It is by no means impossible to paddle upriver – I have done it myself – but even without a headwind it is very hard work and is rarely tried solo. Astonished, I kept my eyes on the paddler. He must have muscles like steel ropes, I thought. His chances of capsizing seemed extraordinarily high. Clearly, he was someone who liked danger, someone who was excited by risk, perhaps even someone who got a certain kick out of pain, or at any rate, out of enduring it. But for how long, I wondered, could his arms take so much punishment?
Do not undertake anything unless you desire to continue it; for example, do not begin to paddle unless you are inclined to continue paddling. Take from the start the place in the canoe that you wish to keep.
Old advice, three centuries old, but still sound: that was Jean de Brebeuf, writing home to Paris with tips “for the Fathers of our society who shall be sent to the Hurons”. I always think of them, those French Jesuits, voyageurs, when I see a canoe pitching itself against the current. I think of them often, as a matter of fact, since I moved out here onto the river. I frequently browse through their Relations, those lively, detailed, sometimes despairing reports to their superiors. Paris, Rome: it must have seemed as uncertain as prayer, dispatching words by ship.
The Relation for 1649 to the Very Reverend Father Vincent Caraffa, General of the Society of Jesus, at Rome: I have received, very Reverend Paternity, your letter dated 20 January 1647. If you wrote us last year, 1648, we have not yet received that letter…
The Relation for 1637: You must be prompt in embarking and disembarking; and tuck up your gowns so that they will not get wet, and so that you will not carry either water or sand into the canoe. To be properly dressed, you must have your feet and legs bare: while crossing the rapids, you can wear your shoes, and, in the long portages, even your leggings.
I imagine them with their blistered European hands and their cassocks hoisted up around their thighs, paddling full pelt up their Great River St Lawrence (they wrote of it with such affectionate possessiveness, with such respect for its stern powers), dipping their paddles toward their deaths, skimming past these very rocks that buttress (and will eventually smash) my dock, heading west with their mad cargo of idealism, dedication, and wrongheadedness.
You must try and eat at daybreak unless you can take your meal with you in the canoe; for the day is very long, if you have to pass it without eating. The Barbarians eat only at Sunrise and Sunset, when they are on their journeys.
I could see the flash of the paddle now, knifing into the water, keeping to the right side, pulling closer to shore. His arms are giving out, I thought. He is going to try to beach on this stretch. Now that the canoe was close enough, I could see that it was neither fibreglass nor aluminium, but birchbark. It wasn’t until the next day that I was struck by the oddness of this, and by the fact that I had never seen a bark canoe before, except in photographs and museums. At the time it seemed quite unsurprising, or at least, not significant. I merely noted it, wondering exactly where the canoeist would reach shore, and if he would manage this before capsizing.
And then, gradually, it became clear to me that the paddler had no intention of trying to land. He’s crazy, I thought. Shoulders hunched forward, head slightly down, eyes on the prow of his craft, he was bent on defying the current and continuing upriver, parallel to shore and now only about thirty feet out. It seemed incredible. He was all manic energy and obstinacy, and I fancied I could hear the pure high humming note of his will above the general bluster of the wind. His strength, which seemed supernatural, was oddly infectious. It was as though infusions of energy were pumping themselves into my body, as though the paddler’s adrenalin was an atmosphere that I inhaled. I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Go, go, go, I urged, weirdly excited.
It is odd how certain body shapes, certain ways of moving the body, are retained like templates on the memory. So we recognise a voice, a face – we take this as unremarkable – but so also a gesture or a way of walking can be recalled. I could still see only the outline of the figure (though I’d assumed from the start the paddler was male), and he was wearing a hooded windbreaker so that he (or even she) could have been anyone. And yet, watching the way the shoulders hunched forward, the way the arms dug into the water, the sharp thought came to me: This reminds me of someone. Who is it? Who? Who?
It was maddening. It was like meeting someone at a party and knowing you have met that person before somewhere, but being unable to summon up a name or a context. This sort of incomplete recollection can drive you crazy. The canoe was drawing level with my dock now and I wished I’d brought my binoculars down. The plunge and lift and dip of the shoulder blades, oh, it was at the tip of my mind, who did that movement remind me of? Now the canoe was level with the end of my dock, but the hooded head kept its eyes resolutely on the prow and the water, the paddle flashed.
Oh please look up, I willed.
And he did.
“Good god!” I cried out, thunderstruck. “Brian!”
Brian – no, of course not Brian, I was aware almost instantaneously that it couldn’t possibly be Brian, who was either in Australia or Japan – not Brian, then, but the man in the canoe simply sat there, resting his paddle and staring at me, startled, which naturally meant that he scudded back downstream very swiftly. He dug the paddle furiously into the water, dip, dip, dip, until he drew level again, closer this time. He rested his paddle and stared. I felt, as the current again bucked him backwards, that I had to do something potent and instant to stop time unwinding itself, but I could neither speak nor move, the resemblance to Brian was so eerie. I was experiencing something like vertigo, and a pain like angina in my chest. Shock, I suppose.
