Seeing Things

The first time I saw her was in the shower, when I turned to adjust the faucet, and the other me, my shadowy twin, my reflection—she did not.

Did it really start there? I don’t know. Maybe it’s been happening when I wasn’t looking for years. Maybe forever.

But either way, it has been about two months since I first saw it. Saw her, in my bathroom, in my shower, washing my hair.

See, I—I did like my reflection, you know, before, so I kept quite a few mirrors in my flat, wanted to be able see myself from every angle. I made quite a bit of money off looking pretty, right up until the world stopped turning. I bet you’ve seen me, while you’re wandering around a department store looking for some five-dollar powder to soak up the shine on your nose. I’m forgettable, flawless. I’ve walked runways in Brazil and Tokyo and still, no one remembers my name. Sure, I get the occasional fan—Weren’t you on that game show, holding a briefcase with a bunch of money in it? No, I wasn’t, but I’m anonymous enough to smile and say yes, I was. But no one’s getting together to make game shows or showcase the latest fashions, not anymore, which has forced me to really consider just how expendable my position is.

I wonder, now, if things would have been different if I’d just turned around a little earlier. Or just kept my eyes closed, letting the water wash everything away. If I’d just missed it. Maybe it would have been the same.

I was looking at a fly on the top corner of the mirror in the shower when it happened. I wasn’t even washing anymore, just standing there, letting the water beat the filth and grime away. I wasn’t really seeing the fly, though, because I was trying to remember when I’d showered last. I hadn’t worked, hadn’t gone anywhere, hadn’t spoken with anyone but the food delivery guy in days. He only comes masked and gloved, and we don’t speak. There’s too much risk.

I don’t know how long I pondered this—though I do think I eventually washed my hair twice and forgot conditioner. The water began to run cold, and I turned to adjust the faucet, trying to coax just a little more hot water out to rinse off with.

Except—something out of the corner of my eye didn’t look right, and I froze. There was just enough time for me to realize that my reflection hadn’t moved with me before it righted itself, the thing warping and snapping back into place.

I forgot about the water. I stared at myself, or what I thought was myself. I poked at my face—gently, of course—and looked for anything off. There was nothing. It was just me, staring at myself in confusion.

Then I laughed, of course, because it’s just the isolation, right? I’m just losing it a little but it’s probably nothing. And my reflection laughed, too. I don’t think I ever rinsed my hair.

The city was silent, the streets dead and empty, with the stoplight on the corner closest to my flat flicking green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red, signaling to nothing and no one. The occasional person mills by, either a brave idiot or an infected, but almost everyone is too afraid, we all know the numbers. Desire to wander, to spread the disease, is one of the symptoms, so it’s hard to be sure.

After the shower incident, I quit sleeping in the bedroom. The other me, in the mirrored ceiling, was impossible to sleep under. I’d start to drift off and sometimes even get close, but then I’d remember that warping, twisting thing in the shower, and in the dark, it was much easier to believe it was real, easy to imagine her coming back while I slept. Sometimes I’d drift into an uneasy slumber, wake and swear she was watching me, sometimes smiling, sometimes snarling, sometimes expressionless entirely. I began sleeping on the couch.

Taking care of myself had already began to feel like a pointless exercise. My hair lived in a tangled ponytail, and I was constantly broke out because I forgot to wash my face. I missed brushing my teeth a few times, too, and real clothes became a thing of the “Before.” I was alone anyway, who cared if I wanted to live in sweats? I stopped intentionally looking in the mirrors at some point, because I didn’t want to see it, either. I think, looking back, I just needed a good excuse—a rational excuse—to avoid reflections for a while. It’s easier if you just… don’t have any need.

Eventually, it was too much, to be alone, with all those mirrors—my shadowy selves—and the news, growing bleaker by the day. I texted a friend who’s okay with a no-strings-attached policy, and lucky for me, he was just as desperate for human connection as I was. I don’t have a lot of friends, and neither does he. There’s only so long you can go with no human contact before you start to go crazy, okay? I was already seeing things. Go ahead, judge. But I needed some company. He was going to pick up a pizza, which gave me half an hour to get ready.

This was the first time I’d really paid attention to my reflection since the shower incident, which I’d pushed to the back of my mind. I studied the other me at first, but everything was normal. It blinked when I blinked, its hands moved when mine moved. I was starting to wonder if I really had imagined all of it. I hadn’t had any reason to put makeup on in a while, and my hands shook a little, but I did alright, all the way up until the lipstick.

I always do that last because it’s the hardest. I like long-lasting formulas, but I never quite get it even. They don’t let me do my own makeup for shoots. I willed my hand to stop shaking as the doe-foot applicator, dripping candy-red, hovered millimeters from my lips.

