The Mirrors Read online

  Your nightgown swished through the air-conditioned dark as you walked into the hallway. Something had torn asunder a huge section of wall—a full meter in width and half that in height. Dust and shattered drywall littered the carpet. You would have fumed and cursed, had you not come to realize that the music was being played on the other side of the hole. That must have been where it had been coming from earlier, as well. Music wasn’t the only thing that gushed out of the gaping wound in the wall, either. Moonlight did too.

  Your cell phone chirped and chimed on your nightstand, and you winced at the cacophony it imposed on the Shostakovich piece. You considered letting it go to voicemail, but then you thought it might be Hank. You walked away from the moonlight, the music, and the hole and went to pick up the phone. It wasn’t Hank. It was a woman you’d never heard before. She spoke too quickly to understand.

  “Mrs. Abernathy?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Mrs. Abernathy? Is this the wife of Henry Abernathy? This is Katrina from Houston Emergency Medical Services. Ma’am, I’m sorry. You might want to sit down before I tell you this. Earlier tonight. He collapsed. Your husband, I mean.”

  The Fourteenth grew louder. The soprano shrieked. The paramedic-woman kept talking on the other end of the phone, but you could no longer piece together what she was saying. Wood blocks from the orchestra’s percussion section pounded against one another, making sounds like slowing heart-beats. Then the strings whirring, whirring, like a child’s top slowing down; devolving from a tight spin to a clumsy wobble.

  The woman on the phone raised her voice, apparently frustrated with having not been heard but trying to rein in that frustration for the sake of politeness. “There’s a hole in the hallway,” she wailed.

  You almost said, “I know, and there’s moonlight and music pouring out of it.” Then you realized she was talking about a different hole in a different hallway. Far away.

  “That’s where he fell. We think he was on his way back to his room when he collapsed. He fell so hard he made a hole there. It was a stroke, ma’am. The ambulance couldn’t do anything. He’s, he’s died, ma’am. Pronounced dead, that is.” A pause. “Ma’am?”

  You pulled the cell phone away from your ear. In the hole—the hole in your hallway—music still blared. The symphony should have come to an end, but instead the strings remained in a holding pattern, whirring. The top still wobbled, long after it should have stopped. It was as though the symphony was being played on a skipping record.

  Your out-of-shape knees ached as you knelt on the floor. You stuck your head into the hole and saw a vast landscape of sand dunes on the other side, illuminated by the full moon. An orchestra and singers occupied one of the dunes. The string players’ bows worked diligently, playing the same notes over and over. The soprano’s eyes caught yours. She grinned and beckoned you to come watch the last moments of their performance. In the hollow under the dune, a well-dressed audience listened. Dapper gents in tuxedos and ladies in silk gowns.

  “Ve are vaiting for you,” the soprano hollered in Russian-accented English. “Come now, the orchestra can not feenish unteel you arrive.”

  You set the cell phone down on the hallway floor and crawled into the hole. Into the desert night.

  You found yourself adorned in a red strapless gown of the sort you hadn’t worn in twenty years. Heels, too. Awkward for marching through the desert. You decided to take them off until you reached your seat. You felt hard, sharp fragments of shells or rocks in the sand. Some tortured the soles of your feet. Some crunched under your step. Wind whipped through the night, tossing dust into your eyes and throat. You coughed, but persevered until you arrived at the appointed dune.

  The moment you took your seat the string section performed new notes—as though a record had just become unskipped. You’d never heard the Fourteenth performed live before. You felt yourself grow dizzy with each jab of the violin bows, as though you were the top whirring and wobbling—the world around you spinning but slowing. When the symphony ended, you struggled to rise to your feet for the standing ovation. Members of the audience flung bouquets of white lilies toward the soprano. The conductor, a thin gentleman with longish, Oscar Wilde–like hair and a pencil mustache, swept them up and presented them to his prima donna. More applause.

  He approached the bulbous, antique microphone at the front of the stage and spoke to the audience. He, too, had a thick Russian accent. “Teenk you lahdeez end geentlemun. Now, for yew-ur enjoyment, zee cournival.” Applause, this time accompanied by cheers and laughter. The previously prim and proper crowd shed evening jackets and scarves and took on a deportment more fitting a fraternity party than a reception.

