Surfacing (8 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

In the early morning Joe wakes me; his hands at any rate are intelligent, they move over me delicately as a blind man’s reading braille, skilled, moulding me like a vase, they’re learning me; they repeat patterns he’s tried before, they’ve found out what works, and my body responds that way too, anticipates him, educated, crisp as a typewriter. It’s best when you don’t know them. A phrase comes to me, a joke then but mournful now, someone in a parked car after a highschool dance who said
With a paper bag over their head they’re all the same.
At the time I didn’t understand what he meant, but since then I’ve pondered it. It’s almost like a coat of arms: two people making love with paper bags over their heads, not even any eyeholes. Would that be good or bad?

When we’re finished and after we rest I get up and dress and go out to prepare the fish. It’s been hanging all night, the string through its gills looped to a tree branch out of the reach of scavengers, raccoons, otters, mink, skunks. A squeezing of fish shit, like a bird’s only browner, drools from the anus. I untie the string and carry the fish down to the lake to clean and fillet it.

I kneel on the flat rock beside the lake, the knife and the plate for the fillets beside me. This was never my job; someone else did it, my brother or my father. I cut off the head and tail and slit the belly and open the fish into its two halves. Inside the stomach is a partly digested leech and some shreds of crayfish. I divide along the backbone, then along the two lateral lines: four pieces, blueish white, translucent. The entrails will be buried in the garden, they’re fertilizer.

As I’m washing the fillets David saunters down to the dock with his toothbrush. “Hey,” he says, “is that my fish?” He regards the guts on the plate with interest. “Hold it,” he says, “that’s a Random Sample.” He goes for Joe and the camera and the two of them solemnly film the fish innards, collapsed bladders and tubes and soft ropes, rearranging them between takes for better angles. It would never occur to David to have someone snap him with a Brownie camera holding his fish up by the tail and grinning, nor would he ever have it stuffed and mounted; still, he wants to immortalize it, in his own way. Photo album, I’m in it somewhere, successive incarnations of me preserved and flattened like flowers pressed in dictionaries; that was the other book she kept, the leather album, a logbook like the diaries. I used to hate standing still, waiting for the click.

I dip the fillets in flour and fry them and we eat them with strips of bacon. “Good food, good meat, Good God, let’s eat,” David says; and later, smacking his lips, “Couldn’t get this in the city.”

Anna says “Sure you could, frozen. You can get anything there now.”

After breakfast I go into my room and begin to pack. Through the plywood wall I hear Anna walking, pouring more coffee, the creak as David stretches out on the couch.

Perhaps I should fold up all the bedding and towels and the abandoned clothes, tie them into bundles and take them back with me. No one will be living here now and the moths and the mice will get in eventually. If he doesn’t ever decide to return I suppose it belongs to me, or half to me and half to my brother; but my brother won’t do anything about it, after he left he’s evaded them as much as I have. He set it up better though, he simply went as far away as he could: if I stuck a knitting needle straight through the earth the point would emerge where he is now, camped in the outback, inaccessible; he probably hasn’t even got my letter yet. Mineral rights, that’s what he explores, for one of the big international companies, a prospector; but I can’t believe in that, nothing he’s done since we grew up is real to me.

“I like it here,” David says. No sound from the others. “Let’s stay on for a while, a week, it’d be great.”

“Don’t you have that seminar?” Anna says dubiously. “Man and his Electricity Environment, or something?”

“Electrifying. That’s not till August.”

“I don’t think we should,” Anna says.

“How come you never want us to do anything I want to do?” David says, and there’s a pause. Then he says “What d’you think?” and Joe says “Okay by me.”

“Great,” says David, “we’ll do some more fishing.”

