The Book of Mirrors

by E. O. Chirovici

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  To my wife, Mihaela, who has never forgotten who we really are and where we came from

  Most people are other people.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  / Part One /

  PETER KATZ

  Memories are like bullets. Some whiz by and only spook you. Others tear you open and leave you in pieces.

  —Richard Kadrey, Kill the Dead

  I received the submission in January, when everybody at the agency was still trying to recover from the post-festive-season hangovers.

  The message had deftly missed my junk folder, turning up in my in-box, where it formed part of a queue with a few dozen others. I cast a glance at the query and found it intriguing, so I printed it along with the attached pages from the partial manuscript and put them in my desk drawer. Busy completing a deal, I forgot about them until nearly the end of the month. It was on the weekend extended by Martin Luther King Day that I rediscovered the papers, lying in a pile of submissions I was planning on reading during the holiday.

  The query letter was signed Richard Flynn and went like this:

  Dear Peter,

  My name is Richard Flynn, and twenty-seven years ago I majored in English at Princeton. I dreamed of becoming a writer, published a few short stories in magazines, and even wrote a three-hundred-page novel, which I abandoned after it was rejected by a number of publishers (and which I myself now find mediocre and dull). After that, I got a job at a small advertising agency in New Jersey, and I’ve remained in the industry to this day. At first, I fooled myself into believing that advertising could be likened to literature and that one day I’d go back to being a writer. Obviously, nothing of the sort happened. I think that for most people, growing up means, unfortunately, gaining the ability to lock their dreams in a box and throw it in the East River. I was no exception to the rule, it would seem.

  But a few months ago I discovered something important, which brought back to my memory a series of tragic events that took place in the fall and winter of 1987, my last year at Princeton. You probably know how it is: you think you’ve forgotten something—an event, a person, a situation—and then all of a sudden you realize that the memory has been languishing in some secret room in your mind and that it’s always been there, as if it happened only yesterday. It’s like opening an old closet, full of junk, and all you have to do is to move one box for it all to come crashing down on you.

  That thing was like a detonator. An hour after I found out the news, I was still thinking about its significance. I sat down at my desk and, overwhelmed by memories, I wrote. By the time I stopped, it was long after midnight and I’d written more than five thousand words. It was as if I’d suddenly rediscovered who I was, after completely forgetting myself. When I went to the bathroom to brush my teeth, it seemed to me as if a different person was looking at me from the mirror.

  For the first time in many years, I fell asleep without taking a pill first, and the next day, after telling the people at the agency that I’d be out sick for the next two weeks, I continued to write.

  The details of the events of those months in ’87 came back to my mind with such force and clarity that they quickly grew more vivid and powerful than anything else in my present life. It was as if I’d woken up from a deep sleep, during which my mind had silently been preparing itself for the moment when I’d begin to write about the events whose protagonists were Laura Baines, Professor Joseph Wieder, and I.

  Of course, given its tragic outcome, the story had found its way into the newspapers at the time, at least in part. I myself got harassed by police detectives and reporters for quite a while. That was one of the factors that led me to leave Princeton and pursue my MA at Cornell, living for two long, dull years in Ithaca. But nobody ever found out the truth about the whole story, one that changed my life forever.

  As I said, I chanced upon the truth three months ago, and I realized that I had to share it with others, even though the anger and frustration I felt, and still feel, were overwhelming. But sometimes hatred and pain can be a fuel just as strong as love. The result of that intention is the manuscript I recently completed, after an effort that left me physically and mentally exhausted. I attach a sample, in accordance with the instructions I found on your website. The manuscript is complete and ready for submission. If you’d be interested in reading the whole thing, I’ll send it to you immediately. The working title I’ve chosen is The Book of Mirrors.

  I’ll stop here, because my laptop says that I’ve already exceeded the five-hundred-word limit for a query. Anyhow, there’s not much else to say about me. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, I’ve never been married, nor had children, partly, I believe, because I’ve never truly forgotten Laura. I have a brother, Eddie, who lives in Philadelphia and whom I see very rarely. My career in advertising has been uneventful, with neither outstanding achievements nor unpleasant incidents—a dazzlingly gray life, hidden among the shadows of Babel. Today, I’m a senior copywriter at a middling agency based in Manhattan, quite close to Chelsea, where I’ve lived for more than two decades. I don’t drive a Porsche and I don’t book five-star hotels, but nor do I have to worry about what the next day will bring, at least not when it comes to money.

  Thank you for your time, and please let me know whether you’d like to read the full manuscript. You’ll find my address and phone number below.

  Yours sincerely,

  Richard Flynn

  There followed an address near Penn Station. I knew the area well, because I’d lived there myself for a while.

  The query was rather unusual.

