Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  The mystery-charged atmosphere hanging over Mirror Lake on August 18, which I will call the 17th to prevent any confusion, wasn’t simply a product of my imagination. This looks bad, I thought as I half opened my bedroom curtains, we’re in for a long day. Then, to prove myself right, I got dressed, ignoring the darkness and its intimation that I could still shove my head under the pillow for another two or three hours and not feel guilty. I made myself a good strong coffee and went out, leaving Artie to bury his snores in the depths of an innocence he might lose that very day. Unlike me, the sun had not yet risen, and the earliest of the morning birds, some insomniacs no doubt among them, were emitting delicate trills to greet the imminent arrival of the light they could sense by virtue of whatever is their ability to measure time’s passage, though of course it could also be that their matinal conversation was nothing more than a way of keeping their insomnia-induced boredom at bay.

  But for the anxious chirping of a few neurasthenic sparrows, the silence was almost total, and the layer of fog concealing Mirror Lake was so dense that it was impossible even to know that there was a lake in front of you. Anyone unaware of Mirror Lake’s existence and choosing to go for a walk might have headed directly into the water despite the faint, nervous lapping emanating from it. As for those who did know Mirror Lake, they risked stumbling over who knows what, and, if they were truly unlucky, smashing their heads in. Being familiar with a place is no guarantee of safety. Uninterested in tempting fate, I wiped the bench on the porch with the sleeve of my shirt and sat down as Bill and Jeff, sensing something afoot in the fog, wisely stayed close, their ears pricked and eyes fixed on the impenetrable veil surrounding us.

  Anything we could see was grey and wet, washed in gloomy colours heralding bad news. Ed Wood and, closer to us in time, John Carpenter would have found it the ideal setting for a horror movie, the tableau completed by the hooting of a barred owl, ho ho ha ha ha, that made all three of us turn, ready to pounce on anyone, man or beast, that might tear through the veil to attack us. Then I told the dogs it would be a very long day and, whatever came to pass, that they mustn’t forget I loved them — “yes, Bill, you too” — and would carry on loving them even if I were to disappear into the limbo of Mirror Lake, or the limbo Victor Morgan had created. I’m pretty sure they understood, because their big brown eyes watered up and took on a delicate sheen of sadness, love, hope, and powerlessness.

  Meanwhile, more birds had woken up and added their song to the chorus of depressive sparrows. I must have counted about twenty birds dispersed around the cottage and seeming to ask themselves whether or not it was worth waking up or if they were better off, in weather like this, returning to their nests. Then it was the turn of my loon, whom I’d not heard in ages, to add his voice to the hesitant concert. Hoo, hooo, hoohoohoo, tourloulou, tourloulou, he cried and trilled, and with such melancholy that the dogs really did start to cry, and I started wondering why sadness was so frequently lovely, why, three times out of four, it was clothed in beauty’s apparel. I was drifting on the spleen these reflections had caused when the little voice in my head — which annoys me but, for all that, is still mine — retorted that ugliness isn’t especially funny either, referencing Cyrano de Bergerac and Quasimodo. Couldn’t disagree. What is more heartbreaking than the pain of an ugly person? No matter how repellent, an ugly person’s suffering engenders a certain amount of compassion, whereas the suffering of a beauty — should you be prone to spite and not especially beautiful yourself — prompts you to secretly rejoice. Seen from this perspective, you wonder why it is that ugly people feel so sorry for themselves, but that’s forgetting the terrible truth of being hideous: ugliness, if it changes at all, only does so for the worse.

  You’re starting to sound lugubrious, the little voice added, get a grip. But I didn’t need to do that. The sun gave me a shake, its first rays beginning to stream delicately through the mist and down onto the lake immediately in front of us, the loon was now calling in a less melancholy fashion. And then, little by little, the haze evaporated and the lake reappeared. The rising heat created images to go with the sound, and the birds chirping their song and travelling from branch to branch were visible once more. The dogs, delighted to forget their dawn shivers, ran out to the water.

  I, too, was happy that the sun was finally revealing itself. However much I like rain, I couldn’t have coped had it rained that day. I was desperate for light, as much of it as possible, in order to orient myself in the dark labyrinth Moreau and I had entered.

