A Map Of Glass Part 1

A MAP OF GLa.s.s.

by Jane Urquhart.

For A.M. to the west of me And A.M. to the east of me.

They encouraged and inspired.

"By drawing a diagram, a ground plan of a house, a street plan to the location of a site, or a topographic map, one draws a 'logical two dimensional picture'. A 'logical picture' differs from a natural or realistic picture in that it rarely looks like the thing it stands for."

Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings The Collected Writings

He is an older man walking in winter. And he knows this. There is white everywhere and a peculiar, almost acidic smell that those who have pa.s.sed through childhood in a northern country a.s.sociate with new, freshly fallen snow. He recognizes the smell but cannot bring to mind the word acidic acidic. Snow Snow, walking walking, and winter winter are the best he can come up with these few words and then the word are the best he can come up with these few words and then the word older older, which is a.s.sociated with effort effort. Effort is what he is making; the effort to place one foot in front of the other, the effort required to keep moving, to keep moving toward the island. It might have been more than an hour ago that he remembered, and then forgot, the word island island. But even now, even though the word for island has gone, he believes he is walking toward a known place. He has a map of the sh.o.r.eline in his brain; its docks and rundown wooden buildings, a few trees grown in the last century. Does he have the word for trees? Sometimes yes, but mostly no. He is better with landforms. Island Island though it is gone at this moment is a word that stays longer than most; though it is gone at this moment is a word that stays longer than most; island island, peninsula peninsula, hill hill, valley valley, moraine moraine, escarpment escarpment, sh.o.r.eline sh.o.r.eline, river river, lake lake are all words that have pa.s.sed in and out of his mind in the course of the morning, along with the odd hesitant, fragmented attempt at his name, which has come to him only partially, once as what he previously would have called the article are all words that have pa.s.sed in and out of his mind in the course of the morning, along with the odd hesitant, fragmented attempt at his name, which has come to him only partially, once as what he previously would have called the article An An, then later as the conjunction And And.

Tears are sliding over the bones of his face, but these are tears caused by the dazzle of the sun in front of him, not by sorrow. Sorrow and the word for sorrow disappeared some months ago. Terror is the only emotion that visits him now, often accompanied by a transparent curtain of blinding gold, but even this is mercifully fleeting, often gone before he fully recognizes it. He does not remember the word gold gold. He does not remember that in the past he saw the real colors of the world.

He senses an unusually cluttered form in his immediate vicinity: "a fence," he once would have called it. It would have brought to mind the "path-masters" and surveyors of the past, but now he knows it only as something that has not grown out of the earth, something that is impeding his progress. As he stands bewildered near the fence, he looks at the intricate shadows of the wire created by sunlight on the snow in front of him and the word tangle tangle slips into his mind. He walks right through the tangle of the shadow, but is not able to gain pa.s.sage through the wires themselves. slips into his mind. He walks right through the tangle of the shadow, but is not able to gain pa.s.sage through the wires themselves.

He does not remember what to do with a fence, how to get over it, through it, past it, but his body makes a decision to run, to charge headlong into the confusion, and in fact this appears to have been the correct decision, for he has catapulted to the opposite side and has landed first on one shoulder, then on his stomach so that his face is in the snow. Snow, he thinks, and then, walking, which is what he must do to reach the island. He gropes for the word island island, and has almost conquered it by the time he is back on his feet. But the shape and sound of it slips away again before he can grasp the meaning, slips away and is replaced by a phrase, and the phrase is the place the water touches all around the place the water touches all around.

He knows the island was the beginning knows this in a vague way, not having the words for either island or beginning. He must get to the place that water touches all around because without the beginning he cannot understand this point in time, this walk in the snow, the breath that comes into his mouth and then departs in small clouds like the ghosts of all the words he can no longer recall. If he can arrive at this beginning, he believes he will remember what was born there, and what came into being later, and later again, and later again a theorem that might lead him to the now now of effort and snow. of effort and snow.

He begins once again to move forward. Often he b.u.mps against trees, but this does not worry him because he knows they are meant to be there, and will remain after he has pa.s.sed by them. Like an animal, he is stepping by instinct through the trees, branch by branch, the smell of the destination on the edge of his consciousness. While he is among pines, an image of an enormous raft made of timber floats through his imagination and connects somehow, for an instant, with the word gla.s.s gla.s.s, which, in turn, connects again, for just an instant, with the word ballroom ballroom. In this daydream there are men with poles standing on the raft's surface. Sometimes they are dancing. Sometimes they are kneeling, praying.

When he comes to a break in the forest, he is perplexed by an area of openness that curls off to the left and to the right. Then, quite suddenly, inexplicably, he remembers a fact about winter rivers and their tributaries, how they become frozen, covered with snow. He is momentarily aware of some of the natural things he used to think about. He enunciates, quite clearly, the syllables of the word watershed watershed, then straightens his shoulders, attentive to, and briefly suspicious of, the deep, bell-like sound of his own voice.

He walks for some time on the hard, pale river, his left sleeve now and then brushing against the arms of snow-laden pines. Eventually his body comes to know it is exhausted and takes the decision to lie on the smooth bed of ice and snow. By now the sun is gone; it is a deep winter night of great clarity and great beauty. He can see points of light that he knows are stars, and yet he no longer knows the word for stars. When he rolls his head to the left and then the right, the still, leafless branches of the trees on the bank move with him, black against a darkening sky. "Tributaries," he whispers, and the word fills him with comfort, and also with something larger, something that, were he able to recognize it, would resemble joy.

He sleeps for a long time. And when he wakens he discovers that his body has been covered by a thick, drifting blanket that is soft and cold and white. The whole unnamed world is so beautiful to him now that he is aware he has left behind vast, unremembered territories, certain faces, and a full orchestra of sounds that he has loved. With enormous difficulty he lifts his upper body from the frozen, snow-covered river and allows his arms to rest on the drift in front of him. The palms of his gloved hands are open to the sky as if he were silently requesting that the world come back to him, that the broken connections of heart and mind be mended, that language and the knowledge of a cherished place re-enter his consciousness. He remains alert for several moments, but eventually his spine relaxes and his head droops and he says, "I have lost everything."

This is his first full sentence in more than a month. These are his last spoken words. And there is n.o.body there to hear his voice, n.o.body at all.

