Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  The night before, after a dreamless sleep, I’d woken up at around three or four in the morning, a little lost in Winslow’s bedroom, and heard the night speaking in Hortèse’s voice and whispering in my ear that I didn’t need to rob Peter to pay Paul. The night’s message was, let us say, enigmatic, and I asked the voice to clarify. It added that one picks up where the other leaves off, that half a loaf is better than none, that you need to choose the lesser of two evils, and other such platitudes. Basically the voice was telling me to keep my mouth shut, but before it could come out with “he who laughs last laughs loudest,” I ordered it to be quiet, and buried my head underneath the pillow.

  I had always believed, trusting a certain mythology, that night had a warm, sensual voice, a voice that slipped lasciviously into your dreams to tickle your fantasies and cover you in a sweat that was blessed because it was a result of sin. How mistaken! Night has a grating voice, identical to Hortèse’s, and it feeds nightmares, anguish, and guilt; it prevents you from sleeping and leaves you with bags under your eyes. Certainly, it is nothing like the voluptuous sweet nothings of a lover, nor soft lullabies summoning Morpheus to your side. When night speaks to you, it’s neither to comfort nor enlighten you, but to let you know you have problems, big problems, the darkness concealing their true dimension. Because that’s what night said to me: shut up, play dead, things are bad enough already.

  It was pretty depressing, really, and in the tone of a guy who wants to be alone I told Artie and Moreau that I was going out with the dogs. I went down to sit near the lake, in which the light of the moon was softly undulating but the stars not reflected, the stars too far away, too small, and, like vampires, too dead to have a reflection, though in truth the only vampiric thing about them is their attraction so impossible to resist. Whatever. I lay down on my back ready to be vampirized, and gazed at the portion of the universe visible from Mirror Lake, as it sank into interplanetary time. After making their usual reconnaissance, the dogs came and lay down by my side, and when I put my hand on Jeff’s head, I could see his future, just as Johnny Smith sees the future of the people he touches. Perhaps it is more accurate to say I saw his dream, saw our dream of future days, drawn inside the same big bubble above our heads.

  We were on a beach on a starry July night. An owl was hooting. At our feet, small waves expired, sighing, in the sand and we could hear the wind whispering in the pines. “These are the most beautiful noises in the world, Jeff,” I said, these and the sound of rain on a wood-shingle roof, of a loon lost in the mist, all part of an unending dream in which the rain succeeds the owl, the owl the merle, the merle the loon, the fog the rain, as, at long last, the sun the clouds, which were lifting off the surface of the lake with the lightness of being of someone who has slept soundly there, a cheek against the cool water. We were fine, and we were alone.

  It’s not actually that difficult to make such a dream come true. Everything we needed was within reach. The problem was that other people were close by too, seeking the same paradise as us and driving it further away, always further away. Conclusion: paradise is a con, and that’s what God wished to demonstrate by catapulting me into Winslow’s skin. Still, maybe he also wanted to prove to me that I was fine as Robert Moreau, that I should have been content with that and not spent my time pitying myself while three-quarters of the planet was starving to death or had bombs dropping on their heads. And since when had God and I made up anyway? Once I’d become Bob Winslow, I figure, or from that moment when only divine intervention could explain what had happened to me.

  Speaking of divine interventions, something started moving in the branches next to the cottage, and Bill, Jeff, and I all jumped to our feet, convinced that the bear was coming back for another visit, but it was a raccoon doing his rounds of the garbage cans. Bill and Jeff raced off after him and the little animal’s mask disappeared at top speed behind the cottage, and I remembered that my question about the bear had never been answered. Did the bear have Winslow’s eyes, as he had seemed to me before I fainted, or did he not, and I’d imagined it? There was only one way to find out: track the bear down, or wait for it to return. If I was allowed a bit of space, I’d attend to it the next day, and maybe I’d take a quick trip into town to fetch a copy of The Dead Zone and figure out how it was that Johnny Smith had ended up in my story.