  Speaking of Moreau, he was late. If I thought back to August 17 of the previous year, he’d knocked at my door, or, rather, Winslow’s door, before sunrise. But I had to take account of the fog, of the fact of his being a father, and of the inconvenient truth that he now had a woman in his bed. Events wouldn’t transpire exactly the same way they had the year before, this much was obvious, impossible even, though I was not yet sure this was something I could celebrate.

  Anyway, the sun was up and best to take advantage of it while I was still of this world. I went down to join the dogs by the lake, removed my running shoes, and walked along the strip of soft sand where folk who don’t wish to leave footprints never venture. Then I rolled up the bottom of my pants and walked toward the cold water. A residue of mist remained at the centre of the lake, stretching languorously toward the patch of fog still obscuring the north shore, while on our side the lake was like a mirror. Never had its name seemed so apt. My legs were reflected in front of me, a little twisted by the diffraction of the light waves my footsteps made. Higher up, the reflection of my checked shirt was also undulating, and then, higher still, was the mirror image of my face swollen from lack of sleep. But something seemed to have changed in this face. Had my third eye disappeared in the night? To know for sure, I crouched down and peered more closely at myself.

  That day I was expecting anything to happen, though I certainly wasn’t prepared for what I saw. The image the lake was reflecting back to me was no longer Bob Winslow’s face but mine, Robert Moreau’s! I rushed into the cottage to check the image out in a more dependable mirror, and Artie, who’d not been up long, yelled at me because I was leaving sand and water all over the floor. I left him raging away and double-locked myself in the bathroom. Before I could look truth in the face, I sat down on the edge of the bathtub and felt my pulse, only to notice that I was experiencing serious tachycardia. While I was at it, I also took my blood pressure, and I wasn’t doing well. Abjectly refusing to die before learning my identity, I swallowed a couple of aspirin and stood before the mirror.

  In conversation, disappointment can manifest itself in different ways. The verb to disappoint can be conjugated in every tense or swapped for synonyms — or phrases like that hurts me, and others like darn, what a shame or shit, or interjections like oh darn! or shit! But with faces, the expression is always the same. When disappointment reigns, it falls. As did mine. But not enough for me to fail to recognize myself. My third eye had indeed taken on a certain pallor, but I was undoubtedly Bob Winslow. If I scrutinized myself closely, I could identify resemblances to me, but by and large I was Bob Winslow, and even more Bob Winslow with the weight I’d put on.

  “Who am I?” I asked Artie as I left the bathroom. Not used to questions of this nature as soon as he was out of bed, and not very keen on philosophy, Artie let out a great sigh and chose the simplest answer. “Bob Winslow, you’re Bob Winslow, Bobby. And your eggs are ready.”

  “It’s important, Artie. Don’t you think I look like Robert this morning?”

  “No, you don’t look like Robert. You look like Bob, and your eggs are getting cold.”

  Clearly it was impossible to have a serious conversation with Artie, so I went back down to the lake, crouched over the water again, and saw the same thing Mirror Lake had displayed to me a few minutes earlier: me. Then I went to ask the bathroom mirror for a second opinion, returned to the water and then back up, three or four times i
n a row, before concluding that the lake wasn’t seeing the same thing as the mirror was. Which of the two was misguided? A total mystery. If the mirror was in the wrong, that meant Artie was too. If it was the lake, it meant I was myopic or that it didn’t know how to reflect properly anymore. I needed a third opinion — which Moreau could provide when he finally arrived.

