The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  “Do you play?” Nessa asks.

  They are the first words either of them has spoken since entering the house. Logan depresses a key, expelling a sour note. “Me? No.” The sound hovers in the air, then is gone. “I’m afraid I haven’t been completely honest with you,” he says, looking up. “You asked me if I came from a religious family. My mother was what used to be known as an ‘Amy dreamer.’ Are you familiar with the term?”

  Nessa frowns. “Isn’t that a myth?”

  “You mean, hasn’t modern science rebranded the phenomenon? In conventional terms, I suppose you could say she was crazy. Schizophrenic with a tendency toward grandiosity. That’s more or less what the doctors told us.”

  “But you don’t think so.”

  Logan shrugs. “It’s not really a yes-or-no question. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. At least she came by it honestly. Her maiden name was Jaxon.”

  Nessa is visibly taken aback. “You’re First Family?”

  Logan nods. “It’s not something I like to talk about. People make assumptions.”

  “I hardly think these days anyone would make much of it.”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised. Out here, folks put stock in a thing like that.”

  Nessa pauses, then asks, “What about your father?”

  “My father was a simple man. Straightforward would be the term. If he had a religion, it was horses. That, and my mother. He loved her a great deal, even when things got bad. When they married, according to him, she was just like anybody else. Perhaps a little more devout than most, but that wasn’t so unusual in these parts. It wasn’t until later that she started having spells. Visions, episodes, waking dreams, whatever you like to call them.”

  “Was the piano hers?”

  Nessa has correctly intuited this. “My mother was a country girl, but she came from a musical family. From an early age she was quite good. Some people said she was a prodigy, even. She could have gone on to a real career, but then she met my father, and that was that. They were very traditional in that way. She still played sometimes, though I think she had mixed feelings about it.”

  He pauses, takes a deep breath, and continues: “Then one night I woke up and heard her playing. I was very young, six, maybe seven. The music wasn’t like anything I’d heard before. Incredibly beautiful, hypnotic almost. I can’t even describe it. It swept me up completely. After a while, I went downstairs. My mother was still playing, though she wasn’t alone. My father was there, too. He was sitting in a chair with his face in his hands. My mother’s eyes were wide open, but she wasn’t looking at the keys or anything else. Her face had a kind of erased blankness to it. It was as if some outside force was borrowing her body for its own intentions. It’s hard to explain—maybe I’m not telling it right—but I knew instinctively that the person playing the piano wasn’t my mother. She’d become someone else. ‘Penny, stop,’ my father was saying—pleading, really. ‘It’s not real, it’s not real.’ ”

  “It must have been terrifying.”

  “It was. There he was, this proud man, strong as a bull, completely helpless, shaking with tears. It rocked me to the core. I wanted to get the hell out of there and pretend the whole thing had never happened, but then my mother stopped playing.” Logan snaps his fingers for emphasis. “Just like that, right in the middle of a phrase, as if somebody had thrown a switch. She stood up from the piano and marched right past me like I wasn’t even there. ‘What’s happening,’ I asked my father, ‘what’s wrong with her?’ But he didn’t answer me. We followed her outside. I didn’t know what time it was, though it was late, the middle of the night. She stopped at the edge of the porch, looking out over the fields. For a little while nothing happened—she just stood there, the same empty look on her face. Then she began to mutter something. At first I couldn’t tell what she was saying. One phrase, over and over. ‘Come to me,’ she was saying. ‘Come to me, come to me, come to me.’ I’ll never forget it.”

  Nessa is watching his face intently. “Who do you think she was talking to?”

  Logan shrugs. “Who knows? I don’t remember what happened after that. I suppose I went to bed. A few days later, the same thing happened. Over time it became a kind of nightly ritual. Oh, Mom’s playing the piano again at four A.M. During the day she seemed fine, but then that changed, too. She became harried, obsessive, or else wandered around the house in a kind of daze. That’s when the painting started.”

  “ ‘Painting’?” Nessa repeats. “You mean, pictures?”

