* * *
This morning, as I was filling the bird feeders, I said to myself that V. was one of those unexpected arrivals whose authenticity — and honesty — I needed to determine. If
V. is lying, it must mean that V. is real, as it’s unthinkable that I’d have created a character whose only purpose was to lie to me. What would become of truth then?
So the important thing is not to discover whether
V. actually exists, but to determine whether what he says is true. If he’s lying to me about Heather’s death, then he’s real. But if, on the other hand, he’s telling the truth, that means I’m writing a story that other people are inventing along with me — and it’s possible that I only exist because of these others. In both cases, V. exists, and the theory I’m trying to construct about the truthfulness or otherwise of V.’s words doesn’t hold up. V. is as alive as Heather is.
* * *
The calico cat follows the path of my pen on the rough draft and tries to catch it each time I move to the next line, as if she wants to interrupt the backward movement that is crucial to the next sentence’s momentum. Is the cat trying, by biting the pen’s black plastic case, to stop me from uncovering the corpses strewn across my study in the bombyx’s wake, spreading their rotten odour over the much-anticipated summer? I stare into the cat’s green eyes and let my pen drop, but as soon as the object has stopped moving it no longer interests her.
* * *
I’ve started asking questions everywhere about a young woman named Heather Waverley Thorne, who would have lived in this area a few decades ago. First off, I interrogated the owner of the convenience store, where the gossip about everyone in the area circulates on a daily basis, but since she’s only lived in the village for twenty years, she’s not heard anything about a girl by that name, alive or dead.
I had no better luck at the hardware store, where all the employees were too young to know of any event linked to this hypothetical Heather Thorne. “Heather? Heather Waverley, you said? No, never heard of her.”
The realization that half the village’s inhabitants were young enough to be my children and would therefore have no memory of my own childhood years left me feeling terribly old. I was living in a world in which the ghosts and the dead outnumbered the living, in which the people with whom I might have talked about Gosselin Lake, the big rock, the old wooden college built in the shadow of the church, or the Texaco garage fire that kept the village population awake until dawn in July ’64 or ’65 were becoming rarer and rarer.
As I left the hardware store the sun beat down on me like a hammer on an anvil and I wanted to be crushed right there on the deck, waiting for the maggots to come and gnaw away at my body. But instead, I headed to the cemetery just next to it, in the hope of finding Heather Waverley Thorne’s grave.
Heather wasn’t likely to make a run for it, so first I paid homage to my father, as well as the trees around his tombstone, as if, were something from this man still living, it would exist now in the tree sap, and then in the buds that would imminently bloom. I said, “Hi Dad, hi trees,” and waited, stiff as a board, in front of his grave, for his spirit, travelling among the trees, to respond to the tears that spring to my eyes every time I stand in this spot.
A gentle wind made the lowest branches move. I murmured, “Thanks, Dad, I love you, Dad,” before walking, with my nose full of snot, over to the verdant plots where my other dead lay: Joseph, Élise, another Joseph, Angélina, Alcide, Gracia, Berthe, Suzanne, Lucien, Antonio, Béland, Cécile, Lorenzo, as well as women and children who’d died young and whom I’d never known but had one or the other of my two surnames — Audet and Michaud.
After extricating an old tissue from the bottom of my pocket, I started surveying the cemetery in minute detail, intent on discovering a gravestone with Heather’s first and middle name — but also Thorne, the surname that had recently become my own — chiselled into it. I walked around the whole graveyard twice, from north to south and then east to west, I was even brazen enough to pull away with my bare hands some of the vegetation that had grown over stones lying on the ground, aware that I was engaging in a sort of profanity I’d have to explain were I caught in the act, but the urge was stronger than I was, and I needed to reassure myself that Heather had never been buried in this rectangle of either greenery or snow, depending on the season, visible from my childhood bedroom window.
I left the cemetery at dusk, my nails black, my knees grass-stained, but certain that Heather Thorne was alive, that V. had lied to me and, consequently, that he was not one of my creations.
* * *
The man with the gun has just parked his truck in the yard. From the kitchen I see H. W. Thorne. His two hands are on the steering wheel, and he seems to be hesitating over getting out of his vehicle and coming to meet me. The motor is still running, and I expect him to drive off again at top speed, sending gravel flying.
P. has just come down and said a man is parked outside the house. I tell him it’s the man with the gun, and I’ve been expecting his visit. P. is quiet for a few moments, then asks me to send this stranger back where he came from, this man I’ve talked about on several occasions while conceding to P. that my universe is slipping away from me. According to P., nothing good will arise out of my meeting this “man who’s come from elsewhere,” as he’s named him, emphasizing the fact that I have no hold over a character born of some blind spot in my story. Only it’s impossible for me to send H. W. Thorne away, because now he’s standing under the arch, between fall and spring.
