Three Years with the Rat (22 page)

“No. We have a
no trespassing
rule, not that we get many visitors. You three excluded, we've had only a handful of trespassers to the facilities. And we've been coming here for a very long time.”

“If they're not at your
facilities
, then why are you taking me there?”

“Who says I am?” Her shoulders and arms have a smooth, curving rhythm and her movements with the paddle are precise and elegant.

“
No trespassing
,” I say. “You realize there's an irony to that, right? Who says we shouldn't come to your version of Toronto and harass
you
?”

“My version.” She shakes her head, grins again. “We're not from here any more than you are. Just one of our junctions, a place to build entrances, windows.”

Entrances.
She's talking about the dead end.

I ask, “Why?”

“Because we're not shaped like you,” she tells me. “We're not little skinny tubes of consciousness. Need to force part of ourselves into your shape before we go to your side, anybody's side.”

“No, I mean why come to our side at all?”

“What do you mean?” For an instant she looks genuinely confused. “Because we
can
.”

I shake my head. “Not good enough. From the sounds of it, you're capable of plenty of things. So why bother with us ‘skinny little tubes'? Why follow us around?”

Her strokes remain even, disciplined. “Why put rats in little boxes and make them work for sugar pellets? Why implant little pieces
of plastic and metal in their bellies? Why bother finding empirical ways to answer your great philosophical questions?”

They are scientists. Physicists, biologists. Tinkerers. I say, “You're no less foolish than Grace and John, then.”

“There are better and worse ways of doing science,” she says. “Ways of asking questions without compromising some other creature's dignity. Ways of celebrating and respecting truth without exploiting every kernel of data. Even some of your scientists have a vague glimmer of that.”

“It still doesn't explain why you'd play a gig with some band at the Fortress.”

Her steel eyes lock on me. “Your behaviours make a lot more sense when viewed from the ground level. Call it cultural immersion. Or, like some of my colleagues, call it a waste of time.”

So she is an anthropologist, too.

There is no wind and the water barely ripples under the boat. I don't know if I've ever seen Lake Ontario so calm. Sure enough we are veering farther around the eastern edge of the islands. From here I can see that the buildings are very simple and without windows. There is no activity or signs of life. I look down the shore to the gap between the land and the islands. Officer 2510 speaks up from the rear of the boat.

“This all used to be a spit, a peninsula. Hundred years ago a big storm wiped out the sandbar between the mainland and the islands. Consider yourself lucky it didn't happen only in your Toronto.” She stops paddling for a moment and takes in her scenery. Her features are soft and her expressions are hard. Even if she isn't police, she looks like one. “Does it feel like the island's farther from the mainland? Your Toronto laid down a bunch of landfill and made an artificial waterfront.”

“O.K.,” I say. “Enough. Where the hell are you taking me, officer?”

She smiles at the title and resumes her paddling. “Look, let's just
say I admire you. Doomed to fail, completely out of your element, and yet you just take it all in stride. No pretension, no illusion of control. You just persist.”

“I think you referred to me as ‘dopey' before.”

She laughs quietly. “Now, I wouldn't mind showing you a few things, stretching out your self-awareness into a more fitting shape. Maybe even blowing your mind a little.”

She might be flirting with me but I'm not sure what sort of desires a woman, creature, like her would have.

She says, “I'd be willing to show you around and have a little fun. This is not an insubstantial offer. But I'm guessing you'd say no. In fact I know what you say already.”

We're both silent.

“So instead I'm getting you on your way to John and Grace,” she continues. “Way I see it, you've got two problems. First, John is fifty kilometres from here.”

It's an easy guess. “Oshawa. The dead end.”

We reach the edge of the islands and begin rounding them, out into the expanse of Lake Ontario. At the easternmost tip of the last island is another large wooden pole sticking out of the rocks, and it too has a heavy rope tied around it. The rope leads to a second boat, identical to this one, that bobs in the water.

“You know what Oshawa means?” she asks. “It's
The Crossing Place
in Ojibwa, those sly motherfuckers. Now it's going to be a damn-near perfect day on the water but at your best you'll paddle only five kilometres an hour. You'll want to get there before the dark slows you down, on account of the second problem.”

“Wait,” I say. “What about Grace? Where is she?”

