Reversal

Sensitive content: Incest as a manifestation of evil

It was one minute to midnight, on Wednesday, 25th April, 1979, the eve of Oyna’s eighteenth birthday. 

Unforgiving and unblinking, Oyna’s ice-cold gaze slid, slowly and carefully, up and down the naked female body on bold, fully frontal display before her. Complemented by raven black, shoulder-long straight hair, her perfect, alabaster skin gave onto mathematically pure, smooth-shaded curves of breast, waist and rounded rear. Be it in the eye of the beholder or out there in the objective world, this was true beauty without shadow of doubt. The girl opposite glared defiantly back as her dark eyes met Oyna’s, one hand on her hip, her truculent pout mirroring and challenging Oyna’s own. 

The girl out here and the girl in there held eye lock for fifty-nine seconds, then Oyna heard the distant, signature pop-pop-pop of Uncle Hugo’s tread on the top step of the stairs, and her eyes flicked to her left. The bathroom door still stood ajar, maybe an inch, just as she had left it. He was there, on the landing, only a few feet away. He would have to pass the partly-open bathroom door to reach his own room. A step, a floorboard softly groaning. “My turn,” said the next floorboard, in Oyna’s mind. “Don’t miss me.” Another step, another floorboard, and then time, and every creak of the old wooden house, collapsed into a vacuum of silence. 

Either in her real eye or her mind’s, Oyna could see him in the mirror, peering diffidently through the slightly open door, the thirty-something face neither old nor young. His focus seemed fixed on the perfect curve of her bottom and she sensed a tingle as though his eyes’ passive collection of light was actual physical contact. He wasn’t really her uncle. Her parents, who were dead, had taught her to call him that. They’d given her to him before they died and he’d never betrayed their confidence. Uncle Hugo had been her guardian since she had been orphaned. Uncle Hugo had shown nothing but kindness to Oyna, for thirteen years, and he had been a fit-looking man back then, although he was getting older now. 

Another floorboard protested softly, and his gentle tread carried the man away to his bedroom. With a muted clunk, the old clock on the landing marked Friday’s passing. Oyna’s eyes swung back to her twin in the bathroom mirror. It crossed her mind that her reflected doppelgänger had been the one facing Uncle Hugo through the crack of the doorway. Had something been exchanged in that moment, between Hugo and her reflection? Oyna felt an irrational pang of envy. 

Midnight. The hour of reversal, the scriptures said. The moment when good became evil; the moment when forward turned to backward. A dangerous time. A time when power might shift from one to another. Reflected Oyna seized Real Oyna’s gaze and held it fast. 

Oyna in the mirror moved her left arm away from her torso, upper arm at around thirty degrees from the shoulder; forearm pointed straight down. Real Oyna knew it must be she, not Reflected Oyna, who was making the movements. I mean, what else? A reflection in a mirror couldn’t lead a real person in a kids’ follow-me game. Real Oyna’s right arm mirrored Reflected Oyna’s left. 

Real Oyna raised her own left arm, into a V shape at the elbow with her hand vertical, palm facing the mirror and the other girl. As Reflected Oyna did the same, Real Oyna felt the other’s eyes coruscate for a moment. Something darkly tingling passed between from virtual eighteen-year-old to real. From the backwards, midnight world within the mirror, to the real, rational universe without. 

23rd April, 1966 had been a normal Saturday in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Soon-to-be-five Oyna had celebrated her upcoming birthday early, with her parents and a few invited infant friends, at their eighth storey apartment in the centre of town. One of the guests had been Sasha, Oyna’s best friend at the local playgroup. Olga, Oyna’s mother had caught the two little girls in the apartment’s bathroom, both standing on a footstool in front of the washbasin mirror, staring intently at their reflections. When she’d asked what they were doing, Oyna had told her they were playing ‘Bloody Mary’, a game where you had to fix your eyes on your reflection in a mirror for as long as you could, and you would see your face start to change into something horrible. Olga had shooed the children out of the bathroom and back to join the party in the living room, where they were about to blow out Oyna’s five candles and all make a wish. 

Oyna’s mother couldn’t have known that poor little Sasha’s face really would soon morph permanently into something awful and final, when the earthquake struck Tashkent without warning, early on Tuesday morning. Sasha and her parents, who resided on the sixth floor of the building, all perished, crushed by falling lumps of concrete. Neither could Oyna’s mother have known that she and her husband would suffer the same fate, when their bedroom ceiling smashed down onto them as they slept. 

Hugo Petrov had lived in the apartment next to Oyna’s family. He and Ivan, Oyna’s father, had become firm friends, after the latter had helped Hugo move some furniture into his apartment. The work over, the two had gone out for beer at a nearby bar, returning in the small hours, slapping each other’s backs and trading bawdy jokes. When Hugo’s father died, Ivan had spent hours round at his flat, offering comfort and consolation, much of it in the form of takeaway lager. One night, amid the empty cans, Hugo had thanked his friend from the heart, for helping him through the hardest times of his life. Hiccoughing, Hugo had declared, “Agar sizning oilangiz yordamga muhtoj bo'lsa va siz ularning yonida bo'lolmasangiz, men u erda bo'laman.” If your family ever need help and you cannot be there for them, be sure I will be there. 

