Surfacing (11 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

The slop pail was full; I carried it to the garden to pour the dirty water into the trench. Joe was lying by himself on the dock, face down; when I came to rinse the pail he didn’t move. Anna passed me on the steps, wearing her orange bikini, oiled for her sun ritual.

In the cabin I set the pail under the counter. David was pondering his chin bristles in the mirror; he slid his arm half around me and said in a guttural voice, “Come wiz me to zee outhouse.”

“Not right now,” I said, “I have to do some work.”

He mimed regret. “Ah well,” he said, “some other time.”

I took out my samsonite case and sat down at the table. He leaned over my shoulder. “Where’s old Joe?”

“Down on the dock,” I said.

“He seems out of sorts,” David said, “maybe he has worms; when you get back to the city you should take him to the vet.” And a moment later, “How come you never laugh at my jokes?”

He hung around while I set out the brushes and paper. Finally he said, “Well, Nature calls,” and soft-shoed out the door like the end of a vaudeville act.

I swivelled the caps back onto the paint tubes, I had no intention of working: now they were all out of the way I would search for the will, the deed, the property title. Paul had been certain he was dead, that made me doubt my theory. Perhaps the C.I.A. had done away with him to get the land, Mr. Malmstrom was not quite plausible; but that was preposterous, I couldn’t start suspecting people for no reason.

I rummaged in the cavity under the wall bench, went through the shelves, groped under the beds where the tents were stored. He might have filed the papers in a safety-deposit box, earlier, in a city bank, I’d never find them. Or he might have burned them. At any rate they weren’t here.

Unless they were in among the pages of a book: I checked Goldsmith and Burns, holding them by the spines and shaking, then I thought of his lunatic drawings, the only clue I had that he might not be dead. I’d never gone through all of them. In a way that would be the logical hiding place; he’d always been logical, and madness is only an amplification of what you already are.

I lifted down the stack of drawings and began to look. The paper was thin and soft, like rice paper. First the hands and antlered figures, always with numbers scrawled in the corner, then a larger sheet, a half-moon with four sticks coming out of it, bulbed at the ends. I righted the page, judging by the numbers, and it became a boat with people, the knobs were their heads. It was reassuring to find I could interpret it, it made sense.

But the next one was nothing I could recognize. The body was long, a snake or a fish; it had four limbs or arms and a tail and on the head were two branched horns. Lengthwise it was like an animal, an alligator; upright it was more human, but only in the positions of the arms and the front-facing eyes.

Total derangement. I wondered when it had started; it must have been the snow and the loneliness, he’d pushed himself too far, it gets in through your eyes, the thin black cold of mid-winter night, the white days dense with sunlight, outer space melting and freezing again into different shapes, your mind starts doing the same thing. The drawing was something he saw, a hallucination; or it might have been himself, what he thought he was turning into.

I uncovered the next page. But it wasn’t a drawing, it was a typed letter, I skimmed it quickly. Addressed to my father.

Dear Sir:

Many thanks for forwarding the photographs and tracings and the corresponding map. The material is most valuable and I shall include some of it in my forthcoming work on the subject, with your permission and giving due credit. Details of any subsequent discoveries you may make would be most welcome.

I include a copy of one of my recent studies which you may find of interest.

Yours sincerely.

The letter had an illegible signature and a university crest. Paper-clipped to it were half a dozen xeroxed sheets:
Rock Paintings of the Central Shield, by Dr. Robin M. Grove.
The first few pages were maps and graphs and statistics; I skimmed them quickly. At the end of the article there were three short paragraphs, subtitled
Aesthetic Qualities and Possible Significance.

The subject matter falls into the following categories: Hands, Abstract Symbols, Humans, Animals and Mythological Creatures. In treatment they are reminiscent, with their elongated limbs and extreme distortion, of the drawings of children. The static rigidity is in marked contrast to the rock paintings of other cultures, most notably the European cave paintings
.

From the above features we may deduce that the creators of the paintings were interested exclusively in symbolic content, at the expense of expressiveness and form. However we can only indulge in conjecture as to the nature of this content, since no historical records exist. Informants questioned have supplied conflicting traditions. Some state that the sites of the paintings are the abodes of powerful or protective spirits, which may explain the custom, persisting in remote areas, of leaving offerings of clothing and small bundles of “prayer” sticks. One gives more credence to the theory that the paintings are associated with the practice of fasting to produce significant or predictive dreams
.

Doubtful also is the technique employed. The paintings seem to have been executed either with the fingers or with a crude brush of some sort. The predominant colour is red, with minor occurrences of white and yellow; this may be due either to the fact that red among the Indians is a sacred colour or to the relative availability of iron oxides. The bonding agent is being investigated; it may prove to be bears’ fat or birds’ eggs, or perhaps blood or spittle.

The academic prose breathed reason; my hypotheses crumbled like sand. This was the solution, the explanation: he never failed to explain.

His drawings were not originals then, only copies. He must have been doing them as a sort of retirement hobby, he was an incurable amateur and enthusiast: if he’d become hooked on these rock paintings he would have combed the area for them, collecting them with his camera, pestering the experts by letter whenever he found one; an old man’s delusion of usefulness.

I pressed my fingers into my eyes, hard, to make the pool of blackness ringed with violent colour. Release, red spreading back in, abrupt as pain. The secret had come clear, it had never been a secret, I’d made it one, that was easier. My eyes came open, I began to arrange.

I thought, I suppose I knew it from the beginning, I shouldn’t have tried to find out, it’s killed him. I had the proof now, indisputable, of sanity and therefore of death. Relief, grief, I must have felt one or the other. A blank, a disappointment: crazy people can come back, from wherever they go to take refuge, but dead people can’t, they are prohibited. I tried to recall him, picture his face, the way he’d been when he was alive, I found I couldn’t; all I could see was the cards he used to hold up, testing us: 3×9 =? He was as absent now as a number, a zero, the question mark in place of the missing answer. Unknown quantity. His way. Everything had to be measured.

