Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  Nothing else made much sense, but it suited the drift of the story. Mirror Lake disappeared under a new cloak of impenetrable fog, out of which every now and again appeared a leg, an arm, a fist, a red or white face, depending on the mood and state of its owner. I remember seeing the Daltons show, as well as Anita’s mother, whom I’d not yet had the pleasure of meeting, because you can’t do everything. It’s even possible that Stephen King turned up, apologizing for being late for dinner. What a mess. Then, when Strauss’s waltz struck up in the fog, I saw myself in slow motion gliding directly over one of the Xs I’d drawn on the four-hundred-million-year-old rock in a game of tic-tac-toe; it’s ridiculous what goes through your head when you’re in slow motion. After impact, I remember opening my mouth to gurgle “John Doe is . . . is . . .” and then I was propelled to a place where knowing what your colours are is useless, because there aren’t any.

  There is only one past. And there is only one present.

  On the other hand, there is a multitude of futures.

  But only one of them can happen.

  — Philippe Geluck, Le chat

  When the stars go out, you’re justified in thinking it’s the end of the world. When they light up again, you have several choices. It really depends where you are. If you open your eyes on the chimerical splendour of Mirror Lake, you can tell yourself you’re in a dream or a nightmare and nobody will contradict you. I’ve been living on Mirror Lake for twenty years and I still haven’t managed to figure out if I’m dead, in hell, in paradise, or in some transitional place you could call purgatory.

  When I returned from limbo the day after August 18, three hundred and forty-two days that I’d had neither the pleasure nor the misfortune of living had passed, but at least I was Robert Moreau. Little Robert was a year older, Anita had a few more wrinkles at the corners of her eyes, which only made her more beautiful, and Winslow’s face was a little crumpled, but he definitely was good old Winslow. I preferred seeing him in front of me rather than in my mirror.

  Over the next few weeks, I tried to make him admit he was Albert, the racoon, but the imbecile stuck to his guns. He’d never known a racoon by the name of Albert, he said. So was he the bear, then?

  “Answer me, Winslow, for God’s sake. If you were not the raccoon it means you were the bear, no?”

  But all my queries went unanswered. Winslow categorically denied having been anything other than himself. When I tried to elicit information about Victor Morgan’s novel, he claimed there was a gap in his memory concerning the subject. I called him a liar but to no effect. Winslow would clearly be no help, so I researched other avenues in my effort to discover who Morgan was, but apparently the writer had fallen into such total oblivion that all traces of his time on earth had been erased. But I still have pages 216 to 221 of The Maine Attraction, which prove beyond a doubt the novel’s existence. And if there’s a novel, there must be a novelist, there’s no getting around it.

  As for Anita, she seemed happy to know I was back, and we tried not to yell at each other too much. We picked up the game we’d invented solely for ourselves, and depending on whether the evening was sad or languid, we slipped into the skins of Marlon Brando, Lana Turner, Fred Astaire, or Elizabeth Taylor. Anita was exceptional as Martha, the hysterical woman in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and one day she also agreed to play Juliette Lewis’s Lolita for me. After that, I no longer dreamed about Juliette Lewis. In my darkest, wildest fantasies, it was Anita, the incredible Anita Swanson, who took her place.

  Little Robert resembled me more every day. It used to be that looking at him was like standing in front of a mirror, but a mirror that makes you look younger, that allows you to travel through time at the speed of light and confirm that yes, you weren’t too ugly a few years ago, and you might have not become so stupid had life not decided to run you over. But that wouldn’t happen to little Robert, I would be there to protect him, or like all parents, that’s what I claimed, forgetting that he would leave me one day and there would come a moment in which I’d no longer be able to do anything to help. The stubborn do exactly as they pleases, period.

  And then what had to happen happened. Time’s inexorable passing brought us to August 17, John Doe rose up from the abyssal depths of Mirror Lake, I made a swan dive through the air, smashed myself on the forehead, and an attentive ear — Artie’s ear, it turned out — leaned over me, and three hundred and forty-two days later I was Artie. This year, come the morning of August 17, I took no chances and told everybody that if by chance Moreau cracked his head on the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, nobody should go near him. I made up some story about the connections between the neurons and synapses when you take a blow to the head, and they swallowed it, unless they simply wanted to make Artie happy. Unfortunately, the racoon missed my explanations and, before Strauss’s waltz ended, I felt four little paws gripping my shirt. When I woke up I was Albert.

