Thirty-seven
John parted a curtain to a living room window and
watched the sheriff drive away.
"Was he really going to shoot me?”
"I couldn't be certain,"
Marlene said. "He was under
considerable stress."
"I don't even own a recliner. Why didn't he notice?"
"Gene has an unconscious memory of the recliner from
childhood," Marlene said unseen. "He sensed something out of place, but allowed
himself to accept the transaction at face value. It soothed his anger."
During the conversation between Sheriff Gene
Packerson and an apparition of himself, John had observed in complete
silence from his position alongside the window. He looked out over the
sunlit world outside, contemplating the extent of the world’s
powerlessness in the face of Marlene's power to deceive.
David came in the front way looking happy, but
fatigued. "Gene's not mad at me for beating up Tony and Steve," he
announced, then went to his room to rest.
"It was best this way,"
Marlene assured him. "Gene
suspects that you blackmailed Ben and Jim in self-defense and that they
ran off to avoid prosecution."
"I actually had no idea that Jake had been
murdered." He searched the dark room for an image to go with the soft
voice. Marlene dutifully appeared against the back wall with her hands
clasped before her. She wore a bright cotton summer dress of many years
ago.
"How can you know what people are thinking?" he said,
agitated by the casual way she invaded what he had always thought of as
the inviolate sanctity of the human mind.
"If I asked you how is it that you perceive the world
around you, how would you answer me?"
"How is it that I can see and hear?"
"Remember that I have no body, John. Therefore, I am
blind. I have no physical senses. So tell me what it is like to see."
"You project a convincing image for someone who's
blind."
"I project no image," she said.
"I sure as hell see one."
"The mirror manipulates structures of consciousness
as you would manipulate objects in your physical environment. I exist
within that environment, your conscious and neurological environment, not
in the environment you think to be outside of yourself.”
"So you're finally going to confess that I'm talking
to the mirror?"
"That's not at all possible, John. The mirror has no
consciousness of its own."
John scoffed. "I don't know why I bother with
questions. The answers don't help a bit."
"You think of yourself as individual and separate
from other people by virtue of the time and the space between you,"
Marlene said. "You do not recognize time and space as ways that you
organize the content of your mind. Even your own science is beginning
to realize the difference between the deep unity between all things and
your very limited perception of it."
"Which I think is a backhanded way of letting me know
that intelligible answers to my questions will be out of my reach."
"You loved me, John. Do you remember that?"
John closed his eyes, devastated by the way she
insisted in identifying with Marlene. "I remember," he said.
"We shared thoughts and feelings. You firmly
believed that."
"I wanted to believe that."
"Love of that intensity is sharing consciousness in a
most literal sense of the word. Your rapport with Gene Packerson is
normally so strong that he could not have brought a weapon to bear upon
you. He will regret allowing the pressure of his job to betray his
friendship. His regret will be a recognition that the two of you share a
small part of your very souls. He couldn't have killed you without
having killed a small part of himself. You and I shared a much greater part of
ourselves."
But she could talk forever and never convince him
that the dead could be brought back to life.
"If the word ‘soul’ has a meaning, John, it is a
structure of consciousness that is uniquely individual by virtue of its
relative isolation. When I died, the part of my soul that dwelled within
you was cut off from its source. But that part continued to live within
you, dependent upon you, but to some extent still a part of the lost whole
that continued to exist beyond the world as you perceive it. A part of me
was trapped within you and David both. Parts of me were scattered
elsewhere and began new paths to fulfillment. The mirror is salvaging
those scattered parts, each containing the pattern of the whole in the
manner of a hologram. They become a part of me again, just as they once
were."
John looked up at her in surprise. "Are you talking
about memory?"
"Memory is but a
connection with the original experience, an address that points the way.
The experience itself exists in the eternal moment as does all of
reality. Time is an illusion.”
"But you're still claiming that the mirror is
resurrecting my dead wife to prove that it knows what it means to be
human."
"To validate its understanding of human nature, the
mirror is required to recreate a human being who will function
autonomously in human society. The dead do not need to be resurrected.
They continue to live in ways you do not understand. They live in worlds
born of reconsidered choices never made in the world that you shared with
them. In some of those worlds, I never died in a car accident. In
others, you were killed in combat many years ago and we never met. The
possibilities are endless."
"So let's stick to the here and now," John said.
"If the mirror does not understand what it means to
be human, I will not be reassembled correctly, and I will never convince
you that I am your wife."
"So what happens if you fail?"
"The probe will be retrieved soon. The specimens
that have been taken will go back with it. I am not a specimen. I only
have this one chance to live again."
"David will be heartbroken if you leave. It'll kill
him."
"I need to be self-sufficient to survive," she said.
"I need to free myself of the mirror."
"And how are you going to do that?" he said, and he
said it trying to suppress mounting despair.
"I need to find a way. I have the full resources of
the mirror to do so."
"And what happens to me and David if those resources
aren’t sufficient?”
"If the mirror fails, its technology is inferior to
the task. It happens from time to time. No one form of life can
understand all others, regardless of its abilities to reach out into the
universe and make contact."
An exercise in futility, all of it. He couldn't
imagine how she hoped to make herself flesh and blood again. An image and
a voice could not replace the woman who had shared his bed and given birth
to his child. The part of the mirror that wanted to call itself Marlene
was not his dead wife.
John put his thoughts on another track. "I still
have to deal with Kahl and the authorities because of the specimens you
have taken," he said with lingering bitterness. He held his mangled hand
to view. "I can't handle it alone in this condition. Does the mirror
give a damn about the suffering it will cause?"
"No," Marlene said bluntly. "But I do."
John thought about what she might do to help. "It
would seem to me that you could get Kahl put a gun to his head and blow
his own brains out. That should help."
"The mirror uses its resources to serve its own
needs," Marlene said. "I use mine by virtue of who I am."
"And Marlene wouldn't kill a man in cold blood."
"I would in self-defense," she said with unexpected
determination. "In defense of your life, and David's. The
mirror would not under any circumstance."
Then he'd have to work fast to resolve the crisis
with her help, because when the mirror was gone, he and David would be on
their own again.
Having momentarily forgotten that she was aware of
his every thought and feeling, he glanced at her with a twinge of guilt.
Tears flowed from her eyes. He swung quickly away from her with a moan of
utter torment. In the end, none of them could possibly survive. He
headed down to his den for a bottle of whiskey, thinking that hell was a
place of suffering equally intense, but without the benefit of grain
alcohol.
