SUSY Asylum

by Michael Pierce

  I walked up to the crouched man, with Desiree and Darius a few steps behind. The monkey scampered down my body and rejoined the creepy-looking man, who stood up to meet my gaze straight on.

  “Arnold chose you, lad. You should feel honored,” the man said.

  “Chose me for what?” I tried to sound strong, but I couldn’t tell how convincing I came across.

  “For a chance to converse with Madame Matilda.”

  Darius stepped up to my side and spoke into my ear. “No one can just go in and see Madame Matilda. Only those who are chosen may enter her tent. It’s like one in a thousand.”

  “The odds are even greater than that, my dear boy.” The man grinned wide, reached over and pulled back one side of the slit in the tent, and nodded his head for us to proceed inside. I looked back at Desiree before entering and she gave me a vague shrug.

  “Come in, children. Come in,” a young woman called from behind a tall, circular table. She sat on what appeared to be a bar stool. There was only one stool across from her. She wore a decorative black hat and gossamer veil covering her eyes. My attention was immediately drawn to her sparkling red lipstick, and then shifted down to the powdery cleavage popping out of her low-cut dress. I diverted my gaze quickly, but it was hard not to glance back.

  She sat up straighter and pushed out her chest as we neared the table. Her assortment of bracelets slid up her arm when she positioned her hands into a steeple in front of her.

  “Sit, Oliver,” she said in a deep voice that made her sound much older than she looked. Madame Matilda couldn’t have been older than twenty-five and judging by her looks alone I thought her to be even younger. But if I had closed my eyes and listened to her speak, I would have sworn she was at least fifty.

  It wasn’t until I’d taken a seat on the stool that it clicked that she’d said my name without me ever saying a word. I shot a puzzled look to Desiree and Darius. They both remained straight-faced.

  “How do you know my name?” I asked.

  “I am Madame Matilda.” She smirked playfully. “I know a great many things. One of which is that you’re not supposed to be here.”

  “Your monkey invited us in—”

  “Not here in the tent. Here,” she said, emphasizing and elongating the final word.

  “Why do you say that?” I gulped, scared of how she might answer.

  Madame Matilda reached for my hand. She looked at both of my friends and then back at me. The enigmatic woman met my eyes with a stare that pierced through my consciousness and ventured into places I’ve never shared with anyone. “Your father would not approve.”

  I noticed under her shifting bracelets that she didn’t have a tattoo ID—or DNA Brand, as Darius had called it. She turned my hand over several times in hers, rubbing the back and tracing subtle lines on my palm.

  “What do you know of my father?” I demanded.

  “He’s a very powerful man, but I’m sure you already know that.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I don’t really know anything about him. I can’t even remember what he looks like.”

  “I see you and him together, here in the city. It was the first time you had been here—here in Provex City. You and the rest of your family came from far away, escaping with the wolf on your heels.”

  “Kafka?” I asked, mesmerized by what she was saying.

  “You are a young boy. You hand him a stuffed dog toy and say that he will protect him. Here, Daddy. Frolics will protect you.”

  “That’s the name of my dog now.”

  “I see,” Madame Matilda said with a wry smile. “You hand the stuffed animal to your father, hug him, and then run away.”

  “Until just recently, I thought my father was dead.”

  Madame Matilda opened her eyes and lifted the delicate veil, staring straight at me like we were the only two people in the world, and then suddenly snapped her hands back.

  “What is it? What did you see?”

  Madame Matilda’s face became tight, and her eyes distant. She swiveled on her stool so she was facing away from us and began speaking softly in another language. I turned to Desiree, and she shrugged. I gazed around the tent at the abstract pictures and geometric shapes hanging from hooks in the fabric. There were piles of books overflowing from boxes on the ground. Madame Matilda pulled her veil back down.