I sit down on the bed. They might have asked me first, it’s my house. Though maybe they’re waiting till I come out, they’ll ask then. If I say I don’t want to they can’t very well stay; but what reason can I give? I can’t tell them about my father, betray him; anyway they might think I was making it up. There’s my work, but they know I have it with me. I could leave by myself with Evans but I’d only get as far as the village: it’s David’s car, I’d have to steal the keys, and also, I remind myself, I never learned to drive.

Anna makes a last feeble attempt. “I’ll run out of cigarettes.”

“Do you good,” David says cheerfully, “filthy habit. Get you back into shape.” He’s older than we are, he’s over thirty, he’s beginning to worry about that; every now and then he hits himself in the stomach and says “Flab.”

“I’ll get crabby,” Anna says, but David only laughs and says “Try it.”

I could tell them there isn’t enough food. But they’d spot that as a lie, there’s the garden and the rows of cans on the shelves, corned beef, Spam, baked beans, chicken, powdered milk, everything.

I go to the room door, open it. “You’ll have to pay Evans the five anyway,” I say.

For a moment they’re startled, they realize I’ve overheard. Then David says “No sweat.” He gives me a quick look, triumphant and appraising, as though he’s just won something: not a war but a lottery.

When Evans turns up at the appointed time David and Joe go down to the dock to arrange things with him. I warned them not to say anything about the fish: if they do, this part of the lake will be swarming with Americans, they have an uncanny way of passing the word, like ants about sugar, or lobsters. After a few minutes I hear the boat starting again and accelerating and diminishing, he’s gone.

I’ve avoided Evans and the explanation and negotiations by going up to the outhouse and latching myself in. That was where I went when there was something I didn’t want to do, like weeding the garden. It’s the new outhouse, the old one got used up. This one is built of logs; my brother and I made the hole for it, he dug with the shovel and I hauled the sand up in a pail. Once a porcupine fell in, they like to chew axe handles and toilet seats.

In the city I never hid in bathrooms; I didn’t like them, they were too hard and white. The only city place I can remember hiding is behind opened doors at birthday parties. I despised them, the pew-purple velvet dresses with antimacassar lace collars and the presents, voices going Oooo with envy when they were opened, and the pointless games, finding a thimble or memorizing clutter on a tray. There were only two things you could be, a winner or a loser; the mothers tried to rig it so everyone got a prize, but they couldn’t figure out what to do about me since I wouldn’t play. At first I ran away, but after that my mother said I had to go, I had to learn to be polite; “civilized,” she called it. So I watched from behind the door. When I finally joined in a game of Musical Chairs I was welcomed with triumph, like a religious convert or a political defector.

Some were disappointed, they found my hermit-crab habits amusing, they found me amusing in general. Each year it was a different school, in October or November when the first snow hit the lake, and I was the one who didn’t know the local customs, like a person from another culture: on me they could try out the tricks and minor tortures they’d already used up on each other. When the boys chased and captured the girls after school and tied them up with their own skipping ropes, I was the one they would forget on purpose to untie. I spent many afternoons looped to fences and gates and convenient trees, waiting for a benevolent adult to pass and free me; later I became an escape artist of sorts, expert at undoing knots. On better days they would gather around, competing for me.

“Adam and Eve and Pinch Me,” they shouted,

Went to the river to bathe;
Adam and Eve fell in,
So who do you think was saved?

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You have to answer,” they said, “that’s the rules.”

“Adam and Eve,” I said craftily.
“They
were saved.”

“If you don’t do it right we won’t play with you,” they said. Being socially retarded is like being mentally retarded, it arouses in others disgust and pity and the desire to torment and reform.

It was harder for my brother; our mother had taught him that fighting was wrong so he came home every day beaten to a pulp. Finally she had to back down: he could fight, but only if they hit first.

I didn’t last long at Sunday School. One girl told me she had prayed for a Barbara Ann Scott doll with figure skates and swans-down trim on the costume and she got it for her birthday; so I decided to pray too, not like the Lord’s Prayer or the fish prayer but for something real. I prayed to be made invisible, and when in the morning everyone could still see me I knew they had the wrong God.

