Surfacing (16 page)

He reached the dock first, outdistancing me, his fury propelling the canoe like a motor. By the time I got there he had vanished.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

There was no one in the cabin. It was different, larger, as though I hadn’t been there for a long time: the half of me that had begun to return was not yet used to it. I went back outside and unhooked the gate of the fenced oblong and sat down on the swing, carefully, the ropes still held my weight; I swayed myself gently back and forth, keeping my feet on the ground. Rocks, trees, sandbox where I made houses with stones for windows. The birds were there, chickadees and jays; but they were wary of me, they weren’t trained.

I turned the ring on my left-hand finger, souvenir: he gave it to me, plain gold, he said he didn’t like ostentation, it got us into the motels easier, opener of doors; in the intervening time I wore it on a chain around my neck. The cold bathrooms, interchangeable, feel of tile on footsoles, walking into them wrapped in someone else’s towel in the days of rubber sex, precautions. He would prop his watch on the night-tables to be sure he wasn’t late.

For him I could have been anyone but for me he was unique, the first, that’s where I learned. I worshipped him, non-child-bride, idolater, I kept the scraps of his handwriting like saints’ relics, he never wrote letters, all I had was the criticisms in red pencil he paper-clipped to my drawings.
CS
and
DS
, he was an idealist, he said he didn’t want our relationship as he called it to influence his aesthetic judgment. He didn’t want our relationship to influence anything; it was to be kept separate from life. A certificate framed on the wall, his proof that he was still young.

He did say he loved me though, that part was true; I didn’t make it up. It was the night I locked myself in and turned on the water in the bathtub and he cried on the other side of the door. When I gave up and came out he showed me snapshots of his wife and children, his reasons, his stuffed and mounted family, they had names, he said I should be mature.

I heard the thin dentist’s-drill sound of a powerboat approaching, more Americans; I got off the swing and went halfway down the steps where I would be shielded by the trees. They slowed their motor and curved into the bay. I crouched and watched, at first I thought they were going to land: but they were only gazing, surveying, planning the attack and the takeover. They pointed up at the cabin and talked, flash of binoculars. Then they accelerated and headed off towards the cliff where the gods lived. But they wouldn’t catch anything, they wouldn’t be allowed. It was dangerous for them to go there without knowing about the power; they might hurt themselves, a false move, metal hooks lowered into the sacred water, that could touch it off like electricity or a grenade. I had endured it only because I had a talisman, my father had left me the guides, the man-animals and the maze of numbers.

It would be right for my mother to have left something for me also, a legacy. His was complicated, tangled, but hers would be simple as a hand, it would be final. I was not completed yet; there had to be a gift from each of them.

I wanted to search for it but David was jogging down the path from the outhouse. “Hi,” he called, “you seen Anna?”

“No,” I said. If I went back to the house or into the garden he would follow me and talk. I stood up and walked down the rest of the steps and ducked into the trail entrance through the long grass.

In the cool green among the trees, new trees and stumps, the stumps with charcoal crusts on them, scabby and crippled, survivors of an old disaster. Sight flowing ahead of me over the ground, eyes filtering the shapes, the names of things fading but their forms and uses remaining, the animals learned what to eat without nouns. Six leaves, three leaves, the root of this is crisp. White stems curved like question marks, fish-coloured in the dim light, corpse plants, inedible. Finger-shaped yellow fungi, unclassified, I never memorized all of them; and further along a mushroom with cup and ring and chalk gills and a name: Death Angel, deadly poison. Beneath it the invisible part, threadlike underground network of which this was the solid flower, temporary as an icicle, growth frozen; tomorrow it would be melted but the roots would stay. If our bodies lived in the earth with only the hair sprouting up through the leafmould it would seem as if that was all we were, filament plants.

The reason they invented coffins, to lock the dead in, preserve them, they put makeup on them; they didn’t want them spreading or changing into anything else. The stone with the name and the date was on them to weight them down. She would have hated it, that box, she would have tried to get out; I ought to have stolen her out of that room and brought her here and let her go away by herself into the forest, she would have died anyway but quicker, lucidly, not in that glass case.

It sprang up from the earth, pure joy, pure death, burning white like snow.

The dry leaves shuffled behind me: he had shadowed me along the trail. “Hi, whatcha doin’?” he said.

I didn’t turn or speak but he didn’t wait for an answer, he sat down beside me and said “What’s that?”

