The Mirror

THE MIRROR

The party at the pool had lasted until almost two in the morning before some pissed off resident finally called the cops. By then about half of the remaining women were naked, but I was too drunk to really take advantage of the situation. I slumped on the edge of the shallow end of the pool and watched the pretty red lights of the cop cars go round and round until my neighbor Dean slapped me on the back of the head and told me to get my ass in gear if I didn’t want to spend the night in the drunk tank. I’d been to the place the inmates called “thunder dome” so I clumsily tried to follow him over the fence but caught my foot between the painted iron bars and landed face first in the grass. Dean grabbed me by the arm and dragged me a few feet until I got my legs back under me and we loped to the building where we lived, he in the upper apartment and myself in the lower. We sat on the stairs and smoked a joint, watching the other party goers run from the police who were listlessly pointing their flashlights hither and yon looking for those who didn’t live in the complex and so had no place to hide. I saw one such stick his head out from behind a stairwell after the cops had passed him and he then started to slink off into the night after first making an obscene gesture in the general direction of the cops, a fine example of the all American boy, I decided. He noticed us watching him and saluted us as well. Dean yawned and went upstairs. I think I fell asleep for a few minutes and woke with a pain in my neck. I managed the lock on the door well enough and so laid myself down in bed to sleep the sleep of the righteous.

A few minutes before dawn I awoke with a full bladder so I stumbled to the bathroom, flicking on the light switch as I always did to facilitate aim. As I relieved myself I read once again the quote someone had scrawled in pencil on the wall above my toilet one disorganized night:

“Drink deep and piss deep.”

Henry Miller

Finishing up I realized that I had once again, and perhaps once too often, obeyed old Henry’s command. I flushed the pot and turned to leave when I saw something that froze me to the spot and filled my mind and soul with terror and bewilderment. The reflection I saw in the mirror on the wall was not my own. Instead it was an image of a naked girl of eighteen or nineteen walking slowly toward me as if from a great distance. A bright white light seemed to emanate from her body. Suddenly she was directly before me and was soundlessly laughing at me. And then she was just as suddenly gone, with my image replacing hers in the mirror. What I saw then was almost as disquieting. I looked thoroughly insane. After I had quieted my breathing and heart rate somewhat I dove back into bed and wrapped the covers around my head and told myself lies about drinking too much and my mind playing tricks on me, but I knew better. Inside me was the certainty that I would see her again.

About one in the afternoon the next day I was awakened by a string of firecrackers exploding directly outside my bedroom window. It was the Forth of July. Although the panic and fear I had felt hours before had subsided I did not feel enthusiastically patriotic and I fervently wished that all those who did would go somewhere else. My head was pounding and my mouth tasted of bile and corruption. I brushed my teeth in the kitchen, dressed, pulled a quart of beer from the refrigerator and sat drinking it in my living room. I didn’t know if I had the courage to ever go in that bathroom again, but I had an idea. It was a band-aid solution but I had to reclaim the toilet and the sink and shower from what lurked behind that mirror. I cut black trash bags into sheets, took up a roll of duct tape and crept into the bathroom as though I was trying to not wake a sleeping occupant. I kept my eyes glued to the floor and stood for at least a full minute before I gathered the courage to look up into the mirror. I only saw my own bloodshot eyes staring back at me. Quickly I taped the opaque sheets of plastic over the mirror then stood and admired my work, not a sliver of mirror remained visible. I decided to grow a beard.

I then felt a little silly and wondered about my sanity. The sane don’t cover their mirrors with trash bags, but my dread of what I had seen the night before made me leave the mirror covered. And I thought that it hardly mattered if I were sane or not, the result was the same.

The day passed uneventfully enough. I tried to watch a baseball game on television but kept dozing off. In the evening I walked to the diner a block from my apartment and ate a huge stack of pancakes. When I paid the bill I thought I saw something in the mirror behind the cashier’s head but didn’t look directly at it. I dreaded returning to my apartment but tomorrow was a work day and sleep was essential because I was looking at a twelve hour day, four twelves in a row, actually, to make up for the holiday. Such is the life of an American proletarian. I wished for the thousandth time I had remained in college. I saw the sun go down walking back to my apartment. It reminded me of blood.

That night I slept soundly until I woke to the buzz of my alarm clock at five AM. I was thankful to have slept through the night and the bathroom didn’t seem so terrifying. I considered pulling the cover from the mirror, but decided to leave it up another night. It seemed to be doing the trick.