  As I waited for him to get his butt over here, I gathered some rocks and arranged them in order of size and colour, the result telling me what I already knew: pink rocks are the rarest, and white rocks are neither as rare nor as beautiful as you might think. The most beautiful rocks are striped, the ones with a thin pale line through the middle. That’s what I think, and anyone who doesn’t, I decreed that morning, is an ignoramus, dispersing the third pile of rocks with a kick for it to be understood this wasn’t the moment for Neanderthals to contradict me! And then, once I’d had enough of rocks, I played tic-tac-toe on the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, drew a hopscotch grid in the sand, and jumping into the air almost smashed my head in three times. I told Jeff a story, told Bill one, looked at my watch and said, “Whoa, enough! If the hooligan doesn’t show, I’ll have to go meet him.” I yelled to Artie that I was off to find Moreau, that we’d be back soon, then whistled for the dogs and, just as we were getting into the boat, I noticed the raccoon watching us, half hidden behind the pile of logs I hadn’t finished stacking beneath the porch. This will make me sound like an idiot, but I had the feeling the racoon was laughing. But I was too busy to bother about him. I’d find out when I got back.

  As I paddled over, I thought about the racoon’s attitude. What if I’d mixed things up all along? Was it possible . . . was it possible that Albert was Winslow, and the bear simply a bear? What colour were Albert’s eyes again? It’s stupid, but sometimes there are people I’ve known for a while and if someone asked me I’d still not be able to say what colour their eyes are. That’s how it was with Albert. It was pointless wondering. I’d see when I came back — if I came back, that is. As it was, I couldn’t see a thing. We’d moved into the bank of fog covering the north shore, in defiance of all meteorological logic, and I only knew we’d arrived when the boat went crrshshsh on the sand and the counter-force pushed me into Bill, grazing my third eye on the edge of the boat on the way past. Darn!

  To avoid a fourth eye on my forehead, I crawled over to the porch, climbed the steps on all fours, and found myself face to face with Junior. “Doodle!” he cried, after which Anita, who was knitting in the fog, exclaimed, “Bob, what are you doing here?”

  So there I had my third and fourth opinions: I was Winslow, alias Doodle, in the entire world’s eyes except my own and the lake’s.

  “Hi Anita,” I said. “I have to see Robert, it’s urgent.”

  She pointed to the cottage with her knitting needle and I went inside. When Moreau saw me arrive on all fours, blood on my forehead, he raised his eyebrows, which was the best he could offer in the way of compassion, and waited for me to explain myself. I showed him the pages of Morgan’s novel and told him how I’d got hold of them. While he was examining them, I also reminded him that today was August 18 of a non-leap year — in other words, August 17 in a leap year. But saying this was unnecessary, fiddling with the pages I’d held out to him, he was already turning pale.

  “What should we do?” he asked.

  “Go back to my place, watch for the corpse to appear, cross back over to fish it out, then call Robbins and wait for what happens next.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to watch for the drowned guy from here?” he started. Then he thought some more and added, “Whoa, hang on a minute,” this his introduction to making me understand we were panicking uselessly, that we’d fished John Doe out the year before, and that he wasn’t going to reappear just because it was August 18 of a non-leap year, for fuck’s sake. And what’s more, how would we find a drowned man in a fog where you can’t even see your own shadow? His last argument didn’t stand up, but I raised no objection.

  I let him finish, showed him my bleeding third eye, and told him about Johnny Smith and my vision. Then a ray of sun landed at our feet and we heard Anita call out that the fog was lifting. We swallowed hard, looked at each other, and wondered again what we should do. Moreau was of the opinion we should vamoose, take Anita, Junior, the dogs, some food, two or three bottles of bourbon, and hole up in some sordid motel from which we’d be able to phone Robbins and Conan after registering fake names under the receptionist’s baleful, lusty eye. I was just about to agree to his plan when Anita raced through the door to tell us there was a dark shape on the lake.

  “It looks like a moose,” she said, but I heard mouse, which led, because of my nerves, to a new burst of hilarity.

  “A mouse, for God’s sake, a fucking mouse!” I said, and then I played Winslow’s part and fell from my chair.

  “A moose,” Anita articulated more clearly, handing me a tissue to wipe the scratch that had appeared near my third eye after my little tumble, which had thrown me near Junior’s chrome-plated toy car. I needed this whole story to come to an end, because if it didn’t I wouldn’t have any forehead left.

