The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

  “Isn’t what you’re talking about brainwashing? And what happens when the memories come back to the surface at the wrong moment? What if a mountain climber’s blockage comes back all of a sudden, just as he’s hanging from a rope at three thousand feet?”

  He looked at me in astonishment and slight alarm. Up until then, his tone had been somewhat condescending, but after that I detected a note of fear mingled with his surprise.

  “That’s a very good question. I see you’re smarter than I thought—no offense. So, yes, what happens in such a situation? Some people will probably hold the person who ‘butchered’ the climber’s mind responsible, to use your word.”

  Just then the phone rang, but he didn’t answer it, and I wondered whether it might be Laura. Then he suddenly changed the subject, using his familiar tactic. He probably thought he’d already said too much about his experiments.

  “Sorry Laura couldn’t come. Maybe we’d have had a more pleasant conversation. You know, I’m aware of your relationship, so you don’t need to lie to me about it anymore. Laura and I don’t have any secrets from each other. She told you about Timothy, didn’t she?”

  I knew he wasn’t bluffing, so I told him it was true. I felt embarrassed at having been caught red-handed, and I said to myself that he and Laura had a deeper connection than I’d previously presumed, that they shared a secret place to which I hadn’t been admitted yet, even as a guest, despite my illusions.

  “When I asked you about the nature of your relationship, I’d already known you were together,” he said. “It was just a test.”

  “Which I failed.”

  “Let’s say, rather, that you chose to be discreet, and that my question was out of line,” he reassured me. “How much does Laura mean to you—or, rather, how much do you think she means?”

  “A whole lot.”

  “You didn’t hesitate,” he observed. “So let us hope that everything goes well between the two of you. Has anybody asked you about your visits here yet?”

  “No.”

  “If anybody does, tell me immediately, no matter who’s doing the asking, will you?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great, thanks.”

  I decided to play his game, so this time I was the one who suddenly changed the subject.

  “Have you ever been married?”

  “My bio is public, Richard. I’m surprised you’ve never read it. No, I’ve never been married. Why? Because when I was young, I was only interested in studying and making a career for myself, which was something that happened quite late on. When two people meet when they’re young and grow up together, it’s easy for them to put up with each other’s quirks and habits. When you’re older, it’s almost impossible. Or perhaps I just never met the right person. I was once head over heels in love with a pretty young lady, but it ended quite badly.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe you’d like me to tell you the combination to the safe, too? That’s enough for tonight. Do you want to know what my earliest memory is?”

  “I have a feeling I’m going to find out.”

  “Your feeling is correct, buddy. You’re cut out to be a medium. Well, I wasn’t sitting on a balcony, trying to break off a wooden slat. I was in a large yard full of roses, it was early one beautiful summer, and the sun was shining. I was standing next to some rosebushes with big, red blooms, and at my feet there was a tabby cat. A tall and handsome man—all adults look very tall when you’re a toddler—was leaning over me and telling me something. He was wearing a dark uniform, and he had a couple of medals pinned to his chest, one of which caught my eye more than the others, probably because it was very shiny. I think it was silver, in the shape of a cross. That young man, with blond hair in a crew cut, was paying attention to me, and I was very proud of that.

  “That’s my memory, which I can still see vividly before my eyes. I was born in Germany, if you didn’t know, and I’m Jewish. I came to America with my mother and sister when I was four years old. My sister Inge was just a baby. My mother later told me that on that day we’d been ‘visited’ by some storm troopers, who’d beaten my father very badly; he died in the hospital a few days later. But that memory, which masked so painful an event, has remained here in my mind. I prefer to keep my memories, you know, no matter how painful. I sometimes use them the way Catholics use a hair belt: they’re abrasive, and you tie them around your waist or your thigh. It helps me to never forget what some seemingly normal human beings are capable of doing, and that behind appearances there sometimes lurk monsters.”

  He stood up and turned on the light, which dazzled my eyes and caused me to flinch. He went to the windows and drew the curtains.

  “It’s hell outside,” he said. “And it’s almost midnight. Are you sure you don’t want to stay over tonight?”

  “Laura would be worried,” I said.

  “You can call her,” he answered, gesturing toward the hall. “I’m sure she’ll understand.”

  “No, that’s all right, I’ll manage.”

  “I’ll call you a cab, then. I’ll pay the fare. It’s my fault you stayed until this hour.”

  “It was an interesting conversation,” I said.

  “As I told you before, there’s no need to lie,” he said and went into the hall to call a cab.

  In fact, I hadn’t lied. He was probably the most intriguing grown-up I’d met up until then, not only due to his reputation and fame, but also because of his undeniable personal charisma. At the same time, however, he always seemed stuck inside a sort of glass cubicle, locked up in there by his own incapacity to accept that others weren’t just sock puppets in his twisted mind games.

  I went to the window. The snow looked like a group of ghosts as it whirled in the glow of the light on the balcony. Then, all of a sudden, I thought I saw a figure in the darkness, ten feet away from the window, a figure that darted to the left, behind the tall magnolias, whose branches were laden with snow. I was almost sure I hadn’t imagined it, although the visibility was very poor because of the darkness, but I decided not to mention it to Wieder; he seemed stressed enough as it was.