I was dimly aware that my book had fallen into the water and that I was on my hands and knees on the dock. I watched the canoe draw level a third time, and the paddler and I stared at each other (he was very pale, and there seemed, now, to be no expression at all on his face), and then he, Brian, I mean the man in the birchbark canoe, turned away and lowered his head, and resumed paddling more fiercely than ever.
I watched until he disappeared from sight, which seemed to take hours. I have no idea how long I stayed on my hands and knees. I know that when I tried to climb the steep steps up our cliff, my legs felt like jelly and kept shaking so badly I had to stop and rest several times.
People climbing mountains and cliffs hyperventilate, this is common knowledge. They see things. Visitations alight on them.
Between the fiftieth step and the fifty-first, the past distended itself like a balloon and I climbed into it. I could feel its soft sealed walls.
Trapped, I thought. And simultaneously, pleasurably: home. I could smell the rainforest, smell Queensland, feel the moist air of the rich subtropics. I am here again. Home.
Brian is a few feet ahead of me, both of us drenched, both feeling for handholds and footholds, both of us (I realise it now) equally scared, but too proud to admit it.
(This would have been our last year in high school, and this was something we did every year, spend a day in our bit of rainforest – we thought of it that way – on the outskirts of Brisbane, climbing the waterfall. But our last year in high school was the year of the floods. I think we both gulped a little when we saw the falls, but neither would ever have been the first to back out. We were both given to constant high anxiety, and both temperamentally incapable of backing away from our fears.)
So. Every handhold slips, every foothold is algae-slick. My fingers keep giving way. My heart thumps – thud, thud, thud – against its cage. Delirium, the salt flavour of panic: I can taste them. Just inches above my eyes, I see the tendon in Brian’s ankle. If I were to touch it, it would snap. I tilt my head back and see his shoulder blades, corded tight, lift like wings, pause, settle, lift again. He reaches and pulls, reaches and pulls, he is a machine of bodily will. The energy field of his determination – pulses of it, like a kind of white light, bouncing off him – brush against me, charging the air. This keeps me going.
“Mmm,” I murmur drowsily at last, “I love this heat. I could lie here forever. How come the water’s so cold, when it’s so hot here on the rocks?”
“I’m not even going to answer that, Philippa,” Brian says lazily. “It’s such a dumb question.”
“Piss off,” I say. I inch forward on my stomach and peer over the lip of the falls. I can’t believe we have climbed them. I watch the solid column of water smash itself on the rocks below. I feel queasy. I can see four years of high school shredding themselves, all the particles parting, nothing ever the same again. “Where do you reckon we’ll be five years from now?” I ask him. I have to shout. My voice falls down into the rift and loses itself in spray.
Brian crawls across and joins me. Side by side, we stare down ravines and years, high school, adolescence, childhood, we’ve climbed out of them all. There is just university ahead, and then the unmapped future.
“Where will we end up, d’you reckon?”
“Not here,” Brian shouts. “We won’t be in Brisbane.”
“But even if we aren’t, we’ll come back. Let’s do this every year for the rest of our lives.”
“Not me,” Brian says. “After uni, I’m never coming back.”
The shouting takes too much energy, and we crawl back to the relative hush of the flat rocks ringed with ferns.
“So where will you be?”
“I don’t know. Cambridge. Japan, maybe. There’s some interesting research going on in Tokyo. Wherever’s best for the kind of physics I’m interested in.”
“What if you don’t get into Cambridge?” I ask, although I know it’s another dumb question. It’s like asking: what if you don’t get to the top of the falls?
Brian doesn’t bother to answer.
“I’ll probably still be here,” I say.
“No you won’t.”
“You’re such a bloody know-it-all, Brian.”
“I know you and me.”
“You think you do.”
“Philippa,” he says irritably, with finality. “I know us well enough to know we won’t stay in Brisbane. You’ll end up somewhere extreme, Africa, Canada, somewhere crazy.”
“You’re nuts,” I say. “Anyway, wise guy, wherever I am, you can bet I’m going to stay close to water.”
“Yes,” he says. “We’ll both stay near water.”
In the dream, I am at the end of my dock, reading, when I notice the most curious light over Wolfe Island. The whole island seems burnished with gold leaf, and there is an extraordinary clarity to things, to individual trees, for instance, as though each detail has been outlined with a fine-tipped black brush. I can see vines, orchids, staghorn ferns against the tree trunks. I can see that Wolfe Island has gone tropical, that it is thick with rainforest, that lorikeets and kingfishers are flashing their colours on the St Lawrence banks.
Then I note that there is a suspension bridge, the catwalk kind, with wooden planks and drop sides, the kind sometimes strung a hundred and fifty feet up in the rainforest canopy to allow tourists to see the aerial garden running riot up there. This bridge starts at the end of my dock and crosses the river to Wolfe Island, but it is submerged.
What catches my eye first are the ropes tied to the end of my dock, just below water level. I lie flat on my stomach and peer down. I can see the arc of the bridge, little seaweed gardens swaying on its planks, curving down and away from me.
