A Reflection Between Two Mirrors
Everything about her was a lie, I found out later,
said the man in front of me, rigid and unmoving upon his high-backed chair, face in the shadows, expression unseen.
She was a liar, but I was as a liar as well, a mirror too, mirrors the two of us, so it balances out.
His fingers beat a tattoo against the arm of his chair; he was considering his next words carefully.
Even now, I am a liar,
he finally admitted, regret (but not remorse) filling his voice.
I am far too much of a bad person to tell the truth. Fundamentally good, nice people have no need to lie; even admitting their little peccadilloes brings others to praise them, even if only out of happiness that they aren’t as good as they thought. Lying is no sin; it is merely a mark of it. If I had not lied for most of my life, I would have had my throat torn out. My throat, yes…
He rubbed his throat; I rubbed mine as well, wincing.
He coughed, self-consciously. I was getting nervous, but the man was just getting started with his speech; I would have rather wished he would not speak a word of it, it was so compromising. He continued:
Should I recite anecdotes? Little comedic tales? Little tragedies? Yes, little tragedies. You know, my whole life has been one great tragedy; but I myself am so “small” and petty that it becomes a little tragedy when attached to me. It is not a traditional tragedy; there was no fall from grace, at least not one that I noticed. The tragedy was the hamartia itself, the little thing that I was born with; the little thing I call my soul, perhaps? Yes, ye-es, that was the tragedy; the entirety of my being, the entirety of my life up to when I stopped living, so to speak (I’m not dead yet!), and crawled away from all the people who want to know the truth; even now I have resolved not to tell the truth to any human being other than myself. And yet I babble on till the tower falls, speaking with tongues, so to speak (forgive me, only I can understand what I say, and I really have no idea of what I’m saying). The truth is, though, the truth; what was it? When did I discover the truth? I suppose it was when I really started lying.
He shuffled in his seat.
I do not exist,
he declared at length, and seemed pleased with this announcement.
I do not exist, and what is more, I never have. I have always been the pronounced absence of a person, of a personality, and all the real people noticed this long before I did. Once I figured out that I was not truly a human being, everything clicked into place! All those stares, all those little glances that I didn’t catch until years later. Well, now I have, and I know what’s going on. See, every single human being is a narcissist.
He leaned back as far as he could in his straight-backed chair; I did the same, mimicking him. He seemed very pleased with this last revelation, though we were both aware that it didn’t sound very good. I pointed out that it sounded like something a narcissist would say.
Of course it is,
he said, and
I am a human being, am I not? I know that I just said I wasn’t, but… if I am, then I should know whether they are narcissistic or not, and I should be just as reliable a source as all those people on the outside of this house. If not, then I’m looking at it from the outside in, and looking at something from the outside in is the best way to find the truth about it. Although either way I’m still a narcissist, because monkey see monkey do, wise aping each other, right? If they are narcissists, then I will be their Echo! They hate seeing people who insult humanity, because it insults them, too. If possible, an insult against their ingroup will be deflected by the accusation that they aren’t part of it, but here is the nasty, horrible, rotten truth: that someone who is willing to insult the human species can’t be dismissed so easily.
He seemed very satisfied with himself. I called him crazy, and he nodded a little bit.
Yes, of course I’m crazy. Nobody with any amount of sanity would ever admit that they are wrong, and I’m admitting that my entire species is wrong. Oh, the inhumanity! What a horrible disanthrope am I! What an awful, deluded outside observer, regarding while not seeing the psychotic physics of my retina and lens.
I asked him if this worldview had actually helped him.
Practicality is the apology of the scoundrel,
he retorted.
It seemed as if he had come up with most of what he was saying long beforehand, and had practiced it many times in front of the mirror. He had no real people to talk to.
Next you’re going to say that this is just because I have no real people to talk to; that if I actually went out of this little hole in the ground I wouldn’t be this way?
Yes, of course, I said.
Well, then, let me tell you about my aboveground interactions, with real people. That’s who you wanted me to talk about, right? Her. It’s been a while since I’ve thought about her… no, that too is a lie, since I think about her very often. You know, it’s going to be very dangerous for you and me both to discuss her; we’ll start longing and hurting again, and that’s never nice. That’s the whole reason I retreated down here, into myself, where I’ll never hurt again, the anodyne den of alkaline zen, a basic and burning brainwashing with self-served soap in the dirty-mouth-sores, the sound of one hand washing the other without knowing what the other hand is doing. A little idiosyncratic idioglottic idiotic idiom, mangled and tangled and wrangled into something that I then cough up. Look where the rat dragged itself to!
I sighed, annoyed with the man in front of me. He sighed as well, but I’m sure it was dramatic.
But I’m meandering, yes. You want to know about her.
I nodded.