  “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  He escorts her upstairs. Three tiny bedrooms, tucked under the eaves; in the ceiling of the hallway is a hatch with a cord. Logan pulls it down and unfolds the rickety wooden stairs that lead to the attic.

  They ascend into the cramped, low-ceilinged space. Standing a dozen deep, his mother’s paintings line nearly a whole wall. Logan kneels and draws the protective cloth aside.

  It is like opening a door onto a garden. The paintings, of various sizes, depict a landscape of wildflowers, the colors burning with an almost supernatural brightness. Some show a background of mountains; others, the sea.

  “Logan, these are beautiful.”

  They are. Bound up in pain, they are, nevertheless, creations of stunning beauty. He takes the first one and brings it to Nessa, who holds it in her hands.

  “It’s …” she begins, then stops. “I’m not even sure how to say it.”

  “Unearthly?”

  “I was going to say haunting.” She looks up. “And they’re all the same?”

  “Different viewpoints, and her style improved over time. But the subjects are identical. The fields, the flowers, the ocean in the background.”

  “There are hundreds.”

  “Three hundred and seventy-two.”

  “What do you think this place is? Was it someplace she’d been?”

  “If it is, I never saw it. Neither did my father. No, I think the image came from inside her head someplace. Like the music.”

  Nessa considers this. “A vision.”

  “Perhaps that’s the word.”

  She examines the painting again. A long silence passes.

  “What became of her, Logan?”

  He takes a long breath to steady himself. “It eventually got to be too much. The spells, the craziness. I was sixteen when my father had her committed. He visited every week, sometimes more, but he wouldn’t let me see her; I gather her state was rather bad. My junior year in college, she killed herself.”

  For a moment, Nessa says nothing. And, really, what is there to say? Logan has never known. One minute there, in another one gone. All of it far in the past, nearly forty years ago.

  “I’m sorry, Logan. That must have been very hard.”

  “She left a note,” he adds. “It wasn’t very long.”

  “What did it say?”

  The rope, the chair, the silent building after everyone had gone to bed: this is where his imagination ends. He has never permitted it to go further, to envision the mortal moment.

  “ ‘Let her rest.’ ”

  They return to the inn. There, for the first time, in Nessa’s room, they make love. The act is unhurried; they conduct it without words. Her body, firm and smooth, is extraordinary to him, as wondrous a present as he has ever received. In the aftermath, they sleep.

  Night is falling when Logan awakens to the sound of running water. The shower shuts off with a groan and Nessa emerges from the bathroom in a soft robe, a towel wrapping her hair. She sits on the edge of the bed.

  “Hungry?” she asks, smiling.

  “There aren’t a lot of choices. I thought we’d go to the restaurant downstairs.”

  She kisses him on the mouth. The kiss is brisk, but she allows her face to linger close to his. “Go dress.”

  She returns to the bathroom to finish her preparations. How swiftly life can change, Logan thinks. There was no one, now there is someone; he is not alone. Telling the story of his mother was, he rea
lizes, his intention from the start; he has no other way of explaining who he is. That is what two people must give to each other, he thinks: the history of themselves. How else can we hope to be known?

  He puts on his trousers and shirt to go next door to change for dinner, but as he enters the hallway he hears his name being called.

  “Dr. Miles, Dr. Miles!”

  The voice belongs to the hotel proprietor, a small, deeply tanned man with jet dark hair and a nervously formal manner, who bounds up the stairs. “There is a phone call for you,” he says with excitement. He pauses to catch his breath, waving air into his face. “Someone has been trying to reach you all day.”

  “Really? Who?” As far as Logan is aware, nobody knows he’s here.

  The proprietor glances at the door to Nessa’s room, then back again. “Yes, well,” he says, and clears his throat self-consciously, “they are on the phone now. They say it is quite urgent. Please, I will show you the way.”

  Logan follows him downstairs, through the lobby, to a small room behind the check-in desk, where a large black telephone rests on an otherwise empty table.

