The Dickens Mirror (6 page)

That’s crazy. I can’t be nothing
. But he’s never looked at himself in the mirror now, has he?
Has
he? He can’t remember.
Shit
. He feels the spit drying up on his tongue. This is just too close to that damn nightmare.

Well then, settle it. Go on. Check, you coward. Go on
.

“Okay” —and then, casually, “No big deal.” Which is
such
a lie, because it is, it
is
. Heart thumping, he uses the side of his left hand to squeegee water from silvered glass, and he
seeees
 … him. He. Whatever. That is, he recognizes the kid with the cap of wet brown curls and light blue eyes in the mirror as the boy he’s always imagined he is.

“Well, who else would it be?” Lifting his hand, he turns it this way and that. His hand, all right. Isn’t it? How can you really tell something like that? Just because you keep waking up in the same body? How do you
know
that whatever you wake up
in
is yours?

“What’s going on?” He raises his eyes to his reflection. “Do
you
know?”

For just a sec, he has the funniest feeling that the kid in the mirror will answer, like
that
kid stands on the other side of a pane of rain-spattered glass: different bathroom, another Wisconsin, whole other planet. A twin, all tangled up in his life the way Mr. Steele, his physics teacher, says might happen if you believe Schrödinger. (Although Einstein didn’t. But the concept’s cool, actually: that a cat can exist in between, both alive and dead at the same moment. When you look in the box—
collapse the wave function
is how Steele put it—Schrödinger’s cat is either alive or dead because you looked. You forced that cat to be either/or. The cat can’t be both.)

So he’s stupidly relieved when his reflection perfectly syncs, saying the same thing right back at him at the same time. Still, he can’t rid himself of this nagging sense that something has changed. Like … what has
he
forced by clearing fog from that bathroom mirror
for the very first time
? In a funny way, isn’t this bathroom a kind of box? Who knows what’s really beyond the door?

“You’re a nut. You’re going to drive yourself crazy with shit like this.” Thumbing his stupid Snoopy electric to life, he begins scrubbing his teeth, hard and thoroughly. Yet he’s also got this strangest swoop of déjà vu all over again, the sneaking suspicion that this whole routine is something he’s gone through maybe more times than he can count: Michael on the radio,
Twisted Tales
by the sink, Crest on his toothbrush, and so much green foam on his mouth, he looks like a rabid dog that’s escaped from the set of
The Wizard of Oz
.

Stop
. But he can’t. He spits, sucks water from the faucet, rinses, spits again. Fights the urge to see what the boy in the mirror is doing. Instead, he watches murky spit-water circle down the drain.

What’s new is the nightmare
. Now he does turn a look at his reflection.
And you. This is the first time I’ve ever wiped away the fog to find you
.

It hits him then:
the first time
.

But the first time … 
when
?

BEIRUT HAPPENED IN
October. So did Grenada. He knows that it’s the week before Christmas,
buuut
 …

Shit
. His heart flutters against the cage of his ribs. He reaches for his comic, the movements as slo-mo as a dream. Being generally sucky at art, he doesn’t know squat about perspective, but he thinks the view in the first color panel is foreshortened, the scene set as if you’re looking up from the bottom of a foxhole to a soldier with a weapon balanced on his lap and the bright coin of a moon hanging in a purple, starless sky. His gaze skims the panel’s
last line, when Hacker thinks that maybe he and his men have been in this desert …

“Forever,” he says, and wonders just who he’s talking about here. Look at it a certain way, and isn’t Hacker, stuck on six flimsy pages sandwiched between glossy covers, a guy in a box, too? Hacker’s only
alive
when Tony’s there to read him, right?
Yeah, but what really happens inside the comic book when I’m not looking?
Does Hacker go off and do something else? Maybe characters from other stories decide,
Hey, let’s go visit those guys on page 20; that’s waaay more interesting than here
. Or when Tony decides to start Hacker’s story on page 13 instead of 10 … doesn’t
that
become Hacker’s present, his
now
, as opposed to
then
?

