Maybe he joined her for a while. Maybe he didn't. At one point he felt an underwater rush in his ears. At another point he found himself alone on the dock, cold and naked, watching the stars.
And then later still he woke up in bed. A soft pinkish light played against the curtains. For a few seconds he studied the effects of dawn, the pale ripplings and gleamings. He reached out for Kathy, who wasn't there, then hugged his pillow and returned to the bottoms.
28. How He Went Away
Three miles out, in open lake, Wade turned straight north. Dawn came up thin and cold.
By seven in the morning he was well beyond Buckete Island, moving at fifteen knots, nothing ahead but the wilds. On occasion he found himself scanning the lake, throttling down as he passed bleak islands of rock and pine. Hopeless, he realized. Kathy was not to be found. It was finished, obviously, and he had to take consolation in the fine line between biology and spirit.
Around mid-morning he crossed over into Canadian waters and continued north through a chain of thickly wooded islands. The Chris-Craft bounced along nicely: an expensive wheel-steered vessel, trim and fast. At moderate speeds, Wade estimated, the topped-off tanks gave him a two-hundred-mile cruising range. The emergency gas cans might tack on another fifty. Which was sufficient. Emergencies belonged to an earlier period. Now it was down to essentials. He leaned back, calm and relaxed, letting his thoughts mix with the overall flow of things, the sweeps of timber, the waves and water. Not so bad. Not at all. The day had turned mostly sunny, not warm but comfortable, and to the west little puffs of cloud animated a pleasant autumn sky. Twice he spotted deserted fishing cabins along the shoreline, but after an hour the forests thickened and the country went shaggy and unbroken. He used his new plastic compass to hold a bearing due north.
Very simple, really.
Lost was his forte. A lifelong pursuit.
It was close to noon when he moved into a series of channels that twisted capriciously through the wilderness. He swung to the northeast, where the woods looked deepest and most inviting, the channels splitting off and multiplying and then multiplying again. At one juncture he found himself thinking aloud. Nothing sensible. A little jingle in his head: East is east and lost is lost ... He told himself to shut up. Don't lose it, he thought—not that, not yet—but soon he was singing against the throb of the engine: You're much too good to be truuue ... Later, other songs came to mind, which he voiced to the afternoon, and for a considerable expanse of time he had the sensation of being adrift on a sea of glass, reflections everywhere, backward and forward. At times he found himself speaking to Kathy as if she were in an adjoining room, some secret hidey-hole just behind the mirrors. He told her everything he could tell about what had happened at Thuan Yen. The pastel sunlight. The machine-gun wind that seemed to pick him up and blow him from spot to spot. "Oh, Kath," he said quietly, "sweet lost Kathleen." The only explicable thing, he decided, was how thoroughly inexplicable it all was. Secrets in general, depravity in particular. He did not consider himself an evil man. For as long as he could remember he had aspired to a condition of virtue—for himself, for the world—yet at some point he'd caught a terrible infection that was beyond purging or antidote. He didn't know the name for it. Simple befuddlement, maybe. Moral disunity. A lost soul. Even now, as he looked out across the glassy lake, Wade felt an estrangement from the actuality of the world, its basic nowness, and in the end all he could conjure up was an image of illusion itself, pure reflection, a head full of mirrors. He laughed and thought aloud, Won't you trust in me pleeease, then paused to appraise the woods and water. Very natural. White-caps and plant life. Here was a region that bore resemblance to the contours of his own little repository of a soul, the tangle, the overall disarray, qualities icy and wild. Yes, and all the angles at play. This angle, that angle. Was he a monster? Well? he wondered, but it was inconclusive. A while later he yelled, "Hey, Kath!"
Not a monster, he thought. Certainly not. He was Sorcerer.
"Kath!" he yelled.