A mosquito lights on my arm and I let it bite me, waiting till its abdomen globes with blood before I pop it with my thumb like a grape. They need the blood before they can lay their eggs. There’s a breeze, filtering through the screened window; it’s better here than in the city, with the exhaust-pipe fumes and the damp heat, the burnt rubber smell of the subway, the brown grease that congeals on your skin if you walk around outside. How have I been able to live so long in the city, it isn’t safe. I always felt safe here, even at night.

That’s a lie
, my own voice says out loud. I think hard about it, considering it, and it is a lie: sometimes I was terrified, I would shine the flashlight ahead of me on the path, I would hear a rustling in the forest and know it was hunting me, a bear, a wolf or some indefinite thing with no name, that was worse.

I look around at the walls, the window; it’s the same, it hasn’t changed, but the shapes are inaccurate as though everything has warped slightly. I have to be more careful about my memories, I have to be sure they’re my own and not the memories of other people telling me what I felt, how I acted, what I said: if the events are wrong the feelings I remember about them will be wrong too, I’ll start inventing them and there will be no way of correcting it, the ones who could help are gone. I run quickly over my version of it, my life, checking it like an alibi; it fits, it’s all there till the time I left. Then static, like a jumped track, for a moment I’ve lost it, wiped clean; my exact age even, I shut my eyes, what is it? To have the past but not the present, that means you’re going senile.

I refuse to panic, I force my eyes open, my hand, life etched on it, reference: I flatten the palm and the lines fragment, spread like ripples. I concentrate on the spiderweb near the window, flyhusks caught in it catching in turn the sun, in my mouth tongue forming my name, repeating it like a chant. …

Then someone knocks on the door. “Ready or not, you must be caught,” says a voice, it’s David, I can identify him, relief, I slip back into place.

“Just a minute,” I say, and he knocks again and says “Snappy with the crap in there,” giving a Woody Woodpecker laugh.

Before lunch I tell them I’m going for a swim. The others don’t want to, they say it will be too cold, and it is cold, like icewater. I shouldn’t be going by myself, we were taught that, I might get cramps.

What I used to do was run to the end of the dock and jump, it was like a heart attack or lightning, but as I walk towards the lake I find I no longer have the nerve for that.

This was where he drowned, he got saved only by accident; if there had been a wind she wouldn’t have heard him. She leaned over and reached down and grabbed him by the hair, hauled him up and poured the water out of him. His drowning never seemed to have affected him as much as I thought it should, he couldn’t even remember it. If it had happened to me I would have felt there was something special about me, to be raised from the dead like that; I would have returned with secrets, I would have known things most people didn’t.

After she’d told the story I asked our mother where he would have gone if she hadn’t saved him. She said she didn’t know. My father explained everything but my mother never did, which only convinced me that she had the answers but wouldn’t tell. “Would he be in the graveyard?” I said. They had a verse about the graveyard at school too:

Stick him in the bread pan,
Sock him in the jaw;
Now he’s in the graveyard,
Haw, haw haw.

“Nobody knows,” she said. She was making a pie crust and she gave me a piece of the dough to distract me. My father would have said Yes; he said you died when your brain died. I wonder if he still believes that.

I go off the dock and wade in from the shore, slowly, splashing water over my shoulders and neck, the cold climbing my thighs; my footsoles feel the sand and the twigs and sunk leaves. At that time I would dive and coast along the lakefloor with my eyes open, distance and my own body blurred and eroding; or out further, diving from the canoe or the raft and turning on my back under the water to look up, the bubbles fleeing from my mouth. We would stay in until our skins became numbed and turned a strange colour, bluish-purple. I must have been superhuman, I couldn’t do it now. Perhaps I’m growing old, at last, can that be possible?

I stand there shivering, seeing my reflection and my feet down through it, white as fishflesh on the sand, till finally being in the air is more painful than being in the water and I bend and push myself reluctantly into the lake.

