Surfacing

"Where will you get food?" I said.

"What do you mean 'you'?" he said. "I'm just speculating." I thought of how it would appear in the history books when it was over: a paragraph with dates and a short summary of what happened. That's how it was in high school, they taught it neutrally, a long list of wars and treaties and alliances, people taking and losing power over other people; but nobody would ever go into the motives, why they wanted it, whether it was good or bad. They used long words like "demarcation" and "sovereignty", they wouldn't say what they meant and you couldn't ask: in high school the right thing was to stare fixedly at the teacher as though at a movie screen, and it was worse for a girl to ask questions than for a boy. If a boy asked a question the other boys would make derisive sucking noises with their mouths, but if a girl asked one the other girls would say "Think you're so great" in the washroom afterwards. In the margins around the Treaty of Versailles I drew ornaments, plants with scrolled branches, hearts and stars instead of flowers. I got so I could draw invisibly, my fingers scarcely moving.

The generals and the historic moments looked better framed. If you put your eye down close to the photograph they disintegrated into grey dots.

A

"Don't interrupt," he said, but when she made a whimpering face he said "Yep, you did, almost every day," and patted her arm.

"It's spread flat at the end," she said, explaining to us.

"I hope you didn't sell out," David said to me. I shook my head. "Good girl," he said, "your heart's in the right place. And the rest of her too," he said to Joe, "I like it round and firm and fully packed. A

I washed and A

I looked around at her: her voice was like fingernails, I'd never heard her talk that way about David.

"Why?" I said. "What's wrong?" He hadn't said anything at lunch that could have upset her.

"I guess you think he's hot for you." Her mouth stretched down tight with the lips inside, a toad's.

"No," I said, bewildered, "why would I think that?"

"Those things he says, you know, like about your ass and being fully packed," she said impatiently.

"I thought he was teasing." I had thought that too, it was just a habit like picking your nose, only verbal.

"Teasing, shit. He was doing it to me. He always does stuff like that to other women in front of me, he'd screw them with me in the room if he could. Instead he screws them somewhere else and tells me about it afterwards."

"Oh," I said. I hadn't deduced that. "Why? I mean, why does he tell you?"

A

"Thank you," I said. I was sorry she'd told me; I still wanted to believe that what they called a good marriage had remained possible, for someone. But it was kind of her, thoughtful; I knew in her place I wouldn't have done it, I would have let her take care of herself, My Brother's Keeper always reminded me of zoos and insane asylums.

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. A

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.