The M-shaped wound on the bend of my wrist refuses to heal, however. I’ve put mud on it, as my mother taught me long ago, I’ve cleaned it many times and applied various creams, but the lesion’s slightly fringed edges are still bright red under the glowing skin. This injury will leave a scar and be proof that my story is a true one, in which blood does not cede to the will of someone wanting to see it gone.
An unexpected storm battered our region, and summer seemed as though it were no more than a brief flow of hot air over the dusty roads. Ten or more centimetres of snow fell in the night, blown by a north wind we could hear whistling in the chimney.
Several more months have passed since I repaired the fence with P., several months of invisible days during which I feel as though I’ve been wandering alone on an arid plain, cut off from light, cut off from night, cut off from the blooming of the hydrangeas and asters. The summer has retreated into this disassociated time, and here we are back again at the point where P., his back all sweaty, is digging the path leading to the forest floor, head dipped forward to protect himself from the stinging hail. That April morning when I swore to myself in the dazzling spring brightness that I would wholeheartedly enjoy the colours of the coming season is now far behind me, lost deep in that infertile plain where I no longer exist.
In the area of the 4th Line to which her life is currently confined, Heather Thorne hasn’t reckoned on things changing either. She didn’t see the summer coming to an end, hydrangeas wilting, leaves turning red, phlox stiffening in the frost. She barely felt the rain pass over her injuries and imbue the ground with a scent of cold rottenness.
Since these months have been stolen from my senses, and I only have the memory of other summers to narrate, I plunge into the heart of the storm like someone wanting to run barefoot in the warm rain. I put P. into position on the path, focus on the whistling of the wind, and reread the page where Heather strokes the soft fur of a squashed insect.
* * *
Intending to turn back the way she came, Heather Thorne has abandoned the caterpillars to their fate. She stands at the top of the hill, at the point on the road along which she’d arrived, and cannot recall whether she came from the north or the east. Houses are dotted here and there by the intersection in the shade of the hill, but she doesn’t recognize any of them. The second house on the right, the paint of its red shutters flaking, vaguely reminds her of a house she recalls being under the trees, except this one is surrounded by an enormous lawn where all she sees are wilted rose bushes. The house at the south corner of the crossroads would also have struck her as familiar, were it not for the barn behind it, a red-roofed building near which a child is playing hopscotch and singing, “One, two, buckle my shoe.”
Heather looks at the child, and then at the big slope to the right, and decides she must have come from the section of the road that appears to be clinging to the foot of the mountain, its beauty receding in the fine fog. Contemplating the stunning view offering itself up to her, she feels that the errant can only really make progress in settings whose splendour has been designed to mitigate their sense of being lost. But she fears a trap, so, still following her instincts, sets off in the other direction.
* * *
The M-shaped wound where my wrist flexes is identical to the one I drew long ago on Sissy Morgan’s skin. Sissy was a young girl who died from bleeding out when the jaws of a bear trap closed around one of her long legs. That happened not far from here, at Boundary Pond, before the winter caught me off guard.
* * *
Heather has just arrived at my house. I can see her through one of my study windows, where melting hail has mixed with the snow accumulating at the bottom of the panes and made shapes resembling mountainous landscapes dotted with greenish lakes. Heather stands, right leg slightly raised because of the pain, under the archway at the entrance opening onto our property. Above her head, the wooden plaque with our house number swings in the wind, making its rusty chains squeak.
Distracted by the squeaking, which stirs up old childhood fears, Heather doesn’t dare go any further. The arch beneath which she’s standing seems to cleave the world in two. To the north of the arch, it’s still fall — indeed, some Pyrrharctia isabella are crossing the road behind her. But beyond it, snow is piled up on either side of a path that someone has recently dug out. A man, she guesses, judging from the size of the footsteps pressed into the snow. A shiver runs through her body and she sees me, standing at the window and signalling for her to come in.
* * *
I wonder why I’ve brought Heather here, because I have no idea what to do with her once I’ve opened the door. Incapable of deciding whether or not I was going to let her head toward the misty beauty of the mountain, I stupidly propelled her to retrace her steps while I was clearing the paths with P. or continuing my reading of Paterson. In fact, I don’t even know why I wrote this incredibly simple sentence: “Heather has just arrived at my house.” I was aiming for an effect of surprise, I think, the cymbal clash that would make readers start and hold their breath, but now I’m faced with a situation that both frightens and disconcerts me. What am I to do with Heather Thorne once she crosses the threshold and we are confronted with our resemblance?
From the other side of the archway, arms wrapped around her body, Heather begins to limp along the path dug out by P. She ought to run in this cold, but, like me, she’s afraid of the meeting about to take place. She hesitates for a moment at the bottom of the porch steps, wondering if perhaps she shouldn’t just turn around, retreat back through the arch and into the fall I’ve prolonged for her sake. This season, thinks Heather Thorne, could become her eternal fall, but the fear of being its captive and having to witness the trees slowly rotting pushes her forward.
