Through Broken Mirrors (Fiction)

Daniel

This city’s intersections are home to a curious phenomenon; light after light, wave after wave of cars all emit the same soundtrack through their various speakers. They’re all tuned to the same few stations, playing the same few songs, over and over again. I guess no one stays on a street corner long enough to notice this but, three stories above, in a cramped dorm room, I often stick my head out the window to smoke a cigarette or two and end up inadvertently getting a sense of what’s trending in music.

    Often, when I’m leaning on my windowsill and looking out, I regret not having my hair done up or a clean shirt on, that way I can reflect some of the beauty I see when I take in the view. Unfortunately, beauty is the last thing on my mind when I’m stuffing my face full of pasta and whatnot. Also, with midterms creeping up, laundry days are few and far between. Meals also tend to get more scattered, but I decide to get some breakfast in the hopes that it’ll help the intricacies of intellectual property law and advanced quantum mechanics stick better in my head.

     If I was blind, I’d still be able to tell the time of day by simply listening in on the conversations in this dorm’s food hall. The conversations in the morning tend to be more academically- and logistics-oriented (What classes d’you have today? What’re you gonna work on first? Study before or after we grab lunch?), while in the afternoon, conversations tend to center around pop culture (That episode was… Who honestly thought he’d be a good choice for that role? She has a new song?). Conversations tend to be more scholarly and gossip-oriented in the evenings, eventually stripping down to more intimate topics as the night marches on. The pre-dawn hours contain snores, if anything at all. Of course, a good dorm party will shuffle all of this up, a bad one even more so.

     Amid conversations of German history in the 19^th century, the pervasiveness of Freud’s work, and so on, I manage to get a bite to eat, making small talk with some friends at a table while the coffee begins to wake us up. I then head back to my dorm room.

    While it is a bit cramped, my room is still a relatively quiet place where I manage to get some decent work done. I have complete access to it and it’s located close to campus (duh). This is priceless, especially since study space on campus is so limited. My friend Joey commutes to school and is always complaining about the lack of study areas; I always invite him over but he declines.

     As I light one of my 2 pre-study cigarettes and lean out my dorm window, I get to thinking about Joey and the tension I feel is between us.

     How do you describe someone like Joey? I see so much in him, we all do, but he can’t seem to see it in himself. He looks for it in others, or, if not in others, then somewhere other than himself and anywhere other than where he is—searching for a sort of perfection and its ensuing comfort. Even when he’s talking to you his mind seems to be elsewhere. Or maybe he only acts the way he does around me because of Alisa.

     As I understand it, he and Alisa went to high school together and had a near miss. Despite all that, they still occasionally hang out. Joey tries his best to act all nonchalant about the whole thing, but it slips out here and there, especially when he sees her really enjoying herself with someone else, someone like me. It’s never more than a sullen glance, maybe even a stare, but it’s there.

    Alisa, Alisa is what my mom would call a sweetheart, but I know her as something else, someone more complicated than the front she puts up for the world. But that front is unlike any other; it’s childlike in a way that’s refreshing. When Alisa sees you, she beams, and her smile is truly worthy of that description. And whereas others keep up a cool front when they wave you over, she may do a little run to you, beaming all the while. She’ll hold you as the center of the world while talking to you, and if you didn’t know any better, if you weren’t quite raised right or mature enough, you’d hold this against her. But it isn’t you she’s treating like this, it’s really the world in general that she treats with the attention that one would give a shy child who’s built up the courage to come downstairs during a party and introduce themselves.

     A unique front, but a front nonetheless. If you look long and close enough, you’ll see the disappointment she has with the world, a disappointment that it isn’t consistent with how it appeared to her when she was younger. To combat this, she’s trying to build a consistency in herself, the only kind true warmth can come from I guess.

