Nobody’s been through the clearing where Heather’s Buick has been parked since the accident. As the days have passed, Heather has come to realize that nobody comes through the clearing for the simple reason that she is currently outside the world, and anyone who does venture this way finds themselves expelled from the dimension of ordinary people, a prisoner of the endless autumn, the yellowing trees, the damp nights accentuating the smell of decay that follows her wherever she goes.
Only the man with the gun has set foot on this bit of land, and he too is a prisoner of this interminable season — unless he’s found a gap, an exit through which he has managed to break free from the stasis. But if not, he must still be there, and close by, waiting for the weather to clear and the snow to finally fall on the forest.
Heather also wonders what is beyond the forest, perhaps a desert, a paved road, or the sea. Then a falling leaf makes her jump and she sees Ferland and McMillan’s faces again, the men whose names she’s written down so they won’t be forgotten, and the truth appears to her in its desperate bareness: beyond this forest there’s another forest, and another, and another still, ravaged by a storm that is also infinite.
The second cat — write his name: “Beauboule, Beauboule the Magnificent, Beauboule the Admirable, Beauboule the Magnificent and Adorable” — the second cat dies on Friday and the house tilts dangerously.
The Tilted House. This is what I wanted to call my next novel, once I’ve put the final touches on my most recent one. The novel would have been about the fence that needs putting back up, the hill our house stands on, the wild roses growing on both sides of the land year after year, and I would have told no other story than that of the house, of the relationship between it and its inhabitants, of P. and the cats, of me and P. and so on. Like in a movie where nothing happens but the constant rigour of days, during which we need to fix the fence, feed the birds, paint the porch, pour wine for dinner.
I would have talked about that in the book as well, about the long conversations we have over a glass of wine, discussing, depending on our mood, the fence that has to be fixed, the latest news, asking did you know this, did you see that, and about the house being built a little further down the road, the brown one with black shutters, and about the springtime ladybug invasion, the insects appearing out of the tiniest cracks as soon as the sun has passed the equinox, all these subjects inevitably leading to what we are reading, to the novels I consume with varying degrees of enthusiasm, so dull and insipid are the times, and to P.’s readings about matter, about the constant movement of things, leading us in turn to talk about the wood of the table our wine is standing on.
I’d have taken on these subjects if it hadn’t been for my walk on the 4th Line, which might have ended differently if I’d decided simply to go buy the newspaper or go and visit my old friend V. who lives on the mountain, in which case I’d have known nothing of Heather had I not met the woman earlier and experienced the ineluctable revelation of our having the same name.
Despite its title, The Tilted House would not have been a novel about imminent catastrophe, because catastrophe is always imminent. I’m thinking, among other things, of death, of the second cat, Beauboule. (Write his name.) No, it would have been a novel about the precariousness of what leans and needs to be propped up if you want it to remain standing; in summary, a novel about the angles that result from our desire to stabilize the inevitable collapse of our existence.
It would also have been about stories I might have written — this story, for instance, begun on the road to La Languette, explaining how two men, in the throes of a sudden madness, were in some way under a spell, were, in other words, victims of that other victim always referred to as “beauty,” and that has always, since the dawn of time, caused a sudden craziness to germinate in people’s minds — the futile desire to possess, destroy, or annihilate what can’t be seized.
Before we took him to the place where skin, fur, eyes, and blood are reduced, no matter the colour of the coat, to white and grey ashes (let’s not think about it too much), I needed to see and touch the second cat’s corpse one last time: Beauboule, write his name, and write it again — “Beauboule” — to ensure that he, like Schrödinger’s cat in a box, isn’t condemned to exist for all eternity in a quantum purgatory where he is both alive and dead at the same time.
I flipped through the few notes I’d taken after that walk in La Languette when two men appeared to me at the start of the logging road that runs alongside the river, two men who were about to go crazy, and would go crazy again each time a quiet moment brought incendiary images of their nightmare back to them, images of those few unreal minutes during which, obliviously, they’d been possessed by a violence they’d thought themselves incapable of, by a rage shot through with red flashes of light, of blinding desires that would launch them into the abyss of those who know they are irremediably guilty.
