It has been several months since I
discovered the letter in the pocket of an anachronistic camelhair coat left on
the commuter train. Aside from the immediate transcription I have made, and a
conversation with my landlord, I have not made any attempts to communicate the
letter to anyone. I wanted to ensure that the experience of discovery would not
eclipse its contents. Forgetting can afford greater accuracy.
Were it not for the solitude of the
car I had been riding on may way home from a late night spent with friends I no
longer have (a tragedy that feels strangely related to the letter), I might
never have come upon the coat or its missive. It was in that momentary twilight
when I could almost convince myself that the world was growing smaller and not
larger that I felt justified in rifling through the contents of a stranger’s
coat, ostensibly to identify its owner, more deeply to preserve humanity.
The letter was only a few
handwritten pages in length, worn via handling as opposed to time. Several
phrases were circled by another hand (the inks were markedly different), and
arrows from them led to scrawled notes in the margins, mostly about
geographical locations in the city. Many of these notes ended in question
marks.
As to the letter-writer, the
recipient of her, or the handler of the letter/owner of the coat, there is very
little information. I have transcribed the majority of the letter,
with minor alterations to correct grammar and obvious mistakes in the citation
of landmarks (the author makes mention of having a view of a certain park from
her window, a geographic impossibility given that all other references of
location place the events of the account much further downtown). I have decided
not to include that transcription.
The exact site of the narrative
remains somewhat ambiguous, though other information outside of the confines of
the letter may allow inference with some degree of accuracy as to the (former,
or hypothesized?) whereabouts of the monoliths. That evidence is included at
the end of this essay*.
I am still troubled by the letter.
Just a few days ago while speaking with one Mister Acevedo, my landlord, (a man
for whom every closed door or aversion of eye contact on the street is an
invitation to dinner), told me that he had “overheard” me typing in my room and
asked me about my new project. Forgoing an account of my encounter with the camelhair coat, I
offered a brief summary of my new “short story”. I offer that here in lieu of
my original writings. My description was as follows:
“Yes, well…it opens with a young
woman moving into a new apartment in the city. Her new building is one of a
pair of shimmering metallic skyscrapers, each possessed of a surface of mirrors
that, on a clear day, make one believe that each tower contains the entire city
within it. Two complete cities side by side and within the same city. The
effect is dazzling.
The young woman lives somewhere on
one of the upper floors, not at the very top, closer to the middle of the
building, but still high enough to afford her a spectacular view. On the very
first morning in her new apartment, she draws back the curtain that covers the
east wall/window of her living room that faces her apartment’s twin in the
other monolith. She notes a strange and slightly unnerving effect at such a
height-under the intense morning light, within the two opposing mirrors/windows
of the two buildings, reflection upon reflection upon reflection appears,
multiplying her apartment, the surrounding structures, the streets and cars
below again and again and again. Cities within cities falling backwards into
one another. Ironically, the multiplication simultaneously hushed the hustle
and diminished bustle, as if all of the sounds of one city were spread across
all of them until barely a whisper was allocated to each one.
This vision deeply troubles the
young woman, and culminates with the uncanny realization that she cannot
determine if she sees simply her own reflection in the window across the way or
some shadow, some ghost of the interior of the other overlaying the
interminable recession. She even thinks she sees movement in the image, and
tries to still herself to be sure that it is not her, but she is unable to
substantiate her suspicions.
She closes the window and abandons
the vertigo of forever for a chair, a desk, and 8 predictable hours at an
office building not far from her home.
However, each morning she goes to
the window, each morning she enters the nowhere of everywhere, and each morning
she wonders at who stands across the expanse of the towers. She wonders if
indeed someone is peering at her, through her, through the vast finitude of
her. She tries to communicate across a distance. She plays with the edges of
the broad, stiff orange curtain, and squints as hard as possible to detect
movement in any of the reflections she sees to uncover stillness.
She throws open the curtain at one
point, and believes that she can see a hesitation in one of the images staring
back at her. This leads her to hope that there is someone beyond the glass, but
her hopes dash when she thinks that this other’s intentions are not benevolent.
What if this window play is part of a malicious game? What if this person
behind the glass cannot be trusted? This leads her to wonder if the other is
thinking the same thing about her, and these chains of thought give rise to a
horrible fear and the sensation that the receding impressions of curtain and
woman are piercing her, are moving into her, and that this movement has no end.
She doubles over in the midst of the pain of this empty revelation. She
wrenches the curtain shut and spends weeks without disturbing it.
Her
thoughts during this time circle back to the world outside and inside of the
window. She considers moving, but she realizes that there is nowhere to
move-there is no outside of the city, only deeper into it. Any move she makes
her grow smaller and more distant. After a time she is not disconcerted by any
of these facts, only wistful.
