“You should be proud of your genes,” Mom and Dad always say. They’re the founders of the Progressive Parish, a local political party that worships being different. Get-together: “We just adopted a little Filipino.” “No kidding! Our son is gay.” “Really? Well, ours has no shadow.” Three-nil, nobody beats that. Mom does yoga and is Zen, and Dad would rather cook for the homeless than for us. Like a lot of bleeding hearts, their charity ends at home.
Until I was seven, they managed to keep me under wraps. But you don’t have to be Einstein to figure it was bound to come out. One day two men in dark sunglasses snatched me from the classroom, bundled me into an armored car, and stuck a needle into my arm. When I woke up I found myself at an army base in the United States, where a team of scientists and agents spent four months examining me. The first three weeks I claimed I was from Mars and that my goal was complete world domination; then they got extremely rude and started threatening me. I lost it when I woke up one morning to find that they had sliced a piece of skin from my butt to grow a culture. I told them to go fuck themselves, but that same week I was told I was of no use to them and got reunited with my parents. To compensate for our inconvenience we were offered a feature in National Geographic. First my parents flipped and considered legal action, but when they discovered that the men who had kidnapped me were in fact above the law, and that the ensuing media hype was a goldmine for the Progressive Parish’s coffers, they soon came round.
And me? I became a celebrity, thanks a bunch. On Oprah they wouldn’t let me wear makeup ’cause they figured a floating, painted mask with no eyes or mouth would look too freaky on TV. Practical upshot: a completely invisible boy, which meant that everybody who wasn’t actually in the studio just saw clothes moving and me picking up objects and standing behind an infrared machine to prove my existence. When Oprah asked how the scientists had treated me I responded: “I think the government has no right to experiment with my ass.” That cost them three million in hush money, and still the accusations of sexual abuse came pouring in. Suckers.
One-all, you’d think. Not by a long shot. In the years that followed, our front yard was overrun by camera crews eager to catch a glimpse of me. Which is technically impossible. Twelve circuses and twenty-three freak shows, including Ripley’s, offered astronomic amounts to exhibit me. I’ve been called a Saint 268 times and have 29,000,000 hits on Google, as many as Brad Pitt. Cool, Mom and Dad, being different. Until it’s you who’s different. Everybody knows who I am. Everybody, except me.
Splinter once said your dreams make you who you are. But I don’t dream. Loads of people say this, but I really don’t dream. To tell the truth, I don’t even know what dreams are. The countless EEGs that I’ve had show that my brain performs absolutely zilch activity during REM sleep. They never found a link with my condition, but duh. I suppose that’s why I have no friends, no feelings, and no imagination. I lack a goal. I lack depth. Like I care.
I guess my only wish is to find my reflection. If I have no idea what my face looks like, how will I ever know who I am? And you know how saints and celebrities go. They get pinned on a cross, and while they watch the life seeping out people piss on their shadows.
The arrival of Splinter Rozenberg changed everything.
I was fourteen by then and living a relatively quiet life. The hype had died down, as hypes do. We had moved a couple of times within our shit-hole town, and in exchange for a statement that I had not been abused during my stay in the US, two men in dark sunglasses were stationed in front of our house for a year, removing pilgrims and other freaks from our front yard.
Obviously all this had an effect on my school rep. I’ve got no friends, and because I’m tall I have a lot of nerve where others don’t. They avoid me, which is exactly how I like it. Sometimes I beat up someone, not because I like it, but I’m helping an image along. And come on, it’s not all that obvious, unless I’m in front of the mirror. I wear long sleeves. Only my face is a dead giveaway. With the sun on my right, I look luminous on the left. Mom tried to hide the effect with make-up, but then I look like a drag-queen, so I don’t think so.
Even Jord Hendriks lets me off the hook, confining himself to trash talk. On a good day I’m ‘See-Thru’. On a bad day, it’s ‘Zero’ or just ‘Freak’. He says without a reflection I don’t actually exist, except that my fuck-face hasn’t figured out yet.
