The Mirrors Read online

  I clear my throat.

  The hermaphrodite stirs.

  “Folks …” I say.

  The others stir.

  “Foe-olks …” I say, a little louder, like I’m trying to call a cat. (In my head, I imagine saying: “Heeere, hippy-hippy-hippy-hippy!” But I don’t, because I’m a professional.)

  The hermaphrodite wakens. Gasps. Starts to crab walk away from me. Looks at me like I’m a grizzly bear, on its hind legs, about to attack.

  “Look, I ain’t gonna hurt you, I just need to—”

  The man seems bothered when the hermaphrodite’s hand slips out of his. He stirs awake. Grunts. The woman seems bothered when the hermaphrodite’s hand slips out of hers. She stirs awake. Whimpers.

  “Look, what I mean is …”

  I see the man’s front now. He has a long beard and long hair and his dick’s just hanging there—as shamelessly as a bull’s. He’s grunting louder. Sounds like something’s the matter with him. Like he’s, well, as we say in this neck of the woods … touched, or something. The woman is now starting to cry. I mean, for no apparent reason, just starting to bawl. Her pale skin is turning pink and red around her cheeks and forehead.

  “Folks, you gotta move … I can’t let you stay here.”

  The man grunts louder. The woman cries louder. The hermaphrodite gasps and trembles. I point at him/her/it. “You …” I say, “you seem like the calmest one here. You’re going to have to leave this land. This is private property. You can’t stay here. And you can’t just go around naked, either. I’m going to have to arrest you for trespassing and indecent exposure. Where are your clothes?”

  Finally the hermaphrodite speaks. A deep voice, husky but a little whiny. “We cannot be banished from this land, officer. We will be here forever.”

  “Now look, I didn’t want to do this, but this situation being what it is … What I mean is, if you aren’t going to find your clothes and come peacefully I’ll have to call for backup.”

  I get out my cell and call the office. Tell them there’s troublemakers out here. I recite the charges and explain that, because of the nature of all that’s going on, I’d like at least two deputies on the scene. I request that at least one of them be female, because I don’t want the crying girl to say I touched her inappropriately while loading her into the back of my squad car. The deputies bitch and moan about going out this far, because Orescular Island is a hell of a long drive from the county seat. But they do as they’re told, because I’m the sheriff.

  Procedure says I need to obtain a statement from the suspects, but the man’s grunting is getting worse—almost animalistic. And the woman’s crying is getting damned near hysterical. So I point to the hermaphrodite and tell him/her/it that we need to have a chat, away from the other two.

  “You can’t expect me to leave them alone, officer,” the hermaphrodite says. “I need to keep an eye on them at all times. There will be terrible consequences if I don’t. Far worse than indecent exposure, I can assure you.”

  At this point I’m just about to lose my patience. I want to slap his/her/its face. I don’t do that, though, because I’m a professional.

  But I’m not perfect.

  And by that I mean I’m human. This is a bit much for me to handle before I’ve had my third cup of coffee. I don’t like the hermaphrodite’s tone. Not at all respectful. So I go and grab him/her/it by the wrist. Pull him/her/it out away from the others so we can have a chat.

  The man’s now howling like a wolf and leering at the woman. The woman’s freaking out, trembling.

  I pull the hermaphrodite a good twenty feet away, behind a cluster of vine-covered trees, just so we can have a little privacy. There’s a struggle all the way. But I need to take a statement, and there’s no way I can do it in the middle of chaos. Someone has to speak for these weirdos, and the hermaphrodite is, relatively speaking, the only calm candidate.

  “You imbecile!” he/she/it hisses.

  Then there’s a woman’s shriek, followed by a long, loud male scream. There’s a thud of something heavy landing in something wet. I jog away from the hermaphrodite, back around the trees and their vines, to see what’s the matter.

  The caveman is heaving a large stone into the woman’s face, over and over.

  I pull my pistol out of its holster. I scream as loud as I can. Aspire to scream even louder than the caveman. “Stop it now! Drop that rock and put your hands over your head!”

