Bryan resembled an old-fashioned telephone switching board. Tubes and wires protruded all over his body, connecting him to the machines that had long been more responsible for keeping his body alive than anything inside him.
Caroline, his wife, sat beside him with her hands in her lap. During his first months in the hospital, she touched him as often and as much as she could. She even persuaded the nurse to let her give him his sponge baths. Rubbing his antiseptic sagging skin was the nearest she could come to intimacy with him without endangering what remained of his life. He told her it felt good for a while, but his frustration at not being able to respond to her and the steady deadening of his senses twisted even that pleasure out of his control.
Most recently, the parts of his brain that allowed him to formulate speech started behaving erratically. In the middle of telling Caroline or one of the nurses a joke, he would either forget his thoughts and be unable to finish it, or he would spasm and spout nonsense. When he recovered, he said he preferred the spasms, because those sometimes still elicited a laugh. That he had made his living as a stand-up comedian and often brought his wife along to the more romantic locations was a cruelty everyone knew but never mentioned.
He still had some good moments, bursts of something short of convalescence but better than simple suffering. Those were the times he followed one of Caroline’s conversational monologues, or smiled voluntarily, or loved the sunset. He had requested a room with a west-facing window. He was too lethargic now for anyone other than himself to notice a difference, but he felt better. Before he died, though, he believed he would still make someone happy.
<><><>
On the day Bryan died, Caroline came into his room wearing a yellow dress. It was a couple of shades darker than her hair, and the two combined equaled the color of the sun in his eyes. He preferred her natural color, but he did not tell her because he knew how much she liked being a blonde. Her green eyes, magnified and sparkling from tears that appeared after she dried her face in the hall, shone as brightly as they did every day. She kissed him quickly and sat down, her head in line with his rib cage. She was too far away to hear him.
Instead of looking at his face, which puckered in a tiny crater wherever she happened to kiss it that day, Caroline had lately taken to staring at his hands. Because he had never used them much when he was healthy, their deterioration was less noticeable. She had difficulty focusing her eyes when she looked at him.
She was alert enough, however, to see his index finger move. He raised it less than an inch, and it was only because they had been married for fifteen years that she knew it meant he wanted her to raise her head.
"Closer," he mouthed.
She leaned in, her arms on the side of the bed, but she was still too far away. Whatever he added
in volume he would lose in endurance, and he knew it would take everything he had to say what he needed to tell her.
"Closer," he repeated.
Caroline perched on the edge of the bed and leaned over his chest. She could hear him wheeze out every breath, and to get away from the sound she moved closer to him, so that her chin almost touched his.
She smiled, which surprised both of them. "Close enough?" she asked.
Bryan held his blink for a second longer than normal, and then he spoke. All he could manage was a whisper that came from the front of his throat and did not even sound like his voice, but it was enough.
"I was doing some shows at a resort in the Caribbean. One night after my set, I couldn’t sleep, so I walked on the beach. I saw a woman in the water, splashing and playing like a little girl. Her bathing suit was black. It looked like her arms and legs were spinning and flying on their own, like they weren’t connected. Her hair was blonde, so bright it looked like the sun rising. I stopped and watched, but I didn’t want to disturb her. She was so beautiful, so pure and innocent in the water."
Caroline knew this story. It was how they first met. He got some of the details wrong–she wore a bikini and her hair was red then–but she was thrilled to hear how much he still remembered.
"The next morning, I saw her in the exercise room. I was too distracted to work out, and I almost followed her into the ladies’ shower room. Right before I went on that night, I found an envelope in my dressing room. A picture of her was inside, and she’d written her room number on the back. That night was the worst set I ever did. I couldn’t remember any of my material."
Caroline could not hold back any longer. Trying to be as gentle as she could, she said, "No, that’s not how it happened, honey. I was laying out by the pool, remember? You could see me there from your room. You called room service and had them bring a drink out to me. You made them write your name and room number on the little umbrella. I’d watched all your sets and I thought you were funny, so I went up. You almost passed out when I showed up at your door in my bikini. Don’t you remember that?"
Bryan blinked. "Of course, Care. But this story is about Jackie. She came first. I went to her room after my set, but she wasn’t there, so I changed and went to the beach. She wasn’t there either. I tried to play in the water like her, but I couldn’t. I felt silly. Just when I was getting out of the water, I saw her coming. She was wearing a beautiful white dress, but she took it off and left it on the sand. She introduced herself in her underwear. We went back out, and she showed me how to play in the water."
"Bryan, why are you telling me about this now? You’ve never said anything about it, about her, before. Why wait until now?"
"Care, I want you to understand. That’s all I want now. She was like a sunrise to me. But my sunset was better."
She dug her chin into his collarbone and pressed his sides with her hands; she could not then have said whether it was from anger or affection. Had he been able to feel pain, to scream, or to cry, he would have. But as Caroline knew from the silence in his chest, he was already beyond agony’s reach.
<><><>
All the legal issues and funeral arrangements had to be taken care of, she knew, but they could wait. She rushed out of the room and past the nurses station without saying anything or even looking at them. She barely breathed as she drove home, and she had not even thought about crying.
It was upstairs in their bedroom, tucked unceremoniously away in one of the bottom dresser drawers; she had forgotten which one and so had to search through three full drawers, throwing aside articles of clothing like a burrowing animal, before she found it.
It was wrinkled and dusty, but in good condition overall, considering how long it had been since she last wore it. Her life had been so consumed with taking care of him for so long. She could not even remember the last time she thought about swimming.
She needed to know if it still fit. Caroline had become conditioned to take care of herself and change her clothes in between Bryan’s medications and emergencies, and she undressed and put on the black bathing suit–one-piece, with a low-cut back–in only a few seconds.
She was already crying softly before she looked at herself in the mirror. She collapsed on the floor when she saw her reflection, sobbing and grateful to Bryan for his final gift to her.
Sunday, January 6, 2008
I watched Terrence Malick's "The New World" last night. This was my second viewing. The first time, I thought it was supposed to be some kind of historical epic action story, and while there were some cool moments, I mostly thought it was slow and kind of boring. But after reading the chapter on it in Jeffrey Overstreet's "Through a Screen Darkly," I decided I must have missed something the first time and needed to give it another chance. This time I watched it as a love story. (Keep that contrast in mind. It's important.)
The movie basically tells the story of the English colonists' first arrival in the new world, and especially of Pocahontas's relationship with the men she meets. I don't know how accurate the movie is historically, and I honestly don't care. So now that that's out of the way...
