Edgar Pangborn - A Mirror for Observers

He wasn’t. He had started downstairs but came back before I spoke, and glanced at my door uneasily. “Could I stop in a minute?”

“Sure. What’s cooking, friend?”

“Oh, just ham and eggs.” But there wasn’t any laughter in him. He fidgeted around my room. In a comic way he had, he pulled down his upper lip with thumb and finger and pushed it from side to side. “I dunno…. Maybe everybody feels like two people, sometimes.”

“Sure. Two or more. Many selves in all of us.”

“But” — he looked up, and I saw he was genuinely frightened — “but it shouldn’t be — sharp. Should it, Ben? I mean — well, there in Uncle Jacob’s room, it was like—” He fussed with trifles on my bureau, to hide his face maybe; added miserably: “Wasn’t any errand at the store. I just wanted out…. I mean, Ben, there’s a me that likes it here — everything: living here, Sharon, Bill, the other kids, even school. And — well, especially the woods, and — oh, talking with you, and stuff….”

“And the other one would like…?”

“Chuck everything,” he whispered. “Just every damn thing and start fresh. In there, in that room, I was like — like cut down the middle. But that’s whacky, isn’t it? It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t really want to go anywhere else. If I could…”

“I think it’ll pass,” I said, finding no better words than these weak ones that could hardly help him.

“Oh, I guess.” He started to go.

“Wait a minute.” I took the wrapped mirror from the back of a bureau drawer. “Something you might like to look at. I brought it from Canada. When I taught history, Angelo, it was ancient history mostly. This thing was given me by a friend who knows his archaeology, who—” Drozma, I think I had been afraid of that mirror. That may be why I had never unwrapped it until this poorly chosen moment. Is it a product of accident or a lost art? Some subtle distortion in the bronze that compels many truths to cry aloud? I saw the young Elmis, the almost-good musician, the scatterbrained youth whom you taught so patiently, the persistent student of history, the absent-minded lover and husband, the clumsy Observer, the inadequate father. How can this be, in a poor frail artifact of the long-dead Minoan world? At other shifts of the mirror — oh, let that escape words. It is one thing to know, with the mind only, that one will be old, that one has different faces for victory, shame, death, hope, defeat; another thing to watch it brilliant in the bronze. I was lost there, seeking for what I was once at City of Oceans, when I heard Angelo say: “What’s the matter?”

“No, nothing.” I did not want to show it to him now, but it was passing from my silly fumbling fingers into his innocent brown ones, and I went on talking somehow: “It’s Minoan — anyway, came from Crete, likely made before Homer lived. You see, the patina’s been kept away — I mean, taken away, polished off, so it’s still a mirror as it was—”

He wasn’t hearing me. I saw him shaking, his face crumpled and twisted as if in nightmare. “Here, let me take the damn thing — I hadn’t looked in it before, myself. I didn’t know, Angelo. But it’s nothing to be afraid of—”

He twitched it away when I would have taken it, forced to stare in spite of himself. “Cheepus, what a—” He started laughing, and that was worse. I took it out of his hands then and flung it on the bureau.

“I ought to be kicked. But, Angelo, I didn’t know—”

He pulled away from my hand. “Look out — I’ll prob’ly erp.” He ran for the stairs. When I followed, he glanced back up out of the well of darkness and said: “It’s all right, Ben. I get whacky, that’s all. Forget it, will you?”

Forget it?

That night I could neither sleep nor enter contemplation. I heard humanlike sounds from my enemy next door. If Namir had gone out I would have followed him. If the grenade’s disintegration were complete, I might have destroyed him that night, in his room. But there would have been some noise, even if I caught him asleep. There would have been the stains, the purple glare, the reek of gases, handfuls of rubbish to clear away.

I did not go to bed but sat dressed near my window, and was rewarded by a moonrise I could not enjoy. At midnight a copter-bus thundered, the last until six in the morning. Smaller human sounds persisted: late footsteps, a girl laughing behind a curtained window, a few cars whispering by on Calumet Street but none on Martin, which ends blindly at a lumberyard three blocks east. A baby fretted till someone hushed him. Past one o’clock I heard the Chicago-Vienna jet liner, far and high and lonely.

The opening of the door in the back-yard fence was a ghost of noise. The moon had climbed; no light touched my face. It was near two in the morning. I watched him slip in, fog-footed, pale-haired, dangerous. He had to pass through moonlight, then scratched on the kitchen screen delicately as an insect’s wing. He was aware of my open windows, but I was in darkness.

Angelo came out. They did not talk. They faded across the yard, Angelo moving in spite of his lameness as softly as Billy Kell.

I let them gain some distance down Martin Street, then eased the screen out of a window and jumped. Only fifteen feet, but I had to be cautious of sound. They did not look back. I found moon shadow, and they were stealthy in that shadow too, gliding toward the lumberyard like embodiments of a mist that was making dampness on the walks, aureoles around the street lamps. From my window I had hardly noticed the mist. Now I breathed it. It was all around me, wandering, melancholy, less bewildering than the cloud in my mind. Earth can weep too, my planet Earth.

As I sneaked into the lumberyard after them I heard suppressed muttering of a dozen voices, most of them treble, a few mature like Billy Kell’s. A tall stack of two-by-eights loomed black in front of me, and I knew the gang was on the other side of it. With luck I could climb that stack in silence and look down. The voices became individual. I heard Billy Kell’s: “You passed all the other tests, you won’t fluff this one.” And some small excited whiny voice encouraged: “He’s nothing but a damn dirty Digger, Angelo.” A shuffling of feet lent me a covering noise. I mounted the stack and wormed across it to peep over.

A thin lad was tied by the waist to a timber of the next stack. His hands were bound behind him, his shirt hung in rags over the cord at his middle, his face and chest were begrimed. He was the only one facing me. His head drooped forward; even if he looked up he might not see the blot of my head against the greater dark. He was cursing mechanically, sounding rugged, contemptuous, and not in pain. I supposed I could jump down if I had to and break it up in time to prevent major disaster. Meanwhile I had to try to understand.

Billy Kell was embracing Angelo’s shoulder, urgent and coaxing. He drew Angelo away from the others and near to my hiding place. The cricket-voices of the other boys ceased to exist for me. “Angelo, ’tisn’t as if we were going to do him any real harm, see?” Billy Kell’s whisper was smooth and soft. I could watch him smile. “Look—” and he was showing Angelo a knife, turning it to catch the wan light, which gave me Angelo’s face too, a dim battlefield of terror and excitement, fascination and revulsion. “Just a five-and-dime gimmick,” said Billy Kell. “It’s plastic. Look.” He jabbed the knife at his own palm, so realistically that I winced before I saw the blade curl harmlessly at the tip.

“Just scare the pants off him, that it?”

“Sure, Angelo, you get it. Poke it to him without touching, see, and then a jab — oh, at the shoulder or somewheres. But listen: the other guys think you think it’s a real knife, see? I’m giving you a break because, hell, you’re my friend, I know how you feel. You couldn’t use a shiv. I understand, see, but they don’t. So put on an act for us, huh?”