Officer 2510 makes a look of distaste. “Oh, the dead end is lousy with her. Not as bad as some of our other entrances, but still.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about.”

“You will. But right now I don't have time to explain. Like I said, the second problem.” She's paddling the boat toward the makeshift dock. She looks at me hard and demands my attention. We're coasting in the water now. “Second problem is you broke the rules. Our entrances are built with specific considerations in mind. Your little wood-and-mirrors-and-dirt trick, not so much. You forced your way through, caused a fracture, sloughed off some nasty shit. And you left your door open, which was practically an invitation for that nasty shit to follow you here.”

The hunter. “The thing in the woods. The thing that Buddy confronted.”

She nods. “Point is it won't be more than a couple hours behind you. Now listen to me: if it catches you, it will undo you. And your last moments will be very, very unpleasant.”

The boat wobbles and scrapes onto the rocks. She climbs out onto the island's shore and gestures for me to sit in the middle of the boat. She hands me her paddle and it's much lighter than I expected, perhaps not made of wood at all. The handle is lined with cork and feels good in my grip. The end of the paddle has a T-shaped nub for my other hand. I squeeze the two grips and twist.

“Don't do that,” she says. “Friction is bad. No matter what, you're going to blister, but if you keep your hands dry and don't grip too hard, you'll bleed less.”

She leans forward and grabs me by one shoulder. Her hand is small but strong. “Last chance for you to come with me instead. Why follow through if you already know you won't succeed?”

I take her hand in mine and lift it off my shoulder. It's warmer and softer than I expected. I let it go. She gives me one last crooked smirk and pushes the boat out into the water.

I say, “The last time I saw Grace, she said you—all of you—had rejected her.”

“She gets exactly what she wants,” Officer 2510 says from the shore. “She gets her little solipsistic paradise,
and
she congests a bunch of our entrances in the process. In the end she regrets it all, comes to us all folded in over herself. She demands answers about everything but she'll never be satisfied with the truth she gets.”

The distance between us is increasing so I have to raise my voice. “Why not?”

“Because it's too much for her. Beyond her limited comprehension.” Officer 2510 steps back, out of reach of the small waves, and crosses her arms.

I remember the quote verbatim:
I realize that if through science I can seize phenomena and enumerate them, I cannot, for all that, apprehend the world.
Nicole was right.

“Goodbye, officer,” I shout. “Do you have a name?”

“Sure I do.” Her expression is inscrutable. She lifts an arm and claps the hand open and closed, an exaggerated gesture. “Bye, bye.”

With the paddle I take a few awkward stabs at the water. The boat spins and drifts. Thirty feet from the island's shore, a horrible realization comes to me. I lay down the paddle and turn toward Officer 2510. She is still standing where the water meets the trees and watching me float away.

I cup my hands to my mouth. “How do I get home? How do I return to my side?”

She doesn't try to project her voice but the response is unmistakable.

“Oblivion,” she says.

THE INSTRUMENT IS UNFAMILIAR
in my hands. For a long time my strokes are inefficient and consume all my concentration. My eyes are focused on the fin at the end of the paddle and on the black water into which I submerge it. I rarely see anything past the front of the boat. I try to cross sides with the paddle in a smooth motion and make my strokes even and perpendicular to the water. I try to keep the lower grip of the paddle dry and the upper T-bar cupped under the non-power hand. But no matter how hard I try, I can't keep the goddamned boat moving in a straight line and my hands are damp within the hour. The boat traces an infinite Z-shaped path along the coast.

Soon the paddling motion becomes more natural and my attention expands beyond my immediate surroundings. Officer 2510 was right: it is as perfect a day on Lake Ontario as I have ever seen. There is almost no wind and the only ripples on the water come from my idiotic flailing with the paddle. Across the sky there are very few clouds and soon the sun beats down from high above. The air becomes heavy and limp. I strip down to my T-shirt and underwear,
piling the rest of my clothes in the back of the boat. Even still I'm covered in sweat before the worst heat sets in. This is undoubtedly a day in late summer, not the December that I left behind.

My little boat never drifts more than a few hundred metres from shore. It's probably reasonable to call this a canoe but I have no idea how to differentiate one from a kayak or any other kind of boat. Its skeleton is made of a wood so dark it looks burnt, with a coarse grain that runs along the long planks. The outer skin of the boat, the hull, is smoother but still unrecognizable. The shore of the lake, on the other hand, is perfectly recognizable apart from the massive trees that line it. I round the slow bends, stare into the deep woods, and I remember the train to the suburbs, the few brilliant bursts of the lake from the tracks.

