The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  I carted Nurse Duff to the bathroom and suspended her body above the tub. Through some lingering womanly instinct, she had looped her arms around my neck; she had yet to notice the water, as was my hope. I was gazing deep into her eyes, beaming thoughts of reassurance. Her trust in me was absolute. What was I to her? Father? Lover? Deliverer? God?

  The spell was broken the moment her body touched the water. She began to thrash wildly, fighting to free herself. But her strength was far outmatched by mine. Pressing her by the shoulders, I forced her gargoyle’s face below the surface. Her panic and confusion rippled through me. What betrayal! What incomprehensible deceit! Others would have been moved to mercy, yet these feelings only strengthened my resolve. I felt her take the first breath of water. It ricocheted through her like a hiccup. She took a second, then a third, filling her lungs. A last agonal spasm and she was gone.

  I stepped back. The first test had been passed; here was the second. Waiting for the restoration of her human form, I counted off the seconds; when nothing happened, I hoisted her from the water and arranged her facedown on the floor, thinking this might encourage the process. But more minutes ticked away, and I was forced to concede that no change was forthcoming; Nurse Duff had permanently departed from this life.

  I retreated from the room and sat on the woman’s bed to ponder the situation. The only conclusion I could draw was that the transformative effect of death by water was for me alone—that my descendants possessed no such gift of resurrection. Yet why this should be so—why I should be sitting there, looking altogether like the man I’d once been, while she should be lying dead on the bathroom floor like a beached sea monster—was beyond my power to explain. Was I simply a more robust version of our species, being the alpha, the original, the Zero? Or could the difference be one not of body but of mind? That I had wanted to live, while she had not? I considered my emotions. I didn’t really have any. I had drowned an innocent woman in a bathtub, yet my feelings were utterly colorless. From the moment I’d sunk my incisors into the soft meat of her neck and taken the first, candy-sweet sip, she had ceased to exist as an entity distinct from myself; rather, she’d been a kind of appendage. Killing her had seemed no more morally noteworthy than trimming a fingernail. So perhaps that was where the difference lay. In the only way that really mattered, Nurse Duff was already dead when I’d shoved her in the water.

  Simultaneously, alarm bells were ringing inside me. The light in the room was changing; daybreak, my nemesis, was at hand. I moved hastily through the house, drawing every drape and shade, locking doors both front and back. For the next twelve hours, I was going nowhere.

  I awoke in delicious darkness, having discovered the most refreshing dream-free sleep I had ever known. No knock on the door had aroused me; Nurse Duff’s departure from the world had yet to be noticed, though surely this would come. I made my preparations quickly. On America’s byways, even a vampire, especially one who wishes to fly beneath the radar, needs money to get by. In a cat-shaped cookie jar, I discovered twenty-three hundred dollars in soft bills, more than enough, and a .38 revolver, which no person in the history of the planet needed less than I.

  My plan was to zigzag my way east, avoiding major highways. The journey would take five, perhaps six nights. Nurse Duff’s well-worn Corolla, with its detritus of candy wrappers, pop cans, and worthless scratch-offs, would suffice for the time being but would have to be discarded soon; somebody was bound to catch wind of the dead demon in the bathroom and note her missing automobile. I also felt—and looked—ridiculous in the woman’s oversized sweat suit and shower shoes; a more suitable costume was in the offing.

  Eight hours later I was in southern Missouri, where I commenced the pattern that would organize my life for the duration. Each new daybreak found me safely ensconced in an off-brand motel behind closed drapes, duct-taped cardboard panels, and a Do Not Disturb sign; once night fell, I would set out again and drive without stopping until an hour or two before dawn. In Carbondale, Illinois, I decided to ditch the Corolla. I was also very hungry. I lingered at my hotel past dark, sitting in my parked car, so that I might observe the comings and goings of my fellow travelers and identify an appropriate provider of nutrition, clothes, and transport. The man I selected was my approximate height and weight; he also seemed, conveniently, inebriated. As he entered his room I pushed in behind him, killed him tidily before he could utter more than a drunken whimper—he tasted rancidly of nicotine and bar-pour whiskey—wrapped his body in the shower curtain to conceal the stench of putrefaction, shoved him in the closet, helped myself to the contents of his wallet and suitcase (Dockers, no-iron sport shirts of obnoxious plaid, six sets of underpants and a pair of “novelty” boxers with the words KISS ME, I’M IRISH stenciled on the crotch), and skedaddled in his plushly appointed, thoroughly American sedan. The business cards in his wallet identified him as a regional sales manager for a manufacturer of industrial air-circulation equipment. I might as well have been him.