  Being a racoon does have advantages. You’re totally chill, breakfast is served every morning, and nobody bothers you, since nobody is interested in wrecking a racoon’s placid life. While I was Albert, I really did try to have the four-hundred-million-year-old rock moved, but without success. The rock will likely still be there even after the entire surface of the earth has been destroyed in a nuclear war or a Klingon invasion.

  Over the course of two decades, following a cycle I’ve ceased to try to understand, I’ve been Winslow, me, Artie, Albert, Jeff, me, Junior, me, Robbins, Bill, each of the Dalton brothers in turn, Conan, Jones, Winslow, and me, etc. The only person I’ve never been reincarnated as is Anita. Which is a shame, because I really would have liked to inhabit a woman’s body once in my life, especially Anita’s, so I might have learned what I looked like in her eyes, and how it is that the weight of her breasts, so full of her woman’s story, could sometimes be such a burden. Knowing as much might have helped me console her in those moments when I’d see her past blow across her face in the interlude between two sorry smiles seeming to apologize for everything — life, misery, all the horrors we are forced to endure for the sake of a little beauty. Anita might often have been forced to trade her body for a bit of cash, but her soul wasn’t so easily ravaged.

  That said, I’ve been all the others — except for John Doe, who rises out of the mist once a year just to taunt me. The worst occasion was when I turned into Robbins. I was obliged to chew a toothpick and see the world in brown for twenty-three days and twenty-three nights because, as I can now confirm, Robbins doesn’t take off his sunglasses to go to sleep. They are fixed onto his head. He’ll die wearing them. The best time was the few weeks when I was Jeff. I had no other aspirations but to play, rest, eat, be on the lookout for squirrels, and take care of my master — who was me, as it happened. I looked at me and I thought I was good-looking. I looked at me and I thought I was intelligent. I looked at me and loved myself unconditionally. Furthermore, it was the only time in my life when I truly understood the meaning of the word Zen, which stood out in capital letters in front of me whenever I got carried away thinking of nothing. The Jeff year was a happy year, a year of grace, affecting not only my ego, but what I shall call my humbling experience of the world — but, like anything of merit, it didn’t last long enough.

  The truly disastrous aspect of my situation is that I only live for twenty-three days a year. If I was Buddhist, I would claim this was my samsara and that I was moving through successive states that would lead me nowhere, for the simple reason that I am too slow or not Buddhist enough to attain enlightenment. Since I have never been reincarnated as a Tibetan monk, and as I prefer not to know how good my karma is, I chalk it down to fate and make the most of those twenty-three days. I spend the rest of the time in total blackness or total whiteness, depending on the year. And as for the people whose identities I borrow, I’ve still not managed to figure out into what limbo they disappear while I exist in their place. Neither do I have the slightest idea of what happens
in my head when I’m not there. When I do become myself once more, all memory of this parallel space-time is erased. Still. I try to see life’s positive side. I don’t have any choice. And I tell myself that if I do, I’ll not age so quickly and will be acquainted with just one season, the most beautiful, the season of summer and the Perseids.

  This year I’m me, but I have no idea who I will be the day after August 17. Maybe the four-hundred-million-year-old rock, whose vertiginous knowledge will complement Jeff’s teachings and allow me to reach my nirvana. I actually believe that were I to become a rock one day, it would turn out to be the last cycle of my reincarnations so that I’d still be lying there in a few million years, frozen under the crust of an ice age, or serving as a landing rock for extraterrestrial spaceships. I’d also bet that some other guy has been shut up in the rock for four or five centuries with his tomahawk, and he’s fed up with being trampled underfoot and is patiently waiting for someone to free him.

  If this does happen, it will probably be soon, because the banks of Mirror Lake are less populated now. Jeff died a long time ago, on the saddest sunny day of my life, promising me that he’d wait for me on the other side. On the other side of the lake? The other side of the mirror? I don’t know, I will see. We’d just been out walking in the woods — very slowly, because his old bones hurt him — and when we sat down on the beach to rest a little, he put his big head on my thigh and I saw in his moist eyes that he was at the end of his strength, that his dog-love could no longer keep him alive. Let me go, his tired eyes were saying. So I replied, “Okay, Jeff, run, go look for a star,” and that’s where he went, toward the sky constellated with infinite lights. Before leaving, he assured me that when my human solitude was attacking me with a sabre right in my sternum, he would never be far away. Then his eyes drank in Mirror Lake, a place that had become an earthly paradise for him, turned back to me, smiled his painful tired-dog smile, and suddenly he wasn’t suffering any longer. He went off, stroking the tears soaking my face as he went, tears mixing with ones I’d previously shed for Alfie, the first dog in my life.

