“Could be that bastard’s dead too,” murmurs Howard W. Thorne, after a diatribe about the murderer’s cowardice. I can feel, in his voice, the bitterness that has grown over the years and made his breath taste of the bile he tries to eliminate by gargling alcohol. “A shit like that doesn’t deserve a gentle death,” he continues, the greatest joy Howard W. Thorne can imagine being to wrap his hands around the son-of-a-bitch’s throat until he begs for mercy and confesses to the crime. Afterwards, he’d take all the time necessary to make him regret ever having set eyes on Thorne’s daughter.
Howard W. Thorne’s expression is glassy and remote, so consumed is he by the desire for revenge. He goes on to say there is no torture he’s not imagined in all these years of pursuing a shadow, that there isn’t a face in the region whose features he hasn’t scrutinized until his quarry blushed, sometimes to the point of Thorne losing it in trying to discern some trace of shame or remorse, a flicker of the assailant’s eyes, that would betray his fear — or, worse, the bravado of someone who feels invulnerable. “But the sonofabitch disguised his tricks so well he’s been able to live in full view of the world,” Thorne spits out, thumping a fist on the arm of his chair. “As if he’d done nothing wrong, still fucking his wife, still laughing with his pals around a table of full glasses and empty bottles, still driving his kids to school and licking the priest’s ass every Easter.
“Tabarnak,” he shouts, and then throws his glass against the wall, just missing me. He mumbles an apology, puts his head in his hands, and then staggers over to pick up the pieces of broken glass, which aren’t the first pieces he’s had to pick up, because I can see, on the wall where the glass smashed, brownish stains commemorating Howard W. Thorne’s numerous impotent rages.
I’m wondering if I should help, or whether my interference would simply fan the flames of his fury, when I spot a different photograph lying flat on Thorne’s coffee table. Within its white frame are a dog, and a little girl wearing a blue dress: Jackson and Heather one summer’s day. It makes my blood run cold, because I recognize the photograph in which I appear on a hot summer’s day with my dog Jeff, a photograph I had thought was lost.
I’m leaning over the photo when Thorne returns with a rag, broom, and dustpan. I point at the photo with a trembling finger, hoping he’ll enlighten me about its origins, but just at that moment someone knocks at the door — three little taps followed by a big thump, like some kind of code. Howard W. Thorne looks at his watch and then puts down the broom, rag, and dustpan, takes me by the arm and ushers me out the back door, obviously not keen for me to meet his visitor. I try to protest, but the door closes on me with a dry slam, and I stand there, in the dark, listening to my heart beating.
* * *
Lasiurus borealis, commonly known as the Eastern red bat, likes hanging from trees, where it can be mistaken for dead leaves. I can see three or four of them around me, swinging from the end of a branch and then letting go to drop toward the ground or launch themselves on their erratic flight into the night, catching, as they go, a specimen of Lymantria dispar, Olceclostera angelica, or any of the other moths whose names I don’t know.
The hour of the bombyx has arrived, but no lamp lights the undergrowth through which I am making my way in the hope of finding a lookout spot from which to survey Howard W. Thorne’s visitor. A wasted effort. The curtains are drawn, and all I can make out are two silhouettes moving from one window to the next as they proceed from the front to the back of the house. Then the patio light flickers on, and Thorne comes out and sits down, followed by Vince, who’s carrying a bottle and two glasses.
Surrounded by bombyx hurling themselves at the light bulb above their heads, the two men talk in low voices, and from where I am lying in wait, all I can hear are low murmurs and the occasional burst of laughter. I examine the surroundings and decide that if I want to hear their conversation I need to move out into the open. Instead, I decide to go home and wait to be a part of the parallel story that Vince and Howard W. Thorne are writing. As I skirt around the house, I hear a name, Howard, rising above the squeaking of the Lasiurus borealis.
* * *
Back home, I write in my notebook: “Howard,” “Howard Wayne Thorne,” to establish once and for all H. W. Thorne’s identity. Then I sit down in the black leather armchair near the cat’s chair, from where I can watch the undergrowth at night. Through the motionless branches, fragments of the dream, a brief summary of which I’d recorded in one of the notebooks, comes to mind with startling precision, given that the dream happened several months ago. I’d been at Lake Saint-François, where I spent my childhood summers. The sky was overcast, though perhaps it was simply that the atmosphere was dusty, the clarity of the day diminished by the fine powder rising from the arid banks. I was walking close to where the lake had been; all I could see in front of me were a depression in the sand and rocks that disappeared into the horizon. My childhood was done. I was becoming old and dried out, just like the lake’s furrowed depths.
But instead of giving in to this unavoidable reality, I grabbed hold of the docks meandering out over the sand in the hope they might lead to some river where I could soak my bones and renew my youthful suppleness. In vain. I woke up on a bed of rocks over which no river would ever flow again.
It was, I think, on this day that I went to La Languette and imagined, near the riverbed where just a thin trickle of water snaked between the stony banks, the tragic story of a young girl whose blood would entice me with the illusion that my hands were not yet so parched that I was no longer able to write.