The first man Pocahontas meets is John Smith (played by Colin Farrell). He has been locked up in the ship's brig for insubordination, but instead of executing him once they reach land, the captain spares his life. He is freed to wander through the pure wilderness and experience all the wild joy he finds there. Chief among the delights he discovers is Pocahontas (the amazing, gorgeous Q'orianka Kilcher, in her first acting role).
Their first meetings are natural and electric. Though they can't talk to one another yet, they communicate on much deeper levels, seemingly without having to try.
To recap: Smith is the uncontrollable good-looking bad boy, whose shirt is never more than halfway buttoned and who is more at home in nature than in society. He is what John Eldredge thinks every man should be, and Pocahontas falls in love with him instantly. She thinks they will be together forever.
But Smith is an explorer. Seeking out and discovering new things is what drives him. And though he is extremely happy with Pocahontas and does love her, when he is offered a chance to leave her and search for a new path to the Indies, he takes it. The call of an adventure is too strong on him: He has to go.
He is not the man Pocahontas thought he was. She is devastated. She has been told the man she loves, the man she left her family to be with, has died at sea. She wanders through the village like a dazed ghost.
Enter John Rolfe (Christian Bale). He too knows the pain of broken relationships: His wife and child have died. He is a quiet, contemplative, kind man. He does not stand out, doesn't do anything wild and dangerous, and his shirt is always buttoned to the top. He is called a tree: steady, dependable, and providing shelter and shade.
He sees something beautiful in Pocahontas, something worth resurrecting and saving, but she is not interested. She does not want to be hurt again, and anyway, Rolfe's demeanor does not enthrall her the way Smith did. But he persists, gently following her and loving her, even though the love is not intially requited.
Eventually they marry, but Rolfe knows there are parts of her heart his wife will never share with him; they are still with Smith, whom Pocahontas has learned is still alive.
John Smith is nothing like me. I'm not bold or exciting or wild, I don't make first impressions, and I keep myself buttoned up. I have much more in common with John Rolfe, Pocahontas's quietly curious, tentative second lover, and the one who waits months and years for her to decide if she really loves him.
Pocahontas and John Smith meet again near the end of the movie. The temptation (and opportunity) is there for her to go off with the daring explorer, her first love, and leave the shelter and nurture of the tree.
But she doesn't.
She returns to Rolfe and tells him, "You are the man I thought you were, and more."
In Malick's movie, the staid tree gets the beautiful princess. And I get to believe.
The movie basically tells the story of the English colonists' first arrival in the new world, and especially of Pocahontas's relationship with the men she meets. I don't know how accurate the movie is historically, and I honestly don't care. So now that that's out of the way...
The first man Pocahontas meets is John Smith (played by Colin Farrell). He has been locked up in the ship's brig for insubordination, but instead of executing him once they reach land, the captain spares his life. He is freed to wander through the pure wilderness and experience all the wild joy he finds there. Chief among the delights he discovers is Pocahontas (the amazing, gorgeous Q'orianka Kilcher, in her first acting role).
Their first meetings are natural and electric. Though they can't talk to one another yet, they communicate on much deeper levels, seemingly without having to try.
To recap: Smith is the uncontrollable good-looking bad boy, whose shirt is never more than halfway buttoned and who is more at home in nature than in society. He is what John Eldredge thinks every man should be, and Pocahontas falls in love with him instantly. She thinks they will be together forever.
But Smith is an explorer. Seeking out and discovering new things is what drives him. And though he is extremely happy with Pocahontas and does love her, when he is offered a chance to leave her and search for a new path to the Indies, he takes it. The call of an adventure is too strong on him: He has to go.
He is not the man Pocahontas thought he was. She is devastated. She has been told the man she loves, the man she left her family to be with, has died at sea. She wanders through the village like a dazed ghost.
Enter John Rolfe (Christian Bale). He too knows the pain of broken relationships: His wife and child have died. He is a quiet, contemplative, kind man. He does not stand out, doesn't do anything wild and dangerous, and his shirt is always buttoned to the top. He is called a tree: steady, dependable, and providing shelter and shade.
He sees something beautiful in Pocahontas, something worth resurrecting and saving, but she is not interested. She does not want to be hurt again, and anyway, Rolfe's demeanor does not enthrall her the way Smith did. But he persists, gently following her and loving her, even though the love is not intially requited.
Eventually they marry, but Rolfe knows there are parts of her heart his wife will never share with him; they are still with Smith, whom Pocahontas has learned is still alive.
John Smith is nothing like me. I'm not bold or exciting or wild, I don't make first impressions, and I keep myself buttoned up. I have much more in common with John Rolfe, Pocahontas's quietly curious, tentative second lover, and the one who waits months and years for her to decide if she really loves him.
Pocahontas and John Smith meet again near the end of the movie. The temptation (and opportunity) is there for her to go off with the daring explorer, her first love, and leave the shelter and nurture of the tree.
But she doesn't.
She returns to Rolfe and tells him, "You are the man I thought you were, and more."
In Malick's movie, the staid tree gets the beautiful princess. And I get to believe.
I cannot remember a time when I didn't know that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker's father. There must have been some point when I learned that fictional fact, but one of my earliest memories is of watching Star Wars on television (we were taping it, and I pressed the pause button at the wrong time, thus deleting about half of a climactic lightsaber battle); I simply can't remember when the plot of George Lucas's epic was not part of my life.
I was reminded of this today, because in the book I'm currently reading (Through a Screen Darkly), the author, Jeffrey Overstreet, mentions how awestruck he was when he first heard James Earl Jones's voice say, "Luke, I am your father." It was a kind of defining moment for Overstreet, in which he learned that heroes and villains are not always exactly as they first appear, and that even the most terrifying villain can have a final moment of redemption.
Sometimes, I'm sad I've missed out on revelatory experiences like those. I knew what was really going on with Norman Bates long before I actually watched Psycho, it feels like I've always known that the Wizard of Oz is really just a little man in a green suit, that Dorothy and Toto will make it back to Kansas safe and sound, and that Bambi's mother doesn't escape the hunter.
Much more significantly, knowing that Jesus died to save me from my sins feels like something that's been in my head from the time I was conceived.
I'm fascinated by missionary documentaries where the natives are so outraged and shocked that Jesus gets crucified, and then so jubilant when they hear about the resurrection. I really can't imagine what it would feel like to hear that story for the first time.
I think that's part of what drives me to seek out obscure and (especially) foreign movies. I want to see directors I've never seen before fleshing out scripts by writers I've never heard of, so that actors I don't recognize can tell a story I haven't already heard. I want to be surprised and amazed, to have to consider something from a new perspective, to wrestle with ideas I haven't comprehended, to root for a character without knowing her fate beforehand. New and unknown stories let me enter into them and experience them in a way that familiar stories just can't.
