The City of Mirrors

by Justin Cronin

  “Good luck,” he says.

  They make their way through the trees, into the field. The house stands about two hundred meters distant.

  “Logan …” Nessa says.

  “I know.”

  Everything is perfect. Everything is just the same, without the slightest deviation. The flowers. The mountains. The sea. The way the wind moves and the light falls. Logan keeps his eyes forward, lest he be consumed by the powerful emotions roiling inside him. Slowly, in their bulky suits, he and Nessa make their way across the field. The house, one story, is homey and neat: wide-planked siding weathered to gray, a simple porch, a sod roof, from which a haze of green grass grows.

  As promised, the woman is working in the dooryard, which is planted in rose bushes of several colors. Logan and Nessa halt just outside the picket fence. Kneeling in the dirt, the woman doesn’t notice them, or appears not to. She is profoundly old. With gnarled hands—fingers bent and stiffened, skin puckered in folds, knuckles fat as walnuts—she is plucking weeds and placing them in a bucket.

  “Hello,” Logan says.

  She offers no reply, just continues her work. Her movements are patient and focused. Perhaps she has not heard him. Perhaps she is hard of hearing or deaf.

  Logan tries again: “Good afternoon, ma’am.”

  She stops in the manner of someone alerted by a distant sound; slowly she raises her face. Her eyes are rheumy, damp and faintly yellow. She squints at him for perhaps ten seconds, fighting to focus. Some of her teeth are gone, giving her mouth a pursed appearance.

  “So, you’ve decided to come up, then,” she says. Her voice is a coarse rasp. “I was wondering when that would happen.”

  “My name is Logan Miles. This is my friend Nessa Tripp. I was hoping we could talk with you. Would that be all right?”

  The woman has resumed her weeding. She has also begun, faintly, to mutter to herself. Logan glances at Nessa, whose face, behind her plastic mask, drips with sweat, as does his own.

  “Would you like some help?” Nessa asks the woman.

  The question appears to puzzle her. The woman shifts backward onto her haunches. “Help?”

  “Yes. With the weeding.”

  Her mouth puckers. “Do I know you, young lady?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Nessa replies. “We’ve only just arrived.”

  “From where?”

  “Far away,” says Nessa. “Very far away. We’ve come a great distance to see you.” She points toward the field of rocks. “We got your message.”

  The woman’s yellowed eyes follows Nessa’s gesture. “Oh, that,” she says after a moment. “Set that up a long time ago. Can’t really remember the reason for it. You say you want to help with the weeding, though—that’s fine. Come on through the gate.”

  They enter the yard. Nessa, taking the lead, kneels before the rose beds and begins to work, scooping the dirt aside with her thick gloves; Logan does the same. Best, he thinks, to let the woman get used to their presence before pressing her further.

  “The roses are lovely,” Nessa says. “What kind are they?”

  The woman doesn’t answer. She is scraping the ground with a metal claw. She appears to take no interest in them whatsoever.

  “So, how long have you been here?” Logan asks.

  The woman’s hands stop, then, after a beat, resume working. “Started work early this morning. Garden doesn’t rest.”

  “No, I meant in this place. How long have you lived here?”

  “Oh, a long time.” She plucks another weed and, unaccountably, places the green tip between her front teeth and nibbles on it, her jaws working like a rabbit’s. With a sound of dissatisfaction, she shakes her head and tosses it in the bucket.

  “Those suits you’re wearing,” she says. “I think I’ve seen those before.”

  Logan is perturbed. Has someone else been here? “When was that, do you think?”

  “Don’t remember.” She purses her lips. “I doubt they’re very comfortable. You can wear what you like, though. It’s not really my business.”

  More time passes. The pail is nearly full.

  “Now, I don’t believe we got your name,” Logan says to the woman.

  “My name?”

  “Yes. What are you called?”

  It is as if the question makes no sense to her. The woman lifts her head and angles her gaze toward the sea. Her eyes narrow in the bright oceanic light. “No one around here to call me anything.”

