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and turned, reaching out for the light switch, flooding the bathroom with a blue-white glow that made his mirrored image look as pale as a ghost. He closed the door and stood before the full-length mirror on the inside of the door, squinting at his reflection. In pajama bottoms and no shirt, he was a mass of bruises, to be sure, and the ones on his face were the worst. One eye was puffed nearly closed and there were blood crustings under both nostrils, more of it under his left earlobe that had been torn by a punch, and a ridge of knuckle marks on his jaw and lips. He turned and looked at his side, where he’d landed on a pumpkin, and the bruise glowed a fierce purple over the cracked rib. All of that was as it should be, as he expected. Nevertheless the bruise on his stomach, which was the worst of all the injuries, was now nothing more than a faintness of red, like a blush, not even as scarlet as the red from a belly flop into a pool. Last night—not eight hours ago—it had been a swelling mound, a volcano about to blow with a dark purple fist-size core surrounded by every shade of blue and red. Now it was almost gone.
    Mike Sweeney stared at the bruise—at the absence of a bruise—and then looked into the mirror image of his own blue eyes. He looked and looked, searching for answers in those familiar eyes—and then just like that flick of a switch that had made him step out of his body last night, those eyes were not familiar at all. One second he was looking into the eyes of Mike Sweeney, fourteen going on fifteen, teenage paperboy and favorite punching bag of the town’s meanest son of a bitch and the very next second he was looking into the eyes of someone he didn’t know at all. These new eyes were older, deeper, stranger. The blue was the same shade but it was flecked with red as if tiny drops of blood were sprinkled throughout each iris. The pupils were huge, like a cat’s at night, and the whites were veined with red. The face was different, too. Still bruised, but now the bruises looked superimposed over a different face, which was also older, with a stronger jaw and skin that was gaunt and stretched over brow and cheekbones. The lips of this stranger’s mouth were thin and hard as if he was fighting a grimace of pain, and the upper lip was cut by a thick white scar. The hair had, indeed, turned reddish brown.
    Mike Sweeney stared at this face for a long time and the longer he stared the clearer the image in the mirror became, and the less clear the look in the flesh-and-blood face was. Those eyes, his real eyes, dulled into glass as if they were the eyes of a mannequin. Anyone looking at those eyes would have said that there was no one home.
    At fourteen, Mike had never heard the expression fugue state before. Had he been in any way cognizant of what was happening at that moment—which would be a paradoxical impossibility—he would have seen a true fugue state. For the moment, however, Mike Sweeney was indeed not home. At that moment there was no Mike Sweeney. There was something else. Call it a chrysalis.
    He turned and went back to bed, his body functioning with reflexive efficiency even to the point of turning out the bathroom light. He climbed into bed, pulled the covers up, and lay there, staring up at the ceiling and seeing absolutely nothing. Certainly he didn’t see the ghostly figure of a gray-skinned man with a guitar sitting on the chair of his computer table.
    When he woke later that morning, he would remember nothing at all about what he had seen in the mirror, and the thought that the bruise on his stomach had healed too fast would not even enter his mind.
     
    As the boy slept, the figure sitting on the chair sat and stared at him, leaning forward, elbows on knees, eyes intent on the lines of the boy’s face, wondering if he should be filled with hope or despair.
    It was a toss-up.
    (5)

    Detective Sergeant Frank Ferro of the Philadelphia Police Department’s narcotics division was a