After my mother’s death I found myself in a calm, unanticipated place. I no longer hated Eric for leaving me—that energy had finally been sprung. Our kids were off living their own faraway lives and I had stopped counting the exclamation marks in their texts in order to gauge their happiness. In the past year, two, three defining roles had slipped off me like loose garments.
But I felt a certain melancholy glide setting into my days—a willingness to simply mark time. At my age, if I chose to watch cat videos every day until felled by an aneurism, no one would begrudge me (or, possibly, notice). At the same time, certain desires still stirred: to drive the Dempster Highway, to fight for a cause, to flirt with someone inappropriate. In the twenty or so years left to me (inshallah) I wanted to become more of myself, not less.
So when Leonard and his assistant, Shell, gently broached the idea of moving in with me, I said yes right away. When I was young I had shared a house with several postgrad philosophers who liked to make dessert soufflés. Why not now? And this way I wouldn’t end up lying stroke-ridden for days on the bathroom floor before someone discovered me. With the three of us sharing one bathroom, it would be more like a matter of hours.
I find it’s a tonic just being around Shell’s youth, the way she takes the stairs three at a time and talks to all the dogs in the laneway. Her relationship with Leonard is playful, tender, and (I think) platonic, although she chooses to sleep on a mat near his bed.
As for Leonard and me, our habits mesh nicely. We steer clear of each other in the mornings when we both prefer to work. I’ll do a little Flo-Q copy, or maybe push on with my new thriller, Abra Cadaver. Around four in the afternoon we might have a cup of matcha and commiserate about our lower-back pain. I like Advil, he swears by Aleve. He prefers to stack the dishwasher, and I would rather empty it.
On warm days Leonard does Qi-Gong in the backyard, which amuses the neighbors. I caught the musician who lives across the lane taking a picture once, but mostly no one bothers him. Leonard has never cultivated fame and as a result he rarely suffers from its consequences.
Still, some of my friends remain skeptical about this new living arrangement.
“I’ve got an extra ticket for that Turkish film if you’re interested,” Sarah emailed me last week. “Unless you and the Tower of Song have other plans;).”
“We’re just housemates,” I replied, “and anyway we’re both too old.”
“Right. How does that song of his go? ‘She’s a hundred but she’s wearing something tight.’”
Couriers will occasionally come to the door with packages. (My new boss at Flo-Q likes me to have what he calls a “hand-feel” of the new products.) If Leonard answers, often they recognize him, falling speechless or blurting out worshipful things. I can see how much gracefulness this requires, having to put strangers at ease. It makes me want to give Leonard a footbath, or some gesture that asks for nothing in return.
Whenever Leonard and I pass in the narrow corridors of my Victorian house, our bodies touch easily. We smile at the contact and move on. That’s the extent of it, although he is closer to me than a lot of men I’ve slept with in the past. No doubt many of his fans feel the same way. Still, they haven’t lived with him, or folded his laundry.
It’s an innocent merging of the three of us that reminds me, strangely, of breastfeeding (which has its erotic quotient too). I know that sounds weird. But since they moved in I wake up every morning happy—a feeling I thought I had outlived.
Shell enjoys it when I show her how to do certain old-fashioned things, like making a pie crust with lard. She is no longer in touch with her mother and seems to want nothing more than to be around me, to sit near me. One afternoon Leonard painted my toes a tropical aqua while Shell did my fingernails a different shade and a Nina Simone record played.
All this is sweet and new.
* * *
Lately Leonard and Shell have gotten into the habit of watching an episode or two of Call the Midwife. Most nights I join them. But about ten minutes in, the picture will often freeze, then we have to reload Netflix, and a message will come up saying there is a problem with Apple TV and to call them. At this point my tendency is to give up, but Leonard is more persistent. He punched in the number and explained the situation.
“It’s Leonard Cohen calling.”
He rarely plays the name game, but it does come in handy.
The next thing we knew, a technician was at our door. It was Taylor Swift, holding an aluminum toolbox, her little cupid mouth a bright red.
“Hi, guys,” she said. “I’m here to fix your connection.” She didn’t bat an eye when Leonard came into the hall.
“Thank you for your prompt attention,” he said, shaking her hand with a small bow. “We’re almost at the end of season four, so this is quite frustrating, as you can imagine.”
“I hear you,” said Taylor. “I had the same problem watching Rectify, until I had a little powwow with the Apple folks. Our relationship is pretty good—I’m, like, four percent of their iTunes revenue now, which is crazy. Anyway, they’ve promised to work on a whole new delivery system. Oh, nice high ceilings!” she said, stepping into my living room. She pulled out the mysterious black unit behind our screen and wiggled the cords.
“You’d be surprised how often it comes down to one box not being plugged into another.”
Shell was gazing at Taylor in silent awe.
“We can take pictures of Pluto, but everything still needs a cable, right?” said Taylor with a wink at Shell to relax her. “Looks like you’re okay here, though. It’s a problem at the other end.”
I took the tea towel off my shoulder and ducked back into the kitchen, where I had a rhubarb-strawberry crisp in the oven.
“Something in there smells really good,” said Taylor loudly.
She wore pinstriped overalls with platform sneakers and her hair was an interesting dark ashy blond. Not movie-star at all. She was on the skinny side, with the irresistible face of a small, alert animal.
“It’s a crisp,” I said, coming back into the living room. “You’re welcome to have some with us.”
“Really? Thank you!”
“The rhubarb’s from our garden,” Shell said. “Rose’s garden.”
“Oh, I love your faux tat,” Taylor said, touching the Arabic-looking gold braidings on Shell’s arm.
“It’s supposed to last for thirty days.” She twisted her arm around to show the underside. “I got my real ones removed. They were just initials anyway.”
“Wrong guy?”
“Yeah. So wrong.”
“Been there, shot the video.” Taylor laughed.
She opened her toolbox, took out something that looked like a waiter’s Visa machine, and held it against the Apple unit. Lights flashed along the edge. “Okay, good. Let’s fire it up.”
