Mirror Lake

by Andrée A. Michaud

  However, that day the game had lost something of its flavour and, when we left the steamy bedroom, the fan’s blades must have blown a cool breeze across the sheets we’d not managed to wrinkle.

  Out in the asphalted courtyard, I was still trying to cheer Anita up by monkeying around under the plastic palm that barely threw a shadow over the dirt-filled swimming pool, but she started to cry, her eyeliner running, and I wondered what I’d done to set off such a meltdown.

  “You don’t like monkeys?” I added carelessly, to make myself seem interesting and because I was helpless — utterly useless — in the face of these inexplicable tears that can only be provoked by a man’s stupidity. Then, before she ripped my guts out, I apologized: “Sorry, Anita, I’m stupid, I monkey about your time,” I said, my attempt at English drawing a feeble smile out of her — a smile, incidentally, that had the same effect as a load of tnt on a beaver dam, her hesitant rictus smile immediately giving way to another terrifying volley of tears. By that point I had absolutely no idea what to do, so I just gave up.

  Ten minutes later I was sitting next to her on the edge of the pool, my arm around her shoulders, her head resting on my shoulders, our feet in the dirty water, asking myself how it was possible that I was mopping up the fallout from a lovers’ quarrel, even though I was no more in love with Anita than I was with Winslow and, let’s face it, she was no Juliette Lewis. As I waited for Anita’s final snivels to fade away, I looked at the insect corpses drifting around in the water, pushed by the little wavelets Anita’s feet were stirring up as she gently and rhythmically kicked the pool’s slimy wall. When Anita finally said she had to go home, I peeled the remains of a moth off my left calf, examined it closely for a while thinking what disgusting little creepy-crawlies moths were, and we both headed our separate ways, me toward the lake and she toward her dump, her pimp, her boyfriend. As I watched her Ford Taurus disappear along the road, I thought that, of the two of us, I was the one in the more enviable position, which wasn’t hard given the shitty life she led. But, regardless, the comparison would help me not to get too upset the next time Winslow paddled merrily “over the blue summer swells” and toward my cottage.

  Back at my house, I went to sit by my window, a little stunned by a day in which, like some drone-bee excited by the promise of nectar underneath the inviting circle of Marilyn Monroe’s skirts, I’d hoped to sample Anita’s delectable pollen. In the state I was in, I could have done with watching a movie, and preferably an action movie: one in which the women don’t cry and the only part of your brain that needs to do any work is the damage-assessment part. But I hadn’t brought any of the trappings of my former life with me — no TV, no video player, no dvd player, nothing at all — believing the majesty of the silence would be more than enough.

  So I fell back on The Maine Attraction, which I’d abandoned on page 94, right in the middle of a passage in which Jack Picard, the brute Morgan cast as the hero, talks about the women who have passed through his life, starting with his mother, who thought she was Marilyn Monroe and whom he’d murdered one evening as she was walking the streets. Sordid stuff. I closed the book again, took Jeff outside, and picked up a piece of wood to throw for him, pretending to be happy, behaving as though I were free of human limitations. But it was a lousy day, as so many are over the course of a life, and my efforts to challenge the laws of nature were useless. When a day is lousy it’s lousy, the process is irreversible, when something has fallen from the tree it can’t be put back, when it’s split it stays split, when it’s boiled, idem, it can’t return to being firm, it can only bend and sag, when something is born with a flaw, time can’t help. Winslow’s arrival only confirmed the day’s lousiness. I hadn’t seen him coming, busy as I was trying to add colour and light to a day ending in darkening cumuli.

  If Tim Robbins’s showing up was always like a disagreeable drizzle, I’d have put Winslow’s more in the category of a diabolus ex machina, his sudden appearance always managing to worsen a situation that didn’t need worsening. Here he was coming over to talk about the man in the two photos, someone I’d not forgotten but was forcing myself not to think about. Winslow was sure he knew the guy, but couldn’t remember when and where he’d met him. I told him he should go ask Robbins, whom I called by his real name, Paquette, but Winslow didn’t like the idea at all. But it seemed as though Paquette had decided not to approach Winslow either, preferring to sort things out without him.