  “I’ve told you that you should not be here and now I have seen why. The wolf will kill someone very close to you. He will be tracking you again soon, and when he picks up your scent, there will be no escape.” Then she went back to babbling in that other language. “It would be best if you leave now—Oliver Grain—go home and don’t come back until you are ready.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “What does that mean?” Desiree chimed in.

  “I will not charge you for this session.”

  “Thanks…I guess.”

  “Come on, Oliver. This lady’s giving me the creeps.” Desiree pulled me off the stool.

  Madame Matilda swung around just before we reached the slit in the tent. Her fingers were curved like claws and her red painted nails dug into the table. “And Oliver, I know Provex City is a beautiful city, but it’s not all magic and wonder. Keep yourself and your friends safe. Go home.”

  I nodded and threw the purple fabric aside to exit the tent. The man crouched outside fed Arnold an olive and eyed us as we walked by. Arnold the monkey cried again, but the man shushed him once, and Arnold quieted immediately.

  “Maybe it wasn’t lucky to be chosen,” Darius said as we got some distance between me and the mad Madame.

  “You think?” I was leading the way at the moment, but I had no idea as to where.

  Desiree grabbed my hand to slow me down. She rubbed my knuckles with her thumb.

  “Don’t worry about it, Oliver. People like that are paid to be mystical and ominous. I wouldn’t read too much into it,” she said.

  “She knew things about my father.”

  “Maybe. I dunno.”

  “Is it time to go home?” Darius asked.

  “No,” Desiree replied, and then proceeded to complain about being hungry for dinner. So we decided on a type of food and found a cart that sold it. Nothing said a day at the fair to me like a cheeseburger, so that’s what I chose, but it didn’t taste like real meat. It also had a thick layer of spinach and a sweet dressing that I couldn’t identify. I ate half and threw the rest down on my plate.

  “Not good?” Darius asked.

  “It’s all right.”

  “Can I try?” Desiree asked and snatched the crumbling sandwich off my plate before I could answer. “I like it,” she said in between bites and cast aside whatever it was she had been eating.

  “Are you guys dating?” Darius asked.

  “No, just friends,” Desiree said as if she had been anticipating the question. She took a sip from her drink and smiled.

  “There you go,” I said.

  “I don’t mean to stir up anything. It’s just that you guys kinda act like you do—or did, maybe.”

  “We usually get that we’re like brother and sister,” I said.

  Desiree almost spit out her drink and coughed loudly from sucking the liquid into her lungs.

  “There, there, dear.” I patted her on the back with exaggerated movements. “What would you do without me to save you all the time?”

  And when Desiree was done dying, we all laughed.

  “When you’ve got your food down to where it stays down, I’ve got to show you something. I haven’t been through it since I was a kid, but it should thoroughly entertain and horrify you both,” Darius said with a slight grin and one cocked eyebrow.

  “After the mad Matilda fiasco, I don’t know if I can handle it. Can’t we do like a ride or something?” I asked.

  “No. The Nucleus is what you can’t handle right now. Your food needs to settle. Trust me; this is the next best thing.”

  “What is it?” Desiree asked cautiously
.

  “We’ve got the best House of Mirrors in the country.”

  “That’s cool,” I said with forced zeal, hiding the fact that I was slightly underwhelmed by the idea. What was so special about warped mirrors anyway? We had an abundance of houses of mirrors back home. I had never actually been in one, but I’d consider them commonplace. They were all cheap carnival kiddie attractions.

  We walked over to the House of Mirrors and stood in the ever-growing line, which was proceeding slowly into a building covered in an animated mural that depicted either a post-apocalyptic or alternate universe version of Provex City. The high rises were crumbling into the streets and flickering like florescent bulbs on their last throes of life.