So that's why (at least in part) I watch movies about an abused French donkey (Au Hasard Belthazar), an oriental boy with a camera (Yi Yi), two German angels in trenchcoats (Wings of Desire), and a man who guides a scientist and a writer into the Zone (Stalker).
I was reminded of this today, because in the book I'm currently reading (Through a Screen Darkly), the author, Jeffrey Overstreet, mentions how awestruck he was when he first heard James Earl Jones's voice say, "Luke, I am your father." It was a kind of defining moment for Overstreet, in which he learned that heroes and villains are not always exactly as they first appear, and that even the most terrifying villain can have a final moment of redemption.
Sometimes, I'm sad I've missed out on revelatory experiences like those. I knew what was really going on with Norman Bates long before I actually watched Psycho, it feels like I've always known that the Wizard of Oz is really just a little man in a green suit, that Dorothy and Toto will make it back to Kansas safe and sound, and that Bambi's mother doesn't escape the hunter.
Much more significantly, knowing that Jesus died to save me from my sins feels like something that's been in my head from the time I was conceived.
I'm fascinated by missionary documentaries where the natives are so outraged and shocked that Jesus gets crucified, and then so jubilant when they hear about the resurrection. I really can't imagine what it would feel like to hear that story for the first time.
I think that's part of what drives me to seek out obscure and (especially) foreign movies. I want to see directors I've never seen before fleshing out scripts by writers I've never heard of, so that actors I don't recognize can tell a story I haven't already heard. I want to be surprised and amazed, to have to consider something from a new perspective, to wrestle with ideas I haven't comprehended, to root for a character without knowing her fate beforehand. New and unknown stories let me enter into them and experience them in a way that familiar stories just can't.
So that's why (at least in part) I watch movies about an abused French donkey (Au Hasard Belthazar), an oriental boy with a camera (Yi Yi), two German angels in trenchcoats (Wings of Desire), and a man who guides a scientist and a writer into the Zone (Stalker).
But It Did Happen
I've been thinking quite a bit about stories--not any story in particular, but more about them as a concept and what they mean and how they work. (This is something writers do.) One aspect that has occupied more of my attention recently is what makes a story worthwhile. When I was younger, I thought that a story was valuable only insofar as it reflected some higher (e.g. Christian) reality or principle. Basically, I looked at everything as an allegory and evaluated its merit based on how it functioned on that level, or I distilled it into a set of consistent, easy-to-understand divine rules.
For example, the band Five Iron Frenzy has a song titled "The Day We Killed", which is about the Indian massacre at the battle of Wounded Knee. I now think it is one of the band's strongest songs, but when I first listened to it, I thought it was missing something. I kept struggling to find the song's allegorical significance--did Crazy Horse represent God? Was it really a metaphor for human disobedience and destruction?--because I didn't think the tragedy of one group of people slaughtered by another could really be that important.
This mindset affected the way I read the Bible, too. While that might not initially seem like a bad approach (the Bible does have lots of parables and allegories, after all), it led me to discount the individual human struggle that drives so many of the Bible's stories; sure it must have been rough for Job while everything he knew and loved was destroyed, but it turns out okay for him in the end, so all his pain and suffering isn't that big a deal, right?
When I encountered someone who was struggling or suffering, I wasn't quite sure what to do with them, because I assumed that everything would work out in the end, and the waiting between now and whenever the solution or repayment came was really pretty insignificant.
What I had not learned then, though, is that most (or all, depending on how you look at it) of life is lived in the waiting time, and that by minimizing the importance the waiting (so I could skip ahead to what I thought of as the good parts), I was ignoring what really makes life what it is.
So now then: How does all of that tie in with the nature of stories?
All the things of life--pain, sadness, isolation, heartbreak, and tragedy, as well as joy, love, and fulfillment--are completely significant, not because you can glean a lesson or principle from them, but simply because they do (or could) happen. Stories give us the opportunity to celebrate and grieve over how vitally important everything is.
And every story works differently: The movement, rules, and internal logic of one story might be irrelevant, or even contradict, how another story unfolds. This does not, however, mean that one is necessarily better or more important than any other, or that the specific truth of one need harmonize with another; stories remind us that the world is somehow big enough to accomodate all of them, all at once.
For example, the band Five Iron Frenzy has a song titled "The Day We Killed", which is about the Indian massacre at the battle of Wounded Knee. I now think it is one of the band's strongest songs, but when I first listened to it, I thought it was missing something. I kept struggling to find the song's allegorical significance--did Crazy Horse represent God? Was it really a metaphor for human disobedience and destruction?--because I didn't think the tragedy of one group of people slaughtered by another could really be that important.
This mindset affected the way I read the Bible, too. While that might not initially seem like a bad approach (the Bible does have lots of parables and allegories, after all), it led me to discount the individual human struggle that drives so many of the Bible's stories; sure it must have been rough for Job while everything he knew and loved was destroyed, but it turns out okay for him in the end, so all his pain and suffering isn't that big a deal, right?
When I encountered someone who was struggling or suffering, I wasn't quite sure what to do with them, because I assumed that everything would work out in the end, and the waiting between now and whenever the solution or repayment came was really pretty insignificant.
What I had not learned then, though, is that most (or all, depending on how you look at it) of life is lived in the waiting time, and that by minimizing the importance the waiting (so I could skip ahead to what I thought of as the good parts), I was ignoring what really makes life what it is.
So now then: How does all of that tie in with the nature of stories?
All the things of life--pain, sadness, isolation, heartbreak, and tragedy, as well as joy, love, and fulfillment--are completely significant, not because you can glean a lesson or principle from them, but simply because they do (or could) happen. Stories give us the opportunity to celebrate and grieve over how vitally important everything is.
And every story works differently: The movement, rules, and internal logic of one story might be irrelevant, or even contradict, how another story unfolds. This does not, however, mean that one is necessarily better or more important than any other, or that the specific truth of one need harmonize with another; stories remind us that the world is somehow big enough to accomodate all of them, all at once.
Quietus
A short song
out of tune but sincere
sung in parts that won’t harmonize.
Flowers arranged in neat rows
all of them primary colors:
blue, yellow, red.
Black dresses and suits
for contrast
hands folded, resting in laps.
Bowed heads rise
file slowly past
and then leave for home.
The silence
is just what I was expecting.
out of tune but sincere
sung in parts that won’t harmonize.
Flowers arranged in neat rows
all of them primary colors:
blue, yellow, red.
Black dresses and suits
for contrast
hands folded, resting in laps.
Bowed heads rise
file slowly past
and then leave for home.
The silence
is just what I was expecting.