I was staring down at the drawings, they were framed by my two arms lain parallel on the table. I began to notice them again. There was a gap, something not accounted for, something left over.

I spread the first six pages out on the table and studied them, using what they called my intelligence, it shortcircuits those other things. The notes and numbers were apparently a location code, it was like a puzzle he’d left for me to solve, an arithmetic problem; he taught us arithmetic, our mother taught us to read and write. Geometry, the first thing I learned was how to draw flowers with compasses, they were like acid patterns. Once they thought you could see God that way but all I saw was landscapes and geometrical shapes; which would be the same thing if you believed God was a mountain or a circle. He said Jesus was a historical figure and God was a superstition, and a superstition was a thing that didn’t exist. If you tell your children God doesn’t exist they will be forced to believe you are the god, but what happens when they find out you are human after all, you have to grow old and die? Resurrection is like plants, Jesus Christ is risen today they sang at Sunday School, celebrating the daffodils; but people are not onions, as he so reasonably pointed out, they stay under.

The numbers were a system, a game; I would play it with him, it would make him seem less dead. I lined up the pages and compared the notes, carefully as a jeweller.

On one of the drawings, another antlered figure, I finally spotted the key: a name I recognized, White Birch Lake where we went bass fishing, it was connected to the main lake by a portage. I went into David’s and Anna’s room where the map of the district was tacked to the wall. Marked on a point of land was a tiny red x and a number, identical with the number on the drawing. The printed name was different,
Lac des Verges Blanches
, the government had been translating all the English names into French ones, though the Indian names remained the same. Scattered here and there were other xs, like a treasure map.

I wanted to go there and verify, match the drawing with reality; that way I’d be sure I’d followed the rules and done it right. I could disguise it as a fishing trip, David hadn’t caught anything since his first attempt, though he’d been trying. We’d have time to go there and get back with two days to spare.

I heard Anna’s voice approaching, singing, the words trailing off as her breath gave out climbing the steps. I went back to the main room.

“Hi,” she said, “do I look burnt?”

She was pink now, parboiled, white showing around the orange edges of her suit, neck dividing body colour from applied face colour. “A little,” I said.

“Listen,” she said, her voice shifting into concern, “what’s wrong with Joe? I was down on the dock with him and he didn’t say one word.”

“He doesn’t talk much,” I said.

“I know, but this was different. He was just lying there.” She was pushing, demanding answers.

“He thinks we should get married,” I said.

Her eyebrows lifted like antennae. “Really? Joe? That’s not …”

“I don’t want to.”

“Oh,” she said, “then that’s awful. You must feel awful.” She’d found out; now she was rubbing after-sun lotion on her shoulders. “Mind?” she said, handing me the plastic tube.

I didn’t feel awful; I realized I didn’t feel much of anything, I hadn’t for a long time. Perhaps I’d been like that all my life, just as some babies are born deaf or without a sense of touch; but if that was true I wouldn’t have noticed the absence. At some point my neck must have closed over, pond freezing or a wound, shutting me into my head; since then everything had been glancing off me, it was like being in a vase, or the village where I could see them but not hear them because I couldn’t understand what was being said. Bottles distort for the observer too: frogs in the jam jar stretched wide, to them watching I must have appeared grotesque.

“Thanks,” Anna said, “I hope I won’t peel. I think you should go talk to him, or something.”

“I have,” I said; but her eyes were accusing, I hadn’t done enough, conciliation, expiation. I went obediently towards the door.

“Maybe you can work it out,” she called after me.

Joe was still on the dock but he was sitting on the edge now with his feet in the water, I crouched down beside him. His toes had dark hairs on the tops, spaced like the needles on a balsam twig.

“What is it?” I said. “Are you sick?”

“You know fucking well,” he said after a minute.

“Let’s go back to the city,” I said, “the way it was before.” I took hold of his hand so I could feel the calloused palm, thickened by the wheel, concrete.

“You’re screwing around with me,” he said, still not looking at me. “All I want is a straight answer.”

“About what?” I said. Near the dock there were some water skippers, surface tension holding them up; the fragile shadows of the dents where their feet touched fell on the sand underwater, moving when they moved. His vulnerability embarrassed me, he could still feel, I should have been more careful with him.

“Do you love me, that’s all,” he said. “That’s the only thing that matters.”

It was the language again, I couldn’t use it because it wasn’t mine. He must have known what he meant but it was an imprecise word; the Eskimoes had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them, there ought to be as many for love.

“I want to,” I said. “I do in a way.” I hunted through my brain for any emotion that would coincide with what I’d said. I did want to, but it was like thinking God should exist and not being able to believe.

“Fucking jesus,” he said, pulling his hand away, “just yes or no, don’t mess around.”

“I’m trying to tell the truth,” I said. The voice wasn’t mine, it came from someone dressed as me, imitating me.

“The truth is,” he said bitterly, “you think my work is crap, you think I’m a loser and I’m not worth it.” His face contorted, it was pain: I envied him.

“No,” I said, but I couldn’t say it right and he needed more than that.

“Come up to the cabin,” I said; Anna was there, she would help. “I’ll make some tea.” I got up but he wouldn’t follow.

While the stove was heating I took the leather album from the shelf in their room and opened it on the table, where Anna was reading. It was no longer his death but my own that concerned me; perhaps I would be able to tell when the change occurred by the differences in my former faces, alive up to a year, a day, then frozen. The duchess at the French court before the Revolution, who stopped laughing or crying so her skin would never change or wrinkle, it worked, she died immortal.