  I never was able to find a copy of The Dead Zone, which doesn’t matter, because not only was I already familiar with Johnny Smith’s story, but how he’d feel, such a type, I understood the painful loneliness of someone directly connected to the invisible, someone besieged by images mere mortals cannot sees — someone paranormal, basically, a circus freak show people find fascinating and terrifying at the same time. The only difference between Smith and me was that nobody actually knew who I was, beginning with me.

  I was still intent on buying the book. Anyway, I was getting ready for the drive into town when I heard Anita shouting on the other side of the lake, shouting unpleasant words like bastard, irresponsible, selfish, and then another bastard, all of them aimed at Moreau. It was all a bit much, Moreau could be hard to take, but calling him a bastard was insulting his mother — in other words my mother — which I couldn’t accept. We needed to have a word. Immediately after her barrage, I heard the door slam behind a hesitant Moreau. He stood on the porch for a minute examining the tops of his shoes, as if they might somehow encourage him, but the only thing shoes can do, if you help them a little, is walk, squash insects, or kick walls, empty cans, and pebbles, if they don’t like pebbles. Moreau’s shoes decided to walk, kicking up a few stones in front of them as they went, and then I watched as they — the shoes and Moreau — headed for the red boat tied up at the dock.

  Straight away, I turned and told Artie I was driving into town and wouldn’t be back before nightfall, perhaps not until next month, but the oaf had heard Anita yelling and was already jumping into Winslow’s car, which is to say my car, determined to help her or console her, depending on what was needed, and I stood there, arms dangling, staring first at my shoes, which needed a good cleaning, and then at the car disappearing in the dust. Fuck. To let off steam, I kicked a few stones that should never have decided to settle in Maine, and waited for Moreau. I could have run off and hidden in the woods, or underneath the cottage with the raccoon, but Moreau would have found me. It was written, or else it was going to be written. It’s your destiny, Darth Vader reminded me as he popped up for a moment in my gloomy mind, and you can’t stop fate. Yes, you can always choose to kill yourself, but that’s still fate and changes nothing. You might as well put up with whatever is poisoning your life while leaving it to us. So I decided to sit down on the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, said “Hi rock,” and apologized for kicking its little sisters’ heads, but either the rock was indifferent, it was sulking, or it had no familial feelings, because it didn’t bat an eyelid. I’d hoped it would rise to the occasion and apologize, in turn, for hitting me, but it maintained a stony silence, the verb to apologize evidently not part of its vocabulary.

  Nonetheless I stayed sitting on it and watched Moreau approach. I could also say that I listened to his approach, because he was humming the Soggy Bottom Boys’ song “I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow.” That’s also the tune I would have chosen — because I was Moreau, because I knew the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? by heart, and because, standing in front of the mountains, I was suddenly filled with an enormous sadness. Des millénaires de montagnes, as Élise Turcotte put it so well — the “millennia of mountains” — against which Moreau’s defeated voice was echoing, because his heart was not light. Once he reached the shore, I went down to help him pull his boat up on the sand, but as the dispirited fella put a hand on my shoulder so that he’d not lose his balance disembarking, I saw his fate and it was the same as Johnny Smith’s. Fuck! With his touch, my brain’s dead zone was suddenly activated, or so it seemed, I started trembling and seeing flashes, all sorts of strange shapes, an
d then the image I was seeing settled and I was catapulted onto the north shore of the lake on a beautiful August afternoon, perched over and, together with Winslow, trying to roll a dead body up onto the beach.

  At the time I thought I was having a flashback — that I was reliving the day Winslow and I had fished John Doe out of the lake, and would finally find out who the guy was. Which is when Anita arrived and events got more complicated. Winslow and I were harpooning John Does with our branches when Anita came up to tell us she was taking Junior to her mother’s house, because she didn’t want him witnessing the scene. I answered that we weren’t planning on inviting the dead guy in for a cup of tea, but she told me to take a hike and said the atmosphere was creepy, that the corpse was giving off morbid vibes, and we anxious men giving off a bad smell, all things that might leave indelible yet indecipherable scars in little Robert’s brain, which at best would mean we’d be paying for psychoanalysis once he was twelve, or, at worst, that he’d become a serial killer, a fucking sicko who’d plunge his girlfriends’ heads in bathwater and capsize his ageing parents’ boat in the middle of the lake with a predator’s smile on his face. “Is that what you want, Robert?” Regardless, if Junior turned out badly it would be my fault, and so?

