Fifty-one
"There are billions of people in the world,"
Marlene had once told him. "Most live peaceful lives. They always
have and they always will. In all of human history, the power of love has
outstripped all the death and violence we've ever managed to inflict upon
ourselves."
He had thought her sentiments foolish. He could see
now that she had been right. Her world had been a world of life, and his
had been one of death. It was unjust that he should have survived, and
she murdered by a madman's lust for power and wealth.
When he reached Marlene's gingerbread house on the
Ridge, he paused to watch David toss a Frisbee far out over the slope.
The sleek Doberman raced through the low grass and leaped with feral
agility to snatch it from midair. The two went further out into the open
to give themselves more room to play. John went into the house lost it
his own foreboding thoughts. He sat down at the kitchen table and put his
head in his hands.
Marlene stood nearby.
"What would constitute proof of my identity?" she
asked of him.
John couldn't imagine what it would take.
"You think that continuity is the only measure of
individuality. Death ends continuity. It therefore ends individuality."
She stated the obvious.
"If the mirror has access to the past, John, then it
has access to the life that was mine before I died, and it has access to
my memory. It has access to my very soul, does it not? It will have
gathered the pieces of me scattered in space and time and put me back
together, and brought me here intact to stand before you."
John studied her, keenly interested in her blind
quest for Marlene's identity now that he had seen a hint of her unearthly
power. He had misjudged her potential. He doubted if anyone on the face
of the earth could have guessed the extent of it. But he still did not
believe she could succeed in what she was trying to do.
"I remember why Orville Kahl had me killed, John. I
was researching the connection between his business dealings and the
deaths of certain men in business and government. I knew that Mr. Kahl
might want to steal or destroy the information I had found when he heard
about my research. I never suspected he would silence me instead."
"I would have warned you had I known what you were
doing," John said.
"I hid copies of the disks that contain the articles
I was writing," she said.
John thought about it. He rose to his feet, knocking
the chair over behind him. How could the mirror know what his wife had
done before her death? What possible source could it tap for that
information?
"I taped the computer disks with my files in plastic
sandwich bags. I dug a hole alongside one of the garden fence posts, and
I taped them with duct tape to the post two feet beneath the ground. The
post is the third one from the back of the lot on the east side of the
yard."
John needed time to resolve
Marlene's trick. Surely he
had overlooked some obvious explanation. There had to be one.
"No one moment of the past or the future is any more
valid than any other, John. Each moment has infinite potential and many
different courses for its futures to take. There is so very much more to
learn of who and what you are in a universe you have barely begun to
understand."
John hurried to the shed out back and rummaged among
Marlene's garden tools for the hand trowel. Third post from the east side
of the fence. He dropped to his knees before the designated post and dug
out a square of sod. He set it aside, then systematically began to dig
into the rocky dirt.
He found the silvery duct tape wrapped around the
post eighteen inches below the surface. He slit the tape with a pocket
knife and retrieved two three and a half inch floppy disks still safely
sealed inside their polyethylene plastic bags.
Trying not to hurry, but with his heart beating
wildly, John went back inside and down to the den. He fired up
Marlene's old computer and loaded Marlene's word processor.
He slipped one of the disks into the floppy drives and tried to open one
of the files.
The world processor announced its inability to read
the file.
"Minimize the word processor, John. Run the
decryption program, the bottom left icon. Find the file, highlight
it, and select 'decrypt’. The password
is ‘Jonathan’. Use the original file name to save the decrypted file. Go
back to the word processor and try again to open it."
Text snapped onto the computer screen. The title of
the first article leaped out at him.
SPRUCE VALLEY OPPONENTS DIE IN SEPARATE ACCIDENTS
John saved the file onto the hard drive and fed the
floppy drive the second disk.
WIFE OF LOCAL BUSINESS TYCOON DISAPPEARS IN FLORIDA
"Kahl's wife," John said mildly. "Damn."
He felt a dim panic begin to grow. The mirror had
given him back his hand, his son's life, but he would never believe that
Marlene had been returned to him, even if the mirror possessed Marlene’s
memory. He accepted the abyss of death that stood between them. His
wife's dying screams in the flames of their toppled van still haunted his
dreams. In his own mind, no matter how convincing, and no matter how much
proof she had to offer, Marlene would always be the trick of an alien
device and not truly the woman of his heart returned to him body and soul.
"Your mind is too rigid, John. David's is still
flexible. David is the one who must make the terrible sacrifice necessary
to bring me back from beyond the grave. It is David's willingness to give
up the very foundations of his sanity that will validate the mirror's
understanding of human nature."
"It began with David," John said. "It ends with
David."
"The sacrifice must be his,
but he will need your support."
"I still don't understand what's going to happen."
"You need only observe."
"I want to be wrong,
Marlene. You know that."
She turned to him, stubbornly wiping tears from her
eyes and cheeks. "I can show you how wrong you are, John.
Come upstairs with me."
John followed and paused in the kitchen for further
instructions.
"David left the sphere just outside the door. Bring
it to me.”
He did as he was told. She pointed to the closed
door of the master bedroom.
“Put it there.”
The evening following her death, he had closed that
door. Neither he nor David had ever opened it. He did not want to open
it now.
“Marlene, no.”
The sphere dropped from his grasp, seemingly of its
own accord, and rolled across the floor to bump gently at the closed and
locked door.
"Marlene, please."
She disappeared before his eyes.
John stood unmoving, tempted to back down the
basement stairs and drink himself into oblivion. He glanced out the back
door at David calling to the dog out on the slope. When he looked back,
the sphere was gone, and the bedroom door stood open.
The sun poured through both windows, each cracked a
foot or so with lace curtains stirring in a breeze from outside. He heard
David cry out gleefully from outside, but as heard through the master
bedroom window, David’s voice was that of a three-year-old toddler.
Stepping closer to the door, he could see the child running in circles in
the moved grass, chasing a Monarch butterfly.
Without thinking, he stepped through the doorway. He
stopped, reeling from the all but physical impact of the realization that
he had stepped through the mirror.
He was inside the mirror!
This was not the real world, not this world of golden
sunlight and the aroma of cut flowers on the nightstand alongside the bed.
“John?”
Her voice came from off to one side. She stood on
the other side of the neatly made bed, radiantly beautiful. She kicked
off her shoes. She reached behind her back with one hand and unzipped her
dress. Using a thumb and forefinger, she lifted the straps of the dress
off her shoulders.
The dress slid down the curve of her body to her
feet. Beneath the dress, she wore his favorite lace panties and bra. She
had always left it up to him to remove those last two items of clothing.
"I have no material body in your world, John. In my world, objective reality can be simulated. Both
worlds are conscious experiences, if you think about it, and if
consciousness is not the foundation to human reality, I can’t imagine what
else is.”
His hand had touched her face in the mirror, a mirror
with no thickness, a hand and a face with no physical reality. David had
been reluctant to return from paradise. He could guess why. He
walked to her, stopping close enough to reach out with his right hand and
again touch her cheek, to test the reality of her in this universe within
the mirror.
And then he gathered his wife
in his arms and embraced her. His ability to believe and to accept was not an
issue for that moment, not reliving a moment in the past so completely that his being filled
it to overflowing.
