Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  “You know I’m not Winslow,” I said immediately, looking him right in the eyes.

  He held my gaze and, after a moment’s reflection, conceded that I’d not actually seemed myself since I’d come back to Mirror Lake.

  “That’s not what I mean, Moreau. I’m not Bob Winslow, and you know that.”

  He thought some more, and then said my private life was none of his business, he didn’t care what my real name was and, in any case, knowing it wouldn’t change a thing because in his heart I would always be Bob Winslow. Good old Bobby.

  At that point I practically started to yell — no, not “practically,” I did. I just started yelling. I yelled that my real name was Robert Moreau, for fuck’s sake, that his son was mine, that he’d taken the opportunity of my back being turned to transform Winslow into a bear and take my place. Moreau looked at me as if I’d gone mad, genuinely mad, he took fright, he ran away, I caught him, I jumped on him and pushed his face into the sand. Had Artie not intervened, I wouldn’t have spared his skin, which was actually mine.

  After Artie separated us, we lay on the sand for a few moments, still staring each other in the eyes as we caught our breath, which is when I saw a flash streak across his face, some kind of light, an indication that perhaps he had just started to understand something. He admitted that when he’d found out Anita was pregnant by him he’d dreamed of being in my place, but in fact he preferred his own, given that I was ill — was I ever. Then he added that he was leaving for my north shore right away, which I forbade him to do. We had stuff to sort out and he wasn’t going to get out of it that easily. We were about to wrestle again when Artie grabbed a hold of our collars, mine plaid, Moreau’s striped, and dragged us away from the fire, one of us in his left hand and the other in his right. Then he sat down between us and told us to make peace. We each forced a recalcitrant smile and Artie started cooking the sausages and said we weren’t very nice.

  The Great Bear had time to do a lap around the pole before any of us said anything worthwhile.

  “Yes,” Moreau said occasionally.

  “No,” I’d quietly answer every now and then to the questions Artie posed about Stephen King.

  Artie hadn’t read King’s books but had seen It and The Shining on television and wanted to know everything about him so as not to seem like an ignoramus when he came for dinner. Enthusing about The Shining, he stood up and imitated Danny, Nicholson’s child, the kid who sees fucking terrifying twin girls everywhere, with big foreheads and abundant wavy hair, just like my sisters’ dolls, Vicky and Nicky, who, when I was little, used to monitor my bedroom door with their mean plastic eyes. “Redrum, redrum,” he groaned, his expression frozen in some kind of trance, and I asked him to imitate Nicholson instead, or even Donald Duck, as that child gave me shivers up and down my spine. “Redrum, redrum,” he continued, walking around the fire and going to look at himself in the lake, “redrum, redrum, redrum.”

  When finally he came back to the fire, he continued to bombard us with questions as he wrote backwards on the sand. But for his voice, all we could hear was the crackling of the fire, an owl’s cry, and, from time to time, the rustling of a moth’s wings. The last must have annoyed Moreau, because he caught one mid-flight and crushed it in his hands, sending Artie into a rage, shouting that we had no right to kill innocent creatures without cause. Moreau retorted that Artie ate sausage and that sausage, wasn’t it true, was made from innocent creatures. He shouldn’t have said that. It was as if he’d stabbed him right in the heart, poor Artie leaving us and repeating “redrum, redrum, redrum,” before throwing up behind the cottage.

  The rest of the evening unravelled lugubriously. We watched the fire slowly go out and spoke just a few useless words — yes, no, maybe. Yes, no, and maybe are not always useless words, I know, but that particular evening they were of no use whatsoever. We went to bed with our backs slumped, our shoulders hunched, indifferent to the Pink Lady who was waiting at the edge of the forest in a captivating yellow princess dress, or was it a wood fairy’s dress, that she’d put on just for us. Before turning out the light, I heard Artie murmur “Goodnight, Bobby, goodnight, Robert,” before at last grunting, “Goodnight Tony,” like Nicholson’s bastard son talking to his finger, and I couldn’t fall asleep. I counted cracks in the ceiling until the wee hours wondering how this story would end and if I was ever going to become myself again one day.