  And then Winslow casually asked me, point-blank, if I’d noticed that Paquette looked like the dirty cop Tim Robbins had played in a movie, the name of which he couldn’t remember. “Did you notice that, Robert? They’re like two peas in a pod.”

  “Yes, they’re like two drops of water in a pond,” I replied. “Two John Does in a pond of boredom.” And then I said, “Short Cuts, the movie was called Short Cuts,” and from my answer Winslow deduced that I too had noticed the resemblance.

  “Amazing,” he said, slapping his thighs, without specifying whether he thought it was amazing that Paquette looked like Robbins or that we’d both used the same reference to establish the similarity. Frankly I didn’t care which, because Winslow was starting to seriously annoy me with his mania for doing everything like I did, including thinking.

  “But where does that get us?” I continued.

  “Nowhere, it’s just funny,” he said, though I couldn’t see anything funny about it. It seemed more depressing than anything to me, and I would have gone in to bed if I hadn’t noticed that Winslow was hovering near the four-hundred-million-year-old rock and waiting for me to show some manners. So I invited him onto the porch and went inside to get a couple of beers, pointing out that unfortunately they were my last ones, which was a lie, but I didn’t want Winslow hanging around for too long. He hung around for too long anyway — so long that I looked like a complete fool when, after I’d shared a whole pot of coffee with this guy determined to stick around, I miraculously found two more beers, and then another two. “There’s a god of drunkards!” the buffoon guffawed, or something like that. I forced a laugh and watched the yellow sky disappearing behind the mountains between two cumulonimbus clouds, a sign of bad weather the next day.

  The evening dragged on interminably, but Winslow did tell me a couple of details about the man in the photo, who, he was convinced, was not the drowned man. He was so certain, I decided there must actually be two John Does, unless Winslow had lied about the first one, the drowned one, which was what made him so sure. Indeed, if Winslow hadn’t seen anyone drowning, the man in the photo couldn’t be the drowned man, logically speaking, unless he’d also drowned.

  To put it clearly, there was either a drowned man and a disappeared man, two drowned men, one missing drowned man, or one missing man who hadn’t drowned, at least not yet, none of this helping me in the slightest. But I did learn that the man in the photos was dangerous because Robbins — that’s what, between ourselves, Winslow and I were calling him from then on, “Paquette” not suiting him at all — had told Winslow to be careful.

  “Be careful, Bobby,” Robbins had said as he was leaving Winslow, an enigmatic phrase Winslow would puzzle over, while for my part I noticed that Robbins hadn’t warned me, this not surprising me, since it was obvious this great-great-grandson of a French Canadian was more racist than the founder of the Ku Klux Klan and had sworn to himself that he would make me pay for the misery my face and accent triggered in him. Never mind. As far as he was concerned, I was racist too, which was proof that you can hate even the residue of your own race. This strain of bigotry must have a name, I was thinking as Winslow pissed away his third beer behind a third oak and I had a bit of time to myself. “Everything has a name, if it exists it has a name,” as Wittgenstein almost said, but still I couldn’t come up with it.

  Afterwards, we picked up the conversation where we’d left off, wondering what we should be careful of, but our narrative was not yet sufficiently illuminating, so we’d
have to wait for Robbins’s next visit to find out. Then, as a cool breeze started blowing, Winslow stood up, immediately followed by Bill, who had been sleeping at his feet, and Jeff and I were able to end the evening in peace, watching a few shooting stars fall behind the mountains.

  The fact that the universe has neither beginning nor end is beyond my understanding, as it is over most people’s, but the opposite seems just as inconceivable, so every time I look up at a starry sky I start hoping God exists for him to explain all this to me once I’m in heaven. At least, that’s what I used to hope, when I could still claim a small chance of going to heaven. I know now that I’m screwed. If God does exist, he’ll be sending me straight to hell, which can’t be all that different from here. This is what makes me saddest, believing that hell is basically just a reproduction of the earth, with maybe a few more volcanoes, deserts, forest fires, and fire eaters, but above all a higher proportion of idiots. Some other company would be welcome. Anyway, after Winslow left that evening, I was certain I would be awarded a place in heaven alongside Gandhi, Malcolm X, Jeff, and Martin Luther King.