CHAPTER NINE

The trouble is all in the knob at the top of our bodies. I’m not against the body or the head either: only the neck, which creates the illusion that they are separate. The language is wrong, it shouldn’t have different words for them. If the head extended directly into the shoulders like a worm’s or a frog’s without that constriction, that lie, they wouldn’t be able to look down at their bodies and move them around as if they were robots or puppets; they would have to realize that if the head is detached from the body both of them will die.

I’m not sure when I began to suspect the truth, about myself and about them, what I was and what they were turning into. Part of it arrived swift as flags, as mushrooms, unfurling and sudden growth, but it was there in me, the evidence, only needing to be deciphered. From where I am now it seems as if I’ve always known, everything, time is compressed like the fist I close on my knee in the darkening bedroom, I hold inside it the clues and solutions and the power for what I must do now.

I was seeing poorly, translating badly, a dialect problem, I should have used my own. In the experiments they did with children, shutting them up with deaf and dumb nurses, locking them in closets, depriving them of words, they found that after a certain age the mind is incapable of absorbing any language; but how could they tell the child hadn’t invented one, unrecognizable to everyone but itself? That was in the green book at high school,
Your Health
, along with the photographs of cretins and people with thyroid deficiencies, the crippled and deformed, the examples, with black oblongs across their eyes like condemned criminals: the only pictures of naked bodies it was judged proper for us to see. The rest were diagrams, transparencies with labels and arrows, the ovaries purple sea creatures, the womb a pear.

The voices of the others and the riffle and slap of cards reach me through the closed door. Canned laughter, they carry it with them, the midget reels of tape and the On switch concealed somewhere in their chests, instant playback.

After Evans left that day I was uneasy: the island wasn’t safe, we were trapped on it. They didn’t realize it but I did, I was responsible for them. The sense of watching eyes, his presence lurking just behind the green leafscreen, ready to pounce or take flight, he wasn’t predictable, I was trying to think of ways to keep them out of danger; they would be all right as long as they didn’t go anywhere alone. He might be harmless but I couldn’t be sure.

We finished lunch and I took the breadcrumbs out to the tray for the birds. The jays had discovered there were people living in the cabin; they’re intelligent, they knew a figure near the tray signalled food; or perhaps a few of them were old enough to remember the image of my mother, hand outstretched. Two or three of them stood sentinel now, out of reach, wary.

Joe followed me out and watched as I spread the crumbs. He put his fingers on my arm, frowning at me, which may have meant he wanted to talk to me: speech to him was a task, a battle, words mustered behind his beard and issued one at a time, heavy and square like tanks. His hand gripped me in a preliminary spasm, but David was there with the axe.

“Hey lady,” he said, “I see your woodpile’s gettin’ low. You could use a handy man.”

He wanted to do something useful; and he was right, if we were staying a week we would need a fresh supply. I asked him to find standing trees, dead but not too old or rotten, “Yes’m,” he said, giving me a burlesque salute.

Joe took the small hatchet and went with him. They were from the city, I was afraid they might chop their feet; though that would be a way out, I thought, we’d have to go back. But I didn’t need to warn them, about him, they had weapons. He would see that and run away.

When they’d disappeared along the trail into the forest I said I was going down to weed the garden, another job that had to be done. I wanted to keep busy, preserve at least the signs of order, conceal my fear, both from others and from him. Fear has a smell, as love does.

Anna could tell she was expected to help; she abandoned her murder mystery and stubbed out her cigarette, only half-smoked, she was rationing them. We tied scarves around our heads and I went to the toolshed for the rake.