  In the end, I did sleep that night, though only for a minute or two because I had a hellish nightmare. I know from experience that you don’t have to be asleep to hobble along horror’s tortuous paths, but for this category of nightmare you do have to be asleep, otherwise everything is meaningless.

  I’d become myself again and had struck upon the brilliant idea of holidaying with Winslow in the Rockies, don’t ask me why. We’d chosen the Overlook Hotel for its tranquility, the hotel in King’s novel where Jack Torrance tries to kill his wife and son. I really do have a knack for unearthing peaceful places. From the moment of our arrival, we’d been pursued by the bloodcurdling screams of Jack Nicholson, priceless in the role of Torrance, so we took refuge in Kubrick’s labyrinth, which I have called that because it’s not in the novel, endeavouring to cover our tracks by walking backwards in the artificial snow. We covered them so well that we managed to get lost, which led to an epic argument with Winslow shouting left while I yelled right and vice versa. “We came from the left so we need to leave by going right,” Winslow argued, labyrinths invented for him to believe the right path was the wrong one, to which I replied that if we kept turning the same way, going around in a circle, we should, logically speaking, reach the middle, so that all we needed to do was turn in the opposite direction to find the exit. Winslow didn’t agree, so I told him to choose whatever route he felt like and I set off on my side. We must have passed each other at least twenty times, casting hate-filled glances at each other, when Nicholson joined us, closely followed by an irate Humpty Dumpty, and I woke up before either of them was able to decapitate me.

  Near the cottage, a few birds were chirping, two or three crows were croaking, and one Moreau was whistling an unfamiliar tune, which was impossible, unless he’d learned it during the year I was in a coma. Whatever. I shut myself in the bathroom, dunked my head under the cold water and took two prophylactic aspirin, a precaution against the coming headaches. I entered the kitchen, and Artie had become vegetarian and was trying to come up with a meatless menu for our dinner with Stephen King. He told me he could no longer go into town to buy me fish because it was against his principles from now on.

  “What will I give my bear to eat?”

  “Blueberries,” he said, and that was his last word on the subject.

  I could have gone into town myself, but I was too tired. As for fishing: no way. So I furnished myself with a pot and went off to the blueberry bushes, but as the season was not yet at its peak, I had to be content with a quarter-pot of soft raspberries. For small fruit, the beginning of August is the worst time. Strawberries are over, raspberries are dying, and the blueberries are pale. It’s very sad.

  Back at the cottage, I tipped out the raspberries that had already turned in the heat, trampled them on the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, and went to look for a jar of liquid honey and poured it over the raspberries. Then I hid behind a tree and waited for Winslow. An hour later, the rock was swarming with ants, but still no sign of a bear.

  “What are you doing behind that tree?” asked Artie, who’d stepped outside to shake out the tablecloth for lunch.

  “Waiting for my bear,” I answered, and he rolled his eyes, his way of indicating that I’d be waiting a very long time. He was right. I waited for two weeks. But not behind the tree. Every morning I’d leave him a snack on the rock, near the lake, or in the undergrowth, but it was always the ants and the raccoon enjoying it.

  Other than that, life continued on its quiet way. Artie had proved incapable of d
eciding to murder any of the hunting camp owners, and had instead resolutely ensconced himself in the house, asking me each morning whether or not I’d telephoned Stephen King. Moreau visited us whenever he quarrelled with Anita, which was every other day. Eventually I headed over to see her, since I’d opted to behave like Winslow while I waited for him to show up. I have to admit that I was getting quite attached to little Robert, who could twist my father’s heart around his little finger simply by opening his mouth. He just had to gurgle a gagaga and I melted. I’d have bought a flight to Greenland if the kid had asked me to. But as I was unable to confess to him that I was his father, and he was too young to be exposed to such trauma, I had to play the jolly uncle spoiling him, indulging all his whims. I even tried to teach him the words to “Yankee Doodle,” if only to make Moreau mad. Of course, he couldn’t remember all the words, but he did remember Doodle, and every time he saw me coming he’d call out “dad-daddu-doodle” as a pretty spit-bubble rose to his baby lips. Anita said he was calling me Uncle Doodle, but I knew he was calling me dad, Daddy Doodle.

