“These dogs had been left for me so I could go hunt the red bears which were plentiful in those parts. I’d eaten dinner and was smoking my pipe, right next to the fire, my two hounds sleeping at my side; the night was dark and silent when, out of nowhere, I heard a scream so bitter, so piercing, that my hair stood on end. It couldn’t be the bark of a dog, not even a great wild wolf. In that great shriek I clearly heard the voice of Satan himself. My two dogs answered with howls of pain, as if their bones were breaking. I took my time. My pride got the best of me, and I set off with three bullets in my gun. My two dogs followed me, trembling with fear. Silence had fallen again, and I was getting ready to come home when I saw a man coming out of the woods with an enormous black dog; he was taller than most men, and wore a giant hat as wide as a millstone that left no part of his face visible. I called out to him, yelled at him to stop, but he walked right by, and he and his dog disappeared into the river. My dogs were quaking with fear, pressed up against me with every limb, begging for my protection. I went back to my cabin, overtaken by the fear of death. I closed and barricaded all three doors with whatever furniture I could find, and then my first movement was to cry out to the God I had so offended and beg forgiveness for my crimes — but my pride got the better of me, and I put off this moment of Grace, and lay down, fully dressed, on the twelfth bunk with my two dogs by my side.
“I’d been there around half an hour when I heard a scratching on my cabin, as if a thousand cats, or some other creature, were clinging to the walls with their claws. What I saw, though, was countless tiny men, all around two feet tall, climbing up and down my chimney at an astonishing speed. After watching me for a moment with an evil expression they climbed back up the chimney in a flash, to the sound of diabolical peals of laughter. My soul was so hardened that this fearsome spectacle didn’t make me want to retreat, far from it — it sent me into such a rage that I bit my dogs to give them a jump, then grabbed my gun and hit the trigger hard. It didn’t fire the first time. I made unfruitful attempts to get up, grab a harpoon, and attack these diabolical little men, when a new shriek even more piercing than the last nailed me to my spot. The little creatures were gone, a deep silence fell, and I heard two knocks on the first of the cabin’s doors. There was a third knock and then, despite all my precautions, the door opened with a horrible racket. My arms and legs were covered in a cold sweat, and for the first time in ten years I prayed. I beseeched God to take pity on me. A second scream made it clear that my enemy was making ready to break through the second door, and on the third knock, it opened like the first one. ‘My God, oh my God,’ I yelled. ‘Save me!’ And the voice of God rose up like thunder and answered: ‘No, miserable creature, you shall perish.’ Then the third scream rang out and a silence descended that lasted around ten minutes.
“My heart was beating double-speed; it seemed my head was opening and my brains leaking out, drop by drop, my limbs growing stiff, when, at the third blow, the door splintered to pieces. I stood still, as if defeated. Then, the fantastical being I had seen walk by came into my cabin, with his dog, and took up a position facing the chimney. The last dying ember was snuffed out, leaving us in total darkness.
“I began to pray, desperately, and swore to good Saint Anne that, should she deliver me, I’d spend the rest of my days wandering from door to door, begging for my daily bread. I was distracted from my prayer by a sudden flash of light: the ghost had turned toward me and lifted his enormous hat, and his two giant eyes shone like flames in the night, lighting up the horrific scene. Then I recognized this henchman of the Fiend: it was the young man I’d known thirty years before, under the leap-year moon, the mere youth who had transformed into a grotesque werewolf before my very eyes. He looked exactly the same, with the same skin, smooth as the finest ivory, that had led me to believe we were the same age. The face of an angel fallen from heaven it was, a face that had inspired affection and trust while we lay in wait for the Indian attack and while we lay in panic in our sketchy shelter. Now he stared at me from above. He stood above me, his face towered over me with a beauty as awful as the night was dark. He was still twenty years old, whereas I was fifty with deep wrinkles carved under my eyes and forehead.
