The engineer’s home

First, an explosion of light. Next, bitter moisture and paper pulp all over me. 

“Welcome.”

A medium-built bespectacled man looked at himself as he spoke to me. 

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, you’re now at my beck and call.”

For three days I did not see him again. 

On the first day, I made friends. 

On the second day I learned that a ball of fire called the sun is particularly flashy at certain hours. My informants—a table lamp, a chaise, and balcony railing— taught me about thebasics of life and the world.

On the third day, I struck a deal. Chaise brokered with the big olive tree outside on my behalf. In exchange for an honest reflection, the tree would move his branches to protect me from the midday sun. Only Chaise was able to speak with him.

We did not have much to talk about for most of the time, but some of us were exceptionally chatty. Table lamp—or Tam—as he liked to be called, told us about a walking, talking doll that could not hear him much like the tree. Chaise had not been around (as alive)when the mysterious encounters had occurred and Bella from the balcony called it baloney. 

“Mr. Tam is fabricating stories per usual. I must warn you against the perils of lying.”

Tam made us all wince with the strobe light frequency he had recently learned. 

“I swear I’ve seen it!”

“I have seen no doll neither inside nor outside. Yes, nor outside. As the only one of us capable of looking beyond the four walls of this room, my word has weight. My iron bars can look both within and beyond the bedroom, simultaneously at that. Remarkable, it is.”

He visited us on the fourth day. This time he brought a lady with him. I later learned that it was his wife. We all swore to not utter a word while he was around; Chaise thought he could hear us. He cradled her in his arms as he walked into the room. He was looking at her and only her with earnest dexterity. She, on the other hand, could not stop looking out at the tree. The shade it was providing them with was bothering her, and she asked her husband if the tree had grown taller. He put her down and whisked her into a ballroom dance. She couldn’t resist a forced smile. Her hair was pinned up with the exception of some—no, many—lose strands of hair scattered at the back of her head. Her voluptuous blue satin dress mimicked the tempo of a burbling fountain as she went around in twirls, anchored duplicitously by the adjoining of herfinger with that of her husband’s in a ballerina-like whirl. He planted a soft kiss on her lips and held her close to him as he softly touched her wrists. 

They stood in front of me, hand-in-hand. Her eyes were puffy and couldn’t—or wouldn’t—focus. When she finally met her pupils in me however, something bizarre happened: I did not produce a mirror image. Whereas she looked unkempt and tired and dull, the reflection I produced was of a tidy and energetic and beautiful woman. She smiled faintly at first and then she squinted at me in appropriate disbelief. She must have stared at the image for no more than a few seconds when the sun shone directly at me and hence, into her eyes, causing her to look away. The man held her face with one of his hands and escorted her out. 

“You broke the agreement.”

“I did no such thing!”

Chaise continued to relay the tree’s contention. 

“You receive respite from the sun in exchange for an honest reflection. You produced a false image of the woman today, and you dishonored our agreement.”

“I did not intend to produce the image I produced. I am surprised! I mean, I saw her. She looked messy and dreadful. And then I also saw what I showed her… I saw two women. Two different women who were the same. I don’t know how I did it. I don’t know what happened.”

But the tree wasn’t having it. And he was not interested in bickering any further. If he said anything else, Chaise did not tell me about it. We settled into a scornful silence. Bella had broken the silence once to say “wonderous”. She probably saw a butterfly again. At another time Tam tried to talk to us about the talking doll. He claimed, once again, that the doll could walk and therefore, probably, see more and tell us more about, well, everything.

By nightfall Tam and Bella had begun to bicker again. Tam cried wolf and Bella spoke of perjury. 

“I don’t think it’s your fault.”

Chaise was talking to me. 

“I don’t know how I reflected a reflection… dishonestly.”

“You know, I am not supposed to grow. The tree told me that wood, when taken away from a tree, is no longer alive. Yet I grow.”

“I don’t see you grow.”

“I grow. I grow without volition. It’s usually when the man is taking a nap. I somehow know to grow an inch here or there to press against his back or calves. It’s a gentle oscillating motion that no one but I, and the man, can feel.”

“How do you move then? Sorry—grow. Or why do you grow?”

“I’m not sure. But I am changed.”

Several days go by and we have not been visited. Bella has told us about the different sizes of butterflies. Rabbits chasing squirrels. Clouds. The smell of poo. Tam has learned to increase the brightness of the bulb in response to some feeling he has. The tree has not extended his olive branches, so I burn every midday. Chaise and I have not talked any further about our grand conspiracy from the other night, and we haven’t mentioned a word to the other two. 

