Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  Later he’d learned, when he was a little older, that the murderer of Sylvia Delacorte had been a boy of just seventeen. He too had been a camper on Big Burnt, with his parents. One of those boys Mikael had probably seen on the island, older boys whom he’d envied—barefoot, dark tanned, fearless swimmers off the docks, loud voiced and jeering, oblivious of a five-year-old.

  Mikael was staring at his woman companion whose name—for just a moment, fleetingly—he’d forgotten as he’d forgotten what the thread of their conversation had been, before the subject of the murdered girl had derailed it. Dappled light gave the attractive fair-skinned woman an underwater look as if seen through a scrim of water of a depth of just a few inches.

  The woman was telling Mikael how much she’d like to camp on Big Burnt Island, and how much her children would love it. This was a bold statement, Mikael knew. But what could he say in response?—the last things determined that, after Labor Day, Mikael Brun would cease to exist.

  How vulnerable this woman was!—how perishable, the human body. That was the human tragedy, which no one could bear who dared to confront it head-on, without subterfuge and hypocrisy.

  He was touched that Lisbeth Mueller had trusted him, coming to Lake George with him on this impulsive venture, and to Big Burnt; he was obliged to protect her, since she had so trusted him.

  Yet still it was so—she too could perish in the woods. Whatever has happened to one can happen to another.

  He announced that he was going swimming, and hoped that Lisbeth would join him.

  She had told him earlier—in fact, several times she’d tried to explain—that she did not much like swimming, and had not swum in years.

  Yet he seemed almost not to hear her. When she told him that she didn’t think it was a good idea to swim so soon after eating Mikael laughed at her. “That’s ridiculous. An old wives’ tale.”

  Zestfully he stripped to his swim trunks, which he was wearing beneath khaki shorts. His legs were covered in coarse, dark hairs and were hard muscled and tanned from the knees downward; his thighs were pale, his torso and upper arms so pale you might imagine you could see veins through the skin. His body was reasonably lean yet flaccid at the waist; his chest and back were covered in wispy, graying hairs. Lisbeth had not seen the man so exposed—that is, on his feet, a little distance from her.

  “C’mon! Come with me.”

  “I didn’t bring a bathing suit. I told you …”

  “Then wade in the water. You won’t get your shorts wet. And if you do, a little—so what?”

  Because I don’t want to! Damn you, leave me alone.

  But she was laughing, for Mikael meant only to tease.

  Lisbeth accompanied Mikael to the edge of the lake, directly below the promontory; she would take iPhone pictures of him swimming, as she’d taken pictures that morning of the lake, the island seen from the lake, the mountains across the lake.

  Pictures of herself and of Mikael Brun in the rented boat, taken by the teenaged marina attendant who surely thought the two a married couple. Thanks! Lisbeth had told the boy brightly.

  You want a record, a commemoration of an interlude so intensely lived. You believe that you do.

  Below the promontory there was no beach, only a few misshapen boulders strewn amid sandy soil. Boldly Mikael stepped into the lake and waded out until he was staggering waist-deep in the thick-looking water and then, as Lisbeth watched with some unease, he pushed himself out as if plunging into the unknown and began swimming.

  He was a good swimmer, as he’d boasted. Fortunately he seemed to have forgotten about urging her to wade by the shore. A stronger breeze had arisen and the lake was now reflecting a pale-glowering sky.

  For some minutes Lisbeth stood watching her companion swim in large, loose circles like a freed child. She smiled to think how totally oblivious of her he was—and yet, she could understand that he wouldn’t want to come to this remote place alone.

  It was a relief, her companion was swimming so well. Other campers, if they happened to glance in their direction, would think that the middle-aged husband was a competent swimmer but the middle-aged wife standing on shore looking on with a vague smile, probably not. She had no need to think, wryly—What if he drowns? How will I get back home?

  Lisbeth returned to the picnic table, and began The New York Times crossword puzzle. What a relief, to be alone! To be free of Mikael Brun’s laser-like attention, if for just a few minutes!