God's Good Going Away
I have grown up believing that being close to God, knowing him directly and immediately, was one of the highest, most honorable, and most mature goals I could have. It’s hard for me to remember a time when this idea was not part of my spiritual thinking.
It threw me for a loop, then, when I read Jesus saying things like this: “But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7)
If I’m supposed to grow close to God, then how can his going away possibly be a good thing? Even when there’s no physical contact involved, you still feel closer to someone when you can see them and hear their voice. The second half of the verse tries to offer an explanation, but the logic behind how the visible incarnation of the Son of God being replaced by the Counselor (i.e. the Holy Spirit)–an invisible, inaudible, misty Thing that most people don’t like to even talk about, let alone try to explain–could be a good thing was a proposition that seemed fuzzy to me, at best.
The conclusion seems inescapable: No matter the fringe benefits it brings, Jesus going “there” means that he is not “here” anymore, and how could that possibly be a good thing? It takes a body to hug you, to calm your nerves with its touch, to soothe your fears and lull you to sleep with the sound of its voice, to wipe away your tears and to take on the lurking bullies; can a ghost, even the Holy one, do any of that?
A few chapters earlier–but still part of the same Upper Room speech to the Disciples–John records a statement that feels even more audacious:
“I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12)
If we have faith in him, not only will we do what he was doing, but we will do even greater things. If anyone other than Jesus himself had said that, I would laugh it off and dismiss it without another thought. It sounds too ridiculous to even consider. But Jesus did say it, and so I find myself forced to wrestle with it.
The explanation for why we will do even greater things, “because I am going to the Father,” seems to link this verse with John 16:7; somehow, God exiting the scene is an immeasurably good development. But how can it be?
According to John, the answer has something to do with the Spirit coming. But like I wrote earlier, I have trouble understanding what’s supposed to happen when the Spirit comes, so I needed to find another way to look at it.
In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul writes that being in Christ doesn’t just upgrade us from what we used to be, but actually makes us into a whole new creation. A few verses later, he explains what our job is because of our new creation-ness:
“We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5:20)
An ambassador acts as a stand-in, living in a foreign country and serving as the visible representative of the real ruler. Albeit in a delegated capacity, he has the same power and responsibilities as the ruler; to put it another way, he speaks with the king’s voice. And that is the position God has entrusted to us: To be his face and voice, as though we were making his appeal through us. All because Jesus left and sent the Counselor (the only reason we can function in our new position at all) to us.
The pieces start to fall into place. Jesus leaving and the Spirit coming is good because instead of the presence of God being localized in a single person (or a single place, in the Old Testament), God’s presence is dispersed into billions of breathing, walking, talking people. I get to see God because of them. Even more daunting, they’re supposed to see God because of me.
There are any number of ways to apply this idea, but the first that comes to mind for me has to do with how I talk to people. Why would I want to hide anything from you, when your response could be the words of God to me? And when I ignore you or blow you off, what does that communicate about God to you?
I’m still trying to imagine how prayer might fit into this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------While I don't want to say unequivocally that God doesn't communicate with people directly anymore, it's never happened to me. My attempts to rationalize that formed the beginnings of this note.
It threw me for a loop, then, when I read Jesus saying things like this: “But I tell you the truth: It is for your good that I am going away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you.” (John 16:7)
If I’m supposed to grow close to God, then how can his going away possibly be a good thing? Even when there’s no physical contact involved, you still feel closer to someone when you can see them and hear their voice. The second half of the verse tries to offer an explanation, but the logic behind how the visible incarnation of the Son of God being replaced by the Counselor (i.e. the Holy Spirit)–an invisible, inaudible, misty Thing that most people don’t like to even talk about, let alone try to explain–could be a good thing was a proposition that seemed fuzzy to me, at best.
The conclusion seems inescapable: No matter the fringe benefits it brings, Jesus going “there” means that he is not “here” anymore, and how could that possibly be a good thing? It takes a body to hug you, to calm your nerves with its touch, to soothe your fears and lull you to sleep with the sound of its voice, to wipe away your tears and to take on the lurking bullies; can a ghost, even the Holy one, do any of that?
A few chapters earlier–but still part of the same Upper Room speech to the Disciples–John records a statement that feels even more audacious:
“I tell you the truth, anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12)
If we have faith in him, not only will we do what he was doing, but we will do even greater things. If anyone other than Jesus himself had said that, I would laugh it off and dismiss it without another thought. It sounds too ridiculous to even consider. But Jesus did say it, and so I find myself forced to wrestle with it.
The explanation for why we will do even greater things, “because I am going to the Father,” seems to link this verse with John 16:7; somehow, God exiting the scene is an immeasurably good development. But how can it be?
According to John, the answer has something to do with the Spirit coming. But like I wrote earlier, I have trouble understanding what’s supposed to happen when the Spirit comes, so I needed to find another way to look at it.
In 2 Corinthians 5:17, Paul writes that being in Christ doesn’t just upgrade us from what we used to be, but actually makes us into a whole new creation. A few verses later, he explains what our job is because of our new creation-ness:
“We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.” (2 Corinthians 5:20)
An ambassador acts as a stand-in, living in a foreign country and serving as the visible representative of the real ruler. Albeit in a delegated capacity, he has the same power and responsibilities as the ruler; to put it another way, he speaks with the king’s voice. And that is the position God has entrusted to us: To be his face and voice, as though we were making his appeal through us. All because Jesus left and sent the Counselor (the only reason we can function in our new position at all) to us.
The pieces start to fall into place. Jesus leaving and the Spirit coming is good because instead of the presence of God being localized in a single person (or a single place, in the Old Testament), God’s presence is dispersed into billions of breathing, walking, talking people. I get to see God because of them. Even more daunting, they’re supposed to see God because of me.
There are any number of ways to apply this idea, but the first that comes to mind for me has to do with how I talk to people. Why would I want to hide anything from you, when your response could be the words of God to me? And when I ignore you or blow you off, what does that communicate about God to you?
I’m still trying to imagine how prayer might fit into this.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------While I don't want to say unequivocally that God doesn't communicate with people directly anymore, it's never happened to me. My attempts to rationalize that formed the beginnings of this note.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
The Mirror Suit
The chest-piece was an old hallway mirror–egg-shaped with false gold molding for a border–that he inherited after his parents died. It came to him in a packing crate, mailed from whoever had taken care of their affairs. He knew they had died before the crate arrived, but there was a note stapled to the address label reminding him of their demise nonetheless.
The hall mirror lay on the floor of the spare bedroom, which had never been used, for several months, reflecting only the floor on which it sat. All of the other mirrors in the house–long, narrow ones the approximate shape of floorboards; smaller, roundish ones; rectangular ones small enough to hold in his hand–also eventually came to rest in the spare room. The only reason some of them survived in the other rooms of the house longer than others was that they were in corners or at angles where he rarely noticed them.