  “Let her go,” advised Winslow. “She’s still rather fragile.” I let her go.

  The rest of the vision pretty much resembled what Winslow and I had been through the year before. Tim Robbins arrived in a squeal of tires with Conan, the forensics guy, who was wiping his glasses on his white hazmat suit. A little later the Daltons showed up, followed soon afterwards by Anita’s mother, a kind of ersatz Ma Dalton who glared at me as if I was the one who’d drowned John Doe, and now it was my turn to flash a predaceous smile. It all degenerated into a brawl for the most nebulous reasons, and once again I found myself skewered on the fence picket that had reappeared beneath the porch. That was the end of the vision, and still I didn’t know who John Doe was.

  My vision had only lasted a few seconds. When I returned to real time, Moreau was just about out of the boat and swearing because he’d put his left Doc Marten in the water. “Are you okay?” he asked, gazing up at me, because I must have looked somewhat startled.

  “I’m okay,” I replied, wanting to add that he could speak to me in French, which he knew perfectly well, but the detail was irrelevant next to what had just happened to me.

  If my vision really had been that, then it meant there was another John Doe in the lake, or that someone else would drown soon. It also indicated Winslow would come back, that or I would put on a hundred pounds and become a bona fide Winslow. It also meant Anita had a mother and that I would die by being impaled. But was it really me who would die? If Winslow resurfaced, would I be reintegrated into my own body? And who was the real Robert Moreau? Was he me, or the guy next to me who was shaking his waterlogged boot and telling me Anita had kicked him out and, if I didn’t mind, that he was going to chill at my place for a couple of days just until the storm blew over?

  Yes, I did mind, but given that I was not actually me it was incumbent upon me to demonstrate delight. That’s how Winslow would have reacted, and he’d have given me a big slap on the back too, which I did a little sheepishly. But upon contact with Moreau, my brain’s dead zone joined in the fray before I could file a complaint, say a prayer, or tell God his actions were excessive. This time, at least, I was entitled to a cheerful vision, surely.

  Which came to pass that evening. Moreau, Bill, Jeff, and I were sitting around a campfire, just like in the good old days, with a couple of empty bottles beside us. Moreau was cooking sausages and I was saying, “Red, red as red roses,” rather poetically.

  “A rose is a rose is a rose,” Moreau declaimed to make himself look intelligent, and then I carried on with red, red as strawberries, as raspberries, as cranberries, red as cherries, tomatoes and McIntosh apples, Cortland apples, and so on and so on. We went through all the fruits, big and small, edible and not, everything the earth brought forth that was red, including anger and rags to a bull. The Pink Lady was back, to our great pleasure and also that of the dogs missing the felicity of our drunken evenings. When the game ended, we all looked up to the sky, inhaled deeply, smiled, and I saw myself ask Moreau who John Doe was.

  “You don’t remember?” the imbecile guffawed.

  I said no, that I was drawing a blank on the subject. Which didn’t go down well because he was too drunk to remember. End of the second vision.

  “Are you okay?” Moreau asked again, and I muttered, “No, no, I’m not. Who is John Doe?” Immediately, I knew the question was pointless, because the future had taught me that when night fell on Mirror Lake I would still be clueless about the identity of the man who’d suffered this misfortune. But I hazarded the question anyway, in case my future was less headstrong than my fate. Were that so, it might be possible to alter it. I was playing a dangerous game, I knew, trying to change the course of things is like imagining you’re God, or at least one of his subalterns, who don’t always do good work. And it’s impossible to predict just what series of catastrophes you might set in motion should you involve yourself in matters that don’t concern you. Arthur Bolduc, Ti-Ron’s father, knew as much. One day, at a bend in the Cordon road, he tossed a hubcap that had been lying in the middle of the asphalt into the ditch so that it wouldn’t cause an accident. Just one hour later, Julienne Lessard, blinded by the beam of sunlight bouncing off the hubcap, ploughed into the ditch in her husband Grégoire’s brand-new Chrysler. Requiem in pacem, Julienne. Filled with pain and remorse, Arthur had gone back to find the cursed hubcap and restored it to the middle of the road. Then, the following day, Damien Jutras smashed his head in after skidding on it with his motorbike. The moral of the story? Everything has a place, and everyone should mind their own business, just as Hortèse and the majority of the villagers had decreed, imploring Arthur not to try to outwit fate again. Mind your own damn business, Arthur!

