Don't I Know You? (28 page)

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.”