I handed her the tiny silver remote. “You have to hold it way up,” I said, showing her how, like some new hip-hop move. The unit was tucked away on a top shelf. She raised her arm, clicked it on to Netflix, loaded Call the Midwife, and played a few minutes. We watched a wavy-haired woman on a bicycle speed down a cobbled road.
“I could totally get into this,” said Taylor. “I love history.”
“Shall we turn it off?” suggested Leonard. “I’m not there yet.”
I put on my elbow-length oven mitts, which made me feel vaguely surgical, and slid the crisp out of the oven. Shell came into the kitchen with her hands crossed over her chest. “Can you believe this?” We could hear Taylor and Leonard chatting in the next room, until they came and found us.
“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” Taylor said, “but … why are you here? Are you guys all cousins or something?”
“No, we’re just visiting the city,” Leonard said, “and Rose has kindly opened her home to us.”
Shell mouthed a silent thank you to me and turned to Taylor. “Are you, like, working for Apple full-time—or vice versa?”
Taylor laughed. “I try to do two days a week when I’m not performing. I like to get right into people’s houses whenever I can, you know? It helps me actually connect with how they live.”
I brought out a tray with the still-percolating crisp, bowls, spoons, and a carton of Kawartha Dairy vanilla. We sat around the dining-room table, where three laptops stood open and glowing like treasure chests. Leonard shut them down.
“This is excellent,” said Taylor, taking tiny spoonfuls so as not to burn her lips. She had the prettiest mouth. “Thanks, guys. Normal is so rare for me.”
“And it’s good to have regular ice cream for a change,” Leonard murmured. Through the window we could see the Mr. Softee truck parked in the laneway behind us.
“Is that your neighbor’s?” Taylor asked.
“No, it’s Leonard’s.”
“I use it as a studio of sorts.”
She clapped her hands. “That is so cool! You record in there?”
“Yes, I have a little analog system set up. But mostly I use the PA to work on material. Shell and I like to drive around the city and broadcast the new tunes. I find it helpful to see how people in the street react. You know—do they clutch their ears and run away?” He chuckled.
“Right on! Getting out of the studio, man! Things can get so complicated when they don’t need to be.”
“Yes,” said Leonard, giving her an appreciative gaze. “And people have very fixed ideas about how music ought to sound.”
“A lot of people still can’t stand his voice,” Shell piped up, and then blushed.
“That’s true,” he said, smiling.
In the corner of the dining room were a couple canvas backpacks, some packages of dried soup, Ziploc bags of trail mix, and an ax. I had almost finished the tedious job of organizing the food and gear for our expedition.
Taylor went over to the pile of equipment.
“Whoa. Are you guys joining the military or something?”
“No, we’re going on a canoe trip,” said Shell, “with some Norwegian guy who’s here to write a story about Canada. Look, we even have bear spray.” She took a canister out of the top of a pack and held it up. It had a cartoon of a charging grizzly on the front.
“I am so jealous!” said Taylor. “I have never even been in a canoe, that’s the one thing I haven’t done!” Her face clouded over.
Leonard caught my eye and I gave a why-not shrug. She was young and strong, at least.
“Then you should definitely come with us,” he said, touching Taylor’s wrist.
“But we’re leaving, like, tomorrow,” said Shell. “For four days.” Her brow furrowed. She had registered Leonard’s enthusiasm.
“Done!” said Taylor. She pulled out her phone and made a call.
“Ed, please clear my schedule, I’m going to be out of touch for the next few days. And let Apple know I’m on pause for now.”
Her eyes shone. “This makes me really happy. Will there be reception in the woods?”
“I doubt it,” and “probably” Shell and I answered in unison.
I looked at Taylor’s platform sneakers, which were roughly my size. She could wear my old Timberlands, I guessed. I hoped this wasn’t all a big mistake. It was one thing to lead a bunch of newbies into the woods, but I did not want to deal with any twisted ankles on the portages. Part of our route was along the Madawaska, where the trails could be steep.
Also, I hadn’t been in a canoe since the two college summers I’d spent working for a Temagami outfitter. But Shell had been a camp counselor, and Taylor was a quick study, obviously. We’d manage. As for Leonard, he was old for this sort of thing, but he knew how to husband his energy. A three-hour concert is a kind of expedition too.
It was mostly the group dynamics I was worried about. The wild card was Karl Ove Knausgaard, who was flying in that night. Not a barrel of laughs, to judge from his books. Leonard had an ardent following in Norway, but that didn’t mean that Knausgaard was a fan. And when I told Leonard about My Struggle, the writer’s hugely popular, 3,600-page, six-volume novel, he hadn’t even heard of it.
“I’m afraid I don’t have the patience for reading fiction anymore,” he said.
* * *
But let me explain how Karl Ove came into the picture, because that was really strange.
Things with Flo-Q were going well. I had been promoted from writing copy for faucets and showerheads to their top spa features—the hydrotherapy tubs, infinity pools, and living-wall waterfalls. Leanna had been fired and my new boss liked to encourage my creativity, so I began to quote little water-related passages from literature (or “liquiture” as he liked to call it). To the Lighthouse has lots, obviously. I found some good stuff in The Road by Cormac McCarthy too. After the world has been destroyed, water suddenly becomes a big deal.
“It’s a bit dark, but that can be a good thing,” my boss said when he read the quotes. “Just stay away from the shower scene in Psycho.”
One morning, on the hunt for fresh inspiration, I sat down with Knausgaard’s latest novel, a 740-page sequel to My Struggle called The Truth. Bathrooms and plumbing, I noticed, are a recurring motif, which is not a surprise. Our faces in the morning, our fears at four a.m., the sad mortal ring in the toilet bowl—they all confront us with the truth in the bathroom. Perhaps this is why I have no shame about my work for Flo-Q.
Knausgaard likes to take his readers into all the little shifts of consciousness that accompany us in the course of a normal day. So I was happily lodged inside his brain when I turned to page 243 and was shocked to find the scene below. The narrator has just returned to the house in Tromsø, Norway, that he had shared with his wife, Solvi, before their divorce and her sudden accidental death.
