Yours very truly,
Brinkley
Dear Brinkley,
Write smaller. You’re using up too much paper. What are we going to do when it’s gone? Tried shouting through the grate again, and the silence nearly killed me. (Bad pun.) Don’t be afraid of your mother. She can’t hurt you. You sent her packing. (Though given what I know of her, I suspect she’s in the basement of this place.) Think of me. I’m holding you in my mind.
Sincerely, Velvet
P.S. My hair, what’s left of it, has become a shock of white-blonde. Acceleration.
Dear Velvet,
My second-to-last remaining clump of blond hair came out in my hands! Growing older, growing younger? Perhaps the transformation of our physical bodies is a safe passage, a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card. (I always did love Monopoly.) What becomes of the finite mind in an infinite place? Oh so many questions—the agonized dialectic of life pales in comparison to the agonized dialectic of death. Are we matter? I feel like matter, I bleed like matter. Does matter matter? (Hell does not dampen a taste for puns.)
My mother’s face is still in the fucking mirror! (Pardon me.)
Yours very truly,
Brinkley
A rag doll with its stuffing knocked out—a pale-faced Raggedy Ann in the mirror. I looked smaller even than the last time I’d looked at my whittled figure. Features shifted, bones softened, custard face. I lifted my dress: smooth, tender, unadorned.
Dear Brinkley,
I loved Monopoly too. From the gangplank of Hell to the Boardwalk of reincarnation? I was a blonde baby. Are we travelling—back into the womb? A womb would beat this place by a mile.
Sincerely, Velvet
Dear Velvet,
I was a blond baby too. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I pray I get a better womb.
Yours very truly,
Brinkley
Dear Brinkley,
I am in my mirror—my hanging self. What a horrible sight.
Velvet
P.S. Heard sirens.
Dear Velvet,
Help me. My mirror is bleeding.
B
Bleeding? His mirror was bleeding? Were we trapped in The Shining now?
I curved like a comma on the eyelet spread, Paddington making us into a semi-colon by sitting just above my head. The excoriating sight of my hanging self dangled in my mind. Was this the beginning of Brinkley’s Judgment? Was I for some unknown reason being spared? Never a glutton for optimism, I was sure that couldn’t be it. Face it, Velvet, you’re next.
Rolled onto my back. Helplessness, the precursor to despair, leadened me. The note that I had pushed through the grate in a panic, telling him that my mirror wasn’t bloody, it was all in his head, pinch hard and shake yourself, would be no comfort to him, I knew. I couldn’t help him. He couldn’t help me. We couldn’t help each other.
Seemed like a much longer while had passed than usual and still no note. I stood at the desk flipping through the dwindling pages of my legal pad, doing everything I could to avoid looking at my dishrag hanging body in the mirror. This pause in the letter-flow was alarming, alarm unmitigated by deep breathing. Brinkley reeled around my mind, flung from wall to wall by a pair of bloody claws extending out of his mirror.
Velvet,
My mother is in the mirror, crying blood. Wait—now she is gone. Now the room is reflected as before. I apologize for the shaky, chicken-scratch handwriting. I am curled on the floor in the corner. In the centre of the room, there are three spots of vomit—I could not seem to keep it all in one place.
B
Voices in the room: How is she? . . . Lift her leg . . . Do you want to do your Jane Fonda today? . . . Grab her leg, let’s get the blood flowing . . .
Blurred, as though travelling through the deep heat of a dark place. Then silence, returning like water reestablishing its mirror over the sand.
V: Did you hear the voices? Difficult to make out, but they sounded female. I’m under the sheets as I write this, heart still pounding. It was like the lid flipped off the silence and a bunch of Mexican hat dancers jumped out. Now my ears hurt, and I’m not sure whether it’s from hearing the timbre of voices after so long or the density of the silence that replaced them. Mother in the mirror?
B: No voices, but a sound like a bowl hitting the floor and rolling. My skin must be getting loose—I have jumped in and out of it so many times. Yes, she is in the mirror, holding up her hands now—they are crying blood also. I want to hang my suit jacket over the glass, but I am afraid to get close to it, afraid she might reach through and grab me, or that some other terrible thing will happen. Would it matter now? What could be worse? But I believe we have asked that question before, and we have been duly and thoroughly answered. And Velvet, I really am frozen with fear—I cannot go near it. I am mostly staying under the bed, receiving your notes and writing you back. But sometimes I crave bright light, and every time I stick my head out from under the bed I am compelled to stare at the glass. I know that you see goodness in me, and for that I am so thankful, but perhaps the mirror is the truth. I am a murderer, after all.
Alfalfa. That was the only word to describe the remaining sprouts of white-blonde hair that dotted my skull. Interesting it was, to see one’s skull for the first time, the shape and texture of it, its secret marks and bulges. I noted an infant’s pliability, a delicate doughiness.
