Surfacing - Margaret Atwood [56]
“We aren’t fishing,” I said, my lips clipping the words. My arm wanted to swing the paddle sideways, blade into his head: his eyes would blossom outwards, his skull shatter like an egg.
The corners of his mouth wilted. “Oh,” he said. “Say, what part of the States are you all from? It’s hard to tell, from your accent. Fred and me guessed Ohio.”
“We’re not from the States,” I said, annoyed that he’d mistaken me for one of them.
“No kidding?” His face lit up, he’d seen a real native. “You from here?”
“Yes,” I said. “We all are.”
“So are we,” said the back one unexpectedly.
The front one held out his hand, though five feet of water separated us. “I’m from Sarnia and Fred here, my brother-in-law, is from Toronto. We thought you were Yanks, with the hair and all.”
I was furious with them, they’d disguised themselves. “What’re you doing with that flag on your boat then?” I said, my voice loud, it surprised them. The front one withdrew his hand.
“Oh that,” he said with a shrug. “I’m a Mets fan, have been for years, I always root for the underdog. Bought that when I was down there for the game, the year they won the pennant.” I looked more closely at the sticker: it wasn’t a flag at all, it was a blue and white oblong with red printing, GO METS.
David and Anna had caught up with us. “You a Mets fan?” David said. “Out of sight.” He slid his canoe in beside theirs and they shook hands.
But they’d killed the heron anyway. It doesn’t matter what country they’re from, my head said, they’re still Americans, they’re what’s in store for us, what we are turning into. They spread themselves like a virus, they get into the brain and take over the cells and the cells change from inside and the ones that have the disease can’t tell the difference. Like the late show sci-fi movies, creatures from outer space, body snatchers injecting themselves into you dispossessing your brain, their eyes blank eggshells behind the dark glasses. If you look like them and talk like them and think like them then you are them, I was saying, you speak their language, a language is everything you do.
But how did they evolve, where did the first one come from, they weren’t an invasion from another planet, they were terrestrial. How did we get bad. For us when we were small the origin was Hitler, he was the great evil, many-tentacled, ancient and indestructible as the Devil. It didn’t matter that he had shrunk to a few cinders and teeth by the time I heard about him; I was certain he was alive, he was in the comic books my brother brought home in the winters and he was in my brother’s scrapbook too, he was the swastikas on the tanks, if only he could be destroyed everyone would be saved, safe. When our father made bonfires to burn the weeds we would throw sticks into the flames and chant “Hitler’s house is burning down, My Fair Lady-O”; we knew it helped. All possible horrors were measured against him. But Hitler was gone and the thing remained; whatever it was, even then, moving away from them as they smirked and waved goodbye, I was asking Are the Americans worse than Hitler. It was like cutting up a tapeworm, the pieces grew.
We landed at the campsite and rolled up the sleeping bags and struck the tents and packed them. I covered the toilet hole and smoothed it, camouflaging it with sticks and needles. Leave no traces.
David wanted to stay and have lunch with the Americans and talk about baseball scores, but I said the wind was against us, we would need the time. I hurried them, I wanted to get away, from my own anger as well as from the friendly metal killers.
We reached the first portage at eleven. My feet moved over the rocks and mud, stepping in my own day-old footprints, backtracking; in my brain the filaments, trails reconnected and branched, we killed other people besides Hitler, before my brother went to school and learned about him and the games became war games. Earlier we would play we were animals; our parents were