The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

She was nearsighted, and when she wasn’t wearing her glasses she had to screw up her eyes to be able to see, which made her look angry. She cast me such a glance, with her eyebrows bunched up, and stuck her tongue out at me.

  “Don’t be such a dogged pessimist! Pessimists get on my nerves, especially when they’re young. Whenever I tried anything new when I was a child, my dad could never shut up about how many insurmountable difficulties stood between me and my dream. I think that’s why I gave up painting when I was fifteen, even though my teacher said I was very talented. When I went to my first international math competition, which was held in France, he warned me that the jury would be biased in favor of the French entrants, so I shouldn’t get my hopes up.”

  “And was he right? Were they biased in favor of the cheese eaters?”

  “Not one bit. I won first place, and a kid from Maryland came in second.”

  She put the chamois cloth on the desk, placed her glasses on her nose, and drew her knees up to her chest, clasping them with her arms, as if all of a sudden she was cold.

  “I have a feeling that it’s going to turn out all right, Richard. You were born to be a writer—I know it, and you know it, too. But nothing comes to you on a silver platter. After my dad died, when I was sixteen, I looked at all the stuff he’d kept under lock and key in the drawers of his desk, the desk I’d always wanted to rummage through. Among his papers, I found a small black-and-white picture of a girl about my age, with her hair swept back under a hairband. She wasn’t very pretty—she had a common look—but she had nice eyes. I showed the picture to my mom, and she curtly told me that she’d been my dad’s girlfriend in high school. For some reason, he’d kept the picture all those years. You know what I mean? It was like he hadn’t had the courage to stay with that girl, God knows why, and he’d accumulated so much unhappiness inside himself that he’d spread it all around him, like a cuttlefish squirting ink to hide itself. Now, drop those trousers, Cap’n. Can’t you see there’s a naked lady waiting for you?”

  Laura proved to have been right.

  A week later, we were eating a pizza in an Italian restaurant on Nassau Street when I suddenly got it into my head to call the Signature office then and there. I went to the phone booth by the door to the restroom, put a couple of quarters in the slot, and dialed the number on the business card I’d been carrying around since the lecture. A young lady answered, and I asked for Mr. Hartley, telling her who I was. A few seconds later, I heard the editor’s voice at the other end of the line.

  I reminded him who I was, and he got straight to the point: “Good news, Richard. I’m putting you in the next issue, which is due out in January. It will be a strong issue. After the holidays, we always have an increase in readers. I haven’t changed so much as a comma.”

  I was overwhelmed.

  “Which story did you choose?”

  “They’re short, so I decided to publish all three. I’m giving you five pages. By the way, we’ll need a photo of you, black-and-white, portrait format. We also need a brief bio.”

  “It sounds incredible . . . ,” I said, and stammered my thanks.

  “You’ve written some very good stories, and it’s natural that they should be read. I’d like us to meet after the holidays, so that we can get to know each other better. If you keep it up, you’ve got a good future ahead of you, Richard. Happy holidays—I’m glad to have been able to give you some good news.”

  I wished him happy holidays, too, and hung up.

  “You’re radiant,” Laura said when I sat back down at our table. “Good news?”

  “They’re going to publish all three in January,” I said. “All three, can you imagine! In Signature!”

  We didn’t celebrate with champagne. We didn’t even go to a fancy restaurant. We spent the evening at home, just the two of us, making plans for the future. It felt as if the stars were close enough for us to reach out and touch them. Words like “Signature magazine,” “three short stories,” “black-and-white photo,” and “published writer” were whirling around my head like a merry-go-round, forming an invisible halo of glory and immortality.

  Today, I realize that I was overwhelmed by the sudden change that had occurred in my life at that moment, and that I was exaggerating its importance in every respect—Signature was hardly the New Yorker, and its authors were paid in free copies rather than checks. What I didn’t realize at the time was that something about Laura had also changed in the last few days. Looking back on it, she seemed distant; she was always preoccupied with something, and she’d started speaking to me less and less. Two or three times I caught her talking on the phone in a hushed voice, and each time she hung up as soon as she noticed I was in the room.

