Mirror, p.7
Mirror, page 7
Martin tried to see through the crack in the doorjamb. He glimpsed Emilio’s faded red sneakers, flashing for a moment, and then Emilio’s black tousled hair. But the door wasn’t open wide enough for him to be able to see the mirror on the end wall; and if he had opened it any farther, he suspected that he would scare away whoever or whatever Emilio was playing with.
Emilio laughed. ‘Stop throwing it!’
But then Martin heard another voice – a voice that didn’t sound like Emilio’s at all. A young, clear voice, echoing slightly as if he were talking in a tunnel or a high-ceilinged bathroom. ‘Get another ball! Get another ball!’ And then a strange ringing giggle.
Martin felt as if somebody had lifted up his shirt collar at the back and gradually emptied a jug of ice water down his back.
What had he said to Morris? If I don’t know Boofuls’ voice when I hear it, then nobody does.
Emilio said, ‘What? What? Another ball?’
‘We have to have two! If you throw a ball to me, I can throw a ball back to you!’
A moment’s hesitation. Then Emilio saying, ‘Okay, then, wait up’, and dodging toward the door on those squeaking sneakers.
At once, Martin swung the door open wide. It banged and shuddered against the wall. He lifted Emilio bodily out of his way and jumped right into the middle of the room.
He thought he saw a blur that could have been an arm or could have been a leg. But then again, it could have been nothing at all.
The mirror was empty, except for himself and the room and the late morning sunlight; and just behind him, a bewildered-looking Emilio.
Martin swung around. ‘Where is he?’ he demanded, his voice cracking.
Emilio shook his head. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘The boy, the real boy. Where is he?’
‘He’s –’
‘Listen, Emilio, I was standing right behind the door. I heard him. I heard him with my own ears.’
Two clear tears unexpectedly dropped onto Emilio’s cheeks, and rolled down on either side of his mouth, and fell on the floor.
‘He said I mustn’t tell anybody. He said they punish him if anybody finds out.’
Martin got down on one knee and hugged Emilio close. ‘You listen to me, old buddy, I’m not going to hurt him. I’m his friend, the same way that you are.’
‘He says he’s frightened.’
‘Well, what does he have to be frightened about? He doesn’t have to be frightened of me. I can help him. At least, I think I can help him.’
Emilio shook his head. ‘He says he’s frightened.’
‘All right,’ said Martin, and stood up. He looked toward the mirror and wondered if the real boy was listening to them. ‘But if that boy really is who I think he is – and if he’s gotten himself trapped inside that mirror or something – for whatever reason – and he’s frightened – well, I’m sure that I can find some way to help him – because I know more about him than he knows about himself.’
Emilio glanced quickly at the mirror, almost furtively, and then asked, ‘Can I go now?’
Martin grinned and shrugged. ‘Sure you can go. This isn’t the third degree.’
Emilio didn’t know what he meant but he went, anyway. He was passing the kitchen door, however, when he said, ‘Are you going to have him through for dinner?’
‘Through?’
‘Well, you know, like through the mirror.’
Martin came along the hallway and gave Emilio a pretend Rocky punch. ‘You’re way ahead of yourself, Emilio.’
‘But he likes lasagne.’
‘He told you that?’
‘He likes Swedish meatballs and he likes lasagne and he likes pecan pie.’
‘So your grandmother’s lasagne won’t go to waste?’
‘No, sir.’
Martin watched Emilio climb back down the stairs. It was extraordinary how easily children accept the strange and the supernatural, he thought. But maybe this mirror wasn’t as strange and as supernatural as it appeared to be. He had read in Popular Radio that mirrors could sometimes pick up radio signals from powerful transmitters, because of their silver backing, and that their glass could vibrate sufficiently to make people hear disembodied voices. Late one night in 1961, in Pasadena, the wife of a grocery-store manager was lying in bed waiting for her husband to come home when her dressing-table mirror began to pick up a live Frank Sinatra interview from Palm Springs. Her husband, coming home late, heard a man’s voice in his wife’s bedroom, and shot to kill. He wounded his wife and then turned the gun on himself.
