Your Watery Watcher

Echo Lake, Vermont.

She died after slipping through a fissure in the ice. Within seconds, she was lodged in between two slabs, vice-like, as the weight of the lake, trembling, with hot shrieks bouncing from one side to the other in (mocking, or was it empathetic) imitation of her silvery, staccato yelps of pain, coerced her body into its watery mill. If it weren’t for her mind, formaldehyde-soaked, drenched in the numbness of potential motherhood, she would have given signs of struggle. It wasn’t so. She was well aware of the pimple that had popped on her insides when her husband slugged a meteoric reproach into her ripe bowl. A tugging and stabbing, a slipping and twisting that lay in situ in her core numbed the grinding of the ice sheets snagging her midriff; a human cork, caught between temporary mineral and permanent liquid light. Stringy veins of snow, caused by granite gusts of wind, stretched down the arm of the lake, into the cradle of the exposed wrist of the broken ice in which she was pinned. Above her, her director, her husband, battling the hooks and jabs of the wind, held out a wretched hand, just out of reach; everyone knows a director should never cross the line between reality and pretence. 

As she struggled for purchase on the ice, he said it was all a ‘bad, bad dream’ and proceeded to eulogise about the lake and its idiosyncrasies, as if it were bedtime nonfiction, not the death of his wife.

‘A lake thinks with its currents. From inlet to outlet, it fires off pulses of nutrient-rich material aiding a continual flow of acuity. It’s always thinking as it rushes and slows, it twists around submerged obstacles; the lake is contained in the creatures it hosts, and that’s why lakes are all about excogitation: what keeps it alive is its careful seasonal planning. Unlike the sea and its gibberish, with its salt and its savoury monuments, a lake takes its personality from its mangled, fibrous depths, where on its silty diaphragm, bellowing shadows and contiguous creatures parabolise its evolution. Don’t be fooled, a lake is on no one's side.    

‘The decomposition of matter in the humid months provides it with feed for all living organisms, and thus, with the symbiosis of the currents, the creatures, the wind, and broken down matter, the lake thinks. It holds opinions, beliefs, creates, remembers, but without these things, its shores would become fetid, its depths, brain dead, rotten.’ The lake cracked, and she clawed at the ice again. ‘Do you want my help?’ 

‘Burn in hell,’ she said.

‘No chance of that happening around here,’ he said, outlining the frozen shores of the lake with a slow, directive finger. ‘You’ll never get out alive.’

‘I don’t intend to,’ she snarled, spitting out a berry of blood onto his goloshes. 

The ice slab anchoring her in place on the small of her back slipped, made a tectonic shift and slid under her, yanking on her fur coat, dragging her back so that only her shoulders and arms were above the water.

‘Nothing will ever restore my trust in you,’ he said, placing a foot on the back slab, rocking it to test its buoyancy.

Behind them, the mountain conceded its last hue of winter sun, and the glacial winds came screaming down the gorges, vanishing into the forest's slow-brewing decoction of bark and breath. Someone was watching. A charcoal, dusty shadow. On the shore. 

That eeriness you sense when you’re at a lake, the weight of liquid sight, the cloak of ominous omniscience pressing into your back, is because there is always someone, something watching. 

She stretched out an arm, then slipped back.

‘In the summer, I came to sting you, to let you know life was to be an unfettered howl, chaotically passionate. In the winter, I let you be a snow drift, piled up against a rock, thaw, I think not. It was the middle months that change became a pickled experiment; if only I’d let you change me. If only I’d let you dazzle me! The natural world is far more dazzling than the love of a woman; the love of a woman is indeed futile, a menial, perfunctory love that, in its peculiar gossage, pretends to be committed.’

A third ice slab, which had broken off, slammed into her side, and she let out a guttural shriek, staining the ice.

‘With my assiduous knowledge of the local flora and fauna,’ he went on, ‘I could have either poisoned you, or elevated you. I did nothing but devote myself to you. There was no herb or fungi I could ingest enough that would enhance my devotion. Can you not see how much love I had for you? The building blocks of devotion are not formed solely by duty, nor love, but from the seasonal rejuvenation of limerence.’

Someone was watching. You were watching. Always watching from the shore. A violent shimmer of pine branches led to a hollow crack, and her ribs snapped. A rib-tip, milky with strawberry entrails, poked through her sodden blouse. Bone idle eyes, purple lips, and a vein on her forehead, which put up the most resistance, eventually sneezed, blowing out and collapsing her instruments. Salted and peppered, the ice, as it shoved her lower, shaved a ‘bless you’ out of its last breaths.