  I continued to go to Wieder’s house almost every day, working for three or four hours at a stretch in the library, which was slowly beginning to take on an organized shape, and I spent my evenings with her, giving up every other activity. But most of the time Laura brought her work home and sat hunched on the floor, surrounded by books, piles of paper, and pens, like a shaman officiating at some secret ritual. If I remember correctly, we no longer even made love. Although I got up early in the morning, I’d usually find that she’d already left, without waking me.

  And then, one day, I came upon the manuscript in Wieder’s library.

  At the bottom of the shelves opposite the door there was a small cupboard, which I hadn’t been curious enough to open until then. I was looking for some writing paper, wanting to make a diagram of the final arrangement for the shelves by the door, which was where I’d begun my work, so rather than go back downstairs to fetch some from the professor’s desk, I decided to look in the cupboard. I opened it and found a ream of paper, a couple of old magazines, bunches of pencils, ballpoint pens, and markers.

  As I was pulling the paper from the cupboard, I dropped it, and the sheets scattered all over the floor. Kneeling down to pick them up, I noticed that the point of one of the pencils in the cupboard seemed to be wedged in the wall, poking inside the place where two of the sides ought to have joined together. I leaned forward to get a better look, moved the other objects out of the way, and discovered that the left side of the cupboard had a false wall, which opened to reveal a space the size of a phone book. And in that niche I found a sheaf of papers inside a cardboard file.

  I pulled it out and saw that there was no inscription on the cover that might identify the manuscript. Leafing through it, I realized that it was a work of psychiatry or psychology, but there was no page giving the title or author.

  The pages seemed to have been written by at least two different people. Some were typewritten, others were covered in very small handwriting, in black ink, and others still were in a different hand, in blue ballpoint pen, with large scrawling letters that leaned to the left. Both the typewritten and the handwritten pages were covered in corrections, and in places, additions of one or two paragraphs had been attached to the pages with clear tape.

  I wondered whether it might be a draft (or one of the drafts) of Professor Wieder’s famous book, which Laura had told me about, or whether it was the manuscript of some older, already published work.

  I quickly read the first couple of pages, which abounded in scientific terms unfamiliar to me, and then I put the manuscript back, taking care to arrange the objects more or less the way I’d found them. I didn’t want Wieder to notice that I’d discovered his secret hiding place or that I’d been rummaging through his house.

  One afternoon, I lost track of the time, and when I went downstairs, I bumped into the professor, who was talking to Derek. Derek left, and Wieder invited me to stay for dinner. He was tired and looked gloomy and preoccupied. He congratulated me in passing about my stories being accepted for publication, which he’d probably found out from Laura, but didn’t ask me for more details, which I would have been very happy to offer. It had started to snow heavily, and I thought to myself that it’d be better if I left, as the roads might get blocked, but I was unable to
refuse his invitation.

  “Why don’t you tell Laura to come over?” he suggested. “Come on, I insist. If I’d known you were here, I’d have invited her myself. We were working together today.”

  While he was looking for some steaks in the fridge, I went into the hall and called home. Laura answered almost immediately, and I told her that I was at Wieder’s and that he’d invited us both for dinner.

  “Did he suggest that you call me?” she asked in a quarrelsome tone. “Where is he now?”

  “He’s in the kitchen. Why?”

  “I don’t feel well, Richard. The weather’s bad, and I’d advise you to come back home as quickly as possible.”

  I didn’t insist. I told her that I’d get back as soon as I could before hanging up. Wieder gave me a quizzical look when I went back into the living room. He’d taken off his jacket and was wearing a white apron on whose chest was embroidered in red the following words: “I Don’t Know What I’m Doing.” He looked like he’d lost weight, and the circles under his eyes were darker than ever. Bathed in the harsh fluorescent light from the kitchen, his face looked ten years older, and the confident demeanor he’d had on the evening we’d met seemed to have given way to an almost hunted appearance.