He found the final two loose mirrors in the house in the far corner of the attic, behind a stack of comic books he had forgot he possessed. The mirrors were set in the top half of a woman’s cosmetic compact that had belonged to his former girlfriend Madalyn. He caught a glimpse of his eyes in the small spherical reflectors. They blinked back at him and stared for a second before he averted his gaze, trying to preoccupy it with the adventures of superheroes whose powers no longer intrigued him. It was the first time he had seen any part of his face in years. He still touched it occasionally, running his fingers over the curve of his lips, along the stony bridge of his nose, through the bristly forest of his brows, but that offered only a secondhand reconstruction. Even if he managed to keep in mind all the various features of his face, their placement and proportion was entirely up to his imagination. In effect, he could draw his imagined face according to whatever theme he wished to follow. He variously saw himself as beautiful, an ogre, an innocent child, a self-conscious adolescent.
But he could not manipulate or negotiate with the blank stare of the mirrors. His eyes were simply there, uncomfortably fixed points reminding him with indifferent finality who he was and what he looked like. He turned over the compact with the edge of a comic book and approached them cautiously, like a primitive confronting the magic of an elevator or a gun. Once he was satisfied that it would not spontaneously flip over, he picked it up and brought it to the spare bedroom. He laid the compact on top of the dresser that had never been used, leaving it to rest beside the other smaller mirrors he had collected. They were carefully arranged, the larger mirrors on the left giving way to steadily smaller ones as they neared the bedroom window, all of them with their reflective face turned down. There was an ever-narrowing path between the mirrors on the floor from the dresser to the door.
The furnishings of his own bedroom, the one in which he slept and lived most of his life, were only slightly more elaborate than those of the spare room. The same ceiling fan hung in both rooms, and while his room featured a dull tan rug with a black-and-white striped trim, the paint and carpeting in the spare room were brighter and livelier. His room also had a computer, which sat on a desk in the corner farthest from the window. On it, he performed the freelance contract work by which he supported himself and his lifestyle, as well as ordering his food and all of his life’s other necessities, prepaying for everything, including the extra service charge to have it all delivered. Paradoxically or not, his own room was less crowded than the spare room.
He normally turned off the ceiling light before the room got dark, because of its tendency to create a reflective glare on the window, but this night he left it on. He scarcely noticed the additional light, however; he could not stop thinking about his eyes.
<><><>
At the very end of his closet, occupying the hanger nearest the wall, was a vestige of his previous life, in which he had gone outside and done numerous things that most people do every day without thinking that anything remarkable has transpired, because for them, nothing has. And while a wetsuit is not an everyday article of clothing, it hung in his closet as a symbol of the days when he had worn such things. Looking at it, he wondered for the first time in years if it still fit.
Thinking back to the last time he had worn it, a jet skiing party with Madalyn’s friends the summer after he graduated from college, he compared his physique then to his body now. Despite the lack of running space in his house, he had amassed an impressive home gym in his basement and used it regularly, and if anything was in better shape now than he had been in college.
He tried on the wetsuit, flexed and felt along his arms and legs for any signs of untoward strain on the suit’s part, and then took it off again, satisfied that there were no obstacles in this phase of his still-forming plan. Next he took it into the spare bedroom and hung it on the door. Picking up his parents’ old mirror, he held it up to the suit. Although somewhat wider than he was at its middle, it would work suitably as a chest-piece. He set it in the hall, so it would not become lost in the jumble of the other mirrors, and looked for a back-piece, finding an ideal candidate underneath the dresser. As he pulled it out, he could see that it was larger than his chest mirror, though not too large for his purposes.
A set of eight strip mirrors he had once received as a present–originally, they were a joint gift to him and Madalyn–proved to be of adequate sizes to cover his arms. They had been manufactured for decorative purposes, and so were not all the same dimensions: half were longer and narrower, perfect for his forearms, while the rest were shorter and slightly rounded, and so would work well on his biceps. He found a similar but larger set to use for his legs. He would wear gloves on his hands.
Next he considered the problem of how to affix the mirrors to the wetsuit. Although the method was not terribly complex–he would use a combination of rubber cement and hanging wire threaded through the skin of the suit, making himself into a kind of human wall–the logistics of how to get himself into the suit with the mirrors attached to it was considerably more difficult. He was going to leave his joints unmirrored in order to maximize his flexibility, but the prospect of putting on a fully-mirrored suit without breaking some of the mirrors, to say nothing of the difficulty of hoisting up so much extra weight on his body at once, forced him to think of a compromise solution. He decided to attach, glue, or otherwise jerry-rig the mirrors on the back of the suit first, while he was not wearing it–because it would be impossible for him to do those with the suit on–and then once those were in place and he was wearing it, to put together the front half of the suit.
With those details taken care off, he turned his attention to his face. Of course he would have to cover it as well, but the question of how to do so was more difficult to answer than his body had been. He had more than enough mirrors of the right sizes and shapes but no obvious way to affix them in place. The wetsuit had a hood that extended around the back of his head and completely covered his hair, but it left his face completely exposed. Because the idea of putting rubber cement all over his face–and possibility sticking hanging wire in his nose–stuck him as patently foolish, he decided to put a ski mask on over the hood and attach the mirrors to it.
He put the mask on and marked the places where the mirrors for his ears, mouth, nose, and eyes should go, took off the mask, and began working. Although his other orifices did not present him with any unforeseen difficulties, when he came to the eyes he realized he had overlooked something. It was so obvious that he laughed when the problem finally occurred to him. With a pair of mirrors over his eyes, he would not be able to see, thus turning the already difficult proposition of moving around in the suit into a seeming impossibility.
While he was trying to think of a solution to this predicament, his mind wandered to the police shows he often watched on television. The interrogation rooms in the various police stations scattered across the televised landscape invariably had an attached observation room, where the other detectives and officers could watch the interrogation unseen behind a one-way mirror. He turned on his computer and searched for one-way mirrors. After skipping past a number of sites offering to sell him a one-way mirror and to install it in his house or place of business, he found a site that explained the physical principle upon which one-way mirrors operated. When a mirror is placed between two rooms, and the light in one of the rooms is significantly brighter than the other, the mirror will be reflective in the bright room, while at the same time allowing anyone in the dark room to see through it. With this principle in mind, it seemed reasonable that the same phenomenon could be recreated with a pair of mirrored glasses, so long as the space between the lenses and eyes was kept dark.