  In this manner I hunt-and-pecked my way across the great featureless slab of the American Middle West. As the nights and miles slithered by, road hypnosis cast my mind into the past. I thought of my parents, long dead, and the town where I was raised—a doppelgänger to the many anonymous hamlets that I, King of Destruction, passed through unremarkably, just a pair of headlights drifting downstream in the dark. I thought of people I’d known, friends I’d made, women I’d bedded. I thought of a table with flowers and crystal and a view of the sea, and a night—a sad and beautiful night—when in falling snow I had carried my beloved home. I thought of all these things, and many more besides, but most of all, I thought of Liz.

  The lights of New York rose from wretched New Jersey on the evening of the sixth day. Eight million souls: my senses were singing like a soprano. I entered Manhattan via the Lincoln Tunnel, abandoned the car on Eighth Avenue, and set out on foot. I stopped in the first tavern I came to, an Irish pub with a heavily lacquered bar and sawdust on the floor. Among the patrons, nothing seemed out of the ordinary; such is the insularity of New Yorkers that what was happening in the middle of the country had yet to coalesce into a feeling of general crisis. Seated alone at the bar, I ordered a Scotch, not intending to drink it, but discovered that I wanted to and, more interestingly, that it caused no ill effects. It was delicious, its most subtle flavors dancing upon my palate. I was on my third when I realized two other things: I was not the least drunk, and I badly needed to piss. In the men’s room my body released a stream so powerfully percussive it made the porcelain chime. This, too, was immensely satisfying; it seemed there was no bodily pleasure that had not been amplified a hundred-fold.

  But the real object of my attention was the television above the bar. A Yankees game was on. I waited until the last pitch was thrown and asked the bartender if he would switch to CNN.

  I did not have to wait long: “Colorado Killing Spree,” read the chyron at the bottom of the screen. The madness was spreading. Reports were coming in from locales throughout the state: whole families obliterated in their beds, towns without a man or woman left alive, a roadside restaurant of patrons gutted like trout. But there were also survivors—bitten, but alive. It just looked at me. It wasn’t human. It gave off this kind of glow. The ravings of the traumatized or something more? No one had done the math yet, but I did. Per my instructions, for every nine killed, one had been called into the fold. The hospitals were filling with the sick and injured. Nausea, fever, spasms, then …

  “That’s some creepy shit.”

  I turned to the man sitting next to me. When had the adjacent stool become occupied? A certain urban type, manufactured by the thousands: balding and lawyerish, with an intelligent, slightly pugnacious face, a speckling of day-old beard, and a little paunch he kept meaning to do something about. Wingtips and a blue suit and starched white shirt, necktie loose around his throat. Somebody was waiting for him at home, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to face them yet, not after the day he’d just had.<
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  “Don’t I know it.”

  On the bar before him sat a glass of wine. Our eyes met for what seemed an unusually long time. I noted the overwhelming odor of nervous perspiration he’d attempted to cloak with cologne. His eyes traveled the length of my torso, pausing at my mouth on the upswing. “Haven’t I seen you in here before?”

  Ah, I thought. I darted my eyes around the room. There were no women at all. “I don’t think so. I’m new.”

  “Are you meeting anyone?”

  “Not until now.”

  He smiled and put out his hand—the one without the wedding ring. “I’m Scott. Let me buy you a drink.”

  Thirty minutes later, wearing his suit, I left him in an alleyway, twitching and frothing.