  “Well, what did she say?”

  “She said she doesn’t feel like going out in this weather. And—”

  He interrupted me with a gesture.

  “She could at least have come up with a better excuse.”

  He picked up one of the steaks and tossed it back in the fridge, slamming the door.

  “Women can say that they are indisposed, can’t they, without going into details? It’s one of their major advantages in life. Go down into the cellar, will you, and pick out a bottle of red wine, please. We’re about to have a sad, lonely bachelor dinner. Neither of us is a football fan, but we could watch a game afterward, have a beer, belch, do whatever contented men are supposed to do.”

  When I came back from the cellar with the wine, the steaks were sizzling in a big frying pan, and he was making some instant mashed potatoes. One of the windows was wide open, and the wind was blowing large snowflakes inside, which melted instantly in the warm air. I uncorked the bottle of wine and poured it into a paunchy carafe, following his instructions.

  “No offense, but if I’d asked Laura to come over a year ago, she’d have been here like a shot, even if it were raining brimstone outside,” he said, after taking a gulp of whiskey. “Listen to an old man’s advice, Richard. When a woman senses that you’ve got something for her, then she’ll start testing her power and try to dominate you.”

  “What do you mean by ‘something’?” I asked. He didn’t answer, but merely gave me a long look.

  We ate in silence. He’d cooked the steaks in a rush and they were almost raw, and the mashed potatoes were full of lumps. He finished off almost the whole bottle of wine himself, and when we moved on to coffee, he poured a big shot of bourbon into his and drank it. Outside, the storm had turned into a blizzard, which writhed against the windows.

  After dinner, he put the plates in the dishwasher and lit a cigar, which he had taken from a wooden box. I declined his offer and lit a Marlboro. For a while he smoked absently, seeming to forget that I was there. I was getting ready to thank him for dinner and tell him I was leaving when he started to speak.

  “What is your earliest memory, Richard? Chronologically, I mean. Usually, a person’s memories start from the age of two and a half or three years old.”

  The light in the kitchen was still on, but the living room was in semidarkness. As he spoke, he waved his hands, and the incandescent tip of the cigar traced complicated patterns in the gloom. His long beard gave him the look of a biblical prophet, drained of visions, trying to hear the voice from heaven one more time. On the ring finger of his right hand he wore a red gemstone, which glinted mysteriously when he puffed on his cigar. The table between us, covered with a large white cloth, looked like the surface of a deep, cold lake, separating us more starkly than a wall.

  I’d never thought about my first recollections “chronologically,” as he’d put it. But after only a few moments, the memory he referred to began to take shape in my mind, and I shared it with him.

  “I was in Philly, at Aunt Cornelia’s house. You’re right: I must have been three years old, or it was a month or so before my third birthday, at the beginning of the summer of 1969. I was on a balcony, which seemed very big to me, trying to pull a wooden slat off a green cupboard. I had on shorts and white sandals. Then my mom came and took me away from there. I don’t remember the journey by train or car, and I don’t remember the inside of my aunt’s house or what she and her husband looked like then. I just remember that slat, the cupboard, and the balcony, which had butter-colored floor tiles, and also a strong smell of cooking, which must have been coming from the kitchen, somewhere nearby.”

  “So, you were around three when Armstrong walked on the moon,” he said. “Did you have a TV in your house at the time? It happened during the summer you’re talking about.”

  “Sure. It was a small color TV, on a stand in the living room, by the window. Later we got a bigger one, a Sony.”

  “Your parents more than likely watched the moon landing, one of the most important moments in history since the beginning of the world. Do you remember anything about that?”

