“He’s not doing that well, Doris.”
“Why don’t you bring him up to the woods?”
“I can’t, not before the weekend.”
“We’ll come and get him, then. Antibiotics are fine, but I’ve got two or three other things in mind.”
Now he’s in his bed at the cabin and it’s night. His father had arrived a bit earlier, had sat down on the covers beside him and placed his hand on his chest. Behind them, Jacques Plante the trapper was seated at the table in front of a beer, eating pieces of cucumber. Doris was busy at the stove.
“Feeling better, boy?”
“Yes, papa.”
“Yes, he’s better. He’s been eating well since this morning. But he sleeps, the little rascal. Now we’re going to make you a mustard plaster and you’re going to go beddy-bye. Same for you, old man, you’re going to have a bowl of soup and some tourtière and you’re going to bed. You look tired too.”
Doris stirred up two teaspoons of dry mustard in a bowl, along with cornstarch and cold water. She spread the plaster over an old cloth that she applied to Jim’s chest. It was hot and dizzying. After five minutes, she came to lift it off for a few seconds, and kissed him on the brow. After a half-hour, she took it away altogether.
Now Jim is dreaming and listening. He hears what they’re all saying about him. He’d like to reassure them, to explain to them. He often has a dream with no up nor down, where the beast attacks him and devours him. It’s a dream of carnivorousness and violence, but not of death. He does not expire while the cougar is annihilating his body, he fossilizes within the animal like a memory of flesh. In its belly he dreams himself into a child itself of dreams, the stillborn offspring of a legendary creature, and there’s colour in the dream, and the sounds dogs make, dozing next to the stove.
“Jim’s sleeping,” says Doris.
*
Jim often fell asleep just so, and listened in snatches to adults talking close by. He rolled over in his bed, and an hour was gone. He missed whole swathes of conversation. At one point he realized that his father was lying in bed in front of him, and only Doris and Jacques Plante the trapper were up and about. Like diligent angels, they watched over their sleep, and put the cabin in order while talking quietly.
They picked up full ashtrays and set them on the counter with a little water in them before emptying them into the trash. Jacques Plante doused the last cigarettes in a bottle of beer. In one of the two big dented kettles that Jim went to fill every morning and night at the lake, they put water to boil on the large burner of the Vernois stove, whose high flames licked the metal almost to the bottom of the handle. Jacques Plante emptied the boiling water into the dish tub in the sink, and the shadows filled with long wreathes of vapour smelling of lemon soap. Doris washed and Jacques dried. Jim watched them intermittently, and always asked himself how Doris could keep her old hands in such hot water. Sometimes she herself misjudged her resistance and left one hand immersed for a bit too long, snatching it out with a quick yank, shaking it, and saying, “Goddam, that burns.” When they had finished the plates and utensils, they put the other kettle to heat to make water for the glasses, which they left to soak until morning. They emptied the ashtrays and lined up all the empty bottles at the end of the counter. Afterwards, Jacques Plante cleaned the old plastic tablecloth with Windex and a rag. Half asleep, Jim sometimes heard Jacques Plante asking Doris if they’d forgotten something, but by the time Doris did the rounds and came to murmur words in Jim’s ear about times to come and things that would get better, he was beyond hearing anything.
Jim slept. They had gone when he woke up in the middle of the night to lay a log on top of the embers in the stove, and he was sleeping when his father woke at sunrise, pulled on his jacket, and left the cabin in silence to see the day dawn rich in mist and dew.
In the Midst of the Spiders
He travelled for weeks at a time, but it was always, whatever the city, the same airport, the same empty space, with its distant hubbub and jet-lagged travellers. He’d been killing time for twenty minutes, sipping a gin and tonic in the company of a red-faced fifty-year-old who was on the same flight. The man had told him his name, but he’d forgotten it. It wasn’t like him to forget names. That was his job, handshakes and slaps on the back, significant winks. He could — he ought to — remember the name of any random mortal stumbled upon in an airport or a trade fair. When he happened to remember the first names of their wives and children, that was even better. He’d had a professor of public administration once who liked to say that memory was a muscle you could train. The professor knew by heart almost every country in the world and their capitals. That had impressed him. Now he’d memorized the names of several hundred clients, their birthdays, their addresses, and always two or three personal details. He remembered who was the record collector and who the fly fisherman, knew who was happily married or getting divorced, who had a pregnant daughter or a son in detox. He also remembered what everyone drank. People always feel close to someone who can order their liquor for them.
The trick was to never write anything down. He’d read somewhere that at the end of the nineteenth century, some people refused to have their pictures taken, fearing that the apparatus would steal their souls. It was probably a superstition, but this for him was a proven fact: you would never remember anything as long as you didn’t get out of the habit of noting everything, everywhere, every chance you got.
Behind the airport’s windowed walls, rain was pouring down. It was like being in a car wash. The planes, far off on the runway, were blurred, and perched on the asphalt, seemed hunched over like big wet crows. He took another sip. He could not for the life of him remember the damned name. He really must have been out of sorts. What’s more, the guy was ready to eat out of his hand, to lend him his summer house for a month, and, if pressured a bit, to pay him ten cents a litre for the water that flowed from his tap. But that too was his line of work. To sell. He was very good at it, but that’s not why he was here.
Michel arrived at about 4:30. That gave him about three quarters of an hour before catching his return flight. He took leave from his anonymous friend, left the bar, and sat at a table with Michel, a few metres away. He lit a cigarette. He’d stopped smoking ten years earlier, and had started again two weeks ago.
Michel had bad breath and wore a cheap suit that seemed to have spent the last week in a garbage bag. He disliked him intensely for that. He’d spent the entire flight going over everything that irritated him about Michel. His hygiene was suspect. Michel had lived in Montreal and spent his time trying to recall it, citing street names, restaurants, and bars to which everyone (he in any case) was totally indifferent. Michel carried around in his wallet dozens of photos of his three ugly daughters, and trotted them out on the slightest pretext. Michel was also a consummate ass-licker, who had concocted his own personal technique for flattering your ego in a way that was both understated and obscene. It was hard to go on in that vein, because in the end he was a good guy and everyone liked him fine. But he had to set all that aside. In the beginning he’d embarked on these meetings full of empathy and compassion, and it had almost done him in.
They talked about this and that for a few minutes, and three times he forestalled Michel’s launching into his diorama of ugly daughters. A waiter brought another gin and tonic and a cup of hot water. Another reason to loathe Micheclass="underline" he’d stopped drinking a long time ago. Tippling in an airport bar seemed even grimmer when he had to do it in the company of an abstemious imbecile who wandered the world with his pockets full of herbal teabags.