The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

  It attracted me because it was the kind of house I’d have liked to live in if I were a successful writer and if that success put a pot of gold in my pocket. As my time at Princeton drew to a close, and I began to think seriously about what I’d do next, I was increasingly worried that things might not work out the way I wanted. The handful of short stories I’d sent to literary magazines up to then had received rejections, though some of them had been accompanied by a few words of encouragement from the editors. I was working on a novel, but it wasn’t at all clear to me whether it would be worth persevering with it.

  The alternative would be a dull life as an impoverished, misanthropic English teacher in some small town, surrounded by mocking teens. I figured I’d end up wearing tweed jackets with leather patches on the elbows, carrying a never-to-be-finished book project in a briefcase, like a millstone around my neck.

  That house was a universally acknowledged symbol of success, and for a couple of minutes I imagined that it was mine and that I lived there with the woman I loved, who was my wife by now. I was taking a break from writing my next bestseller, calm and relaxed, waiting for Laura to arrive so that we could go out and spend the evening at Tavern on the Green or the Four Seasons, where we’d be recognized and watched with curiosity and admiration.

  But the image quickly began to dissolve, as if in contact with a destructive chemical, when I remembered that the home belonged to a man I didn’t fully trust. Although I was inclined to believe that Laura had been telling me the truth and their relationship was strictly professional, whenever I was in that house I couldn’t stop my imagination from running wild. It was as if I could see them coupling right there on the living room couch, or going upstairs to the bedroom, already naked and gamboling together even before they hit the sheets. I imagined all the perverse games Laura submitted to in order to excite the old man, crawling under his desk with a kinky grin on her face, while he unbuttoned his pants and made lewd suggestions.

  Even when he wasn’t there, Wieder was able to mark his territory, as if every object were part of his personal shrine.

  That morning, I’d agreed to meet Laura by the Battle Monument at three, so that we could then catch the train to New York. At two p.m., I locked the door to the library and went downstairs to get ready to leave. I almost fainted when I saw a tall guy sitting in the middle of the living room. He was holding an object that, in the next instant, I identified as a hammer.

  It wasn’t a dangerous neighborhood, but in those years the newspapers were always full of stories about burglaries, and even murders.

  The guy, who was wearing a parka, a cotton sweatshirt, and jeans, froze to the spot in terror. My throat had gone dry, and when I tried to speak, I barely recognized my voice. “Who the hell are you, man?”

  He stayed frozen for a few moments, as if he didn’t know what to say. He had a large, round, unnaturally pale face, disheveled hair, and a few days’ stubble on his cheeks.

  “I’m Derek,” he said finally, as if I ought to have heard of him. “Joe—I mean Professor Wieder—asked me to repair that pelmet.”

  He pointed his hammer at one of the windows, and I noticed a toolbox on the floor.

  “How did you get in?” I asked.

  “I’ve got keys,” he said, pointing at the coffee table by the couch, on which lay the items in question. “You’re the library guy, right?”

  I gathered that he was that ex-patient Laura had mentioned, the man who looked after repairs at Wieder’s house.

  I was in a hurry, so I didn’t hang around to ask him any more questions; nor did I call Wieder to check out Derek’s claims. When I met Laura, around an hour later, I told her about the encounter that had almost given me a heart attack.

  “The guy’s name is Derek Simmons,” she told me. “He’s been with the professor for a few years. In effect, it’s Wieder who takes care of him.”

  On our way to Princeton Junction, where we were going to catch the train to New York, Laura told me Derek’s story.

  Four years previously, he’d been accused of murdering his wife. They lived in Princeton, had been married for five years, and had no children. Derek worked as a maintenance man, and his wife, Anne, was a waitress at a coffee shop on Nassau Street. As neighbors and friends of the family were later to declare, they never argued and they seemed to have a happy marriage.

  Early one morning, Derek called for an ambulance from home, telling the operator that his wife was in a serious condition. The paramedics found her in the hall, lying lifeless in a pool of blood, having been stabbed repeatedly in the neck and chest. An assistant medical examiner declared her dead at the scene, and the crime scene investigators were summoned.

  Derek’s version of the tragedy was as follows:

  He’d gotten back home at around seven p.m., after doing some shopping at a store near where they lived. He’d eaten dinner, watched TV, and then gone to bed, knowing that Anne would be working the evening shift and wouldn’t get back until late.

  He’d woken up at six a.m., as usual, and seen that his wife wasn’t in bed next to him. Coming out of the bedroom, he’d found her lying in the hall, covered in blood. He didn’t know whether she was alive or dead, so he’d called an ambulance.

  Initially, the investigators thought that it was possible that the man was telling the truth. The door was unlocked and there was no sign of a break-in, so probably somebody had followed her, attacking her as she was entering the apartment. Maybe the perpetrator then realized that there was somebody else at home and fled without stealing anything. (The victim’s handbag, still containing approximately forty dollars in cash, was found next to her body.) The coroner determined that she’d died at around three a.m. There was no motive for Simmons to have murdered his wife, and he seemed devastated by her loss. He didn’t have any debts, wasn’t having an affair, and minded his own business at work. He was generally seen as hardworking and quiet.

