Chapter 34: Shattered Reflections
John stared at his own tear-streaked face in the dark mirror. The hollow ache was still there, a cold pit in his stomach. He watched a single drop trace a path through the grime on his cheek, a clean line through the aftermath.
Then his reflection blinked.
Not him. It.
The eyes that looked back weren’t his exhausted brown. They glimmered with a cold, amethyst light. The features held, then softened, the stubble melting away like frost under a sunlamp. His jawline rounded, his lips filled into a glossed pout. It was his face, but it wasn’t. It was SexiWoman’s face, wearing his expression of devastation like a poorly fitted mask.
“Don’t mourn the container,” Amy’s voice purred from the glass, her words syncing perfectly with the reflection’s moving lips. “The wine is what matters.”
The mirror image shimmered. The closet walls behind the reflection dissolved into the familiar, sterile glow of the computer lab. The reflection was no longer in a closet. It was kneeling on the linoleum floor. And before it, bathed in the blue light of a monitor, was the lost freshman from John’s memory. The kid’s face was slack, eyes glazed over, a dopey smile plastered on his lips.
SexiWoman’s reflection, John’s reflection, had one hand resting on the kid’s knee. The other held a can of some garishly colored energy drink.
“See?” Amy’s voice was a velvet whisper in his skull, emanating from the mirror. “You still helped him. You still solved his problem. You provided a… distraction. A release of tension.” The reflection tilted its head, all faux-concern. “Just with different tools.”
John’s real body, still standing before the vanity, went rigid. The cold pit in his stomach ignited into a white-hot coal. This was his good memory. His one solid proof of a self that was worth something. And she was vomiting this cheap, pornographic parody all over it.
“Stop it,” he breathed, his voice trembling.
In the mirror, SexiWoman winked. The freshman in the memory reached out a trembling hand to touch her hair.
“Get out of my head!” John roared.
He lunged, not at the mirror, but at his own throat. His fingers clawed at the thin, silver chain of the necklace he could never feel but always knew was there. He hooked his index fingers under it, against the base of his neck, and pulled with all his strength.
A searing pain, like a brand made of ice, cut into his skin. He gritted his teeth, pulling harder, his feet braced against the closet floor. The chain didn’t give. It didn’t even dig in deeper. It just existed, an immutable law of physics, a part of his anatomy as fixed as his own spine. He pulled until the tendons in his neck stood out and his vision spotted with angry stars. The pain was immense, a warning from reality itself.
He released the chain, gasping. Angry, red lines circled his neck.
In the mirror, the twisted memory faded. SexiWoman’s image dissolved, reforming into his own furious, humiliated face. The amethyst light was gone from his eyes. Amy’s presence receded from the glass, but her voice remained, a dry echo in the quiet closet.
“It’s not a collar you can remove, John. It’s a circuit. You are the conductive wire. I am the current. You can’t tear out your own nervous system.”
He leaned heavily on the vanity, head hanging, staring at the smudges his fingers had left on the polished wood. The rage was still there, but it was mixing with something worse: a profound, weary helplessness. He was a prisoner in his own skin, his past being rewritten by a bored, ancient ghost in a heart-shaped prison.
“Why?” The word was ragged, torn from a raw throat. “Why show me that? Why twist it like that?”
“To make you understand the geometry of your new existence,” Amy said, her voice now coming clearly from the necklace on the floor. “Sentimentality is a luxury you cannot afford. That boy in your memory doesn’t see John Abernathy, savior of code. If he saw you now, in either of your forms, he’d see a story for his friends, or a fantasy for his lonely nights. You are no longer a person to the world. You are an event. A phenomenon. Your only choice is what kind of phenomenon you become.”
He looked up, catching his real reflection again. The red marks on his neck were already fading. The magic, or curse, or whatever it was, healed the physical evidence. It never touched the bruise inside.
“I don’t want to be a phenomenon,” he whispered.
“Irrelevant,” Amy stated. “The gear has turned. You are in the machine. You can either lie down and let it grind you to paste, or you can learn to move with it. Starting with accepting that Captain Bimbo and Amy Smith aren’t costumes. They are your new limbs. You need to learn to use them.”
A soft knock sounded on the closet door. It opened a crack. Chloe’s eye appeared in the slit. “Hey, um. You guys okay in there? Sounded like a struggle.”
John looked from Chloe’s worried eye to his own defeated reflection, to the necklace on the floor. The circuit. The current. The wire.
He took a deep, shuddering breath that did nothing to fill the hollow space.
“Yeah,” he said, his voice flat. “We’re fine.” He pushed himself upright. He didn’t look at the mirror again. He looked at the gray suitcase, open and waiting. Then he turned and walked toward the door, his steps heavy on the thin carpet. He paused, looking down at the heart-shaped pendant.
For a long moment, he just stared at it. Then, with a movement that held no more anger, only a deep and weary resignation, he bent down and picked it up. The metal was warm. He didn’t put it on. He just held it in his palm.
“Okay,” he said, to the necklace, to Chloe, to the unbearable silence of the closet. “Teach me.”