On the third page of the Blueline notebook I used to jot down any ideas and thoughts relating to the novel that might have been called Fall Day, my notes ended with these words: “The first will be called Ferland and the second McMillan.”
Under the carpet of the trunk of her car, where the spare wheel should have been, Heather found a gun engraved with her initials, H. W. T., and two boxes of bullets put there in case of danger. She doesn’t know what the W stands for — her father’s name, maybe; that face she remembers vaguely, its features blurring when she exposes them to too much light — but she is sure the gun belongs to him. After she’s checked that it actually works, she practises by shooting one of the Buick’s doors, where three almost straight rows of holes are now lined up.
This isn’t the first time Heather Thorne has held a gun in her hands. As soon as she grips the weapon, the smell of powder returns to her memory, and she remembers how to support its wooden butt on her shoulder to absorb some of the recoil, and remembers, too, how the breech slides when you eject a cartridge. She squeezes the trigger a final time and closes her eyes until the echoes of the shot die away. The men called Ferland and McMillan can now arrive.
At dinner, P. talked to me once again about the philosophical trend he’s interested in at the moment, a new materialism that some call object-oriented ontology, “Oh Oh Oh,” for those in the know, perhaps hearing in the acronym the legendary laugh of a Santa Claus who already understands everything about the world of objects. What I like about this particular approach is that it doesn’t consider matter to be inert and passive, but, instead, to be endowed with vital properties that render it active, productive, and creative without human intervention.
But I’m not one of those in the know, and this idea that matter can act by itself — that conscience and subjectivity may be nothing but accessories to the world — matches up with what I’ve always naïvely believed. It confirms to me that humans have no right or reason to keep themselves on their pedestal. Of course, the only things I know about this “new materialism” are what P.’s told me about it, but the fascination I feel is enough to make me believe my place in the universe is beside the wooden table, beside the tree, beside the stone that erupted from the ground during the frosty snap.
The dinner dishes are put away, the cat’s in, I’ve brushed the calico, and P. is in his bedroom reading Graham Harman’s The Quadruple Object or one of his other books about existential materiality that he’ll tell me about tomorrow. It’s bombyx time, the hour when the house sinks into shadow and I take refuge in my study to focus on an idea, a dream, an image that’s important to me or that deserves attention as the day draws to a close. It’s also the time of day that I’m alone with myself or the cat, who right now is washing himself in the armchair and taking particular care to clean away all traces of mud on his paws.
The La Languette notebook is sitting upside down on my desk, still open at page 3, the one on which I named Ferland and McMillan. This morning, after I reread the sentence about those two men, “The first will be called Ferland and the second McMillan,” I tried to relegate it below the banality of the daily tasks — fixing the fence, painting the porch, pouring wine for dinner — but it never left me for a single second. It was right there in black and white, “McMillan, Ferland,” “Ferland, McMillan,” when P. was telling me about the book that had come in the mail for him, as the cat was chasing a chipmunk, when a branch fell off the maple tree, scraping the roof on the way down, when a deer crossed through the backyard and I thought of the nature-defying hunt Ferland and McMillan would have undertaken had I not abandoned the La Languette notebook on its third page.
And moreover, it seems that the story gestating in this notebook, after sketching out the basics near a frozen river criss-crossed with animal tracks, hadn’t come to an end when I shut the notebook and put it away at the bottom of a drawer. Everything unfolded as if the tale, once it had been set in motion, had taken on a life of its own, though it might always have known a whimsical life of its own, regardless of whether or not I intervened, a life analogous to all these objects that have absolutely no need of me to exist and evolve. How else to explain why Heather is so afraid of Ferland and McMillan? The story continued without me — perhaps happened without me — and here I am back at the starting point again, needing to reconstruct the story if I am to learn what happened to Heather Thorne, Gilles Ferland, and Herb McMillan.