He returned to the sitting room and leaned against the mirror with his arms upraised and listened and waited for a long time. No boy. Nothing.
‘Walter!’ he shouted. ‘Boofuls! Come here, Boofuls, let me take a look at you! I’m your biggest fan, Boofuls! Why’n’t you step out and give me that sailor’s hornpipe, hunh? Come on, Boofuls, I’ve devoted three years of my life to writing and rewriting about you. Three years – and three complete transfusions of blood and sweat. The least you can give me is a couple of minutes of hornpipe.’
He waited five minutes, ten. Nothing happened. No Boofuls appeared. After a while, Martin turned away from the mirror and looked across at his typewriter. He had some work to do on a Knight Rider teleplay. He might just as well sit down and get to it. Trying to get in touch with boys who lived in mirrors wasn’t going to pay the rent.
He switched on his tape player and inserted the sound track of Suwannee Song. Immediately the flutes thrilled and the drums rattled, and the sitting room was filled with the opening march, when Boofuls was strutting like a drum major in front of a regiment of two hundred black minstrels, as they paraded along the levee.
Surrr … wannee Song! Suwannee Song!
You can blow your flute and you can bang your drum and you can march along!
Martin sat down at his desk, zipped a fresh sheet of paper into his typewriter, and started work on the latest adventures of Michael Knight. He wondered mischievously if Kit the talking car could turn out to be gay: if he could come out of the garage, so to speak.
Surrr … wannee Song! Suwannee Song!
It’s the song, it’s the song, it’s the song of the South!
He didn’t know what it was that caught his eye; what it was that stopped him typing ‘What is it, David? Bad guys?’ and turn around in his chair and stare intently at the mirror. But the blue and white ball came rolling out from under the table, halfway across the room, to settle there, rocking slightly from side to side before it came completely to rest.
He turned to look at the real room. The ball wasn’t there. He switched off his typewriter and walked up to the mirror and stared at the blue and white ball for two or three thoughtful minutes. Then he went back to his desk and opened up the bottom drawer and took out a tennis ball that he had used for practice last summer.
‘We have to have two!’ the boy had called out. ‘If you throw a ball to me, I can throw a ball back to you.’
Martin hesitated for a while, tossing the old gray tennis ball up and down in his hand. Then, without warning, he threw it at the mirror, quite hard, half expecting to break it, half hoping to break it.
There was a sharp smacking sound, and the ball ricocheted off the glass and rolled across the floor. It came to rest only five or six inches away from the toe of his Nike sneakers.
But it wasn’t a dingy gray tennis ball. It was a bright new blue and white bouncing ball. And when he turned in shock and looked toward the mirror, he saw his own tennis ball there, in exactly the corresponding place, five or six inches away from his toe.
He picked up the blue and white ball. It was quite hard and smelled strongly of rubber and paint. His mirror image picked up the tennis ball and sniffed that, too.
‘My God,’ he whispered; and approached the mirror, holding up the blue and white ball until it was touching the mirror’s surface. His reflection did the same with the tennis ball, until the two balls apparently touched.
Martin could scarcely believe what he was seeing. He turned the ball this way and that, but it remained, without argument, a blue and white ball, while the ball in the mirror remained the same balding gray tennis ball that he had been punting around last year.
He tried one more experiment. He stepped back, and wound back his arm, and pitched the blue and white ball straight toward the glass. Again, there was a smacking sound; but this time the blue and white ball came bouncing back into the real room.
Martin picked up the blue and white ball, turned it around in his hand, and then set it down on his desk, next to his bronze paperweight of a fin de siècle plume dancer. He sat there and watched it, and then poured himself some wine, and watched it some more.
The sun rotated around the room. Next door, beside the pool, Maria Bocanegra came and went, sunning herself with Sno-Cones to protect her nipples; but Martin didn’t bother to get up and look. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the blue and white ball.
The day died. He didn’t understand it. It was a clear night, the lights were sparkling all the way to Watts.
