It is August, hot. I hitch in from the main road; it’s been a long somnolent train ride followed by an eye-bobbling bus ride, so far, so far, and I’ve caught a ride out of Hearst with a trucker aptly named Rudy who banters on his CB radio about the beaver he has tucked in beside him, i.e. me. I feel myself becoming an object, an iconic Canadian object, sure, worth about five cents. It is good to be an object; it releases me from thought. I am a nickel, and worthy.
It’s difficult to navigate up north with all these rough, little-used roads, these temporary arteries to obscure wooded (and de-wooded) bug-infested limbs. And yet I manage. Rudy stops the rig and, with a lurching, lustful grope between my legs, lets me off at last season’s treeplanting camp, his maniacal laughter receding only after the dust settles and I am alone. Arrived. I take stock. There is the repeating circular evidence of a dome tent village, yellow and white wormy-looking grass patches in strange random groupings, tiny crop circles of recent anthropology, and over there, further, is Willem’s tent site, a skinny rectangle of dead grass, his old pup. Can I smell him? I walk through the field as if the entire cornucopic cult were still here and finally pitch my tent back up in its same old spot and settle for the night. Tomorrow will be a grand walk deep into the past, and I need my rest.
I wake up early, my arm numb from sleeping on it. The dead weight of it is like a bad thought, a misdeed, and it is all I can do to slowly release it from its neural paralysis, shaking it out. The inside of my tent is hot and humid; a pretty amber light isheld there as if the tent is a vessel full of it. I eat from a supply of dried fruit I have packed, and as I do so, the true meaning of what I am doing here begins to sink in, as fear will if let. I pack up my things and glance around one last time, hoping for company against the facts as they are so clearly laid out before me. A bird would do, but I hear nothing. There is an occasional rustling as chipmunks and other small rodents make their escape from me. I walk toward the old mine clearing, recalling here an odd-shaped shrub and there a weather-stunted tree, ones I’ve seen before and which now infuse my journey with nostalgia. And so I experience a blunted, hopeful anxiety not unlike excitement, not unlike dread. It does not seem safe to be alone out here, and I consider that I might be insane or that I could be in an extended fugue state from which I may awake refreshed.
The deeper into the bush I go the less sense my plans make, certainly, and my entire life seems suddenly over-dramatized; at several points on the long walk I almost turn back. I find myself singing to pass the time and keep imagined predators at bay. My backpack is heavy, my arm has woken up but still tingles from time to time, not painful but dully aching. This sensation passes by late afternoon, when the pool comes into view. Willem and I first found the ghost town together. We came across it one evening after a long day’s planting, late in the season, the sun high in the early summer sky and the bugs alert, spurred into a frenzy, a breeding hunger, by the cooler dusk air. We stopped the ATV and solemnly anointed one another with citronella. And then we continued over potholes and streams that had broken out of their man-made channels and formed rivulets across the abandoned road. The joyride, the gift of Willem’s uncle, Ortwin, was a fast-moving escape from the incessant bug life. Our clothes were caked with mud by the time we found the place. The pool, the tiniest edge of which caught our eyes fifty metres into the old gravel clearing, intrigued us, and we stopped the quad and went to it.
The gravel was so thick nothing grew there. The clearing was like a great dead oasis, a lost civilization in the middle of nowhere. The pool, unfathomably deep, was shaped like a funnel, the tube of which, so deep yet so clearly visible underwater, was an old copper mine shaft. This receded into nightmare blackness, a black inactive endlessness. The water, for the rest, was the blue-green of a penny picked up along the curb, and in it too nothing grew. No plant life, no fishes. It was beautiful with the poised elegance of industrial artifice.
It is a woman, Willem had said.
Only as rendered by a man, I muttered back.
The area around the pool was strangely quiet, without the teeming omnipresence of blackflies. It was the stillest water I had ever encountered, and yet no larvae wriggled at its stagnant edges. We held one another for some time, gathering in the poignancy of whatever message it sought to give us. I recall I pressed myself against Willem’s long leg, enjoying that soft on hard. What was it exactly that made us turn around, except we were entranced? The little shack stood just there, and we laughed because it represented our deepest separate wishes made manifest. It offered a framework for what we intended to do in it. You’d think they might have built a better town with all the standing timber up there. But from inside we saw it was all planks, set side-by-side and insulated with more planks placed horizontally. I looked out between the boards at the sun-bleached sky, the swirl of blackflies and the heaps of fallen structures, the splintered, grey-weathered shards of previous lives, and then not, and then again, as my perspective moved with our breath, in and out.
So, this is Canada? he said, post-coital, bare-legged. This great land.
Yeah. True north strong. I sifted through his trousers for tobacco. Oh, the smell of him, that smell that completed me.
It is chaos, the empty space, he said. The bugs. The wasted land. The sky falling all the way down to the ground. Everything moving around so mean, so pretty, so free, and in the middle, this — what we just have together. He gestured, then, at his penis.
Um, Willem? I said. It’s in your own mind. We have cities here too.
No. Just this. This is the Canada I want. I will come back here, right here.
He wanted so badly to make the particular the universal, to make nature into a symbol, make the bugs mean something, make his come important. This is my last memory of him — seed, Drum, earth, sweat.