  “I will leave you to it,” the proprietor says with a curt bow.

  Alone, Logan picks up the receiver. “This is Professor Miles.”

  A woman’s voice, unknown to him, says, “Dr. Miles, please hold while I patch you through to Dr. Wilcox.”

  Melville Wilcox is the on-site supervisor at First Colony. Such calls happen only rarely, and always with considerable advance planning; only by positioning a chain of airships across the Pacific, a tenuous and expensive arrangement, can a signal be relayed. Whatever Wilcox wants, it’s bound to be important. For a full minute, the line crackles with empty static; Logan has begun to think the call’s been lost when Wilcox comes on the line.

  “Logan, can you hear me all right?”

  “Yes, I can hear you fine.”

  “Good, I’ve been trying to set this up for days. Are you sitting down? Because you might want to.”

  “Mel, what’s happening there?”

  His voice grows excited. “Six days ago, an unmanned reconnaissance airship surveying the coast of the Pacific Northwest took a photo. A very interesting photo. Do you have access to an imager?”

  Logan scans the room. To his surprise, there is one.

  “Give me the number,” Wilcox says. “I’ll have Lucinda send it over.”

  Logan fetches the proprietor, who enthusiastically provides the information and offers to man the machine.

  “Okay, they’re sending it,” Wilcox says.

  The imager emits a shriek. “The connection has been made, I believe,” the proprietor declares.

  “Why don’t you just tell me what it is?” Logan asks Wilcox.

  “Oh, believe me, it’s better if you see this for yourself.”

  A series of mechanical clunks and the machine draws a piece of paper from the tray. As the print head move noisily back and forth, Logan becomes aware of a second sound, coming from outside—a kind of rhythmic beating. He has only just realized what he is hearing when Nessa enters the room, dressed for dinner. She looks animated, even a little alarmed.

  “Logan, there’s a lifter out there. It’s looks like it’s about to land on the front lawn.”

  “And here we are,” the proprietor announces.

  With a triumphant smile, he places the transmitted picture onto the desk. It is the image of a house, seen from above. Not a ruin—an actual house. It is encircled by a fence; within this perimeter are a second, smaller structure, a privy perhaps, and the neatly planted rows of a vegetable garden.

  “Well?” Wilcox says. “Did you get it?”

  There is more. In the field adjacent to the house, rocks have been arranged on the ground to make letters, large enough to be read from the air.

  “What is it, Logan?” Nessa asks.

  Logan looks up; Nessa is staring at him. The world, he knows, is about to change. Not just for him. For everyone. Outside the walls of the inn, the racket reaches a crescendo as lifter the touches down.

  “It’s a message,” he says, showing Nessa the paper.

  Three words: COME TO ME.

  92

  Six days have passed. Logan and Nessa, in the observation lounge, sit in silence.

  On an airship, time moves differently. The excitement of travel quickly wanes, replaced by a kind of mental and physical hibernation; the days seem shapeless, the ship itself barely to move at all. Logan and Nessa, the only passengers, the objects of obscene fussing by a staff that far outnumbers them, have passed the time sleeping, reading, playing cards. In the evening, after eating by themselves in the too-large dining room, they have their pick of movies from the ship’s collection and watch alone or with members of the crew.

  But now, with their destination in view, time snaps back into line. The ship is headed north, tracing the northern California coastline at an altitude of two thousand feet. Towering cliffs wreathed by morning fog, mighty forests of ancient trees, the indomitable greatness of the sea where it collides with the land: Logan’s heart stirs, as it always does, at the sight of this wild, untouched place.

  “Is it what you thought it would be?” he asks Nessa.

  Looking raptly out the window, she has barely spoken a word since breakfast.

  “I’m not sure what I thought.” She turns her face toward him, lips pressed together and eyes slightly squinted, like someone puzzling out a problem. “It’s beautiful, but there’s something else to it. A different feeling.”