And what if
he
—Tony, a real live boy—what if
he’s
the same way? What if
he’s
like Hacker, and the only reason he’s standing at his sink, brushing his teeth, getting ready for school, listening to his mother die … is because he’s
not
a real boy but only a character in a book that someone just happens to be reading?

“What?” he says to his reflection. “What are you doing? Stop thinking this way.” But he can’t stop this, and isn’t entirely sure he wants to. His brain is feverish, a steaming, belching runaway train, his thoughts whirring over the tracks
clickityclack-clickity-clack
. Because … here’s the thing, the flip side, the whole
other
part of it all.

What happens to
him
when there’s no one there, outside, looking at him and putting him together letter by letter, word by word?

Jesus. If this moment, this day, is only a couple three, four pages in a book … what about when the book is closed? When there’s no one out there to read him? Or when they’ve skipped his chapter, started in a different place? What if he—his character—never shows up again? Does that mean he doesn’t exist?

If there is no one to read him … 
is
there any him—a
Tony
—at all?

“Stop it,
stop
it!” Of course he’s real; he knows about Michael Jackson and Einstein and Jack Nicholson! But wait wait wait—he’s starting to hyperventilate, his breaths coming short and sharp—don’t writers put pieces of real life into books all the time to make the
characters
seem more like people?

Damn. That’s right.
Pop-cultural references
is what his English teacher said:
Writers do this to ground characters in their particular time periods or add a layer of verisimilitude to the narrative
. The references didn’t have to be books either, or movies, but slang, food, songs, even people who’d actually existed. Like a writer could slot in Einstein or Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle, use one of
them
as a character to make the book seem closer to reality. God, and if you
did
that, even if you changed them all around or did one of those alternative-universe things, made them into the people they
might
have become … would they
know
they were characters?

“Shit.” His forehead’s slick with perspiration.
“Shit.”
What if
he
only knows about Michael Jackson or Crest toothpaste or
The Wizard of Oz
because some writer—some crazy lady, hunched over a typewriter and stuck in a room somewhere—is playing God, sprinkling cutesy pop-cultural references to make some point, and she’s thinking,
Oh, that Tony, he’s such an interesting character; let’s torture him some more
.

There’s a sudden crack, like the snap of a branch, and a jump of pain. Winking against the sting of salt, he stares at his hand, then at the mirror and the red splotch on that kid’s cheek.
Slapped myself
. He just
hit
himself! Had he meant to do that? Or did the crazy lady at the typewriter just put that in for kicks?

Stop this, stop this!
Laughter gurgles in his chest, but he’s afraid to start, worried he won’t stop until he’s clawing out his eyes and eating them like gumdrops.
Get a grip
. He grits his teeth and welcomes the ache in his jaw. He tastes copper.
That’s real
. He tongues the small rip in his cheek.
I feel that. It hurts. I can taste my blood, and no one wrote that. I did that to myself
.

Unlesss
 … Unless someone wrote that he ought to do it. Unless the crazy lady at the typewriter’s talking to her cat:
Oh, this is good, this is great, bwahahaha, go on, slap yourself. Take
that,
Tony
.

Which might happen if he truly
isn’t
real.

“This is crazy,” he says, and spits, the foamy red gob splatting like a squished mosquito. “Your mom is dying and you’re freaked, and that’s all. Hacker’s the one who’s only ink on crappy paper that you picked up from a drugstore.”

But when did he buy this? He picks up the comic, listens to the rustle of paper.
That’s real. It’s got pages
. Flipping back to the table of contents—cheap, pulpy paper fanning past so that whatever’s printed there is a blur—he looks for the date. It’s there, solid and in black letters.
Okay, okay, this is good
. He says it out loud, feeling the words full and heavy and
real
in his mouth: “April. April, 1983.”