Although he would never have wished it to be that way, Hugo got the chance to honour his pledge that Tuesday morning. He had risen early, pulled on a track suit gone out for a run. He had been jogging across a main road when a crack had split the asphalt in front of him, raising a six inch step up that had not been there a moment before, making him trip and sending him sprawling. A taxi skidded around him and he hurried to the side of the road, rubbing his bruised knee and grateful nothing was broken. 

A few metres up the road, an impossibly large chunk of concrete slammed down, embedding itself into the roadway with a dull thunk that shook the whole street. There was a roar, and morning became midnight, as the dust of the collapsing building choked the air. Holding his breath and hoping he was going the right way, Hugo set off back the way he had come. What would he find when he got back to his own building? If he made it alive, that was. At least he had no family to worry about, but what of Ivan, and his wife and little girl? 

He had found the structure still standing but obviously severely damaged. Balconies had collapsed. Firefighters were helping people to safety as they staggered, dazed, out into the broken street. Hugo moved around with urgency, amid the dusty, bloody, newly homeless. No sign of Ivan, Olga or Oyna. They must still be in there. Hugo grabbed a firefighter and yelled at him. “A family. A child. Eighth floor. I have to go. Now” 

The fireman tried to hold Hugo back, but he had no chance. A promise is a promise, man to man. Hugo shouldered open the main door, whose lintel had dropped, making it almost impossible to move, and then only a few inches. He squeezed his body through the small aperture and made for the service stairway. 

A fine dust filtered down as Hugo powered his way upward, landing after landing, ignoring the burning pain in his injured knee. A rolling rumble, like approaching thunder, made him pause and grab the banister, as the staircase shook and rattled his back teeth. Must be another floor collapsing. How long could the building stay up? To his surprise, the staircase ahead was still structurally sound as far as he could tell, and he continued up, coughing and spitting out dust, until he finally reached the eighth landing. 

Hugo quickly saw that his own apartment had ceased to be. That end of the landing was gone. A two-feet thick section of reinforced concrete, its black steel skeleton laid bare against its ashen grey flesh, had compressed his home and all his possessions to the thickness of a sheet of paper. If he hadn’t gone out for a run that morning…. 

But what of Ivan, Olga and their little girl? What was her name? Oyna, that was it. The Uzbek word for mirror. The building rumbled again, and the floor shook beneath his feet. He was outside the apartment doorway. The door was splintered matchwood, the aperture half its normal height. Knowing he could be flattened and burst like a swatted fly at any second, Hugo pulled himself onward. “Ivan! Olga!” he yelled. Nothing. Later, he would learn that Oyna’s parents had both died instantly in the block’s partial collapse. For now, amid the endless roaring growl of distant, tearing concrete, he focused only on the tiny, plaintive cry he was convinced he hadn’t imagined. 

“Uncle Hugo, is that you?” Hugo fought his way along the passage, stamping down protruding wood and plaster, spitting out dust, choking and gasping. Oyna’s bedroom door was off its hinges; he wrenched it away and tossed it into the room. What he saw combined the extremities of miraculous and horrific. A collapsed outside wall and a fallen ceiling had formed a triangular cave, and in its middle was Oyna, unharmed, the clean wet trails of her tears marking tracks down her dust-covered cheeks. “I’m here for you, baby,” said Hugo, breathlessly, as he grabbed her up and bore her away from her parents’ concrete grave. 

The dust was thicker on the stairway, going down. Hugo knew he didn’t have much time and the building seemed to be agreeing with him, the seismic thumps and vibrations getting stronger, nearer and more frequent. Oyna held on tight as Uncle Hugo took the steps three at a time. When Hugo heard - no, felt in his chest - a supremely powerful thadda-thadda-THADDA-THADDA from behind and above them, he knew the building was finished, and they were too. It was the sound of the landings above him smashing down in sequence, and it was only going to be a few seconds before he and Oyna were both smeared out like flies on a windshield. 

And then they were in the foyer, and running hard for the street door, and after that they were out in the dusty sunshine, lying at the crown of the fractured road, tortured lungs dragging in what sweet air they could as the dust thickened around them. 

“Happy eighteenth, Oyna.” They clinked glasses and Oyna sipped the fruity red wine Uncle Hugo had just uncorked. She’d smiled as he’d twisted the corkscrew, watching him grunt and strain, savouring the climactic pop as the cork had come free, soaked in dark red at its lower end, its pink-and-beige shaft smooth and moist. Afterward, there was the warming flow of the deep, rich claret into their glasses, bringing them to the moment of now. 