There is someone lying on his back on the bridge, or rather floating with it, just above the planks, just below the rope siderails. It is Brian. His eyes are open but unseeing, his skin has the pallor of a drowned man, algae spreads up from his ankles, tiny shell colonies are crusting themselves at all his joints. Seaweed ferns move with him and around him. He looks like Ophelia. There with fantastic garlands did she come …
“Alas, then,” I say to him, “are you drowned?”
“Drowned, drowned,” he says.
No one would be too surprised by the fact of my dream. First I see a man in a canoe who reminds me of someone I know, and that very night I dream of Brian. A canoeist in a storm is at risk; I dream of death. There is a simple logic to this sequence of events; anyone would subscribe to it.
Nevertheless, I woke in a state of panic. I woke with the certainty that something was wrong. I hadn’t seen Brian for, I had to count back … well over a year, it must have been. It was always hit or miss with Brian. Luckily, childhood friends had a slightly better chance of making contact with him than ex-lovers or his ex-wife, but no one alive could compete with the sharp scent of a new hypothesis. I used to picture him literally living in his research lab, Melbourne or Tokyo, either city it was the same. I used to imagine a railway bed tucked under the computer desk. The last time we met for dinner in Melbourne he said, sometime after midnight: “My god, the time! I’ve got to get back to the lab.”
“You sleep there?” I asked sardonically.
“Quite often,” he said.
On principle, Brian never answered his phone. He kept it unplugged (both in his lab, and at the home address he rarely used) except for when he was calling out. I knew this. Nevertheless I called, Melbourne and Tokyo, both; and of course got no answer.
I sent faxes and got no response.
I called the secretary at his research institute in Melbourne. “Professor Leckie is in Tokyo,” she said, “but no one has seen him for weeks. We still get his e-mail though, so he’s all right.”
E-mail! I never remembered to check mine, I used it so rarely. I plugged in the modem on my computer, keyed in my password, got into the system, and opened my “mailbox” on screen.
There was only one message, undated.
Philippa: I’m going away and wanted to say goodbye. Remember the falls! Those were the good old days, weren’t they, when nothing could stop us? I often think of you. Of us back then. Pity we can’t go backwards. Take care. Brian.
I sent a message back instantly.
Brian, I typed onto my screen. Had a disturbing dream about you last night. Are you okay? I miss you. Take care. Philippa.
* *
Back then, on the day of the message on my screen, the order was still beyond question for me. First the man in the canoe, then the dream, then the message. I began to be less confident of this sequence after the letter from my mother in Brisbane. Not immediately, of course. But a few weeks after the letter, I had to make a point of reminding myself that the terrible thunderstorm weather had begun in late August, that my mother’s letter was postmarked September, and that I could not anchor (by any external proof) either my dream or my e-mail to a date.
I bumped into Brian’s mother in the city last week, my mother wrote. She says something’s the matter with Brian, some nervous-system disorder. I think she said, something quite dreadful, there was some Latin-sounding word but I can’t remember. She said she flew down to visit him in the Royal Melbourne, and he looked like a skeleton, he’d lost so much weight. He’s not taking it well, she said. He’s never been able to tolerate any kind of interference with his work, not even his marriage, as you know. She’s terribly worried. He refused treatment and checked himself out and flew to Tokyo, can you believe that? You know he used to phone her once a week from wherever he was? Well, he’s stopped doing it. She’s quite depressed and quite frightened. I thought maybe you could get him to phone her, poor dear. Or maybe you’d like to write to her yourself? She must be awfully lonely since Mr Leckie died. We thought perhaps we should invite her for Christmas, but it’s hard to tell whether she’d enjoy this or not. Maybe you should write to her, Philippa. You know her much better than we do.
E
very day I would begin a letter in my mind.
Dear Mrs Leckie: Remember when Brian and I used to go on rainforest treks and get home hours later than we planned? You used to worry yourself sick, and my parents too. But we always did show up, remember? Brian’s just off on another trek, he’s lost track of time, that’s all …
No. Begin again.
Dear Mrs Leckie: Brian’s gone on a journey, as we always knew he would, from which (both you and I have a hunch about this) he might not return. He carries everything he needs inside his head, and always has. In his own way, he misses us. I promise I’ll visit when I’m in Brisbane next year. How is your frangipani tree? Remember when Brian and I …?
I never sent these unwritten letters.
I began to ask myself whether I’d imagined the man in the canoe. Or whether I’d dreamed him. Or whether I’d dreamed the e-mail message which had vanished into electronic ether without a trace.
For my night-time reading, I followed records of lost trails. The Relation of 1673, for example, written by Father Claude Dablon: He had long premeditated this undertaking, influenced by a most ardent desire to extend the kingdom of knowledge … he has the Courage to dread nothing where everything is to be Feared … and if, having passed through a thousand dangers, he had not unfortunately been wrecked in the very harbour, his Canoe having been upset below sault St Louys, near Montreal …
In Brisbane (two years ago? three?) on the verandah of the Regatta Hotel, a mere stone’s throw from the university, a jug of beer between us, Brian said: “D’you ever get panic attacks that you’ll burn up all your energy before you get there?”
“Get where?” I asked.
“I shouldn’t even answer that, Philippa. God, you can be annoying,” Brian said. “Get to where you wanted to go.”
North of Nowhere, South of Loss Page 8