I wish once in a while to exercise my prerogative not always to act, but to explore; to hear vague, ancestral sounds of boughs creaking, of mammoths; to indulge impossible desires to embrace the whole world with the arms of understanding — impossible to those who act.
- Virginia Woolf, The Waves
forcing nothing, be unforced
accept no giant miracles of growth
by counterfeit light
- Adrienne Rich, “The Spirit of Place”
INSTRUCTOR
THE DAY OPENS in birdsong. A hermit thrush, sky above, lake below, concealed within concentrated shadow against pink light. Dawn chorus. Are you there? Are you there?
Somewhere a light goes out.
In the hour between wolf and dog — when a line of black thread held up to the horizon will distinguish itself to the human eye — Ydessa Bloom’s husband, an experienced pilot, away in the north country on a fishing trip, plummets into a lake called Baptiste. The search and rescue captain, a lake resident, takes it upon himself to drive alone to Toronto. There, standing uninvited in her vestibule alongside the police officer charged with unpleasant duty, he explains in what manner Ydessa’s husband and his friends died. Is there someone you could call to be with you? the men ask, and Yes, she says, there is, but No, never. She closes the door without another word.
Her mother, Rose — how she wails and shouts and tears her clothes when bad news arrives, when any new horror falls. How Rose and her father, Sam, will wail, forced to do the one thing they cannot easily or with pleasure do — wait. In their Swiss German tongue there is a phrase for a wordless thought that arrives in one’s mind, a sudden flare, an impulse not yet formed. One would say of this flare: There is a bird in it. The bird comes to her: Go. She moves quickly, involuntarily. She assembles things one needs for a brief stay at a summer lake: cottons, linens, black lingerie, a sweater, folds these into a black leather suitcase. On the drive north, thought does not exist. When a thought presses in, she refuses it, though how she does so she cannot say. The atmosphere in the car is the pressure of resistance in June sun.
You scan your body from head to toe, looking for sensation, little pinches or twinges or aches. A dull, deep ache in your right shoulder, under the rotator cuff. Another in your groin. A third, yes, there, quiet but definite in the patella. To scan is your practice, a devoted daily observation. The day opens in birdsong.
The years of your youth, years when you grappled with questions relational in nature — we who live next to this beautiful and venerable body of water, what is against us, what for (or against) the lake? — those years are gone.
So much in youth goes unthought, so much goes unsaid — so much longing can break the mind in two.
Some mornings you weep for your unlived life.
Your dedication to the lake, to lakeside stillness and contemplation, to listening, your disinclination to adopt the traditions and tastes of others, your interest in inner life, have earned you rude names over the years, though name-calling matters very little now.
You know how odd you are.
You observe the lake as morning comes, its language of balance, connection, of weights and measures, feeling its way toward shore, listening to itself as it goes, making inquiry, sending waves into subtler levels of its basin, images deposited on the basin floor, from which will rise a sphere of forms to hold you throughout this day.
Roger Campsall was an astonishingly handsome man. Ydessa thought life with him was made resplendent by his physical beauty, a life that rolled roundly beneath her sensitive fingertips. His steady voice — the surprising goad of it —
His body lies at a funeral home three hours north of Toronto. In the car bound for the north, where thought does not exist, where there could be no thought of hip bones, or of skin gone moist, supple, arousal in and beneath her hands, eyes opened and closed while small bubbles of harmonized sound escape slack lips, small sound rolling sinew, bodies naked and swollen in clean white sheets — between brief, slant light, no-thought streams north to the town of Bancroft. She drives fast, at reckless speed. You’re driving too fast, you’re cutting too close. Stop honking.
Roger, fastidious driver, safety-conscious pilot. One time, after one of her wild escapades, he asked for her wallet, removed her driver’s license, tore it into pieces, set these alight in a glass bowl.
That will slow you down, my friend.
But it hasn’t. No. Nothing has slowed.
The director ushers her to an anteroom and gently urges her toward Roger’s body, its contours unfamiliar beneath a draped white sheet. She turns away, retching. After a while she recovers, then nods to the director, who lifts the sheet.
When Ydessa is sixteen years old, a beloved friend is lost in a head-on collision. One driver fell asleep at the wheel, his vehicle sped across the median into space already occupied, in a just-chanced turn of the head, words of comfort to the agitated Siberian husky whining in the back, now washed in blood, then again in a spray of lapis blue paint from blasted cans; the husky works her way out of the wreckage to stand obediently, unobserved, at the side of the road, blue tail beating dry earth. First responders arrive in emergency vehicles, step around and again around the wreck, begin work to remove the trapped body inside. For two hours the dog stands in cascading shadow. When at last the fire chief notices her, tries to coax her into his vehicle, she will not be moved.