  The hermaphrodite lets out a coarse laugh. “I told you so, officer. This is what happens if I’m separated from them. This is what happens. This is what happens. This is what—”

  And on the third repetition, the hermaphrodite’s voice gets deeper. And the legs grow longer, right before my eyes. And the shoulders broaden. And the cock gets longer and the labia turn into scrotum and the breasts recede and he/she/it sprouts more body hair. And a beard. And it becomes clear the hermaphrodite is no longer a hermaphrodite.

  The hermaphrodite is now a man. I stagger. Whimper. The carotid arteries in my neck are dancing to the pounding beat of my heart.

  “When I’m not around to watch them,” the gruff voice says, “he kills her. And then the female aspect of me dies with her. You’re a man of justice, so you know what—regrettably— has to be done next.” The once-hermaphrodite-now-man wrestles my pistol out of my grip. It’s not hard to do. My palms are sweaty. The gun slips out.

  The murderous caveman is still hunched over the dead woman’s body. The head is bashed in. Skull bones jut out of the head at odd angles, but he doesn’t find the sight unattractive. He’s grinning and starting to fuck her. He’s so absorbed in his pleasure that he doesn’t notice the once-hermaphrodite-now-man’s approach. A voice cries out: “This is justice!” And then there’s a shot. And there’s blood blowing in the wind. And the caveman slumps onto his victim.

  The shot wakes me out of my astonishment. There have been two murders—both of which happened after I arrived on the scene. Luckily, no one else saw anything. (Unless the retired couple is watching at the window with their binoculars. That prospect doesn’t help my nerves any.) I go over to apprehend the shooter, but just as I grab a hold of him, his flesh starts to feel like butter. Mushy. Insubstantial. Then a gust of wind kicks up and tears pieces off of him. They fly into the air, briefly circle around one another like a tornado of flesh, and then dissolve. This process starts at his hairy feet and proceeds upward. When it reaches his hands, the gun falls onto the ground. When it reaches his chest, he shrugs and says: “I was them and they were me. I can’t exist without the two of them. But still, we cannot be banished. We will be here forever.”

  When my backup arrives, the bodies of all three of them are gone.

  The hermaphrodite went away in the flesh tornado, but the other two bodies just … faded. It was the damnedest thing. Faded as soon as I heard the squad cars approaching in the distance. There’s still a thin wisp of smoke trailing up into the sky from their campfire, though. That assures me I haven’t gone mad.

  What can I say under these circumstances? I think on my feet. Tell the deputies the suspects have escaped to somewhere else on the island. The retired couple get out on their dock, take their boat over to my dock, and insist on giving my deputies their statement. They look badly hung over. “We got woke up by a gunshot,” the wife says. There’s a cigarette dangling from her mouth. She doesn’t bother removing it when she talks. “Figured ’em hippies murdered the sheriff. Hid in the basement until we heard police sirens. Then we figured we’d better come over and testify.”

  The deputies look at me weird. Ask if I’m all right. Say it looks like I need to sit down. Say I look like I just ran a mile through the desert. I feel my uniform clinging to my back, it’s so sweaty.

  The deputies search the island, but can’t find anyone. I go back to my office and file a report, but it’s vague and brief. Part of that stems from necessity. (Clearly, I can’t document everything I saw.)

  But it’s more than that. I ha
ve trouble concentrating. The words can’t seem to find their way on to paper. I can’t seem to pull my mind away from the scene.

  Ragged, smacking wind along the shore of the Ohio.

  A sky the color of suffocation—gray here, blue there.

  Trees—naked and gaunt.

  The vines.

  Blood blowing in the wind. Dancing through my veins.

  The vines.

  The caveman smashing open the woman’s head, then fucking her.

  The hermaphrodite stealing my gun for the execution.

  The flesh tornado, the fading.

  The vines.

  The vines.

  The vines. Green and gray and brown. It’s November outside but it’s May in my brain and the vines are growing and they’re twisting around each cauliflower-curve of gray matter and they squeeze all resistance out.

  Go there, they insist. Go back.

  So, around one in the afternoon, I go back.

