“Are we climbing that mountain too?”
“Hill,” Jasmine corrects me.
Hidden Lake, she explains, is not only hidden, it is also secret. There are no roads to the lake, so people have to hike to it. Until recently, only a few old-timers like Amos knew about it.
We are halfway down the second mountain when we suddenly see the lake. We stop as if stunned by sudden brightness. From the side of the mountains I can see the full circumference. Here and there around the sides I see the fishing shacks. They are small wooden structures, and I don’t know how any person can lie down and sleep inside of them.
“See that one painted blue with the white stars all over? That one is Amos’s.”
“How do they sleep?”
“The shacks just barely fit a cot. In the winter they drag the shacks to the middle of the frozen lake, make a hole in the ice, and fish and carry on like teenagers.”
“But the cold.”
“See this?” She touches a pouch inside the harness. “This is coal for the stove that warms Amos at night. In the daytime he toughs it out. Every time I come over I bring some supplies. Can
you imagine making the trip we just made in the winter? Amos gets someone to take care of the animals, puts his snowshoes on, and off he goes. A couple of years ago there was a civil war over generators. The younger fishermen wanted to bring over generators so that they could watch TV and have all the comforts of home. But the generators are so noisy and smelly. This quiet would be gone. You should have seen them. I had to stop Amos from bringing his shotgun out here.”
“And then?”
“So far those in favor of modern comforts have relented, out of respect and maybe a little fear of the old-timers. But when the old-timers go, the generators will come on the back of snowmobiles.”
We get to Amos’s shack and unload supplies. There are bags of rice and cans of pork and beans and coal for the small iron stove that is connected to a black chimney pipe sticking out of the roof.
Then Jasmine unfolds the tent. We pick a spot not far from the edge of the lake with the front of the tent facing the water. It is a tent shaped like a triangle, big enough in the middle for a person to stand up. As we are putting it up, I look around for another tent. I realize for the first time that Jasmine and I will be sleeping side by side. I have never slept with anyone else except Yolanda, when we went to Spain, and then we each had a single bed in a hotel room. This is different somehow. It makes me nervous. “Pull up the pole on your end,” she yells at me. My nervousness makes me think of Adam and Eve and how they realized they were naked after they ate the apple.
“What are you thinking about? Snap out of it. After we finish
getting the camp ready, I’m going to get the canoe out in the lake and go fishing. What would you like to do?”
“Marcelo came to Vermont to ponder, remember.”
“Well, here you are. You can stay here or come with me in the canoe. Either way you’ll have lots of silence.”
“Jasmine will not talk.”
“You’ll be facing forward and I’ll be in the back fishing. You won’t even know I’m there.”
We paddle, or rather, Jasmine paddles close to the shore, where the shade of the trees reaches the water. Then Jasmine directs the canoe straight into a fallen tree. “Duck,” she says. I put down my head quickly and we slide through a space so narrow that only a canoe as slim as ours can fit through, and we are in what seems like an even more secluded lake surrounded on all sides by bushes of red, yellow, and white flowers. When we reach the center of the cove, I hear a splash and the canoe stops. I turn my head around and Jasmine whispers, “The anchor.” Then she places her index finger to her lips.
I lower myself to the floor of the canoe and listen. I listen to the periodic swoosh of Jasmine’s fishing line. I listen to splashes in the water. I hear the buzz of insects, the wind ripple through the trees, lake waves, and now and then the high-pitched sound of a large bird, a sound of pain.
How did Ixtel become real for me? The world is full of Ixtels who I can help without hurting my father. Why this one? How was it
her
suffering that touched me? Father. I feel connected to her through my father’s actions. I feel an obligation to right my father’s wrong. But why? Shouldn’t my father’s welfare come first?
His welfare is my welfare. How does one weigh love for a parent against the urge to help someone in need?
I feel like what is right should be done no matter what. This lack of doubt makes me feel inhuman. But it is not a question of my head for once. I hear the right note. I recognize the wrong note. Maybe the right action is a lake like this one, green and quiet and deep.
