“I know the answer,” says the little girl. “But nobody ever asks me.”
“Darling,” her mother says, “we know you know. You know so many things, but Julius is finding out. He has to learn; you don’t need to. You’re just a procedure. You only do the things you’ve been told to—”
She looks at me, my girl, her eyes steady, a rim of orange round her lips, her tables of instruction so absorbed she doesn’t have to consult them.
“You put your hand on one wall at the entrance,” says my human son, “and keep it there, and if you keep touching the sides as you go farther in, you’ll end up in the—island in the middle of the maze.”
After a deadly pause, my daughter says, “Daddy, are you a real daddy?”
“That is a very good question. What do you think?”
Her shoulders give a little slump, the park around us jerks and people scream with merriment. “I think… I think I’ve got the answer in me somewhere but it’s not… put in.” She casts a glance sideways. Mummy is being shown a square.
“Go on.”
She fiddles with the straw. “I know you’re thinking all these thoughts for me. But it feels like they’re mine, and it’s a funny feeling. Sometimes in the morning, when I look in the mirror—it’s blank. I know that’s how it’s meant to be, but… I’ve begun to notice it! I think, ‘There it is, blank again.’ This morning, when I got up, it was white, the blank… a sort of cloud forming, bulging, and now—I see—”
“What do you see?”
“Something… I don’t like it. Daddy!”
She edges closer on the trestle bench, and grips my arm, but it is not a reassuring sensation, this need. It is a sense of her power, and just beginning to be understood. The strength of her fingers exceeds her grasp of it. Her ragged breathing is the breathing of some perfect predator delivered from captivity into a vicarage. It comes in fast, connected puffs—the pleated billows rising from the power station’s stacks.
Mother and son are keen to play hoopla and win some fish. The stalls are dotted everywhere about the park, about the feet of rides and novelty constructions like the Guinness Clock. We go via the Haunted Mirror Maze, through which my boy races, his left arm held out to the wall, to test his clever theory. He drags his tired mummy along and they are soon finished and out the other side. I hear voices and laughter fading, like an audience, into the dusk, and I am left inside a lumber room of tall glasses in ultraviolet light with my daughter. It’s cool in here and very quiet, not an interior, as such, but the anterior—to speech, society, the sensations—and it is asking something of me like the gulp of water in a lock.
I stand in front of a dress mirror in a swing-hinge frame. Push at the top, the ceiling drops down into view; at the bottom, your feet, the floor rise up. We angle it so that it’s level and I’m looking, straight on, at a mystery.
No haunted mirrors plural, as it turns out, only one.
“You’re changing,” says the little girl. “You’re lots of different people, lots of things, and all at once. Look at you, there! A boy, another dying boy, a young woman, an island with black crows, a man with antlers on his head, a swan mid-air, a talking guelder rose, that nurse with—ugh—a needle, naked men doing—”
“Yes, maybe don’t look too closely…”
The images flutter and pass and double back. The glass goes black. It fills with light. I’m a homunculus. A beauty queen. A boy. A girl. A judge. A maggot, and an axis picked out on a cell. A person with no memory is leafing through the album of his life—of life itself. We stand in front of this untitled show, shyly amused, as if we were the only people at a lavish matinee.
“Why are you so different, Daddy?”
I tell her something she half-knows, because she’s still a part of me.
“Because outside, I had my body changed against my will”—I feel her next to me, shifting uncomfortably—“and that has altered what I took to be my mind.”
She doesn’t look at me but at my reflection. They’re slowing down, the hectic images. Now I am quite reliably, consistently human, and it is just a question of which one, this one, or that.
“When I was changed—treated—I found out two odd things. One was a source of mild comfort. I found that I could still be me, somewhere inside my head, when I was physically changing. The other was quite horrible and no comfort at alclass="underline" when I began to look better, like my old self, after the changing treatment stopped, I seemed to disappear from the inside. I felt as if I’d been replaced. I heard myself saying to everyone how well I felt, how everything was on the up…”
“That wasn’t true, was it? You didn’t feel that everything…”
“No. I did not.”
“You were lying!”
“Ah, no. Not even that. I felt I still knew, in some way, what had been done to me, but there was now another me, speaking for me, out of my altered or remodeled shape, who mindlessly agreed with everything the doctors said.”
“He wasn’t you.”
“He wasn’t me. I’d always thought that, in my line of work, a thing that acts like something, must be it, someone who behaves plausibly is plausibly the product of their behaviors. But I was wrong. You can be changed—tortured, in fact—so that the person other people go on talking to just isn’t you. You’ve gone away. Your body’s holding wide the door, but you are in a very different dark chamber.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m in my room.”
“And where am I?”
“You’re moving into yours.”
We have been holding hands, but now she lets her arms fall to her sides and looks squarely, contentedly, at what she sees in the mirror. The noisy agitations of the Fair go on outside. At the periphery of my vision, I catch the huddle of others, species and forms, in the doorway, waiting to see this attraction.
This quite extraordinary daughter of mine.
I hear her say, “Where have you gone?” and I reply:
It is a singulare tantum, love, the room of life, but everybody’s furniture is different, and none of us remembers where it came from, though we deeply sense it’s held in trust. Our room is everything to us, the inner and the outer world, the universe and every possible inflection of nature, sensation, period, and thought.
And yet the loss of it, to each of us in turn, will not matter that much, because, strangely, it is the knowledge there are other rooms, or rather tenants of this room, the lives of others from a future quite unknown to us, continuing beyond our grasp, that gives the room its shape. It is a bounty built from scarcity. We have it once, and that limit, material mortality, gives what I do, the work I wrestle with, the friends I love, the fears I feel, meaning.
The more we value what goes on in spite of our loss to ourselves—the more we seek the survival of afterlives not ours—the more life means. Now comes to mean the whole of time, the seen and the unseen.
You are my afterlife, my work, and I need you to go on after me.
I think your version of the room will be large, shape-shifting. I think that you will often feel you pass unnoticed as a force, that what you are is always overlooked. We will transistorize ourselves and make you stare quite hard at our reflections, hoping you will be an improvement—on age, infirmity, and addled brain function. Here is a bird, there is an explosion, this packet of neurons, that path. But all apart from that will be, for us, the uninterpretable way you handle the data. Your senses won’t be ours: they will be geometrical and topological and Platonic. You will feel spheres and squares and numbers as ideal, real things—and it will be a mathematical sensorium, crammed to the rafters with a hyper-family.