First you need to know about me, though, because we were both mirrors, both liars, and if you don’t know that you aren’t going to be able to understand all the times that, like two mirrors in front of each other, she and I formed tunnels of vapidity and nothingness and reflection. Because that’s what I am, that’s what I became, a mirror. I said that it took me a while to learn to lie, yes? To blend in with the people born with stripes and speckles and green beards, which I lack; the coloration of my personality is lacking, alerting them to my inhumanity. So the solution was simple; pretend to be them. People are so narcissistic that you can usually get away with mimicking their personality; some few people (often criticized people) dislike people who act like they do, but this is fundamentally an honest behavior and much less prideful than someone who likes people who act like they do. It truly is a golden world when people do as you would do, unto them or you or not. Empathy is just believing others to be yourself; feeling their pain, a senseless little charade of alter-egotism. I hate it, don’t you know? I wish people would feel more empathy for people who don’t feel empathy, but their mirror neurons recognize that as a gap that cannot serve as a synapse. I feel nothing, and I never have, and I still would even if we were literally the same person, ha-ha. I have made my current life a living hell by feeling nothing for myself or other people; I have no empathy for my future or current self. It would not be a problem, of course, if I was any good at mimicking humans; I could have gotten a job, a good job, a good life, all that which is rewarded to the human species.
I said that I didn’t want to talk about someone such as him; he called me a liar. If I hadn’t wanted to, I wouldn’t ask about her. We were so similar, were we not? I may have been the victim of a just desertion, but if she had not acted I would have. I was not as passive, back then… now I can barely imagine myself doing anything, saying anything, monologuing about anything. I can only think of myself listening and nodding along and nodding off.
But speak of her! I imply, and he catches my glance and my meaning.
She was sitting on a balcony when I first saw her, wrapped up in a coat and an illusion. I was shivering from a mixture of excitement and rage; I had gone to the balcony to escape the party, only to find that the party waited for me there. But then, I suppose that to her, I was the party, carrying festivities like rats carry fleas.
Symmetry, I noted.
I found her in a characteristic way for the both of us; we were imitating people, as people do, and we do as people do, and we found each other and did as we did. Conversation was meaningless, more meaningless than usual, because I took cues from her, and she took cues from me; like a dance with two followers, and no lead. We looped and spun and turned in tight circles and the following morning we realized what had happened. We were mirrors that had finally caught a glimpse of their reflection. And what did we see?
Well, what did we see?
An endless and ever-darkening tunnel of mirrors, bending ever so slowly out of sight.
And that’s why I loved her, I thought.
And that’s why I loved her,
he said.
Anything else about her was a mere artefact, a cataract in the eye of the beholder. A product of blinding love, not a cause of it. The rose-color of blood-stained glasses. My memories of her are so stuffed full of filling and artificial sweeteners that they would be more accurate if they were fully fabricated.
That’s not quite true, I thought.
That’s not quite true,
he admitted, as he always knew what I was thinking.
But it’s the kind of lie you tell yourself to cover up all the other lies… Because who calls someone a liar when they call themselves a liar? And you get lost in the loops. You know, we used to mirror and lie to other people, to get along with them. But now we do it to ourselves, because we can hardly stand being around ourselves, being ourselves.
I had to agree with him. I asked what it had been like, though I knew his experiences were but mine.
I never knew her. I knew what she did, what she said… but the thing about mirror people, like the two of us, like us, too… is that the doing and the saying doesn’t mean anything. The only emotion behind the words we hide behind is fear. And yet… We did sweet things. We did stupid things. We said sweet things, and we said stupid things, and most of those things we said were both. And we both said them, and the things we said and did we did together.
And when all was said and done, when the bad and hurtful things were said, and done, we did those together too. Sweet.
Stupid.
“She” was more of an image than a person, some kind of idealism or optimism on my part. Hope drove me to think she was different from everybody else, made me think there was someone better than all of this. No. There never is.
Because after ten long years of letting other people see themselves in me, I finally see myself in other people. In mean people, awful people, stupid people.
I see myself in her, and she saw herself in me, because that’s just what we let other people see. And if it was correct… then it was a fluke. It wasn’t personal. It was just the way things happened to be.
If only we had known,
he said, and I agreed. I wondered if I had known, and simply did not want to tell myself. Perhaps I simply looked at myself and pretended, showing myself another person entirely.
It was my fault, really,
he continued.
I should have known that being with another mirror-person, another echo, wouldn’t work in the long run. Hope, faith, and love got the better of me, strange for someone who has so little of any. Now the only thing that I can do is reflect on it. Ha.
This has been a nice talk; it always is.
We stood up at the same time, turned our backs and walked away from each other.
I cried a little as I turned off the light in that little room, and shut the door.
He will be there, still, when I come to listen to him talk tomorrow.
I hate listening to him talk, these days.
I hate mirrors.