Chapter 2
My body felt as though I was being turned inside out. Like I’d been pulled through a small gap and reformed.
Then, after that bizarre sensation, I landed on my hands and knees on something solid. Solid but soft.
Not tile. Not stone. Something that gave under my palms the way hard flesh gives. Warm. Not hot. The warmth of a body that has been sitting in the sun. The warmth of skin.
The right knee of my tights tore on impact.
I felt it go before I saw it, the stretch then the rip.
A bead of blood came up at the very center of the kneecap, perfect and round, the size of a sequin.
I watched it. I watched it with the polite, displaced attention of a person who knows she should be doing something more useful but cannot, just at this moment, think what.
The hoodie was damp at the shoulders from the Suydam Street rain. The cuff with the small frayed half-moon was twisted around my left wrist. My hair, what was left of the low knot, had finished falling. I could feel it against the back of my neck.
I drew a breath.
The breath was wrong. The air had a temperature I could not immediately place—neither hot nor cold but pressurized somehow, the way the air at the back of a long tunnel is pressurized.
It smelled — and here my brain did the thing my brain did at parties, the writer’s reflex of hunting for a word and feeling—it smelled of faded life.
Bodies, not unpleasant, and underneath there was something faintly floral I could not name.
Not jasmine. Not rose. Something that had once, perhaps, been a flower, and had been dried and pressed in a book and forgotten about for a hundred years.
The word didn’t come. My brain offered me three and rejected all of them.
I looked up.
Was that a sky?
It was the color of cinder, the color of the inside of a fireplace twelve hours after the fire has gone out, low and close enough that I felt I might, if I stood up very slowly, be able to touch it.
It was lit. That was the part I could not get my mind around.
There was light in this place. The light came from somewhere.
I could not, by turning my head, find a source for it.
There was no sun. There was no moon. There was no horizon glow.
The light was simply present, the way the light is present in a dream, evenly distributed across every surface, casting no shadow that I could find.
I looked down.
Beneath my hands was also the sky.
Not a copy of it, not a reflection of it—the sky itself, perfectly, exactly, the same low cinder ceiling, the same impossible even light, except that beneath the cinder, under the silver of the surface, there was a face.
It was looking at me.
I had spent ten years not looking at faces in mirrors, and especially not at this one.
It met my eyes and held them. It was sharper than any reflection I had ever taken in.
The edges of it—the line of the jaw, the small wet shine on the lower lip, the two soft pieces of hair coming down along either side—were rendered with the kind of precision a glass lens cannot do, the kind a memory cannot do.
The face was mine. It was, by every measurement my eyes could perform, the face I had carried for twenty-nine years.
The want was still on its mouth.
The same want. The Crosby ladies’ room want. The bare, undeflected, unqualified envy I had let myself look at for one second over a basin of expensive hand soap and then walked away from. It had followed me through the silver. It was here. It had got here first.
I made a small sound at the back of my throat. The face under my palms made the same sound, a half-second behind, in perfect courteous mimicry. Its breath fogged the underside of the surface from the wrong direction.
I lifted my hands away from the floor.
I sat back on my heels. The bead of blood at my knee had spread to the size of a dime.
The hem of the gray hoodie pooled in my lap.
I pressed both hands flat against my own thighs, just to feel a thing that was reliably mine, and then—because there did not seem to be any other thing to do—I stood up.
The floor was warm under my bare feet. Almost alive. I had the unsettling, embarrassed sense that the soles of my feet were sticking to it very faintly, the way bare skin sticks to a glass tabletop on a humid afternoon. I shifted my heel. The floor shifted, microscopically, against the heel.
I turned slowly, because I didn’t know what was behind me.
There was no door.
There was no apartment. There was no medicine cabinet, no white tile, no bathroom, no Suydam Street.
There was no rectangular pool of silver hanging in the air where I had come through.
There was—in every direction my eyes could find a direction—the same plain.