  I stood up and examined the pattern my blood had left on the tissue — it resembled a Zorro-style Z, very stylized but otherwise uninteresting — and followed Anita and Moreau outside as I threw my cape over my shoulders. Yes, there was indeed a dark shape on the lake, a dark figure, but it wasn’t a moose, or a bear, or a fucking mouse, a beaver colony, or a shoal of cod. It was a John Doe, there was no doubt on that front, but, unlike the previous year, he was on the far side of the lake. Just like the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, said the disagreeable little voice inside me. We had to go anyway, otherwise Doe would get away from us. Having understood what hung in the balance, Anita picked up Junior and announced that she was going to her mother’s. Events were not unspooling as they had in my vision, but close enough that my agitation was on the increase. So I shook hands with Junior and stroked Anita’s head and wished them good luck. Moreau did the same, and as to the rest, there was no need to consult with each other. We jumped in the boat with the dogs, Jeff at the back, Bill at the front, stern and prow, each toward his own shore, and rowed so hard that our biceps felt on the brink of exploding as we belted out “Po’ Lazarus” louder than we’d ever belted it out before. It was beautifully done, to be honest. We were perfect. The Cohen brothers couldn’t have directed us any better if we’d been in one of their movies. Should I get out of this alive, I thought, I’d give them a call and pitch my services or a screenplay.

  When we touched land, Moreau went to look for branches, I went to get scarves and Artie, and then the lot of us returned to the lake in perfect synchrony, the three of us working as one to haul the dead guy out of the water. Before we called Robbins, we poked the corpse with the ends of branches to find his wallet. He didn’t have one. But he did have teeth, which was beneficial and meant I wouldn’t have to retrieve my dentures from the damn lake. To ease the tension, I tried to pull my dental plate out of my mouth with the intention of throwing it nonchalantly into the undergrowth, but apparently it was soldered to my gums, because I could no longer remove it. I started yanking at it with both hands with my feet pressed against a stump when Winslow asked what I was trying to do. Winslow? . . . WINSLOW!

  I quickly stood up and went to pat him down, wanting to know where he’d come from. I was so happy to see the big oaf that I didn’t wait for him to answer. I threw my arms around his neck, hugged him, and pulled out his dentures to be sure that I wasn’t mistaken. Jesus, Winslow! Winslow was back, I couldn’t believe my eyes. He was even wearing his cap, the moron. And I’d become myself again, because surely Winslow and Artie would have noticed I wasn’t me.

  But whoa, there, hang on a moment. How was I to know if I had actually become me again if I had always been myself? How would I know that I wasn’t the Moreau who’d always been Moreau, or that there wasn’t still a Moreau i
nside Winslow? How could I be sure I wasn’t still, even if only a little bit, Winslow?

  Ignoring Bob, Bill, Jeff, and Artie’s astounded stares, I pretended I had to do something urgently and went to lock myself into the bathroom, where the mirror, which was starting to get tired of all this, confirmed I was me. It didn’t answer all my questions, but that was enough, and I knew not to stay in this diabolical place a moment longer. If everything was about to happen as my vision predicted, then I would knock my head again, and be led into an infernal cycle perpetuating itself from one August 18 to the next, August 18 becoming the 17th every four years, in a terrible loop that would re-loop each year. I would slip on the tail of some fucking snake that ate itself every twelve months, and I didn’t want any more of this, never, might as well die. I was preparing to escape through Winslow’s bedroom window when Winslow came to tell me that Robbins had arrived with Conan.

  “And what exactly are you doing on the window ledge?” he asked.

  There are four things a person can do on a window ledge: get ready for their imminent suicide attempt, clean the windows, plan an escape, or play guitar. I told him that I was measuring the length of the curtains and sighed. My fate had a sacred determination, and that being the case, I might as well confront it bravely. I climbed down from the windowsill, dusted it off, and followed Winslow, saying a prayer as I went.

  Outside, the first thing I saw was the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, which was waiting for my destiny to be concluded. The first thing I heard was Conan, who was wiping his glasses on his hazmat suit, shout, “I found his wallet.” Given that Winslow, Artie, and I had not found the wallet, I thought John Doe must have swallowed it — it does happen. Not often, but it happens. Before things could get worse, I went to stand by the lake, and looking down at my feet I noticed the lake was now reflecting Winslow’s image back at me. Can’t trust anyone anymore.