Something moved behind me, a blur, intangible, and my head whipped around behind me. I scanned the room, but everything seemed to be in place. I turned back to the mirror and everything stopped, for me—I didn’t know how to process the image in the mirror. My heart felt frozen in my chest, and I forgot how to breathe, didn’t know how to scream.

It was me; but it wasn’t me. She was holding up the applicator, looking between it and me, and a slow grin crawled across her face. She pressed the lipstick to her own lips and I felt the pressure on mine, but my hands weren’t anywhere near my face, and I dropped the lipstick on the vanity, but she kept going. She outlined the top lip quickly, messily, and on the bottom lip, she dragged the applicator halfway-across before swiping sharply downwards, smearing lipstick across her—and my—chin. She laughed wickedly, silently, and I threw myself backwards, away from the vanity. Some sound choked out of me, something like a scream, but it got caught in my throat around a sob that shook my chest.

Behind the vanity was the bed, and as I pressed up against it, I remembered the mirror in the ceiling and instinctively snapped my head toward it. But it was just me, now, looking horribly shaken. My lipstick was a mess, and my mascara had started to run a little, but it was just me.

Goddamn it, I had time to think, reaching up to the mess of my mouth. How am I going to fix this?

The doorbell rang. I pulled myself to my feet, shaky, and went to answer it.

His eyes widened when I opened the door, his eyebrows raised.

“Sorry,” I said, feeling heat in my face. “I, uh, twitched.”

“No,” he said, his eyes darkening. He grinned, and grabbed my chin, pulled my face to his own and kissed me. “It’s kinda hot.”

He stepped in, put the pizza on the counter, closed the door behind him. He’d been here before, and he took my hand, leading me toward the bedroom.

“Um,” I planted my heels and he turned to me, confused. “Maybe, we could stay in here this time?”

My date turned and looked at the couch, raised his eyebrows at my depression-nest—empty chip bags, soda bottles, bags of trash I’d pulled out and tied off but not actually taken outside. He looked between that, the bedroom door, and me, then finally asked, “Seriously?”

“I’ve just been having some… weird stuff happen in there.”

He pulled me close, wrapped his arms around me. “I’ll protect you; I’ll be right there. Come on, your room is amazing. We gotta use the mirror.”

Nothing had actually happened with the ceiling mirror, yet, I supposed. I looked over at the couch, the mess. “Okay,” I finally answered, and led the way to the bedroom.

And then we were under the mirror.

His hands in my hair, breath on my neck. The thought creeped at the back of my mind: I hope he’s been careful. And underneath that, in a darker tone. He wasn’t wearing a mask when he showed up. Did he wear one on the way? But he was warm and gentle, and he smelled good, and that was all I really cared about.

I didn’t want to look up. I stayed on top, kept my face buried in his neck, at first. But he flipped us over and whispered, “Watch.” My eyes opened, locked with those in the mirror.

But it wasn’t me.

I twisted my fingers in the sheets, and I felt my eyes go wide with terror, but she was smirking, grinning, as she draped her arms over his back, watching me. She buried her nails in his shoulder and he gasped. I lifted my hand, looking at it, as she raked her nails across his back. Dark, red liquid formed under the tips of my fingernails.

Bloody lines opened across his back and he let out a scream, but he seemed to like it, pressing me even harder against himself and nipping at my shoulder. She laughed and then warped, and it was me again. And I could have stopped it… but I realized that, well… I liked it, too.

We fell asleep after, immediately, it seemed. I hadn’t planned to, but I awoke in a tangle of limbs, in the dark. The red digital clock on my bedside table flashed 3:20.

I gently shook my friend’s shoulder. “Wake up,” I said, softly, firmly.

One eye squinted open, barely. I tried to remember if they were blue or green. “Wha’? What’s up?”

“You have to leave,” I told him, thinking of the mirror.

I kept the pizza and ate the whole thing by myself.

That filled the need, for a few days. It was a surprisingly short amount of time before I started feeling it again, the need for interaction. I wanted to really talk, which left me with few options. As a starting-out model, I’d found it hard to make friends—I believed it was because I was too pretty, at the time, which was also why I started carrying a gun, though I never needed it. However, I’ve started to realize, toward the end of my career, other beautiful women have friends. The difference is, they care about other people, and I never really learned how to do that.

I decided to call the most reliable contact in my life, the guy whose friendship I pay for in royalties. My agent picked up on the first ring. “Hey,” he said, and he smacked his gum. I could almost smell the wintergreen. “I’m sorry, I don’t have anything for you yet. No shoots, we talked about this.”