The same cinder sky. The same mirror under it.
They met one another at a horizon line so clean and so far away that I understood, with a small administrative shock, that there was no land between them.
Sky above. Sky below. The thinnest seam where they had been stitched together by something.
For a moment, it felt as though I did not know which way was up.
I looked down at my feet, at the woman in the gray hoodie standing on the underside of the cinder, looking up at me with a torn knee and a bead of blood and her hair coming down, and I understood, with the same small administrative shock, that she did not know either.
She was waiting to be told.
So I told her. “Walk.”
I didn’t get far.
I heard them first, behind me. A snuffling, scratching sound that was remarkable because it was the only thing that broke the silence. When I turned, it felt as though my heart burst through my ribcage.
There were six of them at the far edge of the plain, walking toward me in a loose, almost courteous file, and there were six of them walking toward me from the underside of the cinder as well.
The two sets of feet met at the seam. The seam, which had been so clean and far away when I had taken it for a horizon, was not a horizon at all.
It was a hinge. The hinge held two skies together and twelve walking shapes between them, and the walking shapes converged on me from above and below in the same long unhurried stride.
They were tall.
Tall in the way a thing that has been stretched is tall—not built up but pulled, as though something had taken a normal-shaped person at the crown and the heels and drawn them gently apart and held them there until they stayed.
Scrawny. Their limbs were long and held wrong at the joints, the elbows a half-inch further down the arm than mine, the knees a half-inch higher up the thigh.
They walked upright. They walked, in fact, with a posture so carefully upright that I understood, watching it, that the uprightness was a courtesy.
They were the color of nothing in particular.
They were not gray. They were not white.
They were not the color of bone or the color of fog or the color of cooled ash.
They were the color a thing becomes after it has stood for too long in fog and taken on the fog’s color instead.
Their reflections walked underneath their feet on the upside-down sky and met them, sole to sole, at every step.
Where their faces should have been there was an iridescence.
I want to be careful with this. I had a writer’s habit of overworking a face.
I would not overwork this one. Where each face should have been, there was a faint shifting shimmer the color of oil on a wet street—the slow hot wash of pinks and greens and purples that did not, exactly, settle.
It moved. It moved the way a face moves when a person is trying on expressions in front of a mirror—a small tilt toward sorrow, a flicker toward amusement, a pull toward hunger—and could not, having tried a thousand of them, decide which one to wear.
The iridescence had the suggestion of features the way a dropcloth has the suggestion of the chair underneath it.
There was a place where a mouth might have been.
There was a place where eyes might have been.
The places drifted by half an inch every few seconds.
They moved quickly, like a pack. I thought about running, but I knew it wouldn’t help, that they’d close the distance in the end. I could feel their want for me, almost smell it.
They were twenty feet away when they locked in on me.
They turned the way a hand grips, every finger at once, every knuckle in concert, a single decision distributed across six bodies. The synchronization was so polite, so courteous, so unhurried that for one whole heartbeat I thought I had imagined it.
One of them, the smallest, dropped a half-pace forward out of the file.
Its shimmer flickered toward something that was almost a smile and then away from it.
It made a small wet sound. The sound was the sound a person makes against the back of their teeth when they have been handed a bowl of something they have wanted for a long time.
Anticipation. Salivation. The mouth getting itself ready for an arrival.
It was threat.
I did what I had done in every threatening room of my adult life.
My shoulders, which had come up around my ears the second I had registered the doubled bodies on the plain, came down.
They came down in the small soft drop that I had practiced in a thousand mirrors I had not let myself look directly at.
My chin tucked half an inch. My palms, which had been pressed flat against my thighs, came open.
Not up. Up was a beggar’s gesture. Open at the side, slightly forward of the hipbones, the inside of each wrist exposed.
The gesture said: I have nothing. The gesture said: I am no threat to you. The gesture said: please.
I opened my mouth.