The Revelations

At the northeastern end of Lake Ontario, toward the mouth of the wide St. Lawrence River, a number of islands begin to appear. Some of these are large enough to support several farms, a pattern of roads, perhaps a village, and are still serviced year-round by a modest flotilla of ferries that departs from and returns to Kingston Harbour. One or two minor islands are completely deserted in winter, having always been summer playgrounds rather than places of employment. There is a small, difficult-to-reach island, however, an island that a hundred years ago was busy with ships and lumber, that is now a retreat for visual artists and, for this reason, its single serviceable nineteenth-century building a sail loft has been renovated as a studio where an artist can live and work for a limited period of time, alone.

On the final leg of his journey from his Toronto studio to this sail loft, Jerome McNaughton had kept his back to the mainland view and had watched instead the skeletal trees and tilting grey buildings on the island grow in size and, behind them, the less definable evergreen forest enlarging, like a motionless black cloud, as the boat drew nearer. He had chosen the equinoctial period of late winter, early spring for his residency on the island, and he had chosen it because of the transience he a.s.sociated with the heavy sinking snow, the dripping icicles of the season. The difficulty of arriving at the place when the ice was either uncertain or breaking up altogether the enforced isolation brought about by these diffculties had attracted him as well.

He had left Kingston Harbour on a Great Lakes coast guard icebreaker, onto the deck of which he had loaded a stack of firewood, enough food to last at least two weeks, a couple of bottles of wine, some whiskey, camera equipment, and a backpack filled with winter clothing. Though it was only a mile or so from the city to the island, the men on board had thought him reckless to go out there alone in this season. They were somewhat mollified, however, when he admitted he had a cell phone. "You'll be using it soon enough," the captain had ventured. "Pretty grim out there this time of year."

Grim was what Jerome was after. Grimness, uncertainty, difficulty of access a hermit in a winter setting, the figure concentrated and small against the cold blues and whites and greys that made up the atmosphere of the landscape, the season.

Ordinarily, residencies were not permitted during the winter months, but the oofficials at the Arts Council were aware of his work, his growing reputation, knew from his Fence Line Series Fence Line Series that he preferred to work with snow. A young woman whose voice had indicated that she was impressed by his dedication had made the arrangements with the coast guard and had speeded his application through the usual channels. In a matter of days he had found himself standing on the deck of the vessel, his whole body vibrating with the hum of the engine, then shuddering with the boat's frame as the bow broke through the ice. The wind had repeatedly punched the side of his face, and there was not much warmth in the late March sun, but Jerome had preferred to remain on the deck in order to dispel the impression that there was a look about him, a scent maybe, that suggested longing, dependence. that he preferred to work with snow. A young woman whose voice had indicated that she was impressed by his dedication had made the arrangements with the coast guard and had speeded his application through the usual channels. In a matter of days he had found himself standing on the deck of the vessel, his whole body vibrating with the hum of the engine, then shuddering with the boat's frame as the bow broke through the ice. The wind had repeatedly punched the side of his face, and there was not much warmth in the late March sun, but Jerome had preferred to remain on the deck in order to dispel the impression that there was a look about him, a scent maybe, that suggested longing, dependence.

The captain was right though, he would be using the phone soon, to call Mira. He had to admit that he wanted to please the girl who had miraculously remained in his life for almost two years, that he felt concern for her and must honor her affection for him. In this way he had been able, so far, to slip easily around the disturbing truth of his own feelings, the pleasure he felt when thinking of her, and the ease with which he remained in her company. He was almost always thinking about her.

For the time being, however, he had stayed focused on his journey, intrigued by the dark, jagged path the boat had left in its wake as it moved through the ice. It would be a temporary incision, he knew, one that would likely be healed by the night's falling temperature, so he removed his camera from the case, then leaned against the railing and photographed the irregular channel. The opened water was like a slash of black paint on a stretched white canvas. Breaking the river. Breaking the river. He liked the sound of the phrase and would remember to record it in his notebook once he got settled in the loft. He liked the sound of the phrase and would remember to record it in his notebook once he got settled in the loft.

He himself would never be a painter, considered himself instead a sort of chronicler. He wanted to doc.u.ment a series of natural environments changed by the moods of the long winter. He wanted to mark the moment of metamorphosis, when something changed from what it had been in the past. He was drawn to the abandoned sc.r.a.ps of any material: peeling paint, worn surfaces, sun bleaching, rust, rot, the effects of prolonged moisture, as well as to the larger shifts of erosion and weather and season. This island was situated at the mouth of the great river that flowed out of Lake Ontario, then cut through the vast province of Quebec before losing its shape to the sea. The idea that he would be staying near the point where open water entered the estuary excited him and made the pull of the island stronger.

Now, two days after he'd arrived, as he stood near the sh.o.r.e with the camera around his neck and a snow shovel in his hand, the phrase breaking the river breaking the river was still fresh in his mind, and he had decided that it would be the t.i.tle of the first series he would complete on the island. He observed, by looking at the shards of ice along the sh.o.r.eline, that, in effect, the river was broken by the island. Arguably, this would be true even in summer in that the island would break up the current of the water that pa.s.sed on either side of it. But it was the ice that interested Jerome, the way it had heaved itself up on end and onto the sh.o.r.e like some ancient species attempting to discard an aquatic past. He plunged the handle of the shovel into a nearby drift, where it remained upright like a dark road sign. Then he walked away and began to search the surroundings for slim fallen branches of a suitable length. was still fresh in his mind, and he had decided that it would be the t.i.tle of the first series he would complete on the island. He observed, by looking at the shards of ice along the sh.o.r.eline, that, in effect, the river was broken by the island. Arguably, this would be true even in summer in that the island would break up the current of the water that pa.s.sed on either side of it. But it was the ice that interested Jerome, the way it had heaved itself up on end and onto the sh.o.r.e like some ancient species attempting to discard an aquatic past. He plunged the handle of the shovel into a nearby drift, where it remained upright like a dark road sign. Then he walked away and began to search the surroundings for slim fallen branches of a suitable length.