“I went round to the side of the house to the outdoor shower, a folly of ours given the climate in Tromsø. But we had just come back from Thailand that winter and felt nostalgic for bathing out of doors, so we had made a little stall out of birch, and ordered a special showerhead on the internet, [my emphasis]. Covered with tiny nozzles, it was as broad and round as the face of a sunflower. But it turned out we didn’t have the water pressure to sustain the flow. After standing several times under an icy trickle, shivering, we abandoned our dream of the shower. And in a sense that meager trickle marked the beginning of the end of us.”
It was an unmistakable reference to the Rainmaker, a wall-mounted twelve-inch-diameter nickel-plated showerhead that is a perennial Flo-Q bestseller. And the phrasing was exactly mine: “The Rainmaker, broad and round as the face of a sunflower, will transport you to a steamy Costa Rican forest…” Knausgaard had poached my simile.
I was pondering my next move when an email arrived from my boss, forwarding a message:
Dear Flo-Q
In the course of doing some research, it has come to my attention that there are striking similarities between a passage in my current novel “The Truth” and phrases that occur in the Luxury Showerhead section of your website. I would be grateful if you could put me in touch with the writer so we can discuss this matter further.
Sincerely,
Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Was he accusing me of plagiarism?
I wrote back immediately. I began by saying that I was a great admirer of his work, and was rereading Book Two: A Man in Love for the second time. This was not strategic flattery, it was true. With its relentless self-scrutiny and searching earnestness My Struggle does invite parody. The way in which he exposes the people close to him raises moral questions too. But there is also something necessary about it that makes more conventional fiction seem hollow and contrived in comparison. You are trying to capture how it feels to be alive, I loftily wrote. And that includes paying attention to all the in-between moments in life: pushing a stroller, turning on a tap, standing under a shower.
But, I continued, it had shocked me to stumble on the sunflower simile, a phrase I thought I had invented. (I didn’t add that a large showerhead so closely resembles the face of a sunflower that it requires only the tiniest scrap of imagination to make the analogy. It was neither my finest moment nor his.)
Instead I told him how honored I felt that our imaginations had aligned like this, if only for one phrase. Then I signed off by saying that Flo-Q products were “internationally revered in their field, much as you are in yours.” (I still shudder to recall this.)
Here is what Karl Ove wrote back to me:
Dear Rose,
Thank you for your message and your kind words about my work. I confess that I sometimes have a great fear that I am boring my readers, so your belief in the value of the mundane helps me to face another day of writing.
Of course, I accept your explanation about the “alignment of our imaginations”—a lovely thought. I was only shocked, as you must have been, to come across a figure of speech I assumed was mine alone.
I want also to say that I have now read much of your work on the Flo-Q site, with growing admiration. I applaud your attention to detail (the “tired” shimmer of brushed aluminum). There are moments in your copy that succeed in giving a difficult subject—plumbing—a human, even poetic dimension.
Perhaps there is a favor I can ask of you? I have recently agreed to write a travel story about your country for the New York Times Magazine, a follow-up to a much-hated piece of mine about a car trip through the United States.
However, I have no idea how to go about this. I dislike interviewing people and have little feel for landscape. My memory is bad, and whenever I take notes I can never read them later. All this concerns me.
My editor at the magazine has strongly urged me to take part in a canoe-camping trip or similar wilderness activity to reflect the abundance of this sort of thing in Canada. I understand that you are based in Toronto, where my journey begins, in September.
So I come to my point: any guidance you could offer me regarding canoe adventures in your area would be gratefully received. And may your imagination continue to align with mine.
Sincerely,
Karl Ove Knausgaard.
I replied that September would be the ideal time for a canoe trip, given the fall colors. I offered to organize a four-day excursion for him through the northwest corner of Algonquin Park, an area made famous by the Group of Seven painters. My Flo-Q boss seemed keen on the idea. (“If you can get a picture of him under a waterfall, that would be great.”) The NYT editor approved the plan, and as Leonard and Shell were running out of Netflix options, they were keen to join me. With Taylor, that would make five of us, in two canoes.
But I said nothing to Knausgaard about his celebrated trip mates. The wilderness treats everyone alike. I simply booked him a room at the Intercontinental and left a message the night he arrived, saying we’d pick him up at six thirty a.m., and be on the water by noon.
* * *
“Don’t hold it like a baseball bat. Put your right hand on the top of the paddle, and keep your left low on the shaft. Then reach forward and dig it in. You’re shoveling water, basically.”
“But if I lean out, won’t we tip?”
Karl Ove was in the bow of my canoe. I had been under the impression that all Norwegians skied and spent time in the woods, but this was clearly not the case. It turns out that he had never slept in a tent and insisted on bringing along a large down pillow, which he said accompanied him everywhere.
“It is my stuffed animal,” he said, shrugging. His thick pewter-colored hair was swept back in a leonine manner. He wore the sort of sunglasses with side bits that shut out all the light. Without them, his gaze was so direct as to be uncomfortable and his handsomeness was in a class of its own.
But he had a touching timidity as well. I noticed the way he treated each new environment, whether it was the hotel lobby or a doughnut shop, as an unmapped foreign country. He seemed at pains to preserve his lack of worldliness—not so easy, once the world discovers you.
“Whenever you see someone canoeing in a movie, the actors are always holding the paddles wrong,” I said to make him feel better. He moved his left hand down the shaft and began to propel us forward with stabbing strokes. I had lent him an old flannel shirt of Eric’s, which fit him perfectly.
“Good. That’s the idea.”
The blue canoe surged past us.
“Is this not gorgeous?” said Taylor. She was sitting up straight, kneeling properly, paddling in perfect sync with Leonard and Shell. At the end of each stroke she gave the paddle a little twist, like someone signing her name with a flourish.
We made our way across Round Lake, a route I had taken years before. Nothing had changed. After a broad and windy stretch, the lake narrowed into a meander that wound its way snakelike through a corridor of reeds. It went on and on; we had to follow it blindly, bumping into the banks as our canoes navigated the tight corners.
“Will there be moose?” asked Karl Ove.