* * *
When the light of the lamp illuminates just half of his face, the man with the gun vaguely resembles Heather, but I don’t fall for the trick of the light and I wait for him to speak to me. Right now, he’s talking about Paterson, which he saw on my desk, and he’s alluded to the death of Sarah Cumming, Hopper Cumming’s wife, who fell from the top of the Passaic River Falls on June 20, 1812, around two months after their wedding. He admits that this is more or less all he can remember about Paterson, this random fact narrated by Williams, about a slender woman toppling over in the mist, her veil grabbed by the tumultuous waters.
That’s how he imagines Sarah Cumming — in a young bride’s dress, her long brown hair slicked against the wet satin enveloping her cries, arms and legs flailing in a confusion of hair and fabric, and the chaotic folds of her dress revealing a glimpse of her immaculate underwear. According to him, there is nothing more shocking than the deaths in full flight of youth lost to a moment of distraction: one second of inattention and the foot slips, the eyes widen in the face of the inevitable, and it’s all over. Two or three heartbeats and you are no more.
“It’s all over,” he repeats, “end of story, no more can be added, nothing.” And then he leans toward me, his face now three-quarters lit by the lamp, and asks, “Why, then, why resuscitate the dead?”
How can I explain to him that Heather’s return is not a resurrection at all, that a writer — even if she can, for just a few pages, resuscitate people whose absence is unbearable — cannot bring a woman back to life when she knows nothing of her death. I lean toward him in turn, our faces sharing the shadow, and murmur, “You’re wrong. This woman, Heather, is not who you think she is, I haven’t resuscitated anyone.”
I’d hoped the man with the gun would seize the pole I was holding out to him and reveal Heather Waverley Thorne’s identity, but he retreated into such a silence that the wind coming in through the half-open window had Holy Crappy Owl spinning at the end of his rope. Suddenly interested in Crappy, H. W. Thorne wanted to know where the owl had come from.
“From another story,” I answered. “He managed to get out of that one and slip into this one. Everyone comes from some story. So do you, but I have no idea which one.”
I hadn’t even finished my sentence before H. W. Thorne’s expression turned surly and a wave of anger infused his face. He rose suddenly, picked up the
first thing that came to hand and sent it flying against the wall, murmuring, in a tone unsettling Crappy, that he came from the same story as me, from the same story as Heather, from the same story as Sarah Cumming, whose departed body now accompanied our own. Then he snatched up his coat, a part of which brushed my face, and I smelled cedar, that fresh scent of the forest which had struck Heather so. In the heat of the moment I almost touched the man with the gun to reassure myself he was real but, in the face of his mounting anger, all the magic had flown away.
I stood up and tried to stop him leaving, but he was already through the door and disappearing into the cold night air. I watched as the rear lights of his truck disappeared behind the trees and sank into my armchair, the forest smell of his clothes still lingering. H. W. Thorne had just proved to me my inability to solve the mystery I had created. Without beating around the bush, he’d shown that I understood nothing; ever since I’d met Heather I’d been swimming in total darkness.
The rain started after H. W. Thorne left, and for three days we listened to its incessant rattling on the porch roof. “These are the great May seas,” my mother would say, and, before her, my grandmother, one of whose ancestors no doubt came from one of those foggy places where May tides are affected by the clouds. The expression followed the ancestor, from beside the sea to beside the river, and ended up here at the foot of mountains that have never tasted a single drop of salt water.
I reminded my mother of the expression yesterday, when I visited her in the hospital where she’s staying for a few months following a bad fall. I sat at the foot of her bed and talked to her about the great seas and ocean sprays she had conveyed to me, while in the room across the corridor a drama was playing out as it did every day, no less upsetting for that. I could hear cries coming out of the room, inconsolable cries, the kind that make you want to take the crying person in your arms and lead them away from the dying person.
Because this was exactly the kind of drama unfolding in the room opposite: someone was dying, no doubt a mother, a woman who also had numerous friends, and numerous siblings, whom I noticed as they filed into her room, one after another, twenty or so people with serious faces, coming to say their goodbyes and then gathering in the little lounge at the end of the corridor, from which an occasional peal of laughter would burst out, because you must face death however you can, and not let it seize you so tightly that it suffocates the laughter freeing you from it for a few moments.
I’d have preferred not to witness the spectacle, but right there, sitting at the foot of my mother’s bed, it was impossible not to speculate about the movements of the silhouettes leaving and entering the dying woman’s room, where they stayed for a short or long time depending on just how close they were to her, or on their ability to cope with the disarmingly bright eyes of the woman in the bed. All I could see were her legs, wrapped in a blue blanket that reminded me of a shroud, and whose stillness indicated to me that life was slowly leaving the body over which friends and relatives were bending for a last kiss.
I was unable to endure the intimacy of someone else’s grief any longer, and pretended that I wanted to go out for a smoke in order to take refuge in the hospital’s parking lot, where sunlight had finally pierced the clouds and was warming up the asphalt and the cars. I paced up and down some distance away from the Emergency entrance and thought about the dying woman, whose name and age I didn’t know, wondering what you might feel when twenty faces came to remind you that you wouldn’t
be there tomorrow and would no longer be able to cherish these hands stroking your own.