He exaggerates, if you ask me. If I’m supposed to believe the stories I’m no oil painting, but it’s not as bad as all that. Lots of artists, including my grandpa, have made impressions of what I look like. None of the drawings look alike, and none of them really suit me. The charcoal drawing on the cover of People I can’t take seriously for starters, because it creates the illusion of shadow. Some show a boy with a broad, roughly hewn face. Mom says Grandpa’s is the best likeness. But Grandpa also did a portrait of Mom that sort of makes her look like a man instead of a woman—so much for Mom’s opinion.
Too bad that Jord Hendriks is such an incredible dick. The other kids are afraid of him. I think he’s hot. I mean, just look at that body in the locker room before P.E., holy fuck!
Of course that’s about the last thing you’d say to him, if you know what’s good for you. One disorder is more than enough, trust me. Mom and Dad would love it, and that’s exactly why I won’t tell them. They’d drag me to lunatic parades and conferences on tolerance by the Progressive Parish, and then the whole media circus would start all over again, so no. The Internet is no good either. It’s easy to click Yes, I am 18 or over, but chat-rooms kick me ’cause I’m supposedly too scared to show myself on webcam.
Oh, well. The thought of Jord Hendriks putting his mouth to better use and my right hand offer plenty of release for a healthy boy like me, exclamation mark smiley face.
Splinter was new in class, so I was old news. Thanks in part to his mom, Mrs. Rozenberg, who had made the unforgivable mistake of accompanying him to school the first day to explain all about his condition. I remember them standing there, side by side, Mrs. Rozenberg like she was lecturing some rugrats and Splinter staring glassy-eyed into the room. Splinter always stared at things glassy-eyed. That’s because his eyes were made of glass. As was the rest of his body. It’s one of those funny little accidents you get in certain gene pools. Polished, he was a perfect mirror. He had some flexibility and was able to move his limbs, but slo-mo, like Neil Armstrong on the moon. Facial expressions were a difficult story.
Mrs. Rozenberg, all flesh and blood, told us to think of him as a china cabinet, which wasn’t all that far from the truth. He wasn’t allowed to play games during recess or P.E. A well-aimed football would surely kill him. Jack-assing was out of the question. When we heard an old bag like her say that, we screamed with laughter. Mrs. Rozenberg was delighted, thinking she was cool. Splinter knew he was doomed.
From day one Jord Hendriks and his friends put him under siege. Paperclips, coins, biro springs, and ballpoint pens were fired at him in a game of finding out which part of the body to aim for to get the opening notes of Man in the Mirror. “Your dick, okay?” Splinter said when the teacher had left the classroom. “Will you please stop now? It’s dangerous what you’re doing.”
Whoops, that only made things worse. Splinter knew how fragile he was, and that paperclips and coins would probably cause no permanent damage. But accidents will happen and when Jord launched a biro that scratched his neck, he grassed on him.
Big whoops. Suspensions aren’t forever. After some third-year kid acting on Jord’s instructions concocted a story to lure the shop teacher out of the classroom, Jord took Splinter under his arm and put him on the workbench. Splinter screamed. Not with pain—he didn’t have nerves—but to catch a teacher’s attention. He didn’t put up a struggle, because he knew that any wrong move would break him in two.
“I’ve always wanted to be a glassblower, shitbag,” Jord said, as he ignited the Bunsen burner. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land will have the crookedest dick of ’
em all?”
Three or four boys formed a cordon around them to keep the softies away. The rest of the class smirked or pretended not to notice. Me? I was glad it wasn’t me lying there.
Jord stopped at Splinter’s left pinky. He heated the tip and squeezed it with a pair of pliers, so Splinter would never need another spoon to stir his tea. Then one of Jord’s mates sounded the alarm about Splinter having a welding accident and all that. Anyone who blabbed, we were told, would suffer the same fate, glass or no glass.
