Mirroring

THE FACE WOULD NOT DIVULGE a single thing. How long had he been staring at it? By the calendars of old, much time had passed. It varied little, every morning, every night, unblinking, meeting his glances unabashed and as opaque as a coat of paint. He was without a face, if this was not his face. The mirror has been mocking him all these years. An unreliable narrator, a merchant of doubt, he was never sure of its truth. It was a paradox, but his face wanted to hold the entire world while also sweeping itself away, and so we all wind up where we started sometimes.

Blankly staring.

He shook off these thoughts. The identity thing. Only one use, after all. There were more reliable ones for mirroring. Better to stick to the matter at hand. Peering into the glass, he frowned at himself and looked a little closer.

What’s that?

He was distracted by a man dancing on the street, which he could watch in the mirror’s reflection. He was looking through the window as the dancer shuffled—the window in the mirror. He watched the man capering, the poor dimwit, and then returned his glance to the lesion on his cheek.

It hadn’t always been there.

He opened the medicine cabinet and consulted the poster taped to the back of the mirrored door. Cutaneous papillomas were harmless—this was not that. Dermatofibroma? Not brown enough. He felt anxiety in the pit of his stomach and chest as he moved down the list to the cancerous lesions. The squamous cells. The Keratoacanthomas.

The identity problem was not real. This was a troubling thing he stuck pins in, but on better days, he just tacked up on the wall and stood back, to revisit at a later date, when it would perhaps make sense. There was no hurry. Like a machine with no housing, he could keep it chugging along without engaging in these terrible, nagging questions. Alternatively, the squamous cells.

This was real.

If he looked at it or the dancing man or anyone else who pass by, only through the mirror, he would be safe. He knew what he knew; there was no doubt. Any mirror was better than naked viewing, unprotected sight. Only the mirror could ward off the rays of blindness. No one had a less provisional scientific name for them or it. The last researcher had been executed many years before he was born, so no one alive had names for these new pathologies.

A slim possibility existed that this lesion was not malignant. With his phone, X2453-202Z took a picture of himself and sent it to his cousin, who had been cured of an advanced basal cell carcinoma. His cousin knew the right folk, in case this was something concerning. His cousin's contacts had done right by him. They would extend the favor to him or so he thought, but the cousin’s message came back: fuck off.

No telling why he’d take such a turn with family, but X2453-202Z was used to these casual betrayals. They were a dime a dozen these days. The county drinking water, they said. Tainted with chemicals that caused mood swings, palpitations and/or aggressive behavior, something like bad alcohol. Ironically, the worst of the effects was blindness.

He let it go for a while, some months, but losing his cousin was not something he could resign himself to, so one day, he wrapped up and grabbed his mirror. The mirrors were essential for seeing the world. Night vision travel was so dangerous now that almost everyone had nyctalopia, and the curfews were still in place in all but the best districts. Unprotected seeing caused the lesions. He knew this the day he went out without his mirror, but told himself that he would go like a diver, who takes deep breaths and plunges below the water, not coming up for many minutes at a time. Besides, it wasn’t far to go. He would only have to look a few times.

In Paraíso, where he lived, no one had SPF-300 face coverings. Though scarcer than joy, anything less than three hundred sun protection factor was useless. They say the model had been discontinued because of the threat of “terrorist activity”. Everyone knew this for a bald-faced lie. It was a way to decimate the life and economy of the district. The unofficial district conflict had raged on for years, ever since what had been hate speech became free, a way to preclude outright civil war.

It was a schizophrenic who discovered the trick of using a mirror. The man was paranoid. He thought he was watching the watchers. Some bright person observed he had no macular degeneration, even though he lived on the street, where he ran errands in his more lucid moments for his blind companions.

X2453-202Z walked through the ramshackle tunnel, knocked together with recycled wood, wire, and plastic. He banged on the galvanized sheet metal that served as a door. J5623-615R opened it. He squinted at his cousin with an air of contrition. They went into the main room, which might have once been a switch station before the tube was rerouted.

“I’m sorry I snapped at you, Bean.”

Not a first time, but surprising that his cousin would apologize.

“Feelin’ poorly?” It was strange what just a few months could do.

“Yeh, utter crap.”

“Thought so. Why I come, and why I ain’t pissed off.”

“Lemme see it.”

X2453-202Z lowered his tube scarf and turned his cheek to the light. J5623-615R looked at it through a makeshift loup. His face went soft.

“If you go to Central Med Processing they’ll register you. You don’t want that, believe me. It’s how I lost the house.”

“You think it’s something, then.”

“You want to err on the side of caution, mate.”

“So who do I go to?”

“Around here, it’s a guy who lost his license.” J5623-615R put out a hand to say, ‘Not what you think.’ “Drug runner, that’s all. He’s got kit. You can’t do no worse.”

X2453-202Z shrugged.

“Hook me up.”

J5623-615R made the call and grabbed his coat off the hook.

“Gotta come with.”

“Thanks, Jase.”

J5623-615R had his mirrors rigged up on a special eyeglass frame he’d built himself so that he had a full mirror sweep, no hands. Pride of the family, for sure.

“There’s something else.” X2453-202Z wanted to confess. “I don’t know what I look like. ”

“Why are you telling me this?

“Because it’s a troubling thing I stick pins in, but on better days, I just tack it up on the wall and stand back. Because I feel confused. I am that thing that is and is not what I say I am. The reason I dispense names like multi-colored candies, but then I realize they are really contronyms, so now I have dispensed with these, too.”

