FOURTEEN

From the Journals of Sheriff Friendly

[Early Winter, 2005]

The worst is when I look into the mirror-glass and see, staring back, exactly myself, with no difference save for the difference of being myself reversed. If I could look, for instance, and find a hole instead of my face, otherwise exactly the details, in whole, of my head, it would be some greater comfort, some lesser fear. I would know that I am not there. But that I am there, or that I’m there in that form, is the worst impossible terrible.

The light light of the bathroom is a flat and flickering sick-light, a dead-body-light, the mirror-glass scratched and speckled, flecked with toothpaste and paint and the small, smashed bodies of bugs, the fist-ham-prints of insect-killing blows, not all of them mine. I’ve never thought to wipe this glass clear, and neither has anyone else, ever. The yellow walls of the little bathroom are striped with thick drippings of some inconceivable oily stuff, which maybe come from the walls themselves. There is a shower stall standing floor-to-ceiling behind my body, at the opposite end. It too, its glass, frosted and translucent, runs also with the gray striping of mineral accretions, ignored over decades, brought finally into appreciation.

Why is my face… only my face? What’s gone wrong?

I should have known better than to come to this place.

I should have known better than to repeat the signal.

I should have known not to call the others, and not to send the others away, and not to call for the like-kind, and not to send them into the heart of the empty sun, with their fingers splayed and small hands upraised, and their feelers pointed nowhere but forward and sniffing at the air, sensing perhaps the subtle presence of prey, hands to their weapons, objects extracted, their whispering voices scarcely audible over the vast and sourceless wind, that same thing that carries them, that holds their bodies aloft and carries them, and if I am the living stone center of some plural-world, incompatible with the justice of law, I should have known this first. But then, if the law is mine, or if I am some servant of its form, then the law establishes itself by plurality, and the parallel world is served, or in the service of, the protection and the service of the law –

And But Then I smashed at the mirror-glass with my hand fist and broke the glass into simple shards, and each shard shook shone back a separate face that was just exactly like mine, only backwards THE WAY THEY SAY IT SHOULD BE and that was how I knew that it was time – and time again – and time – to leave this box and go into the gathered force of comparable body-forms, all filling in the empty space and that shake together and severally in the whole-form and dry-shape, the Shape that was pressed, the hole-punch circle-face, the picture-form, the empty-space; this, the perfect and the plural world, the Valley of the Snake. Is it? Because I was never there. I was never there. Oh… fuck.