    It’s really in this way that Joey and Alisa are similar, as he too shares a disappointment in how the world is. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that they commute to campus from a quiet town, that they take in the campus and the city surrounding it in short bursts and then go back to their quiet town where they can reflect on how different the world actually is from what it could be, how all the unseen possibilities and wonderful permutations have no effect on how the cards are currently spread. I call this phenomenon “Post-Superposition Despair.” In quantum mechanics (according to the Copenhagen interpretation, I think), particles exist in a superposition, a “state” where they occupy multiple positions at once. Upon observation, the particle collapses into one set position, and I imagine this causes it a lot of despair, regardless of how good its current position is. The particle probably doesn’t even notice where it ends up, it’s only preoccupied with what could’ve been, with the world of possibility rather than reality. If it does consider reality, it’s only to ponder why its luck turned out so crummy, why the world is so unfair to it. By not appreciating where it is and what it’s got, the particle can never really connect with others in any meaningful way, in any way beyond that of the rules governing its existence (the laws of physics). Observers feel this too, not looking at the particle for what it is but what it could’ve been, harkening back to the mindset of alchemists.

     I often get like this when I go back home for the summer or during a break, where you look back and realize that all the magical wonder the world had when you were a kid seems to be gone, and all we have is this. Any sign or reminder of wonder in the world is fleeting and hard to grasp, yet still we try. The others who commute to campus start to stick around later and longer into the night, and along with the dormies, they spread further and further into the city, to find something (or someone) worth holding onto, something () to replace or remind them of the impossible wonder the world once held for them. And if that doesn’t pan out, then maybe they take to spirits and substances to try to regress to a state where they can feel as they once did, in that long ago.

     I asked Joey once about Alisa and the others from his town and, after some time, he said, “The problem, as I see it, is that we’re trying to communicate, in code, something we don’t entirely understand that well ourselves. The result is a jumbling of codes that lack any real meaning but, in lieu of anything else, these jumbled messages are the closest thing we have to any real connection with each other.” To which he laughed, before shaking his head and looking away. Clearly he was somewhere else.

     I stub out my cigarette and put away the other one for now. I won’t have any time to grab another pack so I should really cut back, at least until midterms are over.

     I’m looking at the people below rushing to their next stop gracefully. I can just barely make them out (I think I may need glasses), but it strikes me that, from afar, people seem so whole, so complete. When you get to know them better, that’s when you see the flaws in who they are, the flaws inherent in all of us.

     Alisa’s gift seems to be that she puts her flaws away when she’s with others. They’re there, but she deals with them on her own if she deals with them at all; I get the sense that she’s at an understanding with them that most others don’t have. Joey’s somewhat the same, but if you never get a sense of his flaws, it’s because you never really get a sense of him at all. He seems to be aiming at a sort of inhuman completeness, hiding until he achieves it.

     When I watch Alisa be, I can’t help but be moved by how brave she is in her being. We all were once as open and trusting as she is, but I guess we found it easier to stop being so and never bothered to look back. One thing you can’t help but notice growing up is the story: person falls for someone, person gets burned, person goes on to burn others. Alisa decided to forgo all that, if only so as to experience something new, if only as a different path to experience the magic that the world once held for her.

     Yet, even though she chose to forgo all that, she still ends up playing a role in it.

Joey

While you’re looking for a table, you can’t help but notice how much time has passed that could’ve been used to study or, get procrastination out of the way so you can focus on the tasks at hand. Once you do manage to find a table and get comfortable, it’s hard to keep track of time. That’s why I’m still sitting here even though my friend’s astrophysics class started a couple o’ minutes ago.

    There’s this quote I came across in my readings that I keep going over: “We find that the prisoners who decorate their cell tend to be the happiest.” What an odd little sentence, nestled in some boring, dry scholarly article.

     Anyway, it’s time I pack up and head to my friend’s class. I’m not taking that class myself, but I like to keep her company. Besides, it’s just boring enough to where you can let your mind wander and think over whatever you need to, yet interesting enough to be worth it when you do happen to pay attention. I really need a class like this today.

     I get to the lecture hall and my friend waves me over. We make some small talk as I pull a binder out to make sure everything looks legit. She goes back to taking notes on the lecture and I lean back in my chair.

     The other day I went to the mall near campus and watched the people mill about. How dull was I to think of these people as dull, as missing out on the music of life to decorate themselves senselessly? No, it’s really me who’s been missing out on the music, who—unable to do—has taken to senseless criticism. In criticizing outwardly, I’ve ignored who I am, who I’ve become.

     As far as I can remember I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I think my desire to write is similar to my adolescent desires to be a cop or a firetruck, except I never really grew out of it. But sometimes when we think we are acting, we’re really reacting, the line between the two being so small; after all, I only got serious about writing after things between Alisa and I broke down.