Was this how I’d like to die? Surrounded by my people even as I was aware their very presence meant I was about to leave? Would I want to say my goodbyes in such heartbreak? Goodbyes to a world whose textures and winds I have so loved? The answer was no, and I decided not to dwell on the subject.
I stubbed out my second cigarette without worrying about all the butts I’d left behind in filthy ashtrays, then picked up a small, smooth stone I’d been examining for a few moments. It had the shape of a druid’s hood, the sort of hat worn by magicians in illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages. I stroked its corners and slipped it into my coat pocket since it was, I knew, one of those stones from which a weary spirit can draw powers to repel death.
* * *
My mother is not well. P. is not well. The second cat is not well. I have to go outside.
Nobody’s been through the clearing where Heather’s Buick has been parked since the accident. As the days have passed, Heather has come to realize that nobody comes through the clearing for the simple reason that she is currently outside the world, and anyone who does venture this way finds themselves expelled from the dimension of ordinary people, a prisoner of the endless autumn, the yellowing trees, the damp nights accentuating the smell of decay that follows her wherever she goes.
Only the man with the gun has set foot on this bit of land, and he too is a prisoner of this interminable season — unless he’s found a gap, an exit through which he has managed to break free from the stasis. But if not, he must still be there, and close by, waiting for the weather to clear and the snow to finally fall on the forest.
Heather also wonders what is beyond the forest, perhaps a desert, a paved road, or the sea. Then a falling leaf makes her jump and she sees Ferland and McMillan’s faces again, the men whose names she’s written down so they won’t be forgotten, and the truth appears to her in its desperate bareness: beyond this forest there’s another forest, and another, and another still, ravaged by a storm that is also infinite.
* * *
The second cat — write his name: “Beauboule, Beauboule the Magnificent, Beauboule the Admirable, Beauboule the Magnificent and Adorable” — the second cat dies on Friday and the house tilts dangerously.
* * *
The Tilted House. This is what I wanted to call my next novel, once I’ve put the final touches on my most recent one. The novel would have been about the fence that needs putting back up, the hill our house stands on, the wild roses growing on both sides of the land year after year, and I would have told no other story than that of the house, of the relationship between it and its inhabitants, of P. and the cats, of me and P. and so on. Like in a movie where nothing happens but the constant rigour of days, during which we need to fix the fence, feed the birds, paint the porch, pour wine for dinner.
I would have talked about that in the book as well, about the long conversations we have over a glass of wine, discussing, depending on our mood, the fence that has to be fixed, the latest news, asking did you know this, did you see that, and about the house being built a little further down the road, the brown one with black shutters, and about the springtime ladybug invasion, the insects appearing out of the tiniest cracks as soon as the sun has passed the equinox, all these subjects inevitably leading to what we are reading, to the novels I consume with varying degrees of enthusiasm, so dull and insipid are the times, and to P.’s readings about matter, about the constant movement of things, leading us in turn to talk about the wood of the table our wine is standing on.
I’d have taken on these subjects if it hadn’t been for my walk on the 4th Line, which might have ended differently if I’d decided simply to go buy the newspaper or go and visit my old friend V. who lives on the mountain, in which case I’d have known nothing of Heather had I not met the woman earlier and experienced the ineluctable revelation of our having the same name.
Despite its title, The Tilted House would not have been a novel about imminent catastrophe, because catastrophe is always imminent. I’m thinking, among other things, of death, of the second cat, Beauboule. (Write his name.) No, it would have been a novel about the precariousness of what leans and needs to be propped up if you want it to remain standing; in summary, a novel about the angles that result from our desire to stabilize the inevitable collapse of our existence.
It would also have been about stories I might
have written — this story, for instance, begun on the road to La Languette, explaining how two men, in the throes of a sudden madness, were in some way under a spell, were, in other words, victims of that other victim always referred to as “beauty,” and that has always, since the dawn of time, caused a sudden craziness to germinate in people’s minds — the futile desire to possess, destroy, or annihilate what can’t be seized.
* * *
Before we took him to the place where skin, fur, eyes, and blood are reduced, no matter the colour of the coat, to white and grey ashes (let’s not think about it too much), I needed to see and touch the second cat’s corpse one last time: Beauboule, write his name, and write it again — “Beauboule” — to ensure that he, like Schrödinger’s cat in a box, isn’t condemned to exist for all eternity in a quantum purgatory where he is both alive and dead at the same time.
* * *
I flipped through the few notes I’d taken after that walk in La Languette when two men appeared to me at the start of the logging road that runs alongside the river, two men who were about to go crazy, and would go crazy again each time a quiet moment brought incendiary images of their nightmare back to them, images of those few unreal minutes during which, obliviously, they’d been possessed by a violence they’d thought themselves incapable of, by a rage shot through with red flashes of light, of blinding desires that would launch them into the abyss of those who know they are irremediably guilty.
Back Roads Page 9