  He managed to find a cab after a number of attempts, and it took me over an hour to arrive in front of my house. The taxi spat me out in the snow somewhere near the Battle Monument, from whence I continued on foot, sinking up to my knees in the drifts, the frozen wind lashing my face.

  Twenty minutes later, I was sitting on the couch with Laura, wrapped in a blanket, holding a mug of hot tea.

  Laura suddenly said, “Timothy came by three hours ago—” She never used the shorter form, Tim or Timmy, just as she never called me Dick or Richie. “I think he means to continue with the harassment. I don’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll talk to him. Or maybe we should call the cops, like I told you before.”

  “I don’t think there’s any point,” she said quickly, without specifying which option she was referring to. “It’s a pity you weren’t at home. We could have sorted it out on the spot.”

  “Wieder insisted I stay for dinner.”

  “And you had to go along with it, didn’t you? What did you talk about?”

  “Stuff about memory, something like that. How about you explain to me why you’ve turned against him lately? If it hadn’t been for you, I’d never even have known him. He offered me a job. He’s a respectable professor, and I was just trying to be polite, that was all, including because I know you value your relationship with him. It was you who insisted on my meeting him, remember?”

  She was sitting on the small rug in front of the couch with her legs crossed, as if she were about to meditate. She was wearing one of my T-shirts, the one with the Giants logo, and for the first time I noticed that she’d lost weight.

  She apologized for her tone, then told me that her mother had discovered a lump in her left breast. She’d gone to the doctor and was now waiting for the results of the mammogram. Laura had let me know very little about her family—nothing but small scrap
s and snatches of memories—and I’d never really been able to form a coherent picture from the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle she’d offered me, even though I’d told her everything about my own folks. I was thinking of spending the holidays with my mother and brother, the first Christmas without my dad. I’d invited Laura, but she’d said she’d rather go to Evanston. There were only a few days left, and already I could feel the metallic tang of parting; it was to be our longest time apart since we met.

  The next day I had my photo taken for Signature at a small studio downtown. A few hours later, I picked up the pictures and sent two of them to the magazine’s address, keeping the other two: one for Laura and one for my mom. But I forgot to take them out of my shoulder bag before I went away for the holidays, so I never got the chance to give Laura the photograph I’d intended for her. Later, in Ithaca, when I remembered the pictures, I discovered that they’d vanished.

  By the time the magazine came out, at the end of January, I was already being harassed by detectives and reporters, so I changed my address, and the free copies of the magazine, sent through the mail, never reached me. I didn’t see that issue of Signature until fifteen years later, when a friend of mine gave me a copy as a present. He’d come across it in a secondhand bookstore on Myrtle Avenue, in Brooklyn. I never spoke to the editor again. It wasn’t until the beginning of the 2000s that I found out by chance that he’d died in a car accident on the West Coast in the summer of 1990.

  As Laura would have said, maybe the way the magazine, and my literary career, slipped out of my grasp was a sign. After that I never published anything again, although for a while I did continue to write.

  Professor Joseph Wieder was murdered in his home a couple of days after the evening we’d had dinner together, on the night of December 21–22, 1987. The police never found the perpetrator, despite extensive investigations, but for the reasons you’ll discover below, I was one of the suspects.

  SIX

  Somebody once said that the beginning and the end of a story don’t really exist. They’re merely moments that are chosen subjectively by a narrator to allow the reader to look in on an event that began sometime previously and will end sometime after.

  Twenty-six years later, my perspective changed. I was to discover the truth about the events of those months—I wasn’t looking for this revision; instead, it hit me, like a stray bullet.

  For a while after, I wondered when exactly it was that my relationship with Laura fell to pieces, and perhaps also my whole life with it—or at least the way I’d always dreamed of living it up until then. In a way, it was when she disappeared from home, without saying good-bye and without my ever seeing her again, the morning after Wieder was killed.

  But, in fact, things had started to go downhill immediately after that evening when I’d had dinner at the professor’s house.

  Just like on a snow-covered mountain, where a single sound or a falling stone can trigger a huge avalanche that sweeps away everything in its path, a seemingly banal occurrence was to shatter everything I thought I knew about Laura and, ultimately, about myself.

  That weekend I’d decided to go to New York with an acquaintance, Benny Thorn, who’d asked me to help him move some of his stuff and to stay over at his place for the night. He was moving into a furnished one-bedroom apartment, and he had to get rid of some surplus belongings he hadn’t managed to sell. Laura told me that she didn’t want to spend the night alone, so she was going to stay at a friend’s and work on her thesis. The friend’s name was Sarah Harper, and she lived out in Rocky Hill. I’d been making faster progress on Wieder’s library than I’d expected, so I thought that I could afford to skip going there the weekend before Christmas.