“Uh, no. Actually, I, um…” My mind groped for some good way to describe what was happening. “I think I might be seeing things.”

There was a long pause. I imagined my agent sitting at his kitchen table, glancing at his wife, measuring the pros and cons of getting into any elongated conversation with me. He sighed. “Like what?”

“Like—weird stuff in the mirror. My reflection is doing weird shit. But I’m not.”

He took a long time to answer, and I could imagine his face, contorted with concern.

“Okay, well, I’ll tell you what it is, hon. You’re spending too much goddamn time in the house with all those goddamn mirrors. You can go for a walk, you know. Don’t be rubbin’ up on anybody, keep to yourself, but you gotta get out once in a while. You could go to the park, or somethin’.” I heard him take a breath and knew that meant more was coming, that he was weighing his words before he said, “And maybe you should take some of ‘em down, too. It’s creepy, isn’t it, being alone with all those versions of yourself?” 

“You’re right,” I agreed, thanking him and hanging up.

I took his advice. I started turning all of them around, all the ones I could anyway. I hung sheets over some of them, sacrificed all the blankets from my closet. Memories of traditions involving covering mirrors to keep from trapping the dead kept trying to pop into my head as I did this, but I pushed them away. There wasn’t anything to do about the ones in the bathroom, or the ceiling, so I just avoided them, and didn’t look at them when I had to pass. 

He was right. I was going to go outside; I was going to fix it. I was going to see other people, and it was going to be good for me. There was a coffee shop within walking distance, and I was sure they were still open.

I got dressed, grabbed the essentials (phone-keys-wallet-purse-mask) and stepped outside. I was even a little excited. I made a note to thank my agent again.

The fresh air and the breeze felt like exactly what I needed. I passed more people than I expected. Only about half of those that I saw wore masks; those who didn’t either ignored me or gave me looks of disdain. I ignored them. If they didn’t want to be careful, they would reap the consequences.

I was almost to the shop when my phone began ringing; my most recent paramour was calling. He had bad news for me—that’s how I ended up here. But I’m getting to that. I answered with a half-purred, “Hello?”

Static.

“Hello?” I asked again, irritated.

“Sorry,” he said, and he finally added, “I thought I should tell you that they’re testing me.”

All I could say was, “Okay.”

Another long moment passed between us, static crackling in my ear. 

I finally added, “It could be nothing. Other diseases still exist.”

“Right,” he agreed. But then he coughed and even through the phone I could hear the way it rattled around in his lungs, knocked the breath out of him. He wheezed. My mind ran through the numbers quickly, flashing over the last ones I’d seen, figuring the most recent mortality rate.

“You’re a pretty healthy guy,” I reminded him, which seemed like the right thing to say at the time. Neither of us pointed out that the death rates were the same, regardless.

“I know,” he said, falsely cheerful. “But hey, you should stay inside for a bit, and stuff. See if you can get delivery.”

“I’m pretty sure I can. Thanks for letting me know,” I said, hanging up.

I was in front of a clothing store, halfway between the coffee shop and home. The mannequins were in form fitting dresses, glittering gowns intended for high-end parties, the kind often chosen by equally high-end escorts.

I found myself glancing between the outline of my reflection, barely visible in the glass, and theirs; those hourglass bodies, long legs, high breasts, missing arms. And I decided that, when that store opened back up, the first thing I would do would be to buy every dress in the window, leave the mannequins bare.

And then I went to the coffee shop. And I touched everything.

The next morning, I decided the outing had done me some good.

There was a bit of guilt, but underneath it, a bitter sense of delight. Anyways, those who were being cautious were unlikely to be infected, and the coffee shop was cleaned regularly, thoroughly.

I looked more like myself. My reflection seemed entirely normal and I determined that maybe, all I needed was a little bit of sunlight, a little contact with others. I pondered over it while cooking breakfast—something I hadn’t done in a while, something I wasn’t good at. I was trying to avoid looking at my hands, and that made it more difficult.

I would wait a few days before my next outing, I decided while eating my lumpy pancakes. And, to avoid future guilt, I would vow to try not to touch things the next time I did. I think I spent the rest of the day trying to decide whether I was lying to myself.

But, I did okay for the next few days. I didn’t really feel the need to go anywhere, not yet. I could feel the pressure of the dark rooms and sometimes, it almost seemed I was being watched. It had to be the mirrors, I thought—the mirrors that I, at some point, must have uncovered.

I think that it was maybe five days before I started coughing. Five days before I felt driven to leave. I fought it, of course; I’m not a monster. I didn’t tell anyone. I made my own soup, tucked myself into bed. My agent checked in on me, and I told him I was fine. I made it a point to not cough, explained away the thickness of my throat with allergy season.

