Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [45]
I pressed my fingers into my eyes, hard, to make the pool of blackness ringed with violent colour. Release, red spreading back in, abrupt as pain. The secret had come clear, it had never been a secret, I’d made it one, that was easier. My eyes came open, I began to arrange.
I thought, I suppose I knew it from the beginning, I shouldn’t have tried to find out, it’s killed him. I had the proof now, indisputable, of sanity and therefore of death. Relief, grief, I must have felt one or the other. A blank, a disappointment: crazy people can come back, from wherever they go to take refuge, but dead people can’t, they are prohibited. I tried to recall him, picture his face, the way he’d been when he was alive, I found I couldn’t; all I could see was the cards he used to hold up, testing us: 3×9 =? He was as absent now as a number, a zero, the question mark in place of the missing answer. Unknown quantity. His way. Everything had to be measured.
I was staring down at the drawings, they were framed by my two arms lain parallel on the table. I began to notice them again. There was a gap, something not accounted for, something left over.
I spread the first six pages out on the table and studied them, using what they called my intelligence, it shortcircuits those other things. The notes and numbers were apparently a location code, it was like a puzzle he’d left for me to solve, an arithmetic problem; he taught us arithmetic, our mother taught us to read and write. Geometry, the first thing I learned was how to draw flowers with compasses, they were like acid patterns. Once they thought you could see God that way but all I saw was landscapes and geometrical shapes; which would be the same thing if you believed God was a mountain or a circle. He said Jesus was a historical figure and God was a superstition, and a superstition was a thing that didn’t exist. If you tell your children God doesn’t exist they will be forced to believe you are the god, but what happens when they find out you are human after all, you have to grow old and die? Resurrection is like plants, Jesus Christ is risen today they sang at Sunday School, celebrating the daffodils; but people are not onions, as he so reasonably pointed out, they stay under.
The numbers were a system, a game; I would play it with him, it would make him seem less dead. I lined up the pages and compared the notes, carefully as a jeweller.
On one of the drawings, another antlered figure, I finally spotted the key: a name I recognized, White Birch Lake where we went bass fishing, it was connected to the main lake by a portage. I went into David’s and Anna’s room where the map of the district was tacked to the wall. Marked on a point of land was a tiny red x and a number, identical with the number on the drawing. The printed name was different, Lac des Verges Blanches, the government had been translating all the English names into French ones, though the Indian names remained the same. Scattered here and there were other xs, like a treasure map.
I wanted to go there and verify, match the drawing with reality; that way I’d be sure I’d followed the rules and done it right. I could disguise it as a fishing trip, David hadn’t caught anything since his first attempt, though he’d been trying. We’d have time to go there and get back with two days to spare.
I heard Anna’s voice approaching, singing, the words trailing off as her breath gave out climbing the steps. I went back to the main room.
“Hi,” she said, “do I look burnt?”
She was pink now, parboiled, white showing around the orange edges of her suit, neck dividing body colour from applied face colour. “A little,” I said.
“Listen,” she said, her voice shifting into concern, “what’s wrong with Joe? I was down on the dock with him and he didn’t say one word.”
“He doesn’t talk much,” I said.
“I know, but this was different. He was just lying there.” She