  There’s been a crazy increase in temperature over the last few hours. A good twenty degrees at least. The thermometer on my dash says it’s now sixty-three outside.

  When I arrive at Orescular Island, I see that the retired couple’s boat is still on my side of the Ohio. Two figures sit on the dock. One is shaggy, the other curvy. I run toward them. I need answers.

  The shaggy man raises a glass. “We were hopin’ you’d come back out,” he says with his warbling voice. He is the old man, but hairier. Heftier. More robust. Moment by moment, his gray turns brown. He smiles and takes a sip of gin.

  Even more alarming is the curvy young-old woman. Each moment she grows less frail and more luscious. Time works backwards on her body. Once desiccated, she’s now delicious—morphing into a clone of the tight-assed vixen I saw earlier.

  She pours some gin in a glass for me. “Care for a drink?”

  More than anything, I need a drink. I need many drinks.

  And together we drink and we laugh and we talk about how much we enjoy one another’s company. Afternoon stretches into evening. As the sun goes down we get on our bellies, on the dock, and look out at the Ohio. And as the sun slips over the horizon we look down into the Ohio. And we see one another in the water’s reflection, as we really are, for the first time. Caveman. Vixen. Intersexed. And, exceedingly curious about our bodies, we remove our clothes. (They already seem like foreign things—unwelcome chains tethering us to some outrageous time and space.)

  And I run my hand over my breasts and down to my tiny penis and labia. And the caveman rubs my rump, and I kiss the curvy maiden. And we roll against each other, on the dock. And the caveman howls. And the maiden lets out yippy little squeals of delight.

  Our bodies writhe around one another like vines until we are one. We must be one. A hideous imbalance strikes if we are separated from one another.

  We make solemn vows to always stay together. To always stay on this land. To never again let ourselves be separated, under any circumstances. We have every right to dwell in this zone of existence forever. We belong here. We cannot be banished.

  CODA

  The Mirrors

  The day the mirrors took over, you could still see a reflection—it just wasn’t yours. It made no difference whether you looked in the bedroom mirror, medicine cabinet mirror, rearview mirror, or sideview mirror. Always, someone else who wasn’t you stared back (a different someone else in each mirror). In many cases, the image in the glass held not even the slightest hint of a resemblance to you. Hair, eyes, nose, weight, skin color—all different. Occasionally, it wasn’t even the right gender.

  This tormented you, but you said nothing about it to anyone else. You didn’t want to sound crazy. Besides, everyone looked so frazzled, you felt certain you’d not find an understanding ear. That day, you almost wet yourself because your coworkers constantly occupied the office’s single-stall bathroom.

  The second day, you woke up, rubbed the sleep out of your eyes, and lurched toward your bureau to take a glance. You wanted to think the worst was over. You sought to confirm a hunch that reality had just taken a personal day, and had now returned.

  But the second day proved even more distressing than the first. At least then, your reflections had all been more or less ordinary human beings. The second day, you looked in the mirror and saw a dummy made out of clay, with hair made out of yarn. Dull, asymmetrical eyes glanced back at you. A drooping mouth drooled. Stubby appendages hung from the torso, more like fins than arms. Worse, the whole thing began to melt. The mirror had concocted a clumsy effigy, not even real enough to scare away crows. You whimpered and put a sheet over it. That made things better until you went to take a shower.

  This day, everyone called in sick. The folks on TV called it a flu epidemic, since so many people feigned illness.

  It was also the first day the Prophet appeared. The initial reports placed him smack dab in the middle of downtown. The five o’clock news teased you, promising an upcoming feature about him and his robe of tiny mirrors woven together like chain mail. Reporters at the scene tossed around phrases like “mentally ill” and “traffic nuisance” and “coming up next,” but the station never broadcast actual photos of the man creating the disturbance. The promised story never materialized. You waited a long time for it, too. Later in the program, the anchors pretended they’d never mentioned it. They weren’t quite themselves that day. The male anchor’s hair looked too tousled. The female’s eyeliner looked as if it had been applied by a fourth grader.