He slept in his chair. The blue and white ball stayed where it was, unmoving.
Three
HE DREAMED THAT night that he was the smallest of sea creatures, crouched in the tiniest of shells, on a broad moonlit beach.
He could feel the grit. He could taste the salt. He could hear the slow, restless convulsions of the ocean; rocks into stones, stones into pebbles, pebbles into sand, year in and year out, even when there was nobody to listen to it.
He felt the terrible fear of being small and defenseless.
He opened his eyes. He was sweating. It should have been hot, but it was stunningly cold. He shivered. He sat up in bed and his breath smoked. He couldn’t decide if he was awake or still asleep – if he was Martin Williams or if he was still a mollusk. He called, ‘Hello?’ even before he was properly awake.
From the sitting room, he could hear whispered voices: two children sharing secrets. He could see lights flickering, too: cold clinical lights, as if somebody were silently welding.
‘Emilio?’ he called. Then, louder, ‘Emilio?’
He drew back his futon and reached for his robe. Quickly he stepped out into the hallway and approached the sitting room door. The light inside the sitting room was spasmodic but intense, and he had to lift his hand to shield his eyes.
He paused outside the door. This time, he didn’t feel so much frightened as deeply curious. If he was right, and it was Boofuls, or Boofuls’ spirit, then what an encounter this was going to be. If he had lived, Boofuls would be coming up to his sixtieth birthday; Martin was only thirty-four.
He pushed open the door. The room was glaring with static and crackling with cold. He turned and saw Emilio in his Care Bears nightshirt, kneeling in front of the mirror, one hand lifted; and facing him – instead of a true reflection – a small white-faced boy with golden curls, dressed in pale-yellow pajamas.
Martin’s heart hesitated, bumped, hesitated, the same way it did on Montezuma’s Revenge at Knott’s Berry Farm. And the same hyped-up, almost hysterical reasoning: I don’t want to do this more than anything else I can think of, but I have to, because it scares me so much I can scarcely think how much it scares me.
There was no doubt about it at all. The boy in the mirror was Boofuls. Martin stared at him in horrified fascination. He was there, smiling, his eyes much smaller and paler than Martin would have imagined, but then the studio makeup artists had probably darkened his lashes before he appeared in front of the lights. His hair was thinner, too. Gold, yes, bright gold; and very curly; but thin, the way that little children’s hair goes when they’re anxious or allergic, or suffering from sibling rivalry.
Emilio bowed his dark head toward the mirror and Boofuls bowed his head toward Emilio. Their movements were exactly reflected, although it was impossible to tell which of them was initiating the action and which was following; or if somehow they were empathizing so intensely that they could both move at once, identical movements.
The scene oddly reminded Martin of one of those Marx Brothers movies in which Harpo appeared behind an empty mirror frame, mimicking the movements of the poor sucker who was trying to adjust his necktie in it.
Emilio whispered, ‘We could do it now.’
And Boofuls nodded, and Emilio nodded.
Emilio stood up, his arms by his sides. The white-faced Boofuls stood up, too and smiled at him, his arms by his sides.
‘One! Two! Three!’ said Boofuls.
And it was then that Martin understood what they were going to do – the old gray tennis ball flying into the mirror-world and the bright blue and white ball flying out of it – except that he had found it impossible to throw the blue and white ball back.
‘Emilio!’ he bellowed. ‘Emilio, no!’
Emilio turned, startled. Boofuls turned too – but here his mirror-mimicking failed him, because he looked straight toward Martin the same way that Emilio did. His tiny eyes flared bright sapphire blue for a moment, welding-torch eyes, and he snatched for Emilio with both arms.
But in that instant Williams, who couldn’t duck or weave, did his high school coach proud – with a sliding tackle that caught little Emilio around the waist and sent him sprawling across the floor.
For one second, Martin felt an extraordinary pull on Emilio, as forceful and demanding as if he were being sucked out of a depressurized airplane; but he grabbed hold of his desk with one hand, slipped, grabbed again, and clung on to Emilio with the other. After a split second of ferocious suction, the force subsided, the flickering lights died away, and the two of them were left lying on the floor, in cold and darkness and silence.