I was convinced that Jord wouldn’t get away with this. But he did. Feel free to dismiss it as schoolyard law. We give each other hell and we cover each other’s backs—a matter of self-preservation. Bubbles of deceit and lies will burst sooner or later. But that’s too easy. Time has taught me that we live in a world full of Jord Hendrikses, a world that thrives on the destruction of its rare wonders and where people live under a blanket of smog, the stench of sameness.
Why did I feel attracted to Splinter?
He was the only person in my life who understood me. He was looking for a glimmer of happiness, which no one was prepared to give him. And let’s face it, how could he ever discover himself when all he saw in his skin was the outside world reflected?
“Dad says I should look for happiness within,” Splinter once said to me, during one of the many afternoons in his room. “But then I’ll never find it, unless I smash myself to pieces. A glass cousin of mine threw himself off the roof to see if it was true, but the chimney sweep didn’t find anything of importance among the shards. So what am I supposed to do?”
“Well, you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette,” I grinned, but the joke failed to disguise the sadness in my voice.
Splinter felt attracted to me because I was the only one who actually saw him when I looked at him and not myself. One time Mrs. Rozenberg rushed in, right before she was due at a reception. She placed Splinter in front of her, squinted into his face, tousled her hair until she was happy, and ran out again. People always looked at Splinter in an ugly way, ’cause people find themselves ugly in the mirror. Splinter took that personally. With me, it wasn’t there. If I looked at him in an ugly way, he knew that I was in a rotten mood. If I laughed at him, he knew my laugh was meant for him.
During Splinter’s first few months at school—between summer and Christmas—I hadn’t exchanged more than five words with him, no more than with any other of my classmates to be precise. If I had to take a leak during recess I would go to the Boys room in the old part of the school to avoid any smart-ass remarks or frightened freshmen. Around there, there were only echoes in the hallway. To get there you had to cross the foyer by the assistant principal’s office, where just before Christmas he had put up an enormous tree.
That day a voice made me jump: “Er... could you give me a hand?”
I looked around, didn’t see a thing.
“Up here.”
Then I saw. It was Splinter. They’d stripped him to his boxers, sprayed him with red paint, and put him up in the tree amongst the other balls.
“Holy fuck,” I said. “What happened to you?”
“Jord Hendriks,” he shrugged. What else? “Worst thing is that the assistant principal has already walked by three times without noticing me.”
I’d never really taken much interest in Splinter, had always thought of him as a bit of a goofball. Now, semi-naked, I got my first proper look at him. His chest rose and fell smoothly with each breath. I’d never realized that he could breathe. I noticed the silver garland tied around his neck like a noose, which would have strangled any other kid.
“Hey, aren’t you that boy that has no shadow?” Splinter asked with that peculiar, crystal voice of his.
Lying, with all those Christmas lights, seemed pointless. “Yup, hullo.”
“Cool! I saw that item on the Discovery Channel about you. I thought that theory about light-transmitting cells was totally awesome.”
I didn’t say a word.
“You’re famous, man. I mean, everybody’s talking about you. You wanna come over to my place sometime? My dad’s got an ultraviolet lamp. We could do experiments.”
So I did have feelings: I pitied him for his naiveté. Splinter just stared at me with those sparkling eyes and said: “Shit. You’re even more fucked up than me.”
I looked at him dangling up in that tree and held my tongue.
“Look, I need to take a leak,” I said.
“Would you... would you mind helping me down?”
For a split second I hesitated, then grabbed a chair and pushed it towards the tree.
“Careful,” Splinter said, as I clambered up on the chair and pine-needles stuck in my arms. “Drop me and I’m dead.”
He wrapped his arms around my neck. Although I should have been prepared, it still gave me goosebumps. The touch of something so far out, so alien, filled me with both revulsion and curiosity. He was unnaturally cold and didn’t weigh a thing. I didn’t even dare grab hold of him, scared he would crack. Splinter was sensitive to my reservations and said: “That’s it, I’ve got you. You can release me now.”