With my hand on the doorknob, I too am questioning myself. Should I open it, or send her back out into the woods, back into a restricted universe where her fate has only a distant influence over mine, following a plan in which our lives play out in parallel?
* * *
I could take Boris Vian’s famous sentence in the preface to Froth on the Daydream: “This story is entirely true because I imagined it from one end to the other,” but this would be a lie, in part, my story only “entirely true” because I have lived it from one end to the other.
I push the door open and wave Heather in.
* * *
Heather is sitting in the cat’s armchair, the cat having fled after I opened the door and let in a gust of glacial air. I’m sitting at my desk opposite Heather, with about a metre between us. Were we both to lean forward with outstretched arms, our fingers could touch, like in those movies when one of the characters is desperately reaching out and someone grabs his hand before he falls down, and down, with no way back.
I’ve lit the lamp near where the memory of the bombyx lies, and its glow is cutting Heather’s face in two, just as it must be dividing mine. If we brought together the two illuminated parts of our faces, we might finally see what the real Heather Thorne looks like — the one existing only in our amalgamation. As for the shaded parts, they seem to want to flee toward the windows so they can disappear into the night that suits them more than the overly bright light.
Heather’s been here for over an hour and still hasn’t said a word. She’s looked at her surroundings and scrutinized me, observing the scratches all over my arms and pausing on the M-shaped wound on my right wrist. And she’s taken little sips of the tea I made for us. When she opens her mouth, it will be to ask me who she is, where she comes from, and whether or not I’ve arranged a future for her, or if we’re condemned to sit and stare at each other until her face disappears as mine is superimposed over it.
P. has just come down the stairs and noticed us, Heather and me; two women with identical profiles sitting face to face in my study. He asks why I haven’t come up to bed — why I’m still down here in the half-dark watching a character who, regardless, will be c
oming to bed with me — but I indicate that he should leave us alone. Heather and I must see our silent meeting through. Sighing, he goes back upstairs, clearly not understanding my determined efforts to discern my features in the shadowy ones of a woman who, according to P., I have entirely fabricated — even if she’s every bit as real as the story I’m living through these pages.
We can hear P. snoring, aware even in his sleep that he is not just my companion now, but also Heather Thorne’s.
* * *
Heather and I eventually compared our injuries, and as we brought our arms back to our bowed bodies, we felt the light dimming as the room’s temperature dropped, as if the anguish emerging from the identical nature of our injuries had pressed with all its weight down upon the house’s atmosphere. Even our faces seemed no more than lunar-white half-ovals from which every distinguishing mark had disappeared. We needed nothing more for us to understand that we were linked by a kinship stronger than blood, and this bond would remain, whether we liked it or not, until one or other of us left the stage.
But, aware we should not have met each other yet — that we risked becoming a single formless entity condemned to stasis — Heather quickly asked me what kind of future I had planned for her, but I had no answer to give. As I’ve already said, how can we predict what, tomorrow, a storm or mere gust of wind might set off, what might prompt an unexpected phone call, or cause a branch to snap with such a startling crack that I’m inspired to head toward the source of the sound and entirely forget the text I’ve been hunched over in my effort to lose myself in the colours of winter. How can we predict the consequences of her limp, when it might lead us in an altogether unexpected direction and have us reinvent everything — from her accident right up to the moment of her meeting the man with the gun.
In any case, we had to start there, with the man with the gun, before the effects of the cold could distract us from our endgame and leave us to fate. We needed to find this man again and work out the meaning of his words, You aren’t who you think you are. Our future and reality depend on it.
Out of the silence Heather had fallen into since I’d started to speak, I heard a low murmur. It might have been agreement. To echo her distress, I murmured in turn, then waited until she’d put her cup down on the corner of my desk before asking her to leave and never come back. We’d see each other again, but in territory where our faces could not be erased by the light.
* * *
Heather has just made her way back through the arch, on the other side of which leaves are spiralling down in an autumn night that’s not yet known the snap of frost, and I’m alone in the sleeping house with no chance of abandoning myself to dreaming.
I touch the M-shaped wound reddening my right wrist and wonder what led to it. Did this letter so deeply encrusted in my flesh come from the rose bushes, from Sissy Morgan, or from Heather Thorne? Do I project my own injuries onto people around me, or, through some strange phenomenon of wishful thinking, do they appear on my skin like stigmata of the alienation of an author unable to separate her flesh from the written word?
If this is the case, then before long my body will be entirely tattooed with the miseries fiction inflicts on the characters it creates in its effort to give reality meaning.
Andy Williams, may he rest in peace, is singing “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” on the radio, and I let myself be carried away by the nostalgia of a time so distant I can scarcely remember being the little girl who trembled as Christmas approached, plunging joyfully into the Sears and Eaton’s catalogues full of every single thing that could satisfy the desires of spoiled children unaware that this greed would partly determine their ridiculous adult dreams. Christmas is a few days away, but I don’t feel the slightest hint of excitement. On the contrary, I am dreading the tedium of long white nights during which I’ll have to fake joy with a few guests who’d no doubt prefer to be sitting comfortably in their own living rooms and watching the year’s latest blockbuster.