Her friend’s father asks Ydessa to adopt the dog.
I’ve never cared for an animal. I don’t know how.
Good food and water, exercise.
She holds the father’s gaze while the husky, now shorn of blue fur, naked, vulnerable, lies at their feet beating her tail against the step.
The strike to the throat — so much that can’t be felt.
If the idea is to treat her like she’s human, she says at last, I shouldn’t be the one entrusted.
Whereas Ydessa was a cauldron, pitched in thought and intention, Roger was a steady wave, focused and relaxed. For their first date he had proposed a short flight in the Cessna. Arriving at the landing strip under a clear blue sky, the summer breeze soft and sweet, he’d said, We’ll go up for a couple of hours. You’ll have to shout over the noise of the engine. Do you want to wear plugs to protect your ears? I won’t mind. Later I’ll take you to a little French bistro — quite extraordinary to find so good a place around here.
Ydessa could have wept. She could be a cauldron and he would still take her to dinner.
She had watched the dashboard, fascinated by the dials, switches, and contacts, the red and green needles on the instruments oscillating in small, pleasant jerks. Roger held the controls peacefully. Takeoff into the dazzling blue was exhilarating, the shining expanse of farmland that rolled out below them widening, becoming woods, turning strange and piercing. When they banked to the north, it seemed as if some dead thing had come to life, raising itself inside her like a flag. Small lakes glittered like baubles, silver, flashing in the sun.
Sitting next to Roger with her hands empty of purpose, she grew anxious. Exchange was her occupation, moving people, things — a steady going forward. She was good at exchange, the golden girl of Toronto real estate brokerage, swift to move houses, connect people. To do nothing was to be overwhelmed by an unpleasant restlessness. Roger shouted above the drone of the engine. There’s Stoney Lake. A turquoise-and-opal brilliance sailed beneath them. Commercial navigators use it to establish their bearings. It has a limestone basin, which accounts for that staggering colour. It can be seen from very high altitudes. Above thirty thousand feet, other lakes mostly disappear into the landscape.
His shouting was a dignified act, but to shout back would perhaps bind her to him. She studiously avoided feelings of obligation.
She had dated other men, had let a man’s hard body fill her own. But always, soon and rarely too soon, rapture turned to boredom. If she could see through her lovers, if magic was effaced by an overactive executive function, affairs ended. Sometimes she simply drifted away, easily enough, so rarely did a man seek her out to ask where she had gone. She wasn’t immune to convention — she understood the seductive appeal of a beautiful ring on a slim finger — but sometimes she questioned her loyalty to conventional romantic relationship. With time, misgivings gave way. She’d sell three hot properties in a row, be celebrated at the office by those who could afford to admire her without subterfuge, and questions of basic existence could be forgotten.
She observed the magnificent colour of the lake and said nothing. How impossible, in any case, to describe the beauty of light on the earth, its patterns ceaselessly generated across lively airs. She remained silent, held her tongue. The sky was sheer blue volume. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere. Their line of motion dissolved beneath them.
Alone in her room, that blue sky, the slow and magnificent meal shared in the bistro garden, her robust effort to move things along (she had bowed her head slightly following remarks he made about her love of speed), unfurled in reconsideration. Quietly, outside his house, they’d uttered to one another only two words: Good night. The curious prop of Good night, she thought, a woman speaking low on one side of a car door, a man on the other. One of the most gorgeous scenes imaginable: warm air on a summer night, starlight expanding as desire expands. The stars might have been lining up into new constellations for their two hearts alone. He had taken her face in his hands, her hands had remained on the wheel. Well. Good night. Good night. He went inside and she sped away, each to re-enter their familiar rooms, draw in the day’s net, feel in their skin some heat abating, heat still continuous in the heart, though her mind did wrestle with pictures it soon would bury.
She shot through the door of the anteroom, down a hall, out the front door to the parking lot. She knew she mustn’t scream. Must not. Where was Roger’s forearm, his hand; where was his wedding band? Squeal of tires, image of a hand grabbing hold of the wheel, clenched, restored. Authority.
Roger could not be the figure lying beneath that cloth.
Roger, come apart on the lake bottom. She refused to take this in.
