The City of Mirrors: A Novel (Book Three of The Passage Trilogy)

by Justin Cronin

  Two days before our departure, Liz’s father announced that we would be eating lobsters for dinner. (He did all the cooking; I’d never seen Patty so much as fry an egg.) This was for my benefit; he had learned, to his alarm, that I had never eaten one. He returned from the fish market in the late afternoon bearing a sack of squirming red-black monsters, removed one with a carnivore’s grin, and made me hold it. No doubt I looked horrified; everyone had a good laugh, but I didn’t mind. I loved her father a little for it, in fact. A lazy rain had been falling all day, sapping our energy; now we had a purpose. As if in acknowledgment of this fact, the sun emerged in time for the festivities; Jonas and I carried the dining table out to the back porch. I had noticed something about him. In the last couple of days, he had adopted a manner I could only describe as secretive. Something was afoot. At the cocktail hour, we drank bottles of dark beer (the only proper accompaniment, Oscar explained); then on to the main event. With great solemnity, Oscar presented me with a lobster bib. I had never understood this infantile practice; no one else was wearing one, and I felt a bit resentful until I cracked a claw and sprayed lobster juice all over myself, to an explosion of table-wide hilarity.

  Imagine the perfection of the scene. The table with its red-checkered cloth; the ridiculous bounty of the feast; the golden sunset streaming toward us across the sound, then sinking into the sea with a final flash like an elegant gentleman tipping his hat in farewell. The candles came out, polishing our faces with their flickering glow. How had my life led me to such a place, among such people? I wondered what my parents would have said. My mother would have been pleased for me; wherever she was, I hoped its rules included the power to observe the living. As for my father, I didn’t know. I had severed all ties completely. I saw now how unfair I’d been and vowed to get in touch. Perhaps it was not too late for him to make my graduation.

  When we’d finished dessert—a strawberry-rhubarb pie—Jonas clinked his glass with his fork.

  “Everybody, if I could have your attention.”

  He rose and moved around the table so that he was standing next to Liz. With a little grunt of effort, he turned her chair so she was facing him.

  “Jonas,” she said with a laugh, “what the hell are you doing?”

  His hand fumbled in his pocket, and I knew. My stomach plunged, then the rest of me. As he bent to one knee, my friend withdrew the small velvet box. He opened the lid and held it before her. A huge, nervous grin was on his face. I saw the stone. It was enormous, made for a queen.

  “Liz, I know we’ve talked about it. But I wanted to make it official. I feel like I’ve loved you all my life.”

  “Jonas, I don’t know what to say.” She looked up and laughed uneasily. Her cheeks were flushed with embarrassment. “This is so corny!”

  “Say yes. That’s all you have to do. I promise to give you everything you want in life.”

  I wanted to be ill.

  “C’mon,” Stephanie said. “What are you waiting for?”

  Liz looked at her father. “At least tell me he asked you first.”

  The man was smiling, a conspirator. “That he did.”

  “And what did you tell him, O wise man?”

  “Honey, it’s really your decision. It’s a big step. But I’ll say I’m not opposed.”

  “Mom?”

  Ever so slightly, the woman was crying. She nodded ardently, speechless.

  “God,” Stephanie moaned, “I can’t stand the suspense! If you don’t marry him, I will.”

  As Liz looked back at Jonas, did her eyes pause at my face? My memory says she did, though perhaps I imagined this.

  “Well, I, um—”

  Jonas removed the ring from the box. “Put it on. That’s all you have to do. Make me the happiest man alive.”

  She stared at it, expressionless. The damn thing was fat as a tooth.

  “Please,” said Jonas.

  She looked up. “Yes,” she said, and nodded. “My answer is yes.”

  “You really mean it?”

  “Don’t be dense, Jonas. Of course I mean it.” At last she smiled. “Get over here.”

  They embraced, then kissed; Jonas slid the ring onto her finger. I looked out over the water, unable to bear the scene. But even its broad blue expanse seemed to mock me.

  “Oh!” Liz’s mother cried. “I’m so happy!”