  I thought of visiting my old apartment but discarded the idea; it was not, had never been, home. What is home to a monster? To anyone? There exists for each of us a geographical fulcrum, a place so saturated with memory that within its precinct the past is always present. It was late, after two A.M., when I entered the main hall at Grand Central Terminal. The restaurants and shops had long since closed, sealed behind their grates; the board above the ticket windows listed only morning trains. Just a few souls lingered: the ubiquitous transit police in their Kevlar vests and creaking leather accoutrement, a couple in evening wear racing for a train that had long since departed, an old black man pushing a dust mop, earphones stuffed in his head. At the center of the marbled hall stood the information booth with its legendary timepiece. Meet me at the kiosk, the one with the four-faced clock … It was New York’s most celebrated rendezvous point, perhaps the most famous in the world. How many fateful encounters had occurred in this place? How many assignations had commenced, what nights of love? How many generations walked the earth because a man and a woman had arranged to meet here, beneath this storied timepiece of gleaming brass and opalescent glass? I tilted my face toward the barrel-vaulted ceiling, 125 feet overhead. In my young adulthood, its beauty had been muted by layers of coal soot and nicotine, but that was the old New York; a thorough cleaning in the late nineties had restored its gold-leaf astrological images to their original luster. Taurus the bull; Gemini, the twins; Aquarius, bearing his water; a milky smear of galactic arm, as one sees only on the clearest of nights. A little-known fact, though not unacknowledged by my scientist’s eye, is that the ceiling of Grand Central is actually backward. It is a mirror image of the night sky; lore holds that the artist was working from a medieval manuscript that showed the heavens not from within but from without—not mankind’s view but God’s.

  I took a seat at the top of the west balcony steps. One of the transit cops gave me a quick eyeball, but as I was now dressed for the part of respectable white-collar professional and was neither asleep nor visibly drunk, he left me alone. I took logistical stock of my surroundings. Grand Central was more than a train station; it was a principal nexus of the city’s substrata, its vast underground world of tunnels and chambers. People by the hundreds of thousands flowed through this place each and every day, most never looking beyond the tips of their own shoes. It was perfect, in other words, for my purpose.

  I waited. The hours moved by, and then the days. No one seemed to notice me or, if they did, to care. Too much else was going on.

  And then after some unknown interval of time had passed, I heard a sound I had not heard before. It was the sound that silence makes when there is no one left to listen. Night had fallen. I rose from my place on the steps and walked outside. There were no lights burning anywhere; the blackness was so complete I might have been at sea, miles from any shore. I looked up and beheld the most curious of sights. Stars by the hundreds, the thousands, the millions, locked in their slow turning above the empty world, as they had done since time’s beginning. Their pins of light fell upon my face like pattering drops of rain, streaming out of the past. I did not know what I was feeling, only that I felt it; and I began, at last, to weep.

  15

  And thus to my woeful tale.

  Observe him, a capable young man of passable looks, slender and shaggy-haired, tan from a summer of honest outdoor work, good with math and things mechanical, not without ambition and bright hopes and possessing a solitary, inward-looking personality, alone in his bedroom beneath the eaves as he packs his suitcase of folded shirts and socks and underwear and not much else. The year is 1989; our setting is a provincial town named Mercy, Ohio—famous, briefly, for its precision brassworks, said to produce the finest shell casings in the history of modern warfare, though that, like much else of the town, is long faded. The room, which is to be unoccupied within the hour, is a shrine to the young man’s youth. Here is the display of trophies. Here are the soldier bedside lamp and matching martial-themed curtains; here the shelves of serial novels featuring intrepid trios of underappreciated teenagers whose youthful intellects enable them to solve crimes their elders cannot. Here, tacked to the neutral plaster walls, are the pennants of sports teams and the conundrumous M. C. Escher etching of hands drawing each other and, opposite the sagging single bed, the era-appropriate poster of the erect-nippled Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, beneath whose lubricious limbs and come-hither gaze and barely concealed pudenda the boy has furiously masturbated night after adolescent night.

