Read The Dickens Mirror for Free Online Page B

already
. He studies the angry red scald. Be lucky if that doesn’t blister.
It’s just toothpaste, you dope
.
    Squishing out another rope of green goop, he lifts the brush to his mouth, then hesitates. Behind its watery film, his reflection patiently waits. He feels its eyes trying to bore through that mist—but for a split second, he has the eeriest feeling:
I don’t know what you look like
. Which means he’s not sure what
he
looks like either, just like that moment in his dream when he reached for his face and …
    “Stop it.” Yet … has he
ever
seen his face in this mirror? With his free hand, he skims the hollow under his left eye. In the mirror, the blob shifts, and its arm mimics his move, of course, of
course
, because that is just a reflection. But what color
are
his eyes? He waits for the answer to slot into his brain. Nothing comes.
Okay, what about the color of my hair?
No answer surfaces from the well of his brain; nothing drifts from the dark to settle on his tongue. Total blank.
    That’s crazy. I can’t be nothing
. But he’s never looked at himself in the mirror now, has he?
Has
he? He can’t remember.
Shit
. He feels the spit drying up on his tongue. This is just too close to that damn nightmare.
    Well then, settle it. Go on. Check, you coward. Go on
.
    “Okay” —and then, casually, “No big deal.” Which is
such
a lie, because it is, it
is
. Heart thumping, he uses the side of his left hand to squeegee water from silvered glass, and he
seeees
 … him. He. Whatever. That is, he recognizes the kid with the cap of wet brown curls and light blue eyes in the mirror as the boy he’s always imagined he is.
    “Well, who else would it be?” Lifting his hand, he turns it this way and that. His hand, all right. Isn’t it? How can you really tell something like that? Just because you keep waking up in the same body? How do you
know
that whatever you wake up
in
is yours?
    “What’s going on?” He raises his eyes to his reflection. “Do
you
know?”
    For just a sec, he has the funniest feeling that the kid in the mirror will answer, like
that
kid stands on the other side of a pane of rain-spattered glass: different bathroom, another Wisconsin, whole other planet. A twin, all tangled up in his life the way Mr. Steele, his physics teacher, says might happen if you believe Schrödinger. (Although Einstein didn’t. But the concept’s cool, actually: that a cat can exist in between, both alive and dead at the same moment. When you look in the box—
collapse the wave function
is how Steele put it—Schrödinger’s cat is either alive or dead because you looked. You forced that cat to be either/or. The cat can’t be both.)
    So he’s stupidly relieved when his reflection perfectly syncs, saying the same thing right back at him at the same time. Still, he can’t rid himself of this nagging sense that something has changed. Like … what has
he
forced by clearing fog from that bathroom mirror
for the very first time
? In a funny way, isn’t this bathroom a kind of box? Who knows what’s really beyond the door?
    “You’re a nut. You’re going to drive yourself crazy with shit like this.” Thumbing his stupid Snoopy electric to life, he begins scrubbing his teeth, hard and thoroughly. Yet he’s also got this strangest swoop of déjà vu all over again, the sneaking suspicion that this whole routine is something he’s gone through maybe more times than he can count: Michael on the radio,
Twisted Tales
by the sink, Crest on his toothbrush, and so much green foam on his mouth, he looks like a rabid dog that’s escaped from the set of
The Wizard of Oz
.
    Stop
. But he can’t. He spits, sucks water from the faucet, rinses, spits again. Fights the urge to see what the boy in the mirror is doing. Instead, he watches murky spit-water circle down the drain.
    What’s new is the nightmare
. Now he does turn a look at his reflection.
And you. This is the first time I’ve ever wiped away the