The troubles come on slowly. I find myself shifting in my seat, taking momentary breaks to rub my biceps. My body is not used to this repetitive activity. I consciously switch between using my arms and using my torso to pull the boat forward in the water, but all of me is becoming sore. And just as Officer 2510 promised, I can feel the pads of my hands puffing up where they rub against the grips of the paddle. I let the blisters fill up with lymph and that takes some of the discomfort away. Then one bubble bursts and leaves an open wound in the meat between my right thumb and forefinger. I take off my T-shirt and wrap it around my right hand. A short time later I put my other hand in a sock.

The shore meanders, always more of the same. It's not clear how far I've travelled, what I should be looking for, or how to know when I've arrived. I keep paddling.

Every time my mouth feels full of paste I rest the paddle along the edge of the boat and sip water from my cupped hands. At first this is fine, in fact the water is cold and tastes incredible, but as my hands worsen, every dip into the lake stings my palms. I carefully towel my hands dry with my other sock and paddle again.

When I'm sure the sun has started to descend from its highest point in the sky, I allow myself a long break. The boat bobs about two hundred metres from the land and in clear view is the long slow curve of Lake Ontario's northern shore. The clothing I've tied around my hands is damp and making my skin pale and puckered. I free my hands and face them palm up in the sun to dry. Some of the wetness on them is from broken skin and the fluid it releases. There are only small traces of blood in the first burst blister.

I lean back in the boat and try not to use any of the muscles in my upper body. And though I avoided it for a while, sleepiness is starting to creep between all my aches. I knew nothing about the other side, this journey, but still I curse myself for failing to get a good night's rest first. I consider slowing down and conserving my energy, parking the boat onshore and sleeping underneath it, finishing the trip tomorrow. And then something catches my eye.

Far, far off in the direction I came from is a black speck that rides along the water. It is so distant that its shape cannot be made out, but it follows the path I took along the lake and it is exactly the same colour as my boat. It moves in a straight line and with purpose.

The hunter is catching up with me.

My break is over. My clothes have dried so I wrap them around my hands again. I paddle harder and I push myself further than before. My body reminds me that it's in pain, then says nothing at all. There is only the rhythm of my actions and the colours of the sky, from blue to pink to orange. I push my body until I cannot straighten my arms and until my legs are asleep and until my lungs feel full of liquid. When the wraps around my blisters become damp again, I remove them entirely. I paddle until there's a noticeable shift in the light and, just for a moment, I turn to watch the sun kiss the lake behind me. The hunter's black speck on the water has grown. I paddle again.

The horizon turns purple and the rest of the sky soon follows. It becomes difficult to differentiate the water from the land with
my eyes. Twice my little boat wanders too close to the shore and my paddle crashes off the rocks underneath. I dig out the flashlight and hold it in my mouth but it gives me only a few weak shimmers on the water immediately in front of me.

I'm about to pull the boat to shore and continue on foot when I notice the light. It's in the woods and still far ahead, but it's clearly a fire. My whole body protests but I paddle ahead as hard and fast as I can until I reach it. The glow of the fire bathes the forest floor and casts long shadows from the tree trunks out toward the beach, toward me. I can see the flicker of flames about a hundred metres along a manmade path into the woods.

At first my body will not do anything. The boat rests on the rocks of the shore, leaning to one side, and I sit and lean with it. Finally I force myself up and out. The temperature feels like it's dropped sharply, now that I'm not paddling. My hands are almost useless and singing with pain, so it takes a long time to put on my clothes.

I lurch along the path, my arms folded up and my back arched and leaning too much weight into each step.

Flames are billowing out of a messy pile of wood. There's a log for sitting next to the fire. No John, no Grace, but someone must have lit this fire. I close my eyes for just a moment, a tiny rest. It's bright and warm and it feels amazing to be upright and stretching my legs and gently swaying in the forest air.