  The third day, mirrors stopped working altogether: they reflected everything else but you. So this, you thought, is how a vampire must feel. This posed a problem, of course, as far as preparing for the workday (you only had so much sick time left, you had to make a go of it). But you realized that seeing nothing felt better than seeing what you had seen in the mirror the previous two days. You prepared yourself to make the best of it.

  It wasn’t to be. The governor declared a state of emergency. You couldn’t leave your house. You had to stay tuned to the television for further instructions. The governor would read a statement and answer questions at a press conference scheduled for noon. Twelve came and went. Three came and went. It wasn’t until after dark that new information became available, but it wasn’t the governor who delivered it.

  A PRIVILEGE, NOT A RIGHT

  Something wrote those words in a simple, savage script—carved (as if by claws) out of the newly molten surface of your mirror. You turned off the light and hoped the glass would become glass again, that the message-wound would heal overnight.

  The fourth day, the news reported that many people now had their normal reflections restored, while some still suffered “outages.” That day, all the anchorwomen wore a gratuitous excess of perfectly applied makeup, sending a message to the audience about what side of the divide they were on. Not a single anchorman suffered a cowlicky coif. Reports trickled in, and before long the new normal began to establish itself.

  High school principals fared well, as did realtors and many civil servants. Most teachers found themselves Reflected, but a substantial minority didn’t. All doctors and the vast majority of lawyers made the cut, as did their secretaries. The unemployed didn’t. Farmers didn’t. Skilled tradesmen split fifty-fifty.

  During man-on-the-street interviews, some expressed a belief that one’s reflection-status had more to do with geography than occupation. These theorists pointed to the dearth of Reflected persons in the dingy heart of the city and among the dilapidated trailers in the countryside, beyond the reach of the Interstate.

  Debates raged about the so-called Reflection-gap—on TV, Facebook, Twitter, and even good old-fashioned street corners. Some of the latter ended in brawls. Some of the brawls ended in riots. Some of the riots ended in curfews. You obeyed them.

  The fifth day, your bureau mirror still rippled with molten silver, but a new message had been scrawled into it:

  UNDESERVING

  You felt punished and didn’t know why. That one scornful word
managed to scourge your every nerve. You went back to bed for several hours, but fidgeted—unable to sleep. You both sought answers and feared them. You decided to turn on the TV.

  One local network affiliate grabbed an exclusive interview with the Prophet. What transpired wasn’t so much an interview as a monologue (or, as some might say, a sermon). By now, his garish outfit had become familiar. In the eyes of the reporters, he’d undergone an elevation in status—from maniac to messiah. He offered an “exegesis” of the mirror messages, but this was little more than an unpleasant rant.

  “They’ve separated us,” the Prophet said, “the wheat from the chaff, the Reflected from the Undeserving, and the Undeserving from the Condemned. When you look into the mirror, it tells you what you are. They tell us what we are. Gone now are the days of denying what you see there. Gone are the days of hiding the truth.” He contorted his mouth and let out a loud, raspy cry. “Accept your judgment, accept it with humility, ye Undeserving ones, and in time even you might find yourself Reflected! There is still time before you find yourself Condemned!”

  That’s when the phone rang. The caller ID said it was work. You picked it up and listened to a recording. “We’re hoping to return to normal business operations tomorrow. As always, we expect all staff to maintain superb standards of personal grooming.”

  You needed a Reflection.

  You tried using windows, but they invariably fogged, despite the moderate temperatures. You tried using your cell phone to take pictures or movies of yourself, but a ghostly white haze lingered over your face in each and every image. You left in search of a fountain. You tried the wishing well at the mall. A phalanx of well-groomed policemen surrounded it, standing between you and Reflection. They began staring at you, perhaps noting your inordinate interest in the wishing well, perhaps noting some irregularity about your appearance—a crumb stuck to the side of your mouth or a few too many hairs out of place. A policeman gestured toward a mall security guard, who then waddled over to him with alacrity. The cop whispered in his ear and pointed in your direction. Then the security guard huffed his way toward you. You turned around. You walked into a crowd of happy faces, hoping to get lost in them so you could escape to your waiting car. It worked.