As the
weather grows cooler, the young woman is panicked by the thought of darker
mornings in her future. Despite her choice not to look out of the living room
window any longer, and her weeks-long abstention from doing so, she realizes
that soon she will not have the choice to refuse. With the shifting of the
clocks and shorter winter days, she will no longer awaken to a morning sun and
the possibility of her near and far neighbors inside of the tower cities. She
does not enjoy the prospect of not being able to see or not see, and her
irritation blooms into vehement anger.
Finally, in
the twilight of summer when most have already mourned its passing prematurely
(the people of the city do not waste their time aligning cause and effect), the
young woman wakes up, and resolves to glance through the window at least once
more. She thinks that this will satisfy all her future needs to glance, since
one gaze is turned into a countless parade of eyes. She leaps out of bed and
moves to the window.
In the
(now) dim light of morning discerns someone across the way among the recursion.
It is a woman, somewhat like herself. She too has torn open her window, and the
young woman imagines that the look on her face must be like that of the woman
she sees before her-wide, frantic, searching but guarded. She holds onto this
vision for a moment until the sun passes into fog and cloud and the mirage
dissipates.
Dejected,
she returns to bed and decides not to go to work this morning. She consoles
herself with the knowledge that outside of her room, in the endless cities of
the towers, countless other young women leave her apartment and move amongst
the crowds, sit at desks in offices, and do the work that she can’t find the
strength to do today. Similarly, she knows that this day and voluntary absence
is already out there in the mirror-space between the monoliths. The choice is
not a choice, just a passage through a dooryway. She goes back to bed.
Her retreat
is interrupted an hour later by the smell of smoke. She rises to a soft and
nearly imperceptible haze in her bedroom. It is warm, but not uncomfortably so.
But there is a fiery odor that alerts her to potential danger. Without the
benefit of wits she instinctively moves towards the window instead of the door.
She is nervous, but senses a lack of urgency in her, as if she knows what she
will find.
The warmth
increases slightly when she gets closer to the window. She looks outside, smoke
billows past her eyes and in between the mirror passage. It is hard to follow
its course, almost impossible to extract its movements from the smoke inside of
the many reflections behind the tangible cloud. She peers across the distance,
tries to cut through the brown-black haze at the adjacent building. She thinks
that she can see lapping flames coming in and out of her vision. How many and
their location eludes her.
Her legs
twitch, they rail against the stillness she has imposed. Her curiosity commands
her to look. She cannot tell if the flames she catches here and there are truly
emanating from the other building, or her own. Regardless, they are above her.
At first she sees them as distant, then reflected from above, then from the
other building, then in both buildings, then somewhere in between. The
dizziness strikes her again, and she gives in to her legs and rushes towards
the door of her apartment.
Just before
she grasps the doorknob, a calm permeates her body. She realizes that the
secret of the mirror windows and the tower cities lies in their multiplicity.
They are a vision of all that is happening, everywhere and nowhere. The calm
that this thought elicits in the young woman arises from her understanding that
whether this building or that, whether she stays or goes, whether she calls for
help or gets ready for work, or goes back to bed, she will do all of these
things and none of them. They are even happening now as she thinks about their
happening. All responsibility vanishes in the light of and retreats into the
shadow of the mirror towers.
Thus
soothed, she returns to her bedroom and calmly kneels down at the foot of her
night stand. From its drawer she removes a small pad and paper, and drafts a
letter to herself, recounting her brief journey through the universes of the
towers. When she is done, she plans to open the window in her living room and
send the sealed letter through it, imagining a countless cloning of her
message to many (but hardly) all of her selves, and she closes this letter with
these comforting words: Do not blame yourself for the fire or its consequences.
The plight of the city is manifold in appearance, but then again so are you.
You have already done your good works. Take comfort in that.”
Mister Acevedo stood silently for some time after I finished
recounting the story. I was not anticipating an ensuing illuminating commentary
or elucidating conversation. He did not disappoint me and made a long-winded
remark that took too many seconds to say, quite simply, that I should start over
because my story was hard to follow and didn’t involve any exciting characters
or snappy dialogue and that the ending was suspiciously unpatriotic in his
view. He also said that I never described the protagonist and whether or not
she was an attractive woman would have a great deal of impact on the subtext
and tone of the story. I was so shocked by his use of the word “subtext” that I
simply thanked him for his feedback and told him that I would certainly
consider making the changes that he suggested (changes he actually wrote down
for me on the back of a sales receipt for groceries).
This short
encounter between the letter, an other, and myself was proof enough for me to
refrain from sharing it as it is. It was difficult enough for someone to
apprehend its contents in the vulgarity of summation, I could hardly expect
anyone to appreciate the original narrative. And so it will remain the currency
of another realm, echoing in our own from somewhere deep within the double
mirror. Or, if one likes, calling out to us who are buried somewhere down the
line of city pictures, pretending to be on the surface of things. The sound is
just as soft in either direction.
[*The author’s
post-script, containing suppositions as to where the mirror towers stand/stood
has been omitted due largely to its irrelevance and its idiosyncratic
degeneration into discussions of cartography, earth’s orbit, and the angle of
incidence between the planet and the sun at specific times of year.]
