Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  “Just lie here, all that time? I'm not sure I can hold still that long.”

  “Oh, we'll secure your head, prop the chair up, and then there's this—” She raises a thing like a cone, white and stiff, a human-sized version of the sort of collar dogs wear after surgery, to keep them from biting at their own sutures. “It'll diffuse the light, somewhat, but also direct it. And better yet, it keeps you from seeing the restraints.”

  I swallow. “I've…never been good with confinement.”

  “Well, that's what the anesthesia’s for, Mrs. Courbet.”

  They call it twilight sleep, she says, a twilight state. Level Two on the descending scale of sedation. Just enough drugs, in just the right combination, to keep me from forming new memories. It nips the fear in the bud, supposedly, by not allowing me to notice exactly how long my “momentary” discomfort has already gone on, or speculate on how much longer it might continue.

  “Now, we'll be using this IV rig to administer a cocktail of several agents to induce and maintain a light sleep, anxiety relief and short-term amnesia: Propofol and Midazolam, along with a narcotic/systemic analgesic such as Demerol or Fentanyl. Of course, everyone responds differently, so we'll keep a close eye… but really, in most cases the dose is so perfectly calibrated that although you'll respond to vocal commands and light touch throughout, I very much doubt you'll even remember we've started, by the time you wake up.”

  “You've done this before, I take it.”

  “Many, many times. Shall we begin?”

  I cast my eyes over the set-up again, so clinically neat and clean, especially when juxtaposed against the Modern Rustic interior of my family's cabin. It was built back in the 1920s by my great-grandfather Courbet, and re-done many times since. This latest iteration is my mother's work, mainly, and I think I may have spent more time here than anywhere else, over the years. It is bred as much from memory and dream as wood and stones, refuge crossed with mystery, a human oasis amidst the oddity of nature, its constant push and pull—all that life, and none of it your own. In an outcast world, it's as close as I've ever come to home.

  What we do today may ruin that, I suppose. But frankly, I don't see any other way forward.

  (Just do what it takes, Briony, I hear my father whisper, in my mind's ear. Seize charge, for Christ's sake; these people are experts, so let them do their job, and pay them for it. What else is money for?)

  Soon enough I am laid back and tied down, ruffed like an Elizabethan, sinking fast. I feel the IV jack's needle prick as it goes in. Just past the cone's outermost edge, Karr turns the light on: 10,000 lux, green-bulb spectrum rather than blue, to manipulate melatonin and seratonin levels without doing damage to the photosensitive ganglion cells in my retina, or the cones behind my eye. Gauze provides a secondary lid of sorts, penetrable but protective, as Dr Karr murmurs that I need to try and keep my eyes open, but also remember to blink at regular intervals. Three breaths, Mrs Courbet…Briony. One, two, three, then blink. Repeat. Yes, that's right. One, two, three…

  It may register as quite similar to daylight, she's told me, and it does, though not exactly; softer, hazed and vibrant, on the very edge of fading. That one last shred of bright, bravely overwhelmed, which comes before dark.

  Like dusk, I think, and shiver.

  #

  This cabin is where almost every impression I have of Ontario outside Toronto was formed, over years of cyclic pilgrimage: the huge channels of moss-covered rock through which roads run like black-tarred veins, the foliage gummed with a year's worth of spiderwebs, pine needles carpeted ankle-deep upon the earth so they kick up like dirty brown snow with every step—a permanent shadow under every tree, air bitter with gnats and mosquitos that sip the corners of your eyes, where even the weeds can sting. And beyond all that the lake, overcast even on fine days, sun leached to white over grey water; sand and silt in the shallows admixed with great, trailing ropes of weed rooted deep in the dark portions, beyond the drop-off.

  One time we accidentally arrived during caterpillar breeding season, and found the whole place boiling black and green with fuzzy, juicy, far too easily crushable crawlers: roof, walls, foundations all alike, the path itself squishing beneath our feet. Every morning we had to pound the screen door 'til it cleared, simply in order to see outside. But the next visit, the plague was gone, without a trace—vanished, nothing left behind but memory, and that fast-fading. As though it had never happened.