Despite this total absence of spirit, I went up to the attic with P. to look for our few Christmas decorations, hoping the sight of our artificial mistletoe wreath would ignite a spark that would help me remember the meaning of the holiday. A wasted effort: it has no meaning left. If only we were able to celebrate the solstice and be seduced by some pagan rite, if only we could sing about the advent of some hypothetical saviour, but all we do is prove that a commercialism we disapprove of has conquered our will and is therefore doubly victorious.
P. agrees with me on this point. He watches me hang my golden owls above the kitchen table and wonders why the tacky figurines compel me to hum “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” despite my not believing in any of it. I haven’t admitted to him how deeply attached I am to these night birds I’ve named Crappy and Holy Junior — this, in memory of the one and only Holy Crappy Owl, who has swung in my study ever since Marnie Duchamp, a character from one of my earlier novels, started talking to the straw bird. Nor have I let him know that, like Marnie, I talk to owls. P. smokes his pipe in the living room and watches me skeptically, choosing to remain quiet rather than repeat yet again that he doesn’t understand why it is I waste my time with these few pathetic wreaths when, before the Three Kings even make it here for Twelfth Night, I’ll have packed them back in their box the second I’m filled with the desire to hang myself right alongside Holy and Crappy.
He’s right — the urge to hang myself, or to lie down in the snow and sulk, is as fervent as my desire to resuscitate a happiness I’m too old for now. Still, I persevere stubbornly and try to think back on the Sears catalogue from the winter of ’67, in which the box of Lego I so desperately wanted was photographed next to the orange tractor my brother received on the twenty-fifth. And I try to forget these trinkets were simply prefiguring the cheap decorations I’m now wrestling with. Our nearest neighbour battled his yesterday, climbing his pine tree to adorn it with red lights that will flash in the dark until the moment when he, too, wants to cut the wretched thing down, cursing Jesus and the whole damn holiday season.
I tuck the Sears catalogue away in a corner of my memory and focus on the cold days when I’d shut myself away in my bedroom, on the second floor of the family house, and write as I watched the frozen larch and birches in the backyard while the others chatted downstairs. I have an unadulterated memory, one both sweet and nostalgic, of the moments when I’d leave the party and, cocooned in its warm murmur, fill up notebooks that will forever stay at the bottom of a drawer but nonetheless contain the entirety of my happy solitude. Perhaps this is the reason why, this morning, I’m breaking my back in order to balance a sparkling moose against the lamp in the hall. I want to recreate those hours during which, with my eyes riveted to the village cemetery half hidden in the frosty trees, I was preparing for the arrival of Heather Thorne.
* * *
I finally decided to go and visit V., an old friend who’d built himself a house on the mountain, because if anybody can tell me something about the man with the gun, it’ll be V., who’s never lived anywhere but in this area, and who knows, better than anyone, the woods and the people who frequent them: fishers, hunters, trappers, campers, walkers.
As soon as he saw me approaching, V. opened his front door with the same wide smile that seems not to have left his lips since he was a teen, the only difference being that now it reveals the network of wrinkles that age and his exposure to strong cold winds have engraved on his face. I saw, in his smile, all those years in which a bunch of us would hike to the mountains, to La Languette or any of the other places that constituted our domain, a territory bordered only by our desire to confine ourselves in it. Suddenly I want to throw myself into V.’s arms, as if coming across an old friend I’d thought dead, or whom I was leading back to the daylight after interring him in a damp vault for decades. Where had we been all those years? What kind of detachment had we withdrawn into?
Out of reserve, I modestly k
issed V. on both cheeks and followed him into his enormous kitchen filled with the smells of nicely browned bread and tobacco. He made me a cup of coffee and then, as we sat around his wooden table, we picked up the thread of old memories, since nothing linked us more than the past — and neither of us understood how it had slipped away from us quite so easily.
When it came time to leave, I’d almost forgotten the main reason for visiting: the man with the gun. I questioned V. about him, but since my description of the man was somewhat vague, V. wasn’t a great help to me. “It’s like you’re describing a dead man,” he said finally, and I felt my head go numb, my feet and legs too, and my heart start to race. V. had hit the nail on the head. I’d just sketched out a ghost. And yet, the man with the gun couldn’t be a phantom. If that had been the case, I’d have recognized him — a writer always knows her ghosts. Noting my uneasiness, V. suggested that perhaps it was Casgrain. Maybe Casgrain or Ferland, two guys from the next village who both had red trucks, though Ferland was a bit too young to match the man I’d described.
“It would be easier if you’d written down the licence plate,” V. added, and I realized that I hadn’t really seen the armed man’s truck, and the only reason I knew its colour was because the man sat there after he’d left the woods, to reflect on his meeting with the woman claiming to be Heather Thorne. And I’d only witnessed this scene because the man with the gun had, to a point, written it.
Back Roads Page 4
