“You’re a foot soldier,” a former lover told him once. “A foot soldier of the arts. Canon fodder!” he added with a laugh. “Get it?”
Philip wryly admitted that he did.
Not that it mattered to him; not much, anyway. He adored being part of the corps, its discipline and competitive fellowship, the perverse haven of a routine that often felt like a calculus of pain. He loved the fleeting nature of dance itself—of all the arts the one that left almost no permanent mark upon the world, even as it casually disfigured its adherents with deformed feet, eating disorders, careers like mayflies. Most of all, he loved those moments during a performance when he could feel himself suspended within an ephemeral web of music and movement, gravity momentarily defeated by the ingrained memory of muscle and bone.
It all ended suddenly. When he was twenty-eight (“that’s ninety in dance years,” he told Emma) Philip shattered his metatarsal during a rehearsal. His foot turned in as he landed from a jump; he hit the floor, crying out in anguish as his leg twisted beneath him. The other dancers rushed over with icepacks and pillows, and arranged transport to NYU Hospital. He spent weeks in a haze of painkillers, his leg in a cast. Months of physical rehab followed, but ever after he walked with a slight limp.
Still, he’d always been popular within the corps, and the ballet masters and rehearsal teachers liked him. At twenty-nine he found himself teaching the company. His former colleagues were now living eidolons of youth, beauty, health, joy, desire flitting past him in the studio, lovely and remote as figures from a medieval allegory. What he felt then was less envy than a terrible, physical ache, as for a lover who’d died. He could still be transported by watching a good performance, the smells of adrenaline and sweat that seeped backstage.
But his ecstatic dreams of flight became recurring nightmares of falling.
Sam had already driven down to the Keys. Emma’s flight left on Sunday, which gave her most of the weekend to show Philip how to work the composting toilet, emergency generator, kerosene lamps, hand pump, outboard motor, woodstove. Philip knew the camp’s layout as though it were the musculature of a familiar body: the old Adirondack-style lodge overlooking the lake; the campers’ log cabins tucked into the surrounding forest, moss-covered roofs and bark exteriors nearly invisible among birch groves and bracken. In the middle of summer, filled with damp children and smelling of sunblock and balsam, it was heartstoppingly lovely.
Now, with only him and Emma kicking through drifts of brown leaves, it all seemed cheerless and slightly sinister. Two miles of gravel road separated the camp from the blue highway that led to an intersection with a convenience store that sold gas, lottery tickets, beer, and not much else. The nearest town was twenty miles away.
“What happens if I cut my hand off with a chainsaw?” Philip asked.
“Well, you’ll be better off treating yourself than calling 911. It could take them an hour to get here. That’s if the roads are clear.”
They spent one morning on a nostalgic circuit of the old camp road, Philip replacing his silver-topped cane with the sturdy walking stick Emma gave him. They were back at the lodge by lunchtime. A stone’s throw from its front steps stretched Lake Tuonela, a cerulean crescent that could, in seconds, turn into frigid, steel-colored chop powerful enough to swamp a Boston Whaler. This time of year there were few boaters on the water: an occasional canoe or kayak, hunters making a foray from a hunting camp. The opposite shore was a nature preserve, or maybe it belonged to a private landowner—Philip had never gotten the details straight. He dimly recalled some ghost story told around the campfire, about early Finnish settlers who claimed the far shore was haunted or cursed.
More likely it was just wildly unsuitable for farming. Philip only knew it formed some kind of no-man’s-land. In all his years visiting Lake Tuonela, he’d never set foot there.
Not that he was tempted to. A mile of icy water lay between the camp and the far shore, and his bad foot kept him from anything resembling a strenuous hike.
“Whenever you go outside, make sure you wear an orange jacket. Even if you’re just walking out to the car,” Emma warned him as they headed back inside. “Waterfowl season now, then deer season. The camp is posted, but we still hear gunshots way too close. Here—”
She pointed to a half-dozen blaze-orange vests hanging beside the door. “Take your pick. You can have your pick of bedrooms, too.” she added. “If you get bored, move to a different room. Like the Mad Tea Party. Just strip the bed and fold the sheets on top, we’ll deal with laundry when we come back in March.”
He chose his usual room on the main floor, with French doors that opened on to the porch overlooking the lake, though he wondered vaguely why he didn’t simply camp in the living room. The lodge had been built over a century ago with hand-hewn logs and slate floor, a flagstone fireplace so massive Philip could have slept inside it. The place had most of the original furnishings, along with the original windows and concomitant lack of insulation, which meant one was warm only within a six-foot radius of the woodstove or fireplace.
Sunday morning Emma gave him final instructions regarding frozen pipes, power outages, wildlife safety. “If you meet a moose, run. If you meet a bear, don’t.”
“What about a mountain lion?”
“Hit him with a rock.”
And that was it. In the afternoon he drove Emma to Bangor to catch her flight. It was very late when he returned, the night sky overcast. He had to use a flashlight to find his way along the leaf-covered path. Branches scraped against each other, the wind rustled in dead burdock. He could hear but not see the water a few yards off, waves slapping softly against the shore, and the distant murmur of wild geese disturbed by the sound of the car.
He slept that night with the outside light on, an extravagance Emma would have deplored.
The camp was less remote than he’d feared. Or, rather, he could choose how isolated he wanted to be. He had to drive thirty minutes to a grocery store, but its shelves held mostly familiar products. If he wanted company, there was a bean supper every Saturday at the Finnish Church, though Emma had advised him to get there early, before they sold out of plates. There was no wireless or DSL at Tuonela; dial-up took so long that Philip soon gave up using it more than once or twice a week. Instead he devoted himself to reading, hauling in firewood, and wandering the trails around the lake.
As a boy, he’d been able to find his way in the dark from his cabin to the main road. Now he was pleased to discover that he could, at least, follow the same woodland paths in daylight, even those trails that had been neglected for the last ten or fifteen years. Stripling oaks and beeches now towered above him; grassy clearings had become dense, unrecognizable thickets of alder and black willow.
Still, some combination of luck and instinct and sense memory guided him: he rarely got lost, and never for long.
He liked to walk in the very early morning, shortly before sunrise when mist hid the world from him, the only sound a faint dripping from branches and dead leaves. After a few days, he began to experience the same strange dislocation he’d experienced when dancing: that eerie sense of being absent from his body even as he occupied it more fully than at other times. The smell of woodstove followed him from the lodge; field mice rustled in the underbrush. As the fog burned off, trees and boulders slowly materialized. Scarlet-crowned oaks atop gray ledges; white slashes of birch; winterberry peppered with bright red fruit. Gold and crimson leaves formed intricate scrollwork upon the lake’s surface, and ducks and geese fed in the shallows.