She drove erratically through the town until she spotted a liquor store. She settled on a bottle of Scotch, asked the cashier if he could recommend accommodations, and stood stiffly as he gave directions to the Sword Inn on the main road. There was less urgency now, wasn’t there, now that a strong hand was materializing. She would drink until nothing could harm her.
While the receptionist finalized the registration, Ydessa opened a brochure for an exhibition. Bancroft: Gem Capital of Canada. A picture showed tumbled apatite, quartz, nepheline, a treasure chest filled with smooth and polished stone.
Are you a collector?
A collector? No. She bent her head to sign the charge slip.
Listen, do you know of any cottages for rent on Baptiste Lake?
My friend Barri sometimes rents her little cottage on Baptiste in June. Nothing fancy.
I need a clean place, very private.
Barri’s cottage is what you might call rustic. No dishwasher, no microwave, no phone, no TV, no hot tub. But nice. Clean. Yes, private. Not fancy. Right on the lake. Glorious waterfront.
Call her, will you, and ask if it’s available? I need two weeks. The room was overly bright and smelled of stale cigarette smoke. Ydessa opened a window and closed the drapes. If there were other guests, she didn’t hear them, didn’t think again of the possibility of others. In the darkened room she considered her black leather suitcase lying open on a chair, the useless fancy lingerie. Do not think about skin no one will touch: incontrovertible, this fact first gaining then losing strength, an incoming, outgoing wave, vexation of a new order, perversity. Was it blind chance that had brought her to a dank room in a dingy northern motel on a June night?
A horror, she thought. Do not wail. Do not fall apart.
She sat at the desk with the bottle and a glass, drinking steadily as night came down.
Was someone on the bed, watching her as she drank, the Scotch like honey in her parched throat, tears rolling? Stop crying. Drink. She would not remember. She held the Scotch in her mouth, tipped her head, allowed the liquor to burn the soft tissue at the back of her throat. The room ceased. The heat, stench of old cigarettes, the unaccountable terror, dissolved. Night took up its numbers.
She was counting, swimming across an empty accumulation of numbers. She arrived at fifty wondering had she started at one? Couldn’t have. Perhaps twenty, her attention too short to reach all the way from one to fifty. When had thirty come and gone? Start again. Behind and below the counting, intermittent sounds assembled and reassembled. Hands clapping to music, voices droning in irretrievable time. Ydessa. Time so impossible, she thought, always on the run, slack, then interrupted: clock such a crude measurement.
Who’s there? Is someone there?
Her counting was a genealogy, a thrust of forward thought that cracked and exploded whenever she touched even lightly on words that must be resisted, shards in her mind, she a billowing thing that would be torn on the sharp edges of words in her first rage against the raggedness of all that flies against the mind.
THE SUN ADVANCES, you rise to watch another day begin, its colour drenching and amplifying the things of the world, which increase in number as light blends and cascades across the lake. You sit by the window. Anchorwoman releases a prayer onto the floor of things.
For thirty years you have made a cup of strong coffee in that kitchen then seated yourself in this chair.
You went to art college in New York in your twenties, studied music and painting there, your New York experiences raggedy, memories flown. All save the day on which you met Cleo Barnes, a woman you were forced to forget, but never that day, no, that wonderful day. More or less easeful had been your return to this lake where you were born, never a doubt but to flee New York, back to the arms of Baptiste. You sit in your chair by the window and observe, your eyes open then closed. Existence depends on welcoming morning and the lake like this, receiving it deeply, beyond its surface colours, full of its codes, its history. Soon you will rise and prepare the little cottage next door for a guest named Ydessa Bloom.
At noon Ydessa steps from the motel room into light. She suspects she looks like her mother. Waves of nausea lash through her belly and rise to thicken her throat. Sometime in the night she had built a small fire in the bathroom sink, feeding it with bits of torn paper and clippings of hair. The soot and ash left a grey ring on the porcelain, which water and hand soap have been unable to remove. Lifting on small drafts, a bit of flaming paper burnt a hole in the pink bath mat. She has the mat stowed in her suitcase.
She lowers the convertible roof, gets in behind the wheel, readjusts the rear-view mirror, catching sight of her cropped hair, her own dark eyes. She stares at their vacancy, doesn’t hear the receptionist approach, is startled by her face as she squats by the passenger door.
I called my friend. Her place is available, six hundred dollars for two weeks. Not many people rent in June, as the blackflies are bad, though the fireflies — the fireflies will astonish you. Her name is Barri Grew.