‘One last thing… It’s fitting, you know, this death, your death stuff, that it’s on the lake. Did you know that female waterborne flies deposit their eggs in the lake and then die? So, it wasn’t in vain… all this.’ Victor pulled up his coat collar around his exposed neck and stepped back. The wind was cackling away, and her ribs were crackling.       

‘You were never the love of my life,’ were the last words produced from one last biting exhalation.

The sparkling third act of Death ached for attention. This was his final judgement, not hers, and with that, she slipped down into the obsidian water with a child yet to be born, doubly crushed. The slabs came together as praying hands, glued tight through faithful friction, an answered prayer to last until the spring returned. Matter had begun its routine of breaking them down into tiny, spirant, decomposing threads of flesh and marbly jelly, only the voices trailed behind like some ghoulish afterthought. The bodily seltzer, an offering to the future history of the lake.

As young lovers, they had moved to the there on a whim, to escape society’s persistent perversions, disowning friends and family, setting up home in a small log cabin a stone’s throw from the water. Having the courage to establish life in remote wilderness and survive, the two craved the insolation of ardour and, eventually, the precociousness of simplicity. The nearest hamlet was one day’s walk, and it was to this settlement they would pick up supplies to last for one month. Out by the lake, time misbehaved, and like the seasons, it stretched, then shrank, and with its movements would bring distinctive aromas and stenches. Their love was a collusion with nature. It was pure, but ephemeral, unpredictable, but contingent, and with that, they kept their relationship cultivated. The lure of the natural world was too strong a pull, and he would leave for days, trekking through the forest, through gully, and by the lakeshore, while she stayed put, yearning for Victor’s return. You see, that’s how he wanted it - he wanted her all for himself, but at an arm’s length. He would work on his research, she would work on herself, and it was to these ends that they approached survival.

Despite his cruel and haughty farewell, Victor had not been prepared for the howling loneliness that would strip him naked and play with him like a gulag guard. He gave himself nine days to lament. His self-circumcision was painless due to the amount of vodka he had drunk before the incisive moment. His axis of meaning had become devoid of function. Always resenting that demeaning little piece of flappy skin, like a manatee’s silly snout protected by folds in its neck, his wife would give him reason to keep it, for moments like this. He covered it in pine resin and set it alight, just as she did to his life’s work of discovering and documenting unique species endemic in and around the lake.

Tucked under an oil lamp on the table in their gloomy log hermitage, she’d left a note before packing up her possessions in a deer chamois and forsaking him for good by crossing the frozen lake.

I wish I had never met you. That’s all. God bless you, maybe. Just maybe. From your ex-wife.

Dense smoke, chugging out of the cabin, greeted him on his return from a winter forage as words written on ash settled on the snow. His words. Fifteen years of unpublished research and fine illustrations of feather duster worms, of midges that lived at depths of 1300m, and of bark beetles, all returned to nature in an infernal premeditation. For those fifteen years, she had burrowed herself into snarling winters and predaceous summers only for the sake of love and devotion, notions they promised they could subsist on. It was not enough. Their isolation could not survive without reproduction.  

When the nymphs emerged from the lake’s surface in the summer, she would be the most fertile. There was something about the sight of the flies puncturing the water’s gluey underbelly, into the disembodied air, gobbled up by beaks, jaws and volatile vacuums, that got her delivering globules of fecundity on the forest floor. 

But he would not give her a child. He would let her mulch for fear of losing her to a leeching offspring, sucking on her time, her labour, her affection. Yet, he was aware that as long as she was fiercely fertile, she would be nonsensically affectionate; the trick was to avoid satisfying her to completion; keep her longing, keep her needing him. This way, even in times of resentment, he’d be her only hope and refuge. 

But there was always someone watching. Always someone willing to satisfy her.

'The nymphs have hatched. So, while you were out, I lay with a bear, Victor. I laid with its family, and they shared me around. I’m now expecting.’

There were fresh gouges on the bedpost, and tufts of needle-like fur caught between the fingers of splinters that had been pulled back in the lovemaking. 

‘You did nothing of the sort. Take the bear skin off. Put it back by the fire. You’re alone, look around you. Look! I’m all you need here.’