He would use these branches as poles to mark out the perimeter of the site, about twenty square feet comprising one scrub bush, one small hawthorn, a sizable area of deep heavy snow, and the ice along the sh.o.r.eline. Much would happen here, he knew, in the next week or so, some of it natural, some of it caused by his own activities. When the poles were in place, he began to record the site with his camera, first the whole area and then the details, reducing the depth of field in stages until he was able to capture a thorn on the small tree, a grey, cracked milkweed pod with one remaining seed attached, and the feathered end of a tall weed stalk that had somehow not succ.u.mbed to the weight of snow. He enjoyed these exercises in increasing intimacy and was warmed by the knowledge that he would be able to remain for a period of time in the vicinity of the natural references that would move him. He was also pleased by the remnants of abandoned architecture that he had seen here and there on the island, the way these weakened structures had held their ground despite time and rot and the a.s.sault of a century of winters.

After Jerome and his family had drifted down from the north in his early childhood, they had lived first in a small suburban house and then in an apartment building perched on a cluttered edge of Toronto, far away from such haphazard architecture as tool sheds, chicken coops, stables. And yet, his otherwise solemn and often angry father could be brought to levels of brief excitement in the vicinity of childhood projects such as the making of kites, go-karts, tree houses, or forts in scrub lots slated for future development. The engineer in him, Jerome now believed, that part of him he had been forced to abandon when the mine closed, could be miraculously, though falsely, shaken into wakefulness by something as simple as the placement of load-bearing lumber in a tree. His enthusiasm waned quickly, however, as did Jerome's, and these projects were almost always left unfinished, slowly decaying on the margins of the property, until Jerome returned to them later and took a renewed interest in their construction and eventual restoration. After the horror of his father's death, Jerome would call to mind the structures on the now residential lots, and he found that he would be able to recall almost exactly the way a tree house had creaked in the wind, one loose board knocking against a branch, or the way the large nails had looked in his father's palm, his mouth, and then the same nails after a year or so, exposed and rusting during the decline of winter. Once, as a young adult, Jerome had walked all over the low-rental housing development that occupied what had been the vacant land, looking for the tree near a dirty stream where one of these projects had begun to take shape. But both the stream and its culvert were gone. There was simply no way to place even the few sc.r.a.ps of memory he had retained. His first project, then, would be an attempt to rebuild what he thought of as the few good moments of his childhood and would take the form of temporary and incomplete structures playhouses of a sort that he made himself with torn plastic, discarded wood, and broken objects found in abandoned lots.

He remembered a journey he had taken a few years before on a train, a journey he was able to recall now only in terms of the images he had collected while staring out the window. Trains were vanishing from this vast cold province and were often half-empty, those who were there likely being too poor to afford the kind of cars he saw on the freeway that for part of the journey mirrored the path of the railway. He had been thinking about the early days, about vacations taken when his father was still relatively well, holidays that were spent in one provincial park or another, he and his parents crammed into a tent that his father had bought at an army surplus store. He remembered the sight of this tent, an ominous bundle strapped to the roof rack of their deteriorating car along with the bicycle that his father had given him and that he seldom rode. He also recalled the campfires his father had taught him to make, the configurations of which were named after architectural structures such as "the teepee" or "the log cabin." It wasn't until years later that he realized that the ignition of these constructions, made so that air might move more freely and carry fire farther, faster, was like the burning of the history of the country in miniature, a sort of exercise in forgetting first the Native peoples and then the settlers, whose arrival had been the demise of these peoples, settlers in whose blood was carried the potential for his own existence.

He recollected the cool mornings of these not-quite-real episodes in his childhood, how mist rose from the lake (though he could not recall which lake) in long scarves, and how his father, briefly enthusiastic, would insist on a dawn swim. As the day unfolded, however, the mists would evaporate, other campers and their hot dogs and radios would come into focus, and his father's mood would shift down into irritability. He would begin to compare the spot unfavorably with the camp life he had known in the bush when the mine was still operating. "Is there no place left?" Jerome had heard his father whisper once through clenched teeth, just before he had begun to berate Jerome's mother about the food she had brought, her recent haircut, the way she looked in a swimsuit. Then everything about the trip the campground, the tense meal shared near a dwindling fire, his mother standing quietly by the water with her imperfect flesh exposed became tawdry, embarra.s.sing, something to be quickly discarded and forgotten. He would always respond to his father's temperament in this way, would know that any attempt to create family joy would deteriorate in the face of his father's disapproval, anger, or indifference.

It was the indifference that Jerome would try to take into his own nature: the combination of brief infatuation followed by an apparently casual lack of care. This, and the solid knowledge of the mutability of a world that came into being and then dissolved around him before he was able to fully grasp what it was trying to be, what it had been.

When the tracks had swung away from the highway, Jerome had become aware of the fencelines of the fields that were pa.s.sing, one after another, by the train window. It seemed to him that these frayed demarcations made up of rotting cedar rails, fieldstones, rusting wire, and scrub bush were the only delineating features in an otherwise neutered winter landscape. The sole survivors, he had thought, glimpsing the irregular gestures of stunted Manitoba maples and listing wooden posts. (Is there no place left?) All of it in a state of heartbreaking neglect, destined to become the wilderness of asphalt, of concrete that he a.s.sociated with the landscape of his later childhood. He had reached for his sketchbook, had drawn a series of overlapping lines on three or four pages, had made some notes about how these lines might be transformed into a three-dimensional installation within the confines of a rectangular room, and had experienced, for the remainder of the journey, the restless buzz that often announced the beginnings of a new conception.

He quickly became obsessed by the ruined fences, and a few weeks later he had borrowed a car, driven out of the city, and begun to search out remnants of rails, boulders, and stumps, sometimes tramping for hours through swamps and scrub bush following a line of decaying posts or a path defined by rusting, broken wire. He began to think of fences as situations rather than structures. Like an act of G.o.d or a political uprising, they seemed to him to mark the boundaries of events rather than territories. And like events, he felt that these fences had come into being as a result of a great deal of energy, flourishing on the edges of labor for a few hard decades, then collapsing onto a ground whose only crop now was an acre of windblown weeds.

Reading anything he could find on the subject, he learned about wedges and stakes, and about the much-coveted long, true split of cedar that resulted in six good rails to a log. He learned about rails that rested on notched "sleepers" and how those rails were fixed in place by wire. He learned about strong fences withstanding the a.s.sault of bulls and about weak fences that had permitted entire herds to drift into a neighbor's alfalfa. For a time he wished he had been born in the nineteenth century and had been appointed to a team of offcial "fence-viewers."