Some vacant time passed, an hour or more, and when he refocused, Wade saw that the sun had dropped off well to the west. Four-thirty, he guessed. There were clouds now, bloated and purply black, the sky pressing down hard. He smelled winter. Not snow, but the principle of snow—the physics. For a few moments he felt something approaching terror. If the object were survival, which it was not, he would now turn tail and put the throttle on flat-out flee and make a run for whatever was left of his life.
Instead, he chuckled.
"Dear me," he said, and turned in toward a low island a quarter mile to the east.
It was snowing by the time he'd made camp for the night. Nothing elaborate. A pair of pines. A blanket and a fire. He ate a sandwich, not tasting much, then pulled out the note Claude had left him and read it through by firelight. A grand old gentleman. Allegiant in an epoch of shifting loyalties.
"Whether you're nuts or not, I don't know," Claude had scrawled, "but I can honestly say that I don't blame you for nothing. Understand me? Not for nothing. The choices funnel down and you go where the funnel goes. No matter what, you were in for a lynching. People make assumptions and pretty soon the assumptions turn into fact and there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Anyhow, I've got this theory. I figure what happened was real-real simple. Your wife got herself lost. The end. Period. Nothing else. That's all anybody knows and the rest is bullshit. Am I right?"
Wade smiled.
He looked up at the sky, almost nodding, but there was no point in it. Points were hard to come by. He fortified himself with vodka and finished reading.
"A couple of practical things. You got a radio on board. It's set to the right frequency, just switch the fucker on and talk. I stuck the chart book under the rear seat—Canada's that hunk of dry land up at the top of most pages. Recommend it highly. I'm not saying you should change your mind, even if you know what your mind is, but at least there's plenty of space up there to evaporate. It's worth some thought. Luck to you. Love."
Wade read the letter through again, then lay back and watched the snow slanting across the yellow firelight. The old man was mostly right. Kathy was gone, everything else was guesswork. Probably an accident. Or lost out here. Something simple. For sure—almost for sure. Except it didn't matter much. He was responsible for the misery in their lives, the betrayals and deceit, the manipulations of truth that had sub stituted for simple love. He was Sorcerer. He was guilty of that, and always would be.
Just after midnight Wade woke to a heavy rain. He was drenched and cold. For the rest of the night he huddled under the pair of leaky pines, sometimes dozing, sometimes staring out at the dark. Here, Wade realized, he had come up against a few firm truths. The wet. The cold. His quixotic little war with the universe seemed pitiful indeed.
"Well, Kath?" he said.
Later he said, "Well?"
His tone was intimate, open to conversation, but nothing returned to him.
At first light he continued north. The rain had become fog, which was presently replaced by scattered flurries and a hard westerly wind. By nine o'clock the flurries were dense snow. The wind was light, the temperature not far above freezing. Visibility, he reminded himself, was not a problem. All morning he cruised at random through a maze of wide channels, zigzagging, no objective except to lose himself and stay lost. The snow helped. Once, in the early afternoon, he found himself surrounded by several sparkling white islands. The view was stark and beautiful. A Christmas card, he thought. Happy holidays. Despite everything, his mood was curiously festive, his morale high, and it occurred to him that happiness itself was subject to the laws of relativity. He took out his bottle and sang "I'll Be Home for Christmas," then other carols, and as he continued north the appropriate images began to take shape before him—wreaths and eggnog and stuffed stockings and big bowls of oyster stew. "Hey, Kath," he said. He waited, then yelled "Kath!"
Late in the day he switched on the radio. He listened for a moment and then switch
ed it off again.
The world was elsewhere. All static.
And then a zone of white time went by, a mind blizzard, long drifting sweeps of this and that. He was conscious of the cold and little else. Sometimes he was Sorcerer, sometimes he wasn't. His grip on the physical world had loosened. Grip, too, was relative. At one point he heard himself weeping, then later he was back at Thuan Yen, clawing at the sunlight.
