Continental Drift by Russell Banks Page B

it as if it has been there since prehistory. In time, the lake will appear on maps, and roads and streets will circle the lake and bypass it, towns and neighborhoods will be laid out along its shores, water will be pumped from it to irrigate the citrus groves and fields, to flush thetoilets and sprinkle the lawns and wash the cars, and if the lake is large enough, a marina will open for business on one shore, and soon motorboats will draw girls in bathing suits over its sparkling surface on skis, while the water table drops half a foot a year. Then, late one night, in the middle of a marshy field across town and well in sight of a housing complex still under construction, a cow will break through the ground, and attempting to escape from the widening hole, will drown. By morning, half a hundred square yards of land will be under water. Mothers will instruct their children to stay away from it, as if it were alive and warm-blooded, but even so, the children will come out to the edge of the hole and stare at it, exchanging risk for wonder, tossing sticks and small chunks of limestone into the water, their tight, high voices crossing through the morning air like swallows.
    It’s not until Bob has been in Oleander Park for over a full month, however, that he is able to look out his car window on the way to work one morning and for the first time actually see these lakes that surround him. It’s as if, a passenger on a bus, he has been reading a book for hours, and closing the book, looks around and realizes that he’s in a bus station in a strange city surrounded by strangers. He thought he was alone, that the privacy of his dream was his waking reality as well, and suddenly he sees that the wall around him, made for him by his fears and anxieties, is very close to him indeed, and stretching beyond that wall for miles and miles, all the way to the horizon, is a brand-new world.
    He is driving to work one cool morning, past the Cypress Gardens airport, and turning his gaze away from it toward Lake Eloise on his right, he observes for the first time a golden haze lifting slowly in thick swirls from the surface of the lake and drifting toward the trees along the far shore, bald cypress and locust and live oak trees with liana vines and Spanish moss drooping like memories from the branches, and he is struck by the soft, warm ease of the scene, and he wants to enter that scene.
    Bob Dubois is a sensual man—that is, most of his deeper responses to his presence in the world make themselves known to hisbody before moving eventually on to his mind, a condition he learned early in life to trust and respect. If he were more articulate, more like his older brother, perhaps, and words did not so often feel like a tasteless paste in his mouth, he would probably, like most people, mistrust the information regarding the world that gets brought to him by means of his body’s delight, or else he would hold the world so revealed in contempt. But he’s not like Eddie, he’s not like most people, and consequently, a beautiful sound makes him want to listen more closely, a beautiful meal makes him hungry when he wasn’t, a beautiful woman makes him tumescent, and the sight of a morning haze rising off a still, dark lake makes him want to row a small, flat-bottomed boat quietly along the shore, to raise the dripping oars every now and then and cast a line among the knobby cypress roots for bass. His desires, then, reveal the world to him. His fears and anxieties, his aversions, obscure it.
    Until this morning, he has not arrived at work feeling happy. Each day has brought a new disappointment, disillusionment or the kind of frustration you have to lie about to keep from blaming on anyone but yourself, because if you do blame it on anyone but yourself, you will be very angry at that person. And Bob cannot afford to be very angry at his brother Eddie; he is too dependent on him.
    He works twelve hours a day, six days a week, and except for the