“Quite possibly.”
“Have you ever seen the males fighting, with their antlers?”
“No, but I was on a trip once where we were chased by a bull moose in rut.”
“‘In rut’?”
“In heat. During the fall mating season. They can be dangerous then.”
“Oh.” He paused. “But that’s now.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”
“And I hope to see the Northern Lights as well. For the story.”
“Isn’t Norway where people go to photograph them?”
“Yes, but I moved to Sweden some time ago.”
I looked behind us for the others. Leonard was trailing his stern paddle in the water, doing a lazy J as Shell dug away in the bow and Taylor used her paddle to push them off the grassy banks.
“This is like a corn maze!” Taylor called. “How’s my stroke, Rose, am I good?”
I gave her a thumbs-up.
We turned another corner and lost sight of them. The current flowed more strongly and all we had to do was steer as our canoe brushed through leathery green lily pads. A few yellow flowers sat on the surface like teacups.
“This is incredible,” said Karl Ove softly. “It’s like I’m traveling through the folds in my brain. I love it.”
When we had picked him up that morning he had looked so tired, greeting me with an apprehensive, teeth-baring smile. “Everything here is somewhat familiar but askew,” he said. I had never been to Norway and pictured it as a large white LEGO railway station, with colorfully clad people moving about in trams and on skis, silently and efficiently. Like the vestibule of heaven.
“Where are you heading after this?” I asked him as we paddled on.
“Out west. A place called Jasper.”
“Oh, you’ll love the Rockies,” I said. “Your sense of time completely shifts in the mountains. You can feel the great patience of the Earth.”
Karl Ove absorbed this.
“And the west is interesting right now, geopolitically.”
“To tell the truth, I have no interest in doing interesting things.” He laughed. “Can we pause now to have a cigarette?”
We stopped paddling and he lit one.
“My wife and children beg me to quit, but I find it very hard,” said Karl Ove. “Will you join me?”
I hadn’t smoked since college, but sometimes even good habits should be broken. Cautiously he turned around in the bow and passed me a cigarette, some Swedish brand. I leaned forward to catch a light from his match, inhaled, and coughed.
“Cigarettes are like punctuation for me,” he said. “I can’t write without them.”
“How’s that going? Your new book.” I could feel the shape of my lungs from the smoke.
“It is very problematic,” he said. “Hideous, really.” He drew hungrily on the cigarette until it sizzled and tossed the bottom half into the water.
“Why?”
“Originally I had set out to write about my life—not to invent a story, but to go more deeply into my own experience—and then when the first two volumes came out and made a stir, my life changed. I had to do readings and publicity and go on television.”
Far behind us, I could hear Taylor singing a Willie Nelson tune. The meander was now widening into a river.
“I felt I had to live up to this person I spoke about whenever I answered questions in an interview. I wanted to please my readers, of course, I wanted to be good at the business of impersonating a famous author. But it was also undermining my ability to write in an honest way.”
“The same thing kind of happens on Facebook,” I said. “The pressure to create a public identity—usually someone happier and more successful. It’s like we’re all authoring ourselves.”
He stopped paddling and turned in profile so that I could hear him.
“Yes, I think you’re right. So in the process I have become, what is the word, a merkvare, a brand … like Pepto-Bismol.” He slapped a deerfly that was darting at his head. “Yet there is no reward in remaining unread and obscure.”
I was getting used to Karl Ove’s rhythms. He was either completely silent or else he would talk like this and wind on and on, like the meander. On the drive up he had spoken at length about his dead alcoholic father. He seemed a bit lost inside himself, so I changed the subject.
“I’m working on a book too. But just a thriller.”
“Is that right? Will you kill me off in the woods for your story?” he said with his charmingly reluctant smile.
“Perhaps. It does need a body. It’s about a dead Canadian painter, who may have been murdered.”
“My friend Jo Nesbø has become very successful writing thrillers. I wish I had the knack.”
“I can only write when I don’t take it seriously. If I imagine a million readers, I freeze up.”
“I’m afraid I’m exactly the opposite. I take everything too seriously. It’s exhausting.”
“You ‘slip into the Masterpiece.’”
“What?”
“It’s a line from one of Leonard’s songs. About losing your grip.”
Karl Ove looked at his big silver watch. “It’s now midnight in Oslo. My body is longing to be horizontal. Will we stop soon?”
The river had developed some riffles and a faint roaring sound warned of a waterfall around the corner. I steered us over to the shore.
Behind us Taylor and Shell were singing “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” When they came into sight I saw that Leonard had put on his black-netted bug hat, like a Victorian lady at a picnic.
“That was such a mind fuck,” said Taylor merrily. “Like, has time stopped? Will this meander ever end? I loved it. What’s up now?”
“We portage here, around the falls,” I said. “Then an easy lift-over into North Tea Lake, where we’ll camp. Take the packs over first then come back for the rest. You might find that carrying the canoe solo is easier, especially if you wear a life preserver to pad your shoulders.”
As I sprang out of our canoe I felt a twinge in my right knee. I better wrap it tonight, I thought. But the body memories were rushing back as I balanced on two slippery rocks, unbuckled the food pack from the thwarts, and swung it up on shore. I could still do this.
* * *
Leonard had blown up his air mattress and was lying on it in his tent, wearing headphones. Shell bent over the fire, squinting against the smoke as she stirred a pot of chicken curry that I had pre-cooked and vacuum-packed. I was planning to make chapatis from scratch too (showing off somewhat).
Taylor had changed into a red corduroy jumpsuit and was drinking an inch of tequila from a tin cup as she shot some video.
“Here we are on majestic North Tea Lake,” she intoned, “land of the silver birch, home of the beaver.” She zoomed in on me while I rummaged in the food pack for a baggie of fresh cilantro. “And this is our fearless leader, Rose McEwan, who is an awesome cook.”
I was in a familiar canoe-trip state—irritable exhaustion combined with mild lower-back pain. I had collected the firewood, helped everyone put up their tents, and cleared a kitchen area beside the fire pit. Taylor was still bounding over the rocks, with a tiara of fireweed in her hair. Her energy was bottomless. Leonard had paced himself well but as soon as the tent was up, he had slipped into it. Karl Ove sat on a log smoking. It had been a long day for everyone.