I yelp when I see it again and I run toward it. It does not respond. I am alone. I am alone. Alone. All of a sudden I wonder, Now, why did I want to be alone, again? What colossal pretence suggested itself to me that I would behave so? Am I destined to react with such insufferable sensitivity to every life experience? It is true, I returned home. I packed up my apartment, I gave my landlord notice. I wanted to run away, see what that was like, running away. And now I was alone. Alone in this godless place. Alone. Alone. What did it mean? If one was alone, was one, in fact, there at all? Had I ceased to exist? I decide to yell and check for an echo.
Hello! Hello!
Hello! I turn toward the weird echo, for I am not alone. I scan the forest periphery looking for movement, a flash of colour, anything, and I see him. A little man sits on a stump in front of a shack I’d not noticed before. It is behind the other hut and hidden by the scrub edge of the forest so as to be completely camouflaged. The leprechaun grins at me.
Haven’t I seen you before? he says.
I blink to check my senses. He grins wider, and his little eyes completely disappear into leathery crow’s feet.
Fuck, I think. Damn. I come all this way, and still. This cannot be real.
Welcome, there. He’s holding up his little hand by way of greetings.
Hullo? This is certainly a hallucination.
I am Jake, he says, pointing to himself.
Are you real?
That’s right. You bet. And you? He laughs; he is laughing at me.
Huh?
Your name is?
Alma. Listen, who are you? How long have you been here? What’s this . . .
I’m not here, he interrupts, holds his miniature hand up again. And then he breaks out into peal upon peal of shrill laughter, his chin pressed into his ragged old quilted corduroy coat. The man is shaking with laughter. I look up and see Willem’s underwear waving from a pole attached to his shack.
Sweet Jesus.
They are mottled pink bikinis, inadvertently dyed once when they got into a dark load. Willem. I am back in the little hut with Willem, right here, right here. I’m weak in the legs thinking about him, for these thoughts go to obvious places. Willem had jumped up and gone outside in order to find a stick. He was triumphant, came back waving it at me. Tobacco smoke went down my windpipe when I laughed, and I choked and coughed. Willem tied his pink garment to one end of the stick and hoisted his rigged flag up against the structure.
I claim this place. Right here, he announced. I stare, reminiscing.
Jake, the little man is saying again, Jake. I am Jake. I am not here. I am not sweet Jesus, either.
Oh, I see. I say this though I don’t, not really.
You understand, then. Yes. Good. Now, you must come in. You are my first visitor in one hundred years and I’m very lonely. Come in. Come in, please.
Jake gets up and grabs my bicep with both his hands, walks me into the hut, brings me up to every wall and points to his things. It is the cabin of a man with poor eyesight and little concern for hygiene. Filthy. There is a lingering reek of rotting food and badly cured animal skins. These skins are stacked against the wall in anticipation of cold weather. A massive unmortared fireplace takes up the rest of this wall. There are two rooms and three windows. One screened window in the bedroom, south wall, one in the kitchen above the old corroded sink and hand pump, again south wall, one in the main living area, that is to say, the rest of the house, east wall. Each of these has a collection of found anthropology laid out on its sill — animal craniums, feathers, strange rocks, old salve bottles, tins — talismans of what? There is a table, rather ornate considering where it sits, and I wonder how it got here. There is a Findlay Oval cookstove, missing legs and so propped up on little cairns.
The yellow walls are gorgeous. He has parged them with some sort of chinking and painted the place in a thin ochre, which is brighter at the floor, as if the walls are actually draining of colour. I hadn’t seen this particular structure before. I’d anticipated making house in the smaller shelter, the forlorn little cabin that looks out, windows like eyes, onto the pit; it might have been where the foreman kept warm and dry in inclement weather. The one in which Willem and I made love once, up against the back wall of it, the spruce planks absorbing our thrust. But I know no comfort will be found in that hut. It is bereft of comfort. And everything as I had imagined it suddenly shifts to make room for this yellow shack and for Jake.
I look at him and he becomes self-conscious, begins to move things about in the little kitchen, tidying up like a nervous hostess. I wonder. Jake may have been watching us those months ago, or listening, and had we seen him or heard him we might have thought he was a ghost. Perhaps he thought we were. Perhaps we were — as if the imagined is a sort of ghost, distinct from reality but somehow more tangible. Did I imagine it? And this, this ghost town? I consider, for the last and most profound time, turning back. Simultaneously, I consider my mother brooding in her cups and the tragic dullness of my other life; it unreels before me in convincing panels, negatives. He reads my mind.
You have come to live with me. I will sleep here. He indicates the heap of skins. I take very little room. I am often not around at all. Please. You will have privacy over there. He beckons me to come over to the bedroom. My legs will not move. I will not follow this little man, whoever he is — if he is.
I am waiting for someone, I say. I don’t even believe this anymore, not really. I will talk myself around again, even in the face of a bastion of pragmatics. I will reconstruct faith as it suits me.
No one comes here, he says.
I know.
But I know this too. Something will happen here. There is an event in motion. It swirls around this locus, right here. I must, I will stay and see it through.