Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Nyet.

  I went to sit on the porch with The Maine Attraction, which no doubt had a few things to teach me.

  But I only managed to read a page or two, hypnotized by the soft, tinkling oriental music of the chimes beside the lantern. I could not have put a title to their refrain, but it evoked junks on the Yangtze and the fluttering of fans in the humidity of the Gulf of Tonkin, places I had never been to and would never visit, which hardly mattered because the music of the chimes led me there anyway, informed as I was by the thousands of images travellers had amassed for me from these distant lands. Over the years I’d constructed my own East by assembling the pieces I had in an order I liked, too bad for geographical or historical reality, and I challenged anyone who wanted to compete with the beauty of my oriental dreams. I stayed there looking at the boats criss-crossing on Mirror Lake, and then, when the last boat had slipped behind the wall of darkness rising up at the edges of the water, I went inside and cloistered myself in Winslow’s bedroom with Bill and Jeff, leaving Victor Morgan on the bench on the porch where he could wait for me until the next day. I heard Artie’s deep voice behind the wall saying, “Good night, Bobby,” and then fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.

  “No doubt about it, I’m Winslow,” I declared to the mirror, which was making the same movements as me but in opposite, though without it seeming so, and I wondered what would ensue if mirrors reflected not just images but sound, too. Would they talk backwards? Would my mirror have said, ti tuoba tbuod on, wolsniW m’I? No, probably not. And besides, why did I care? All that mattered was that I had Winslow’s face, that, barring Jeff, the whole world thought I was him, and that a person claiming to be Robert Moreau had taken my place on the other side of the lake. But was this person truly me? Apart from the fact that he had my body, the man also had my soul, my mind — or was he pretending to be me, just as I was pretending to be Winslow because I had no other choice? Was it possible, by some phenomenon unknown to science, that there had been some kind of substitution or, rather, a transmigration, at the very instant Winslow and I had collided over the picket and the four-hundred-million-year-old rock in a slow motion that had allowed my soul to move into his body and vice versa?

  No, no, neither was this possible. I’d never believed in this sort of nonsense and was hardly about to start now, even if everything was telling me that certain wonders defy Cartesian dualism. Winslow was reacting exactly as I was, and therefore he was me. If he’d been Winslow, then he would have been amused or touched to hear Anita calling their son Bamboo, and he’d have nicknamed Anita something like Honeypie, Buttercup, or Petal. And if he’d been Winslow, he’d have been happy, but he wasn’t, that was obvious, no less so than I would have been in his place.

  This reasoning still posed a couple of disturbing conundrums. If neither Robert Moreau nor I was Winslow, then where had he gone? Was he floating somewhere in the limbo of Mirror Lake, waiting for someone to take a tumble so he might be reincarnated? Had he disappeared from the face of the earth without anyone realizing? While I was formulating these entirely legitimate questions, I had the feeling Winslow was winking at me in the mirror, so promptly turned off the light. No doubt there was a logical explanation for whatever was going on, and I was going to find it.

  As I entered the kitchen, Artie was exiting the bedroom and still in a sulk about me. To lighten the atmosphere I started in on another apology, attributing my bad behaviour to my coma and fatigue. “I was upset, Artie,” I said. “Don’t forget, I’m a sick man.” But it wasn’t enough. “You know, I like you very much,” I went on, “and I didn’t want to hurt you. Tell me, are we still friends?”

  When I said the word friends, all the sadness pressing down on Artie’s enormous shoulders evaporated, and he fell on me, wailing, “You’re my friend, Bobby. Of course you’re my friend.” Then he made me sit down while he made breakfast, “Because you’re sick, Bobby,” and I had the peculiar impression of having already lived through this scene when the chick on the box of eggs seemed to wink at me too.

  Baptême! Was it possible that Artie was Winslow? But, if that were the case, then who was Artie? Far too many questions for a single morning, so I decided to attack head on, I needed to be sure.