  I’d read hundreds, if not thousands of queries during my five years as an agent for Bronson and Matters. The agency, where I’d started as a junior assistant, had always had an open submissions policy. Most of the query letters were awkward, lifeless, lacking that certain something that suggests that the potential author is talking to you personally and not just any of the hundreds of agents whose names and addresses you can find in Literary Market Place. Some of them were too long and full of pointless details. But Richard Flynn’s letter didn’t fall into either of those categories. It was concise, well written, and above all it gave off human warmth. He didn’t say that he’d contacted only me, but I was almost certain, without being able to say why, that this was the case. For some reason he hadn’t seen fit to declare in that short missive, he’d chosen me.

  I was hoping to love the manuscript as much as I’d loved the submission letter, and to be able to give a positive answer to the man who’d sent it, a man toward whom I already felt, in some almost unexplainable way, a secret sympathy.

  I set aside the other manuscripts I’d been planning to take a look at, made some coffee, settled down on the couch in the living room, and began to read the excerpt.

  ONE

  For most Americans, 1987 was the year when the stock market rose sky-high only to come crashing back down, the Iran-contra affair continued to rock Ronald Reagan’s chair in the White House, and The Bold and the Beautiful began to invade our homes. For me, it was the year when I fell in love and found out that the devil exists.

  I’d been a student at Princeton for a little over three years, and I was living in an ugly old building on Bayard Lane, between the art museum and the theological seminary library. It had a living room and an open kitchen on the ground floor, and upstairs there were two bedrooms, e
ach with an adjoining bathroom. It was only a ten-minute walk from McCosh Hall, where I attended most of my English courses.

  One October afternoon, when I got back home and entered the kitchen, I was surprised to find there a tall, slim young woman with long blond hair parted in the middle. She gave me a friendly glance from behind thick-framed spectacles, which lent her a simultaneously stern and sexy air. She was trying to squirt mustard from a tube, without realizing that you first have to peel off the tinfoil seal. I unscrewed the cap, took off the seal, and gave the tube back to her. She thanked me, spreading the yellow paste over the jumbo hot dog she’d just boiled.

  “Hey, thanks,” she said, in an accent she’d brought with her from the Midwest and that she seemed disinclined to shed merely to keep in step with fashion. “Want some?”

  “No, I’m fine, thanks. By the way, I’m Richard Flynn. Are you the new tenant?”

  She nodded. She’d taken a hungry bite of the hot dog, and now she tried to swallow it quickly before replying.

  “Laura Baines, pleased to meet you. Did the person who lived here before me have a pet skunk or something? The stench up there’s enough to make your nose hairs drop out. I’ll have to repaint it, anyway. And is there something wrong with the boiler? I had to wait half an hour for the water to heat up.”

  “A heavy smoker,” I explained. “I mean the dude, not the boiler, and not just cigarettes, if you get my meaning. But other than that, he’s a nice guy. He decided overnight to take a sabbatical, so he’s gone back home. He was lucky the landlady didn’t make him pay the rent for the rest of the year. As for the boiler, three different plumbers have come over to fix it. No luck, but I still live in hope.”

  “Bon voyage,” Laura said between bites, addressing the erstwhile tenant. Then she pointed at the microwave oven on the counter. “I’m making some Jolly Time, and then I’m going to watch some TV—they’re showing Jessica live on CNN.”

  “Who’s Jessica?” I asked.

  The microwave pinged to let us know that the popcorn was ready to be poured into the large glass bowl Laura had extracted from the depths of the cupboard above the sink.

  “Jessica McClure is a little girl”—li’l gal—“who fell down a well in Texas,” she explained. “CNN is broadcasting the rescue operation live. How come you never heard about it? Everybody’s talking about it.”

  She put the popcorn in the bowl and signaled for me to follow her into the den.

  We sat down on the couch, and she turned on the TV. For a while, neither of us said anything, as we watched events unfold on the screen. It was a mild, warm October, almost entirely lacking the usual rain, and calm twilight was creeping along the sliding glass doors. Beyond lay the park that surrounded Trinity Church, dark and mysterious.

  Laura finished eating her hot dog, then took a handful of popcorn from the bowl. She seemed to have completely forgotten about me. On the TV screen, an engineer was explaining to a reporter how work was progressing on a parallel well shaft, designed to allow the rescuers to gain access to the child trapped underground. Laura kicked off her slippers and curled her feet under herself on the couch. I noticed that her toenails were painted with purple polish.

  “What are you studying?” I asked her finally.

  “I’m getting my master’s degree in psychology,” she said, without taking her eyes from the screen. “It’s my second. I’ve already got one in math from the University of Chicago. Born and raised in Evanston, Illinois. Ever been there, where folks chew Red Man and burn crosses?”

  I realized that she must be two or three years older than me, and that daunted me a little. When you’re that age, a three-year difference seems like a lot.

  “I thought that was Mississippi,” I said. “No, never been to Illinois. I was born and raised in Brooklyn. I’ve only ever been to the Midwest once, one summer, when I was fifteen, I guess, and my dad and I went fishing in the Ozarks, Missouri. We also visited St. Louis, if I remember right. Psychology, after math?”

  “Well, I was reckoned to be a kind of genius at school,” she said. “In high school, I won all kinds of international math competitions, and at twenty-one I’d already finished a master’s degree, getting ready to do my PhD. But I turned down all the scholarships and came here to do psychology. My MS helped me get into a research program.”

