoming increasingly irritated. Throwing in the towel, I lowered my arms. I could hardly have been clearer. Let him deal with whatever was coming down the pipe, I decided, I didn’t know where Artie was. I had started walking back to where Winslow was standing on the beach when Joe grabbed me by one arm, Robbins by the other, and the two of them started bawling me out at the same time, one about Artie, and one about Picard and John Doe’s wallet, and it took me getting shirty for them to ease up a bit, but only a bit, because at that moment the young Jones bounded out of the scrub to tell Robbins he’d seen me palm the drowned guy’s wallet.

  What happened next was simultaneously confusing and of a piece, like a ballet danced by a bunch of clods. What I remember most clearly is that Strauss’s “The Blue Danube,” the waltz Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey, suddenly drowned out the ambient noise, and I started to float on the music, which I was using as some kind of defence mechanism as anarchy settled over Mirror Lake — which had, it goes without saying, seen it all before. Young Jones set everything in motion. If he’d leapt out two minutes earlier or two minutes later, the whole story might have gone a different way, which is what we call fate, but he chose the worst moment and, true to Murphy’s law, the resulting chaos was barely conceivable. Startled by Jones’s unexpectedly bursting onto the scene, Joe stepped in right away, and Robbins thought he was intending to attack him and drew his gun. Jones, who was aware of the misunderstanding despite his not being very bright, intervened by jumping on Robbins, with the result that all three of them ended up on the ground on top of me. Winslow, William, Averell, Bill, and Jeff didn’t like what they saw either and raced to pile themselves on top of us and join the melee. Making the most of a narrow opening between what seemed to me to be Winslow’s legs, I managed to drag myself out of the hellish circle with the intention of sneaking into the cottage to investigate the contents of John Doe’s wallet. I didn’t care at all about what might ensue, I had to know who this guy was before dying.

  I had just reached the porch steps when a shot ripped through the Strauss waltz and everyone, alert to the dramatic interruption, froze in place, except for Conan, who hadn’t been part of the brawl and who, a true disciple of Hippocrates, rushed over to see if there were any injured or dead — preferably dead, because that was his specialty. Sadly for Conan, though a relief to the rest of us, the bullet had managed to find a route through the tangle of limbs and sink into what was formerly the stomach of John Doe, who could have done without taking a bullet on top of everything else, barely missing Conan, who almost fainted at the near miss. But in the place of fainting, he yelled at Robbins that we weren’t in a cowboy movie, dammit, and if he didn’t put his gun away that very second, he’d push the stiff straight back into the water.

  “Doc, don’t do dat,” I said alliteratively from the foot of the porch, in this way reminding Robbins of my existence. He re-holstered his gun with a grumble and started in my direction, triggering “The Blue Danube” once more. Thanks to my small head start, I managed to beat him to the cottage and double-lock the door. Time was short, so I quickly rummaged through Doe’s wallet as I saw, through the window, Robbins approaching and Winslow and the two dogs coming to my aid in hot pursuit. Behind them, I could make out Joe, William, and Averell, lined up in order of height on the beach. A little further away stood Conan, extricating Robbins’s bullet from John Doe’s stomach, the lot of them perfectly silent as they waited for whatever was going to happen next. As for young Jones, he’d returned to his thicket.

  I yelled to Winslow and the two dogs that everything was fine, that I only needed another thirty seconds to fish the driver’s licence out of the damn wallet, which was resisting me in the way objects do when you’re harried, their way of letting on that you’re behaving like an imbecile. When, finally, I did manage to cleave the recalcitrant wallet open, take out the card, and read John Doe’s true name, the single thought to cross my mind was that I was dead, that I’d committed a dreadful crime; that I was dead and that God, just as I had feared, had sent me to hell. As if to prove me right, Winslow, who’d not been bred to fight, took a spectacular tumble over the porch railing, beneath which I suddenly noticed a single old picket post — it got there I don’t know how — and upon which he was going to die just as Morgan had predicted. But thanks to Strauss’s “The Blue Danube,” everything was happening in slow motion and, heeding only a summons to courage, I opened the door with all my force and, in a state of weightlessness, swan-dived, managing to catch Winslow in flight and to push him off course.

  The only thing I remember after that is, despite the slow motion, the four-hundred-million-year-old rock hurtling a little too fast toward my head, Winslow collapsing noisily into a heap of branches, thwump, safe and sound, and phew, night, with its thousands of stars, falling on Mirror Lake and gently enveloping it. Was I in heaven? Or hell? I didn’t care, I had galaxies of hazy darkness all to myself. Then Winslow crawled over to see if I was still in working order and, given that my condition didn’t bode well, he brought a large hairy ear to my mouth and waited for me to confide my last words to him. “John Doe is . . . is . . .” I murmured into his hairy ear, but then the ear grew to an enormous size and my mind stepped into his auditory canal, wiped its feet in the hallway, took a long slide down the cochlear, zoooooom, before it was finally propelled into the shady depths of the ear’s Eustachian tube, so named after Bartolomeo Eustachi, as I pointed out to Winslow, who thought the guy had just the one name, Eustachian. Nobody’s called Eustachian.

  And after that, the stars went out. I could sleep in peace.

  III.

  New Skin

  Roughly speaking: to say of two things

  that they are identical is nonsense,

  and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself

  is to say nothing.

  — Ludwig Wittgenstein,<
br />
  Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 5.5303

  When the stars go out, you’re justified in thinking you’ve reached the end of the world. That’s what I thought at first, when I felt the universe dematerialize and darken around me, and I’m not sure I was mistaken. But if I was thinking this, then it means there is life after life, though it’s better not to hurry its arrival because it’s the same, only uglier, like in one of those warping mirrors you find at a fairground designed to reveal the monstrous potential of things simply by flattening them out or stretching them.

  When, after striking the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, I did wake up, these were not the thoughts that came immediately to mind. I didn’t think of anything, to be honest, as the part of my being that I’d always referred to as “me” was incarcerated in some as-yet-unactivated zone of my brain. Thus it couldn’t have been me who saw the immeasurable sweep of white surrounding me, but my body, and yes, my eyes. They were the little windows through which the white entered, subsequently firing up the neurons that transmitted “white,” but without recourse to comparisons or metaphors; without the capability of associating the white with trains of thought known to me — “white equals snow,” “white like snow,” “a dreadful winter pallor,” and other formulae derived from nature and defining the essential blankness of white. I was in a realm of non-thought, completely and utterly, where any concept of the self is abolished. I was lost in a kind of comatose nirvana that nothing could penetrate except the white, but a white without links or connotations. A free white. Like a non-white.

  This state continued for a period of time I cannot calculate because I wasn’t there. But then the thing that had replaced me during my absence perceived two objects rising up before it. Feet, the neurons translated — the me in me slowly climbing back to the surface via those two feet, recognizing them as things belonging to it. Finally I was able to recall what the world looked like before the stars went out.