Objects in the Mirror

by Nicolò Govoni

  The other looks at them. From above. Observes their embrace in the puffs of dust, their passion pushing them under a table wrapped in plastic. He smiles to himself, smiles at them, the sole spectator of their deadly urgency.

  Inside her, it feels like a lawn, vast and full and deeply green, countless shades of it, ocher where the relentless sun hits the grass, and viridian where it never shines, and she likes it, she likes the dust and her new lover, she likes the frustration that she still feels growing inside.

  The other joins, too. He strokes his back. Searching her mouth. Grabs his head and pushes it to her. They kiss. One slides out, the other enters. Like brothers, they avoid laying their eyes on each other’s members. Modesty, you know, a quite important thing to have. She is waiting for him.

  His sex knows her intimately, it makes her feel different. He’s red, a fire on the beach, and she discovers the natural diversity of her two lovers, and she is full of passion, but an empty one.

  While one loves from the inside, the other pays tribute to both their bodies with his mouth and with his breath and with his fingers and teeth and eyelashes and nose, and looking for the point where the two bodies merge into one, he grabs her, they both do, pinning her against the wall, stretching her limbs wide apart, and here their hunger breaks free.

  The mouths melt. The panting. The muscles losing their original ownership. It is unknown who holds who, who abandons oneself, albeit temporarily, giving up their own identity. Sadness sublimated into joy. Their union is a prayer.

  On the ground again, the necks, the back of the hands, the kisses on her left breast, confetti of shadows and light on their sweat covered bodies, and she is on top, moving sinuous like grass in the wind, arching like a bow while one lies beneath her, and the other takes her from behind.

  They both feel the presence of one other, inside her.

  On her knees, she gives pleasure with her mouth to one of her lovers, who pushes her against the other, who lies still, his arms wrapped around her, his face hidden in her breasts. He cries, perhaps, or maybe he simply enjoys the recoil of the pleasure of his friend who towers right above his head.

  A splendid sense of awareness builds inside her, the pleasure of knowing she’s nothing but a mediator for the camaraderie of her lovers, that she deliberately degraded herself to act as a bridge between them, and at the same time, elevated herself to be the sole focus of their love.

  All three move at their own pace, and she chokes and struggles to find a common ground between the two, and so she bares her teeth and twists her hips and harvests moans of pain from both in return, and takes pride in the power she exerts on them, and she laughs, they laugh, all three of them do, because just as they kill and die together, together they should live.

  Now one lies in the middle and now the other, and they both experience the pleasure of stimulating the farthest corners of their mouths, exercising pleasure and pain, and thus cancelling the perception of time in the unanimity of their union.

  Knees wet with their own blood.

  Studying the temple of their bodies like never before, the very concept of their individuality fades and becomes uncertain and almost unfathomable, and there no longer is a receiver and a dispenser, but a single entity with irregular contours, whose corners are the center, and the center its corners.

  Are the towers collapsing? Does the jungle of hands still have an owner? Is perhaps this loneliness the only thing that may complete them? Is the new season of Sherlock out yet?

  Their body is thirsty for fulfillment, and their loins contract and everything goes smooth as honey and then they wait, feeling the wave coming, and it cleans their mind of all the filth they accomplished so far and will in the future. And they may try to control this feeling, but control is nothing but a mirage. All they can do is scream.

  The universe in check.

  They ejaculate. One, two, all of them, it doesn’t matter. There are seventeen doors. And one window. Everything freezes.

  One of them lies on the ground, his dark back in the dust—he doesn’t move; the amber of her skin covering the tensed muscles of her back; on the face of the other, a crystallized moment of pleasure. Stopped in time. Their unsheathed teeth. Their fists and hair. Black and brown and ash blonde.

  The universe in check.

  They come back to life. Although the universe is still frozen, they start breathing again and resume screaming from where they left, sweating and cursing it out, thrashing their limbs about. Silence falls, yet it’s not silence, it’s the immobility of all sounds combined, sounds repeated indefinitely, merged into a single note, buzzing like a frozen, endless song. That’s right, this is not immobility, it’s perpetual motion.

  They stir, realizing they’re the only things alive in a polaroid hell. What can they do in this crystal reality? Rob a bank? Fuck a famous actress? Blow up the White House? Only that there would be no one to acknowledge their achievements, no one to love them or admire them or even condemn them, so why bother at all?

  Seventeen doors. One window.

  The universe capsizes.

  It does so without a noise.

  Everything flips over and they fall sliding on the floor, toward the window, and gravity gets stronger dragging them down to the void beyond the glass, but they don’t even try to resist and fall, fall through the window. They fall. Through the window.

  The ticking of a clock fills the air.