  “Okay, but you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “Have a little patience.”

  She brushed the popcorn crumbs off her T-shirt.

  I remember it well. She was wearing a pair of stonewashed jeans, the kind with several zippers, which was coming into fashion at the time, and a white T-shirt.

  She went to the fridge to fetch a Coke, asking me if I wanted one. She opened the cans, stuck a straw in each, and returned to the couch, handing me one.

  “The summer after I graduated, I fell in love with a boy”—she pronounced it buoy—“from Evanston. He was home for the holidays. He was doing a master’s degree in electronics at MIT, something to do with computers. A handsome and apparently smart guy, named John R. Findley. He was two years older than me, and we’d known each other vaguely in high school. But a month later he was stolen from me by Julia Craig, one of the dumbest creatures I’ve ever met, a kind of hominid who’d learned to articulate around a dozen words, to wax her legs, and how to use a knife and fork. I realized that I was good at equations and integrals, but I didn’t have the faintest clue about how people think in general, and men in particular. I realized that if I wasn’t careful, I’d end up spending my life surrounded by cats, guinea pigs, and parrots. So that’s why I came here, the following fall. Mom was worried and tried to change my mind, but she already knew me well enough to understand that it’d have been easier to teach me how to fly on a broomstick. I’m now in my last year, and I’ve never regretted my decision.”

  “I’m in my final year, too. Have you learned what you set out to?” I asked. “I mean, about the way men think.”

  For the first time, she looked me straight in the eye.

  “Not sure, but I think I’ve made progress. John broke up with Godzilla after just a few weeks. I didn’t answer his calls after that, even though he’s been trying to get in touch with me for months. Maybe I’m just picky, you know.”

  She finished her Coke and put the empty can on the table.

  We continued to watch the rescue of the li’l gal from Texas on TV, and chatted until almost midnight, drinking coffee and going outside into the garden from time to time to smoke the Marlboros she’d fetched from her room. At one point, I helped her carry inside the rest of her stuff from the trunk of her old Hyundai, which was parked in the garage.

  Laura was nice, she had a sense of humor, and I realized that she was very well read. Like any new adult, I was a seething mass of hormones. At the time, I didn’t have a girlfriend and I was desperate to have sex, but I remember clearly that in the beginning I never thought about the possibility of getting her into bed. I was sure she must have a boyfriend, although we never talked about it. But I was disturbed in a pleasant sort of way at the prospect of sharing a house with a woman, which was something I’d never done up until then. It was as if, all of a sudden, I was going to have access to mysteries that had previously been forbidden.

  The reality was that I didn’t like it at college and I could hardly wait to complete my final year and get out of there.

  I’d been born and raised in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, near Grand Street, where homes were a lot cheaper than they are nowadays. Mom taught history at the Boys and Girls High School in Bed-Stuy, and dad was a medical assistant at Kings County Hospital. I wasn’t working-class, in other words, but I felt as if I were, given the blue-collar neighborhood where I lived.

  I grew up without any major material troubles, but at the same time, my folks couldn’t afford a large number of the things we’d have liked to have. Brooklynites were interesting to me, and I felt like a fish in water among that Babel of different races and customs. The 1970s
were hard times for the city of New York, and I remember that a lot of folks were dirt poor and violence was widespread.

  When I arrived at Princeton, I joined a few academic societies, became a member of one of those famous eating clubs on the Street, and hung out with the amateur actors from the Triangle Club.

  In front of a literary circle with an exotic name, I read a number of the short stories I’d written toward the end of high school. The group was run by a vaguely famous author, who taught as a visiting professor, and its members vied with one another in torturing the English language to produce meaningless poems. When they realized that my stories were “classic” in style and that I was finding inspiration in the novels of Hemingway and Steinbeck, they started viewing me as a freak. In any event, a year later I was spending my free time in the library or at home.

  Most of the students were from the East Coast middle class, which had had a big fright in the 1960s, when its whole world seemed to fall apart, and which had educated its scions in such a way as to prevent the madness from ever being repeated. The ’60s had had music, marches, the Summer of Love, experimentation with drugs, Woodstock, and contraceptives. The ’70s saw the end of the Vietnam nightmare and the introduction of disco, flared pants, and racial emancipation. So I had the feeling that there was nothing epic about the ’80s, and that our generation had missed the train. Mr. Ronald Reagan, like a cunning old shaman, had summoned up the spirits of the ’50s to addle the nation’s brains. Money was demolishing the altars of every other god, one by one, preparing to perform its victory dance, while chubby angels with Stetsons perched on their blond curls chanted hymns to free enterprise. Go, Ronnie, go!

  I found the other students to be snobbish conformists, despite the rebellious poses they struck, no doubt in the belief that this was demanded of Ivy Leaguers as a kind of vague memory of previous decades. Traditions were a big thing at Princeton, but to me, they were nothing but playacting—time had emptied them of all meaning.