Toward dark he turned into a small sheltered bay and dropped anchor twenty yards offshore. He measured out two inches of vodka, drank it down, then tried the radio again. This time Claude's voice came back at him. "Read you weak-weak," the old man said. "Sounds like Alaska. Over."
Wade could think of nothing to say.
"You there?"
"Where?" Wade said.
"Yeah, very comic." Claude's voice came through frail and sickly. "Just so you know, Lux and company are probably monitoring this, so if you don't want nobody to ... See what I mean?"
"Crystal clear."
"You're okay?"
"Snug as a bug. Lost as can be."
"You found the chart book?"
"I did," Wade said, though he hadn't looked for it. "I'm grateful. Thanks."
The old man snorted. There was some static before his voice returned. "... ripped up every board, right now they're prying off the shingles. Search and destroy. Vinny's down on his hands and knees with the sniffer dogs. Ain't found zero."
"They won't," Wade said.
"For sure."
"I appreciate that too. Listen, I didn't hurt her."
"Now there's a fact."
"I didn't."
Claude laughed. "Better late than never. I'll keep it between you and me." The airwaves seemed heavy with sentiment. "You read my little note? Winnipeg's not such a bad place. Calgary, I don't know."
"Thanks again."
"A possibility, don't you think?"
Wade was silent.
"Yeah, well," Claude said. "Try not to fuck up my boat."
Wade turned off the radio and sat still for a while. The afternoon had passed into dark. He took nourishment from his bottle and then found a screwdriver and spent ten minutes disconnecting the radio's twin speakers. Is there sound, he wondered, without reception? Do you hear the shot that gets you? How big, in fact, was the Big Bang? Do our pathetic earthly squeals fall upon deaf ears? Is silence golden or common stone?
He turned off the boat's running lights. In the twilight he ate half a sandwich, wrapped himself in a blanket, and curled up on the front seat with the vodka and his anthology of bad dreams.
The night passed slow and cold, with intermittent snow, and on occasion Wade was compelled to remind himself that misery was in part the point. Except the point sometimes eluded him. Current circumstances, he decided, were not explicable to the likes of a psychiatrist or clergyman.
The point?
To join her in whatever ways were possible.
To feel what she felt.
To harm himself? Certainly not. And yet harm was also relative. Happiness and harm. Clear as a bell, was it not? Had he been happy? Had he harmed her?
Well, no, but yes.
And then soon other thoughts intruded. If time and space were in fact entwined along the loop of relativity, how then could one ever reach a point of no return? Were not all such points contrivance? Therefore meaningless? So, again, what was the point?
Not to return.
Ipso facto, he reasoned.
Yet he could not stop returning. All night long he revisited the village of Thuan Yen, always with a fresh eye, witness to the tumblings and spinnings of those who had reached their fictitious point of no return. Relatively speaking, he decided, these frazzle-eyed citizens were never quite dead, otherwise they would surely stop dying. Same-same for his father. Proof of the loop. The fucker kept hanging himself. Over and over, the bastard would offer shitty counsel at the dinner table—"Stop stuffing it in"—and then he'd slip out to the garage and climb aboard a garbage can and leap out into endless returning, his neck snapped by no point in particular, all points unknown.
Late in the night Wade turned on the radio and broadcast these thoughts to the wee-hour ethers.
Emboldened with vodka, he pooh-poohed the notion of human choice. A scam, he declared. Much overrated. "At what point," he asked, "does one decide on rafters and a rope? Answer: No points to be had. There is merely what happened and what is now happening and what will one day happen. Do we choose sleep? Hell no and bullshit—we fall. We give ourselves over to possibility, to whim and fancy, to the bed, the pillow, the tiny white tablet. And these choose for us. Gravity has a hand. Bear in mind trapdoors. We fall in love, yes? Tumble, in fact. Is it choice? Enough said."
Once or twice his voice failed. He lay under an inch of snow, mike in hand, remarking to the airwaves on how hard and well he had fallen. Few fell farther.
Senator Sorcerer.
High ambition, eternal love.
