The old man wrote tragedy,

and for decades had been amazed that it kept him fed. Once, an interviewer asked him why he penned the stories and characters he did. His answer was simple. 

 

“That’s what I see,” he said.

It was all around, every day. Fiction was a dark mirror and it reflected the tragedy that was us. What the old man strove to do was raise it above just another sound-bite blurb on an endlessly repeating loop. He took it away from pancaked talking heads and gave it back to humanity. There was no twinkle in his eye, no almost smirk on his face. He took it as his solemn duty. That was the promise he had made to Gwen as her hand got colder and colder in his, the cardiac monitor next to her bed beeping out their last moments together. She had seldom asked anything of him in their twenty years together. But she had asked him this, there at the end. 

Make them see they’re still human, Frank. Remind them what that means.

His first novel cast in this new mold, so different than what he’d written before, poured out of him in an isolation filled only with music, and memories that sometimes brought him to his knees, the room swimming and his throat constricted by grief and loss.

People responded. They loved it or they hated it. That was people, forever needing to polarize, to concede only a spectrum of possibilities that consisted of extremes. The book did well commercially, and he kept writing. Along the way he recognized that amid the darkness and the stink there were lights that rose like glowing balloons. They were what made it all worthwhile, he knew. Those bits of illumination put it all into context, gave the mindless chaos and depravity meaning it would otherwise lack.

Now, his breath failing, his own trembling hands going cold and no one to hold them, the grandfather clock Gwen and he had salvaged and restored ticking away the remainder of his days, the old man closed his eyes and wondered if the words he had wrenched from himself had been adequate. He supposed that in a world made of stories, every teller must wonder the same from time to time, even God. 

 

The sound of the pendulum swaying back and forth to mark the linear progression of a force he knew to be circular accompanied him out of the world, his last mortal thought one of regret for humankind’s need to impose meager definitions on things greater than it let itself perceive.

He went into darkness alone, as he had known he would.         

                                           

Only, he was not alone. Amid a sensation of both rising and falling endlessly, he saw in his heart and felt on his face and heard in his mind the pulsing musical light springing forth from a multitude of glowing spheres. They filled the blackness as far as he could discern in every direction, and they traveled together although they were apart. Their myriad songs were one.

He smiled, his own bleak music unfettered by words, the only lyrics reflections in that dark mirror.

The old man understood then that he was one of those balloons of light, filling a void with illumination, one pinprick at a time, and he always had been.


SR 

I'm not in prison

because the c-store didn’t have cameras. Or maybe it did, and the fuckers didn’t work. It was 1986, and all that was just starting to come in, so it could have gone either way. Cold little Big Brother eye, or blank human stare.

I’ll never know. Jimmy and Dean came through the west door three beats later, heading for the back, where the beer coolers were. Dean was new to the Valley, a shitkicker from some small Texas town. But he was angry as the rest of us, maybe for better reasons. He sported a lot of shiners. Jimmy was the youngest after me, the guy who usually puked, had this buzz-oppositional disorder, contemplating his navel if we dropped acid, everyone else bouncing off the ceiling. Then I’d score some weed from my mom and he’d go apeshit after two hits.

I called them Jimmy-Dean. They were trying to prove something. Looking back I realize it was to themselves.

I just wanted some smokes. That meant I got to play decoy. Not that I was some hard-case. Just poor, rebelling against Hamburger Helper, not parents with actual expectations. A mom my friends who weren’t thought way cool. Bored and broke and dropping classes like they were molten, A-average or no. Counselor gave this blank look when I went to him, wanting to know could they switch my teachers back, because this new guy had turned algebra that had made sense into Chinese scribbles on an overhead projector while he read a newspaper. Counselor looked at me like I didn’t have a clue what planet I was on, said, “You get good grades, have good attendance, you’re smart. Figure it out. I’ve got kids stabbing each other, kids sniffing glue in the john, girls hooking out of the parking lot at lunch…”

The lowest common denominator strikes again.

I saw in his eyes that nobody cared. You were supposed to follow the script and get with the program. My middle-class friends with their mohawks and dreadlocks and torn t-shirts, their eyeliner and combat boots, they had something real to rebel against after all.

Jimmy-Dean came up behind me as I paid for a carton of Camels. You could do that at fifteen back then, not get carded. The paper-punch handles of the suitcases creaked in their hands. I hoped they got Bud this time and not fucking Old Milwaukee.

Something in the eyes of the clerk as I took my smokes and Jimmy-Dean came to a stop and in a thunderous voice that was the voice of every pissed-off disillusioned teenager everywhere said, “FUCK YOU,” and sped out the doors with the beer. Clerk looked at me like I’d raped his little sister. He knew I knew, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it, no way to prove it. I didn’t look like them. No hair gel, no safety pins, no tats. Just a kid who came in half a dozen steps ahead of the real punks. But he knew, and a certainty loomed up behind the anger and frustration in his gaze, back in the shadows where truth hung out. My friends were assholes, it said. Then it asked a question:

What did that make me?

I didn’t understand it then, but that was the first time I caught a glimpse of the back of the mirror. And there I was.

SR

What's in the Back of the Mirror?

You are, the real you.  Not the face you put on for public consumption, not the one you want to see, the one that is. Do you see it? Feel it staring back at you? If so, now comes the hard part.

My wife, Victoria, uses the phrase to describe an act of will, a decision to be honest with yourself. A concept I find admirable and strive to emulate. It crops up again and again in my fiction, an implacable theme. Why? Because like many of my heroes I believe it is the writer's job to do more than entertain. A good story should reflect who we are and the world we've made in our image, address the good, the bad, and the ugly. There's light out there and some of it comes from us, but there's darkness too, springing from behind the images we project, or seeping around their edges. We do good and we do evil and a hell of a lot that's somewhere in between, and if we hope to ever get it right, we have to look at it all and say, "Yup, that's me."

So the concept infuses the stories, because all good stories since the dawn of time are the back of the mirror. They see us. They speak, and what they say is brutal, even when it's beautiful.

Especially then.


SR