He attempted to reconstruct the frail, disappearing remnants of the fences on the indoor/outdoor carpeting of a city art gallery, had lugged boulders and fence wire, branches and decaying rails into the s.p.a.ce and had made six lines that moved from the entrance to the far end of the s.p.a.ce. Made uncomfortable by any kind of verbal explanation, he had not stapled the customary lyrical pa.s.sages to the walls so that beyond the announcement "Fence Lines," which the dealer had pasted on the front window of the gallery, there had been no verbal apology for the exhibition. The black-and-white photographs on the walls of what he privately called "similar structures in the wild" had sold to some private and, in a few cases, small public collections, and had been the making of his reputation as a young artist to watch. The sense of loss that he felt in the face of decay, of disappearance had gone unnoticed, uncommented upon by the critics. But it was this loss that he had taken with him on his latest trip out of the city, to the town of Kingston and across the ice-filled lake, the ice-choked mouth of the huge river, to the sh.o.r.es of Timber Island.

Jerome stood at the very edge of the island, looking at the ice, thinking of Robert Smithson's Map of Broken Gla.s.s Map of Broken Gla.s.s, about how the legendary Smithson had transported pieces of gla.s.s to the New Jersey site he had chosen, had heaped them into a haphazard shape, then waited for the sun to come out so that the structure would leap into the vitality he knew existed when broken gla.s.s combined with piercing light. Smithson had been mostly concerned with mirrors at the time and yet had chosen gla.s.s rather than mirrors, as if he had decided to exclude rather than to reflect the natural world. According to something Jerome had read, however, Smithson had come to believe the gla.s.s structure he had created was shaped like the drowned continent of Atlantis. Perhaps this explained his need to use a material that would suggest the transparency of water. But Jerome was drawn to the brilliance and the feeling of danger in the piece: the shattering of experience and the sense that one cannot play with life without being cut, injured. The sight of ice at this moment and in this place, ice rearing up against the sh.o.r.e of the island, the disarray of the arbitrary constructions that were made by its breakup and migration, seemed like a gift to Jerome, as if something electrical beneath the earth were sending signals to the surfaces of everything he was looking at.

The temperature had clearly risen in the week preceding his arrival and the deep snow was gaining in weight and plasticity. Jerome's footsteps remained embedded, small blue pools in sodden drifts, semi-permanent paths could be made from place to place, and the white surface was punctured by emerging gra.s.ses and shrubs, the shadows of which were like maps of rivers drafted on a white sheet of paper. The trees, in which he knew the sap would soon begin to rise, were beautifully placed, their branches vivid against snow and sky, the abandoned nests of birds and squirrels clearly evident. One tree in particular held his attention an enormous oak with a thick trunk supporting a number of twisted branches.

Although it was the end of winter, almost spring, there was something ripe and faintly autumnal in the soft glow of the light in the waning afternoon. A fine mist filled the air and gave a malleable look to shapes that one month earlier would have been so frozen and emplaced that interpretation might have been impossible. This cusp of a declining season, which held on not only to itself but also to the blackened twigs and stems and seed pods, to the bones of what had gone before, felt as exciting to Jerome as the uncovering of an ancient tomb. But it was not the quickening of nature that intrigued him, rather the idea of nature's memory and the way this unstable broken river had built itself briefly into another shape, another form, before collapsing back into what was expected of it.

When he was finished with the primary doc.u.mentation, Jerome wedged the camera in the groin of the hawthorn, then laughed when he found that its odd appearance in that location made him want to photograph it. He removed the shovel from the drift in order to begin the first of the physical sessions of the project. Using the front edge of the shovel he drew a rectangular shape approximately eight feet long and three feet wide on the untouched surface of the snow, then he reached for the camera in order to photograph the lines he had drafted, which were wonderfully exaggerated at this moment by the angle of the low sun. He returned the camera to the tree and began to dig, creating an inner wall by using a plunging motion at the edges; then, with wide-sweeping gestures, he flung the excess snow away from the center so that it would not disturb the surrounding surfaces. It was not easy going; the ice storms of the winter and every crust that had once been surface had formed a series of tough layers like strata on a rock face and often he was forced to turn the shovel around to use the handle as a pick or gouge. When he neared the frozen surface of the earth, he tossed the shovel aside so that he could hunker down and work more carefully with his hands. He wanted everything he was uncovering to remain in place, as it had remained in place since the first snowfall. Unlike some artists who had exposed the roots of trees, he would not call what he was doing "an uncovering," but rather would refer to the process as a revelation, and would ent.i.tle the photographs he would take of this area of the site The Revelations The Revelations. As he was thinking about this t.i.tle, a shadow near some small willows farther down the sh.o.r.e moved at the edge of his peripheral vision, and he sat back on his haunches to survey the outlying terrain. It was then that he saw the small carved angel emerging like an ice sculpture from the snow, and he tramped across the quarter-mile of white s.p.a.ce that separated him from it. An old gravestone, he realized as he approached, most of which was still buried. Perhaps there was a modest graveyard waiting to be revealed by the spring melt. The angel looked like a solemn child, lost in contemplation and surrounded by a circle of fresh pawprints. It had not occurred to Jerome that there would be animals on an island only a mile long and half again as wide, but he supposed that the animal tracks must have been made by a muskrat or an otter, some kind of water's edge dweller shaken temporarily out of hibernation by the sun and the warmth of the day. Whatever it was, it had broken his concentration, made him aware of the declining light, and the sodden state of his gloves, and he returned to the site, plunged the shovel once again into the drift, and picked up the camera. When he reached the door of the sail loft, he turned toward the sh.o.r.e and photographed the site from a distance. Then he walked inside and carefully climbed the stairs, which were littered with an a.s.sortment of old tin cans, some filled with dried pigments, left behind, he a.s.sumed, by the previous resident.

Each time he entered the loft he was astonished by the wealth of s.p.a.ce around him, the width and length of the enormous pine floorboards, the height of the sloping timbered ceiling. The building had the dimensions of a barn or a medieval granary but without the roughness of the former or the stonework of the latter, though the ground floor had a stone foundation, a barnlike odor, and was used to store all manner of tools and equipment; some old, possibly original, some likely purchased recently by the Arts Council for the convenience of the residents. At the south wall there was a large window, a window that once might have been a door where sails would have been pushed onto waiting wagons. Jerome had read the historical pamphlet left on the table for the edification of those visiting artists who, like himself, would have no real knowledge of the island's past, and he knew that the sails stored, mended, and occasionally fabricated in this location were made for ships built in what would have been called "the yard" outside and then launched near the spot where the coast guard vessel had deposited him. There was little about the single remaining quay that suggested the size and presence such nineteenth-century mammoths must have demanded. He remembered that, as a child, he had tried to copy ill.u.s.trations of such vessels, but the time it took to render each line of rope, each board and spar, each of the many sails on the various masts had discouraged him and he had mostly left the drawings unfinished. Thinking of these things, he realized that the disappearance of such huge vessels from Kingston Harbour and from the quays at Timber Island would have resulted in an absence so enormous it would have been a kind of presence in itself. Gathered together at docksides, tall masts made from virgin pines rocking in the wind, the ships would have been like an afterimage of the forests that were being removed from the country. And when the last of the great trees vanished, this floating afterimage would vanish with them.