  “Artie, tell me, are you Winslow?” He widened his bulging eyes, the only response he could manage, and I tried a different tack. First of all, I assured him that he shouldn’t be afraid of revealing his fears to me, very strange things had been happening at Mirror Lake for some time. I was a good listener, and if he had a secret, he could share it. Then I waited — ten seconds, twenty seconds, thirty seconds — until Artie went to lock himself inside the bathroom. What new tactlessness was I guilty of to have provoked such a reaction? Whatever. I’d been slapped, apologizing another time was out of the question. So, again, I counted: twenty seconds, thirty seconds, at which point I heard Artie blowing his nose and rummaging around in Winslow’s medicine cabinet. Surely the idiot wasn’t intent on swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills? But no, he wasn’t; a nose-blow or two later, out he came with a bottle of aspirin, which he placed in front of me. “Because you’re really sick,” he said. Then he served up our cold eggs and I noticed his eyes were red — bulging and red.

  “What’s up, Artie?”

  “Yes, I do have a secret,” he murmured, dropping his head. Immediately, I swallowed two aspirin, because I could tell the time had come. Artie was about to admit he was Winslow, I would confess that I was Moreau, and together we’d set off to look for Artie.

  “Okay, Artie, I’m listening . . .”

  “I’m in love with Anita,” the big fool stammered out, but it was too late to spit out my aspirin. “She’s so pretty, so nice, so beautiful,” he said. “I love her, Bobby.”

  All things considered, it was just as well the aspirin had gone down, because I had a big problem on my hands here. Artie in love?

  “Don’t cry, Artie,” I said, “I’m sure she loves you too.”

  “Really?” he squealed, childish hope lighting up his face.

  “I mean I’m sure she loves you like a friend — a great friend, Artie, a very great friend. And aren’t you lucky to have a friend like her?”

  He didn’t seem to agree. So, as the eggs solidified, I did my best to console him until, finally, a tenuous smile came to his face.

  “It’s Robert,” he said, looking over my shoulder, and as I turned around, I saw Moreau coming up in his red boat. Clearly I hadn’t understood Artie’s complex nature, because he was overjoyed to see his rival appearing. As far as I was concerned, Moreau’s arrival was not a smiling matter. One of the advantages of being Winslow was that, from my point of view, I could remain quietly at home safe in the knowledge that I would be unbothered, since traditionally I was the needy one , but here was this other fool stealing my role. What was Moreau playing at?

  Asking as much, I realized I was starting to think of myself as a separate person, that little by little I was thinking of Moreau as Moreau and no longer as me. But in that case, who was I? Stop, commanded one of the myriad voices that spend their lives monitoring me, you’re driving yourself crazy. Still, there was something particularly disturbing about my believing I was two people. It was like suffering from a double personality where the second personality is identical to the first. What use is that? Was it possible, in the end, that Moreau was Winslow? Shut up! the voice barked again, and the voice asking the questions piped down. Okay, okay, I’ll stop, but I’m sending that cretin back to the north shore as soon as he docks.

  Which turned out not to be possible. Artie beat me to it, rushing outside ahead of me to welcome Moreau and warn him of my bad mood. “Angry,” he whispered, and “sick,” and “aspirin.” While he was offloading his secrets, I lay down on the bench on the porch and noticed Morgan’s novel wasn’t there anymore. Strange, I was sure that’s where I’d left it. I must have been mistaken.

  A few minutes later,
I was sitting with Moreau near the four-hundred-million-year-old rock while Artie did the dishes.

  “I liked this stone,” Moreau said, patting what could pass for the rock’s head, and I understood what he meant. I also understood that he didn’t agree with Anita’s decision to move the rock. “I mean, while we’re at it,” he added, “why not raze the forest, fill in the lake, or buy rubber furniture and cardboard dishes? Why not stop breathing? Hey, she didn’t think of that. If we all stopped breathing we couldn’t pass germs on to Junior anymore, right? And maybe we should stop fucking, in case our sighs hinder his emotional development, cause irreparable trauma, mess with his Oedipus complex, or leave him stuck right in the middle of his anal phase?”