  Of course the crossword puzzles were trivial and a waste of time but there was solace in such brain activity, which blocked unwanted thoughts. Even so, Lisbeth often left the puzzle unfinished. As (she thought) she left so much of her life unfinished. And now she could not concentrate. It did seem ridiculous to be in this beautiful place and to be focused on a mere puzzle.

  Her attention was drawn to the figure in the water, diminished at a distance, vulnerable seeming, and yet somehow stubborn.

  The man was her lover, but not her friend. She had trusted him well enough to accompany him on this end-of-summer trip to the Adirondacks, but in fact she could not trust him, she knew this. In his bemused indifference to her was the promise of betrayal to come. She could not risk this, not at her age.

  “I will risk it. Mikael Brun is worth it.”

  Onstage it is not uncommon for solitary individuals to speak aloud. The convention is that the audience overhears, and the convention is that the audience pretends it is plausible that a solitary individual, brooding, musing aloud, would think so coherently and succinctly. In her adult life Lisbeth yearned badly for the protective confines of a play—a script. Chekhov, Ibsen, Shakespeare. Recently, she’d performed in a locally praised production of Synge’s Deirdre of the Sorrows—which Mikael had seen, and seemed to have admired.

  It was the invention of original speech, spontaneous and unrehearsed speech, that had been so difficult in her life, and had propelled her into a succession of misunderstandings and mistakes.

  Farther out, she saw one of the ungainly predator birds Mikael had pointed out from the boat. A prehistoric-looking creature—a “great blue heron”—though its feathers were gunmetal gray, not blue. The heron’s sharp beak was perfectly suited for aquatic hunting.

  At last, after about twenty minutes, Lisbeth saw to her relief that the swimmer was turning back. Streaming water down the length of his body, stumbling just a little, Mikael emerged from the water. He seemed to be searching for her, staring. (He’d removed his dark glasses before entering the water.) She saw the pale torso slick with wet hairs, which looked thin and wispy; the soft, fleshy knobs at the waistline; the legs, which appeared just slightly tremulous after the strain of energetic swimming. When Lisbeth came to him with a towel he was short of breath.

  His skin felt cold, clammy. His fingers were chilled. Lisbeth embraced him in the towel and rubbed him vigorously as she might have done with one of her children until he took the towel from her to dry himself. He insisted that the swim had been “terrific” and that next time, Lisbeth would come with him—“You’re a good swimmer, after all.”

  “Not me. You’re thinking of someone else, Mikael.”

  “I’m thinking of you.”

  His mood was brusque, jocular. But still he was short of breath. Ascending along the steep, scrubby path to the picnic table he surprised Lisbeth by leaning on her, just a little.

  Her companion seemed to be feeling almost faint. Lisbeth took hold of his arm and held him as he walked in such a way that it wasn’t apparent that she was supporting him, if he chose not to notice.

  Returned to the picnic table Mikael drank bottled water thirstily, and insisted that Lisbeth drink as well. He asked Lisbeth what she’d been doing while he was swimming and she told him nothing really, for she’d been watching him—“Watching and thinking.”

  “Yes? Thinking what?”

  “How lucky we are to be her
e, in this beautiful place.”

  He was regarding her closely. Again, she’d uttered the word beautiful. She did not know if beautiful was a word that conveyed genuine awe or whether it was merely banal, overused; she dreaded Mikael Brun disliking her, for the shallowness of her soul.

  His soul, she supposed she could never grasp. He was right to be bemused by her efforts to understand his work. When they’d first begun seeing each other she’d tried to read some of his scientific publications—A Short History of the Anatomy of the Human Brain, Cognition and Its Discontents: The Linguistic Wars. She could not read more than a sentence or two of his scientific papers, filled with the terminology, figures, and data of neuroscience. She understood that Noam Chomsky had long been a mentor of Mikael Brun’s, and she had tried to read work by Chomsky on linguistics, biological determinism, genetically transmitted principles of language. But when she’d tried to speak to Mikael about these subjects, he’d listened to her with such an expression of patience, if he didn’t laugh at her outright as he might have laughed at a bright, naive child, she’d soon given up.