  “Now, no sneaking around tonight, you two,” her father laughed. “You’re in separate rooms for the duration. Save it for the wedding night.”

  “Daddy, don’t be gross!”

  Jonas turned to her father and extended his hand. “Thank you, sir. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I’ll do everything in my power to make her happy.”

  They shook. “I know you will, son.”

  Out came the champagne, which Liz’s father had kept in the wings. Glasses were filled, then raised.

  “To the happy couple,” Oscar said. “Long lives, happiness, a house full of love.”

  The champagne was delicious. It must have cost a bundle. I could barely swallow it down.

  —

  I couldn’t sleep. I didn’t want to.

  As soon as I was sure Jonas was out cold, I snuck from the house. It was well after midnight; the moon, fat and white, had risen over the sound. I had no plan, only the desire to be alone with my feelings of desolation. I removed my shoes and took the stairs to the beach. Not a breath of wind blew; the world felt stuck. The tiniest of waves lapped upon the shore. I began to walk. The sand beneath my feet was still damp from the day of rain. The houses above me were all dark, some still boarded up, like tombs.

  At a distance I saw someone sitting in the sand. It was Liz. I halted, uncertain what to do. She was holding a champagne bottle. She lifted it to her mouth and took a long drink. She noticed me, then looked away, but the damage was done; I couldn’t turn back now.

  I sat on the sand beside her. “Hey.”

  “Of course it would be you,” she said, slurring her words.

  “Why ‘of course’?”

  She took another swig. The ring was on her finger. “I noticed you didn’t say anything tonight. It’s considered polite, you know, to congratulate the bride-to-be.”

  “Okay, congratulations.”

  “You say that with such conviction.” She sighed mournfully. “Jesus, am I drunk. Get this away from me.”

  She passed me the bottle. Just the dregs remained; I wished there were more. There were times to be sober, and this wasn’t one of them. I polished it off and tossed it away.

  “If you didn’t want to, why did you say yes?”

  “With everyone staring at me? You try it.”

  “So back out. He’ll understand.”

  “No, he won’t. He’ll ask and ask, and I’ll eventually give in and be the luckiest woman on earth, to be married to Jonas Lear.”

  We were quiet for a time.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said.

  She laughed sarcastically. Her gaze was cast over the sea. “Why not? Everybody’s doing it.”

  “That night in New York. I was asleep, and something happened. I felt something.”

  “Did you now.”

  “Yes, I did.” I waited. Liz said nothing. “Did you…kiss me?”

  “Now, why would I do a thing like that?”

  She was looking right at me. “Liz—”

  “Shhh.” A frozen moment followed. Our faces were just a foot apart. Then she did something puzzling. She took off her glasses and put them in my hand.

  “You know, without these, I can’t see anything. What’s funny is that it’s like nobody can see me, either. Isn’t that strange? I kind of feel invisible.”

  I absolutely could have done it. Should have done it, long before. Why hadn’t I? Why hadn’t I taken her in my arms and pressed my mouth to hers and told her how I felt, consequences be damned? Who’s to say I couldn’t give her just as good a life? Marry me, I thought. Marry me instead. Or don’t marry anyone at all. Stay just
as you are, and I will love you forever, as I do now, because you are the other half of me.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I think I’m going to throw up.”

  Then she did; she turned her face away and retched onto the sand. I held her hair back as all the lobster and champagne came up and out of her.

  “I’m sorry, Tim.” She was crying a little. “I’m so sorry.”

  I lifted her to her feet. She was mumbling more apologies as I draped her arm over my shoulders. She was close to dead weight now. Somehow I managed to haul her up the stairs and prop her in a chair on the divan on the porch. I was at a total loss; how would this look? I couldn’t take her up to her room, not with Stephanie there. I doubted I could have gotten her up the stairs anyway without waking the entire house. I drew her upright again and carried her to the living room. The sofa would have to do; she could always say she’d had trouble sleeping and come downstairs to read. A crocheted blanket lay across the back of the sofa; I pulled it over her. She was fast asleep now. I got a glass of water from the kitchen and put it on the coffee table where she could find it, then took a chair to watch her. Her breathing became deep and even, her face slack. I allowed some more time to pass to be certain she would not be sick again, and got to my feet. There was something I needed to do. I bent over her and kissed her on the forehead.