He took the attachment tube off his vacuum cleaner and compared the size of its circumference to the size of the cosmetic compact mirrors. Though too small to fit in the final opening of the tube, the mirrors could fit snugly in the slightly-wider ribs of the tube. He popped the mirrors out of their housing, cut a section of the tube, and placed a mirror in it to make sure that his eyeball measurement was accurate. It fit even better than he had imagined. After securing the mirror in the tube with several dabs of rubber cement, he cut the other side of the tube until it left the mirror the correct distance from his eyes. All that he had to do now was to mold the end of the tube to the curve of his eye sockets.
Once he had finished modifying both lengths of tube, he held them up to his eyes. The effect was similar to looking through a tinted window, or to looking in on a brightly-lit room at night. He cut a piece of the tube in half for a bridge over the nose, and then glued an elastic strap to either side of his invention. The strap was uncomfortably tight around his head, but it held the makeshift glasses to his face and did not allow any extraneous light to reach his eyes.
He laid out the mirrors for the front of the suit on his bed before putting on the half-completed suit. The weight of the mirrors on his back and legs was heavier than he had anticipated, but it was tolerable, especially when he considered the benefits of the suit. He attached the mirrors to the front side of his legs first, then his arms, and finally his chest. Next he put on the ski mask, and finally, the glasses.
For the first time in years, he wanted to see what he looked like. But he no longer had the flexibility necessary to pick up a mirror from the floor, which was where he kept all of his largest mirrors, so he had to settle for the short rectangular one leaning against the wall. Fluffy bears and blue balloons decorated its border. It was one of the last things Madalyn had bought for them, and it was not large enough for him to see his whole self in it all at once, so he first angled it toward his legs and then, in turn, his arms, back, and chest. He saved his face for last.
When he finally picked up the mirror and held it in front of his face, he was greeted with an effect different from when he looked at the rest of his body. When he saw the reflections of his legs and arms, the light bounced from his suit to the mirror and back again at angles that led it off the surface of the mirror. When he looked at his face, however, the angle was such that it reflected him infinitely, in ever smaller iterations, so that he appeared to be shrinking and multiplying even as he stood there. Where his eyes should have been, there was only a bounding spot of brightness as the light of the room attempted to penetrate the reflective surfaces. Trying to follow it made him dizzy.
Walking was not as difficult as he had anticipated. The weight of the mirrors was not as much of an impediment as he thought it would be, although their distribution on the suit–and therefore his body–made him top-heavy, to the extent that he had to stop after each step and reestablish his balance. Fortunately, the front door of his house was not far from the bedroom.
After he opened and closed the door, an operation that required more movements than he had ever before realized, he lumbered down to the sidewalk, wondering what he should do next. He could not go far; walking in the suit was difficult and tiring, and hotter than he had expected. Not having been outside for several years, he had forgotten how warm and humid unconditioned air could be, and wearing what was essentially a black spandex weight suit accentuated the difficulties posed by a summer afternoon.
A woman jogged past him. His glasses severely limited his peripheral vision, so he did not notice her until she was directly in front of him. She was wearing blue athletic shorts and a white tank top, her arms were slender and tanned, and her legs, for as far down as he could see, were toned and muscular. She was wearing sunglasses, but she took them off when she stopped to stare at him. Her hands rested on her hips, one of them holding her sunglasses, and she twisted back and forth slowly, as if admiring the various viewing angles offered by the man in the mirror suit. She reminded him of Madalyn.
The woman put her sunglasses back on and turned to go, but before she had taken a full stride, she looked back at him and waved. He returned it as well as he could, but the suit’s limited range of motion and its weight made it a slow and unnatural-looking wave, something like an astronaut or a deep-sea diver. She smiled. He thought she was trying to meet his gaze, but her sunglasses stopped him from seeing her eyes. It was an unforeseen moment of equality.
Several minutes later, a young boy came up to him, followed a second later by his mother. The boy touched the mirrors on his legs, pressing on them as if trying to set free the image he saw there. The boy was scared when he looked up and saw his reflection in the suit’s eyes.
"What’s wrong with that man, Mom?" he asked. "I don’t think he has any eyes. Can he see anything?"
The mother, an overweight woman who thought he was a statue, said, "There isn’t a person in there. It’s just someone’s idea of a joke. But I don’t think it’s funny. Come on, let’s go home."
"But Mom, it moved! I saw it."
"No, you just thought you did," she insisted, keeping her back to the mirror suit. "You saw everything else moving when you looked at it, and that made it look like it was moving. Mirrors play all kinds of tricks."
She took the boy’s hand in hers and led him away. He tried to twist around for another look, but she would not let him.
After waiting for a moment, he turned and walked toward the center of town; it was the same direction the mother and son had gone, but he was not following them. He waited for the signal to change at the only stoplight in town and crossed the road, stopping in front of the ice cream parlor. There was a bench on the sidewalk. He would have sat in it if he did not have the mirror suit on.
The girl behind the counter looked bored. She cleaned an ice cream scoop in the sink built into the wall, dried it, and surveyed the parlor. Only two other people were inside, and neither of them were interested in ice cream anymore.
One of them was an older man. He had white hair and a white beard, both of which were the same, almost nonexistent length. Sometimes it looked as though he did not have hair at all, and that it was only a trick of the light that made it appear to be there. His hands resembled the roots of a very pale tree. His face was weathered and had a chiseled appearance, but its character changed completely when he smiled. He could lose decades of toil simply by twitching a few muscles in his face.
Sitting across the table from him was the reason he smiled. She was a strange mixture, with a face that looked young and entirely too small for the maturing body to which it was connected. She had slipped off her sandals and was tapping the man’s legs with her feet–small, stub-toed things that were strikingly out of proportion with her hands. She was the sort of girl who looked awkward in every kind of situation. But none of her ungainliness mattered when she smiled and met the eyes of the man sitting across from her.
<><><>
He took off the chest-piece and all of the mirrors on his arms and legs as soon as he was home. Now flexible enough to bend over without falling down, he turned over all the mirrors in the room, leaning some at angles against the walls, leaving others face-up where they were on the floor, hanging some on the walls and even on the ceiling, and resting the largest mirror he had against the side of the never-used crib. He balanced the next-largest mirror on top of the dresser. He took off the ski mask, laid it on the dresser, and looked into the mirror.
The bounding, reflection-multiplying effect was happening again, but he made himself concentrate on the largest reflection; it was the clearest and the one closest to his real face.
A shaft of sunlight streamed through the window and caught one of the mirrors lying against the wall. It rebounded unpredictably but with inexorable brilliance, intensifying on its instantaneous course through the room. It would only stop when it hit him.
He could see himself going blind.