* * *
It rained on my arid dream for a part of the night, and, this morning, the countryside lies beneath one of those stagnant fogs that remind me of the mists at Boundary Pond and their odour of fish and guts. I’m eight years old, I’m throwing stones into the lake, my father is standing on top of a ridge and observing the mountain like a man humbled by the majesty of the rock, and my name is Andrée.
* * *
“It’s like remembering something from your childhood, and you’re not sure if it’s your memory, or a friend’s memory, and then you realize sadly it’s just some photo in an old book.”
I am thinking about these words spoken by Dr. Abel Gideon, a character from the series Hannibal who no longer knows who he is, and who is questioning his own identity as he racks up murders in the hope of remembering.
It’s like remembering something from your childhood . . . The photo on Howard W. Thorne’s coffee table floats up above the misty landscape and I see myself again, scraped knees, running with Jeff, my beloved dog, at the edge of a field. At the end of this race, the camera click is heard, and child and dog together enter a book of pictures.
But the photo of the child and the dog might not belong to me. I concede the possibility that I’ve drawn the image from someone else’s memory and appropriated it for myself — from my mother’s memory, perhaps, as she posed with her dog Puppy, in a field of yellowed grass undulating to the same rhythm as the long black hair of this young woman in love. The thing that unsettles me is not my memory’s ability to pillage other people’s pasts, but the fact that I, like Abel Gideon, am racking up murders in order to find out who I am.
* * *
Nothing about reality seems real anymore. The middle of July is cold and the summer a lie. I’ve written that already, and catch myself believing it when the sun is shining and it’s making sweat trickle down P.’s forehead. But the fall will be real, and already it is encroaching on the daisies’ whiteness.
* * *
There are too many questions jostling for position in my head. I close my eyes and clasp my hands in front of my mouth, thumbs under my chin, in the posture people sometimes adopt for praying, and try to empty my mind so I can think, instead, about Heather’s amnesia, wondering if her forgetting isn’t characteristic of all fictional beings and if it’s actually up to me to fill in the holes that perforate her m
emory.
But can memory really exist in someone who’s just been born? What past do they actually have, these characters, already in their thirties, making their entrance on page 1 of a novel and being nudged toward the future along a trajectory that demands no backsliding? Is it possible to explain these characters on the basis of a hypothetical past, or is their existence only affected from the moment they arrive on the page, pressing the trigger of a gun, or throwing themselves into a river, the depth of which is the only thing that will determine the narrative?
My answer is simple: a character only exists from the moment they slip into a sentence, and I don’t yet know if Heather Waverley Thorne fits this schema — if she started existing when her Buick appeared at the top of the slope on the 4th Line, or if her past eludes fiction, and because of this eludes me too. If this is the case, then Heather’s amnesia is real, and my ignorance the result of her amnesia.
* * *
I’ve just had my first coffee of the morning on the porch and I’m breathing in the smell of my sun-warmed skin, resolving to take a long-overdue vacation during which this is all I shall do — warm my skin, breathe in the scent of P.’s, read under the trees, walk in the summer exuberance — nothing but slow activities permitting my tired body to rest a little. I’d have difficulty leaving Heather in limbo for a few days, but she’d follow me in my dreaming next to the fields, and benefit from a rest that would also benefit the novel; I’ve noticed that the text is showing signs of my fatigue and is likely to soon be mired in the same heaviness into which my body is sinking if I don’t act.
I’ve taken this decision because of the lightness of the air, and the exquisite flavour of the coffee P. had made for me, though also because of the writer Hélène M., who always stood up against injustice but who died a couple of weeks ago because she smoked too much, lived too much, and very probably didn’t give her frail body enough repose.
When P. read about her death in the paper and told me, I behaved just as I did this morning. I left the breakfast table, that time with my lips trembling slightly, bereft of the right words to describe the whiteness suddenly surrounding me, and I went to drink my coffee outside. As I lit a cigarette in Hélène’s memory, I told myself my turn would come, that in time my own horizon would be lost in a grim sky the exact shade of cancer: anthracite grey or pitch black.
Before it’s too late for the wind to blow away the clouds already closing in on me, I’m going to award myself a few carefree days, calm hours for my left hand to relax and for me to think of Hélène, telling myself that surely someone, somewhere, would write for her, “Lone-Angel / I will perform a ceremony for you,” just as she had written for her sister Thérèse, who died before Hélène did under the falling ash of such an anthracite sky.
And as for my vacation, it will begin with your fleeting image, Hélène, with the angel I will draw for you on the wooden fence, and afterwards that of a happy child and dog on glorious July day.
VI.
Of those few days during which I put down my manuscript over the photograph of a child running with her dog, I will retain the memory of the waters of the Samson River, near the U.S. border, snaking around enormous rocks I wanted to climb, stretching my full length over them, with my back against the warmth of the rock. I will take, from those few days, the huge disappointment of not having climbed them, of not having planted my bare feet on the hot stone, of having behaved as if I were old even though my legs still tingle with a desire to jump, clasp the wind, and roll down to the foot of hills where eternity opens.