Though my lack of hair may have made them more striking, there could be no doubt: my eyes were huge, much bigger than any drugstore kohl pencil had ever made them appear. It was as if the rims were drawing back, and the other-planetary aquarium-blue was ever more revealed. I was becoming E.T.
The voices had stopped, but bursts of static now and then displaced the quietness, jolting me and reminding me of the times Davie and I had sat at the beach at night, in his falling-apart car, watching the moon disturb the tide and listening to music on his terrible radio. The static in the room sounded just like that radio, but it didn’t come with any songs.
I crawled under the bed and pressed my hand to the grate.
V: You’re not a murderer, get that through your bald head. You put her out of her misery, which is more than I would have done, and sent her off right with chow mein and fortune cookies. Will you press your hand to the grate? My hand is here, and I want us to be palm to palm, as it were, for a moment.
B: I am right here, and because I can see you so clearly in my mind, I can feel you. There are coloured lights outside my window.
V: I don’t have any lights. What colours?
B: Every colour. And some—I do not think I can name them.
V: You’ve never seen them before?
B: They are impossible to describe. It is every colour we have known, and others we have not, all swirling together. A sight that makes a regular sunset wan by compare.
V: A sunset on acid.
B: So beautiful it hurts.
V: I’m not beautiful. The oldest infant I’ve ever seen, or the youngest old person. Bald, an alien.
B: So am I, and shrunken. Clara would be horrified at the sight of me.
V: I think I look kind of interesting and probably so do you. Frightening, but interesting.
B: I have the sense that we are dissolving. Perhaps I will join the colours outside.
V: Don’t leave me.
B: I won’t.
V: Promise me.
B: I promise.
V: I am a selfish woman.
B: You’re not selfish. Who wants to be alone? I was mostly alone, but I had Clara, and she was enough for me. Alone with Clara Bow, I am okay.
V: I wish I’d met you back in life. You get me. You know how terrifying the Shadowman is. I wouldn’t have been lonely if I’d known you.
B: If the Shadowman comes back, tell him I will break his face.
V: I will. That’s comforting.
B: I feel brave, all of a sudden. What a nice
feeling.
V: I should’ve been braver. Maybe if the Shadowman comes back, I will be.
B: I am certain of it.
V: How kind of you to say.
B: You are most welcome.
Lying under the bed, I ran a hand over my head. The last sprouted-grain tufts of hair came off, floated down onto the carpet. It was easier to experience such a thing in the relative dark. Skull so smooth, a warm orb under my hand. My arms and legs were satiny too, and I thought of the hundred dollars I had saved, back in my other life, hidden in the top drawer of my writing desk, to be allocated to my laser hair removal fund.
Voices fluttered in and out of the room, moths that flitted off as soon as you could almost understand them. Females mostly, but sometimes a male. The same male, I suspected.
Angels crossed my mind, but then I realized that if this was Hell they were automatically out of the picture. And, anyway, none of the sound clips I had managed to decipher lately—blood, eat, colour, pressure—resonated much like I imagined celestial-speak would. And angels ought to unlock the damn door and come inside, not stand in the ether sending coded messages.
I felt safer under the bed than in any other part of the room, a child in body, drawn up in a fetal curve. Pieces of torn paper were spread around me like large, dry snowflakes. Face to the grate, Tiny Tim outside a toy store.
V: So do you still think we’re in the process of being reincarnated?
B: I do hope we look this terrible for a good reason.
V: I don’t mean you return as a goat or some species of insect.
B: I know. Unless the Buddhists are correct. In which case I am about to sprout a tail. I hope we meet. And I hope I see Clara again. I miss her.
V: Maybe you’ll make new friends that aren’t time travellers. You deserve to have lots of friends.
B: So do you. But I think that we are different from other people. Which makes it hard to have lots of friends.
V: But maybe next time we would fit in. Do we really want to be dropped off—back into life?
B: Of course. That is an endless—omnipresent—hunger.
V: Why—God is a recidivist?
B: We are.
V: Yes. And now we’re here.
B: God must hate me. I hate me. My mother hated me. The only person who loved me was Clara Bow.
V: And now me! No God I could ever know is capable of hating you. And while I have not been blessed with any sign of hope—except for your letters, which, when I think of it, should be enough—the same can’t be said of you. The colours at your window—a surprise hope.
B: True.
V: I’m still waiting for my damn colours. Desperately trying to conjure Rainbow Brite.
B: When will I be taken back to where I came from, in the beginning?
V: You promised not to leave me.
B: We will go together.
V: What about your mother in the mirror? Illusion?
B: I am hoping so.
V: You think this is temporary, then? A waiting room.
B: Perhaps. A man of mercurial moods, am I.
V: If you had lived, what would you have done?