  “Yes. You are correct, Lisbeth. Our lives are purely ‘luck’—we are borne along by the current, and imagine we are the ones in control.”

  In his elevated, jovial mood Mikael pulled Lisbeth with him to a secluded place beyond the campsite. He’d returned from the arduous interlude of swimming—and from the bout of breathlessness—with a desire to make love, Lisbeth surmised. She chose not to suppose that, in his exalted state, Mikael Brun would have made love with anyone; she chose to believe that he did in fact desire her. He was not always affectionate in lovemaking, and seemed more playful now. She wasn’t comfortable with the quasi-public nature of this lovemaking but there appeared to be no one within sight. And so she did not resist but returned his kisses avidly, and ran her fingers through his thinned, damp hair. His skull was hard, bony as rock; his breath still came short, but his skin, which had been clammy from the water, was warming. Soon, it would be aflame.

  She had not ever made love in any place quite like this. On the ground—which was hard, uncomfortable against her back—and the sky abruptly overhead—the sky not fair and tranquil as it had been but thicker textured and bunched together, like blistering paint. Mikael was kissing her eagerly, pressing his mouth against her mouth as if wanting to devour her. His unshaven jaws were harsh, abrasive. He was much heavier than she, his limbs longer, dwarfing her as he held her down, in place; a moment of panic came to her, that the man would hurt her, he would suffocate her, half consciously perhaps, for having intruded in this childhood paradise with her distracting questions. Clumsily he pulled at her clothing, pushing aside her hands though she meant to help. She felt like prey gathered in the beak of a great predator bird, without identity, even as the life was being annihilated in her. She was thinking, He has planned this. But not with me.

  Afterward she asked him if as a boy camping on the island he’d had fantasies of bringing girls here and he said curtly, as if the question were offensive to him, “No.”

  “Really? Not even when you were an adolescent?”

  “Big Burnt is like no other place.”

  He spoke disdainfully, and would say no more.

  By quick degrees he fell asleep, one of his arms outstretched and the fingers twitching. Lisbeth tried to lie beside him, in the crook of his arm, not very comfortably. Her breasts, her lower body ached. Her mouth throbbed as if bruised. At a distance she heard the voices of campers, and at distance the sound of a boat on the lake. Her eyelids were heavy yet her brain was alert, brightly awake. She had not yet slept beside this man for in his sleep he was restless, sighing deeply, shrugging his shoulders, pushing her away if she came too near. Now she was wondering if she would ever sleep beside him, in any normal fashion. In a bed, in a bedroom, in a house, in the confinement of a shared life.

  Lovemaking. Making-of-love.

  As if love does not generate itself but has to be made—by the effort of two.

  She was sitting up, and had adjusted her clothing. Her hair was matted. Her skin felt sticky. Gnats circled her damp face, her hair. She took one of the man’s hands in hers—gently. She saw with curiosity that his thumbs were precisely twice the size of hers. The backs of his hands were covered in thin, dark, graying hairs. On the third finger of his left hand was the ghost of a ring (she thought); the wedding ring he’d worn for years, and had, as he’d told her with a harsh laugh, “tossed away” after his divorce.

  She did not want to wake her lover for he seemed drawn, fatigued. Like the swimming, lovemaking took a good deal of energy from him. His face that was usually so alert, handsome in alertness as a predator bird, was slack now in repose. His mouth was slightly open. A glisten of saliva in the corner of his mouth. She wondered if she could love the man sufficiently, to compensate for his not loving her. Or perhaps, in some way, out of weakness perhaps, he would come to love her.

  In time, he stirred and woke. His eyelids fluttered, he was seeing her. “Lisbeth.” The name seemed strange on his lips, a memorized name that made him smile in a kind of dazed wonderment as if the glowering sky was partly blinding.

  Lisbeth leaned over him to kiss him. “Welcome back to Big Burnt, Mikael.”

  It was not a naturally caressing name—Mikael. Yet in Lisbeth’s soft, throaty voice, it had the effect of a caress.