  A cautionary tale, certainly, but my curiosity was too insistent, I was desperate to learn who was hiding behind the cloak of the pseudonym John Doe. “WHO IS JOHN DOE?” I asked Moreau again, and he recoiled from my unexpected tone. “Who is John Doe? Who is John Doe?” But I was the one who should have known who the guy was, I was the one who’d rummaged through his wallet, not Moreau. Except for me, Tim Robbins, and maybe Conan, nobody knew who John Doe was. As Robbins had said, it was someone very important, someone whose identity could only be revealed once the investigation was over, but the inquiry was certainly dragging its feet.

  I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe him for the good and simple reason that he would confess to me that very evening that he’d forgotten John Doe’s name. Besides, how could you forget something you never knew? Can you explain that to me, Moreau? And, hang on a minute, Winslow wasn’t the one who’d gone through the wallet, Moreau had. Could he explain to me, then, why he was lying? No. He couldn’t enlighten me on the subject because I was the one who’d filched the damn wallet. We went back and forth like that for ten or twelve minutes, during which time our voices grew louder and louder. It might even have come down to fisticuffs had a grunting noise in the undergrowth not reached our ears. We stopped in our tracks and I said, “The bear, fuck, the bear, the bear” — the bear I needed to stare right in the whites or the blues of its eyes.

  Leaving Moreau to himself, I rushed into the undergrowth and called in a low, steady voice, “It’s okay, Winslow, don’t go, I recognize you, don’t move, Winslow, stay there, I know you’re the bear,” but I must have frightened it off. All I managed to see was a wide brown rump with a white mark on the left buttock disappearing into the low branches. But, next to the bear’s tracks, I did perceive a colourful object on the ground, an object extremely familiar to me that I had recently misplaced. Just as I bent down to pick it up, a ferocious growling silenced the birds — I hadn’t even noticed how many were chirping — and a deathly silence fell over the for
est. Clearly the bear didn’t want me to pick up the object, and had this been a scene in a movie, the viewers would have been terrified, the girl sitting in the back row would have dug her nails into the thigh of Peter, her boyfriend, who would have been entirely justified in shouting and knocking over his popcorn, thus sending a wind of panic among the hysterical people scattered through the theatre, among whose number the girl with the sharp nails, Pierrette, must be included. But I didn’t let the prospect put me off and bravely grabbed Victor Morgan’s book despite its being shredded and covered in slobber, and ran out of the woods. Now I had the evidence I needed: the bear had to be Winslow, not only because he’d attempted to destroy The Maine Attraction, but because if he was that afraid, then of course he was Winslow.

  “Look what I found near the bear’s tracks,” I shouted to Moreau, brandishing the object in the air. “This bear is not a normal bear. He wanted this book, Robert, he wanted this fucking book. He stole it from me.” Obviously Robert thought I was losing my mind, which is what I too would have thought in his position, which I practically was. He must have been wondering: Is this man as disturbed as he seems — even if he is only unconsciously showing it — or is he simply mocking me? Let him wonder, I knew Winslow and the bear were the same. And besides, I was ready to wager it was written in the book — another reason Winslow wanted to rip it into pieces, whether out of a desire for vengeance or because he was hoping in this way to negate the spell the book had over him.

  “You should be happy,” Moreau said, seeing my vexed expression concerning the state of the book. “First of all, it’s a lousy novel. Secondly, all it’s brought us is trouble. And really, what use is it to learn your future if only to find out you’re going to die? We already know that.” I concurred, but only partially, because I wanted to ascertain which path would lead me to the picket post — the latter becoming, in the circumstances, the last picket staking out my existence (my Last Spike, essentially) — just in case it was possible for me to take a detour, and I had it in mind that Victor Morgan might be able to help me in this undertaking.