  Logan glances at Nessa, who nods cautiously. “But surely you have a name,” he presses.

  The woman doesn’t answer. The murmuring has returned. Not murmuring, Logan realizes: humming. Mysterious notes, almost tuneless but not quite.

  “Did Anthony send you?” she asks.

  Once again, Logan looks at Nessa. Her face says that she, too, has made the connection: Anthony Carter, the third name on the stone.

  “I don’t believe I know Anthony,” Logan tenders. “Is he around here?”

  The woman frowns at the absurdity of this question, or so it seems. “He went home a long time ago.”

  “Is he a friend of yours?”

  Logan waits for more, but there is none. The woman takes a single rose between her thumb and forefinger. The petals are fading, brittle and brown. From the pocket of her dress she removes a small blade and clips the stem at the first tier of leaves and drops the wilted bloom in the pail.

  “Amy,” Logan says.

  She stops.

  “Is that you? Are you … Amy?”

  With painstaking, almost mechanical slowness, she swivels her face. She regards him for a moment, expressionless, then frowns as if puzzled. “You’re still here.”

  Where would they have gone? “Yes,” says Nessa. “We came to see you.”

  She shifts her eyes to Nessa, then back to Logan. “Why are you still here?”

  Logan senses a deepening presence in her gaze. Her thoughts are taking clearer form.

  “Are you … real?”

  The question stops him. But of course it makes sense that she would ask this. It is the most natural question in the world, when one has been alone so long. Are you real?

  “As real as you are, Amy.”

  “Amy,” she repeats. It is as if she is tasting the word. “I think my name was Amy.”

  More time goes by. Logan and Nessa wait.

  “Those suits,” she says. “They’re because of me, aren’t they?”

  It surprises him, the thing he does next. Yet he experiences not the slightest hesitation; the act feels ordained. He removes his gloves and reaches up to the clasp that holds his helmet in place.

  “Logan—” Nessa warns.

  He pulls the helmet over his head and places it on the ground. The taste of fresh air swarms his senses. He breathes deeply, enriching his lungs with the scents of flowers and the sea.

  “I think this is much better, don’t you?” he asks.

  Tears have risen at the corners of the woman’s eyes. A look of wonder comes. “You’re really here.”

  Logan nods.

  “You’ve come back.”

  Logan takes her hand. It is nearly weightless, and alarmingly cold. “I’m sorry it took us so long. I’m sorry you have been alone.”

  A tear spills down her weathered cheek. “After all this time, you’ve come back.”

  She is dying. Logan wonders how he knows this, but then the answer comes: his mother’s note. “Let her rest.” He has always assumed she was speaking of herself. But now he understands that the message was for him, for this day.

  “Nessa,” he says, not breaking his gaze from Amy, “go back to camp and tell Wilcox to gather his team and call for a second lifter.”

  “Why?”

  He turns his face to look at her. “I need them to leave. All their gear, everything except a radio. Deliver the message and then come back. I would be very grateful if you could do that for me, please.”

  She pauses, then nods.

  �
��Thank you, Nessa.”

  Logan watches as she passes through the flowers, into the trees, and out of sight. So much color, he thinks. So much life everywhere. He feels tremendously happy. A weight has lifted from his life.

  “My mother dreamed of you, you know.”

  Amy’s head is bowed. Tears fall down her cheeks in glistening rivers. Is she happy? Is she sad? There is a joy so powerful it is like sadness, Logan knows, just as the opposite is also true.

  “Many people have. This place, Amy. The flowers, the sea. My mother painted pictures of it, hundreds of them. She was telling me to find you.” He pauses, then says, “You were the one who wrote the names on the stone, weren’t you?”

  She gives the barest nod, grief flowing, rising out of the past.

  “Brad. Lacey. Anthony. Alicia. Michael. Sara. Lucius. All of them, your family, your Twelve.”

  Her answer comes in a whisper. “Yes.”