  And he was off, the floodgates were open. Moreau had been brooding over the tribulations of conjugal life without anyone to confide in for almost a year. He’d endured sleepless nights, dirty diapers, Anita’s crises, her whims, her recriminations, and couldn’t take it anymore, was going to lose his mind, so he saw my resurrection — that was the word he used — as a sign and gift from heaven, even though he hadn’t let it show the day before, in front of Anita. Basically, if I understood him correctly, he was excited by my return because he’d have someone to absorb his bile should things go badly. And me, I’d have to be the mediator between a guy who was secretly in love with Anita and another who regretted ever having been in love with her at all.

  “But don’t think I don’t love her,” Moreau clarified, because we were on the same wavelength, he and I, whether we liked it or not. But he preferred loving her from a distance, as he had done before. “Before” meant before her pregnancy, before my coma, before our little Robert. In the good old days. But how could I respond to that? Say that I agreed? That nothing was better than solitude? That I preferred the time when we guys used to drink ourselves silly and throw up beneath the stars?

  What would Winslow have done? He’d have advised Moreau to grin and bear it, helped the other man to see Anita was also at the end of her tether and that he needed to give her time. And then he would have looked for a bottle of gin. But aside from it being a little early to start on the gin, I had no desire to console Moreau. In fact, I felt absolutely no compassion for this guy enduring what I’d have had to endure but for the intervention of the four-hundred-million-year-old rock. The truth of it is that I didn’t like myself, something I had always known unconsciously, but it was particularly unpleasant to learn it in such an irrefutable way. Ultimately, if I didn’t like myself, it was because I was still myself and had never liked anyone. If I’d been Winslow, then I would have liked myself, just as Winslow did. Because it’s true that he was fond of me, right? But where was the old fool when he was needed?

  Just as I was processing the thought, the dogs started growling; we heard something stirring in the branches near the cottage and Moreau turned as white as a sheet. If he’d been in my hospital room, he’d have blended right in to the walls. Only his two eyes would have stood out from the infinite expanse of white in the scene of another damn nightmare. But luckily we were outside.

  “What’s happening?” I whispered, but he couldn’t answer, frozen to the spot by whatever this thing that, according to the direction he was staring in, was behind me. “What do you see?” I said more insistently, and the excessively large pupils of his periwinkle eyes advised me not to move. As for the dogs, they were still growling a little further away. If they’d seen a zombie, they’d have behaved no differently.

  And there was my answer! They were watching a zombie. The thing standing behind me, if you can call it a thing, was none other than Winslow, so that the dogs and Moreau were looking at two Winslows, one skinny and one fat, wondering if they were losing their minds or if they were in a remake of Adaptation with Nicolas Cage playing both brothers, the slim one and the bigger one, the sexy one and the ugly one, or in Face/Off, with Nicolas Cage in the roles of Sean Archer and Castor Troy, the good guy and the bad guy. While they were working through that, I was thinking that I’d been transported into an altered version of The Family Man, in which Nicolas Cage plays a man who meets a kind of genie and sees what his life might have been like had he married his former girlfriend and had kids. By the way, examine me closely and you can spot a slight resemblance between me and Cage, something I’d need to think over again.

  “Don’t panic,” I said to Moreau and the dogs, “there’s an explanation.” Slowly, I turned around, not knowing at all how I was going to react to Winslow, who would be nothing more or less than a second double of myself. If I didn’t submit to an identity crisis in the next few minutes, then I’d be fit for the asylum. “Don’t panic,” I repeated to myself like a mantra. “Don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic, don’t panic,” and then I closed my eyes to soften the shock. When I opened them again, the thing shuffling in front of me did indeed look like Winslow, but smaller. “Grrr!” it growled, ferociously enough that I leapt back, stumbled, and fell on something hard, and dozens of stars appeared in the daytime sky.