     I’m currently in a business program at university (gotta have a back-up, right?), and this year we learned that a business must be aligned internally in order for it to successfully navigate and capitalize on its external environment. Many businesses fail because they don’t synchronize themselves strategically to adapt to external market factors. In trying to assay my own internal alignment, I can’t help but notice how much of who I’ve become in the last few years has been shaped by how things turned out between me and Alisa.

     Alisa: It started with a few smiles, passed notes, anxious greetings that led to nervous small talk. Eventually it bubbled into long talks on the phone, winding conversations on the web, unspeakable truths communicated through body heat… Then, for whatever reason, the phone calls were filled with long pauses, voice messages were filled with more than what was simply said, glances and smiles in passing that I admit I’d read into more than was healthy to, smoke signals yet to be decoded…

     You know, the usual story when it comes to this sort of thing.

    We still talk though. I’d even say we’re good friends, but the whole thing perplexes me because I’m not really sure what happened. It was never official for one thing: there was always an element of crime to it, as if we were both setting up plausible deniability, her more so than me. And it was done through language, vague and passive language, the kind that gives way to reasonable doubt and allows for convenient amnesia in the face of serious questions about what we are and where we’re headed. (I find myself and others using this type of language in my business classes. This type of language allows you to be detached from the situation you’re in, never fully accepting it; it allows you to speak about a thing as if you know about it even though you don’t, and you get away with it because this type of language allows others to join in, to play at cross purposes without even knowing it. I guess I use it in class because I’m mostly there by force and don’t really like it, but I still have to pass. I don’t use this type of language outside of class, at least not that I’m aware of.) That’s what hurt the most, knowing that a person could say one thing and mean another, all with a straight face. Beyond that, I’m still not sure how I really feel about the whole thing, only how I reacted to it, how my writing is a reaction to how it all turned out between me and her, and how it (my writing) may be nothing more than an attempt to impress and catch her eye.

     It all reminds me of this porn star who only got into the business to scorn her ex. She finally caught up with him years later, only to discover that he’d never heard of her career. Not only that; it turns out that he was gay, and a lot of the heartbreak he dealt her when they were young was a result of his own confusion and insecurities. Her reaction was based on his reaction, which was likely based on another reaction. And so on and so.

     The truth is, most businesses are formed from a series of reactions as opposed to pre-meditated actions. The businesses of the world are patched together with quick fixes, glue and gum sealing up the cracks and slipshod support beams spread throughout; and us as people aren’t all that different. Looking around, that’s how it’s always been, and if it’s got us this far, is it really that bad?

     The other night is what set me down this path of thought, what got me thinking. I dreamt that I was moving along with a panic-struck crowd, more in tune with the panic than the crowd but caught up nonetheless. We were all in a big room with this one wall that used to have a curtain hanging over it. From behind this curtain it was said that a voice would give out orders and instructions on how to be and this would bring peace and understanding to the crowds back then, who lived in a now-forgotten harmony with each other. That voice had suddenly stopped and ever since then, those who were descended from those who heard and knew the voice would give instructions and recite stories to the crowd until the voice would return, instructions and stories that went a long way in maintaining order. However, somewhere along the line the curtain fell, revealing a barren wall, and people concluded that there never was a voice and now there was panic, chaos. Adults were scared, kids were cutting up the curtain and dawning it on themselves. There were cries and screams and other attempts to grab attention, but no stories. That’s what I found myself amongst, and as I’m looking up and around, there she is, looking down on me, on us—the panic and the crowd—with understanding and sadness misting her eyes. She’s standing on a platform that leads down to the crowd via a wooden staircase and she makes a motion as if to come down and join us, but I can’t be too sure. I woke up, tried to recall whether she finally moved or not, tried to figure out why I left her side. Maybe so she could see me better?

     Now, sitting here in this half-empty lecture hall, all I can think about is the panic of that crowd and how familiar it is.

     The lecture seems to be winding down. On the screen in front is an image of what appears to be the universe, with an example of the lensing effect that’s produced when light is bent around the intense gravity that results from large bodies of mass. I can’t be too sure though, as I’m not close enough to clearly make out the text.

