Will Eaves - Murmur

Mother inhales the bad news like an idiot’s insult.

“If that is so, dear Alec, dearest June,” she says, smiling, “and we are, in your routine and statistical opinion, doomed, then perhaps—on your day of troth—you can explain what all of this is for? The struggle and the upheaval?” She bends over the fire to stir her pot, picks up a flask. “‘Dig up the garden, give away your clothes, your furniture and food, your creature comforts, all your raw materials.’” She gestures at our surroundings. “Hardly a day goes by without some new note of instruction in the post! Why bother, if we’ve lost the war?”

“Because it’s still just possible that we will win, and we should all behave as if it were.” My voice is low; it doesn’t echo in the ringing stone-flagged room; its confidence surprises me. “The ‘as if’ is extremely important. The whole of decency depends on it. Of course I can’t give you a proof. The evidence is to the contrary: men are cruel, driven by fear and greed. But it is civilized to suppose otherwise, as if we were fitted for love and loyalty. ‘As if’ is not… complete, but that does not mean it’s untrue.”

“Against all hope you persevere! How romantic!” When Mother laughs, I can’t help noticing, her jaw moves up and down to give the impression of mirth. “And just a little hard for us to take, I think. The high value you’ve always placed on results, logic, form, the underlying certainties, the way things are —so soon displaced?”

“Quite the reverse,” I say. The fire’s cold flames are tassels rising in my mother’s black pupils. Her skeletal physique is ivory in a cave, her cape billows; the glass she holds, the clothes she wears, all saturated with ideal color—the grain of which is, on inspection, rather coarse. “Logic and math are beautiful but they are far from being certainties. I don’t believe there is a realm of truth. And if there is, well, I prefer this one, with all its faults and inconsistencies.” Expressionless, June’s eyes hold me. “And mathematics, it turns out, is one of them. Logic permits no absolute predictability. Some things are true that cannot be proved to be so. There’ll always be statements or questions in a system or a world, like ‘I’m lying,’ or even ‘Who will win the war?’, no one can settle in advance within that system’s rules.”

“Very cunning.”

“Or merely fair.”

“Fairness!” Mother throws back her head and roars. “I wondered when we’d get around to that!” A chill enters the room. “Fairness!” The light behind her skin fades momentarily; the flesh wattles. “Even your grasp of it, dear son, is enfeebled. Fairness is not logic. It has no human property.” She grins. “I know! Try this. Fairness is absolute indifference.” One of her teeth is going gray. “I hardly needed to fix poor Snow White,” she mutters. “Time alone did that for me—revealed the Prince for what he was, a frighteningly limited minstrel.”

“Don’t listen to her, Alec,” June cries, forcefully. “Oh, Mrs. Pryor, try to understand. I love your son for what he is. Don’t be jealous. It’s no one’s fault, I know, but you and John, you’re both—you can’t help it—you’re just a pair of badly drawn cartoons!”

“Impudent girl!” the sorceress shrieks. “John is trivial. Half of a man—a sketch of sibling rivalry. But I —I am the transcendent original! The Lilith of Cartoons! ”

The room heaves. Every bottle on the table shakes.

“I am the bold outline, betrothed weakling, whose incomplete spaces resound with Law. I am the single rule, the cellular automaton, the one line on a pane of acetate that moves with repetition, multiplies, and springs to life. Draw me! Draw me again! And every time I’m drawn, you’ll find I grow in deep complexity, until the frame of making splits and I am no mere image but the Great Queen, self-aware symbol of light!”

John mumbles something about changes to the script.

June blinks. “I wondered what had happened to the other dwarves.”

“Silence!” my maddened mother shouts. “They’ve been erased! I tired of their routines. The stairs, the stammering, the fairy-tale suburban house. There’s only so much business with the dishes one can take.”

The thrill of earthquake fades away. The glasses cease to chink.

“And what about Snow White?” I ask, from the doorway.

“The cordial.” June speaks slowly. “The Sleeping Death. It’s meant for me.”

Mother looks down, thin eyebrows arched, and swills the liquid, calmer now.

“Well, I can see why you’d think that. Fiancées have a heightened sense of destiny, and marriage is a sort of sleeping death, if you’ve a brain. Let’s see—Monday: rations, cupboards, cleaning. Tuesday: laundry. Wednesday: ironing, silver. Thursday: bed linen and the lounge. Friday: planning the meals for the weekend. Saturday: intimate relations with your spouse. That’s Snow White’s fantasy…”

“Bright people often pine for domesticity.”

“Perhaps. But Snow White never struggles with the idea. She never doubts. She knows her Prince will come. When Snow White sleeps, she trusts she’ll wake up at the touch of love’s first kiss. Alas, you feel doubt peeling at this vision like the silver flaking from a pier glass. She isn’t you. We’ve left behind the old story.”

With one swift motion, Mother hastens to June’s side, leans forward, and pulls back the damask drape. A baleful basalt mirror glares at us, its one eye deep and black. The glass is void, perpetual night.

“Where am I?” June cries out. “Oh, Alec—make her stop!”

No image forms in the crystal’s abysmal depths, and Mother sets her potion down the better to caress the mirror’s stand: wooden cascade of coils and whorls.

“This is a shaman’s glass, my child,” the Queen whispers. “This is the first, the one Mirror of Creation. It shows you what is missing from your picture of the world. And what is that, d’you think?”

“No, no…” June stares at me.

“It is the mind doing the picturing, my dear. The mirror shows you what you cannot ever grasp. And seeing it brings you impossible material knowledge of who you are—the workings of another’s ingenuity.”

June’s eyes are full of angry tears. I cannot reach for her.

“How did I get here?” she wonders. “How did I know the way—Alec?” She turns. “How did I know that you lived in this house?”

“A good question,” the Lilith of Cartoons declares. “You got here first. As if…”

“…as if I followed instructions. Was drawn.” June smooths her hands across her lap, touches her arms. “But I am not a slave. I’m not a line drawing, like you. Who ordered this? Who gave me… my choices?”

A silence like the heart of the forest descends. The hand-less clock omits to tell more time. And, looking at her feet, June sees—as can we all, now, with astonishment—her double, not in the mirror, but upside down exactly where she sits. Doing a headstand on the floor. The ghost of the snicket. It is as though she sat on the calm surface of a lake and summoned up her reflection to join her in a playing-card reality.

“Who knows but we may all be charged with orders in our sleep?” My mother’s voice alters. “Who served the Queen and found a way to honor life? Who mimicked slavery and knew freedom? None but the Forester. None but Snow White’s divided assassin. I bade you go about your daily work, to plant your larch and pine. I bade you kill the Fair One underneath an oak and set the fair heart in a box . But you were weak, deliberately so. You let your quarry go.”

“If I’m the Forester,” June says, “who is Snow White?”