“At the same time, like a flickering flame shining in the darkness, giving no heed to the unspoken laws governing mankind since time immemorial, or the latest scientific treatises, he took on the look of a demon straight from Hell: his nose covered his upper lip, his giant mouth spread from ear to ear, and his ears drooped down to his shoulders, like a jackrabbit. He was two creatures in one, Angel and Beast. And I was trespassing on his territory, here in this Alleghenie Mountain valley, homeland of his secret immortality — that was the message he was sending me. He looked furiously all around and ran his clawed hand the length of the first bunk, and then the second, and so on and so forth, until he came to the eleventh bunk, where he took a short break. And poor, miserable me: I was counting bunks all this time, figuring how many lay between me and his infernal claw. I had stopped praying, was out of strength, my parched tongue was glued to the roof of my mouth and my heart’s beating, which fear could not stop, was the only sound breaking the silence that reigned all around me in the fearful night.
“I saw him reach out toward me; then, summoning up all the strength I possessed, with a jerky movement, I found myself standing upright, face-to-face with this ghost whose flaming breath burnt my face. ‘Ghost!’ I cried out to him: ‘If you be a Creature of God, stay; but if you be an envoy of the Devil I beseech you, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: Leave this place at once.’ Now Satan — make no mistake, gentlemen, this was the Fiend incarnate — let out a piercing shriek that shook the whole cabin like an earthquake. Everything disappeared at once, and the three doors closed with an abominable racket. I fell back on my pallet, my two dogs close to me, barking through much of the night, unable to resist so much cruel emotion, and I lost consciousness. I don’t know how long I lay unconscious, but when I returned to my senses I was stretched out on the floor, dying of hunger and thirst. My two dogs had also suffered terribly; they had scarfed down my boots, my snowshoes, and every other scrap of leather in the cabin. It took a herculean effort to summon the strength to get over this terrible shock and leave the cabin, and when my companions returned, three months later, they scarcely recognized me. I’d become a walking ghost. I had seen The Aberration.”
This text was where I first encountered you — not once but twice. The impetus behind my research started between the lines of this ghost story. Because the villain of this story is you, is it not? Are you, Aimé Bolduc, not this fallen angel? This “flame” described by the beggar, altered by the light, and obscured by orbiting stars? Or are you no more than a man, no different from the narrator, imprisoned in a particular, fatal conjecture of time, looking at yourself through the mirror of your own obsessions and vices? That man that my great-grandmother loved more than anything in the world seems far from diabolical. It’s up to you to show me who he really is. Now that I’ve found you.
The Aberration. Yes, he was the man in the story, of course he was. But at the same time, he remembered — or did he? — being the teller of that story, that exact story, so very long ago. Everyone had leaned in and listened, spellbound, even the fiddlers stopped playing to give his words space to ring out. He, the man who never spoke, the one everyone was wary of because they knew nothing about him, had taken the floor. The music stopped, the fire was stoked again, and he started spinning his yarn like an expert storyteller, a wise old man, or maybe a crazy old man, or some combination of the two working together to convince every listener present. And then he’d disappeared. No one on the worksite ever heard from him again. No one came forward to claim his pay.
As he read the legend of the leap-year man, Aimé was haunted by this memory and by the strange impression that he was at once the story’s protagonist and author. The images were mixed up in his mind: a man taking the floor t
o tell a story, making it up as he went along, clearly inspired, and the memory of reading an old story, a story as old as his own reminiscence. Albert seemed to be saying that his version dated from the 1830s, long before the miner’s life Aimé knew only later.
After the transcribed story, Albert’s writing grew erratic. Visibly, he could no longer control his own wrist, which was giving him a throbbing pain. Aimé struggled to decipher the jumpy handwriting. The lines no longer ran straight but instead angled down toward the bottom-right corner of the page, one after the other, like a flock of desperate animals.