A bright butterfly has landed on her left shoulder and is resting tenderly there, its small yellow body and its palmate wings lit by the sun. Ydessa stares. The brilliant light streams across the creature’s wings, which gently lift and settle, open and settle. The hot leather seat grips her bare legs. She can taste the dust that fills the air, twisting and dissipating over cars passing on the road above the motel.
The receptionist stands and the butterfly rises hesitantly, up then away. She reaches across the seat and taps Ydessa’s forehead.
Hello? Go to Barri’s cottage. Barri Grew. Take South Baptiste Lake Road to Fell Road. It’s the small white cottage after the causeway. She’s expecting you.
Go to a stranger’s cottage? Whatever for? She cannot make this fit to logic of any kind.
The butterfly reappears, hovering in the warm air surrounding the car. The world is quiet, drowsing. A warbler chirps. A weariness descends, a sadness equal to the beauty of bright yellow wings pulsing in the warm air. Ydessa lowers her head to the steering wheel. A great sobbing breaks from her at last and can’t be checked.
The receptionist moves away, turns, and stops, observing the butterfly as it rides the air currents traversing the parking lot. She takes a pack of cigarettes out of her back pocket, opens it, withdraws one slowly, and lights it. Stands there, smoking and watching: not a cloud in the sky. Chet. Chet. The voice of a song comes to her: Don’t interrupt the sorrow. Hearing that voice, she airs out her own voice a little. God goes up the chimney like childhood Santa Claus. Darn right. The woman in the convertible clears her throat. She turns back toward the car. Ydessa is reaching across the seats, her tear-drenched face craning upward.
What’s your name again? she asks.
Teresa.
Call your friend, Teresa. Tell her I’m coming over.
Teresa takes another drag from her cigarette, her open countenance full of light against a background of open sky.
Sure.
Unfurling to the west of the town of Bancroft, Baptiste Lake Road rolls and sags, obedient to the curve of the lakeshore, a road lined with thick stands of evergreen that break occasionally to reveal a glimpse of expansive, shimmering blue. Between the trees the water flashes azure. She catches brief glimpses of lakeside homes, a few seasonal cottages, set far back from the road, partially hidden by cedar. She grips the wheel, racing beyond her overnight self, travelling fast with the ragtop down, dust rising, her feet bare, legs tense, eyes swollen and aching behind dark glasses. A black dog speeds over a green lawn toward the car, barking violently, and within her chest she feels her heart’s blood explode. Her thoughts are tangling, chaotic. She wants a drink. All of a sudden there is nowhere in the world to be. This road is nothing to care about, nothing but a snarling line. And just as words of self-loathing are forming out of the snarl, a young boy emerges at roadside and steps into the windshield frame containing road, trees, her severed interest, and a dim vision of Roger on their wedding day, leaning into a camera, his grin loopy, Ydessa in mid-length Alaïa gown, iridescent green-gold clinging to her body like something wet and heavy, her modern tiara a delicate crown of stars.
She swerves, hard. A wheel catches the verge, the car plows into the ditch, drags to a stop.
She is halfway out of the driver’s seat, and yelling. For fuck’s sake — slipping and sliding in her bare feet on the ditch’s damp leaves until she collapses in grass above a culvert.
The boy steps toward her, no perceptible change to his pace. He stands over her, blocking the sun.
Sorry. Are you all right?
She could tear him to pieces. She could wring his neck. She is so full of raving she cannot speak. Mustn’t look at the kid.
He sits down next to her. The air fills with a kind of electrical snapping.
Move away! she shouts.
What might she do? There beside her, he is the very source of chaos, smelly, filthy, low, speaking like someone half out of a dream. Like a sleepwalker.
Do I look all right? she hisses, perceiving for a second time a terrifying thing flying straight for her, driving up into her mind, a mind so foolishly trafficking in imperatives at that moment, she almost laughs. She holds her knees and rocks back and forth, singing, No. No, there in the ditch, shoeless and raving, not yet free of the horror, the moment not yet averted, then, yes, averted. No screaming din of shattering glass and metal. Not yet impaled.
Sleep is so dangerous. Booze is so dangerous. Try to stay alert to the presence of the savage and the barbaric.