  The silence, at night and otherwise. The complete darkness, once the porch-lights are off and the moths disperse. These are what stay with me. Time at the cabin has always been less a place, to me, than a method of being, never entirely lost, no matter how much distance put between; as though I leave part of myself there with each visit, to be recovered on return, if only briefly—rented, never regained. And I can never stay away for long.

  To arrive here, always, is to step back into a dream I was born dreaming.

  #

  There is a thing you must watch for, Bri-oh-nee, Stana told me, as we sat near the lake together, the summer of my eighth year. The mrak, we call it. This means dark, or dusk—twilight. The time between.

  She was a tall girl, Stana, very spare and severe, as if God had cut corners to make her: frowning lips, dark hair, cheekbones like eskers, set at a slant. A glorious bosom, kept well-leashed. Only later did I realize how she must have encoded herself onto my desire's DNA, forever pushing me towards women who looked like they might hurt me, if I only paid them enough for the privilege.

  Stana came to Canada from Serbia, with her parents, and settled in Toronto. She had medical training, or so she said…not quite enough to requalify and complete her degree, but certainly enough to be somebody's glorified nursemaid. And she didn't hate children, though she often seemed indifferent. This in itself was so unlike my parents' attitude towards me that it probably would have made me think I loved her one way or the other, my eventual sexuality notwithstanding.

  Does it live near here, the mrak? I asked her, mainly to keep her talking, as I spooned silty grey sand into my bucket, digging my toes deeper. Stana shook her queenly head, braids lightly swinging.

  Here? I suppose so; it likes places neither one thing nor another, sand and shore, water and land. But everywhere else, too. The mrak is not bound by distances. It lives inside a moment, as sun dims and night comes on. Before the Morning Star rises.

  Beneath the lake's shallows, my feet looked pale, green-tinged, faintly swollen. A ripple rolled back and forth over them, wetting me to mid-calf as the clouds massed overhead, turning the afternoon light sour.

  We should go inside soon, she told me, while I upturned the bucket onto the shore beside me and made a teetery, decaying tower of its contents, already starting to wash away with the tide. This is no good time for you…for people like you. Of your age.

  Because of the mrak?

  The mrak likes to touch little children, or the things that belong to them. Sometimes it is a woman, huge and dark, sometimes a giant man with a rotten face, and always its hands are glowing—this is how it sees its way, in the darkness. And when it lays these long, bright hands on you, or even on your toys, your books, your clothes hung out on the line to dry, then you become not truly sick or ever truly well, not sleeping, but not waking. You fall between and stay there, for so long…

  Here she broke off, staring out across the lake, where raindrops were beginning faintly to pock its waves. And I remember how I shivered, deliciously—frightened, or playing at it, for the sheer excitement of being so. Felt the wet hair rise up on my neck, my thighs all gooseflesh, as I asked her—

  As long as what, Stana? Tell me, please.

  As long as it takes, of course, Bri-oh-nee, little silly girl. For the mrak to eat you up, from the inside, like bugs eat a tree. Like ants in a hill, tunnelling in and in and in, 'til at last the hill falls down.

  People tell children all sorts of things, I suppose, and who on earth ever knows why?
She might have been angry with my parents, for exploiting her so shamefully, or with her parents, for making her play along. Perhaps she was home-sick, mourning the loss of her true place; Canada must have seemed strange to her, impermanent yet impossible to dismiss, a species of waking trance. Like being forced to dream someone else's dream.

  She was gone by the new year, at any rate, just after Christmas holidays. My mother claimed she caught her stealing, but I never saw any proof that Stana coveted our possessions, and I'd spent far more time alone with her, at that point. In fact, I not only probably knew her better than either of them ever would, but also knew her better than I knew either of them…

  This last truth, unfortunately for all of us, would never really change—not that they seemed to care at the time, or even later, when it was all too obvious I'd be their only child, their only heir. Cancer took my mother, then moved on to take my father, preventing him from running completely through the family fortune before I reached age of majority.