  The sky lightened from black to dark blue, and on the horizon you spotted the first hint of daylight. You followed the line of concertgoers to a dune in back of the stage, where a crude collection of amusements had been assembled in a semicircle. A rust-pocked Ferris wheel. A carousel, bereft of horses to ride and furnished instead with an array of grotesque, saddled chimeras. A concession stand selling black cotton candy. In the middle of it all, a man (Indian? Pakistani?) took a hoe to a pile of hot embers. Smells of burning things lingered unpleasantly in your nostrils.

  The soprano approached you and smiled. “Behuld,” she said. “Zee firevalker.”

  The firewalker nodded, acknowledging the soprano’s introduction, and began his demonstration. With each step, there were crackling sounds from the coals. The crowd gasped and oooed and ahhhed and laughed and applauded.

  A voice drifted toward you from behind, from the place where you’d entered this desert. A woman’s voice, filtered through the mechanism of a cell phone. “Ma’am? Are you all right, ma’am? I’m so sorry to have to make this call, believe me. Are you there?” Then, to someone else, frantically, voice cracking, “She’s not responding.”

  You began to turn away from the firewalker. You weren’t interested in carnivals, and Hank … Oh yes, you remembered now. Hank had just died. You strode purposefully away but felt a cold hand on your bare shoulder. “Not yit,” the soprano said. “Ve all tek turns. Now, chu valk on zee coals.”

  “But my husband, he …”

  The voice on the cell phone again: “Ma’am?” Then, to a coworker: “What do we do now?”

  The soprano took you by the hand as though you were a child. “Chu moost be brev. I inseest.” Then she walked you through the sharp sand. When you arrived at the pile of coals, the crowd inhaled a collective “ahhhhh,” then started the chant: “Wid-ow, Wid-ow, Wid-ow.”

  The landscape brightened another shade, moving past twilight into full dawn. The soprano giggled and shoved you onto the hot coals before joining into the chant, herself. “Vidow, Vid-ow …”

  As the desert sun began to bulge, huge and warty over the horizon, you saw that a glowing, superheated femur splintered under your feet. On the ground a few feet ahead of you, you saw a smoldering skull—a collage of white bone, gray ash, black smoke, and orange heat.

  You were treading on cremains, not coals.

  You wailed as flames began licking your legs. You started to run off of the pyre, but soon found there was nowhere to go. The orchestra members, singers, and carnies blocked your exit. You turned toward the soprano, shrieking as you began to smell the scorching of your own skin. “Help me!”

  The firewalker started a new chant, and the rest of those gathered joined in. “Sut-tee, sut-tee, sut-tee …” Suttee—the act of a Hindu widow tossing herself atop her husband’s funeral pyre. Now largely abandoned, illegal, but still reverberating throughout history and legend. A sign of true wifely devotion.

  Then full daybreak. A howling sirocco gusted over the scene, whipping up the flames in a frenzy around you. The last sight you saw before being wholly consumed was the way the wind cut through all the faces surrounding you. The way ball gowns and tuxedos went limp as the flesh that had inhabited them was revealed to be nothing but ash. The way the desert wasn’t a desert at all, but rather a
wasteland of cremains—dune after dune of human ash littered with tiny chunks and splinters of bone that had survived the ovens.

  You awoke to find the paramedics—locals, not their Houston counterparts—hovering over you. A young man with a buzz cut. “Stay with us, ma’am. Stay awake.”

  All you could say is, “My husband …”

  The paramedic looked you in the eye. “Your children are on their way. Think about your children. Stay awake. You took a nasty spill right into the wall. Broke all the way through the drywall. This cut on your head is gonna need stitches.”

  So you got stitches. They kept you there until Tommy and Jennifer arrived to take you home. Then came the blur. Hank’s body flown back on an airline he’d always hated. A sit-down with the funeral director (something you didn’t remember in the days afterward, even though the children insisted you were there). Hank’s family driving in from Connecticut. A brief viewing (for close family only) before his cremation. He looked gray and sad. Then days in your pajamas and housecoat. Days without showering.