  Bill was terribly upset, but he got over it, as did we all, despite the scar. He joined Jeff a few years later, on another indescribably sad day, and Mirror Lake was never the same again. Junior had left for university and only came back to visit Anita and me occasionally. As for that big chump Winslow, he kicked the bucket last year in a tragic kind of way. I was at his bedside as he passed, and his last words were “No! No! Humpty Dumpty is not a potato, he’s an egg.” Then he let out a big sigh, and was no more. When the worst of the pain had passed, I got myself a dartboard, drew Humpty Dumpty on the target, and emptied out my heart; it hurt too much knowing that stupid potato had haunted Winslow’s final moments.

  Anita, Artie, Junior, and I gave Winslow a first-class burial. We buried him behind the cottage, with his cap, his plaid shirt, and his fishing rod, beside the dogs as he’d requested, and sometimes I think I catch sight of him roaming by the lake. That’s the feeling I had yesterday evening, when the mountains were melting into the darkness. I was convinced he was there, right next to me, with the dogs.

  “Yellow as a star,” he began, and I carried on with “yellow as the sun, yellow as Jeff, yellow as Bill . . .” and he heard me, I know he heard me, as did Jeff and Bill, their big tails beating against the timber of the dock wood to show how overjoyed they were that we were reunited.

  “Look, Jeff,” I whispered, “that’s where I’ll go meet you shortly, you see, up there, in the memory of time,” and Jeff licked my hand, my neck, and my face, collecting a few tears as he did so.

  I stayed with them until dawn. And then, when one of my loon’s progeny started a lament for the new day, I stood, turned my back on the lake, and murmured, “See you soon, racoon.”

  Montreal, by Baldwin Park,

  July 2005 to June 2006

  Acknowledgements

  First and foremost I would like to thank my partner, Pierre, for his presence, his patient reading, his comments and suggestions and, of course, his lake. I would also like to thank my sister Viviane, who inspired the story of Ping, and consequently, Ping Two, as well as my nephew Éric (my favourite hydrogeologist), who provided me crucial information about the world of rocks generally, and about the four-hundred-million-year-old rock in particular.

  A thousand thanks to Guy, my official linguistic repair guy, as well as Bernard, Élise, Jacques, Louise, Sylvain, and, again, Viviane, who wracked their brains to help me choose images evoking Mirror Lake or gave me a hand when it was time to find a title for the novel, which I decided in the end to call Mirror Lake because, even though I find the word mirror unpronounceable, that’s its title and there’s no getting away from it.

  My thanks also go to Jacques Fortin, president of Éditions Québec Amérique, for his unwavering support; to Normand de Bellefeuille, my editor, to his accomplice, Isabelle Longpré, and the rest of the team at Éditions Québec Amérique, whose contagious enthusiasm is the best antidote for writer’s migraine.

  I would also like to express gratitude to House of Anansi Press for the English translation of Mirror Lake and its enthusiastic support of French-Canadian literature. And to Noah Richler, the literary director of Arachnide, for his understanding at all times. Thanks to J. C. Sutcliffe for her formidable work — apologies for the headaches Robert Moreau and I must have brought on — and to managing editor Maria Golikova, designer Alysia Shewchuk, copy editor Gemma Wain, and the rest of the team at Anansi.

  I also thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the jury members who awarded me a grant to write this novel.

  Note

  All of the characters and events in this novel are entirely fictitious. So is Mirror Lake, which is a figment of my imagination, despite there being two lakes in Maine with the name, neither of which I have ever had the pleasure (or misfortune) of visiting.

  I would also like to clarify that I have the utmost admiration for the prodigious talent of Tim Robbins, whose name and features I borrowed to create the sheriff character. Nobody could have played this part better than Robbins.

  © P.

  ANDRÉE A. MICHAUD is one of the most beloved and celebrated writers of Francophonie. She is a two-time winner of both the Governor General’s Literary Award the Arthur Ellis Award for Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing. She has won the Prix Ringuet, the Prix Saint-Pacôme du roman policier, France’s Prix SNCF du Polar, and numerous other awards. Her novel Boundary was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and has been published in seven territories. Back Roads, Michaud’s eleventh novel, was the third to be published in English. She was born in Saint-Sébastien-de-Frontenac and continues to live in the province of Quebec.

  * * *

  J. C. SUTCLIFFE is a translator, writer, and editor. She has written for the Globe and Mail, the Times Literary Supplement, and the National Post, among others. Her translations include Back Roads by Andrée A. Michaud, Mama’s Boy and Mama’s Boy Behind Bars by David Goudreault, Document 1 by François Blais, and Worst Case, We Get Married by Sophie Bienvenu.