  I didn't much care then, and I certainly don't care now it's all mine, to give or withold as I please to whomever I find least unfavourable. If I'd had the inclination, I might even have tried to track down Stana and deed some of it her way, instead of wasting my largesse on cheap imitations of her melancholy charm: my femme fataliste, dead end of all my childish fantasies. But…

  No, it never seemed likely. What's past is past, gone forever, with no recall.

  Yet here I am again, after all these years: up past Gravenhurst to Muskoka, back to familiar territory, the family cabin, the woods, the looming sky. The lake.

  #

  My wife didn't like the cabin, a difference of opinion that festered, the same as any other wound—the same as our marriage, in the end. And the infection left behind worked on me, slowly, in ways I became unable to ignore.

  I brought her up here on our honeymoon, hoping she would love it, or at least come to understand why I did. But she never took to the place, not even at first, and later began to actively loathe it, lobbying me to do the same. It was as though she not only resented my affection for it, but eventually started to consider me just as innately toxic—poisoned, and therefore poisonous. My very touch tainted, by association.

  It seems to watch you here, Briony, she told me, finally, by way of an explanation. To which I replied, perhaps foolishly: Yes, of course. And personally, I find that very comforting.

  She dug her nails into her own palms, trying not to react, and failing. And right there, even so very early on…that was the death of us, summed up in a single moment. I watched our marriage wither, knowing it coffin-bound.

  The truth is, I suppose, I've never felt entirely happy or entirely well, anywhere—not even here. But when I'm not at the cabin, I just feel so much worse. There's no comparison.

  The cabin is where my mother chose to go, when she got her final diagnosis. It's what my father was on his way to, the night his chemotherapy-weakened heart gave out at sixty miles an hour, spinning the car 'til it rammed a guard-rail and bloomed into a warm orange ball of flame. But when I unwisely chose to tell my wife how fitting I thought those two facts were, given my own deep love for our perch near the lake, recurrent centrepiece of our shared lives—how oddly beautiful, in context—she made a face, lips twisting. Her hand all but slapped up to cover her mouth, as though she were about to vomit.

  Christ, Bri! she managed, eventually. That's just morbid. What the hell do you see in that place, anyway?

  How well it sees me, I answered.

  And that was that. As the old song says, I was alone again, naturally.

  #

  For some time before attempting this procedure, I only realized in retrospect, I'd slipped into some sort of all-over malaise with no apparent cause, but also no apparent cure. Constantly tired, I still couldn't sleep, or overslept, but took no particular good from making up for lost R.E.M. My dreams were multi-tiered and repetitive, forever revolving around commonplace moments somehow imbued with inexplicable terror, familiar faces rendered alien and malign, until inevitably I woke knotted from head to toe, in a cold sweat, suffering heart palpitations. Nothing pleased me, and I—in turn—felt incapable of pleasing anyone else.

  Once it was my mother I dreamt of, washing dishes while discussing how disappointing my latest report card was even as her bald and nodding head raised a fresh crown of tumors, each pulsing slightly, a death-filled flesh-sac. Another time it was my estranged wife, dressing for some fundraiser, spraying perfume on her thighs and smiling at me in the mirror; I saw her pupils square themselves and catch fire, put forth a slick green nimbus that spread across her face like grave-mould, bearding her crown to chin with decay.

  And once, predictably enough, it was Stana, faced into the sun with her back turned, shrunk to nothing but one long-braided shadow in the bright haze of its fast-eclipsing corona. Telling me, without much hurry—

  You should go now, Bri-oh-nee. Before it comes, since it comes so soon, now. This is its time.

  Bright Morning Star on the rise above and creeping dusk below, with the lake itself suddenly humping up all over like a submerged monster's back, dim water rolling free. The air itself one invisible chime of pixels and atoms, every particle set vibrating at the very same pace. A moment caught between, hovering on the knife-point verge of becoming something else.

  The mrak, I thought, in the dream. You mean the mrak.

