Mirror Lake by Andrée A. Michaud

Author:Andrée A. Michaud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2021-02-02T20:31:11+00:00

II.

Second Beginning

During the days that followed Picard’s turbulent irruption, Jeff was able to enjoy a degree of peace, though I was not. I spent much of my time scrutinizing the lake, the gravel road, the endless trees in the forest, certain that at any moment I would see Jack Picard’s hirsute head behind a yellow birch I’d been scrutinizing suspiciously, Artie’s bulging eyes in the trembling shadows, John Doe’s eroded features in the vaporous cloud of mist that rose each morning from Mirror Lake, and then Anita’s black eye in the foliage of a bush just a little more disturbed than you would expect it to be. Basically, if it hadn’t already happened, I went crazy.

I strode around the lake muttering old-fashioned words like turbulence, turpitude, and tribulation that I’d found in some small compartment of memory where I store things that might be useful during a disaster. These three words epitomized, to my depressed mind, the collapse of the pitiful Eden that my propensity to dream had led me to imagine inhabited the shores of this heaven-cursed lake. If I’d lived in an earlier century, I’d have written tearful letters deploring the torments brought about by prideful man’s foolish desire to return to some kind of original purity he does not merit. It would have been a relief to lament in a style that wasn’t my own, knowing that someone, across the seas or over a border, was waiting for the faded envelope in which my pain burned. But I was born in the wrong epoch, in the era of messages that are coded, laconic, efficient, and stuffed full of mistakes, and which travel at the speed of lightning, without leaving any time to be tempted to mope. So I walked up and down the beach muttering, and wrote words in the sand that nobody — including me — used or understood anymore, if only to alter my thoughts and put out of mind that life was nothing but tribulation.

“Turpitude,” Winslow said in his Maine accent the first time he came to read my beach. And then, to rattle me a little, he said, “Tut-tut, Robert.” He could see I wasn’t doing well, because you don’t write words like turpitude when your head’s in the right place. But I needed more than a morale-boosting tut-tut for me to regain control of my chaotic life, and this was obvious to Winslow, so he tried suggesting a range of activities from pétanque to Monopoly via ping-pong and water polo. But the whole affair was pointless. Even the Pink Lady game got no reaction from me. Winslow tried with red, mauve, and green, which contained infinite possibilities, but the mechanism had broken after the encounter with the Daltons and Picard. “Green as Graham,” he chortled, proud of his subtlety, in front of his chilly audience. “Green as the magnificent mountains,” he bellowed at the top of his voice, while I sank down into my turpitude in the sand. Tains, tains, tains, responded the green mountains, lending him a hand.

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