  Overhead the sky appeared to be dimming. The air was humid but a cooler wind was rising. Lightning leapt among the clouds like exposed nerves but it was only heat lightning—so far away, its deafening thunder had dissipated to silence.

  “Don’t panic—hey?”

  Another time he spoke playfully yet she understood the severity beneath—Don’t you dare become emotional, not in my presence.

  At last, with a single sixteen-ounce plastic Evian bottle, she’d begun to bail water out of the back of the boat, which had risen to a depth of—could it be six inches? For Mikael Brun had decreed finally, bailing might not be a bad idea. Pelting rain and waves sloshing steadily into the rear of the boat so that the rear was much lower than the front did indeed cause Lisbeth to feel panic, which (she hoped) she was able to disguise from her companion.

  He’d insisted that the boat was “unsinkable.” He’d insisted that she should not worry, he would bring them back to the marina safely. Yet Lisbeth thought Mikael was probably relieved that she’d begun to bail water even as he hadn’t wanted her to think he thought it was necessary.

  Their things in the back were awash in churning water. The backpacks were thoroughly soaked. The oars were floating. Lisbeth was turned awkwardly in her seat in a desperate attempt to bail out water. At least it might be possible to keep pace with the water coming into the boat, though the sixteen-ounce bottle was much too small, absurdly impractical. She had never worked so hard, and so frantically at any physical task. Emptying water out of the bottle, over the side of the boat; submerging the bottle (horizontally) into the water in the rear, allowing the bottle to fill, and again emptying it over the side of the boat … The continuous jolting and rocking of the boat, the agitated motion of the waves, not rhythmic but chaotic as if being shaken in a madman’s fist, was making her nauseated. She felt as if she might vomit but would not succumb.

  Directly overhead were flashes of lightning, vertical, terrifying, so close that the deafening thunderclaps came almost instantaneously and she could not keep from whimpering aloud.

  “If you hear the thunder, you’re all right. You’re not dead.”

  Mikael was trying to be funny, even now. She supposed that was what he was attempting—to be funny.

  Ever more desperately she was bailing water. Like a frenzied automaton, bailing water. Whatever she could do was not very effective—the rear of the boat seemed to be sinking steadily. But she could not give up—could she? If she gave up she would crouch beside the man with shut eyes, pressing her hands over her ears, catatonic in terror.r />
  She was thinking how good it was, thank God her children were nowhere near!

  Still, she continued to bail water. Numbly she smiled, bailing water.

  Her clothing was soaked. Her hair hung in her face. She was shivering convulsively. Yet her heart beat hard in determination. One day, she and Mikael Brun would look back upon this nightmare and laugh, in recollection.

  Crossing Lake George in that storm we realized if we survived, we could survive virtually anything. Together.

  At the steering wheel of the boat Mikael kept on course. Tried to keep on course. His mood had shifted. He’d been elated at the outset, pushing off from Big Burnt, and then he’d been grim, abashed; but now again he was feeling elated, even reckless. They could not drown, after all—impossible! This was Lake George, which he knew like the back of his hand. He had no doubt that he was going in the right direction and might have been a quarter mile from the marina.

  He’d been so happy that day!—he could not surrender that happiness now.

  On Big Burnt he’d felt as if he had come home. Yet it was a home from which others had departed. He’d felt like one who has opened his eyes in a strange place that is also a familiar place—a familiar place that is also a strange place. One of his lurid fantasies, that his father was buried on Big Burnt … Melancholia like an undertow had had him in its grip all the days of his life but now the raging lake was making him happy again, holding his course on the raging lake was making him happy again, bringing the woman back safely to the marina, not harming the woman as he’d vowed he would not do, though it was within his power—as a child is made happy he was being made happy in sudden random gusts, waves.

  Of course, he would not blow out his brains. Ridiculous!

  There are ways less melodramatic. Ways that emulate natural causes. Whiskey, sedatives. He was a distinguished neuroscientist, he knew how to obliterate consciousness the way a blackboard is cleaned. So many “sacrificed” animals in the Brun lab, so many years. The scientist’s hand would not waver at obliteration.