“Cover them. Cover the mirrors, Bean.”

“Yeah, I thought once to live without, and it felt good. You should have seen me. A filth-daubed master of one, with matted hair and claws like talons, lying in the grass with the dogs, smelling of horses, sleeping under the open sky. Letting myself sink into time and forgetting.”

"I see you, man. I know you—I'd know you anywhere. I'm just like you."

It started to rain, which meant the streets were packed with people trying to make the most of it. This was the updated meaning of rush hour: whenever the sky blanketed. It didn’t happen often enough. Mirrors now just for checking appearance. The luxury of questioning identity returned to each their insecurities.

The cousins made their way to a functioning tube and across town to the good side. By good, they understood a few things. Genzi boasted wealth anywhere one pointed one’s steps. The pedestrian thoroughfares were domed with the special glass, more lost technology. Mirrors were not needed here. The buildings were sleek and sharp, or imitations of a kind of nature that could only be commemorated in stone. The colors in this part of town were not completely lost to the sun, like everywhere else, but obscenely vivid. All of history surrounded them. Paraíso, by contrast, was a place of the stark present.

Genzi looked secure, clean and healthy, but it had sinister features one did well not to disregard. For one thing, Paraíso had no surveillance apparatus like this, blatantly recording everything, which compounded the anxiety X2453-202Z already felt, given his unfamiliarity with these interminably straight, broad streets. Who cared that there were bouquets of fresh flowers in the stone urns on every corner? Ugly Paraíso was twisty and dark, and to him, this represented real safety.

“Where are we, Jase? For fuck’s sake, I thought you said he was local.”

“He is, just wait. Almost there.”

They came to a massive complex, towering, scrupulously white, and trimmed in gleaming silver, like a reference to the tools of the surgeon’s trade. J5623-615R had been there before. This much was clear.

“He’ll meet us here, and take us first to where he can have a look at you and take blood. Then to a place where he can get you a PET.”

“A pet...”

“Positron emission tomography. Vintage tech. It measures metabolic activity which can suggest cancer. You said you’ve had it for a few months already and that it’s grown, so that’s why we’re up here. Otherwise, he would have seen us back home.”

“How does he have access to that?”

“I don’t know, but I told you. He’s good. Smart like you’ve never seen.”

J5623-615R looked off to his right at an approaching figure, and the doctor signalled for them to walk away.

“Come on, Bean.”

“He’s not coming?”

“No, he’s right behind us.”

They walked two blocks down in silence, turned left and found themselves in an alleyway. An emergency exit came into view. It was held open by a large mop bucket on wheels. They entered and walked down a drying corridor. The door shutting echoed behind them. The cousins waited for the doctor to catch up, and they all went through a door marked MAINTENANCE. He set his bag down, removed his coat, and took surgical gloves out of the pocket of his maintenance staff uniform. They were in a small, disused office.

“Hello, Dr. Perry. This is my cousin.”

The doctor smiled with his eyes and gave an imperceptible nod. He went to work without a word. Physical examination first, then blood, then shave biopsy.

“Results in two weeks, right Doc?” said J5623-615R.

“We usually wait for the results before doing a PET, but—I’m sorry—given the likelihood not only of cancer but metastasis, it’s better if we get it out of the way right now. Two weeks, yes.”

The scan took fifteen minutes and felt far longer. The banging sound was distressing, but X2453-202Z shut his eyes and thought of M4820-315T, a comforting presence in his mind, though it had been a year since their last encounter.

“We won’t meet here again,” said the doctor, once they were back in the street. “If I were caught, I’d be prosecuted for grand larceny, and a host of other things.”

“It’s a miracle you can procure this for us at all, Doc.”

“There is a network in place. We work for those in need. We’re a volunteer force, and we are legion. I am outside the system, but there are many of us still within it. This is how I can help Paraíso.”

“Volunteer or no,” said J5623-615R, taking a paper bag out of his backpack and giving it to the doctor. It said, “Merrill’s Fine Chocolate” in fancy printed script.

They were paying the doctor in fresh lithium batteries, a precious resource that he mined like gold in the vast wasteland to the east of Paraíso. His was a cottage industry of finding and reviving these and other kinds of batteries, one iteration after another until they were utterly spent.

“A donation,” he said, handing the bag over to the doctor.

Then they went their separate ways.

X2453-202Z went back to his hovel, and the sun undulated in its fashion, illuminating his skin, catching fire to his too warm thoughts.

Dr. Perry’s efforts had not gone unrewarded, but they were in vain. The cancer was metastatic and X2453-202Z did not have his cousin’s constitution. The doctor broke one of his cardinal rules and came to his funeral. He was seen leaving the cemetery with J5623-615R, who found the police waiting for him at his home. The doctor, ever prepared for contingencies, was not captured until a full month after he eluded the pursuers who had followed him that day.

J5623-615R was beaten and interrogated but nothing useful could be extracted from him. He was released, and his disappearance was prompt, the result of an exit plan or foul play, no one knew which, but he was never seen again in Paraíso. The doctor’s fate was far less equivocal. He was staring at the slanted sky, cheek flush to the grass. They had disarmed him, and he was immobilized by the dart—prey—like a rabbit about to be skinned. Music played in his head, and the moment she'd said yes with her eyes, loving him.

His last thoughts.