So I did, and even now I come back to that moment, how casually he trusted me with his life, and without all the psychobabble I put it down to the fact that he had no choice. But in the few seconds it took me to lift him from the tree and put him on the ground, a tremor went through his glass body that made me so acutely aware of the fragility of life that it rattled me big time. That’s when I understood just how precarious the things are that you take for granted. As soon as his feet touched the ground, I got my hands off him as if I’d burned myself on a hot stove.
“Wow, thanks man,” he said and pulled the tinsel from his neck. “If I’d still been up there after the bell they’d have serenaded me with Christmas carols. You’ve spared me the humiliation.”
“Don’t mention it,” I muttered, ill at ease. On a whim I added: “Good luck.”
I was halfway down the corridor when I heard his xylophone footsteps coming after me. I turned around and saw Splinter, barefoot and with a bundle of clothes in his arms.
“I just wanted to say if there’s anything I can do for you... I owe you one.”
“That’s okay.” I pushed open the swing doors to the Boys room. Just in time I realized that I’d almost let them slam into his face. So I waited and held the doors for him. I did it grudgingly. The guy got under my skin. He’d touched a nerve with those glass fingers of his, which had upset the normal state of affairs. I didn’t like it when the normal state of affairs got upset.
“Could you turn on the tap for me?” he asked with a twinkle. “I can’t apply any pressure with my hands.”
I did as he asked. Splinter began to wipe the red paint off his face with tissues. It sounded like rubbing your wet finger across a window. While I was washing my hands he looked curiously at the absence of my reflection in the mirror. I reckon he didn’t know whether to comment. Finally he took the plunge and asked: “How do you fix your hair?”
After a moment’s hesitation I answered. “My mother. And if you tell anyone I’ll smash you with a baseball bat. There’s a reason I keep it short. Normally I wear a beanie. But fucking rules in this school...”
“I hear you,” he said. “Wanna hear something? My arms aren’t flexible enough to reach everywhere. I’m fourteen for fuck’s sake and my mom’s still washing me.”
“Even your...”
He shrugged, looking embarrassed.
We stared at each other sheepishly and then burst out laughing. Right then we’d become friends. At our age you think the depths of your own hell are the darkest; Splinter proved it could be worse. A little self-reflection ain’t a bad thing. Splinter was all reflection. Seeing him wash his face in front of the mirror made my head spin. A mirror in a mirror in a mirror, an optical illusion of infinity. That’s friendship. You give and you take, even if you have nothing to give.
We spent our time talking and watching TV in our rooms, or fish
ing on the canal. In many ways Splinter and I were completely different. He had ideas, he had interests, he had dreams—everything I lacked. His greatest interest was the sea and his greatest dream was to become a captain in the navy. That’s how I got to know Splinter: unworldly, naïve, full of ideas and fantasies.
Sad thing was that we both knew his dreams would never come true. I often wondered how he could maintain such a positive attitude with his condition. Death was just a door away for a nine-pound boy made of mirrored glass. He was born a victim. “And I was a Caesarean,” he told me. “Imagine the bloodbath if there’d been contractions. I would have exploded in my mom’s birth canal.”
He often speculated about his death, no matter how much it brought me down. “It’s a miracle that I’ve even made it this far,” he said. “I mean, my cousin tripped on the doorstep when he was eleven and fell to pieces, and another was caught by the wind when she was four and splattered against a tree. I’m the longest-living mirror boy in the family. The chances of me graduating are slim to none.”
“No surprise, with your choice of friends,” I said. “I heard that Jord’s planning to dump you in the bottle bank.”
He gave me the glass finger and I pretended to whack him; you know how these things go.
Mr. and Mrs. Rozenberg were overly protective. They wouldn’t allow Splinter to do anything besides reading and fishing. His mom made him go about in hand-knitted clothes: triple jumpers, beanies, scarves, mittens, anything soft. His dad insisted on taking him to school every morning, even after a sleepover at my place. It really bummed him out.
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