  Yes, of course. What else?

  (What else indeed?)

  It knows you, you see. Your name, your face, and all of it because…I told it about you.

  But why would you do that, Stana? I never did you any harm. I love you.

  So easy to say, in a dream, but she simply nodded, or seemed to. Did I make her? Well, of course I did; it's not as though she was actually there, after all. Or me, either.

  …perhaps that's why, then, she replied, after a moment. And stood there silent, no matter how I begged and pleaded, 'til I woke up.

  #

  “Sometimes I want to say my body isn’t trying to kill me,” I told Dr Karr, during our next session. “But whenever I stop to think about it, I remember that's really just accurate. Isn't it?”

  “You could see it that way, Mrs Courbet,” she agreed. “And—do you?”

  “Increasingly.”

  “Well, we should probably talk about that.”

  The common cry, the human dilemma; animate meat, expiry dates encoded, all too aware for comfort. So we stave it off with various emollients, until (one day, inevitably) those become equally ineffective, necessitating something…more.

  Nothing so very irreparable, in the end, Dr Karr hastened to assure me; nothing so very transformative, at least physically. And nothing, in the end, that money wouldn't solve—like most of my problems, I'd hitherto found. Yet probably best done in private nonetheless, I decided, once she'd outlined the idea in full—away from the public eye, with as few co-conspirators involved as possible.

  “We could meet at my office, easily,” Dr Karr pointed out. “Say three times a week, or even every other day, depending on how fast you want the treatment over with.”

  “I'd prefer not to, if you don't mind. I need to be absolutely sure this is kept discreet.”

  Polite as she was, she tried her best not to laugh, though I could see it was a bit of a struggle. “It's just light therapy, Mrs Courbet,” she said, eventually. “Not exactly controversial.”

  “Oh, I understand, doctor. But you see, it's more about what the mere fact of any sort of therapy implies, to an outside eye.”

  “That you're unhappy?”

  “Clinically so. It's not something I want widely known.”

  Here she narrowed her eyes slightly, and nodded. Because of your impending divorce, she might have said, if she'd been a different person. Because you fear the judge will think worse of you for being depressed, seasonally affected, sleepless to the point where you'd register as drunk on most tests, breathalyzer content n
otwithstanding. That you'll be forced to settle for less than you want to, because your wife will make it look as though you're not fit to handle other people's money anymore.

  And: yes, doctor, I might have replied, without resentment. Given that's the only job—the only skill—I've ever really had.

  But she didn't, and I didn't. Which, seeing how I'd never have employed that sort of person in the first place, if I could at all help it—the sadly frequent kind who apparently just has to open their mouth while thinking, or else their brain doesn't work quite as well—made me willing to trust her. On the matter of therapy, that is.

  Eventually, we agreed on terms.

  #

  It's unseasonably warm and bright for an October weekend as we arrive at the cabin, yet still raining, as it almost never entirely ceases doing; typical fall, a border season, neither one thing nor the other. Within hours, this rainbow glitter will dull back down to a comfortable grey, but even now the air feels thick, smelling mildly of wet dust, or sodden, half-rotten pine-cones. You can taste it in the back of your mouth, a mint-wrapped stone. I haven't been here for nearly two years, though my people traveled up last week, stocking supplies, cleaning and airing out, the whole nine yards. Thanks to their efforts, we find the place in good repair, welcoming mat well-brushed, with deep drifts of dead leaves already gathered into piles for the mulch-pit.

  Later, I stand at my bedroom window, sipping tea, listening to Karr's team set up her equipment, before the long drive back to Toronto. Soon enough, it'll be just her, me and the plan of therapy, or at least seem so—an easily-dispelled illusion, given that if you walk far enough in either direction you'll reach somebody else's dock, somebody else's beach, somebody else's equally “secluded” home away from home.

  But this is the off-season, boats idle, lake stilled almost motionless whenever the rain slacks to drizzle. And while I might not feel entirely safe, given what's about to take place, I certainly don't feel observed, at least by human eyes.