  The memorial service. A polished brass box, no bigger than an old record turntable, embossed with his name. It bore all that was left of him, burnt and pulverized into thousands of tiny, dead pieces. Kind words from one of the senior partners about the void that he’d leave in the firm with his passing. Even the Flanagans came.

  You insisted the funeral home play Shostakovich. You wanted them to play the Fourteenth in its entirety, but compromised with the mortician and your kids, who said this was impractical and might upset people. You decided to use only the last movement. You translated the libretto for the occasion and inserted it into the service leaflet. “Death is great / We belong to her, we whose mouths laugh. / When we believe ourselves to be within life’s care / she dares to cry within us.”

  His family came over to you and offered platitudes that he was in a better place. “Don’t cry,” his mother (an ancient, hyper-religious shrew) said. “The Lord needed another angel.” You didn’t have the energy to object. One by one, the mourners paid their respects to you. How oddly similar it all seemed to the receiving line at your wedding.

  The funeral director patted your shoulder. “You should come to the reception now, ma’am.”

  “In a moment. You go on ahead.” You needed some time by yourself before moving on to cake and punch and mints. Besides, couldn’t the funeral director see that one mourner remained in line to pay his respects? A little, pale man wearing thick glasses.

  “They vunted deez service to be comforteenk,” Shostakovich said, “to say dat death eez oonly zee begineenk. But eets not a begineenk, eetz zee real end. There vill be noothink aftervards. Noothink.”

  You got up and embraced little Dmitri. “Thank you,” you croaked as tears slalomed down your cheeks. “Thank you for telling the truth.”

  He nervously pushed away from you and lit a cigarette.

  Took a little bow. Then shuffled toward the door. He ran his fingers through his hair and coughed. You’d embarrassed him.

  March fourteenth, seven months later. You were in the kitchen microwaving a potato because you wanted to make dinner for a change, instead of going out.

  The kids weren’t due home for spring break for another week or two. They’d bounced back after the memorial service. They’d only stayed with you a few days afterward, because, well, they’d had a lot of material to read to start off the semester. They’d told you they’d been offered extensions on their assignments but didn’t want to use them because extensions only delayed the stress and didn’t eliminate it. Their professors were breathing down their necks already, they’d said.

  Tommy had seen to it that the hole in the hallway was repaired. You told him there was no rush. (Actually, you didn’t want it repaired at all. You wanted to keep a portal open between this world and the Desert of Ashes. But, of course, you couldn’t tell Tommy that.)

  Shostakovich’s Fourteenth Symphony drifted toward you from the hallway, and you let out a wistful sigh. It was the first time you’d heard it since the day Hank died. The fourth movement this time. The one about a suicide moldering in a cemetery, buried without the benefit of the holy sacraments. (The libretto, from Apollinaire: “Three large lilies, three large lilies on my crossless grave. / Quite alone, quite alone and accursed as I, methinks.”)

  You needed to find your way back to the concert. To the carnival. You had friends there (or at least, companions). You’d given Hank’s old toolbox to Tommy so he could use it to assemble Ikea furniture for his dorm room, and he hadn’t brought it back. So you had no hammer with which to bust up the wall. The music got louder and you became more desperate. You even considered, for a moment, heaving Hank’s brass urn against the wall, but ultimately that felt too disrespectful.

  In the end, you created a new pyre. You used faded wedding photos and baby book pages as kindling. You stacked them against the wall where the hole had been the first time. You hoped that a fire could burn its way through, reopening the portal. Then you struck a match, set it all ablaze, and bent down to the ground with tired joints. Softly, you whispered the chant: “Sut-tee. Sut-tee …”

  The soprano grew louder with each rising flame. You smiled for the first time in years.

  A Catechism for Aspiring Amnesiacs

  Only the most desperate among us feel a tug toward the Time Altar. Fewer still embark on the journey to find it. The outcome is too uncertain. You could end up with exactly what you want, or you could end up with the opposite. Only the Beast, Oblivion, decides what you get. All you can do is figure out what It’s hungry for, and try to be that.