The hall mirror lay on the floor of the spare bedroom, which had never been used, for several months, reflecting only the floor on which it sat. All of the other mirrors in the house–long, narrow ones the approximate shape of floorboards; smaller, roundish ones; rectangular ones small enough to hold in his hand–also eventually came to rest in the spare room. The only reason some of them survived in the other rooms of the house longer than others was that they were in corners or at angles where he rarely noticed them.
He found the final two loose mirrors in the house in the far corner of the attic, behind a stack of comic books he had forgot he possessed. The mirrors were set in the top half of a woman’s cosmetic compact that had belonged to his former girlfriend Madalyn. He caught a glimpse of his eyes in the small spherical reflectors. They blinked back at him and stared for a second before he averted his gaze, trying to preoccupy it with the adventures of superheroes whose powers no longer intrigued him. It was the first time he had seen any part of his face in years. He still touched it occasionally, running his fingers over the curve of his lips, along the stony bridge of his nose, through the bristly forest of his brows, but that offered only a secondhand reconstruction. Even if he managed to keep in mind all the various features of his face, their placement and proportion was entirely up to his imagination. In effect, he could draw his imagined face according to whatever theme he wished to follow. He variously saw himself as beautiful, an ogre, an innocent child, a self-conscious adolescent.
But he could not manipulate or negotiate with the blank stare of the mirrors. His eyes were simply there, uncomfortably fixed points reminding him with indifferent finality who he was and what he looked like. He turned over the compact with the edge of a comic book and approached them cautiously, like a primitive confronting the magic of an elevator or a gun. Once he was satisfied that it would not spontaneously flip over, he picked it up and brought it to the spare bedroom. He laid the compact on top of the dresser that had never been used, leaving it to rest beside the other smaller mirrors he had collected. They were carefully arranged, the larger mirrors on the left giving way to steadily smaller ones as they neared the bedroom window, all of them with their reflective face turned down. There was an ever-narrowing path between the mirrors on the floor from the dresser to the door.
The furnishings of his own bedroom, the one in which he slept and lived most of his life, were only slightly more elaborate than those of the spare room. The same ceiling fan hung in both rooms, and while his room featured a dull tan rug with a black-and-white striped trim, the paint and carpeting in the spare room were brighter and livelier. His room also had a computer, which sat on a desk in the corner farthest from the window. On it, he performed the freelance contract work by which he supported himself and his lifestyle, as well as ordering his food and all of his life’s other necessities, prepaying for everything, including the extra service charge to have it all delivered. Paradoxically or not, his own room was less crowded than the spare room.
He normally turned off the ceiling light before the room got dark, because of its tendency to create a reflective glare on the window, but this night he left it on. He scarcely noticed the additional light, however; he could not stop thinking about his eyes.
<><><>
At the very end of his closet, occupying the hanger nearest the wall, was a vestige of his previous life, in which he had gone outside and done numerous things that most people do every day without thinking that anything remarkable has transpired, because for them, nothing has. And while a wetsuit is not an everyday article of clothing, it hung in his closet as a symbol of the days when he had worn such things. Looking at it, he wondered for the first time in years if it still fit.
Thinking back to the last time he had worn it, a jet skiing party with Madalyn’s friends the summer after he graduated from college, he compared his physique then to his body now. Despite the lack of running space in his house, he had amassed an impressive home gym in his basement and used it regularly, and if anything was in better shape now than he had been in college.
He tried on the wetsuit, flexed and felt along his arms and legs for any signs of untoward strain on the suit’s part, and then took it off again, satisfied that there were no obstacles in this phase of his still-forming plan. Next he took it into the spare bedroom and hung it on the door. Picking up his parents’ old mirror, he held it up to the suit. Although somewhat wider than he was at its middle, it would work suitably as a chest-piece. He set it in the hall, so it would not become lost in the jumble of the other mirrors, and looked for a back-piece, finding an ideal candidate underneath the dresser. As he pulled it out, he could see that it was larger than his chest mirror, though not too large for his purposes.
A set of eight strip mirrors he had once received as a present–originally, they were a joint gift to him and Madalyn–proved to be of adequate sizes to cover his arms. They had been manufactured for decorative purposes, and so were not all the same dimensions: half were longer and narrower, perfect for his forearms, while the rest were shorter and slightly rounded, and so would work well on his biceps. He found a similar but larger set to use for his legs. He would wear gloves on his hands.
Next he considered the problem of how to affix the mirrors to the wetsuit. Although the method was not terribly complex–he would use a combination of rubber cement and hanging wire threaded through the skin of the suit, making himself into a kind of human wall–the logistics of how to get himself into the suit with the mirrors attached to it was considerably more difficult. He was going to leave his joints unmirrored in order to maximize his flexibility, but the prospect of putting on a fully-mirrored suit without breaking some of the mirrors, to say nothing of the difficulty of hoisting up so much extra weight on his body at once, forced him to think of a compromise solution. He decided to attach, glue, or otherwise jerry-rig the mirrors on the back of the suit first, while he was not wearing it–because it would be impossible for him to do those with the suit on–and then once those were in place and he was wearing it, to put together the front half of the suit.
With those details taken care off, he turned his attention to his face. Of course he would have to cover it as well, but the question of how to do so was more difficult to answer than his body had been. He had more than enough mirrors of the right sizes and shapes but no obvious way to affix them in place. The wetsuit had a hood that extended around the back of his head and completely covered his hair, but it left his face completely exposed. Because the idea of putting rubber cement all over his face–and possibility sticking hanging wire in his nose–stuck him as patently foolish, he decided to put a ski mask on over the hood and attach the mirrors to it.
He put the mask on and marked the places where the mirrors for his ears, mouth, nose, and eyes should go, took off the mask, and began working. Although his other orifices did not present him with any unforeseen difficulties, when he came to the eyes he realized he had overlooked something. It was so obvious that he laughed when the problem finally occurred to him. With a pair of mirrors over his eyes, he would not be able to see, thus turning the already difficult proposition of moving around in the suit into a seeming impossibility.
While he was trying to think of a solution to this predicament, his mind wandered to the police shows he often watched on television. The interrogation rooms in the various police stations scattered across the televised landscape invariably had an attached observation room, where the other detectives and officers could watch the interrogation unseen behind a one-way mirror. He turned on his computer and searched for one-way mirrors. After skipping past a number of sites offering to sell him a one-way mirror and to install it in his house or place of business, he found a site that explained the physical principle upon which one-way mirrors operated. When a mirror is placed between two rooms, and the light in one of the rooms is significantly brighter than the other, the mirror will be reflective in the bright room, while at the same time allowing anyone in the dark room to see through it. With this principle in mind, it seemed reasonable that the same phenomenon could be recreated with a pair of mirrored glasses, so long as the space between the lenses and eyes was kept dark.