  Laura knew all the details from Wieder, who was one of the three experts brought in to assess Derek’s mental condition after he’d been accused of his wife’s murder; his attorney was demanding that he be declared not guilty by reason of insanity. For one reason or another, Wieder accorded the case the utmost importance.

  The detectives subsequently discovered a number of things that cast Derek in a very bad light.

  Firstly, that Anne Simmons had started having an affair a few months before she was murdered. The identity of her lover was never discovered—or at least it was never made public—but it seems that the relationship was serious, and that the two were planning to marry, after Anne filed for a divorce. On the evening of the murder, Anne had finished her shift and locked up the café at around ten p.m. The lovers had then gone to a cheap one-bedroom apartment on the same street as the café, rented by Anne two months previously; they’d stayed there until around midnight, after which she’d taken a cab home. According to the driver and the information recorded on the meter, Anne Simmons had been dropped off in front of her building at 1:12 a.m.

  Derek claimed he’d had no idea his wife was having an affair, but the investigators thought this was highly unlikely. So now they had a motive—jealousy—and the murder could easily have been a crime of passion.

  Secondly, the woman had wounds on her arms, called “defensive wounds” by the investigators. In other words, she’d lifted her arms trying to defend herself against the perpetrator, who had most probably used a big knife. Even if Derek was asleep upstairs while his wife was fighting for her life, it was unlikely that he wouldn’t have heard anything. Anne would almost certainly have screamed for help.

  (Two neighbors later claimed to have heard her screaming, but they had failed to call the police as the screams had stopped before they’d had a chance to fully wake up.)

  Thirdly, a friend of the victim’s confirmed that a knife was missing from the Simmonses’ kitchen, a knife she remembered, because just a few weeks earlier she’d helped Anne prepare the food for a birthday party. When asked
about the knife in question, whose description pointed to its being the murder weapon, Derek could only shrug. Yes, such a knife existed, but he didn’t know what had happened to it, because his wife looked after the kitchen.

  Finally, the detectives also discovered that many years previously, Derek—a teenager at the time—had suffered a severe nervous breakdown. He’d been admitted to the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital and kept there for five months, missing his final year of high school. He’d been diagnosed as a schizophrenic, and had been on medication ever since his release. Although he’d been a very good student up until then, he subsequently gave up on the idea of going to college and qualified as an electrician instead, getting a low-level job at Siemens.

  The detectives consequently built a damning theory and concluded that the timeline had been as follows:

  Anne arrived home at 1:12 a.m., and an argument broke out. Her husband accused her of having an affair, and she probably informed him of her intention to seek a divorce. Two hours later, Derek took a knife from the kitchen and killed her. He then disposed of the murder weapon, and called for an ambulance, as if he’d just discovered his wife’s body. He might have been having a mental breakdown or a schizophrenic episode, but only the doctors could come to a conclusion about that.

  After Simmons was arrested on a murder charge, his attorney latched on to the mental-breakdown theory and asked for his client to be declared not guilty by reason of insanity. Meanwhile, the accused stubbornly continued to claim he was innocent, refusing any kind of deal.

  After examining him a number of times, Joseph Wieder reached the conclusion that Derek Simmons was suffering from a rare form of psychosis and had been wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man. The dissociative disorder in question involved the periodic occurrence of so-called fugue states, during which the patient lost all self-awareness, memories, and sense of identity. In extreme cases, such persons might go missing from home and be found years later in another city or state, living under a completely new identity, without remembering anything about their old life. Sometimes a patient would then return to their old identity but forget entirely about the other one they’d constructed in the meantime; other patients remained completely captive to their new life.

  If Wieder’s diagnosis was correct, it was possible that Simmons might not remember anything about what he’d done that night, when, because of stress and the modified consciousness induced by the sudden transition from sleep to waking, he’d reacted as if he were a completely different person.

  Wieder’s report convinced the court, and the judge ruled that Simmons was to be committed to Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, along with other potentially dangerous mental patients. With the agreement of the institution and the patient’s lawyer, Wieder continued to give Simmons therapy, using hypnosis and a revolutionary treatment involving a mixture of anti-convulsive drugs.

  Unfortunately, after a few months in the hospital, Simmons was attacked by another patient and suffered a serious head wound, which substantially worsened his condition. Derek Simmons completely lost his memory and never recovered it. His brain was able to form and store new memories, but the old ones proved impossible for him to access. Laura explained to me that this kind of trauma was called retrograde amnesia.

  A year later, at Wieder’s insistence, Derek was transferred to the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital, where the regime was less strict. There, the professor helped him reconstruct his personality. In fact, Laura said, that was only half true—the patient became Derek Simmons once more only in the sense that he had the same name and physical appearance. He knew how to write, but he had no idea where he’d learned to do so, given that he had no memories of ever going to school. He was still able to do the work of an electrician, but, again, he had no idea where he’d learned his trade. All his memories up until the moment he was attacked in the hospital were locked away somewhere in the synapses of his brain.