It is dusk now. Jasmine has divided the one fish she caught into two pieces and dropped the pieces into a plate of flour. She is now cooking them in a skillet she got from Amos’s shack. I am thinking about time and how quickly the hours of the day passed.
“Did you know that when we were out there on the canoe, you sat still for almost two hours? I mean, you didn’t even twitch. I couldn’t see your eyes from where I was, but for a while there I thought you had fallen asleep sitting upright.”
“No. I wasn’t asleep.”
“What goes through your brain when you’re still like that? Were you thinking about what you were going to do when you got back?”
“Jasmine was still as well. She didn’t speak to me.”
“I was throwing my line every which way, trying to catch the one and only fish in the whole lake. For a while I sat on the floor of the canoe with my back against the seat and closed my eyes.”
The fish is cooked. She puts my half on a tin plate and scoops
corn from a can she opened before. “Dinner,” she says. “Otherwise it would have been pork and beans.”
“Does Jasmine…do you want to say a prayer?” I ask.
“Okay.” She puts her plate on her knees. I do as well and close my eyes. “Thank You for this place. Thank You for the fish.” I open my eyes and see her begin eating. “What? Why do you look so surprised?”
“Your prayers are shorter than mine.”
“Okay.” She closes her eyes. “Thank You for the company.” She opens them again. “There. That covers it, don’t you think? Eat. You have to eat trout while it’s hot, otherwise it doesn’t taste as good.”
After a few bites, she says: “So you never answered my question. Out there on the lake, when you were still for so long, what was happening?”
“For the longest time I replayed in my mind all that had happened since I found the picture of Ixtel. These images of what happened were like the notes of music. Some sounded good, some not. I like the sound that was made when we tracked and found Jerry García. It all seemed as if we were meant to help Ixtel. That’s what I thought for the longest time, and then I thought about my internal music and I looked for it.”
“What’s that—your internal music?”
“Ever since I was six years old, maybe before that but that’s the first time I remember it, I could hear music, only it wasn’t really hearing and it wasn’t really music, it was
like
it. Does Jasmine feel emotions when she hears certain music?”
“Yes.”
“Imagine just feeling the emotions caused by the music
without the sound of the music, but you know the music is there. Only the emotions that you feel are always good—like longing and belonging all at once. I call it music because that is the best word for it. I used it to hear it whenever I wanted. I just had to search for it and I found it, only it was more like waiting than searching. But now it is harder to find it. It is almost all gone, I would say. I was hoping it would come at least while I was here.”
“And?”
I shake my head to indicate that there was no IM. Then I say, “I found the memory of the music I used to hear, and then even this went away and I listened to all the sounds the lake makes. And also the sound of Jasmine trying to fish.”
She puts her plate down. Her fish is getting cold. But so is mine. It is hard to talk about the IM and eat at the same time. Maybe it is also hard for Jasmine to listen to me talk about the IM and eat at the same time. “I can only imagine how beautiful that music must have been. You must have wanted to listen to it all the time.”
“When Marcelo was little, it was hard to leave it. Fortunately I could only hear it if I went looking for it. But it was easy to find.”
We are quiet, looking at our half-eaten fish. Jasmine picks up her plate and then puts it down again. “You want to know what I think?”
“Yes.”
“I think that whatever it is you were doing out there on the lake, searching for the music or trying to remember it, as you say, is all most of us ever hope to do. This ability you had before, that was out of this world. A special gift, I don’t know. What if it was
impossible for you to have it and be a regular person? You don’t hear the music anymore, but now you can be flesh and blood like…me, for instance. Now you’ll have to pay attention and listen, see if you hear anything. Does that make any sense at all? I’m a little out of my element here.”
We sit with the fire crackling in front of us. Jasmine’s words play slowly in my mind as if they themselves were the notes of a musical piece. She stands up slowly, picks up our dishes, and takes them to the lake.
When she comes back she looks up at the night. “It looks clear and it doesn’t feel that cold. We could sleep out here. That way you can look at the stars. Wow! Did you see that? That was the most humongous falling star I ever saw. It went from one end of the sky to the other.”