Our campsite was on a finger of four-billion-year-old rock with tall white pines on the point. The sun was low and the air had a warning chill: Summer was over. On the opposite shore the trees blazed away, a mariachi band of orange and yellows. In July the same shore was a wall of green, almost monotonous. But now we could see the bright differences between pine and maple, poplar and birch. The leaves were becoming more of themselves before they died.
While the curry was heating up I boiled some water and made a cup of black tea. Shell and Taylor were down by the water’s edge, talking in the low purling tones, with bursts of laughter, of women discussing discarded boyfriends. Karl Ove wrote in his notebook. I went over to Leonard’s tent, where the light coming through the blue nylon cast a television pall on his lined, unshaven face. He was lying asleep on the open pages of a book.
“Leonard,” I said gently, “have some tea.”
“This is so kind of you,” he said, brushing at the sides of his mouth. “I’m afraid I’m accustomed to my little pre-show nap.”
“Dinner’s ready when you are.”
Shell was now shooting Taylor, who had changed into a crop top worn over silvery harem pants tucked into my Timberlands.
“Hey girl-squad,” Taylor said to the camera, “you should all get your tushes out of L.A. and join me up here in Canada, in the woods! I am in bear country, see?” She held up the canister of bear spray with its drooling graphic. Shell panned around the campsite, where Leonard was now sitting by the fire, making an I’m not here gesture.
“I’m here with … a few new friends … in an untouched wilderness where you cannot buy things, at all.” A loon let out a faintly ridiculing call, and Shell zoomed out to find it. Taylor continued. “I wish you could all be with me to experience the smell of the … pines, right?” Shell nodded. “And the excellent curry we are about to eat, around a fire made with branches and twigs that we gathered ourselves, actual wood from the woods…” Taylor raised her arm and flexed it. “Also paddling is very good for the triceps.” She turned to Shell. “And, cut.”
“I would love to get a team of synchronized swimmers up here, for a video,” sighed Taylor. “With those crazy nose plugs?”
I dished the curry into our plastic bowls, and for a long moment we all devoured our meals in silence. The chapatis had turned out perfectly—a birch fire burns hot. But my back still hurt.
“Sit here instead,” said Taylor, jumping up to give me her perch against a flat rock. I thanked her and took her spot. Then I reminded myself to slow down, look around, and take it in. The stillness.
Afterward, Karl Ove moved down to the edge of the water to smoke, and Leonard joined him.
“I quit some time ago and promised myself I would start again at the age of eighty,” said Leonard. “I’m heading into year three now,” he said, accepting a light from the Norwegian.
“Ever since I’ve had to travel more,” said Karl Ove, “I find that drinking is no longer helpful. It turns dark too quickly. But the little rituals around smoking cigarettes help keep me sane on the road.”
“I agree,” said Leonard. “It’s like a phone call home.”
Their smoke mingled in the pinkish twilight.
“Will there be music at some point?” Karl Ove asked. “I have this image, of people sitting around a bonfire, playing guitar.…”
“No guitar. But there’s this.” Leonard produced a jaw harp from his pocket, which he began to play. After a few corkscrewing twangs, the loon gave out a long call as if in response. We applauded.
“Let’s sing!” said Taylor. “What shall we sing?”
Silence. Whose material first? Then Leonard began.
Black girl, black girl
Oh don’t lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night?
An old Lead Belly song. Taylor answered:
In the pines, in the pines
Where the sun never shines
And I shivered the whole night through.
“Kurt Cobain used to do that one too,” said Karl Ove. He drummed on the bottom of a pot with his fingertips.
“Hey, that sounds good,” said Taylor. “Don’t stop.”
“I used to play drums in high school, when I was in a band.”
As Karl Ove kept time, Leonard and Taylor harmonized. They were like two people on separate islands, the sound of their voices were so different—Leonard’s woolly, frayed, and ocean-deep, Taylor’s like a thin, strong silver wire.
We stayed up for another hour, going through “All Along the Watchtower,” “Red River Valley,” and “Wake Up, Little Susie.” The darkness surrounded us like a great cave as the temperature dropped. We kept moving closer together for warmth and then went shyly off to bed. Taylor and Shell shared a big dome tent—the Princess Pavilion, as it was dubbed—Leonard’s blue one was nearby; and I had pitched Karl Ove’s closer to the point, where the morning sun would strike first.
I led him there with my flashlight, looking back to make sure the red glow of his cigarette was still in sight.
“This is not what I expected at all,” he said quietly, “which is good. Thank you.”
“Sleep well, Karl Ove.” On the way to my tent I switched the flashlight off so I could feel the path under my feet and see the stars growing brighter above us.
* * *
I pushed the dial on my watch to illuminate the face. Almost four a.m. A sound had awakened me, the sound of something sizable bumbling through the trees. Damn. It had been so late when we went to bed that I didn’t go through the rigmarole of hoisting the food pack high up into the trees, to keep it safe from bears. To keep us safe from bears. Instead we stowed the packs under the inverted canoes.
The thrashing continued. Small animals always sound enormous from inside a tent, I reminded myself. And we were in a national park, where raccoons were numerous and intrepid.
Who had the bear spray? Taylor, of course.
I quietly unzipped the door of my tent, trying to remember the strategies for bear encounters: For a black bear, you make yourself big and try to scare them off; for a grizzly, you curl up, protect your neck, and play dead. Or was it vice versa? Anyway, there are no grizzlies in Algonquin, and black bears are rare. Except for that one inexplicable attack a few years ago, where a couple were both mauled to death.
A branch snapped. I turned on my flashlight and shone it through the netting of my tent. I heard the hollow sound of a gunwale banging against the rocks and leaped out of the tent with my boot in one hand, ready to hurl it.
“I’m so sorry,” said Karl Ove, raising his arms like a fugitive. “I was looking for the box of matches. I ran out.”