He walked across the loft to a counter on which rested a hotplate, an electric kettle, and a microwave oven. He poured some water into the kettle, plugged it in, and fished about in his knapsack until he found the green tea that Mira, concerned about his well-being, had given him before he left the city. He would call her once he had a mug in his hand so he could tell her that he was drinking her tea and that he was thinking of her.

Jerome finished making the tea but did not call Mira right away. He stood instead at the window, looking out over the snow toward the frozen lake, wondering, if it might be possible, in summer, to see remnants of the old schooners through the waters of Back Bay, the location of the ships' graveyard. The wrecks were indicated on the map in the pamphlet as dark markings drawn in the shape of a schooner's deck. These flat, geometric forms immediately signaled obsolescence, just as the rectangular form he was digging into the snow, once he began to think about it, suggested a human grave. He was toying with the idea of making his excavations in the shape of a schooner's deck when he again noticed small animal tracks in the snow. Whatever had made these tracks had moved out of the scrub bush near the foundations of an abandoned, wooden house some fifty feet from the sail loft, had advanced in a westerly direction, then had changed its mind and looped around toward the junipers near the door of another abandoned building, which Jerome was able to identify as the old post offce. Here a skirmish had evidently taken place and Jerome believed, even in this fading light and from this distance, he could make out traces of blood, traces of a kill.

How wonderful the snow was; every change of direction, each whim, even the compulsion of hunger was marked on its surface, like memory, for a brief season. He told Mira all of this when he called her, but forgot to mention the green tea and how it made him think of her.

That night Jerome was awakened by the noise of a tin can bouncing slowly down the stairs, followed by a dull, steady thumping. When he opened the door to the stairs, he found he was looking directly into the green eyes of a large orange cat whose fur was matted with burrs and whose expression was hostile. The animal hunched its back and exhaled a long hiss in Jerome's direction, then strolled calmly into the vast s.p.a.ce of the loft and disappeared. Too filled with sleep to fully believe in this apparition, Jerome staggered back to the cot and did not open his eyes until morning when, sensing that he was being watched, he turned his head and again met the animal's angry green eyes. "h.e.l.lo, puss," he said and was greeted with a low growl. He reached out a hand and the cat promptly attempted to bite him, despite the fact that it clearly had no intention of leaving his bedside and did not pay any attention to Jerome when he rose from the cot and dressed himself. Neither did it refuse the bowl of milk that Jerome offered while he was putting together his own breakfast.

Jerome pulled his cell phone from his pocket and called Mira again. "I'm drinking your tea," he told her, "and thinking of you."

"Good."

"And there's a cat that's come into the loft. Dirty orange. It's feral, I think, growls a lot."

"A cat on a deserted island?" said Mira, her tone almost skeptical.

"Summer people left him here, I suppose, so he's likely to have been on his own for less than a year. He would have some memory of being tame."

"And also a memory of being abandoned."

Jerome was silent.

"The lion," Mira said suddenly. "Saint Jerome in the wild with his lion."

Along with a tiny plaster figure of Krishna, Mira had tucked into his pack a small poster of Joachim Patinir's sixteenth-century Saint Jerome in the Wilderness Saint Jerome in the Wilderness, an image she always insisted Jerome take with him when he disappeared into what she called "the wild," which, to her mind, was located anywhere beyond the city limits. Brought up as a Hindu, she was fascinated by the Christian saints and their stories that were, for her, as distant and compellingly exotic as the various Hindu G.o.ds and warriors were to him. When they began to get to know each other, she had been delighted to discover that his mother and father had given him the name of a famous saint, though he a.s.sured her that religion would have been the last thing on his parents' mind.

After studying the image for a while, they had eventually come to understand that the several tiny lions in the vivid blue-and-green Patinir landscape they were so fond of each lion engaged in a particular activity: chasing wolves, curled at the saint's feet, chumming around with a donkey, or standing in a field filled with sheep represented only one lion and that the painting was episodic in nature, depicting a number of events from the saint's life. In the far distance the lion could be seen either conversing with, or preparing to attack, a gathering of people. Mira believed the lion was conversing. Jerome always insisted he was attacking. Mira had asked how he could be so certain that the lion was a male since it was so small it was difficult to tell. Jerome said the lion would not have been permitted to live in the monastery with Saint Jerome had he not been a male of the species. Mira had loved that phrase, a male of the species a male of the species, and had begun to use it herself shortly after this discussion, often in reference to Jerome himself. "Because you are a male of the species...," she would begin.

Jerome laughed now and looked at the cat. "This animal is as fierce as a lion, anyway."

"Tame him," said Mira, "and bring him back to the city."

Jerome had not given Mira a clear indication of when he would return to the city. He would not be pinned down in that way, wanting to retain both flexibility and control. "I don't think there is much chance of that," he said.

"No chance of bringing him back to the city?"

"No," he said, "not that, exactly. I just don't think he's going to cooperate when it comes to taming. Looks like he's been on the loose for a while. He won't give himself over so easily to trust, I think. He might feel that he needs to protect himself."

The cat kept his distance but followed Jerome everywhere. When he was working, the animal either sat on a tall bank of snow watching his efforts with what appeared to be mild disdain, or it coasted back and forth inside the areas Jerome was excavating with its head high in the air and an ominous growl in its throat any time Jerome came too near. These dugouts, as Jerome thought of them, were a.s.suming the shape of a ship's deck. Sometimes, after he had drawn the outline of such a dugout on the surface of the snow, the cat lay down in the middle of the area he was hoping to excavate and refused to budge, spitting and lashing its tail when Jerome attempted gently to remove it with the shovel. Once, when Jerome became angry, he dug under the cat and tossed it along with a load of snow onto a nearby bank, where the animal scrambled to a seated position and remained in place, scowling. Two or three times a day, without warning, the cat would dash off toward the copse at the east end of the island. It always returned, however, and Jerome was once interrupted in the midst of photographing an excavation by the sound of crunching coming from one of the dugouts behind him where the cat was crouched over the rapidly disappearing body of a bird. Later, while photographing the remains, Jerome determined by the tattered remnants of red and black plumage that the bird had likely been a robin, the harbinger of spring.