He took the attachment tube off his vacuum cleaner and compared the size of its circumference to the size of the cosmetic compact mirrors. Though too small to fit in the final opening of the tube, the mirrors could fit snugly in the slightly-wider ribs of the tube. He popped the mirrors out of their housing, cut a section of the tube, and placed a mirror in it to make sure that his eyeball measurement was accurate. It fit even better than he had imagined. After securing the mirror in the tube with several dabs of rubber cement, he cut the other side of the tube until it left the mirror the correct distance from his eyes. All that he had to do now was to mold the end of the tube to the curve of his eye sockets.
Once he had finished modifying both lengths of tube, he held them up to his eyes. The effect was similar to looking through a tinted window, or to looking in on a brightly-lit room at night. He cut a piece of the tube in half for a bridge over the nose, and then glued an elastic strap to either side of his invention. The strap was uncomfortably tight around his head, but it held the makeshift glasses to his face and did not allow any extraneous light to reach his eyes.
He laid out the mirrors for the front of the suit on his bed before putting on the half-completed suit. The weight of the mirrors on his back and legs was heavier than he had anticipated, but it was tolerable, especially when he considered the benefits of the suit. He attached the mirrors to the front side of his legs first, then his arms, and finally his chest. Next he put on the ski mask, and finally, the glasses.
For the first time in years, he wanted to see what he looked like. But he no longer had the flexibility necessary to pick up a mirror from the floor, which was where he kept all of his largest mirrors, so he had to settle for the short rectangular one leaning against the wall. Fluffy bears and blue balloons decorated its border. It was one of the last things Madalyn had bought for them, and it was not large enough for him to see his whole self in it all at once, so he first angled it toward his legs and then, in turn, his arms, back, and chest. He saved his face for last.
When he finally picked up the mirror and held it in front of his face, he was greeted with an effect different from when he looked at the rest of his body. When he saw the reflections of his legs and arms, the light bounced from his suit to the mirror and back again at angles that led it off the surface of the mirror. When he looked at his face, however, the angle was such that it reflected him infinitely, in ever smaller iterations, so that he appeared to be shrinking and multiplying even as he stood there. Where his eyes should have been, there was only a bounding spot of brightness as the light of the room attempted to penetrate the reflective surfaces. Trying to follow it made him dizzy.
Walking was not as difficult as he had anticipated. The weight of the mirrors was not as much of an impediment as he thought it would be, although their distribution on the suit–and therefore his body–made him top-heavy, to the extent that he had to stop after each step and reestablish his balance. Fortunately, the front door of his house was not far from the bedroom.
After he opened and closed the door, an operation that required more movements than he had ever before realized, he lumbered down to the sidewalk, wondering what he should do next. He could not go far; walking in the suit was difficult and tiring, and hotter than he had expected. Not having been outside for several years, he had forgotten how warm and humid unconditioned air could be, and wearing what was essentially a black spandex weight suit accentuated the difficulties posed by a summer afternoon.
A woman jogged past him. His glasses severely limited his peripheral vision, so he did not notice her until she was directly in front of him. She was wearing blue athletic shorts and a white tank top, her arms were slender and tanned, and her legs, for as far down as he could see, were toned and muscular. She was wearing sunglasses, but she took them off when she stopped to stare at him. Her hands rested on her hips, one of them holding her sunglasses, and she twisted back and forth slowly, as if admiring the various viewing angles offered by the man in the mirror suit. She reminded him of Madalyn.
The woman put her sunglasses back on and turned to go, but before she had taken a full stride, she looked back at him and waved. He returned it as well as he could, but the suit’s limited range of motion and its weight made it a slow and unnatural-looking wave, something like an astronaut or a deep-sea diver. She smiled. He thought she was trying to meet his gaze, but her sunglasses stopped him from seeing her eyes. It was an unforeseen moment of equality.
Several minutes later, a young boy came up to him, followed a second later by his mother. The boy touched the mirrors on his legs, pressing on them as if trying to set free the image he saw there. The boy was scared when he looked up and saw his reflection in the suit’s eyes.
"What’s wrong with that man, Mom?" he asked. "I don’t think he has any eyes. Can he see anything?"
The mother, an overweight woman who thought he was a statue, said, "There isn’t a person in there. It’s just someone’s idea of a joke. But I don’t think it’s funny. Come on, let’s go home."
"But Mom, it moved! I saw it."
"No, you just thought you did," she insisted, keeping her back to the mirror suit. "You saw everything else moving when you looked at it, and that made it look like it was moving. Mirrors play all kinds of tricks."
She took the boy’s hand in hers and led him away. He tried to twist around for another look, but she would not let him.
After waiting for a moment, he turned and walked toward the center of town; it was the same direction the mother and son had gone, but he was not following them. He waited for the signal to change at the only stoplight in town and crossed the road, stopping in front of the ice cream parlor. There was a bench on the sidewalk. He would have sat in it if he did not have the mirror suit on.
The girl behind the counter looked bored. She cleaned an ice cream scoop in the sink built into the wall, dried it, and surveyed the parlor. Only two other people were inside, and neither of them were interested in ice cream anymore.
One of them was an older man. He had white hair and a white beard, both of which were the same, almost nonexistent length. Sometimes it looked as though he did not have hair at all, and that it was only a trick of the light that made it appear to be there. His hands resembled the roots of a very pale tree. His face was weathered and had a chiseled appearance, but its character changed completely when he smiled. He could lose decades of toil simply by twitching a few muscles in his face.
Sitting across the table from him was the reason he smiled. She was a strange mixture, with a face that looked young and entirely too small for the maturing body to which it was connected. She had slipped off her sandals and was tapping the man’s legs with her feet–small, stub-toed things that were strikingly out of proportion with her hands. She was the sort of girl who looked awkward in every kind of situation. But none of her ungainliness mattered when she smiled and met the eyes of the man sitting across from her.
<><><>
He took off the chest-piece and all of the mirrors on his arms and legs as soon as he was home. Now flexible enough to bend over without falling down, he turned over all the mirrors in the room, leaning some at angles against the walls, leaving others face-up where they were on the floor, hanging some on the walls and even on the ceiling, and resting the largest mirror he had against the side of the never-used crib. He balanced the next-largest mirror on top of the dresser. He took off the ski mask, laid it on the dresser, and looked into the mirror.
The bounding, reflection-multiplying effect was happening again, but he made himself concentrate on the largest reflection; it was the clearest and the one closest to his real face.
A shaft of sunlight streamed through the window and caught one of the mirrors lying against the wall. It rebounded unpredictably but with inexorable brilliance, intensifying on its instantaneous course through the room. It would only stop when it hit him.
He could see himself going blind.
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