Martin ruffled Emilio’s hair. ‘You okay, old buddy?’
To his surprise, there were tears glistening on Emilio’s cheeks.
‘Hey, come on now,’ he said, sitting up. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘I wanted to go,’ Emilio sobbed.
‘You wanted to go? Go where?’
‘Through the mirror, I wanted to go.’
Martin looked at the mirror. Boofuls had vanished. All the glass reflected was themselves and the moonlit room. Somewhere outside, heading south on La Brea, a police siren was whooping. Lonely echoes of urgency and danger.
‘Come on,’ said Martin, taking hold of Emilio’s hand and helping him up. ‘Let’s go find ourselves a Coke.’
Emilio stood up and looked sadly toward the mirror. ‘He only wanted to play.’
‘Is that what he said?’
Emilio nodded. ‘He said we could play all day, I wouldn’t have to go to school. He wants me to meet his friends. He wants me to meet his old man.’
‘His old man? You mean his father?’
‘That’s right. He says we could go for rides; swim in the sea; anything.’
Martin leaned across his desk and picked up the blue and white ball. ‘Emilio,’ he said, ‘do you know where this came from?’
‘Unh-hunh.’
‘Emilio – it came from in there. It came from the mirror. Take a look in the mirror right now. What am I holding up? A worn-out old tennis ball, right? Yet look at this one. It doesn’t make any sense. Like seeing that boy doesn’t make any sense. You’re not supposed to look into mirrors and see somebody else instead of yourself.’
Emilio wiped his tears with his sleeve.
Martin said, ‘The trouble is, Emilio, I can’t get my tennis ball back.’
‘But this ball’s okay,’ Emilio told him. ‘Why do you want the other one back?’
Martin tossed the ball up into the air and caught it again. ‘Emilio, that’s not the point. I can’t get it back whether I want it or not. Now, supposing you went through that mirror. The way I see it, for anything to get through, one real thing has to be traded for one mirror thing. Can you understand that? It’s the same as the boy was telling you yesterday. You can’t play ball with just a reflection, it won’t go through. You need two balls – one to go in and the other to come out. Just like you need two boys. One to step into the mirror, one to step out.’
Emilio scratched his head like one of the Little Rascals. ‘But if that boy has to come out when I go in, how do we play with each other? He said he was going to show me his lead soldiers.’
Martin said, ‘Listen to me, planet brain. If this blue and white ball came through the mirror and I can’t get my old ball back, do you have any reason to suppose that when that boy comes through the mirror, I’m going to be able to get you back?’
Emilio was silent for a moment, pouting. Then he said, ‘I don’t want to come back. I don’t care. Anything’s better than Grannie and Gramps. They always smell like garlic, and there are dust balls under the bed.’
‘The same dust balls exist in that mirror,’ Martin assured him. ‘So do the beds they’re under. They’ve got the same garlic, the same people, the same world. The only difference is that everything’s back to front.’
Emilio said wistfully, ‘I wish I could see it.’
‘It is not so hot, believe me.’
‘But it is! Look at that writing!’ And he pointed to the letters ‘I wonder how you speak it. It’s cool.’
‘Cool.’ Martin smiled, shaking his head, and laid an arm around Emilio’s shoulder. ‘You should’ve been a printer, that’s what printers have to do, read type back to front. Come, let’s get that Coke.’
They went through to the kitchen. Emilio perched on the stool while Martin opened up two cans of Coke.
Emilio said, ‘That boy, his name’s not really Petey, is it?’
‘No,’ Martin told him. ‘That boy’s name is Boofuls.’
‘You mean like the same kid in the picture in your bedroom?’
‘The very same kid.’
Emilio made a loud sucking noise with his drinking straw. ‘But that picture comes from the olden days.’
‘That’s right. Nineteen thirty-six, to be precise. And that’s more than fifty years ago.’