I had to concentrate in order to talk to him, the English words seemed imported, foreign; it was like trying to listen to two separate conversations, each interrupting the other. “A mushroom,” I said. That wouldn’t be enough, he would want a specific term. My mouth jumped like a stutterer’s and the Latin appeared. “Amanita.”

“Neat,” he said, but he wasn’t interested. I willed him to go away but he didn’t; after a while he put his hand on my knee.

“Well?” he said.

I looked at him. His smile was like a benevolent uncle’s; under his forehead there was a plan, it corrugated the skin. I pushed his hand off and he put it back again.

“How about it?” he said. “You wanted me to follow you.”

His fingers were squeezing, he was drawing away some of the power, I would lose it and come apart again, the lies would recapture. “Please don’t,” I said.

“Come on now, don’t give me hassle,” he said. “You’re a groovy chick, you know the score, you aren’t married.” He reached his arm around me, invading, and pulled me over towards him; his neck was creased and freckled, soon he would have jowls, he smelled like scalp. His moustache whisked my face.

I twisted away and stood up. “Why are you doing this?” I said. “You’re interfering.” I wiped at my arm where he had touched it.

He didn’t understand what I meant, he smiled even harder. “Don’t get uptight,” he said, “I won’t tell Joe. It’ll be great, it’s good for you, keeps you healthy.” Then he went “Yuk, yuk” like Goofy.

He was speaking about it as though it was an exercising programme, athletic demonstration, ornamental swimming in a chlorine swimming pool noplace in California. “It wouldn’t keep me healthy,” I said, “I’d get pregnant.”

He lifted his eyebrows, incredulous. “You’re putting me on,” he said, “this is the twentieth century.”

“No it isn’t,” I said. “Not here.”

He stood up also and took a step towards me. I backed away. He was turning mottled pink, turkey neck, but his voice was still rational. “Listen,” he said, “I realize you walk around in never-never land but don’t tell me you don’t know where Joe is; he’s not so noble, he’s off in the bushes somewhere with that cunt on four legs, right about now he’s shoving it into her.” He glanced quickly at his wristwatch as though timing them; he seemed elated by what he’d said, his eyes gleamed like test-tubes.

“Oh,” I said; I thought about it for a minute. “Maybe they love each other.” It would be logical, they were the ones who could. “Do you love me,” I asked in case I hadn’t understood him, “is that why you want me to?”

He thought I was being either smart or stupid and said “Christ.” Then he paused, aiming. “You aren’t going to let him get away with it, are you?” he said. “Tit for tat as they say.” He folded his arms, resting his case, retaliation was his ultimate argument: he must have felt it was a duty, an obligation on my part, it would be justice. Geometrical sex, he needed me for an abstract principle; it would be enough for him if our genitals could be detached like two kitchen appliances and copulate in mid-air, that would complete his equation.

His wristwatch glittered, glass and silver: perhaps it was his dial, the key that wound him, the switch. There must be a phrase, a vocabulary that would work. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but you don’t turn me on.”

“You,” he said, searching for words, not controlled any more, “tight-ass bitch.”

The power flowed into my eyes, I could see into him, he was an imposter, a pastiche, layers of political handbills, pages from magazines,
affiches
, verbs and nouns glued on to him and shredding away, the original surface littered with fragments and tatters. In a black suit knocking on doors, young once, even that had been a costume, a uniform; now his hair was falling off and he didn’t know what language to use, he’d forgotten his own, he had to copy. Second-hand American was spreading over him in patches, like mange or lichen. He was infested, garbled, and I couldn’t help him: it would take such time to heal, unearth him, scrape down to where he was true.

“Keep it to yourself then,” he said, “I’m not going to sit up and beg for a little third-rate cold tail.”

I detoured around past him, back towards the cabin. More than ever I needed to find it, the thing she had hidden; the power from my father’s intercession wasn’t enough to protect me, it gave only knowledge and there were more gods than his, his were the gods of the head, antlers rooted in the brain. Not only how to see but how to act.

I thought he would stay there, at least till I was out of range, but he followed along behind me. “Sorry I blew my cool,” he said. His voice had changed again, now it was deferential. “It’s between us, okay? No need to mention it to Anna, right?” If he’d succeeded he would have told her as soon as he could. “I respect you for it, I really do.”

“That’s all right,” I said; I knew he was lying.

They sat around the table in the regular places and I served dinner. There hadn’t been any lunch but no one mentioned that.

“What time is Evans coming tomorrow?” I said.

“Ten, ten-thirty,” David said. “Have a nice afternoon?” he said to Anna. Joe stuck a new potato with his fork and put it into his mouth.