B: I don’t understand.
V: What would you have done with your life?
B: I always wanted to go to Coney Island. Clara Bow worked at a hot dog stand there when she was a teenager.
V: Anything else?
B: I would have liked to run a little shop, in truth. A shop that sold movie memorabilia, and household items with a cinematic twist. Nosferatu lunchboxes, The Sheik hairdryers, Casablanca place mats. Of course, my favourite item would have been the Children of Divorce mouse pad, a tribute to Clara. But Clara does not compare to you. I admire you, Velvet.
V: You admire a suicide?
B: No, I admire you. You are very brave. The Shadowman is terrifying.
V: Thanks. But I’m still a suicide. He got me in the end.
B: Some cultures consider suicide a noble act.
V: You are better than I, Brinkley. What I did was not an act of love.
B: Not better, the same. What I did was not an act of love either. I did not really want to set my mother free, I wanted to set myself free.
V: We all need someone to get lost with, right? And a roadside attraction at which to ask for directions. Maybe you’re that person for me.
B: You’re that person for me too.
V: Wouldn’t all this make an amazing novel?
B: ’Twould put my Harlequin romance to shame.
A volley of voices broke through the static.
V: Can you hear that?
B: I hear the sound of a lawnmower. And someone is reading. Dostoevsky, I think.
V: I heard: “Don’t forget to wash her feet.” And: “What a beautiful day!” I miss the sound of lawnmowers.
B: They’re reading Crime and Punishment. A Judgment on me?
V: Then the Judgment will be for us both.
B: Could our mirrors be oracles? If so, then is your life my future? Please let it be so, not my mother’s angry face.
V: Yes, oracles of the past—modern Greek tragedy, sans poetry, and with some lovely costumes. We’re in The Delphi Room.
B: Most definitely someone is reading from Crime and Punishment. A woman. She does not sound threatening. But under such circumstances—could be taken as last rites before eternal flames.
V: If we were going to be flambéed, it would’ve happened already. There will be no forever of flames. You’re stuck with me forever.
B: Good. That makes me believe in a God . . .
V: That is the most romantic thing anyone has ever expressed to me. Not that I deserve it, in all my flawed glory.
B: I love your flaws. The outtakes are always the best part of the movie.
V: Nothing like a good blooper reel.
B: People should give what they most need.
V: Were you an undiscovered cinephile saint, hidden on a Toronto porch?
B: No saints here. Only the scars from a mother who looked like a movie star, and a love who actually is a movie star. But everything falls away except pain and a few truths.
V: This place has made me less interested in philosophy.
B: I don’t think more punishment awaits us. I am suddenly feeling quite sure of that.
V: I think we’d both fallen for a cartoon concept of Hell. What makes you so sure we’re out of the woods?
B: I crawled out from under my bed to look out my window and all white is gone. Colours everywhere—liquid flowers, gossamer stars, an explosion of sunset.
V: Panic—I have no colours. All white.
B: I have a strange feeling—just below my bellybutton. Not an itch, not a tingle, not a rumble, not a ripple—but all of those.
V: A good feeling? Sounds like the beginning of an orgasm. Where’s mine? (Even in this place, I’m still asking that same question.)
B: Yes, good, quite faint, like the kernel of something warm.
V: See—if those colours are a preview, you will be welcomed.
B: Welcomed where? True, I never imagined Hell would resemble the aurora borealis, but—
V: There is no denying it. Something is happening in your room. Something good. Nothing is happening in mine, save for my gruesome double in the mirror.
B: I have already said that I will not leave you. We both know that I have no power to keep that promise, but I have all the power necessary to mean it.
I always wondered if our dreams were our real existence, enclosed in a real world, and the lives we remember, the people, the jobs, the hours, were only the black wraith of that, a waiting in line to get back inside.
V: If truth is so subject to interpretation, what is the difference between truth and a lie? Intention, I suppose. Things, important things, must happen of which you have no memory, while some of the mind’s clear photographs of events must in fact be spectres of wishful thinking, or suggestion.
B: One thing is for certain: there is no clear divide bet
ween fact and fiction, reality and memory, event and imagination. Clara told me that once. The smell of vomit is making me sick all over again. I left my hiding spot under the bed and searched for some disinfectant, wet wipes, etc. No luck. Laughable, I suppose. Why do we do things we know will be fruitless? My reward: I vomited again. My mother is there, the eye of all, an endless stream of bloody tears. Funny that I can throw up, since it was a lifetime ago that I ate something. The nature of: I suppose we can regurgitate ad infinitum. The feeling in my stomach is getting stronger—if I go, you know everything. The sound of Crime and Punishment is soothing to me. The woman’s voice is sweet. She draws out the words as though she likes the feel of them in her mouth. Quieter now. Some of the words I am losing.
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