. . . my one request is that you never stop being the person I know you are. Be true to yourself, you who, for so long, have dreamt only of being uncovered and unmasked. I know it. I feel it. But now it’s up to you to stop letting the secret of your very being crush you and carve those pointless wrinkles in your immortal face; it’s up to you to come and join me. I don’t know exactly where you are, but I know you will listen to my story right to the end, and I know you won’t be able to ignore my call.
Even before opening the envelope Aimé had known what he would find inside: the urgent, ambiguous words of the person who had been tracking him all these years, crouching in the shadows, waiting to spring up as soon as the opportunity arose. Someone had been searching for him, someone had wanted to find him enough to dedicate his life to it. In the end, he’d succeeded.
Aimé felt admiration, disgust, and pride that he had been the subject of such a fervent obsession, combined with despair that rendered his existence even more futile, despite what Albert might have thought at every thrilling step in his great search.
He read the closing lines of the letter at the same time we did, but understood them differently, and tried to imagine what he would do next.
. . . conceals a profound nervousness. Yet I have no choice but to go for it. So here’s my proposition. I’ll be waiting for you on the corner of Broadway and 4th, on Sunday, March 13, from 10 a.m to 1 p.m. After that I’ll go back to my home in the province of Quebec, where I’ll build a new life far from my friends and family, whom I have hurt irreparably by pursuing this obsession of mine for so many years.
That’s all. If I don’t mail this right away, I never will. You have six months to make your decision.
Warmest regards,
Your descendant and contemporary,
Albert Langlois
P.S. I have enclosed photocopied excerpts of some of my notebooks, along with various documents illustrating my research. The timeline you will find on page 54 of Notebook C was developed in early 1977, when the information I had concerning Aimé was more fragmentary; it should be taken as a rough guide only. However, I like to think of it as the true starting point of my investigation, and return to it often when I am assailed by doubts as to the accuracy of so much contradictory information. Notwithstanding any factual errors it may contain, the linear beauty of the path it traces gives me a sense of my ancestor’s life, and illustrates both the folly of my project and its fundamental truth: everything may be wrong but the actual Aimé, forever on the run, can already be seen there, in the half-light, painted in halftones. Do you recognize him?
The timeline was preposterous: among the locations it placed Aimé were the Bay of Ungava in 1855, where a certain Aimé Bilodeau set down an account of a legendary beast living beneath the eternal ice cap, who returned every nineteenth lunar cycle. The points and arrows scattered everywhere plotted out the rough outline of a ghostly existence, a life examined to reveal not only eternal youth but also geographical ubiquity. Albert must have realized early on, despite the excitement that took hold of him as he unearthed new sources and brought new information to light, that there was no way for Aimé to be simultaneously in Georgia enlisted in the militia walking alongside the Indians down the Trail of Tears and on Quebec’s North Shore piloting a ferry toward Newfoundland. Yes, Albert must have realized and resigned himself to the contradiction. Certain notations had been crossed out, places where Aimé could not possibly have been present, either on the ground or as the crow flies. There were a hundred printed pages in manuscript, cross-referenced in the most convoluted manner.
He saw himself in the enlarged detail of a photo from the end of the nineteenth century, the one in which Jeanne had recognized his likeness. The dark cheeks, red from lack of sleep. The empty, distant stare. His poorly fitted cap and long greasy hair. The fragile shoulders. He looked himself in the eye for a moment, as the distance expanded, then he spread the pile of supporting documents over the table, to go through them systematically before the last stars stopped shining.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
MARCH 1994
JOHN F. KENNEDY INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, NEW YORK, NY
A few yards ahead in the zigzagging lineup he noticed a pretty, thin young woman with a ponytail, and without getting his hopes up wondered whether he might be lucky enough to sit beside her. She wore faded jeans and a white T-shirt, held a U.S. passport in her right hand, and was tapping out a rhythm on her thigh. From a distance Aimé couldn’t tell whether it was the air conditioning that was giving her goosebumps, but he was looking at her naked arms. She broke into a fit of shivering and leaned over and opened her suitcase. There were hundreds of people around Aimé, hurriedly making their way to other terminals. She took out a white wool sweater and put it on, pulling out her ponytail and checking the tag to make sure it wasn’t inside out in a single, fluid movement. She was shorter than the man behind her who never stopped clearing his throat.