  “And Peter. Peter most of all. ‘Peter Jaxon, Beloved Husband.’ ”

  “Yes.”

  Logan cups her chin and gently raises her face. “It was a world you gave us, Amy. Do you see? We are your children. Your children, come home.”

  A quiet moment passes—a holy moment, Logan thinks, for within it he experiences an emotion entirely new to him. It is the feeling of a world, a reality, expanding beyond its visible borders, into a vast unknown; and likewise does he believe that he—that everyone, the living and the dead and those yet to come—belong to this greater existence, one that outstrips time. That is why he has come: to be an agent of this knowledge.

  “Will you do something for me?” he asks.

  She nods. Their time together will be brief; Logan knows this. A day, a night, perhaps no more.

  “Tell me the story, Amy.”

  Dramatis Personae

  (In chronological order)

  B.V., Ohio, Cambridge, and New York

  Timothy Fanning, a student

  Harold and Lorraine Fanning, his parents

  Jonas Lear, a student

  Frank Lucessi, a student

  Arianna Lucessi, his sister

  Elizabeth Macomb, a student

  Alcott Spence, a ne’er-do-well

  Stephanie Healey, a student

  Oscar and Patty Macomb, parents of Elizabeth Macomb

  Nicole Forood, an editor

  Reynaldo and Phelps, police detectives

  A.V., Texas Republic

  Alicia Donadio, a soldier

  Peter Jaxon, a laborer

  Amy Bellafonte Harper, the Girl from Nowhere

  Lore DeVeer, an oiler

  Caleb Jaxon, adopted son of Peter Jaxon

  Sara Wilson, a physician

  Hollis Wilson, her husband; a librarian

  Kate Wilson, their daughter

  Sister Peg, a nun

  Lucius Greer, a mystic

  Michael Fisher, an explorer

  Jenny Apgar, a nurse

  Carlos and Sally Jiménez, expectant parents

  Grace Jiménez , their daughter

  Anthony Carter, a gardener

  Pim, a foundling

  Victoria Sanchez, president of the Texas Republic

  Gunnar Apgar, general of the Army

  Ford Chase, president’s chief of staff

  The Maestro, an antiquarian

  Foto, a laborer

  Jock Alvado, a laborer

  Theo Jaxon, infant son of Caleb and Pim Jaxon

  Bill Speer, a gambler

  Elle and Merry (“Bug”) Speer, daughters of Kate Wilson Speer and Bill Speer

  Meredith, partner of Victoria Sanchez

  Rand Horgan, a mechanic

  Byron “Patch” Szumanski, a mechanic

  Weir, a mechanic

  Fastau, a mechanic

  Dunk Withers, a criminal

  Phil and Dorien Tatum, famers

  Brian Elacqua, a physician

  George Pettibrew, a shopkeeper

  Gordon Eustace, a lawman

  Fry Robinson, his deputy

  Rudy, an Iowan

  The Possum Man’s wife, an Iowan

  Rachel Wood, a suicide

  Haley and Riley Wood, her daughters

  Alexander Henneman, an officer

  Hannah, a teenage girl, daughter of Jenny Apgar

  A.V., Indo-Australian Republic

  Logan Miles, a scholar

  Nessa Tripp, a reporter

  Race Miles, a pilot, son of Logan and Olla Miles

  Kaye Miles, a teacher, wife of Race Miles

  Olla Miles, ex-wife of Logan Miles

  Bettina, a horticulturalist, partner of Olla Miles

  Noa and Cam Miles, twin sons of Race and Kaye Miles

  Melville Wilcox, an archaeologist

  Acknowledgments

  TK

  About the Author

  JUSTIN CRONIN is the New York Times bestselling author of The Passage, The Twelve, The City of Mirrors, Mary and O’Neil (which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize), and The Summer Guest. Other honors for his writing include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Whiting Writers’ Award. A Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Rice University, he divides his time between Houston, Texas, and Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

  enterthepassage.com

  Facebook.com/justincroninfanpage

  @jccronin