  But it happened that while Benny was loading his stuff into a rented van, just an hour before he was supposed to pick me up, he slipped on the ice, took a fall, and broke his leg. So he didn’t turn up to meet me, and he didn’t answer the phone when I called him. I left him a message and went back home to wait for him to get back to me. Another hour later, after the doctor had put his leg in a cast, he called from the hospital and told me that we would have to postpone our departure and resort to Plan B, which involved renting a storage unit out by the airport and taking his stuff there.

  I called the storage company and found out that it was possible to rent a unit for twenty bucks a month, so I spent most of the rest of the day loading boxes into the van, taking it to the storage complex, and then returning the van to the rental company. Meanwhile, Benny had arrived back home in a cab, and I reassured him that everything was in order. I promised to bring him some groceries later that evening.

  Laura hadn’t given me her friend’s phone number, so I couldn’t tell her I’d put off going to New York. I looked for her at the university, but she’d already left. The only thing I could do was head back home. Once I got home, though, I decided to go to Wieder’s and leave her a note, in the event that she might stop there before driving to Sarah’s place. The keys to the professor’s house were kept in an empty jar on our sideboard, along with some loose change, and I was getting ready to leave when somebody rang the doorbell.

  When I opened the door, I saw a man of about my age, tall, thin, and haggard. Although it was very cold and snowing, he was wearing only a tweed jacket and a long red scarf, which made him look like a French painter. He seemed surprised that I’d answered, and for a few moments he said nothing, merely gazing at me with his hands thrust inside the pockets of his corduroy pants.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, certain that he must have the wrong address.

  He sighed and gave me a sad look.

  “I don’t think so—”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  “I’m Timothy Sanders,” he said. “I was looking for Laura.”

  Now it was my turn not to know what to do next. A number of options flashed through my mind. The first would have been to slam the door in his face; the second, to chew him out before slamming the door; the last, to invite him inside, keep him busy, quietly call the cops, and then accuse him of harassment when the officers arrived.

  But to my own amazement, I merely said, “Laura isn’t at home, but if you’d like, you can come in. I’m Richard, her boyfriend.”

  “I think that—” he began. He sighed again, cast a look around—it was already growing dark—and then entered, after stamping the snow from his boots on the doormat.

  He came to a stop in the middle of the living room.

  “Nice place,” he said.

  “Coffee?”

  “No, I’m fine. Mind if I smoke?”

  “We don’t smoke inside, but we could go into the backyard. I wouldn’t mind a smoke myself.”

  I opened the glass door and he followed me outside, rummaging through his pockets for a cigarette. Finally, he fished out a crumpled pack of Lucky Strikes, took out a cigarette, and stooped to light it.

  “Man,” I said, “Laura has told me about you.”

  He looked at me with an air of resignation.

  “I supposed she did.”

  “She told me about your relationship, and complained that you’ve been harassing her. I know you came here a few days ago, when I wasn’t home.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, in a cautious voice.

  He was taking such deep drags on his cigarette that after four or five puffs, he’d almost finished it. His hands were unnaturally white, with long, delicate fingers, as if they were made of wax.

  “And I know you’ve been to New York together,” I added, but he shook his head.

  “I think there must be some kind of mistake, because we’ve never been to New York together. To tell you the truth, I haven’t been there since last summer. I’ve fallen out with my folks, and now I have to fend for myself. I’ve been in Europe for the past two months.”

  He looked me in the eye when he said this. His voice had the same neutral tone as when he’d introduced himself, as if he were stating something that ought to h
ave been obvious to anybody, just as it was obvious that the earth wasn’t flat.

  It suddenly struck me with absolute certainty that he was telling the truth and that Laura had been lying to me. I was gripped by a feeling of nausea and stubbed out my cigarette.

  “I’d better get going,” he said, looking toward the kitchen.

  “Yes, maybe you should,” I agreed, realizing that I wasn’t up to the humiliation of pumping him for information, although I was tempted to do so.

  I walked him to the front door. On the threshold he paused and said, “I’m really sorry. I think I’ve put my foot in it. I’m sure it’s all just a misunderstanding that can be cleared up.”

  I lied to him, saying I thought so, too. We bid each other good-bye, and I closed the door behind him.

  I went straight back to the yard, where I chain-smoked a couple more cigarettes, without feeling the cold and without being able to think of anything except Laura’s face when she’d told me all those lies. I don’t know why, but I remembered one of the first evenings we’d spent as lovers, when we were both sitting on the couch and I was running my fingers through her hair, amazed at how soft it was. I was seething with anger now and wondering about how I might find out where that Sarah lived.

  Then, all of a sudden, I said to myself that Laura had gone in fact to Wieder’s house, that the story about her staying at that friend’s place was just another lie.

  She hadn’t taken the keys to the professor’s house with her, though. I’d found them on the sideboard and put them in my pocket before Timothy Sanders rang the doorbell. I don’t know why, but I was now firmly convinced that she was with Wieder, that if I went there I’d find them together. That everything, absolutely everything, had been one huge lie and that I’d been used for some aim I was unable to understand, maybe just a victim of some perverse, hateful experiment she’d cooked up with her professor.