He was wearing underwear, a T-shirt, and gray wool socks. Eric’s socks.
“You scared me,” I said softly. But nobody stirred in the other tents.
“I woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. Once the thoughts begin, the sentences, that’s it and before long I have to have a cigarette.”
“There are some waterproof matches in my tent, in the first-aid kit.”
“You sleep with the first-aid kit?” He smiled.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “In case a wounded bear comes by.”
Karl Ove followed me to my tent, set apart from the others in a stand of jack pines.
“I’m finding the total silence here quite unnerving. We live in the country but there’s always passing cars or dogs, or the sound of the refrigerator.”
I crawled into the tent, felt around in the metal kit for the matches, and handed them out to Karl Ove.
“They coat them with something, so they’re a pain to light.”
He struck one hard on the side of the box. It flared blue and yellow, illuminating his face, its good bones. He lit his cigarette and drew on it deeply.
“You?” he said, tipping the package my way. I shook my head.
“It was a dream that woke me up,” he said, “about my father. I had to write it down.”
His father again. It’s dreadful, how we continue to love our parents regardless of how they treat us. How we keep returning to them, to solve the mystery of who we are. I thought of all the fathers who have turned their sons into writers, compelled to re-create the family on the page. Slowly stacking up the sentences until they resemble a human figure, like a stone inukshuk.
Karl Ove sat at the entrance of my tent and used my flashlight to read from his notebook:
“I was sixteen, and had just come home from spending the evening with a girl in my class whom I longed to kiss, but she was out of my league. I was in an agony of despair by the time I reached home, to find my father drunk, once again. He was either violent or sentimental when he drank, and sometimes sentimental was worse. That night he kept pouring me wine and saying how close we were. ‘You and I are two peas in a pod, Karl Ove, don’t try to deny it.’ Then he asked, ‘Did you have any luck tonight?’ meaning with the girl I had failed to impress. ‘Not so much,’ I said, unsure of the answer he wanted to hear. His face darkened. ‘You don’t have what it takes to get the girls, Karl Ove,’ he said, ‘you’re too soft and sensitive, you need to toughen up.’ I watched him stagger to his feet and come towards me, with his big hand raised. And that’s when I woke up.”
He closed the notebook and put out his cigarette carefully, grinding it into the earth. I could hear someone in the other tents lightly snoring.
“It’s cold out there, Karl Ove.” I unzipped the top of my sleeping bag and he slid in beside me. His face was wet but he turned away, curving his back. I put my arms around him. He murmured something I had to ask him to repeat.
“I still want to please him, and he’s dead.”
* * *
The next afternoon, Karl Ove caught a pickerel, and Taylor made fish tacos. They were out of this world. Is there nothing that girl can’t do? Leonard spent some time drawing little cartoons of us with his Sharpie. Instead of paddling farther down the lake, we had decided to stay at our campsite, where we puttered around most of the day, reading, snoozing. I gave Karl Ove my iPod with some of Leonard’s music. He sat at the water’s edge listening intently. Then he went over to Leonard, who was applying sunscreen to the tops of his ears.
“Leonard, this song of yours, ‘A Thousand Kisses Deep’? It is perfect. It cannot be improved upon,” Karl Ove said to him. “Can I ask how long it took to write it?”
“A thousand years, more or less.” Leonard rasped. “I write very slowly. I write in geological time, where it can take several centuries for things to shift an inch.”
“We are polar opposites then. My new book is already over five hundred pages and the main character is still in utero.” Karl Ove laughed at himself. “My publisher begs me to shut up.”
“Shorter is harder,” I chimed in.
“You’ve been writing too much ad copy,” said Karl Ove genially. “Brilliant as it is.” Catching a fish had cheered him up.
“Short is a good discipline,” I said.
“That’s true,” said Taylor, who was drying the insoles of her sneakers in the sun. “A chorus in a song might be, like, five dumb words that get repeated over and over. But coming up with the right five words can take forever.”
“Can you work on the bus?” Leonard asked her.
“Sure. I like to have life going on around me. Sitting alone in a quiet room just makes me want a chocolate bar.”
After dinner that evening (penne arrabiata with fresh cornbread) everyone had a smoke and we sat around the fire, reluctant to leave one another’s company.
I held up a log. “Are we good for one more?”
“We should probably do the marshmallow thing,” said Shell, yawning.
“Someone should tell a story,” said Taylor. “A ghost story.”
Karl poured some whiskey into his tea.
“Would a murder story do?” I said.
“What’s it about?” Shell asked.
“A dead Canadian painter.”
“But isn’t that your novel?” said Karl Ove.
“It’s not really a novel, it’s just a mystery.”
“Why do you keep doing that?” he said with genuine irritation. “Why do you patronize your own work?”
The others perked up.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Can’t a commercial, popular work of fiction be a masterpiece as well?”
“You mean, like yours?” I dared.
“I wouldn’t use the word ‘masterpiece.’”
“But you’d call your novels literature. Serious literature.”
“Yes, I would.”
“I agree,” Taylor piped up. “I’m in the middle of Book One right now, and it is rocking my world.”
“Maybe I don’t believe in ‘serious literature’ anymore,” I said, surprising myself. Was that what I thought?
“Or is that just your way of not writing about things that matter?” Karl Ove’s eyes were very dark, almost black, reflecting the dance of the firelight.
“I do write about things that matter. There’s a lot of environmental stuff in The Bludgeoning, for instance. My last book. About coral reefs.”
“Good. But I mean things that matter to you, Rose, personally. The questions or regrets that won’t let you sleep.”
“Is that what you think it takes to write something worthwhile? Just being raw and autobiographical? Exposing the people closest to you to public scrutiny?”
“Of course not. Don’t be so defensive.”
I was stirred up. Why was he attacking me like this? The log I had put on the fire turned out to be too green—the moisture in it began to hiss and pop.
“You know,” I said, “if a woman wrote one of your books, and went on and on about the horror of children’s birthday parties, she would be called a self-indulgent lightweight. But when a man does it, the personal becomes elevated, significant.”
“I agree. But I only have my life, and my experience as a man to write out of.”