By now the ice, both in the river and in the lake, was beginning to completely break up: the water was rising and the floes that were pa.s.sing the sh.o.r.e of the island looked like parade floats featuring non-representational sculpture. Late one afternoon when the light was particularly intense, Jerome photographed several of these ice forms with a color film. Then, with the cat in tow, he walked back to the loft on the path he and the animal had tramped into the snow. On the stairs the cat was so constantly underfoot Jerome began to feel as if his ankles were being bound in a blur of orange wool. Because of the soundless fluidity of the animal's movements, Jerome had decided to call it Swimmer.

"Swimmer," he said now, "are you hungry?" and as he spoke he realized that he had begun to talk to the animal some time ago, that he had explained his work to it, scolded it, and occasionally used terms of endearment. "So this is what solitude does to you," he said to the animal when it reappeared, "you begin talking to unfriendly cats."

Swimmer growled in reply, and ran away from him.

That night, it started to snow and Swimmer sat looking almost picturesque near the large window, watching the flakes descend through the beams of the one outdoor light in the yard. Jerome had given him he had decided that a cat this large must be a neutered male a portion of the tinned tuna fish he had had for supper and this seemed to have put the cat in a more placid mood. Jerome himself was far from placid and angrily paced the loft floor, glancing now and then with irritation at the snow, worrying about the acc.u.mulation in what he now called his Nine Revelations of Navigation Nine Revelations of Navigation. He feared that, unless he sc.r.a.ped the interiors out with a shovel, it would take him hours by hand to bring the bottom of each shape back to what it had been earlier in the day. But, having never before broken the surface of the earth in his work, he would do his best to avoid the disturbance a shovel might cause to what he believed was the purity of scattered twigs and blackened leaves.

Eventually he stopped pacing and turned his attentions to the cat. What a mangy, rough-looking beast! Weren't cats supposed to clean themselves up? An idea struck him. He searched for and found his own comb, put on his leather gloves, and warily approached the cat, who, though suspicious and growling, did not turn around. Gently but firmly seizing him around the middle, he wrapped a towel around the cat's legs. Then positioning his knee against Swimmer's side so that he could free one hand, he began to drag the comb through the matted fur. The cat yowled, swung his head back and forth, and made every effort to bite the offending, gloved hands, but finally he gave up and submitted to the grooming.

It wasn't long before Jerome discovered the wound near the tail. Swimmer hissed and yowled more loudly when the comb neared the lesion and Jerome turned some greyish-yellow fur aside to explore the problem. The torn flesh was clearly infected and not in any way helped by the abundance of dirty fur that covered it. He let go of the animal and went to search for the antiseptic and a pair of scissors he had noticed in a kitchen drawer. After retrieving them, it took some time to locate the cat again, but at last Jerome discovered him crouching behind the shower curtain in the bathroom. He closed the door and ran some warm water onto a clean washcloth. Then he cornered the beast once again, cut away the fur near the infected spot with the scissors, and began tentatively to bathe the exposed skin. When, despite Swimmer's continuous growling, it was clear he would tolerate these ministrations, Jerome applied the antiseptic. When he was finished, Swimmer walked slowly across the room, lay down, and went to sleep.

The next morning, a warm front moved in, melting both the previous evening's precipitation and some of the old snow on which it had fallen, and Jerome was pleased to find that his markers were even more prominent than they had been the day before. The blackened maple leaves, twigs, and flattened weeds appeared to have been pasted to the floor of the excavations by the melt, and a rising mist once again softened the atmosphere. Jerome had brought his sketchbook with him, as well as several graphite pencils and a folding stool, for today he intended to draw the details of what he had exposed. He smiled when he thought of some of his contemporaries who felt that the making of drawings was a stale, traditional way of exploring landscape, for this type of rendering of the details of the physical world gave him great pleasure. He had almost finished the third drawing when he heard an unfamiliar sound, that of the cat's loud, sorrowful, and repet.i.tive meowing coming from somewhere close to the edge of the lake. Realizing that this was the first time Swimmer had used this noise so common to cats, and sensing some urgency, some insistence in the tone, Jerome stood, placed the sketchbook and pencils on the stool, and walked toward the tall brittle gra.s.ses near the sh.o.r.e.

It took Jerome's mind some time to interpret the visual information being transmitted. Some of the smaller icebergs had moved closer to the island during the night and were now lined up like docked rowboats near the sh.o.r.e. He once again marvelled at their mysterious, irregular shapes, but this time there was something more. During their journey down streams and rivers, the icebergs had picked up and incorporated into their structures twigs and branches, as if consciously creating their own skeletons. Jerome was intrigued by this, and was about to pull the camera from his pocket when he noticed a large ma.s.s of ice that contained within it a blurred bundle of cloth that seemed both enclosed in the ice and emerging from it. Wondering if the ice had somehow managed to trap a patchwork quilt or a collection of rags, he moved closer, camera in hand, hoping for an interesting shot. The slab of ice b.u.mped against the sh.o.r.e and shifted slightly. It was then that Jerome saw the outstretched hands, the bent head, the frozen wisps of grey hair, and he heard his own voice announcing the discovery. "A man!" he shouted to the air, to the nearby cat, to himself. "A man!" he shouted again. Then he spoke the word dead dead, just before he turned away and vomited into the snow.

One year later, in a small town thirty miles down the lakesh.o.r.e, a woman woke early. There was no sound coming from the street below. Darkness was still pressed against her bedroom windows.

Her husband was sleeping and did not stir as she slid from the bed, crossed the room, and walked down the hall to the bathroom where she had laid out her clothes the night before: the dark wool suit and grey silk shirt, the string of small pearls, the black tights, white underwear, and conventional cream-colored slip, the somber costume that she believed would ensure that no one would look at her, or look at her for very long. She took no special precautions as she washed and dressed, running the taps and opening the drawers as she would have on any other morning. Malcolm had been out on a night call and had not returned until 3 a.m. He would be sleeping deeply and would not waken for at least two more hours. By then she would be on the train, part of the journey completed.