  The line inched forward until we passed through the opening of the building and into a dark hallway lit with black lights along the ceiling. The walls on either side were floor-to-ceiling mirrors. As we walked almost single file down the narrow hallway, we saw ourselves in the mirrors. But the images weren’t mere reflections following us down the hallway. They looked like us, dressed like us, but not exactly. They were strange projections of the best-looking versions of ourselves: perfectly symmetrical features, porcelain skin, gorgeously styled hair, and toned physiques. They didn’t talk, didn’t make a sound, but they also didn’t mimic our movements as we marched down the hallway. The projections watched us, from either side, and reached out to the glass, reaching for us, yearning for us, hungering for us like we were their final meals.

  “What are we looking at?” Desiree asked, sandwiched between Darius and me in the procession.

  “You don’t know?” Darius said, looking back at both of us. He was noticeably shocked when we both shook our heads. “How can you not know about your mirrors?”

  “We’re not from here, remember?” I said sarcastically.

  “Yeah…but everyone has a mirror. You can’t not have one.”

  I shrugged.

  Desiree reached out for the mirror, and her projection lunged at the glass and slammed against it with both fists. Desiree jumped back with an uninhibited yelp at the thunderous bang, which sent reflection ripples down the hallway. She backed into the opposite mirror, and her projection on that side scratched vehemently at the glass. It looked like it might actually be able to escape and attack her. Desiree screamed louder, shivered, and franticly rubbed her arms like she was covered in spiders. She fell back in line with the rest of us, finally back to a safe distance from either mirror.

  “Yeah, don’t touch the glass,” Darius said, trying to suppress laughter.

  I reached forward and lightly squeezed her shoulder for support, but she just squirmed again, obviously still reeling from her traumatic experience.

  “Ha, ha—very funny you guys,” Desiree said in a sour tone.

  We came to the end of the mirrored hallway and turned into an expansive room. We had entered a re-creation of the moving mural on the outside of the building. Our walkway slithered through the room, lined with a low railing to keep us on the path and out of harm’s way. The sides of a huge flickering building extended to the ceiling, which was a 3-D movie screen creating the illusion of the building extending far into the sky. Dismembered chunks of the buildings fell to the ground as holograms. Imaginary scraps of metal littered the floor, then disappeared as more continued to fall.

  There were mirrors on the sides of the buildings, against the far walls, and standing in the middle of the room in random places like displaced doors to nowhere. As we walked through the room, we saw ourselves in the mirrors for split seconds––our mirrors staring back at us, following us through the room of this decaying urban apocalypse.

  A frail, bloodied woman walked through the glass doors of one of the buildings. Her hands were chained behind her back, with her supposed mirror holding the far end of the chain, giggling with demented glee. The woman’s mirror kicked her and she toppled to her knees, close to doing a face-plant on the ground. She was yanked back to her feet and led into one of the freestanding mirrors and disappeared. A chilling scream rose from the background.

  People in line were huddling closer together, walking slowly. Shadows that looked human moved in the background, but it was hard to tell if it was just my mind playing tricks on me.

  “So what is this?” I asked as we came to the far end of the room, about to enter a new scene.

  “A look into the symmetric reality, where the mirrors live. It’s been re-created through several rare eyewitness accounts,” Darius said.

  “Lorne eyewitness accounts?”

  “Yeah, how’d you know?”

  “Just a lucky guess.”

  “Are we almost out of here?” Desiree asked. She had her hands stuffed into her pockets and inched ahead side-by-side with Darius.

  It turned out we weren’t, but none of the following rooms were as large as the outside city scene. We paraded through four more rooms of mirrors imprisoning and torturing their lesser halves before exiting through a mirrored hallway like the one in the beginning. This time, Desiree kept her hands far away from the mirrored walls.

  Desiree appeared noticeably relieved when we reentered the cool evening air. The excitement in her movements returned and it was clear she wanted to put some distance between us and the infamous House of Mirrors.

  “We don’t have these mirrors where we come from,” I said to Darius as he led us into the thickening flow of the crowd.

  “How’s that possible? Where does it go?”

  “I was meaning to ask you the opposite question. Where does it come from?”