  My contact with the child softened me a little, but so what? I even became friends with the raccoon, to the great displeasure of the dogs, who had both moved in with Artie and me, which suited Anita. I’d wager that was why Moreau came over to see us so much — to have a chance to visit Jeff, because he loved that dog unconditionally, as I well knew. Back to the raccoon, I’d named him Albert, Albert Raccoon, and every morning he was stationed at the corner of the cottage waiting to see where I put his breakfast. “Hi Albert,” I’d say as I went outside, “Hi stone, hi lake,” before setting the previous night’s leftovers near the lake, in the undergrowth, or on the rock, which was a little tired of the routine, I think. After Albert had eaten, he told me about his night and then he went to bed.

  Life was continuing its peaceful course, in other words, without any notable incidents, except that one night Artie accidentally put Ping Two into a vegetable stew. I had trouble consoling him, but in the end I managed to by convincing him Ping Two would continue to live inside us, that there would always be a little piece of Ping Two in both our souls. Once the crisis was over, he wanted to give me a third Ping, but I refused, on the pretext that it would hurt too much when we had to part. We had two Pings and that was enough.

  Then, one morning, what was supposed to happen happened, the bear revealing itself right after my moose. I was stacking wood under the porch when I saw a shadowy form on the lake. My first thought was of John Doe, and a great shiver ran through me and I wanted to run away. But during this time my brain concluded its character was inoffensive and pleaded with me to calm down. If it wasn’t yet another of the innumerable John Does saturating the lake, then it could only be the bear, my bear, Winslow!

  “The bear,” I whispered to Jeff, before slowly proceeding down to the beach, taking quiet, cautious steps with my trembling legs, only to realize that it wasn’t a bear but the moose, our moose at least, “Jeff, look, our moose, shut up, don’t bark.” I might well have been disappointed, and was a little, but this old buck was such a beautiful sight, with its humped back it looked so regal, that I filed the bear away for later. I sat down on the sand, Jeff sat down next to me, Bill joined us, and we admired the enormous beast as it waded majestically through the lake, leaving a massive wake behind it that closed up again almost as soon as it formed, to the extent that within a few seconds there would no longer be any evidence of this animal at all, but for the traces it would leave in the marvelling eyes of those watching it from the beach: Bill, Jeff, me, and the raccoon.

  Albert? . . . What was he doing there? It wasn’t his time. He whistled a sentence in raccoon, and if I’d spoken better raccoon then I’d have understood what he was on about. I’d have known he was talking about the bear, who’d installed itself twenty feet behind us, at most, cleverly waiting for us to stop swooning over the moose.

  Jeff saw the bear first, or maybe it was Bill, I forget, and the fur rose on his back and he started to growl. Nobody needed to sketch it out for me to see that my patience was finally going to be rewarded. I told the dogs everything was fine, that there was no need to be alarmed, and slowly, very slowly, turned around, half twisting my shoulders, rotating my pelvis, bending my knees, lifting my right foot — I was turning to the right — putting my right foot back down on the ground . . .

  The bear was huge — huge, brown, hairy, and alarming — and beside it was another creature, medium-sized, brown, and hairy, a baby bear, a young bear, a yearling. For a moment I thought the bear standing in front of us wasn’t the right bear, but I recognized the little white patch on its left buttock. If I’d been capable of telling the difference between a seal and a sea lion, then I would have already noticed it was a female bear. So, Winslow had been reincarnated as a woman and had had a little Winslow, a Winnie, contributing like Anita to the increase in Mirror Lake’s overpopulation.

  “Congratulations, Winslow,” I exhaled between my teeth, and then I felt my cheeks puff out, a bad sign, and I was overcome by unstoppable crazy laughter, which is effectively a pleonasm. This was not the moment, I know, but laughter that can’t be stopped cannot be controlled, and makes me need to pee on top of everything else. So that none would leak out, I started hopping from one foot to the other and tried to think of something sad, but uselessly, since it was unstoppable, as I said. Mother Winslow, though, had no sense of humour. She stood up on her back legs and pointed at Albert the raccoon. What did she want with the raccoon? At first I was baffled, but then I realized she was annoyed with him, no doubt because he’d been stealing her breakfast for the last two weeks. That’s how I interpreted her anger.

