Keep, Chapter One

In November, the figures of a young man and woman, seniors in high school to be particular, appeared against a bank of a lake that was only just hued with the colors of dawn. The pines made a dark margin around the water, but the other end of the lake was open and permitted a view of the valley, which from their perspective looked pretty much infinite. The surface of the lake itself was so still that it reflected the remnant of stars; it was a mirror of everything and caught every movement with the precision of an eye. Keep stood up and started unlacing her moccasins, a flood of nutbrown hair dipped into the water, obscuring her face. She wore a sky blue poncho and tested the shallows with her toe, disturbing the stillness into happy ripples. There are too many words at present to be able to show you who this girl was in all her complexity, her entirety, but as a child, she’d actually been afraid of going outside. It was too big. The mountains were monsters in her imagination, the trees arrows shot into the ground from giant bows, holding within their columns all the terrors and intrigues young children would generally do well to stay away from. “I’ll be doggone buggered,” said her counterpart, John Mark, who was incredulous at the fact that they had actually found the hidden lake. He didn’t know how they’d found it. An accident, perhaps, a graceful coincidence. He stood a few inches taller and slumped when he stood still, with the habit of hunching up his shoulders mainly since he also had the habit of sticking his hands into his pockets. He had them in pockets now, raw and pulsing, gloveless, with the nose a cherry red and breath unfurling like campfire remains. They’d found the lake on accident, it seemed, but had heard of it through the musing’s of Keep’s beloved grandfather Seymour, who although was a retired logger had memorized Jade’s surrounding geography even better than the cartographers who mapped out lumber extraction strategies. “I found it years ago on an evening walk,” he’d said. “I forget where it is. Definitely north of here, probably about three miles in or so. Myth has it that it used to be an old trapper’s summer stead and that he built his house somehow in the middle of the lake on a dock.” He didn’t mention that he’d seen the house on his visit, that it’d been too dark to really make the shape out but he thought he’d seen a blurred outline of the possibility of a house. The most wondrous idea of finding it, he’d said, was that it was out of the lumber company’s contractual reach. It was, in a sense, a sacred space that could safely merit a person’s piety. He’d been correct. No sign of invasion, no trees perspiring in anxiety. The house on the lake intrigued Keep and John Mark as soon as they heard about it. There were always stories of old mine entryways that apparently wound to the depths of the mountains and out again but were never found, probably stuck way behind labyrinths of pine and heather. Sometimes these legends were better preserved untouched like they would only be sacred if left undiscovered, and maybe, they thought, the lake and its house were of this category. They didn’t dismiss the idea. Neither of them had expected to actually come across the body of water, almost in reverence of its seclusion, and much less expected to set sights on the dilapidated structure of a lean-to in the center of the lake, foundations almost trembling on a dock of ragged, unkempt boards, which was actually there in front of them about thirty yards from shore. The morning’s gold persuaded them against illusion, and they stared in wonder. The slumping lean-to seemed to be holding up for itself, painted a peeling green on basic pine planks. It had a door and a window shattered of its glass, although a piece of white cloth flapped like a flag of surrender in the open space. The structure was skeletal and feeble at its first take, but given some more consideration you couldn’t help but think it looked self-sufficient. It had endured the natural elements for who knows how long and still stood, beacon-like, suggesting it had no intention of going down any time soon. The truth is that it has never been discovered how this thing was actually built, and there has been only a little sincere investigation. There’s a sense in which the house on the lake evaded explanation and dismissed it as besides the point. John Mark would later scold himself for wanting to figure out the architecture, the geometry, and the balance, because although such a want is understandable, it showed a displacement of prerogative. To actually know the nature of the house on the lake, you had to paradoxically stop trying to figure out the semantics of its position and history and meticulous practicalities. Not at all to bash critical minds who are experts at unearthing enigmas. But to do away with the enigma under the posture of definition and method is actually to denigrate the beauty that is only found in its mystery. The house on the lake, they found, was meant to be entered. “We have to go check it out,” Keep breathed, matter-of-factly. John Mark started to scour the bank for any sign of a boat, hoping that they could escape the swim and take their breakfast with them to have it domestically indoors. Keep turned the opposite way and peered in among some hedges and rocks, where after a couple of minutes of searching, she found a slender metal canoe turned on its side and roped to a tree. The rope was so minced that it might turn to dust under the