She stood for some time in front of the open medicine cabinet in the bathroom, gazing at the plastic containers that held her various pills. Then she closed the door and stared at her own face in the mirror. Her fair hair, some of it grey now, was pulled back, and her face, she was relieved to see, was composed, her grey eyes were clear. She could not say whether it was an attractive face that looked back at her. Someone had once told her she was lovely and not, in some ways, that long ago, but she knew that her features, her expression had altered since.

The previous morning, after Malcolm had left for the clinic, she had filled an old suitcase with stockings, one blue skirt and cardigan, underwear, a few cosmetics, two well-used green leather notebooks, a plastic bag containing squares of felt, sc.r.a.ps of fabric and wool, one antique alb.u.m, and a worn hardcover book. Then she had lifted the bag from the bed where she had packed it and had placed it in the unused cupboard of the spare room. The interior of the case was pink and had elasticized compartments under the satin-lined lid where, at one time or another, some long-dead woman must have kept hairbrushes and clothes brushes, and perhaps a bottle filled with liquid detergent for washing silk stockings. That woman may very well have been her own mother, but she couldn't be certain because as far as she knew her mother had never been a traveler. The people who lived in this rural County stayed home. Year after year, generation after generation. The geography of the County discouraged travel; trains no longer visited any of the pleasant towns of the peninsula where she had lived her entire life. She would have to drive for almost an hour to reach Belleville, the larger mainland town where she would catch the train that would take her to the city. The word city city had hissed in her mind all week long, first as an idea, then as a possibility, and, finally, now as a certain destination. had hissed in her mind all week long, first as an idea, then as a possibility, and, finally, now as a certain destination.

After washing and dressing she went into the spare room, removed the suitcase from the cupboard, and carried it with her down the unlit back stairs and into the kitchen where she placed it on the table. On a desk facing the large kitchen window was the tactile map she had been making for her friend Julia, its rhinestones, tinsel, and bits of folded aluminum foil glistening under the single lamp she lit. Placed carefully beside it were the several diagrams and drawings she had made of the location Julia next wanted to visit: an abandoned lighthouse on a seldom-used road at the very tip of the County. She glanced at the map, then looked through the window into the yard, which was partially illuminated by the kitchen lamp. It was the middle of a cold April and only recently had the thaw begun in earnest. At this moment everything beyond the kitchen windows appeared to be weeping; droplets were clinging to her clothesline and shining on branches, and icicles that had disengaged themselves from the eaves were embedded like spears in the remaining heavy snow near the foundations of this house in which she had lived all her life. This is the anniversary of sorrow, she thought everything moist, transitory, draining away, everything disappearing.

Her friend Julia, who had also lived all her life in one house, said that she could smell the beginnings of the spring melt on her farm long before those who were sighted were aware of its arrival. She could also smell the approach of storms on cloudless summer days and the presence of deer hidden deep in the cedar bush behind the barn. How she admired this in Julia, this sensory prescience; that and the calm that always filled her corner of the room like a soft light.

It was Julia who had sensed her grief, Julia who had suggested that she make the journey to the city. In the year since the newspaper article had appeared, she had mentioned it to her friend only twice, her voice as neutral as milk, the need to state the terrible fact of it perfectly disguised. The first time, Julia simply shook her head as she often did when presented with sad news items concerning strangers. The next time, however, in the midst of the retelling, Julia had suddenly straightened in her chair and had moved her hand across the s.p.a.ce between them. "There's something here, Sylvia," she had said. "Something deep and private and important. I think you should meet this young man."

Sylvia had said nothing more, but in the silence that followed Julia's statement the idea of taking her story to the city had been planted.

She opened her suitcase again and placed the map, the sketches, two rectangular plastic containers one filled with an a.s.sortment of threads, textured papers, and several ordinance survey maps, the other with string, twine, sequins, and rhinestones into the interior. Then, once again, she quietly closed the lid, using her thumbs to ease the fasteners into place. She would take the materials with her and continue to work on the map. In this way she would keep the connection to Julia.

As she put on her outer clothing she wondered if she should leave a note and decided, finally, that she would. She took a pen from her purse and wrote the sentence I have engagement I have engagement on the back of a grocery bill. The question that came into her mind at this point was one of placement. Where did people leave such messages: near the phone, under a magnet on the refrigerator, on the hall table? The kitchen, she concluded, would be no place to leave such a sc.r.a.p of paper, to leave such a formal declaration, and so, after lifting the salt shaker from the table and dropping it into one of her pockets, she moved down the hall and went into her husband's study, his library. Selecting two volumes that dealt with medical syndromes, she placed one on top of the other in the center of the desk, then glanced at the note on the top. "I have engagement," she smiled, testing the phrase. She reached for her husband's pen and added the article on the back of a grocery bill. The question that came into her mind at this point was one of placement. Where did people leave such messages: near the phone, under a magnet on the refrigerator, on the hall table? The kitchen, she concluded, would be no place to leave such a sc.r.a.p of paper, to leave such a formal declaration, and so, after lifting the salt shaker from the table and dropping it into one of her pockets, she moved down the hall and went into her husband's study, his library. Selecting two volumes that dealt with medical syndromes, she placed one on top of the other in the center of the desk, then glanced at the note on the top. "I have engagement," she smiled, testing the phrase. She reached for her husband's pen and added the article an an to the sentence. Then underneath this she wrote, to the sentence. Then underneath this she wrote, Don't bother calling Julia, she has no idea where I am. Don't bother calling Julia, she has no idea where I am.

In order to reach the front door she had to pa.s.s through the dining room, and as she did so she recalled that in the late afternoon, while the rest of the house darkened, the low light entering the room from the west window always caused the large oval of the table to shine like a lake, a lake with two silver candlesticks floating on its surface. She had watched this happen almost every day of her life, as long as she could remember, and it would continue to happen when she was not there: an abandoned table gathering light and her far away, not witnessing the ceremony.

Outside, she unlocked her car, hoisted the old suitcase into the front seat, climbed behind the wheel, and backed slowly, carefully away with this one piece of furniture still glowing, senselessly, in her mind.

