Yes that floor-to-ceiling vanity mirror, ow, ow. No sooner had Grissom put his fingers to the glass than he’d received a shock as if he’d been hauled upside-down off his feet and spanked. He snatched his hand back. On the spot he realized that he could have taken hold of any item from his young life — his first child’s first spoon, his wife’s jars of lotion, the ungainly watch his father had given him — any item, and not one would have devastated him so much as this deep stretch of reflecting glass. The rows of bulbs shining to either side pained his eyes. Of course, during this month just past Grissom had found out that his shock, too, had been part of the setup. The agency records explained how the surface of the mirror had been lightly electrified as a precaution. But knowing these things now didn’t change at all the cataclysmic feel of what he could recall from then. For instance he could remember also that at one point he’d thought of lowering his head and smashing on through. And this past month, he’d learned the agency types had been prepared for that move as welclass="underline" he would have knocked himself cold against their protective steel supports. But knowing so now didn’t lessen the pervading weakness, like a steam leaking outward from his marrow, which had kept him from crashing through and which softened his bones all over again every time he remembered the moment.
So memory grew spottier, grainier still after that. Hours, young Grissom must have remained there, silently weeping. He had an odd recollection of pulling the hairs away from his navel and thrusting his reflected belly up towards itself, God knows why. He could be positive only that he’d been standing before the mirror when he’d seen his worst.
He had no idea just how far along it was. The woman had brought him a dripping facecloth. He hadn’t noticed her coming. But after that agony of wet and cold hit his forehead, instinctively he brought up his palm to cover the blazing damp spot and hold it there. The liquid streaming down meantime had forced him to blink repeatedly, lengthily, till under the pressure of light and dark the surface of his thinking had exploded and Grissom could see clearly at last that this “water” striping his skin was itself composed entirely of mirrors. He stopped blinking and watched. Tiny mirrors, these were, each no larger than the fragment of a tear. Like the row of black reflections he’d sometimes seen clinging to his windshield after a storm: tiny mirrors, all wriggling their tails. Yes and in this case they weren’t merely wriggling, either, but moving, actually moving with a purpose. Down from his enlarged eyes, down his cheeks and down, the mirrors traveled in linked chains, with a jerky sinuousness like something out of a cartoon. Grissom’s heart was going so hard he couldn’t move his eyes. He could just make out infinitesimal pairs of dirty bare feet. He could see finally the hemp ropes holding the mirrors in place. One wobbled for a moment; a black hand rose to steady it, the pressure of the fingers — minute as the hairs on a fly — making a small depression in the bulbous reflecting surface. Mirrors, lugging away on their backs what the larger mirror showed! Why, then, these germlike native bearers, these shimmery work gangs Grissom had wrung from the washcloth himself, why they were going to carry away his face. Even now his face was going, running down, in trapped particles of eyelash and eyebrow, bits of sideburn and lip beard stubble….
Grissom had got tough with himself. He whispered into his reflection that this was only another hooker’s trick, another slut way of getting him to spend the entire night and so pay more (why, if she succeeded in driving him insane for the rest of his life, just think what he’d pay). But he couldn’t remove his hand from the facecloth, nor his eyes from the glass. Desperately then he looked to the woman with him — in the mirror. He was startled to discover she stood beside him. She stood in an old-fashioned robe, fixing her face. And as she smeared on some ointment, businesslike but in no rush, he could see she was rubbing away not just the bags under her eyes but her eyes themselves, not just the lines round her nose but her entire fineboned nose itself.
Yet though she met his gaze, with the blank indentations where her eyes had been, she never offered more than a bored smile. Even when her mouth too was wiped away, he could tell she remained unperturbed. She didn’t see the damage done. So Grissom had understood, and thereafter the night was lost to memory. He had wanted to see what he was alone, what he was as an individual away from Syl or anyone else. And now he knew.
Afterwards, well. It was hardly anything you could confide in the wife. Grissom went on the wagon. No surprise, considering.
Also, more or less secretly, he went on the couch for a couple-three years. Syl knew, but no one else. It was Syl in fact who’d suggested Grissom start seeing a psychiatrist. She’d told him, at the end of one unending, weepy night, that some time with a headshrinker seemed to be the only solution to his problems. Syl was also terrific when it came to keeping the analysis a secret from Grissom’s father. The old man was from the old country; he’d never have understood. The two kids, as for them, weren’t even talking yet during those years. And the psychiatrist’s office was in the same crowded steel high-rise as Grissom’s dentist’s, so he always had a ready excuse. Yet a psychiatrist, too…Grissom could never see his way clear to telling a psychiatrist either. How could he? The doctor would stand over him and say: for a businessman in America, there is the work and there is the family, two very strong drives which often conflict. Then how could Grissom start to talk about microscopic native bearers carrying away his face?
Nonetheless he was grateful for the time. Grissom progressed soon enough to a point where he was able to ask for the less demanding job, in the jet-aircraft line, without shame. Once there, also, he found himself prospering. After he reached middle age, after his father had died, Grissom didn’t bother keeping his work with the doctor a secret any longer. Indeed he became a regular advocate of analysis for management-level employees. Couple years on the couch, Grissom took to saying, and you’ll die a rich man.
But he suffered, nevertheless, some lower-grade infections left from his night before the prostitute’s vanity mirror. These remained hard to put into words. Really, the slack hell of the last twenty-five years was rendered best, in capsule version, on the night of his return from that first executive-level trek. Oh, he could say he’d done some other things in the interim. He’d remained faithful to Syl. He’d gone back to the Church, finding his place among those crowds whispering to themselves with eyes closed. He’d raised two sons during the 1960’s, he shouldn’t forget that. Yet really, it had all been in the return.
Two or three more nights had passed since the insanity in the hotel room — impossible, rough-cut dark hours stained with dreams of being born and then going to work at once, still trailing the greasy umbilicus. Impossible nights. So when Grissom did in fact make it home, his young hand was shaking so hard it took him three tries to turn the kitchen doorknob. And—? “Yaaaay, Grissom! He’d stumbled bang into the raised glasses and popping flashbulbs of a surprise party. Syl had been so proud of him for earning the right to go on such a trip, and his birthday fell near enough to make such an excuse. So neighbors, relatives, even slight office acquaintances had been brought over. Syl and he, in those days, were trying to expand their circle.