softest grip. Pine residue stained the canoe’s dull metal surface and rust made red rings around the bolts. She tipped it over right side up, and the clamor attracted John Mark to the scene. “Shooting shoelace, I’ll be dog puckered,” he said. “It almost makes me wonder if someone still lives around here,” muttered Keep, investigating the boat’s insides. Here there wasn’t too much evidence of use. No old tackle boxes or dip cans, no fishing rods, and no paddle. “What say we load up and take a look,” John Mark said. “Yeah, let’s do it.” Tossing their backpacks into the canoe, they set a better part of its body into the shoals. Keep stepped inside and John Mark pushed off the bank with one foot planted in the bow. By the grace of an uncertain balance, the canoe thrust forward. “I guess we’ll have to paddle with our hands,” said Keep. The canoe veered to one side and John Mark plunged his left hand into the water to the wrist, righting its direction and producing a gurgle of current. For a little while, the lean-to didn’t seem to be getting any bigger, like an oasis in a desert hemmed by illusion. The more they set eyes directly in its crooked door, though, the more it grew although the backdrop of trees and mountainside stayed strangely static. It was a rare thing but they were at a loss for words. They felt like they were in an alternate course of reality that actually strengthened the clarity of the real world. Like they were in someone else’s backyard, allowed to explore the fruit trees for a limited amount of time so they could be enamored by the memory of the taste for good, until a much longer return for seconds was in order. The sun fixed a gaze through the valley and colored the slopes, bleeding through the boards of the lean-to so it gleamed. Even in the density of the quiet, they were unable to hear chainsaws or trucks. A tremendous feeling similar to fear, not a type interested in self-preservation, but in the recognition of a near holy object, jutted into their psyches. The dock was just high enough for the boat to slide underneath it. Keep caught its edge and stopped their motion, using her grip on the wood to stand up and cast a leg upon the platform. She steadied the boat once she was up there so John Mark could clamber next to her; he secured the canoe to the post with a piece of fishing string and then they stood up to their full height, warily. The door of the lean-to had no knob, not even a leather string and loop. The initials S.M. were carved into its center by means of what could have been a dedicated fingernail or a pocket-knife. Inside the room, they encountered the unexpected: an opposite wall that was not a wall at all but a glass window interrupted only by a perpendicular crosslike beam running through its center. The view through its transparent lens looked oddly similar to the country they’d just come from like they were in the iris of an eye surrounded with extremities of color on all sides. The floorboards quaked when they walked over them and they could smell the mildew that had formed on the wood’s damp underbellies. John Mark’s head brushed a ceiling made out of a diagonal piece of sheet metal. Holes and cracks in the wall let them see the thin visions of trees and water. It was cold. The door shut itself, knocking three or four times against its frame, and everything went quiet again. There they were, standing in a tiny house on the water, a stationary ship that felt like it held all the motion of the valley in its space. A colony holding the sanctity. A temple. “Well,” said John Mark, peering through the window. “This is about the darndest thing I’ve ever seen.” He touched the flailing cloth in the window, observing the nails that held it in place. “How the hell was this place even built?” “Language please.” “Sorry.” “Good question though.” “Somebody would have had to drive these posts into the bottom of the lake.” “Very true.” John Mark was standing in the middle of the floor, letting his weight bend the boards a little bit, and then, impulsively he jumped, supposedly to experiment with the veracity. There was much hope of bending boards so apparently old; if he could coin the feeling, John Mark would have said that the floor bent him a little bit. He staggered and winced and didn’t try it again. When he touched the glass he revoked his fingers from its burning cold and when he ran a thumb lightly along an edge of shingle it burst open with blood. “Don’t touch anything!” he hissed. “What’s the matter?” John Mark produced a handkerchief from his pocket and wrapped up the wounded thumb while glancing around the space in anxiety. “What else in here is likely to hurt?” he wondered aloud. Keep saw the kerchief blotch with redness and repeated her concern, which John Mark dismissed with a sudden notice of a small chest in the corner of the room, obscured by shadow. “Somebody lived here once,” he mused. “Could be.” John Mark opened the chest and, peering in, unearthed a folded piece of brown paper and rose to his feet exposing it under the light from the window. Keep joined him over his shoulder and together they explored a few lines of elegant cursive, too beautiful for any trapper’s dedication, etched into its fabric. I’ve been here before and yet I’m here for the first time. I’m being brought to the place I love and yet I’ve never set eyes on what I’m about to see. There was no name signed and no indication that this person had written the words in the house or out of it. And then a warmth came through the glass window.