But I’ll go back. Next year, I’ll go back. I’ll find the road I took to the river once more, I’ll park near the bridge, I’ll take off my sandals or running shoes, and I’ll climb. When I will still be young.
* * *
The rushing noise of the Samson River was still enveloping me when I sat down at my desk to find Heather again. It was 8:25 in the evening and to one side of the road there was a rainbow, facing the sunset and the dark mass of cloud heading toward the last patches of blue sky. Despite the approaching storm, a few white-throated sparrows carried on singing, and the cat remained lying in wait beneath the cedars. As for the calico, she’d taken shelter in the basement, and the second cat, Beauboule, was materializing in the clouds. I was following the trace of his ginger tail when, announcing the deluge, the first drops of rain hit the windows and a flash of lightning tore through what remained of the blue to the north
I put my pen down on the page, where a few Lasiurus borealis lie scattered among the bombyx, and hurried outside. Streaks of yellow and pink were reflected in the wet asphalt, reflections before the storm, and suddenly I could no longer hear the sparrows. The din was here, sovereign in the windswept branches.
“None of this is real,” I told myself as the cat ran under the porch. I turned around. The house was red and black.
* * *
Another vacation memory: where the sunset meets the north, clouds, like a broad expanse of sand lapped at by a lazy sea, roll out in their wrinkled state before night falls.
* * *
I explain to P. that perhaps the only way to know what really happened to Heather involves putting myself in her place and reliving her death. “But,” he says, “isn’t that what you do with all the characters whose death you decree?” I set him straight and remind him that Heather was already dead when I met her, that I hadn’t planned her death, since it resulted from events which occurred before the story — back when the idea of our possible end was not a part of the future we anticipated.
“If I relive Heather’s death then I’ll remember,” I concluded, clearing the table and not worried about the danger this identity theft might bring, not considering that effectively I might die in place of Heather, whom I would consequently abandon to a limbo in which she would be neither dead nor alive.
* * *
Native plants have invaded the part of the hill where, last year, I planted seeds of flowers that could not possibly compete with the robustness of the indigenous ones. So, pointlessly, I watch for the flowering of poppies and those delicate little mauve flowers whose name I can’t recall and whose appearance I will consequently forget, for lack of being able to locate a picture of them after consulting the index of some book about wildflowers.
Still, every morning I lean out of the window looking out over the hill in the hope of noticing a few spots of red or mauve bursting through the green. I’ll do this until the end of the summer — lean out of the window, push aside the tall weeds as I walk the circumference of the little hill — because hope is such that it denies the irrevocable: he will come, he will come, one morning I will see his outline at the end of the field, we tell ourselves, when the lover waited for in this way never comes.
* * *
Vince was fixing his fence when I parked outside his house. His face was wet, his t-shirt stained with sweat, and I’d never seen him so pale. I put his state down to the sleepless night he’d spent drinking and talking with Howard W. Thorne, on page 174 of the manuscript, and offered him the bottle of water I take everywhere in my bag. “You could do with getting some sun,” he gasped after he’d swallowed half the bottle, “you’re getting paler by the second.” And right then I must have turned even paler — was my colour draining into Vince, or, conversely, was he communicating his pallor to me? I was just trying to work out the moment at which I’d started losing my colour when he interrupted my thoughts and led me into the house, where we could talk more comfortably.
He sat me down in the living room, went off for a minute to change into some dry clothes, and then, his hand shaking, gave me a coffee and asked how I was doing. I said, “Same as you, I suppose,” showing him my own trembling hand. Then I told him about the photo I’d seen in Thorne’s living room, and about how the dog in it looked like Jeff, the dog I had when I was a child. “Jackson,” mumbled Vince, who then fell into silence, as if my mentioning the dog had sent hi
m back to a time for which he was nostalgic, a time of untroubled days, though they may not have seemed that way at the time, but which we yearn for when we are capable of measuring the degrees of our insouciance. Then he got up to go look in the bottom drawer of a wooden chest, from which he pulled out a photo that he placed in front of me.
The photograph, covered in thin plastic like everything we want to keep free of dust, dirt, and damp, was of Heather, Vince, and Jackson standing by the La Languette wayside cross just as fall was turning to winter. Heather, barely any shorter than Vince, was resting her head on his shoulder, and they were both smiling at Jackson, who, standing in front of them, seemed to be begging for their attention. The photo had been taken three days before Jackson died — run over by a truck on the mountain roads — and eleven days before Heather did.
I’ve just driven five hundred kilometres under a merciless sun and I’m sitting on a quay near a river that hereabouts is known as a sea, listening to the rising tide. It hasn’t been dark for long, and a few walkers are strolling hand in hand along the quay. I put my notebook down on the concrete platform and realize I’m the only person not holding someone’s hand. It doesn’t make me sad. If P. was here, I wouldn’t be holding his hand anyway, because I hate hands that stop you moving your arms freely and take their grip in a manner suggesting possession. P. knows it, just as he knows I can only be his if he doesn’t put a ring on my finger or the weight of his arm on my shoulder. That’s how it will be until the end. I want to collapse alone and with my hands free, near a man — P. — who’ll let me sink into the slow-moving earth.
Back Roads Page 13