  But the boy: he undertakes his packing with the puzzled solemnity of a mourner at a child’s funeral, which is the scene’s appropriate analogue. The problem is not that he cannot make his belongings fit—he can—but the opposite: the meagerness of the bag’s contents seems mismatched with the grandeur of his destination. Tacked above his cramped little-boy’s desk, a letter gives the clue. Dear Timothy Fanning, it reads on elaborately decorated letterhead with a crimson, shield-shaped emblem and the ominous word VERITAS bespeaking ancient wisdoms. Congratulations, and welcome to the Harvard class of 1993!

  It is early September. Outside, an earthbound, misting rain, tinged by summer’s green, hugs the little hamlet of houses and yards and storefront commercial concerns, one of which belongs to the boy’s father, the town’s lone optometrist. This places the boy’s family in the upper reaches of the town’s constricted economics; they are, by the standards of that time and place, well-off. His father is known and appreciated; he walks the streets of Mercy to a chorus of amiable hellos, because who is more admirable and worthy of gratitude than the man who has placed the spectacles upon your nose that enable you to see the things and people of your life? As a child, the boy loved to visit his father’s office and try on all the eyeglasses that decorated the racks and display cases, longing for the day when he would need a pair of his own, though he never did: his eyes were perfect.

  “Time to go, son.”

  His father has appeared in the door: a short, barrel-chested man whose gray flannel trousers, by gravitational necessity, are held aloft by clip-on suspenders. His thinning hair is wet from the shower, his cheeks freshly scraped by the old-fashioned safety razor he favors despite modern innovations in shaving technology. The air around him sings with the smell of Old Spice.

  “If you forget anything, we can always send it to you.”

  “Like what?”

  His father shrugs amiably; he is trying to be helpful. “I don’t know. Clothes? Shoes? Did you take your certificate? I’m sure you’ll want that.”

  He is speaking of the boy’s second-place award in the Western Reserve District 5 Science Day competition. “The Spark of Life: Gibbs-Donnan Equilibrium and Nernst Potential at the Critical Origin of Cell Viability.” The certificate, in a plain black frame, hangs on the wall above his desk. The truth is, it embarrasses him. Don’t all Harvard students win first prize? Nevertheless, he makes a show of gratitude for being reminded and places it atop the pile of clothing in the open suitcase. Once in Cambridge, it will never make it out of his bureau drawer; three years later, he will discover it beneath a pile of miscellaneous papers, regard it with a quick, bitter feeling, and pitch it into the trash.

  “That’s the spirit,” his fath
er says. “Show those Harvard smarties who they’re dealing with.”

  From the base of the stairs, his mother’s voice ascends in an insistent song: “Tim-o-thy! Are you ready yet?”

  She never calls him “Tim”; always it is “Timothy.” The name embarrasses him—it feels both courtly and diminutive at the same time, as if he were a little English lord on a velvet cushion—though he also secretly likes it. That his mother vastly prefers him to her husband is no secret; the reverse is also true. The boy loves her far more easily than he loves his father, whose emotional vocabulary is limited to manly pats on the back and the occasional boys-only camping trip. Like many only children, the boy is aware of his value in the household economy, and nowhere is this value more lofty than in his mother’s eyes. My Timothy, she likes to say, as if there are others not hers; he is her only one. You are my special Timothy.

  “Haaa-rold! What are you doing up there? He’s going to miss the bus!”

  “For Pete’s sake, just a minute!” He returns his eyes to the boy. “Honestly, I don’t know what she’s going to do without you to worry about. That woman’s going to drive me crazy.”

  A joke, the boy understands, but in his father’s voice he detects an undertone of seriousness. For the first time he considers the full emotional dimensions of the day. His life is changing, but his parents’ lives are changing, too. Like a habitat abruptly deprived of a major species, the household will be wrenched into realignment by his departure. Like all young people, he has no idea who his parents really are; for eighteen years he has experienced their existence only insofar as it has related to his own needs. Suddenly his mind is full of questions. What do they talk about when he’s not around? What secrets do they hold from each other, what aspirations have been left to languish? What private grievances, held in check by the shared project of child rearing, will now, in his absence, lurch into the light? They love him, but do they love each other? Not as parents or even husband and wife but simply as people—as surely they must have loved each other at one time? He hasn’t the foggiest; he can no more grasp these matters than he can imagine the world before he was alive.