I'm not sure how long I stand with the world bright behind my eyelids, listening to the crackle of the wood, but without warning someone grabs my shoulder and twists me in a circle. I open my eyes and see John pulling his other arm back, a large angled rock in his hand, about to strike me. I am too tired to stop him or move out of the way. He has absolutely no concern on his face, no doubts about cracking open another human's skull.

“John,” I say feebly.

His face softens immediately. He looks at me as if his mind is busy and confused. And then he hugs me hard and laughs. The stone in his hand presses against my lower back when he squeezes me. My arms are still bent and I can't hug him back. I breathe deeply.

He sits on the log, while I choose to stand and face him. He looks no worse than the last time I saw him, although his hair has grown long and there are wispy patches on his jaw and chin.

“God, it's good to see you,” he says. “But I don't understand. You know who I am?”

I nod.

“How does that make sense?” He sits very still and seems to be concentrating. Finally he looks up at me. “When did you last see me?”

“About a year ago,” I tell him. “It's December, 2008. Or it was, before I got here.”

“You haven't seen me since 2007? Not in the following spring? You seemed to remember me the longest, even when the others had forgotten.” He shakes his head. “You remembered until things became really different. I don't get it.”

“I think I might.” To me this pattern is familiar, a changing world, others' fading memories. It's a mirror to my own experience. “Somewhere in November of 2007, or maybe December, you started using the dirt from your dead end inside the box you'd built.”

He opens his mouth as if he wants to say something but nothing comes out. My mind is still making the connections as I talk.

“You knew it was a bad idea, that anything from the dead end was out of your control, but you were so desperate to make the box work that you used the dirt anyway. You got Buddy through the box right around the time you had your little celebration at Shifty's.
A week later, you wrote your goodbye note to me, your backup plan in case you didn't succeed, and then you crawled inside the box for the first time. You weren't in there long before something scared you back out. So far, so good?”

He nods slowly. My mouth is only one step behind my thoughts. I continue.

“You had figured it would be as easy as building the entrance and going through it. It wasn't. So you rethink your plan, but you notice something is happening: your reality starts coming apart. People begin to forget about Grace, or about the shit you pulled at your lab. Other things vanish, objects, physical things. Eventually people don't recognize you, look at you like a stranger.”

“How—”

“Let me finish.” It's strange to be talking with John and have all the knowledge and power in the conversation. “So you became increasingly isolated, your world unreal, and finally you came to the realization: the thing that was blocking your way through the box was yourself. One way or another, you learned to let go of those doubts.”

“Overpower them, actually,” he says.

“So into the box you went again. And this time, you found yourself here.”

“It took quite a number of tries, as a matter of fact,” he says.

“Like learning how to meditate.”

“Yes, exactly. For a time I thought I was losing my mind again. But in the end I took control and crossed over.”

“See, that's where you're wrong.” I'm working on straightening my arms, massaging my biceps and triceps with my knuckles. My hands look like raw chicken. There's an ugly implication to what I'm saying. I turn back to John. “You crossed over in December, 2007. You didn't come back to our side after that.”

And that means neither did I. The reality of what I'm suggesting hits me in the guts. I've been stuck in the box since August, 2008.
The last few months of my life weren't
my
life. I shiver and step closer to the fire. “Officer 2510 made it clear that there are a lot of spaces or times or whatever we could call the ‘present.' ”

“Officer 2510?” he asks. “What does she have to do with this?”

So he hasn't seen her here. It's likely he hasn't met any of her people.
No trespassing.

“Never mind her for now.” I'm pacing around the fire to keep up with my thoughts. “She made it clear your box is amateur compared to entrances like the dead end, how I don't know. But I think the first time you got out of the box, it left you drifting across all the possible presents. Like a needle that lost its groove on the record.”

He shakes his head. “I think I get what you're saying. But the grooves of a record would be different times. It's more like a needle that moves to a very similar groove on a very similar record, over and over again, until I don't recognize the record at all.”

“Fuck, John. Give it a rest. It's just a metaphor.”

The fire lights half his face and conceals the other half in darkness. He looks boyish and small. “How could you possibly know all of this?”

“I can't know, not for certain. I'm just working with the pieces that I have.” The lake is audible from the fire, just barely. It sounds as though the water has picked up and waves are sloshing onto the rocks. “One thing I
do
know for certain is that we don't have a lot of time. We need to get Grace, get on the boat, and get back to where the city is on our side. Where is she?”