The garden was full in sunlight and steaming hot, moist as a greenhouse. We knelt down and began to pull at the weeds; they resisted, holding on or taking clumps of soil out with them or breaking their stems, leaving their roots in the earth to regenerate; I dug for the feet in the warm dirt, my hands green with weed blood. Gradually the vegetables emerged, pallid and stunted most of them, all but strangled. We raked the weeds into piles between the rows where they wilted, dying slowly; later they would be burned, like witches, to keep them from reappearing. There were a few mosquitoes and the deer flies with their iridescent rainbow eyes and stings like heated needles.

From time to time I paused, checking the fence, the border, but no one was there. Perhaps he would be unrecognizable, his former shape transfigured by age and madness and the forest, rag bundle of decaying clothes, the skin of his face woolly with dead leaves. History, I thought, quick.

It took them years to make the garden, the real soil was too sandy and anaemic. This oblong was artificial, the product of skill and of compost spaded in, black muck dredged from swamps, horse dung ferried by boat from the winter logging camps when they still kept horses to drag the logs to the frozen lake. My father and mother would carry it in bushel baskets on the handbarrow, two poles with boards nailed across, each of them lifting an end.

I could remember before that, when we lived in tents. It was about here we found the lard pail, ripped open like a paper bag, claw scratches and toothmarks scarring the paint. Our father had gone on a long trip as he often did to investigate trees for the paper company or the government, I was never certain which he worked for. Our mother was given a three-week supply of food. The bear walked through the back of the food tent, we heard it in the night. It stepped on the eggs and tomatoes and pried open all the storage tins and scattered the wax-paper bread and smashed the jam jars, we salvaged what we could in the morning. The only thing it didn’t bother with was the potatoes, and we were eating them for breakfast around the campfire when it materialized on the path, snuffling along bulky and flat-footed, an enormous fanged rug, returning for more. My mother stood up and walked towards it; it hesitated and grunted. She yelled a word at it that sounded like “Scat!” and waved her arms, and it turned around and thudded off into the forest.

That was the picture I kept, my mother seen from the back, arms upraised as though she was flying, and the bear terrified. When she told the story later she said she’d been scared to death but I couldn’t believe that, she had been so positive, assured, as if she knew a foolproof magic formula: gesture and word. She was wearing her leather jacket.

“You on the pill?” Anna asked suddenly.

I looked at her, startled. It took me a minute, why did she want to know? That was what they used to call a personal question.

“Not any more,” I said.

“Me neither,” she said glumly. “I don’t know anyone who still is any more. I got a blood clot in my leg, what did you get?” She had a smear of mud across her cheek, her pink face layer was softening in the heat, like tar.

“I couldn’t see,” I said. “Things were blurry. They said it would clear up after a couple of months but it didn’t.” It was like having vaseline on my eyes but I didn’t say that.

Anna nodded; she was tugging at the weeds as though she was pulling hair. “Bastards,” she said, “they’re so smart, you think they’d be able to come up with something that’d work without killing you. David wants me to go back on, he says it’s no worse for you than aspirin, but next time it could be the heart or something. I mean, I’m not taking those kinds of chances.”

Love without fear, sex without risk, that’s what they wanted to be true; and they almost did it, I thought, they almost pulled it off, but as in magicians’ tricks or burglaries half-success is failure and we’re back to the other things. Love is taking precautions. Did you take any precautions, they say, not before but after. Sex used to smell like rubber gloves and now it does again, no more handy green plastic packages, moon-shaped so that the woman can pretend she’s still natural, cyclical, instead of a chemical slot machine. But soon they’ll have the artificial womb, I wonder how I feel about that. After the first I didn’t ever want to have another child, it was too much to go through for nothing, they shut you into a hospital, they shave the hair off you and tie your hands down and they don’t let you see, they don’t want you to understand, they want you to believe it’s their power, not yours. They stick needles into you so you won’t hear anything, you might as well be a dead pig, your legs are up in a metal frame, they bend over you, technicians, mechanics, butchers, students clumsy or sniggering practising on your body, they take the baby out with a fork like a pickle out of a pickle jar. After that they fill your veins up with red plastic, I saw it running down through the tube. I won’t let them do that to me ever again.