“Fantastic,” Anna said. “I got some sun and finished my book, then I had a long talk with Joe and went for a stroll.” Joe chewed, his closed mouth moving, silent refutation. “And you?”

“Great,” David said, his voice buoyant, inflated. He bent his arm onto the table, his hand brushing mine casually, as though by accident, for her to see. I flinched away, he was lying about me, the animals don’t lie.

Anna smiled mournfully at him. I watched him, he wasn’t laughing, he was staring at her, the lines in his face deepening and sagging. They know everything about each other, I thought, that’s why they’re so sad; but Anna was more than sad, she was desperate, her body her only weapon and she was fighting for her life, he was her life, her life was the fight: she was fighting him because if she ever surrendered the balance of power would be broken and he would go elsewhere. To continue the war.

I didn’t want to join. “It’s not what you think,” I said to Anna. “He asked me to but I wouldn’t.” I wanted to tell her I hadn’t acted against her.

Her eyes flicked from him to me. “That was pure of you,” she said. I’d made a mistake, she resented me because I hadn’t given in, it commented on her.

“She’s pure all right,” David said, “she’s a little purist.”

“Joe told me she won’t put out for him any more,” Anna said, still looking at me. Joe didn’t say anything; he was eating another potato.

“She hates men,” David said lightly. “Either that or she wants to be one. Right?”

A ring of eyes, tribunal; in a minute they would join hands and dance around me, and after that the rope and the pyre, cure for heresy.

Maybe it was true, I leafed through all the men I had known to see whether or not I hated them. But then I realized it wasn’t the men I hated, it was the Americans, the human beings, men and women both. They’d had their chance but they had turned against the gods, and it was time for me to choose sides. I wanted there to be a machine that could make them vanish, a button I could press that would evaporate them without disturbing anything else, that way there would be more room for the animals, they would be rescued.

“Aren’t you going to answer?” Anna said, taunting.

“No,” I said.

Anna said, “God, she really is inhuman,” and they both laughed a little, sorrowfully.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I cleared the table and scraped the canned ham fat scraps from the plates into the fire, food for the dead. If you fed them enough they would come back; or was it the reverse, if you fed them enough they would stay away, it was in one of the books but I’d forgotten.

Anna said she would wash the dishes. It was an apology perhaps, reparation for the fact that she’d found it easier to fight on his side than against him. For once. She rattled the cutlery in the pan, singing to avoid discussion, we were beyond the time for confidences; her voice occupied the room, territorial.

It had to be inside the house. Before supper I searched the toolshed, while I was getting the shovel, and the garden when I dug up the potatoes; but it wasn’t there, I would have recognized it. It had to be something out of place, something that wasn’t here when I left, apple in the row of oranges like the old arithmetic workbooks. She would have brought it here especially for me and hidden it where I would discover it when I was ready; like my father’s puzzle it would mediate, we cannot approach them directly. I dried the dishes as Anna washed, inspecting each one to make sure it was familiar. But nothing had been added since I’d been here, the gift was not a dish.

It wasn’t anywhere in the main room. When we’d finished I went into David’s and Anna’s room: her leather jacket was there, hanging up, it hadn’t been put back since the trip. I examined the pockets; there was nothing in them but an empty metal aspirin container and an ancient kleenex, and the husks from sunflower seeds; and a charred filter from one of Anna’s cigarettes, which I dropped on the floor and crushed with my foot.

My room was the only one remaining. As soon as I stepped inside it I sensed the power, in my hands and running along my arms, I was close to it. I scanned the walls and shelves, it wasn’t there; my painted ladies watched me with their bristling eyes. Then I was certain: it was in the scrapbooks, I’d shoved them under the mattress without reading through all of them. They were the last possibility and they weren’t supposed to be here, they belonged in the city, in the trunk.

I heard a motor droning from down the lake, a different pitch, deeper than a powerboat.

“Hey look,” Anna called from the main room, “A big boat!” We went out on the point: it was a police launch like the ones driven by the game wardens, they were checking us the way they used to, to see if we had any dead fish and a licence to go with them; it was routine.

The launch slowed and drew into the dock. David was down there anyway, I would let him meet it, he was the one with the papers. I re-entered the house and stood by the window. Anna, inquisitive, sauntered down to join them.