  “Good night,” I whispered. “Good night, goodbye.”

  I crept up the stairs. Dawn wasn’t far off; through the open windows, I could hear the birds beginning to sing. I made my way down the hall to the room I shared with Jonas. I gently turned the handle and stepped inside, but not before I heard, behind me, the snap of a closing door.

  —

  The cab rolled up the drive at six A.M. I was waiting on the porch with my bag.

  “Where to?” the driver asked.

  “The bus station.”

  He glanced up through the windshield. “You really live in this place?”

  “No chance of that.”

  I was putting my bag in the trunk when the door of the house opened. Stephanie came striding down the walk, wearing one of the long T-shirts she slept in. It was actually one of mine.

  “Sneaking off, are you? I saw the whole thing, you know.”

  “It wasn’t what you thought.”

  “Sure it wasn’t. You’re a total asshole, you know that?”

  “I’m aware of that, yes.”

  She rocked her face upward, hands on her hips. “God. How could I be so blind? It was totally obvious.”

  “Do me a favor, will you?”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Jonas can’t ever know.”

  She laughed bitterly. “Oh, believe me, the last thing I want is to get mixed up with this mess. It’s your problem.”

  “Feel free to think of it that way.”

  “What do you want me to tell them? As long as I’m being such a fucking liar.”

  I thought for a moment. “I don’t care. A sick relative. It doesn’t really matter.”

  “Just tell me: did you ever think about me in any of this? Did I even once cross your mind?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Fuck you,” she said, and strode away.

  I lowered myself into the cab. The driver was filling out a slip of paper on a clipboard. He glanced at me through the rearview. “Kinda rough, pal,” he said. “Trust me, I’ve been there.”

  “I’m not really in the mood to talk, thanks.”

  He tossed his clipboard onto the dash. “I was only trying to be nice.”

  “Well, don’t,” I said, and with that we drove away.

  * * *

  19

  I left them all behind.

  I did not attend graduation. Back in Cambridge, I packed my belongings—three years later, there still wasn’t much—and telephoned the biochemistry department at Rice. Of all the programs I had been accepted to, it possessed the virtue of being the farthest away, in a city I knew nothing about. It was a Saturday, so I had to leave a message, but yes, I told them, I’d be coming. I thought about abandoning my tuxedo; perhaps the next occupant would get some use out of it. But this seemed peevish and overly symbolic, and I could always throw it out later. Waiting outside, double-parked, was a rental car. As I closed my suitcase, the phone began to ring, and I ignored it. I carried my things downstairs, dropped off my key at the Winthrop House office, and drove away.

  I arrived in Mercy in the middle of the night. I felt as if I’d been gone for a century. I slept in my car outside the house and awoke to the sound of tapping on the window. My father.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He was wearing a bathrobe; he had come out of the house to get the Sunday paper and noticed the car. He had aged a great deal, in the manner of someone who no longer cared much about his appearance. He had not shaved; his breath was bad. I followed him into the house, which seemed eerily the same, though it was very dusty and smelled like old food.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked me. “I was going to have cereal, but I think I have some eggs.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “I wasn’t really planning on staying. I just wanted to say hello.”

  “Let me put some coffee on.”

  I waited in the living room. I had expected to be nervous, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t really feeling much of anything. My father returned from the kitchen with two mugs and sat across from me.

  “You look taller,” he said.

  “I’m actually the same height. You must remember me wrong.”

  We drank our coffee.

  “So, how was college? I know you just graduated. They sent me a form.”

  “It was fine, thank you.”

  “That’s all you’ve got to say about it?” The question wasn’t peevish; he merely seemed interested.

  “Mostly.” I shrugged. “I fell in love. It didn’t really work out, though.”