     My friend puts her notes away and rests her head on my shoulder. The prof is delivering his final message for the lesson:

   “Whether the universe is infinite or not isn’t really of immediate concern to us. Our current focus is on discovering and colonizing habitable planets so as to guarantee our specie’s continued survival. As to whether the universe is infinite or not, that’s a matter of relativity for now. It’s very likely that there’s something beyond the observable limits of our universe, and something beyond that, and so on. But for now, our focus is within what we can observe with our own eyes, on coloring that part of the universe and its planets with our likeness.”

           

Alisa

Evening classes are a pain. Sure, you get some more time to cram for a midterm, but when your class doesn’t end until 9 in the evening, you really start to question your ability to make sound decisions.

     Right now I’m at the mall near campus, waiting on my friend to finish her class and show up so we can catch the train home together. There’s an atmosphere of winding down in the mall as the stores begin to close up for the day. If you’ve ever worked in retail, you know about the communal relief you feel in the fact that you and your team managed to get through another day. Occasionally you’ll catch the glance of an employee in another store as you’re both closing up, and a smile of understanding will pass between you. Last week, when I was also waiting for my friend here, I realized that the whole city goes through this, that we all share this feeling of relief in having gotten through another day and that, in this, the city and possibly the world at large is kind of like one big shopping mall.

     I get a message from my friend that she’s gonna be a little late, so I decide to find a place to sit down, having just spent the last couple o’ minutes mindlessly wandering around and looking over at the crowds milling about on the level below. I also get a message from Daniel (a guy I’ve had a few classes with) but I ignore that one. For now, I just wanna go home, cram for tomorrow’s test a bit, and sleep.

     Daniel’s a fun guy. After growing up in a town full of boys that didn’t really know any better, it’s nice to talk to a guy who’s fun and sees you as a person, not an opportunity. Someone who’s actually interesting, and has a great smile too. The boys that I grew up around were either too immature or too timid, though you can’t really blame them, as us girls weren’t that far ahead either. Joey would say that it has more to do with the insecurities inherent to all adolescents, but I disagree.

     Joey—whose real name is Johan—is one of the few boys from high school I do keep up with. He reminds me a lot of my uncle who someone how managed to own and operate a fleet of successful car garages before losing it all to some woman he loved. My dad ended up taking him in until he got back on his feet and managed to start up a successful restaurant. My uncle, likely wanting to see if others were in as much disbelief at his comeback as he was, threw a banquet hall party to celebrate. All I remember from this party was my uncle’s glossy eyes and his boozy smile as he stared at the woman who would eventually lead him to his second bankruptcy. My dad is still trying to figure out whether he should help his brother again or not, and in what way? At what point do you step back from what someone is to you and start treating them according to their actions? How do you help someone who’s prone to forgetting themselves so quickly? Whose self-esteem is at once fleeting and tied to equally fleeting measures, such as the opinions of others?

     That’s not to say that Joey is destined to end up like my uncle, but I do get the sense that he’s approaching things the wrong way, taking up the wrong measures of self-worth. He wants to be a writer and as such, he’d send me his work to go over and give feedback on. His first attempts were too obvious and cliché; action stories where the characters were all flat stereotypes and the point of the whole thing all but underlined. I made the mistake of telling him what I thought and he took it badly, or, considering his supposed feelings for me, he took it about as well as he could’ve. Months went by without another story, but I never really noticed.

     Then, one day, another story.

    If his earlier works suffered from being too simplistic and direct, this new writing suffered from being unnecessarily complex. In trying to figure out what the point of his new story was, I found myself wondering if there even was one. It was also riddled with horrible sentences like, “I feel addicted to a substance I’ve never tried, but am in withdrawals for nonetheless.” What ultimately held me back from liking his work, complex or not, was how little it made me feel anything. His writing really only amounted to the doling out of facts for the sake of facts, of parts somehow lesser than the whole, in which no emotional bond could be formed by the reader. I could never bring myself to tell him this because it would take a sort of honesty that eludes me, that eludes us.

     Between the town we grew up in, the culture we were bought up in, and the culture we constantly try to adapt to, honesty is just something you’re left to figure out on your own and, as a result, it’s usually a last resort for most of my family and friends. The mentality I grew up around is that it’s better a person like you than know how you really feel or what you really go through. Thus, growing up, the only options you seemed to have when dealing with others was passive-aggression, timidity, or over-aggression. I myself was passive-aggressive and perhaps it’s because that’s all I saw growing up. For example, I’d never state what I wanted directly, believing instead that everyone knew me well enough to know what I wanted. At most, I’d drop what I thought were hints and then get mad when people didn’t pick up on said hints. If I didn’t get what I wanted, I’d get mad and take it out on all those that I thought knew me.