  In the spring of 1985, the judge approved the lawyer’s request to discharge Simmons from the mental hospital, given the complexity of the case and the patient’s complete lack of any violent tendencies. But, Laura said, it was clear that Derek Simmons wouldn’t be able to fend for himself. He had no prospects of employment, and sooner or later he’d have ended up back in a mental institution. He was an only child, and his mother had died of cancer when he was a toddler. His father, to whom Derek hadn’t been very close, had moved out of town after the tragedy, leaving no forwarding address, and seemed uninterested in his son’s fate.

  So Wieder rented a small one-bedroom apartment for him not far from his own home and paid him a monthly wage to keep up his house. Derek lived completely alone, his neighbors viewing him as a freak. Now and then, he’d lock himself up and wouldn’t emerge for days or weeks. During these periods, it was Wieder who brought him food and made sure he took his medication.

  Derek Simmons’s story touched me, as did Wieder’s attitude toward him. It was only with Wieder’s help that the guy, murderer or not, was able to live a decent life. And he was free, even if his freedom was restricted by his illness. Without Wieder, he’d have ended up in an asylum, an unwanted wreck, surrounded by brutal guards and dangerous patients. Laura told me that she’d visited the hospital in Trenton with the professor a few times to do fieldwork; she thought that a mental hospital was maybe the most sinister place on the face of the earth.

  The following week, when the first snow began to fall, I visited Wieder’s house three times and each time found Derek there, doing some minor repairs. We chatted and smoked together, looking at the lake, which seemed crushed beneath the weight of the gloomy sky. If I hadn’t known about his condition, I’d have thought he was a normal person, albeit shy, reclusive, and not very clever. In any event, he seemed gentle and incapable of doing anybody any harm. He spoke of Wieder with veneration and understood how much he owed the professor. He told me that he’d recently adopted a puppy from a shelter. He’d named him Jack and took him for a walk in the nearby park every evening.

  I mention Derek and his story here because he was to play an important role in the tragedy that followed.

  FIVE

  In December, I received one of the most important pieces of news in my life up to then.

  One of the librarians at the Firestone, a friend of mine by the name of Lisa Wheeler, had told me that an editor from Signature, a New York literary magazine, would be giving a lecture at Nassau Hall. The magazine, which is now defunct, was quite well regarded at the time, despite having a limited circulation. Knowing that I wanted to get published, Lisa got me an invitation and advised me to speak to the editor after the lecture, asking him to read my stories. I wasn’t shy, but nor was I pushy, so over the following three days I was in a ferment as to what to do. In the end, mostly at Laura’s insistence, I chose three short stories, put them in an envelope along with a résumé, and turned up at the lecture with the package tucked under my arm.

  I arrived too early, so I waited in front of the building, smoking a cigarette. Outside the auditorium, the air was leaden gray and filled with the cries of the crows that nested in the nearby trees.

  It’d been snowing again, and the two bronze tigers that guarded the hall’s entrance looked like marzipan figurines on some huge cake, dusted with powdered sugar. A slim man wearing one of those corduroy jackets with leather patches on the elbows and a matching tie walked up to me and asked for a light. He’d rolled his own cigarette, which he smoked in a long bone or ivory holder, clasping it between his thumb and forefinger like an Edwardian dandy.

  We started talking, and he asked me what I thought of the subject matter of the lecture. I confessed that I didn’t really know what it was about, but said that I was hoping to give some of my short stories to the speaker, who was an editor at Signature magazine.

  “Splendid,” he said, exhaling a cloud of bluish smoke into the air. He had a slender pencil mustache, in the style of the ragtime era. “And what are your stories about?”

 
I shrugged.

  “Difficult to say—I’d rather they were read than talk about them.”

  “Do you know that William Faulkner said the same thing, that a good book can only be read, not talked about? Very well, let me have them. I’ll wager they are in that envelope.”

  I was left gaping in astonishment.

  “John M. Hartley,” the man said, moving the cigarette holder to his left hand and stretching out his right.

  I shook his hand, with a feeling that I’d gotten off to a bad start. Noticing my embarrassment, he gave me a smile of encouragement, revealing two rows of tobacco-yellowed teeth. I handed him the envelope containing my stories and résumé. He took it and thrust it into the battered leather briefcase that was leaning against the metal stem of the ashtray between us. We finished our cigarettes and walked into the auditorium without saying another word.

  At the end of the lecture, after all the questions from the audience had been answered, he discreetly beckoned me over. When I went up to him, he handed me a business card and told me to get in touch a week later.

  I told Laura about what had happened.

  “It’s a sign,” she said, triumphant and highly convinced of it.

  She was sitting naked, perched on the makeshift desk I’d put together in one corner of the living room. She was waving her legs back and forth to dry the freshly painted polish on her toes, and at the same time was wiping the lenses of her glasses with a piece of chamois.

  “This is what happens when something is written in the stars,” she went on. “Everything comes together and flows in a natural sort of way, like a good piece of prose. Welcome to the writers’ world, Mr. Richard Flynn, sir.”

  “Let’s just wait and see what happens,” I said skeptically. “I wonder whether I made a good choice with the stories, and whether he’ll even bother to look at them. Maybe they’re in the trash already.”