  “Look,” I said to Jeff, pointing randomly at a star, “that’s where we’ll be soon, you and me,” and Jeff followed the tip of my finger as if it really was heaven up there. Dogs are like that, they understand the immensity of microcosms, the inexhaustible power of small groups of atoms, while the rest of us are trying to confront the universe, yet oblivious to the fact that we are the universe and we are nothing, like the thousands and billions of John Does of the rivers, oceans, mountains, and galaxies. Then, as the star I’d called John Doe A-01 disappeared behind the clouds — A for August, for the alpha, the beginning, and 01 to mark my first and likely last attempt to name Mirror Lake’s skies — I petted Jeff’s big head, which happened to be the centre of my universe and of all the universes orbiting in my saturated mind. Then I started to cry, I don’t know why, probably because I wasn’t happy — that’s a good reason — a fact the sky’s beauty made me realize, no doubt because I felt useless and it was too much, all this, the night, the stars, Jeff’s big head, though probably, in the end, because I was not so stupid that I did not see my life was slipping away and that this changed nothing, absolutely nothing, in the order of the cosmos.

  “What are we doing here, Jeff?” I whimpered, the lake blurring with the shimmering of my pain that a brook, a stream, a river of brackish water flooding, dozens of tiny craters emerging in the surface of my hot skin. “What the fuck are we doing here?” I asked, but Jeff didn’t answer, he was happy simply being, which was the only valid answer to such a question. I took him in my arms, he didn’t resist, and we said “I love you” to each other in the water of the doleful night and its abundant stars, Bob Winslow perhaps doing the same thing on his side while taking refuge in the invisible fog shy people conceal themselves in when the sky is really dark so that nobody is able to witness their distress.

  I couldn’t speak unreservedly to Winslow’s suffering, but as apparently we did have some things in common, there was every chance that a man on the other side of the bottomless lake was sitting on the sand with his own dog in his arms and water in his eyes, wondering what human existence was all about.

  Indeed, there was every chance — and here I told myself that, deep down, Winslow wasn’t a bad guy — that maybe I could get used to his presence, not really having any choice in the matter. When I think back on it today, I realize the stars sealed the bond between me and Winslow, that and our relationship with a pair of dogs, the love we had for them and that they had for us, encouraging our shadows to mingle on the bank when time was slowing us down. It happened long ago, so long ago that a few stars must have died in the meantime, and others lit up, and yet more exploded in the gaze of depressed men believing in nothing but the love of dogs. As for the world, well, it hasn’t changed. We’re still obliged to kill each other invoking one of the names of God, who, given the circumstances, must be regretting that we ever invented him.

  To make Pink Flamingo Sperm you need crème fraiche or Nestlé condensed milk, L’Héritier-Guyot Crème de Fraise, and cognac, Rémy Martin preferably. This was the present I’d decided to give Winslow to show my goodwill and provide a little boost to a relationship I’d only invested in due to a sense of urgency that wouldn’t abate. After weeping beneath the stars, I’d slept like a baby, which is always what happens to me after a bawling session, and in the morning I felt unabashedly generous toward the man who’d been snivelling in silence along with me on the far side of the lake.

  The sperm idea hit me during breakfast. In the sky, delicate pink and white clouds were converging due to the heat of the sun, and Anita Ekberg’s wan image floated on the horizon. Soon after, Ekberg disappeared, but the clouds, as always happens when you’re in a good mood, started making all kinds of animal shapes over the mountains — lions, sheep, giraffes. All the classics, basically. A flight of ducks had traversed the lake at the height of the pinks, and I hallucinated flamingos, a flight of flamingos from the east, off to drink the nectar of the gods. Ten minutes later I was singing “La vie en rose” in Julia Migenes’s accent as I drove along in my Volvo 2000, Jeff’s ears pushed back by the wind streaming in through the passenger-side window, the two of us joyously making our way to the state liquor store and celebrating friendship.