  He thought for a moment. “I suppose you’ll want to visit your mother.”

  “That would be nice.”

  I asked him to stop at a grocery store so I could pick up some flowers. They didn’t have much, just daisies and carnations, but I did not think my mother would mind, and I told the girl behind the counter to wrap them with some greens to make them nice. We drove out of town. The interior of my father’s Buick was full of fast-food trash. I held up a bag from McDonald’s. A few dried-out fries rattled inside it.

  “You shouldn’t eat this stuff,” I said.

  We arrived at the cemetery, parked, and walked the rest of the way. It was a pleasant morning. We were passing through a sea of graves. My mother’s headstone was located in the area for cremations: smaller headstones, spaced close together. Hers had just her name, Lorraine Fanning, and the dates. She had been fifty-seven.

  I put the flowers down and stepped back. I thought about certain days, things we’d done together, about being her son.

  “It’s not bad to be here,” I said. “I thought it might be.”

  “I don’t come all that much. I guess I should.” My father took a long breath. “I really screwed this up. I know that.”

  “It’s all right. It’s all over now.”

  “I’m kind of falling apart. I have diabetes, my blood pressure’s through the roof. I’m forgetting things, too. Like yesterday, I had to sew a button on my shirt, and I couldn’t find the scissors.”

  “So go to a doctor.”

  “It seems like a lot of trouble.” He paused. “The girl you’re in love with. What’s she like?”

  I thought for a moment. “Smart. Beautiful. Kind of sarcastic, but in a funny way. There wasn’t one thing that did it, though.”

  “I think that’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s how it was with your mother.”

  I looked up, into the spring day. Seven hundred miles away, in Cambridge, the graduation ceremony would be just getting rolling. I wondered what my friends were thinking about me.

  “She loved you very much.”

&nb
sp; “I loved her, too.” I looked at him and smiled. “It’s nice here,” I said. “Thanks for bringing me.”

  We returned to the house.

  “If you want I can make up your room,” my father said. “I left it just as it was. It’s probably not very clean, though.”

  “Actually, I need to get going. I have a long drive.”

  He seemed a little sad. “Well. All right then.” He walked me to my car. “Where are you off to?”

  “Texas.”

  “What’s there?”

  “Texans, I guess.” I shrugged. “More school.”

  “Do you need any money?”

  “They’re giving me a stipend. I should be all right.”

  “Well, let me know if you need more. You’re welcome to it.”

  We shook hands and then, somewhat awkwardly, embraced. If I’d had to guess, I would have said my father wasn’t going to live much longer. This turned out to be true; we would see each other only four more times before the heart attack that killed him. He was alone in the house when it happened. Because it was a weekend, several days would pass before anybody noticed he was missing and thought to look.

  I got into the car. My father was standing above me. He motioned with his hand for me to roll down the window. “Call me when you get there, okay?”

  I told him I would, and I did.

  —

  In Houston, I rented the first apartment I looked at, a garage studio with a view of the back of a Mexican restaurant, and got a job shelving books at the Rice library to tide myself over for the summer. The city was strange-looking and hotter than the mouth of hell, but it suited me. We search for ourselves in our surroundings, and everything I saw was either brand-new or falling apart. Most of the city was quite ugly—a sea of low-rise retail, shabby apartment complexes, and enormous, overcrowded freeways piloted by maniacs—but the area around the university was rather posh, with large, well-kept houses and wide boulevards flanked by live oaks so perfectly manicured they looked less like trees than sculptures of trees. For six hundred dollars, I bought my first car, a snot-yellow 1983 Chevy Citation with bald tires, 230,000 miles on the odometer, and a sagging vinyl ceiling I used a staple gun to reattach. I’d heard nothing from Liz or Jonas, but of course they had no idea where I was. There was a time in America when it was still possible to disappear by going left when everybody expected you to go right. With a little digging, they probably could have found me—a few well-placed calls to a few department chairs—but this presupposed that they would want to. I had no idea what they would want. I didn’t think I ever had.