     It took two things to happen for me to realize that I was going about things the wrong way. The first was a family gathering around the time my uncle declared his second bankruptcy. There was this one person who started every conversation with, “Beti/Beta, I’m your uncle.” Whether it was getting my little cousins to talk to him or getting me to put away his dishes, he’d make it clear that he was our uncle, that was his role and we were to treat him as such. And soon it began to feel like everyone was playing a role at that gathering. It didn’t matter who you were, only how well you played up to your role, and anything against your role, any shortfall was hushed up and only ever whispered about or bought up in a petty way.

     After a while however, I began to see where that uncle was coming from (and the rest of the people at that gathering really). He probably thought that, despite how he may have acted in that moment, that we all knew him well enough to see past the moment and down to the good person he really was, the person that only he and everyone that knew him really well saw. I saw how I must have come across to others and how that’s all there is, my actions in the moment. Even if someone did think I was capable of being better than I was acting, they could only put up with so much before deciding otherwise.

     A few weeks after that get-together, the second thing happened. I read a book that contained interviews with women who lost someone to World War 1, or the Great War as they called it back then. The book was filled with accounts of mothers, sisters, girlfriends, fiancés, wives, and the occasional mistress; about how they felt upon hearing the news, seeing their loved ones get drafted, forced to defend causes that they (the women) didn’t readily understand or believe worthy of bloodshed—that kind of thing.

     The account that stuck with me the most was of a girl who lost her brother to the war. Her whole family was devastated when he got drafted and they could barely muster the strength to see him get on the train that would carry him to his eventual death. At the train station, this girl talked about how sad she was and all that, but also mentioned seeing a boy there that she usually saw around town, someone who occasionally “passed her fancy.” She recalled seeing him at the station with his family who were also seeing him off and devastated about it; how she began to see this boy in a different light, surrounded by the people he loved and was the most himself amongst.

     As the train with the soon-to-be corpses and heroes began to pull away, she waved goodbye to her brother. And although the most they ever shared were stolen glances at each other, she waved at the boy from around town too, which bought a smile to their tear-streaked faces, likely the only ones in that station.      

     She then went on to detail the grief she felt upon hearing of her brother’s death, of how her family somehow managed to deal with it, how proud they felt knowing that he died for a cause that was referred to as “noble” and “worthy” by others. She saw her brother slowly turn into a heroic soldier in the eyes of all that knew him.

     She also mentioned the sense of loss when she heard about the death of the boy who passed her fancy; the confusion. Mostly what she felt was regret. She never bothered to act on her feelings because she never really gave thought to how short life could be, how final all our decisions end up being, nor how big of an impact all those inactions end up making. She talked about how that boy’s death helped her to grow up, made her more honest with herself and others about her needs and wants, which was pretty radical for a woman in the 20’s.

     Her account really put things into perspective for me and as a result, I’m trying to be more honest with others, although it’s pretty hard to do so. It requires an honesty with yourself that’s pretty fucking frustrating, a sort of un-training of things you’ve always been doing but never really knew why. My hope is that as I help myself by being more honest and direct, I’ll end up hurting others less.

     Still, it’s not as easy to stop hurting others emotionally as it is physically, since the things we do to protect people’s feelings in the moment—such as white lies or leading them on, inadvertently or otherwise—often ends up hurting them in the long run. This is where the frustration comes in, where honesty can seem a bit backwards in terms of effectiveness, seeing as how the long-term isn’t something we seem to account for when we’re around others. Sometimes it gets tough and I question if it’s even worth it, but I once held a newborn in my arms and immediately felt how senseless it was to hurt others.

     I finally get a message from my friend that she’s free and we meet up. Less than half an hour later we’re on a train headed home and I get to thinking about when I was a child. I remember how my parents and I would all sleep in one big bed, how they would have me in the middle where they would smother me with cuddles and kisses. After a couple o’ minutes o' this, I would get fed up and roll out of the middle to get some sleep. As I look out at the city slipping away from my window, at my reflection in the glass and that of my friend’s, at all the passengers on this train; I realize that all of us, in our own little ways, are trying to get back to that middle.