Our Infinite Sadness

Mirror Room

Jasper and Alice abraded the soles of their shoes down to their heels and toes and skidded to a stop on a granite curb, at the arrivals terminal shuttle drop-off. Alice kicked her ruined shoes into the street with disgust.

They stood to either side of Edythe. She had nearly broken the sound barrier.

The sidewalk teemed with people fleeing the battle zone behind them. They couldn't stay here.

Edythe breathed, "How long was he out of your sight?"

Alice couldn't answer. Her mind and body were paralyzed by visions of the near future: a freeway under piercingly unnavigable sunlight; the back seat of a taxicab, a mailbox, an unkempt driveway, scrubby with fresh weeds.

Jasper answered, "He could not have been in the rest room for more than nine minutes."

Edythe groaned.

Jasper insisted, "That's not excessive, given what he could have been doing in there."

"Speculation, because you left him alone there. You don't even know when he ran for it. He could have ten minutes on us."

Alice snapped to the present. "No. I saw the future change when he discovered the concourse exit. Six minutes, tops."

"An eternity."

Carlisle and Emilia caught up with them, and the latter scathingly said, "It will be, if we don't move, now. We need a car."

"A fast one," Alice agreed.

And like that, all five were on the run for the central parking garage.

Now the future flowed through Alice like water, an effortlessly rushing stream, and Edythe couldn't help but dip her toes into its current. Not only were her visions illuminated brashly now by the light of morning, but every scene had scintillating clarity, every variation of Ben's future having collapsed to a single unwavering line.

Flashes across flowing water: from the mailbox and driveway to a bright contemporary kitchen and its shadowed alcove with a phone and vintage answering machine on the small utilitarian workspace. And then, somewhat less clear, the Mirror Room, Ben's preordained destination, and deeper into the future, an infinite regression of self-portraits, cantered on their axis, took flight and wheeled through space to an abrupt crash from which spilled a quick and growing pool of thick, sluggish crimson. Benjamin's lifeblood drained away across the polished oak floor, and he writhed broken at its center.

Edythe stared up at the sky, truncated by the eight ascending levels of the parking garage, and she heard a high, piercing sound, thin and reedy, a hurricane siphoned through dry hollow bone. She saw herself through Alice's eyes, a woman burning alive in a furnace, shrieking at a frequency barely discernible to the birds that she routed for miles.

Her muscles coiled. She saw herself leaping ninety-eight feet straight up, to the top level of the garage, to what end she couldn't imagine, perhaps just to scream her defiance at Heaven.

Carlisle and Emilia grabbed her torso as she prepared to spring. She struggled against them and exhausted herself against Emelia's unbreakable hold. She was panting, chest heaving, and she could see the alarm on their faces, because her dead heart thumped rhythmically and sputtered dry against nothing but air.

The new awareness within herself, that which had become an aspect of herself, had nothing to say, almost as though it had departed her for good, with disgust and contempt—and then she realized that she had it wrong. They were speaking together, through their atmosphere-piercing laments, a unified persona, the same consciousness, the same being immolating in existential peril, one and the same.