  Not much later, the platform appears. Standing a hundred meters above the ocean’s surface, it has the appearance of a rigid structure, though it is, in fact, floating at anchor. The airship moves gracefully into place and attaches at the nose to the docking tower; ropes and chains are lowered; the vessel is drawn slowly downward to the deck. As Logan and Nessa disembark, Wilcox strides toward them with a rolling gait: a heavyset man with an untidy beard peppered with gray, his face and arms bronzed by sun and wind.

  “Welcome back,” Wilcox says as they shake. “And you,” he says, turning, “must be Nessa.”

  Wilcox is aware of Nessa’s role, although he is, Logan knows, not entirely comfortable with it, believing it is too soon to involve the press. But that is part of Logan’s design. Security is never as tight as it should be; word will get out, and once it does, they will lose control of the narrative. He’d rather get ahead of the situation by giving the story to one person, someone they can trust.

  “Do you need to eat, clean up?” Wilcox asks. “The bird’s fueled and ready whenever you want.”

  “How long will it take to get to the site?” Logan asks.

  “Ninety minutes, about.”

  Logan looks at Nessa, who nods. “I see no reason to delay,” he says.

  The lifter waits on a second, slightly elevated platform, its props pointed upward. As they walk to it, Wilcox brings Logan up to speed. Per Logan’s instructions, no one has approached the house, although the building’s inhabitant, a woman, has been sighted several times, working in the yard. Wilcox’s team has moved equipment to the camp in order to bag the house, if that’s what Logan wants to do.

  “Does she know she’s being watched?” Logan asks.

  “She’d have to, with all those lifters going in and out, but she doesn’t act like it.” They take their seats in the bird. From the portfolio under his arm, Wilcox removes a photo and hands it to Logan. The image, taken from a great distance, is grainy and flattened; it shows a woman with a nimbus of white hair, hunched before a vegetable patch. She is wearing what appears to be a kind of thickly woven sack, almost shapeless; her face, angled downward, is obscured.

  “So who is she?” Wilcox says.

  Logan just looks at him.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Wilcox says, holding up a hand in forbearance, “and pardon me, but no fucking way.”

  “She’s the sole human inhabitant of a continent that’s been depopulated for nine hundred y
ears. Give me another theory and I’ll listen.”

  “Maybe people came back without our knowing it.”

  “Possible. But why just her? Why haven’t we found anybody else in thirty-six months?”

  “Maybe they don’t want to be found.”

  “She has no problem with it. ‘Come to me’ sounds like an engraved invitation.”

  The conversation is drowned out by the roar of the lifter’s engines; a lurch and they are airborne again, rising vertically. When a sufficient altitude is achieved, the nose tips upward as the rotors move to a horizontal position. The lifter accelerates, coming in low over the water and then the coast. The ocean vanishes. All below them is trees, a carpet of green. The noise is tremendous, each of them encased in a bubble of their own thoughts; there will be no more talking until they land.

  Logan is drifting at the edge of sleep when he feels the lifter slowing. He sits up and looks out the window.

  Color.

  That is the first thing he sees. Reds, blues, oranges, greens, violets: extending from the forested base of the mountains to the sea, flowers paint the earth in an array of hues so richly prismatic it is as if light itself has shattered. The rotors tilt; the aircraft begins to descend. Logan breaks his gaze from the window to find Nessa staring at him. Her eyes are full of a mute wonder that is, he knows, a mirror to his own.

  “My God,” she mouths.

  The camp is situated in a narrow depression separated from the wildflower field by a stand of trees. In the main tent, Wilcox presents his team, about a dozen researchers, some of whom Logan is acquainted with from previous trips. In turn, he introduces Nessa to the group, explaining only that she has come as “a special adviser.” The house’s resident, he is told, has been working in the garden since morning.

  Logan issues instructions. Everybody is to wait here, he says; under no circumstances should anyone approach the house until he and Nessa report back. In Wilcox’s tent, they strip to their underclothes and don their yellow biosuits. The afternoon is bright and hot; the suits will be sweltering. Wilcox tapes the joints of their gloves and checks their air supplies.