The tenth day after her death was more painful than the rest, as on this day, he had become truly human, and the suffering of loss, not for her, but for his research, had petrified all that he knew about the world. The bridge between the natural and human realm is the simple ritual of placing one letter next to another letter, enshrining the sublunary in the architecture of language and history, and allowing it to mature. But in the burning of his books, she had sent form and formation back into the foggy vegetation. It was a matter of hours from when he came back to see his body of work burning, to his wife’s body disappearing. 

Keeping up with morality seemed useless out there; for what construction of morality would ever lead to him being a perfect, ideal human if he had no reason to be one anymore? To err is to be moral, he would think. A moral life was only useful when others surrounded him, so to err had no use. Even in his isolation, someone was always watching, and that was his biggest failure: that he could never go unseen.   

Nature was ready to circumcise him. It threw everything it possibly could at him, including a brown bear in the wrong time zone and an off-course drunkard. Both tried to stab him in their own ways: one with the bestial innerancy of instinct, the other with the dull shank of imprecise insults. Boisterous, obnoxious winds, with their hulking depositories of ice, failed to preserve his coagulated body. Even the bruised canopy of the firs slung a heavy, clotted darkness over the cabin, a chokehold of absence, deficient in juxtaposition. 

Memory was a fever, a sensational species, in which he took to documenting:  ‘I got my fever, like an unwanted gift, on a Sunday night. I have no confidence in which day it is now. I’ve lain on my bed, incapacitated, decapitated from any mental cognition, and the fever, my damn fever (as if it’s mine!)... The internal, infernal phosphorus that has an incredible knack for promoting a sense of intense reckoning will not subside. Fevers are the closest one can get to an unbecoming human. When the unconscious tries to wake you up, it shakes the rafters of your body and edges out the termites, leaving the bare superstructure of your soul.

‘You’re going to die. You will. You’ll die eventually, not from fever, but from what you find out about yourself. Those untruths keep your cogs moving, that you, the repugnant lattice work of learned morality, face the simplest purpose in life: to survive, yet, with madrigals of sufferance, the celestial ordinances of morality, in high definition, play out my past. 

‘If you ask me about the incriminating evidence of an individual suffering with what we may call ‘parochial guilt’, then my fever represents a transmutation of evil becoming good. The voyeurist, flashing to themselves, about themselves, volunteers a daring proposition to reveal what they didn’t know about themselves. 

‘I let her die, and that says something about my psychological disposition. When I could have saved her, I let her die. For what audience? There always has to be an audience for death; otherwise, what’s the point?’ 

Over two weeks, Victor, in his sibilant, rhyming fever, suffered alone. Atrophy received its invitation and got to work on him as, supine in prickly anguish, Victor tore up every memory from the last fifteen years. Then, with smears of palsy licking up and down his thighs, up to his shoulders, via a stabbing rebuke in the kidneys,  he succumbed to the elevation and took his last breath. 

The lake, a union of frozen platelets, creaked and crushed; stillness, which encased the husk of the partially burnt down cabin, crackled with metamorphic, throaty dormancy. 

One of Victor’s newly discovered species, the Milkfly, a rare specimen that hatched only in the depths of winter through fractures in the ice sheet, landed on his algae-green cheek. It stepped into his pores as if putting on shoes and waited to molt. And then, as if he’d read a stage direction in the wrong order, Victor awoke. The bear skin underneath him shivered, wriggling to free itself of Victor’s emaciated form, until its owner, a raw, Botticellian-pink skinned bear, appeared in the charred doorway; the pelt relaxed and exhaled. 

Victor’s breathing was slow and granulated. The little life he had left was fixed on the back of his throat like a toxic mushroom. While on his back, looking beyond the burnt-out roof and into the ashen fermement, the trees bent over, leaning into the husk of the cabin, prodding his stomach. Behind the bear came two elks, a lynx, a flock of fermented birds, fomenting ancient gases from the earth and water, and an inexact seal. The lake cracked, and the Milkfly shed its skin. It lake discharged a second time and bark flaked around him. The animals drew closer, squeezing through the windows and doorway, and a swarm of Milkflies settled on Victor’s chest. The lake cracked, and through a weave of pine limbs slinked a sedimentary shadow, arching over his body in morbid curiosity, speaking the languages of the lake, a rousing polyphony of applause stirring from an audience always willing to watch.