  Darius stopped in the middle of the crowd, breaking the constant flow like exposed rocks in a river. “It comes from you. Your mirror comes from you. It’s a part of you separated from birth, yearning for reunion more than anything in the world. That’s its focus until the day you die. Essentially, you want to be reunited with the universe—which is what happens when you die—and your mirror wants to live here forever. We were all split at birth and it is imperative to resist that reunion. It will try to convince you otherwise. It has no other objective than to get you over to the symmetric reality. There, your mirror will grab hold of you and never let go.”

  “So you’ll just die there?” Desiree asked.

  “Oh, no, that would make it easier. You would hope to die or be killed by someone else’s jealous mirror. In your state of imprisonment and torture and draining, it can potentially keep you alive…forever.”

  A father of two little girls eyed us suspiciously as he passed. He held their hands tightly in his and pulled them along. I felt the eyes of other passersby as we talked about what everyone supposedly already knew from the time they could stand.

  “Forever?” Desiree gasped.

  “One famous account of the symmetric plane, apart from those documented by Alexandria Lorne, is the one from Antonio Delgado,” Darius said and paused for a moment. “He escaped from 212 years of imprisonment in the symmetric reality. I saw old footage of his interviews when he got back. He looked like death, frail and starving. All of his immediate family and friends were gone. Can you imagine? He wrote a memoir describing his experience called The Great Escape from Myself. It’s now a mandatory read in every intermediate school. Antonio Delgado—the man who survived the other side—only lived a few years after he got back. It was pretty sad.

  “He was one of the extraordinary few who have been over there and come back. Once your mirror grabs hold of you, it never wants to let you go and it will do everything possible to keep you. From here, all it can do is talk. But, in the symmetric reality, it has all the power.”

  “The voice,” I said. “The mirror is the voice I hear.”

  “Yes,” Darius answered. “I still can’t believe this is new to you guys. The kids here are told about their mirrors and the symmetric reality as soon as they can speak. That way, they’re not so easily coaxed to the other side. It’s like telling them to look both ways before crossing the street. They won’t do it instinctively at first. There’s
no intrinsic fear. Parents have to supply that fear to keep them out of harm’s way.”

  “That’s so creepy. Every kid hears this stuff when they’re little?” Desiree asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I guess this place isn’t so perfect after all.”

  “I dunno. I don’t know any different,” Darius said.

  “It’s all what you get used to,” I said. At least now I knew what the voice that had been talking to me was. My mirror. I certainly didn’t look forward to hearing it again, especially now with the imagery supplied to me thanks to the best house of mirrors in the country.

  We got moving again and played some games and rode some familiar-looking rides. There was a rollercoaster that snaked through smaller rides and continued underground, where it shot through a weaving, strobe-lit tunnel before blasting out of the earth in corkscrews. We were back into a celebratory mood of exploration.

  We finally found the ride Darius had mentioned earlier called The Nucleus. It was a little intimidating at first glance. The passengers were strapped into cage-like capsules that looped around the makeshift nucleus in hundreds of orbital paths. And the capsules were nearly a blur when they reached full speed. It was a miracle they weren’t all colliding with one another.

  “Are you ready?” Darius asked giddily, obviously seeing the apprehension in our faces.

  Desiree and I were not ready.

  But after several minutes of gawking and several more minutes of coaxing, we each entered our own electron capsule and prepared to be pulled apart at the seams. The capsules clicked a few times and then quickly accelerated. The G-forces took over. The screaming began. I couldn’t think of anything as I clutched my shoulder straps for dear life, praying that the capsule door wouldn’t come unhinged and catapult me cartoonishly out of the fair and into the side of a skyscraper.

  When the ride finally came to a stop, I could barely feel my arms or legs. My head was pounding and my eyes couldn’t focus on anything standing still—they were telling my brain I was still spinning and I couldn’t yet convince them otherwise. But I was alive! And that was an accomplishment and a victory.