  One of my guiding principles has always been that friendship is sacred, so here I was confronted with a serious dilemma. If I let a bear take the raccoon, I was abandoning, in very cowardly fashion, a friend in need. Because our lives were intertwined, Albert and mine. On the other hand, when it came down to it, Winslow was also my friend and wouldn’t appreciate my betraying him. That said, Winslow’s life was not in danger and Albert’s was. But if I protected the raccoon, I was offering up my own hide to the bear. Had Winslow become so bearlike that he would rip me apart if I defended Albert? Another dilemma. While I was thinking this over, everyone around me was growling — Winslow, Winnie, Bill, Jeff, and maybe a couple of other stray critters — and I couldn’t concentrate. As for Albert, he was doing his best to disappear.

  “Silence!” I finally screamed, my shout indeed having an effect for a second or two, during which we could hear nothing but the waves lapping, since they can’t become silent at a moment’s notice and without any warning. I barely had enough time to say, “Good, let’s not be upset, let’s think this through,” when the growling and agitation started up again. I was on the verge of pulling Albert into the lake and throwing myself in after him as I whistled for the dogs when Artie opened the door of the cottage and called out in delight, “A baby bear! A baby bear, Bobby! A baby bear!” as if I hadn’t seen it myself. Still, the fool did manage to create a diversion for long enough that Albert was able to slip away and I to order the dogs back inside. I had business to sort out with Mama Bear and they were getting in the way.

  But I’d been worrying for nothing because Winnie was afraid of Artie and took off into the woods with Winslow in her wake, this is how mothers react.

  “Winslow, don’t go! We have to talk! Winslow, fuck, stop playing the fool . . .”

  Too late. He’d gone. And worse still, in all the kerfuffle, I hadn’t even noticed what colour his damn eyes were. Wrrrik, wrrrik, whistled the raccoon, who’d come back to sit at my feet, maybe to say, “Phew, that was a close call,” or “Sorry, I don’t know,” and then he looked up at me with a timid smile. Me, I had absolutely no desire to smile at all. I went for a pee, shut myself in Winslow’s bedroom, and ripped apart his cap. That relaxed me a little.

  By the time I left the bedroom, the sun had already set.
The light had been dim for a while now, not beautiful at all. I decided to go outside and look at the stars, which only shine at night. Albert was waiting for me by the four-hundred-million-year-old rock below the porch.

  “What are you doing there, Albert? I don’t have anything for you.”

  He said he didn’t want anything, and then he waited for me to notice the object, the dirty white object, that he’d dug up. A piece of Morgan’s book! Holy shit! Albert had a few pages of The Maine Attraction, almost intact, that had escaped Winslow’s destructive urges. I took them and thanked Albert without noticing what was weird about the situation, and quickly returned to the porch to examine the pages by the lantern light. When I realized the pages numbered 216 to 221 were in my hands, a black veil, entirely opaque, fell over my eyes, hiding the starry sky, the light of the moon reflecting on the barely moving surface of the lake, and Artie’s big face as he bent over to offer me a cup of tea.

  He’d discovered Earl Grey at the same time as vegetarianism and was obsessed.

  “No, Artie,” I muttered from the depths of my blindness, “I wanna bourbon.”

  While he went off to fix me a bourbon, I thought back on the contents of pages 216 to 221 and recalled that the action narrated in these pages had taken place on August 17 in a leap year. If I subtracted three hundred and forty-two — the number of days my coma had lasted — from a year, counted backwards to the day I left hospital and, using my fingers, added two for the days I spent in the endless expanse of white, then the date matched exactly, today was August 17, which meant that the events of Morgan’s novel would take place the following day.

  I could pack my bags and leave Mirror Lake before the sun rose the next day, or, better still, leave immediately, without suitcases or goodbyes; but some sinister, implacable force would have forced me to retrace my steps, because my destiny was here, at Mirror Lake, and fate, like stupidity, cannot be undone.