He wasn’t there with me, I couldn’t remember why; he should have been, since it was his idea, his fault. But he brought his car to collect me afterwards, I didn’t have to take a taxi.

From the forest behind us came the sound of sporadic chopping: a few blows, the echoes, a pause, a few more blows, one of them laughing, echo of the laughter. It was my brother who cut the trail, the year before he left, the axe hacking and the machete slashing through the undergrowth marking his progress as he worked his way around the shore.

“Haven’t we done enough?” Anna asked. “I bet I’m getting sunstroke.” She sat back on her heels and took out the un-smoked half of her cigarette. I think she wanted us to exchange more confidences, she wanted to talk about her other diseases, but I kept on weeding. Potatoes, onions; the strawberry patch was a hopeless jungle, we wouldn’t do that; in any case the season was over.

David and Joe appeared in the long grass outside the fence, one at either end of a thinnish log. They were proud, they’d caught something. The log was notched in many places as though they’d attacked it.

“Hi,” David called. “How’s the ol’ plantation workers?”

Anna stood up. “Fuck off,” she said, squinting at them against the sun.

“You’ve hardly done anything,” David said, unquenchable, “you call that a garden?”

I measured their axework with my father’s summarizing eye. In the city he would shake hands with them, estimating them shrewdly: could they handle an axe, what did they know about manure? They would stand there embarrassed in their washed suburban skins and highschool clothes, uncertain what was expected of them.

“That’s great,” I said.

David wanted us to get the movie camera and take some footage of both of them carrying the log, for
Random Samples;
he said it would be his cameo appearance. Joe said we couldn’t work the camera. David said all you did was press a button, an idiot could do it, anyway it might be even better if it was out of focus or overexposed, it would introduce the element of chance, like a painter throwing paint at a canvas, it would be organic. But Joe said what if we wrecked the camera, who would pay for it. In the end they stuck the axe in the log, after several tries, and took turns shooting each other standing beside it, arms folded and one foot on it as if it was a lion or a rhinoceros.

In the evening we played bridge, with the set of slightly greasy cards that had always been there, blue seahorses on one deck, red seahorses on the other. David and Anna played against us. They won easily: Joe didn’t know how, exactly, and I hadn’t played for years. I was never any good; the only part I liked was picking up the cards and arranging them.

Afterwards I waited for Anna to walk up to the outhouse with me; usually I went first, alone. We took both flashlights; they made protective circles of weak yellow light, moving with our feet as they walked. Rustlings, toads in the dry leaves; once the quick warning thump of a rabbit. The sounds would be safe as long as I knew what they were.

“I wish I had a warmer sweater,” Anna said, “I didn’t know it got so cold.”

“There’s some raincoats,” I said, “you could try those.”

When we got back to the cabin the other two were in bed; they didn’t bother going as far as the outhouse after dark, they peed on the ground. I brushed my teeth; Anna started taking off her makeup by the light of a candle and her flashlight propped on end, they’d blown out the lamp.

I went into my room and got undressed. Joe mumbled, he was half asleep; I curled my arm over him.

Outside was the wind, trees moving in it, nothing else. The yellow target from Anna’s flashlight was on the ceiling; it shifted, she was going into their room and I could hear them, Anna breathing, a fast panic sound as though she was running; then her voice began, not like her real voice but twisted as her face must have been, a desperate beggar’s whine,
please please.
I put the pillow over my head, I didn’t want to listen, I wanted it to be through but it kept on,
Shut up
I whispered but she wouldn’t. She was praying to herself, it was as if David wasn’t there at all.
Jesus jesus oh yes please jesus.
Then something different, not a word but pure pain, clear as water, an animal’s at the moment the trap closes.

It’s like death, I thought, the bad part isn’t the thing itself but being a witness. I suppose they could hear us too, the times before. But I never say anything.