Then one day we hear a shriek. It gets louder before it quiets down. A little person runs inside with the same hair and eyes as the man and continues screaming and crying. 

“The doll! THE DOLL! HELLO! CAN. YOU. HEAR. US?”

As Tam screams, his bulb gets brighter and brighter till it along with the merciless sun has completely blinded me.

“Is that what you have been referring to as a doll all this time?” asked Bella. 

“Yes. It’s a talking doll. HELLO! HEELLLOOO!”

“You dimwit, that is a bloody human. And quite clearly, an offspring of the man.”

“What? No way. That is not a human.”

“Bella’s right. The tree confirms that that is a human and the man’s child.”

“Hey Tam. I cannot see a thing right now. My surface is blinding me. Can you please dim that bulb?”

“I… can’t.”

The child’s cries grows louder. The bulb grows brighter.

“The baby’s crying is making me brighter! What is happening!”

Chaise tried to calm him down, telling him about our theory from the other day and suggesting that Tam may have no control over his…volition.

“WHAT! Am I not a lamp anymore! How long have you two known? What is a volition?”

Enraged and continuously aggravated by the baby’s crying and now intense feelings of betrayal, Tam shined so brightly that his bulb burst into a thousand shards of glass. Glass flew in several different directions, and some even flew out of the window. For a split second, it was beautiful. Thousands of prisms creating thousands of rainbows. And then some of the shards landed on me. 

The child was fine. So were the rest of us. Well, most of us. Tam could no longer light up. He became solemn and quiet. When the noise had erupted, the woman had rushed in. She was breathless on top of her usual disheveled look. She still somehow looked like an ethereal being in my reflection. It was past midday, so the tree could only issue disappointment through Chaise and not really retaliate by dangling his branches around to let the sun come through even more. She nudged the child callously and left the room, shooing him like he (wondrously) shoos the squirrels, according to Bella. 

We were visited that night.

He came long after the sun had gone down. He lit up several candles in the room. He grunted and exhaled as he cleaned up the glass and inserted a new bulb into Tam. Chaise was wrong; he could not hear us. He did not hear any of Tam’s cries of pain as he roughly underwent angioplasty and got affixed with a new bulb that was taken out of a black velvet case and had hues of silver and neon red. He called us idiotic. He was especially upset about Bella, but she was the most innocent of us all never having caused any trouble! He dug out an old paper and scribbled something on it. Moments later he hammered her incessantly with iridescent nails as she let out groans of pain and applied a luminous paint that must have been hot, because Bella screeched in more agony than I do when the sun shines in my face too long. 

Once he had left us alone again, we were in eerie silence. It was Chaise who said the first words. 

“It’s clear that we are all linked to things—people—in this house. And we came to life recently. We do things we cannot control.”

“The glass shards hit the child.”

“What’s that?”

“I am saying, the glass shards hit the child. And the mother touched them too. Many of them. I saw that when she peered into me to look at herself. I saw shards of glass in her hand and all over her child.”

“Wait… the tree says it’s not her child. The woman did not bear the child.”

“They dusted it off like it was nothing. Glass did not hurt them.”

“Maybe glass does not hurt. The tree might tell us if you wait a second."

“It does hurt, because I am now partially blind.”

Over the next several months, we recover quietly. Tam started playing with the bulb again. Sometimes it was volitional and other times it was in response to some feeling of the child’s. I have blind spots I can no longer feel in or see through. If the woman looks into me in those spots, she sees a true image of herself, I presume, because she loses her mind. She screams angrily and tells herself she deserves her fate for being so hideous. 

The tree has reinstated our deal. Well, now it is a favor. I have nothing to offer in return. I get plenty of shade, so I am grateful. Chaise does not speak at all anymore. I have tried to ask him about the man and about the grand conspiracy and if the tree said anything. He simply refuses to talk.

The boy has grown up a little more and he sits at the desk with Tam very often. He is supervised by his father as he works hard in some book with a pencil. Sometimes he is there all by himself. Sometimes he throws a fit and slams the book shut. But Tam’s bulb either changes colors or grows brighter, and even though the boy sniffles, he sits down and starts over. He may not be biologically the woman’s but he is starting to look like her. 

Bella has started speaking again. She exclaims less now, however. She is more rigid. Certain and decisive. She no longer tells us about butterflies and sparrows and bumblebees. Perhaps they aren’t all that wondrous after all, and I am missing out on nothing. She has other interests now. Like, whenever the boy throws his notebook or pencil out of the balcony, she is always able to stop it. And then Tam does something to bring the agitated boy back to the table. They are like a little team! Bella is unstoppable in her new vocation. Nothing—and nobody—falls out from her grasp.