She is removing rocks and sticks from an area in front of our tent. Then she takes out the sleeping bags. She unrolls hers. My heart starts pounding. The area in front of the tent is small. There is no place to put my sleeping bag other than next to hers. She is patting her sleeping bag. She is unzipping it. I am standing paralyzed, my head like lead.
“Are you going to sleep like Kickaz, standing up?” Jasmine is talking to me, I realize.
I grasp at a few words that pass by. “Where. Sleeping bag.”
“That’s probably the best spot.” She points at the ground next to her bag. I kneel down and begin to unroll my sleeping bag in the spot she indicated.
“I need to go to the bathroom.” I am standing up again. Jasmine is lying down on top of her sleeping bag, her arms behind her head, looking at the stars.
She hands me the flashlight next to her. “You know what to do, right?”
I am so nervous I only see the humor of her statement when I am trying to find an adequate place.
“Don’t go too far,” I hear her yell. “It’s swampy back there.”
“It is only number one,” I yell back.
“Thank you for that,” she calls.
When I get back I see Namu on top of my sleeping bag. Jasmine has her eyes closed. Is it possible that she fell asleep so quick? I go back into the tent for my backpack. Am I supposed to put on the pajamas I brought? Jasmine is wearing shorts and a T-shirt and by all indications she plans to wear those to sleep. I leave the pajamas in my backpack.
“What now?” Jasmine asks.
“I need to find the wipes to wash my hands.”
“Good night, Namu,” I hear her say. “Take care of your silly owner.”
I take as long as I can wiping my hands. Now it seems funny to me that I got so nervous at the thought of sleeping next to Jasmine. What is happening? Yesterday, Jonah asked me if I was sexually attracted to Jasmine and that notion seemed shocking to me. And now there is this. I touch my abdomen where I feel a tingling. That’s what “butterflies in the stomach” feel like. These butterflies were let loose by what? The first one or two came out when Jasmine talked about the IM and how I could be flesh and blood like her, for instance, and then thousands fluttered when she pointed at the spot where we will sleep together. They are not unpleasant, these butterflies. Their tiny wings are pulling me out, tickling me with the anticipation of lying next to Jasmine.
I move Namu so that he is at my feet. Part of him is on my sleeping bag and part of him on Jasmine’s. I take off my boots and slip into the bag fully dressed. I am looking up at the night sky. The stars seem like tiny pricks on a dark ceiling through which you can see the brightness that exists on the other side. I lie with my eyes open, listening to Jasmine’s even breath. Then I hear her voice.
“Yesterday when you were talking to Jonah, you said that you and he were having a heart-to-heart. What did you mean? You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
“We talked about love.”
“Oh God.”
“He loves you.”
“I’m going to kill him.”
“But he doesn’t think you will ever love him.”
“I do love him. Just not that way. He’s like an older brother.”
“What does it mean to love someone ‘that way’? That is what Marcelo doesn’t understand.”
“The love thing is difficult to figure, isn’t it?” she says. “You’re not the only one who has trouble with it.”
“Jasmine also?”
“Sometimes…” she hesitates, “sometimes people do hurtful things to themselves or others in the name of what they think is love. They make mistakes galore because of it.”
“Galore.” I like that word.
“It’s easy to make mistakes. I mean, it’s just so easy to get lost. You can know what it is you have to do in life and where it is you have to do it, and then,
bam,
someone comes along and you
get sidetracked and end up heading the wrong way or in the wrong place.” She is quiet, as if her words reminded her of something.
“Is that love?”
“I don’t know. How can it be if you end up unhappy?”
“It is possible that I am not able to love.”
I hear her turn on her side to look at me. “How can you even say that? Look at what you felt when you saw the picture of Ixtel and your impulse to help her. That’s love.”
“But I do not love her ‘that way,’ as Jasmine calls it. To love someone ‘that way,’ with the desire that someone like Wendell feels, does not seem possible for me.”
“Thank God for that. Wendell belongs in the lowest rung of the human species, which is a couple of rungs below most animals.”
“And all the signs a person makes to indicate when a person likes you ‘that way.’ I do not know any of those.”