As I showered I reexamined an idea I’d rejected the previous day: Maybe someone had slipped me some LSD. I had previously dismissed that scenario because it just didn’t feel like acid and I had never had any visual hallucinations while on the drug, but then again, I had never been knee-walking drunk when ingesting it. But why would anyone give me free acid? It was hard to get and expensive when found. Maybe someone had given me a walloping dose of PCP. That was a scary drug at high doses I knew to my regret. Or Belladonna? I knew for a fact I hadn’t choked down any mushrooms. And why would anyone want to fuck with me like that? I looked back on what I could remember about the party Dean and I had attended and I recalled a few times I had been less than polite. It was a logical possibility.

I got to the shop that morning ten minutes before I had to clock in and decided to use the restroom. As I washed my hands the mirror above the sink flashed. I was sure of it. Then it flared again, as if someone had taken a flash photograph inside of the tiny room. The panic and profound sense of dread took hold of me once again. Fortunately I was the only one in the shop at that hour so I could take a few minutes to calm myself. As I did so I decided to lose myself in work, which I did whenever anything was truly bothering me. Switch to work mode. Concentrate on the task at hand to the exclusion of all else. It is an effective coping mechanism.

And so I persevered for twelve hours in that dismal place, dreading, for once, quitting time. On the drive home to my apartment I finally admitted to myself I was I need of a physician. How I could afford one was beside the point.

Working a twelve hour shift after a three day weekend took a toll on my body and even in the best of times left me spacey as hell. I limped into my home, had a drink, ate a TV dinner and then retired for the evening.

At four thirty in the morning my smoke detector started screaming at me and I awoke to the smell of smoke. I could see from my bed flames and acrid smoke billowing out of my bathroom, but also an intense white light. I ran outside and grabbed the fire

extinguisher that hung on the wall outside my apartment. Dean came pounding up the stairs as I did so. I asked him to shut the damned noise off, raced to the bathroom and sprayed the flaming trash bags with white gunk. The blinding white light remained. The remaining bits of plastic and fire retardant sizzled on the mirror and disappeared. Dean managed to silence the smoke detector then came and stood beside me. We both had to shield our eyes against the glare. The light gradually diminished leaving the image of the girl I had seen before. And then she spoke.

“Hello Billy.” she said in an menacing tone of voice.

“Um, hi?” I replied.

“What kind of bullshit is this?” Dean asked as he gawked at the apparition. The blood had drained from his face and he looked likely to soil his trousers.

“Your guess is as good as mine buddy.” I answered.

The girl’s face, at first calm, turned into a mask of rage.

“You don’t even remember me, do you, you evil little piece of shit?” she hissed.

It was slowly coming back to me. I had met her when I was eighteen years old and my parents had insisted on sending me to a bible college. I had dated her a couple of times. She had been fervently and hysterically religious, but she gradually accepted the idea that we should screw in the backseat of my Chevy. When I eventually undressed her I found that her flesh was spongy and unresponsive and an unhealthy hue of bluish white. Normally that wouldn’t have deterred me at that point, but she also gave off a subtle odor of cheap perfume and corruption I just could not ignore. I told her we shouldn’t go through with it, for the sake of the Lord. She said not a word when I drove her home and that was the last time I had ever laid eyes on her.

“Yes, I remember you Barbara.” I said.

“My name is BETTY you nasty fuck!” she screamed at me.

“Sorry.” I said quietly.

“You just stand there and listen to what you did to me Billy boy. After you rejected me so cruelly you caused me to enter into a life of sin and depravity. I knew your refusal of me had nothing to do with the LORD, you just thought you were too good for me. Do you know what that does to an eighteen year old virgin who is offering up her flower of innocence to a boy she thought LOVED her? DO YOU?”

“No.” I whispered.

“She becomes a painted trollop. I spent years proving to myself I was sexually attractive to men and to women and once even to a SHETLAND PONY for God’s sake! Does that sound like a life to you? Does that sound like I was having a good time?”

“No.” I managed to squeak again.

“I kept up with your sorry ass Billy. I always knew where you lived and where you worked and the company you kept. I watched you at night while you slept. I bought myself a big pistol and vowed that the next time I saw you bring one of your whores home with you I would shoot you in the pecker the moment you pulled off your britches. I fantasized about it when I sat alone at night. I shined it up in my mind like I would a gold coin. It was what kept me going all of those barren years. But something changed Billy. I once again accepted Christ into my life, and only months afterwards I died. Jesus has promised me I can watch you scream in Hell for all eternity. Blessed assurance. I can hardly wait, you drunk little twat. Fuck you.”

With that she was gone, the mirror turned back into a normal mirror again. Dean and I stood in the dark for a while and then he asked,

“So she was pissed off because you didn’t fuck her?”

“Yeah I guess.”

“You can’t win for losing can you Bill?”

“Guess not.”

THE END