Every time the line inched forward, Aimé picked up his own suitcase and then set it down again, safe and sound between his knees.
The loudspeakers never stopped broadcasting important information, a rotating cast of voices and languages, beautiful voices speaking English and Arabic and German. They were calling passengers, pronouncing names as best they could, reminding the public of upcoming departures and preboarding, repeating flight and gate numbers. Everything was white, from the floors to the walls to the very high ceilings where giant circular incandescent light-fixtures hung. Aimé was concentrating on the racket of footsteps, clacking high heels, and suitcase casters on the floor, and also the sound of people speaking among themselves, kissing and saying goodbye. On the other side of the large open area where he found himself, a nervous crowd was gathered, waiting for loved ones to arrive via the corridor across from them.
He saw her moving forward to check in, wheeling her suitcase behind her. It lasted a few seconds, maybe a minute. She placed her bags on the conveyor, and they disappeared. Aimé moved forward a step or two. She put her passport and ticket in her handbag and left without turning around. The line didn’t move for a few minutes. An airline employee took over from a colleague. There were only three open counters. Aimé heard an exasperated sigh, even felt the hot air on his neck. He could be easily mistaken for a man of sixty, a man who was still in good shape but had been through his share of ups and downs, with a sadness deep in his eyes that came from somewhere faraway, no one knew quite where, mixed with an inborn curiosity undampened by time. One of his greatest regrets, he had realized with the passing years, was not showing up to meet Albert. It wasn’t always on his mind exactly, he didn’t even think about it a lot, it was more a thought that cropped up from time to time, an ill-defined regret impressed on his psyche, overlaying the blurry, monumental panorama of his memories. Maybe he’d write Albert once he got to Europe.
She disappeared into the labyrinthine airport.
He thought she was pretty, and would love to spend the flight beside her, talking to her about what he was planning to do and the radical changes he wanted to make in his life. He had sold his house at a loss and transferred his assets. She would understand and listen attentively, enraptured by his cultivated manner and speech. He’d tell her about the Jura, where he owned a sizable property with a house even older than he was and a vineyard. He started imagining the sound of her v
oice, like a song, the tonic accents of the South mixed with a Californian lilt. In Paris they would become friends, he’d show her how to pronounce a few words with his old nineteenth-century French. Time passed as he told himself stories, like everyone else in the line, and then it was his turn. An American Airlines agent hollered “Next!” and Aimé approached, his lips dry.
After check-in he had more than three hours to kill. He didn’t look for her too hard in the terminal, just took a stroll through international departures, where the giant windows overlooked the aircraft parked on the tarmac and others arriving in the distance, tiny points that moved and took shape in the cold midday light. He wandered around without a clear aim, not straying too far from his gate. The terminal was crowded, all business. Sunlight reflected off the pink granite floor, flight attendants’ heels clacked. Feeling thirsty and somehow bereft of purpose, without a clear idea why, he ordered a scotch on ice, his first alcoholic drink in nearly five years.
With his ticket and passport in hand, he examined seat numbers and did his best not to bump the other passengers with the coat he’d thrown over his forearm. His beard was grey and neatly trimmed. He was careful about his appearance. These last years had been trying ones. His self-esteem was slumping, he’d been told in private sessions in the offices of professionals who charged dearly for their expertise, serious men and women who probed his state of mind based on the things he told them and those he tried to conceal. They hadn’t prescribed him drugs, yet, but he figured they’d get around to it one of these days. Sometimes he described his dreams, as accurately as he could and in response they would repeat, like a mantra, that change was good.
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