If it occurred to Hugo to ask why an eighteen-year-old celebrating her birthday in 1979 didn’t want to be out on the town with her friends, he didn’t voice it. He and Oyna had lived here, in the hills outside Tashkent, since the day she had lost her parents and he had pulled her alive from the rubble of their home. 

They ate and drank in familiar silence. Sitting back before her empty plate, Oyna asked, “Uncle Hugo, why are all the mirrors in the house covered, except for the one in the bathroom?” 

Hugo smiled. “I need one mirror to shave.” 

“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.” No teenage attitude, just calm, relaxed comfort in the presence of the person closest to her in the world. 

He put down his glass. “If you must know, I don’t like them,” he confessed. 

Oyna smiled. “My name means mirror. Don’t you like me?” Beneath the table, she recrossed her legs. 

Hugo took a pull at his glass, then refilled both. “There are always exceptions.” He smiled sardonically, and drank again. “I’ve known you a long time, Oyna. I guess I can open up a little.” 

Unseen by either human occupant of the house, an almost imperceptible ripple crossed the surface of the bathroom mirror. 

Hugo went on to explain that he had been perplexed, as a boy, by the fact that mirrors inverted images laterally and not vertically. That is to say, if you look at yourself in a mirror, the reflection’s right hand is your left, yet his head is still at the top of the image, not the bottom. 

Oyna sipped her wine. “You were misled, Uncle Hugo.” He leaned forward a little. “Hugo, please. You are eighteen now.” 

Upstairs, the mirror rippled again. Downstairs, Oyna smiled, and her reflection in the mirror smiled too. 

Oyna continued. “You see, mirrors don’t invert anything laterally or vertically. That’s just something we assume. Mirrors only invert front to back. Think about it. When you stand in front of a mirror, your nose is closer to the mirror than the back of your head is. For your reflected image, the same applies. His nose is closer to the reflective surface of the mirror than the back of his head is.” 

Hugo nodded. “I get that. But think about remembrance day. I’m wearing a poppy on my left lapel. My reflection has his poppy on the right. That’s lateral inversion. But his head is still at the top.” 

Oyna smiled again, a little more kindly and, perhaps, condescendingly. “Uncle Hugo, your reflection’s poppy is directly opposite your real poppy. His nose is directly opposite your nose. There is no such thing as lateral inversion. Your physics teachers were lying to you, or they didn’t know any better. Either way, lateral inversion is bullshit.” 

Hugo rubbed his chin. “I was asked, out of the blue, at my college fraternity, to explain why mirrors invert side to side but not top to bottom. I couldn’t to it and I slunk away with my tail between by legs.” He drank again, and poured himself a refill. Oyna’s glass was still full. 

“And there’s more,” Hugo went on. “As a boy, I played that Bloody Mary game. I stared into the mirror and watched my face turn to putty. It was scary. Like I was looking at my body rotting, after I’d died. That and the lateral inversion thing, I’m really done with mirrors.” 

Oyna sipped and set down her glass on the table. 

“Hugo, you need to get a grip. The Bloody Mary effect is just your eyes and your brain. The brain stops taking notice of the same sensory inputs coming in continuously, to free up processing power. Most of the time, your eyes are scanning around. That’s called saccading. When you play Bloody Mary, you intentionally fix your eyes on one point. Your brain gets flooded with the same old, constant data from the retinal cells that are fixed on the same part of the subject while you hold your eyes still. That’s why you see your face morph like melted clay. Your visual cortex shuts down on the repeated, boring data and your imagination does the rest.” 

Hugo nodded, his expression unconvinced. “Ok, so Bloody Mary is a brain phenomenon. But I still don’t get the lateral inversion thing. Why do mirrors invert about one axis but not the other?” 

“There are no fucking axes, Hugo. Mirrors do not give a flying fig about which way round your eyes are, whether you’re standing up or lying down, leaning over or whatever. Mirrors only invert front to back. You think there is lateral inversion because your brain sees your reflected image and tries to rationalise it by imagining another ‘you’ has walked around behind the mirror and is now facing toward you. That means his left is now your right, just like when you shake hands with a guy you’re facing. In reality, your reflection’s right is your right. He’s an inside-out version of you, like if you pushed your face and body into one of those moving-in beds of nails and made an impression by pushing the pins forward. If you then reversed the distance data of the ends of those pins, you’d get your reflection, apparent lateral inversion and all.” 

Hugo nodded and drained his glass. “Ok, I understand now,” he said. 

At school, Oyna gently shook her head as Adam gawped at her in reluctant acceptance of her rejection. “I’m sorry, Adam,” she said, taking both his hands. “I like you but I have something I must do tomorrow.” 

Adam swallowed. “Ok, I understand. How about Saturday?” 

Oyna shook her head again, smiling as gently as she could. “I’m sorry, Adam. I don’t think I should be dating when I already have all I need at home.” 

Half a mile away, the bathroom mirror scintillated once more. Hugo sat back, not sure why he’d kept half the sofa empty, ready and waiting.