  When I woke up, I was surrounded by an impenetrable expanse of black, which didn’t seem like good news, because a coma is all white or all black, depending on your mindset, just as I’d explained to Moreau. I also had a dreadful headache, which at least reassured me I wasn’t dead. I opened my eyes a little wider and noticed a shape moving, black on a black background at what seemed to be the edge of the vast black expanse. “Winslow?” I said almost inaudibly, but the shape didn’t answer. I felt all around me, knocking a few things over, like dentures, a glass of water, a bottle of aspirin, and an onion, and the shape jumped. “Help!” I yelled, just as a lamp was turned on, a door opened, and two dogs barked: I was back to life.

  “How long, how long has it been?” I asked Moreau, whose pale face was framed in the doorway, and Artie, who was shining a flashlight at me.

  “A few —” Moreau started before he was interrupted by Jeff bounding in and racing up onto the bed to lick my face.

  “A few what, Moreau?”

  “A few . . .” he resumed, and then it was Bill’s turn to jump up on the bed because he thought I was Winslow, the poor beast, “. . . a few hours,” he managed to say in the interval before, you never know, a third dog were to arrive, and finally I relaxed.

  Ten minutes later, the three of us were sitting around the kitchen table with a bottle of gin and a bowl of chips, the brand of which I preferred not to know, and Artie was telling me that, through the kitchen window, he’d seen the bear sniff me, thump me on the back, and then slowly return to the woods waggling its big behind. Artie insisted it was a nice bear, not a mean bone in its body, but that wasn’t the thing preoccupying me. What was the colour of the bear’s eyes?

  “As-tu vu ses yeux?” I asked Moreau.

  Yes, Moreau had seen its eyes.

  “What colour were they?” I continued in French.

  “Brown, I guess. What other colour would they be? It was a black bear, it had brown eyes.”

  “You’re sure they weren’t blue?”

  “No, Bob, the bear’s eyes were brown,” he reiterated. But given that the sight of the bear had terrified him, Moreau wasn’t the most reliable witness.

  “Artie, did you see the bear’s eyes?”

  But Artie wasn’t listening. His furrowed brow suggested he was trying to solve a particularly difficult problem of logic.

  “What’s the matter, Artie?” I fretted.

  “You speak French perfectly, Bob,” he said, staring at me as if I was a freak of nature. But he was right, it was true, I’d spoken to Moreau in impeccable French, another piece of irrefutable proof that I was me. Artie sometimes had unexpected flashes of lucidity and to put him at ease, I explained that I was able to do so because of all the blows I’d taken to the head. Then I closed the discussion before Moreau was able to pitch in, though he seemed to think my bilingualism was completely normal. He knew a thing or two, this guy, that I would
have liked to have known myself.

  Not sure what else to talk about, I chose a practical subject, the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, which this time had left a dent of a bruise right in the middle of my forehead that resembled the eye of a Cyclops or maybe a third eye, and I said that if it was a third eye, then maybe I’d have the gift of second sight like Johnny Smith does in Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. I’d said it as a joke, but when I thought it over calmly, I could see there were several similarities between my fate and Johnny Smith’s.

  I must have lost contact with earth — “Odyssey, this is Houston, do you read me?” — as I was mulling over the troubles Johnny Smith and I had in common, because suddenly I noticed a hand waving in front of my face. I heard, “Bob, Bob, are you here?” but didn’t know how to answer because, all things considered, Bob wasn’t there, and suddenly I could feel the weight of my immense solitude. I was the bearer of a secret impossible to share, and I had never felt so abandoned, isolated, and misunderstood in my life. Jeff was the only being in the world in whom I was able to confide, and Jeff didn’t care one iota whether people thought I was Winslow or not. For him, appearances were totally unimportant, and he was absolutely right. I should have trusted in my own wisdom and remained myself, despite the counsel of the night that, ever since I’d returned to Mirror Lake, had urged me not to make waves and to behave like Winslow, that this was the simplest way forward as I waited for the truth to show its great haggard face.