There were two men, police or probably game wardens, they were wearing ordinary clothes; and a third man, blond, Claude from the village probably, and a fourth one, older, the size of Paul. It was odd that Paul was on the launch: if he were coming for a visit he would bring his own boat. David shook hands with them and they clustered on the dock, talking in low voices. David dug into his pocket, for the licence; then he scratched his neck as if worried. Joe appeared from the outhouse path and the talking started over again; Anna’s head turned up towards me.

Then I saw David hurrying, taking the hill steps two at a time. The screen door banged shut behind him. “They found your father,” he said, breathing hard from the climb. He squinted his face, as if to show sympathy.

The door slammed again, it was Anna; he put his arm around her and they both studied me with the intent pouncing look they’d had at supper.

“Oh,” I said. “Where?”

“Some American guys found him in the lake. They were fishing, they hooked him by mistake; the body was unrecognizable but an old guy named Paul something-or-other down there, says he knows you, he identified the clothes. They figured he’d fallen off a cliff or something, he had a skull fracture.” Seedy department-store magician, producing my father out of nowhere like a stuffed rabbit out of a hat.

“Where?” I said again.

“It’s awful,” Anna said, “I’m really sorry.”

“They don’t know where it happened,” David said, “he must’ve drifted; he had a camera around his neck, big one, they think the weight kept him down or he would’ve been found sooner.” His eyes gloating.

It was clever of him to have guessed the missing camera, since I’d told them nothing. He must have thought quickly in order to make it all up in such a short time: I knew it was a lie, he was doing it to get back at me. “Did they ask to see your fishing licence?” I said.

“No,” he said, faking surprise. “You want to talk to them?”

That was a risk, he should have calculated better, it would expose his whole false construction. Maybe that’s what he wanted, maybe it was intended as a practical joke. I decided to act as though I believed him, see how he’d get out of it. “No,” I said, “tell them I’m too upset. I’ll speak to Paul tomorrow when we get to the village, about the arrangements.” That was what they were called, the arrangements. “He’d want to be buried around here.” Convincing details, if he could invent I could invent also, I’d read enough murder mysteries. The detectives, eccentric hermits, orchid-raisers, sharp blue-haired old ladies, girls with jackknives and flashlights, for them everything fitted. But not in real life, I wanted to tell him, you’ve outsmarted yourself.

He and Anna glanced at each other: they’d planned on hurting me. “Okay,” he said.

Anna said, “Wouldn’t you rather …” and then stopped. They walked back down the steps, disappointed both of them, their trap had failed.

I went into the other room and took the scrapbooks out from under the mattress. There was still enough light to see by but I closed my eyes, touching the covers with my hands, fingertips. One of them was heavier and warmer; I lifted it, let it fall open. My mother’s gift was there for me, I could look.

The rest of the scrapbook had early people, hairs blazing out of their heads like rays or spikes, and suns with faces, but the gift itself was a loose page, the edge torn, the figures drawn in crayon. On the left was a woman with a round moon stomach: the baby was sitting up inside her gazing out. Opposite her was a man with horns on his head like cow horns and a barbed tail.

The picture was mine, I had made it. The baby was myself before I was born, the man was God, I’d drawn him when my brother learned in the winter about the Devil and God: if the Devil was allowed a tail and horns, God needed them also, they were advantages.

That was what the pictures had meant then but their first meaning was lost now like the meanings of the rock paintings. They were my guides, she had saved them for me, pictographs, I had to read their new meaning with the help of the power. The gods, their likenesses: to see them in their true shape is fatal. While you are human; but after the transformation they could be reached. First I had to immerse myself in the other language.

Launch vibration, going away. I slid the page back into the scrapbook and replaced it under the mattress. Trample of the others on the hill, I stayed inside the room.

They lit the lamp. Noise of David fumbling and then the cards, he was laying out a game of solitaire; then Anna’s voice, she wanted to set up the other deck. They were playing doubles, slapping the cards down expertly as gamblers, monosyllables as they gained or lost. Joe sat in the corner on the bench, I could hear him scuffling against the wall.

For him truth might still be possible, what will preserve him is the absence of words; but the others are already turning to metal, skins galvanizing, heads congealing to brass knobs, components and intricate wires ripening inside. The cards tick on the table.

I unclose my fist, releasing, it becomes a hand again, palm a network of trails, lifeline, past present and future, the break in it closing together as I purse my fingers. When the heartline and the headline are one, Anna told us, you are either a criminal, an idiot or a saint. How to act.

Their voices murmur, they can’t discuss me, they know I’m listening. They’re avoiding me, they find me inappropriate; they think I should be filled with death, I should be in mourning. But nothing has died, everything is alive, everything is waiting to become alive.