  “I know they watched the coverage, because they talked about it for years afterward. That day, Dad had been to the dentist’s, and Mom made him chamomile tea to swish with. He somehow managed to scald his mouth with the tea. I heard the story dozens of times. But I don’t remember Neil Armstrong saying his famous words, or seeing him bouncing around like a big white doll on the moon’s surface. I saw that scene later, of course.”

  “See? For you, at that age, the landing didn’t mean anything at all. A little piece of wood was more important to you, for whatever reason. But what if you found out that you never went to Philly, and that it was all an image cooked up by your own mind, rather than a real memory?”

  “I’ve had these kinds of conversations with Laura. Maybe some memories are relative, maybe our memories gloss over things or even alter them, but I think that they’re only relative up to a point.”

  “They aren’t relative up to a point,” he told me. “Let me give you an example. When you were little, did you ever get lost in a mall when your parents were shopping?”

  “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “Well, in the fifties and sixties, when malls started popping up everywhere and replaced neighborhood stores, one of the constant fears of mothers everywhere was that they’d lose their children in the crowds. Kids of that generation were brought up in the shadow of that bogeyman, and were always being told to keep close to their moms when they were out shopping. The fear of getting lost or kidnapped in the mall is imprinted in their deepest memories, even if they can’t consciously remember anything about it anymore.”

  He got up and poured two glasses of bourbon, one of which he placed in front of me before he sat back down. He took a puff on his cigar, drank a sip of whiskey, inviting me to do likewise with a glance, and then went on.

  “Quite a few years ago, I carried out an experiment. I took a cross section of students born in that period. Not one of them could remember getting lost in a mall as a child. Then I suggested to them under hypnosis that they’d in fact gotten lost. What do you think happened? Three-quarters of them subsequently declared that they remembered getting lost in a mall and even described the experience: how frightened they were, how they were found by clerks and taken to their moms, how there were announcements on the overhead speakers about Tommy or Harry having been found by the café. Most of them refused to believe that it was all just a question of hypnotic suggestion combined with their old childhood fears. They ‘remembered’ the event all too well to be able to believe it never happened. If I’d suggested to somebody born and raised in New York City that he’d been attacked by an alligat
or in childhood, for example, the result would most likely have been null, because he’d have had no childhood memory of being afraid of alligators.”

  “What are you driving at?” I asked.

  I didn’t feel like drinking anymore, and the mere smell of the booze was enough to make me feel queasy after the dinner I’d forced myself to eat. I felt tired, and I kept wondering whether the buses were still running.

  “Driving at? Well, what I’m driving at is that when I asked you about a childhood memory, you told me about something safe and ordinary, a child playing with a bit of wood on a balcony. But the brain never works like that. There must be a very strong reason why you remembered that and not something else, if we presume it’s true. Maybe the slat had a nail in it and you hurt yourself, even if you can’t remember that part anymore. Maybe the balcony was on an upper floor and there was a risk of your falling, and your mother screamed when she found you there. When I started dealing with—”

  He paused, as if he was wondering whether he ought to continue. He probably decided he should, as he went on.

  “Some people experience very traumatic episodes, which turn, in time, into serious blockages. It’s the so-called boxer syndrome: after you almost get the life beaten out of you in the ring, it’s almost impossible for you to have enough motivation to become a champ. Your instinct for self-preservation becomes a strong inhibitor. So, if a bunch of students can be persuaded that they were once lost in a mall, why couldn’t somebody who really experienced such a thing be persuaded that the traumatic event never actually happened and that his mom merely bought him a new toy that day? You aren’t canceling out the effects of the trauma, but you’re removing the trauma itself.”

  “In other words, you’re butchering somebody’s memory,” I said, but I immediately regretted the forthright way I had put it.

  “If there’s a big bunch of people who give themselves up to the surgeon’s knife for the sake of more attractive breasts, noses, and butts, then what could be wrong with cosmetic surgery for the memory? Especially if we’re dealing with people who are no better than broken toys, unable to do their job anymore or function properly?”