I no longer felt like I was being watched. I knew that I was. I’d pass by the mirror in the short hallway between the bedroom and the living space and I’d see myself turn my head, openly looking over. I think it felt me getting weaker, stopped caring about hiding. Sometimes I’d catch my own face smirking at me, oozing smugness and superiority. Nothing really happened, though, not until I awoke one night broken into a sweat, heart pounding, suddenly knowing two things with absolute certainty: I had a fever, and I was going to puke.

I managed to get all of the puke into the trash can next to the bed. When I was finished, I tried to take in a deep breath, realized that I couldn’t—it seemed like the oxygen had been stripped from the air, and my lungs felt tight, like I’d been wearing a corset all day. I laid back on the bed and closed my eyes, expecting to fall asleep and ride out the fever, feel better in the morning, but I was awake. Miserable but wired and… wary. I didn’t want to open my eyes. I had to.

She was waiting for me, as I expected. She was as nude as I was, and looked just as sickly, but her expression was unbothered. I wondered what my real face looked like, the one that was full of fear. My arms were flat along my sides, shaky, but hers were crossed over her chest, and she chewed on a fingernail as she watched me. Then she smiled, and she sat up, and I did too. I hadn’t planned to, but I did, and I was looking at her again, now in the mirror attached to the dresser. She was getting up and walking to it and I had the sickening realization that this time I was the one warping, flying, on the bed one second and at the dresser with her the next, my hands pulling open the drawers and rifling through things, pulling them out, dumping them on the floor.

My hands found a pair of yoga pants and a hoodie and I knew that it meant going outside. She was going to make me. My body was simply too weak, I was too contagious, it was too irresponsible.

I shoved the clothes onto the top of the dresser and sat down in front of it, out of view. I thought about where the mirrors in the house were, all the places I could maybe sleep safely. I fell asleep on the floor next to the dresser, whispering to myself, there’s nothing in the mirror. There’s nothing in the mirror. There’s nothing in the mirror.

The next time I woke was also thanks to an intense need to vomit, which I scrambled into the bathroom to do. I sat at the foot of the porcelain throne for a while, waiting for more vomit, but it never came—I assumed my stomach had run out of things to reject. I got up, trudged to the bedroom, and found some comfy pajamas.

My agent usually knew what to do. I decided to call him, let him lecture me about “rubbin’ up on somebody,” never give him any inkling about how spot on that analysis was, and get his help.

But he didn’t offer it. “Kiddo, I can’t help you with that,” he told me over the phone, after I’d tried to pull myself together a bit and relocated to the couch. “You know my wife’s got asthma, she’ll kill me if I take you and it turns out that you’re, you know… I can’t bring that shit home.”

“I understand,” I told him and hung up. That was the day that my reflection found the scissors. And he was going to be furious at me when he saw what she did to my hair.

I didn’t fight her that time, not at all, but I didn’t move with her, either. I simply watched, fascinated as my waist-length locks became a spiked pixie cut. Chunks of hair fluttered down to the floor, over the counter, over the sink. I think that we may have worn the same expression—solemn, a hint of sadness, the burden of necessity.

When she was done, she opened the shears and held one blade up to her arm, looking not at it but at me. I could, she seemed to say.

So I smashed the fucking mirror.

I had a bronze statue of a cat sitting on the counter, one that was just heavy enough to do the job. It took a little more heft to move than I had expected, though that was possibly due to my weakened state. I had time to see her look surprised before the cat’s head rammed into her face with a sickening crunch and the glass shattered, shiny slivers jabbing into my hand and falling to the floor.

I simply stood there for a minute, letting little rivulets of blood drip down my arm. I felt a sense of accomplishment, one of peace. But I was starting to feel another wave of heat coming, one of nausea, so I pulled my hand away from the broken glass and set the cat back in its place on the counter. I didn’t bother to move the shards of glass first, so it wobbled precariously before settling at a crooked angle. I vomited into the sink and began cleaning the glass out of my hand.

I felt better when I had my hand wrapped in gauze, clean. Trying to think of anything beyond bare minimum was like swimming in mud—I went on autopilot, carefully stepping around bits of broken glass, floating toward the kitchen for a glass of water. I wanted to let myself think that that would be the end of it, that I could just lay back and deal with the cough and the fever, forget everything else. Everything felt hot and fuzzy, and I wanted to lay on the couch. I must have, I believe I did pass out on the couch.

I’m sure of it, actually, because I was shocked when I woke up in the bathroom, standing, as though I’d been sleepwalking.