"Did I choose this life of illusion? Don't be mad. My bed was made, I just lied in it."
He slept a brief numb sleep, waking to the danger of frostbite. It was a little past three in the morning when he switched on the radio. "Sinners and spinners, welcome back, you're tuned to WFIB, station of the stars, and we're socked in here at Storm Central on this treacherous Sunday morning. Traffic's light, roads are slick." He sneezed and wiped his nose. "As promised—and we deliver—here's our up-to-date list of closings. No services at Disciples of the Lost Shepherd. No mass anywhere, no velocity. Certainly no way out. Other cancellations to follow."
As dawn broke he was conducting a one-man talk show. The interview was going well. "My love, my life. The purpose of all deceit. She is what I had. Have I yet discussed her way of chasing me with a squirt gun? She did indeed. With a squirt gun. 'Squirt, squirt!' she'd cry. During a party once—this was years ago—we drove home and made Yum-Yum against the refrigerator and took a delicious little bubble bath and then drove back to the party in time for the speeches. Senatorial behavior this was not. It was her way. Did I tumble in love? I did. Did I remain in love? Oh, yes. Remember: a squirt gun. The girl of my dreams. Her skin, her soul. So in this time of desolation, let us strive to be honest—would you not tell a fib or two?"
He went off the air at six-thirty.
His fingers were wooden.
It took twenty minutes to remove the radio from its mounting. He dropped it overboard. He fired up the twin Johnsons and swung north into Lake of the Woods.
29. The Nature of the Angle
It is in the nature of the angle that starlight bends upon the surface of the lake.
The angle makes the dream.
An owl hoots. A deer comes to drink in the topmost branches of a pine. From the bottom of the lake, eyes wide open, Kathy Wade watches the fish fly up to swim in the land of sky blue waters, where they are pinned like moths to the morning moon.
On a map of Minnesota, the Northwest Angle juts like a thumb into the smooth Canadian underbelly at the 49th parallel. A geographical orphan, stranded by a mapmaker's error, the Angle represents the northernmost point in the lower 48 states, a remote spit of woods and water surrounded on three sides by Canada. To the west is Manitoba; to the north and east lie the great dense forests of Ontario; to the south is the U.S. mainland. This is wilderness. Forty miles wide, seventy miles north to south. Gorgeous country, yes, but full of ghosts. A lone hawk circles in hunt. A mouse lies paralyzed in the blooded darkness. And in the deep unbroken solitude, age to age, Lake of the Woods gazes back on itself like a great liquid eye. Nothing adds or subtracts. Everything is present, everything is missing. Three middle-aged fishermen vanished here in 1941; two duck hunters lost their way in 1958, never to find it again, never to be found. Thickly timbered, almost entirely uninhabited, the Angle tends toward infinity. Growth becomes rot, which becomes growth again, and repetition itself is in the nature of the angle.
The history here is hard and simple. First the glaciers, then the water, then much late
r the Sioux and Ojibway.
The French came in 1734—men of adventure, explorers and Jesuits—converting or killing Indians, whichever seemed appropriate. Then fur traders and lumbermen and sawyers. And in 1882 the first settlers built their cabins along the southern and western shores of Lake of the Woods. A log church went up, later a granary and storehouse. A few hardy Swedes and Finns carved out their small square homesteads in the forest, but the land was never good for wheat or corn, and soon the farmers were gone and the wilderness reclaimed itself. For nearly four decades the Northwest Angle belonged once more to the mosquitoes. The Angle's border with Canada was not surveyed until 1925; until 1969 the area was accessible only by boat or float plane.
Even now, there are no highways. A single tar road runs through deep forest to the small community of Angle Inlet. The nearest city is Winnipeg, 122 miles to the west. The nearest bus station is in Roseau, 47 miles to the southwest. The nearest full-time law enforcement officer is in Baudette, the county seat, a 90-mile plane ride over Lake of the Woods.