Okay. Doesn’t matter if he can’t remember the exact date he tugged the comic from its rack. (Who pays attention to crap like that? No one.) But he’d done that in April, and now, it’s the week before Christmas. Which means December.
That’s right. Christmas happens in December, on …
He has to close his eyes and
think think think. Don’t freak don’t freak don’t freak
 …

“The twenty-fifth!” he blurts. “Twenty-five. Thirty days have September, April, June, and November … Jesus.” In the
mirror, sweat pearls his reflection’s upper lip. “What’s the date, Tony?” he asks that other kid. “Come on, it’s not a trick question. What is
today
, right
now
?”

The other kid doesn’t reply. His own head is blank, except for that same phrase:

it’s the week before Christmas
.

A slow shudder slithers the rungs of his spine.
Easy, take it easy. Think
. His gaze settles on the silvered plastic of his Sony transistor.
The radio
. He
snicks
it to life, thinking,
Yeah, there’s a DJ. He’ll tell me the weather and the time and the …

And it’s still Michael Jackson.

NO
.
HIS THROAT
catches and knots.
It’s still … it’s … the song’s the sa—

You try to screeeeam
. Michael holds the note an impressive four beats. Again. And then he goes on about terror … but, Jesus, Ol’ Michael doesn’t know the half of it.

This is also when
he’d
 … tuned in?
Faded
in? Awakened in this bathroom, doing the same thing in the same exact way and sequence in a day he’s already been through over and over again and only
thinks
he’s living for the first time? Because someone cracked the book of his life and this is the page where they started? Or they’ve started from the very beginning, page one, chapter one—where and when
he’s
not—and now reached the point in the book where he—the character named
Tony
— finally shows up?

Get out of here. Go to school. Just …
Slotting his toothbrush into Snoopy’s red roof, he turns like a little robot boy and
reaches for the knob with stiff, robot-boy fingers.

And then he pauses.

SAY HE’S THE
cat or a character or a boy or whatever the hell he is. The second he pushes from this bathroom—cracks this particular box or book—a reality will assert itself. His life will be what he forces.

Or … he’s the reflection, and what passes for his life will happen to the boy behind the mirror as he emerges into whatever world lies beyond the looking glass.

It really comes down to which of them is the boy in a box.

“Or you might just be kind of insane,” he says, and twists the knob. The tongue slips back with a
click
. The hinges let out a very soft and mousy
squeee
. A balloon of cooler air pillows into the room, chilling his face. Condensed steam rains, falling in a gentle patter onto his head and shoulders. The mirror instantly fogs again, leaving only a narrow strip of silvered glass low down near the faucet. The staring boy disappears.

Teetering on the brink between this box and what lies beyond, he waits. For a split second, there’s nothing. No
kak-kak-kak
at all. And he thinks,
God, what if it’s really true? What if this is a different Merit where my mom isn’t
—

“Honey?” His mother’s voice is as faint as a cloud dissolving under a hot sun. “Is that you, sweetheart?”

For a second, he feels an absurd sweep of disappointment.
Shit
. It’s the same. His mom’s dying. God’s an asshole. Nothing has changed. So much for reality.

“Coming, Mom,” he calls. “Just a sec.”

IF THIS WERE
a book, this would be the moment he wakes for real and the clockwork of his life resumes ticking. At that second, in fact, the name of the phenomenon he’s been searching for comes to him:
false awakening
. Or
double dream
. And of the two types he’s learned in abnormal psych, he’s having a Type 2: things are eerie, uncanny, terribly out of whack.

But his eyes don’t snap open for the third time. He doesn’t awake in bed with his covers bunched around his ankles, sheet creases stenciled in the drool on his cheek, and his hair in corkscrews. Yet what he does is kind of what you might expect, given the situation. Given that mirror he’s cleared for the very first time that he can recall.

Even so, he hesitates. Thinks about the ramifications and the reality he might be forcing if he does this. Because what if …

If I see something weird, I’ll just close my eyes. It’ll be like the book where that black guy, the cook, tells the kid to shut his eyes and whatever he sees in that spooky hotel’ll go away
.