  The liquor store had no L’Héritier-Guyot Crème de Fraise, so I decided on a crème de cassis that looked kind of gross and was a bit too pink, but could be diluted with a couple of extra spoons of cream. To make up for this, I also bought some good champagne. And then I left, warbling “Summertime” in Louis Armstrong’s hoarse voice and accompanying the warble with a few Gene Kelly dance steps — and hey presto, what a wonderful world! “Summertime, and the livin’ is easy,” I hummed to Jeff as we got back in the car. “Fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high,” he replied, careful not to make crooning fish appear in front of the windshield, but only little fish shivering with joy. The lyrics of “Summertime” were followed by those of “Lady Sings the Blues,” and when turning a corner I spotted Anita on a park bench — the other Anita, the real one, not Ekberg — appearing beaten up and distressed, staring into space and smoking what looked like a joint.

  I braked suddenly, double-parked, and ran over to her. I’d never seen Anita in such a state, and had I seen her like that before I’d never have wanted to see her again. She was wearing a pair of those hideous baggy sweatpants with a wide stripe on each side that I called, and still call, “hanged-man pants,” because they sag so awfully that you need to be on the brink of being beyond repair to ever wear such a horror. She was also hidden behind a pair of no-less-hideous sunglasses shaped like a duck’s tail, their large size failing to hide the green and mauve circle decorating her left eye. Evidently her boyfriend had forgotten how to hit without leaving a mark. If the bastard had been there with us, I’d have invented, just for him, a type of torture that would make all the torturers on the damn planet flinch, but bastards are never there when you want to kill them, and I was hoping only one thing: that he was at that very moment dying deep in some back alley, soaking in the last pint of blood left after the careful attentions of the sidekicks of Anita’s impresario, who was at least good for something.

  “That fucking bastard,” I began, but Anita interrupted with a flailing gesture of her hand, adjusted her glasses to make sure she really did know the person she thought she recognized and then, convinced it was truly me, threw herself in my arms and started crying. History was repeating itself, and dourly, which isn’t to say that all histories repeating themselves are dour, but that dourness is anchored in repetition, and as Anita dried her green and mauve eye on my striped summer shirt I thought to myself there was enough for a syllogism there and led her to the car, where a police officer was about to give me a ticket. I let him amble on and dodged discreetly behind a tree, because Anita still had her joint, which I crushed into some dog shit in which I’d already stepped.

>   My rare experiences with drugs were all a long time past, but I’d have happily smoked the joint myself. The first one I ever smoked was in identical circumstances, except that it was winter, I was fifteen, and the person I was holding in my arms wasn’t a woman but Gilles Gauthier, the pretty boy who’d stolen Rosie Bolduc from me. She’d just dumped him, throwing a dictionary in his face. Even had he been about to breathe his last, I’d never have believed myself generous enough to hold Gauthier in my arms but, given the stunt Rosie had pulled, his hot breath rank with the smell of beer provided me with a feeling so close to enjoyment that I’d gripped him very tightly and given him a few words of solace, explaining that sometimes books make people less stupid, and getting a good whack in the face from the Larousse wasn’t going to do him any harm. Then I took the joint he was trying to light and went to lie down at the crest of the little hill behind the school, and drew owls in the snow as, through the marijuana smoke, I counted the stars that even back then already fascinated me.

  I can’t remember how many stars I counted, though I do remember how clear the sky was, how magnificent the night, and the way the future, now that Gilles Gauthier was no longer an obstacle to my desire, seemed to be opening up for me. Everything was perfect. The snow wasn’t cold and, if we ignored the squeaking of the rusty chains of the old swing half buried in in it, the silence of the schoolyard was complete. That squeak, evoking so many happy memories, was like gentle music born of laughter and a carefree time when we used to fly higher than the stars, higher than the sun, short of breath but not of dreams. In my mind, everything was mixing together in a sweet ballet that the years would transform into melancholy, but right then it was as light as Rosie Bolduc’s skirts, spinning through the stars like the kids we used to be. I even saw a shooting star, which burned itself out in the middle of the Great Bear, the only constellation I can confidently identify, and took it as a sign, doubling it up with a wish that one day Rosie Bolduc would become my wife, in the sight of other people and of God, who finally seemed to have adopted me. Then Rosie showed up dressed in veils, the veils flew back, stroking my face on their way past, and I fell into a dream as soft as what I was imagining under the veils.