  To render yourself acceptable for sacrifice, follow these suggested steps.

  First, you must either shun or be shunned by your family for a period of no less than five years. Relationships are like clouds that obscure, roil, and churn, suggesting picture after picture to our pattern-seeking heads. To be touched by Oblivion, you must trust no one. You must be immune to seeing things in the clouds that aren’t there.

  Next, follow Interstate 65 to the Rust Belt town of Verderben, Indiana. Take in the local color. You’ll see one of the region’s many abandoned factories just off of Spring Street. It’s now put to use as a Halloween spook house, open only a few weeks in October. The garishly painted hearse lingers in the parking lot year-round, though.

  You’ll smell raw sewage from the treatment plant. You’ll drive on crumbling roads, over rusty railroad tracks. You’ll dodge a handful of bleary-eyed addicts trudging across the four-lane highway in no particular hurry. You’ll fear that they might even throw themselves underneath your car. Don’t. This particular gaggle of humanity hungers for nothing but the next fix. They’re merely meandering from their residence on one side of 10th Street to that of their dealer on the other.

  Keep driving straight. Observe the payday loan establishments, churches, and whorehouse motels by the roadside. All three of these temptations cater to your needs in the crassest, most incompetent manner. Signs outside these establishments suffer from misspellings, superfluous quotation marks, and misplaced apostrophes. The relief they offer is ephemeral. Just like pictures in the clouds. Commit that to memory: just like pictures in the clouds.

  You’ll continue to drive north until you pass another abandoned industrial site on your right. Unlike the haunted house downtown, this one goes on for hundreds of acres. It’s an abandoned power plant. Rows of tall, blighted buildings infect the otherwise-empty landscape. All the paint has peeled off, revealing bare cinderblock. Windows have broken. Cement has cracked. A half-dozen smokestacks poke out of the ground like the fingers of a dead, deformed giant rising from a shallow grave.

  Continue on the road for seven miles. You’ll pass Fluvia. This hamlet’s largest business is the methadone clinic. Rumor has it the proprietors aren’t as strict as those who run a similar venture across the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky. During the work week the parking lot exceeds capacity and junkies pull up onto the side of the road, just past the cli
nic. There’s a farm there. They grow feed corn. Sometimes in the autumn, the edges of withered stalks graze the junkies’ cars.

  To find the Time Altar, you must look for it during the work week. This means that you must neglect your job. Employment is just another social tie that must be broken for Oblivion to find you acceptable. Employment may be even more insidious than family, as a bond that promotes a pro-Something point of view. It’s a bait and switch. You think you’re signing up to provide labor in exchange for money, so you can eat and drink and wear clothes. They don’t tell you that in the process, you’re asked to at least grudgingly go through the motions of agreeing with a mission statement (no matter how ill-conceived—and they’re all ill-conceived). They don’t tell you that when you take a job, you become a part of a vast, interconnected matrix of meaning that insists first-quarter goals are real (just as the child insists there really is a face in the clouds).

  To find the Time Altar you must drive further north, to Fluvia State Park. You must go there during the off-season. Preferably a day in late November when the sky is gray—when the clouds huddle together in one dark, inescapable mass so solid and unceasing that the imagination can’t conjure pictures out of it. Around this time of year, the grass turns a straw-like shade of brown. The brown ground and the gray sky are like the jaws of a vise and each day is like the whirring of a lever bringing them closer together.

  You’ll find the booth at the entrance of the park abandoned in the off-season. Admission is free, so you’ll drive on through. It takes longer than you think to get to Trail 3, and by this time in your trip your anticipation will be great. Many pilgrims have experienced tachycardia once they realized they were so close.

  You’ll find few cars, if any, in the parking lot. You’ll find the trail inordinately steep. First descending, then ascending, in a zigzag through leafless trees. If you’re over thirty-five (as, let’s face it, almost all pilgrims are) your knees will hurt. No pain, no gain.