Leonard, Shell, and Taylor had all found quiet little activities to focus on while we argued.
“I’m not saying that I couldn’t be a better writer,” said Karl Ove. “I am painfully aware of my shortcomings in that regard. I’m only saying to you that a mystery novel can be as profound as the Bible—if you invest enough belief and meaning in it. If you open yourself up.”
“Like the face of a sunflower.”
He ignored this. I was beginning to feel like Peggy Olson confronting Don Draper in season five of Mad Men. Peggy was a copywriter too.
“A man who writes honestly about his intimate life is considered brave,” I went on, “but when a woman does, it’s called oversharing.”
“Do we have to bring in gender?” said Leonard wearily. “It’s like Israel and Palestine, we’ll be up all night.”
“Easy for you to say,” I said with more bitterness than I intended.
“Tell us more about your novel,” said diplomatic Shell. “You never talk about it.”
“Well, I’m still working out the plot. Pedestrian as that sounds.”
“You see?” said Karl Ove. “You fail to embrace your own material. Although I have little interest in plot myself. Obviously.”
“All right then,” I said, going over to the bottle of Jameson and pouring myself a good slug, “since you asked. It’s called Abra Cadaver.”
In the darkness it was hard to see anyone’s expression. Leonard had on his bug hat, although the evening was too cool for mosquitos. I think he liked its veiled interior. I took a few drags off Karl Ove’s cigarette and kicked the fire into brightness.
“The story begins not far from here,” I began in classic campfire style, “on a lake near Nipissing, where the famous painter Tom Thomson died. Or was murdered. A young medical student, Julia, has convinced her boyfriend Martin to go on a canoe trip to the spot where Thomson was last seen, before his death in 1917. There are many theories about what happened to him. But Julia thinks she has the answer.”
“An answer to the mystery,” said Karl Ove.
“Can we skip to the cadaver part?” asked Shell.
“Yeah, hurry up and scare us,” Taylor said.
“Hang on. You need the plot.”
“Only the dead need a plot,” said Karl Ove. This drew a laugh from Leonard, who was rummaging through the food pack for the bag of marshmallows. They were squashed under a can but he massaged them until they puffed out again.
“Julia wants to be a forensic investigator—someone who deals with dead bodies.”
Taylor and Shell cheered and clapped.
“And Martin is studying to become an ophthalmologist, because he wants to make heaps of money while having the least possible contact with human beings. Just their eyeballs.”
Taylor hugged her knees. “Uh-oh, trouble. Negative people are sooo toxic.”
“Yes. But Julia is the very opposite of negative. She’s Rachel McAdams in Wedding Crashers. And she persuades him to go on this canoe trip, in search of evidence to help solve the mystery of Tom Thomson.”
“If I can interrupt,” said Karl Ove, “would there be any physical evidence left, if he died almost a century ago?” He was looking at me warmly. He enjoyed a clash of antlers.
“Excellent question. The answer is that Julia has been doing research into some new tests that measure trace levels of cortisol and other stress hormones in human hair and nails—tests to help determine whether someone died in a heightened state of fear. And human hair and nails don’t decompose, at least not quickly.”
“Hello, Tutankhamun,” said Shell.
“She thinks they might still find a strand of hair, or a sliver of a nail that could say something about how Thomson died.”
“What do these say about me?” said Taylor, waving her nails with their greenish glow-in-the-dark polish, like ten tiny cell phones.
“That you like to shine,” purred Leonard. He was handing around the marshmallows and five branches that he had whittled to a point.
“The coals are perfect now,” he said.
“After two days of combing the shores, Julia does come across something—an inch of rotten canvas, perhaps from a canoe, with a tiny dark fragment embedded in it. She’s convinced that it’s a human fingernail, but Martin says it’s a bit of shell, and she’s just imagining things, being unscientific. So they begin to fight.”
“Because he is a competitive nerd,” said Shell.
“Correct. During the argument, he throws the fragment, the nail, into the lake.”
“Way to sabotage her career,” said Taylor. “El jerko.”
“Plus, Martin is drinking,” I said, and here I waved the Jameson bottle. Karl Ove held out his cup. “Some pushing and shoving goes on until Martin grabs a sleeping bag out of the tent and stomps off into the woods. Leaving Julia alone on Canoe Lake.”
Taylor made a grunting noise and brandished the can of bear spray. “Abra cadaver.”
Leonard held up his hand for a pause. “I just want to mention that if you completely blacken these, the inside turns to a delicious liquid.”
“And Martin doesn’t come back that night,” I said.
“Okay. She got ghosted,” said Taylor. “Been there!”
Everyone was now jockeying for position around the fire with their drooping wands.
“I know what you’re all thinking,” I said, “but Julia spends the night unmolested, either by bears or by Martin. She sleeps surprisingly well, wakes up to a fine fall morning, and makes a pot of coffee. Martin’s tantrums are nothing new to her. But then she notices that their canoe and paddles are gone. Along with Martin’s hunting rifle.”
“He took off drunk, stood up in the canoe to pee, fell in, and drowned,” says Taylor. “Case closed.”
“Which is one theory about what happened to Tom Thomson.”
“But why?” said Karl Ove. “Why do you care about this missing painter, whom many others have written about? What’s left to say?”
I was irritated by how Karl Ove stood just outside the circle, smoking. I shone my flashlight on him, his face.
“Why do you keep coming back to your childhood,” I asked, “still hoping for new evidence? Why keep writing about your father? I think he’s your ghost story.”
Karl Ove didn’t reply. The last log in the fire collapsed with a whump, like an old dog settling down for the night.
“Anyway,” I said, “that’s the end of chapter one. To be continued tomorrow night.”
Leonard propped his branch against a tree, like a pool cue. “I think I’ll hit the sack now. Today was a great gift, everyone. Sleep tight.”
“Good night, Leonard,” we all said.
He swept the beam of his powerful flashlight across the path as he made his way to his tent.
“I’m not tired yet,” said Shell. “Stay up with us, Rose.”
Taylor pulled a pair of socks on her hands to keep them warm.
