She knew this was the last chance she was going to get to
visit her favourite spot. Already leaves were curling under her feet, evening
brought on a hint of frost, and she had put on the usual five or six pounds
around her hips, a layer of bear-fat for the coming winter.
This special place of hers was called Burnish
Lake, and she always liked the
double-entendre in the name: the coppery surface of the water in the evening,
the antique gold of early-fall leaves. Burnish
Lake had lots of things going for
it, but most of all it had ducks. Swarms of them, and due to the mild climate
in these temperate parts they didn’t seem to migrate in the fall. No need. Being
social animals, they congregated in swarms around the strange geometric
wooden dock that jutted out into the shallow water where they all
dabbled and splashed.
It was really just a big pond, and this dock – it was more
of a boardwalk, really – went on forever. Besides the ducks, all there was to
see around here were water lilies. She could imagine how the frogs must sound
after dark.
The child in her came out when she saw those ducks, and she
wished she had bread with her, knowing full well that feeding ducks made about
as much sense as feeding bears (which she had done once. Cheesies, which the
big guy had really relished, until he grabbed the plastic bag out of her hands and ate the whole thing.) Then they would truly swarm, revealing the rather
nasty side of ducks and of birds in general, just dinosaurs reborn with all
their primitive saurian instincts intact.
They were mostly female mallards, she guessed, with a few
half-grown babies – juveniles – but no drakes. She looked and looked for the
gorgeous iridescent green heads, but did not see one. What, no sultans to keep
the harem in order? Guess not. She threw a few stones at them, meanly, watching
them “waaak” and scatter.
She had her reasons to be mean, and her reasons for wanting
to come out here alone and get some fresh air. She hadn’t had fresh air in a
while. It hadn’t been her idea to go to the hospital, and in fact most of the
time she felt just fine. Better than fine! She was exhilarated, and people were
telling her things like, “You look ten years younger. What have you been
doing?”
Yes. She felt special, more special than she had ever felt
before. She wasn’t really going to act on those feelings, was she? But Burt
thought she might.
When you’re in a certain state, you don’t know what effect
you’re having on others. You’re oblivious. So even though she stepped on every
sentence to the point that no one was willing to talk to her, even though she
slept barely two hours a night, even though she had lost fifteen pounds (good!),
even though she was one step away from sending out the mass email that
would change everything (or was it Facebook?) – she didn’t think they needed to
take that kind of drastic measure.
Something wonderful has happened, the email would
begin, and I wanted to share it with all my closest and dearest friends. I
have received some information recently that is very special, and very
exciting. I have suspected this about myself for a very long time, but now it
has been confirmed by a Higher Source. I have been granted the ability to
That was as far as she got. So what the hell was wrong with that?
Or of thinking she saw Moses one day in the liquor store? If you think he’s
Moses, he IS Moses, her writer friend said to her the other day. She
wanted to see Moses again, to talk to him, to ask him just how he got that
water out of the rock.
Burt kept saying she wouldn’t let him talk, that he couldn’t
even get a word in, and that was ridiculous. Burt kept saying she was being
abusive, that she was acting like a bitch, but didn’t she have it coming with
all the rotten things that had happened to her as a child? Probably. But it
bothered Burt to be called a cocksucking fuck-face in front of people.
So it was the hospital for a while, again, and
medication, again, and more psychiatrists to beguile. She had been
seducing psychiatrists (verbally, of course) since the age of fifteen, so she was awfully good at it
by now. Most of their patients were so dull, she supposed, that her clever
banter and sparkling irony must have been downright stimulating, if in
a rather embarrassing way.
She hated to leave those ducks, but she had to go to the
bathroom. She noticed there was nobody else around, just nobody, and thought it
was odd. Then she remembered the dates
on the sign. She was the very last
visitor to Burnish Lake
before the season ended. But what about the staff? Nobody around, but it didn’t
matter, she didn’t like people anyway and was finished with them. They were all
so full of shit.
She hated the bathroom here, so primitive, almost a privy.
It was just a big plywood box with hardly any light, only a useless burnt-out bulb, and no windows. Just a slot for ventilation, up too high to be
of any use. She used the smelly toilet, noticed there was no sink but only hand-sanitizer. Disgusted, she squirted some on her hands and rubbed it in.
Was that why the sliding bolt lock wouldn’t move, because her
hands were so slippery?
Then she remembered there
was a much larger sliding bolt on the outside of the door, for when they locked
everything up for the winter. To keep
out homeless people or whatever. But this was the inside lock, stuck. She wiggled it gently, then a little harder, then
wiggled it some more.
Panic began to rise in her. Her worst fear, worse than
falling or being raped or even of dying, was of being trapped, locked inside an unfamiliar
building or unable to get out of some suffocating place. The worst feeling she
had in the hospital was the sound of a big heavy institutional door clanging
shut behind her. It seemed to happen every time.
She wiggled some more. Banged. Then shouted. Then shouted
some more. But then she remembered that no one was there.
She screamed and screamed. Her throat began to grow raw. And it was getting dark
out. The little ventilation slot was greying now, and the whole stinking room
was turning into a black box.
She would die in here, alone, in a shithouse in the woods. They’d look for a
body for a while, then give up. What would they find in the spring? Then she realized that
by throwing herself so violently against the door, she had probably bent the bolt so badly that the lock was irrevocably jammed. Only a hammer or screwdriver would
get her out of here, and even if there were somebody around, how would they get
it to her?
It got dark so fast. She was tired. There was no air
in this place. Panic turned to despair. She was like one of those stupid hikers
who goes on a dangerous trail and doesn’t tell anyone. Who knew about Burnish
Lake, anyway? Not Burt. He had
never even heard of it.
It had nothing to do with the poetic word “burnish” anyway,
but was the name of some hopelessly dull cocksucker of a statesman who’d been
dead 100 years. Nobody gave a fuck about him anyway.
She had to fall asleep eventually: her quota was four hours
at least, and she didn’t want to set herself back to her Healing the World
campaign, in which people from all over the globe would come to her so she
could lay her hands on them.
Bullshit thought, probably, but maybe not. She still didn’t
see what was so wrong with it. Lots of those East Indian women all wrapped up
in white gauze had people just flocking to them, and nobody said they
were crazy. She had stopped a few people on the street and started to explain
it to them, and they had pulled away, but weren’t most people full of it
anyway? The average IQ is 100, her writer friend said to her, and they both
laughed.
She had to sleep. She curled up on the dank floor, and all
the meds she was on eventually pulled her under.
At the very bottom of the murky tank of her sleep, footsteps
crunched on the grass outside, leaving deep imprints. Someone was humming to
himself. He was a little bit happy, mind, but a little bit sad, too. This was
always the final thing he did, the very last ritual before closing up for the
year.
There was a fiddly noise, a wiggling. A little bit stuck, it
was. He’d fix that. He gave it the special wiggle it needed to move. He had a
way with this lock.
There was a thin screech of metal on metal, then the
sure-handed slide and thunk of a bolt as it dropped into place. Satisfied, the
man turned his head and looked around the place one last time, then headed over
to his pickup.
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