I was in front of the mirror in the shower, holding a rather large sliver of glass. I looked down at my hand to be sure, and the image in the mirror did the same. I studied it, looking for signs of her, and she seemed to do the same—we matched, perfectly, for a moment. But then I set the shard down, and she didn’t.

I thought that was going to be it, for a moment, I thought she’d drive it into my neck, and that would be the end, we’d be done. Instead, she stepped forward, lifted the shard to her face, to my face, and paused, giving me a long look.

“No,” I said, frantic, running to the glass, as if I were going to be able to just grab it from her. “No!”

But I couldn’t touch her. The tip of the shard dug into my left cheekbone, burning a molten line across it and over my nose. I screamed, yanking my hands up to my face and jolting out of the shower, forgetting about the glass floor, and cutting my feet in the process. I fumbled the sink on and tried to wash my face, unsure of what exactly to do for it. Antiseptic and a band-aid? I laughed, remembering a flash of white following the shard and wondering was that bone? Was it down to the bone?

I was going to need a surgeon and soon, but I—I was just furious. I’d never been so enraged. Madness and fever rolled hot through my veins, and my vision blurred. 

I started in the living room, knocking them off the walls and onto the hardwood. The easy ones, of course, the ones that didn’t put up much of a fight—hand mirrors, anything that could be thrown. I pulled the little gun I carry in my purse (for just-in-case) out and aimed it over the bed. I wanted the glass to shower down like rain, but I don’t think it really did, just spiderwebbed around the bullet-holes, tiny shards spraying in all directions.

I felt an overwhelming, seeping, hot panic when I realized that there was nowhere, nowhere I could really be safe from her—she was in the TV, in the chrome of the toaster, in every store window. I remember suffocating that hot panic with darkness and then, nothing else.

I woke up in a hospital bed, in a gown, tubes sticking out of my arm, an oxygen mask over my face. I tried to lift my right hand to my face and realized that it was secured to the bed. I unsuccessfully fought the mask, then pressed the “nurse” button with the other hand, and a pixie-like woman rushed in, almost immediately. In my haze, I wondered if she was magic.

She told me that I was restrained because I’d been brought in by the police. Apparently, my neighbors had grown concerned when they’d heard me breaking things and screaming, and they’d called the cops when they heard gunshots. By the time the police arrived, I’d crawled into a closet and was sleeping. They found me because they heard the rattle-y, strangled breaths sighing from the closet. I’d been running a fever of 102.

It’s not illegal to break your own shit, but I was going to be held until I underwent an evaluation. And I wasn’t getting my deposit back.

My agent wasn’t as mad about my face and my hair as I expected him to be. He came in and softly said, “Christ.” He rubbed at his eyes, stared at the gauze on my face. “How bad is it?”

“I don’t know,” I’d told him. It was true; I hadn’t seen it, and no one wanted to talk about it. I had asked one of the doctors and he’d shifted his gaze to the ground, dodging the question by asking if there was anything he could do to make me more comfortable. A nurse had offered a mirror between a bandage change, but I’d told her promptly to keep the goddamn thing away from me.

“Am I fired?” I asked.

“Honey, no,” he laughed, tone incredulous. “If we can fix it, obviously, we do that, make a comeback next year,” his phone buzzed and he pulled it out, then started typing as he talked to me. I’d seen him do this before. To lesser models, never to me. “And if not, we rebrand, make you part of the body positivity thing, or whatever. That stuff’s hot right now.” Also, not one of his interests. He’d be looking to find me a different agent.

“No,” I told him, flatly. He looked surprised and so did I, but it felt true. “I don’t… I don’t know if I want to go back to that life.”

My agent gave me a sympathetic nod and a pat on the head. “We can talk about it more when you’re feeling better. You shouldn’t be making decisions right now.”

I felt a teeny spark of rage at his disregard for my feelings, but mostly, I felt apathy. Maybe even pity: he was trying to help, but I knew that I had a different path now.

After he left, I pulled the bandage off of my face with my free hand. I ran gentle fingers over the puckered, angry line across my face. I should have been upset, but it was as though I’d spent it all, like I couldn’t even find it in me to be upset. It simply… was.

I’ve been in the hospital for a few days now and they won’t let me have any reflective surfaces, not yet. They want me to talk to a therapist first which is fine, because I already know what to say and how to say it. One crucial piece necessary for me to get a healthy psych eval is that I have to prove that I’m unafraid of mirrors, and I have an educated guess about how they’ll do that. But that’ll be easy, actually, because I’m not afraid of seeing her, of those pieces of me, anymore.

I’m looking forward to it.