He has the look of a child who cannot be astonished, as if he has seen and heard every manner of outrageous adult thing. He wakes a little from his dozing. His attitude is soft and receptive, soft especially around the mouth, but Ydessa does not notice. She lets go of her kneecaps and stretches her legs flat out in front of her. The muscles in her thighs tauten then slacken, making her brown knees dance. She becomes absorbed by the clench-and-release, the sensation of blades of grass pressing into the backs of legs and knees. The boy sees how the tendons in her legs pull.
A car roars past, stirring up dust. She turns to the boy. He is staring after the car as it disappears down the road. A swarm of insects balloons behind his head.
Am I very far from Fell Road? she asks.
The boy keeps looking down the road, past the spot into which he had mindlessly stepped.
No, not very far. I could show you. He scratches his head, not looking at her.
You could show me.
Yes. I could come with you in your car. I could walk home after I show you.
She flinches. You almost killed me, and now you want to sit in my car and give me directions? My almost-destroyer, be my little navigator?
The boy looks at her, observing everything about her. How her eyes rush behind outsized sunglasses, her glance falls askew on things then flicks away. How her mouth, somewhat swollen, has lips that curl. She has chewed the bottom one. He sees how thin she is. Where are her shoes? He feels her anger. A burnt quality to the air around them, an odour like burnt metal, the air he senses like fine sand on his bare arms and face.
A wind is rising, clouds are gathering. Time is shortened. He thinks he will have to be careful with her, extra careful. Well, he is an extremely careful and considerate boy. People have said so.
I could go with you. Or I could draw you a map, if you have paper. Do you have any paper?
He removes a fountain pen from the back pocket of his jeans, and holds it aloft.
A map?
She lies back on the grass, closes her eyes.
With the question of Roger’s rightness riding inside every nerve, Ydessa had tried, during their flight to New York, in her double-mindedness, to relax, to welcome the particular textures of their togetherness in the spirit of observation only, and she was failing. She tried to grasp the nature of her failure, Roger dozing beside her, the cabin quiet as they sailed above the landscape at thirty-six thousand feet. She considered his gorgeous profile. Roger was not what is wanted, was he? But. Perhaps.
She did not like New York, with its strange superiority, its inflation on the one hand and its terrific inferiority complex on the other, making a person feel small one minute, gigantic the next. Roger was taking her to his mother’s penthouse on the Upper East Side. The thing was to steer away from him a little, she thought, watching Sixth Avenue slide by, yellow taxis on either side of theirs, in procession, crawling. Her hurry quickened. She reminded herself that this shimmering city was not to be theirs, not ever. Roger had abandoned New York’s complexity for Toronto. She would not be caged, would not be pinned down.
Maybe she could relax.
World, world: once they were inside the penthouse, a glass of very expensive Scotch was placed in her hand. What is it? Bunnahabhain. Never heard of it. Three perfect Macintosh apples shone in a crystal bowl, their soft pulp hidden under waxed surfaces. They were never the proffered food but accent only. Around the rooms twenty mirrors glittered, small fluctuations of a hungry minotaur that prowled deep within the penthouse atmosphere. A Byzantine, three-storey hideaway in hues of blood, steel, and dirt, its complicated form — halls and doorways, stairwells and inner sanctums shaped obliquely, tipping away from every standard grid — tripled by glossy surfaces. Roger’s mother had bought and redesigned the penthouse after the sudden departure of his father, gone without a look back. Vanished.
Like a compass I will be for you, Roger had said as they rose in the elevator to his mother’s rooms. Use me like a world map.
She stands and the boy rises also. She’s dizzy, her thoughts race. Brushes dry grass off her legs and skirt. Tilts back her head to shift her focus, and thoughts vanish. A sudden sharp pain in the centre of her chest.
Look, stop it. I don’t need you to come with me. I most certainly don’t need a map. I can find the place by myself. Just up ahead, you say?
The boy nods.
In one motion she is back in the car. The boy takes two steps down into the ditch and pauses. He returns his pen to his back pocket then shoves both hands deep into the front ones. Through the rear-view mirror she sees him with an unexpected feeling of tenderness.
She leans out to look right at him. Stay off the road.
He nods.
The ditch is shallow, so she’s able to back the car out slowly. She eases into first gear, second. In the mirror she watches the boy recede. The sky is a sea of high scudding clouds, light pouring like milk through blue gaps — soft gold, soft blue, milky light in a layered sky. Dust rises as she accelerates, the sky shines overhead, she gathers all she has seen into a point. Her head aches. She speeds along the road to the small white cottage where she will face the terrible question of how the world has come to be so cold.