  So they’re climbing up the stairs. A large spiral staircase. The glass steps floating, suspended in a sea of nothing, separated from one another but kept in place by an invisible force. Up the stairs they go. The staircase seems to have no beginning, spins endlessly beneath them, lost in the purple haze that envelops everything. They climb the stairs. Except for the haze, you can’t see anything. The air is filled with the ticking of a clock and a roaring white noise, like inside an airplane. They are not afraid. They know where they’re going.

  Squinting, one can see indistinct shapes floating in the mist in the offing. Above them emerges a floating island, a rock penetrated in the center by the staircase. They keep on climbing. Massive gears emerge from the island. Against all laws of physic, the intensity of the ticking remains constant as they approach, filling all evenly wherever they are on the stairway.

  They land, emerging on top of the island, where the stairs end. The gears, now, turn all around them.

  He sits in front of the throne, the Lord of the Gears. The throne itself is entirely made of gears. Before the throne, three rocky steps on which he sits, his elbow resting on his knee, his chin resting in the palm of his upturned hand. He is wearing a lumberjack shirt and blue jeans. On his feet, a pair of old boots. His square face framed by a mop of curls, apparently left to grow naturally, but on closer eye it’s clear they’ve been groomed with almost maniacal precision. Waiting, he seems lost in his own flights of fancy.

  All around, the gears rotate tirelessly, their clicking sound saturating everything. It’s a clock tower, but there is no clock in sight.

  The Lord of the Gears slowly rises. Not young. Not old. He simply exists.

  “Well?” he says, stopping about ten feet from them.

  “I won,” they say.

  The Lord of the Gears caresses the veil of beard covering his jaw. He says nothing.

  “I did what you told me to do,” they insist.

  “I told you how to do it, nothing else.”

  They waver. “I don’t understand.”

  The Lord of the Gears grins. “There is nothing to understand.”

  Silence. Only the ticking of the huge, invisible clock.

  “Come on, come on now,” says the Lord of the Gears.

  “But it took me—”

  “Exactly,” he says, shaking his head. “Think of how long it will take you to go back.”

  Tick-tock.

  “There is no going back,” they say.

  The Lord of the Gears clicks his tongue. “What, you want to steal my job now?”

 
; They climb down the steps.

  After a while one goes, “Why don’t we get married?”

  “Yeah,” says the other, the sound of his voice muffled by the purple mist. “Why don’t we get married, the three of us?”

  “We’re a trouple,” she says, climbing down the endless staircase.

  The moon, behind a curtain of clouds, hangs low, wetting the hills with its light, drawing the contours of the overpass in the night. The Enfield hurtles slicing through the deserted highway, following the road along the winding landscape, parched fields stretching left and right.

  Nil swallows, trying to bring relief to his sore throat, and Ferang sinks his nails into his palms, while Mel enjoys the breeze of the countryside on her face.

  The last curve before the overpass reveals a village nestled in the darkness of a blackout, perched on the side of the hill. Nil squints trying to make out the details, but even by pushing his glasses up his nose he can’t spot any activity, as if it were abandoned. Probably it is.

  Mel parks near a bramble bush, right where the road bends in a blind spot. Getting off the bike, she hears Ferang sighing with relief when the contact between their sweaty bodies is broken, but she cares not, and breathes in the night air, the smell of dry fruit, the smell of dead rivers.

  “Come on, Snowden,” she says.

  Nil stirs. Gets off the bike. Looking around, scratching his cheek, he eyes the village again. Nothing.

  The chirping of insects fills the distance between them.

  Nil turns to look them in the eyes, first him and then her.

  “Shall we go back?”

  A beat.

  Ferang goes, “Who wants to hear a joke?”

  “Sure,” says Mel, smiling.

  “Ever noticed that mirrors look like eyes when looked up close?”

  Bugs chirping it away.

  “This is not a joke,” someone says.

  Other bugs chirping it back.

  “Do you think this whole thing scarred us?” Ferang says after a while.

  “I hope so,” says Mel. “I wouldn’t mind becoming the next Nietzsche.”

  Mel is wearing a white sundress, her pretty hair falling over her bare shoulders, and Ferang wears blue shorts and a red t-shirt and a pair of red flip-flops, and Nil a white shirt and a pair of jeans the price of which he doesn’t remember, for in his pocket a plastic bag sings with his every step, and Mel jams a dance step, offering them her hands, and Ferang looks at her funny, but it’s Nil who takes her hand, and Mel laughs and snaps her fingers, her feet raising clouds of dust.

  Ferang wobbles his head, stomps the ground and claps his hands to an imaginary beat. Nil puts his arm around him. Ferang, full of gallantry, extends his hand towards Mel. She doesn’t take it. She smiles at them both.

  “There’s no music,” one says.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  And it’s amazing, to rise and fall from the skies, alone on the road with nothing more than five coins in your pocket, on your lips the taste of a bitter kiss, and in your chest a heart full of

  Any reference to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Don’t read anything into this.