“Isn’t there supposed to be a moon?”
Karl Ove was a dark shape outside the firelight, drawing on his cigarette until the tip glowed red. Over by his tent Leonard poked the silvery column of his light out across the surface of the lake.
“I have another story,” Karl Ove said, moving in closer. But I put a hand on his sleeve.
“Shh! Look out there.”
Leonard’s light had found a low, dark object on the water, rocking. A canoe, it appeared, but with something in it that rose above the line of the gunwales.
“Yoo-hoo,” called out brave Taylor. “We’re over here!”
“It’s just drifting, there’s no one in it,” said Karl Ove.
“It’s Tom Thomson,” Shell whispered.
Leonard came back to the fire, his sleeping bag draped around his shoulders.
“There appears to be a boat making its way towards us,” he said softly, “with something, or someone, in it.”
I went down to the water’s edge with my light, pushing aside a superstitious thought that I had conjured up this floating coffin with my story.
Karl Ove came down and put his arm around me.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “It’s probably just my dad again.”
I punched his shoulder. Everyone giggled nervously.
The canoe was dark green, and appeared to be carrying a small tree in the bow; we could make out two raised arms, or forked branches. Our flashlights were all trained on the cargo like klieg lights at a movie premiere. Then I let out my breath.
“I think those are antlers,” I said. “Deer antlers.”
I went and dug out the coil of nylon rope we had packed, in case the canoes capsized. After a few throws the yellow rope snagged on the antlers. It took four of us to pull the boat up onto the lip of the shore.
Lying in it was half the carcass of a deer, skinned, butchered, and dressed. The deer’s ribs had the same graceful curve as the ribs of the canoe. The antlers had been hacked off and stuffed into the V of the bow as a sort of grim hood ornament. A long rope trailed from the stern.
No one wanted to go closer.
“A hunter must have been getting ready to go home, then decided to wait till morning,” I said. “Or maybe he was too drunk, and tied the canoe up carelessly.”
“But all that blood,” said Shell. “With the bears. Maybe he was … interrupted.”
“I hope he was,” said Karl Ove. His eyes glistened with tears.
“What a beauty he must have been,” murmured Leonard. The antlers had eight points, although the left branch was smaller and oddly twisted.
“He’s a buck, at least three years old, and one hind leg was injured,” declared Karl Ove.
“How do you know that?”
“When I was driving through Maine to write about America, I stopped at a bar and had a few beers with a hunter. He told me everything about antlers. The velvet that covers them in spring also feeds them. They grow fast, up to a half inch a day. And if the deer injures a hind leg, that can cause the antlers on the opposite side of the body to grow in strange ways, like this one.”
Amazing. The deer’s body was telling its own story.
Leonard put his hands together over his heart and bowed to the animal. Taylor kept the cap on her camera. Small waves at the shore’s edge lifted the stern of the green canoe and banged it against the rocks. The smell of salty blood was strong.
“Karl and I will take him across the lake,” I said.
“We’ll get the food pack up in a tree,” said Shell.
I untangled the rope from the antlers so we could use it to tow the boat behind us. Karl Ove flipped our canoe upright, then tilted it gently into the water. The opposite shore was an inky, unseen horizon a half a kilometer away and we began paddling toward it. Whenever my hand touched the surface of the lake, the water felt surprisingly warm, almost swimmable. It was hard to keep the tow rope taut; the deer canoe kept lurching sideways, as if trying to escape. Karl Ove looked behind us to make sure the campfire was still burning. We needed a point of reference on this moonless night.
Shell’s low murmur and Taylor’s laughter carried clearly across the water, and then dropped away until there was nothing but the sound of our paddles, dipping in, lifting out. Behind us the canoe lunged forward, then tugged at us, like a dog not used to the leash. I was enjoying our companionable silence when Karl Ove spoke.
“Death is always ruining things,” he said with a sort of laugh. “Don’t you think?”
“I don’t know, I feel strangely at home out here in the blackness, dragging a body towards a shore we can’t see. Something about it seems familiar.”
“Let’s rest a moment.”
Karl Ove lit two cigarettes and handed me one.
“You’re bad for me,” I said, inhaling. “This is my last.”
We drifted as a current of air pushed us in the right direction. I lay back with my head on the V of the stern. Above us wheeled a skyful of stars, little corpses of ancient light.
“It was not my place to say those things about your work, Rose,” he said. “I meant them as encouragement but I went about it stupidly.”
“That’s all right. I shouldn’t have accused you of hurting people.”
“I have, though. It weighs on me.”
“I only took you on because I feel I know you, from reading your books. And that you know me. Even though we’re still strangers.”
“I long to be known like that—not famous, but understood, with all my sins intact. When I am out in the world I feel obscured by a thousand small lies.” He tossed his cigarette into the lake. “And that is why I torture myself with this business of writing.”
“So will you put our poor slaughtered deer in your story?”
“Oh no, no one would believe it. Too novelistic.” He did a figure eight with his paddle to correct the slow spin of our bow. He was perfectly at home on the water now.
“And you?” he asked. “What will you do next?”
“I’m free as a bird,” I said, realizing with a jolt that this was true. “So I plan to act accordingly. I’ll take some time to rethink my novel.” I blew smoke his way. “Make it less mysterious.”
“Will you write about this? About us?”
“I might. If that’s all right.”
“Some of your own blood has to be on the page or it’s just an exercise.”
“But there’s no need for a bloodbath,” I said, which made him laugh.
We resumed paddling. The other shore was close now, a silhouette blotting out the stars at the bottom of the sky. The two of us surged forward. I felt boundlessly capable in that moment, equipped to tackle the shapelessness of my future. Although I didn’t know what lay in store, the important thing was to keep moving toward it, even in darkness.
With some effort we hauled the boat onto a point where it would be visible if the hunters came looking for it the next day. The metal keel made an awful sound as it scraped across the granite. I retrieved the tow rope, coiling it neatly, and we lost no time stepping back into the red canoe. And then we were on the water, weightless.
“Hello,” came Leonard’s voice from across the lake, “here we are.”