The road that was taking her out of the County was lined by the homes of some of the earliest settlers in the province. Though it was still too dark to see clearly, she was aware that much of this old architecture was sad, neglected; some of the properties were completely abandoned. A few houses in the County had been restored by city people seeking charm, however, and always seemed to her to be unnaturally fresh and clean, as if the past had been scrubbed out of their interiors, then thrown carelessly out the door like a bucketful of soiled water. She knew the histories of the old settlers as well as she knew her own body. Better, in some ways. She knew the three-p.r.o.nged ladders leaning against trees in autumn orchards, the arrival at barn doors of wagons filled with hay, the winter sleighs, the suppers held on draped tables outdoors in summer, the feuds over boundary lines, politics, family property, the arrival of the first motor car, the first telephone, the departure of young men for wars, the funeral processions departing from front parlors. She knew these things as well, as if they bore some weighty significance in her own life lived behind the brick walls of a house situated in the town.

A graveyard swept by the window near her right shoulder, scarred, decaying stones inscribed with names still common in her County. These tombs stood stark and pale in the early-morning light that lay in pools on the sooty snow surrounding the bases of the tombstones and in small snow-filled hollows scattered here and there in the fields. Trees were dark against the lightening sky, darker than they had been in midwinter when they often became frosted by a coating of snow. She loved the trees, their reliability, the fact that they had always been there on the boundaries of fields or along the edges of roads. She loved certain boulders for the same reason. And there were cairns left behind as a visual reminder of the past. These were some of the markers Andrew had spoken of. The old settlers, he had once told her, had left nothing behind but a statement of labor, nothing but a biography of stones.

Andrew's voice, telling her such things over and over, was inside her head almost all the time now. In the past she leaned toward his whisper, had once or twice heard him sing, and then, near the end, had heard the terrible noise of his weeping. A recording of the sounds he had made was always playing in her mind, but she was losing the shape of his face, the look of his legs and arms and hands, the way his body occupied a chair, or moved across a room toward the place where she stood, as she had always stood each time, waiting for him to touch her. She had never told Andrew how touch, until him, had been a catastrophe for her, how having leapt over the hurdle of touch, he would then become a part of her without him ever being aware of this how the idea of him would be like something she was carrying with her, like an animal, or a baby, or a schoolbag, or maybe something as simple and essential as this purse that rested on the pa.s.senger seat of the moving car.

Afterwards she would rise and dress, cross the orchard, walk to her car, and drive the concessions with the smell of him still on her, wanting to keep this with her, not bathing until minutes before Malcolm returned from the clinic.

And then would come the distant days, days when she would not, or could not, inhabit her own body, as if she had taken the decision to go with Andrew wherever he had gone, as if she were out of doors mapping the scant foundations of houses abandoned by vanished settlers, or following the vague line of an old, disused road, though she did not see such things in her imagination. Then, gradually, she would feel her self begin to return, tentatively, like a guest anxious not to take up too much of her time, and a certain taste or smell would connect her to the present for a moment or two: that, or something like the sight of poplar leaves flickering in an otherwise invisible breeze just beyond the gla.s.s of the kitchen window. If it were winter, she might become focused on the movement of flame, the snap of cedar kindling, and then the satisfaction one feels when a piece of hardwood surrenders itself, finally, to the inevitability of combustion.

It was Andrew's voice that now fueled the engine of this car, his voice that pushed down on the accelerator, his voice that chose the distance, the speed, the direction.

She slept on the train, slept as she often did when confronted by noise and unfamiliarity, willing stimuli to move away from her until a curtain of dark dreamlessness closed across the scene. She awoke an hour or so later in a swaying interior to the sight of the tattered edges of the city under a cold blue sky. Sunlight was pushing past the dust on the window, covering her hands and lap, and making her uncomfortably warm in her good wool coat and her winter boots. Someone rustled a newspaper behind her. Someone else across the way was b.u.t.toning the coat of a squirming child. A uniformed man careered down the aisle shouting the name of the city as if, without this announcement, no one would notice it was there, as if it would slip by, ignored. The city was not something she was going to be able to ignore. She was going to have to enter it. She was going to have to manage.

After walking stiffly along the cement quay, her purse in one hand, her suitcase in the other, she descended a flight of marble stairs, then walked up a long, sloping ramp into the great hall of Union Station, remembering that as a child she had been led by her mother into this overwhelming world for a series of appointments deep in the city, and that the child she had been had often refused to move through the huge room until she had read, high on its walls, all the carved names of places that did not exist on the maps of her County. Vancouver, Saskatoon, Winnipeg: unfamiliar, foreign-sounding names that would be forever a.s.sociated in her mind with the disturbing cacophony of the trains and the portentous, smooth atmosphere, the hushed tone of the appointments.

The doctor she was being taken to see had an office at Sick Children's Hospital, an office in which he kept a dollhouse with three dolls that he wanted her to play with. "Why not call the lady doll Mommy," she remembered him saying, "and the man doll Daddy? The littlest doll can be you." All of this had confused and disoriented her. She had never liked dolls and could not understand why this man wanted her to pretend the small figures were her parents or herself. She developed ways to shut out the doctor, her mother, the dollhouse: she could think about china horses, for instance, or the County atlas she had memorized, or she could let a succession of rhymes play in her mind. Eventually she learned how to disregard the enormous hospital itself and all the pajama-clad children who lived there. "Sick Kids," she had heard her mother call it when talking on the phone. "Robert hopes the doctor at Sick Kids can do something," she would say, adding ominously but also almost hopefully, "She might have to be admitted."

She had always believed that this admission had something to do with confession, that the fact of her would have to be confessed, that she would have to be admitted to, or would herself have to admit to some crime or another. And, indeed, once she was in the presence of the doctor, his soft questions had always seemed like an interrogation, an attempt to pry from her some sort of dark revelation. She had remained resolutely silent, however; she hadn't admitted anything, even though she knew her punishment would be her mother's anger, her mother's refusal to look at her all the way home on the train. And later, when she lay in her room facing the wall, she would hear the adult argument begin, her own name tossed back and forth between her mother and father long into the night.

She was fifty-three years old now and had never been alone in a city before. Still, since childhood, she had been an expert map-reader and, after finding the name and address in the city phonebook kept in her town library, and marking the location on a map, she had believed that, at least in the matter of way-finding, she was prepared. And, of course, each year since adulthood, she had spent the odd day in one of the larger towns of the County, had been peripherally aware of people hurrying, going about their busines