At first, she didn’t hear anything. Then he answered faintly, “Come in.”
She opened the door.
There was just room in the cubicle for her and one folding chair between his desk and the wall. His seat at the other side of the desk was so tightly blocked in with file cabinets that when he wanted to leave he could barely squeeze out of his niche. As Terisa entered the room, he was staring blankly at his telephone as if it sucked all his attention and hope away.
“Miss Morgan. Quitting time?”
She nodded.
He didn’t seem to notice that she hadn’t said anything. “You know,” he told her distantly, “I talked to forty-two people today. Thirty-nine of them turned me down.”
If she let the impulse which had brought her here dissipate, she would have that much less reason to believe in her own existence; so she said rather abruptly, “I’m sorry about Mrs. Thatcher.”
Softly, as if she hadn’t changed the subject, he replied, “I miss her. I need her to tell me I’m doing the right thing.”
Because she wanted to make him look at her, she said, “You are doing the right thing.” As she spoke, she realized she believed it. The memory of horns had changed that for her, if nothing else. “I wasn’t sure before, but I am now.”
His vague gaze remained fixed on the phone, however. “Maybe if I call her brother,” he muttered to himself. “He hasn’t made a contribution for a year now. Maybe he’ll listen to me this time. I’ll keep trying.”
While he dialed the number, she left the cubicle and closed the door. She had the impression that she was never going to see him again. But she tried not to let it bother her: she often felt that way.
The walk home was worse than the one to work had been. There was more wind, and it lashed the rain against her legs, through every gap it could find or make in her coat, past the edges of her bandana into her face. In half a block, her shoes were full of water; before she was halfway home, her sweater was sticking, cold and clammy, to her skin. She could hardly see where she was going.
But she knew the way automatically: habit carried her back to her condo building. Its glassy front in the rain looked like a spattered pool of dark water, reflecting nothing except the idea of death in its depths. The security guards saw her coming, but they didn’t find her interesting enough to open the doors for her. She pushed her way into the lobby, bringing a gust of wind and a spray of rain with her, and paused for a few moments to catch her breath and wipe the water from her face. Then, without looking up, she headed toward the elevators.
Now that she was no longer walking hard, she began to feel chilled. There was a wall mirror in the elevator: she took off her bandana and studied her face while she rode up to her floor. Her eyes looked especially large and vulnerable against the cold pallor of her skin and the faint blue of her lips. So much of her was real, then: she could be made pale by wind and wet and cold. But the chill went too deep for that reassurance.
As she left the elevator and walked down the carpeted hall to her apartment, she realized she was going to have a bad night.
In her rooms, with the door locked, and the curtains drawn to close out the sensation that she was beneath the surface of the pool she had seen in the windows from the outside, she turned on all the lights and began to strip off her clothes. The mirrors showed her to herself: she was pale everywhere. The dampness on her flesh made it look as pallid as wax.
Candles were made of wax. Some dolls were carved of wax. Wax was used to make molds for castings. Not people.
It was going to be a very bad night. .
She had never been able to find the proof she needed in her own physical sensations. She could easily believe that a reflection might feel cold, or warmth, or pain; yet it didn’t exist. Nevertheless she took a hot shower, trying to drive away the chill. She dried her hair thoroughly and put on a flannel shirt, a pair of thick, soft corduroy pants, and sheepskin moccasins so that she would stay warm. Then, in an effort to hold her trouble back, she forced herself to fix and eat a meal.
But her attempts to take care of herself had as much effect as usual – that is to say, none. A shower, warm clothes, and a hot meal couldn’t get the chill out of her heart – a detail she regarded as unimportant. In fact, that was part of the problem: nothing that happened to her mattered at all. If she were to die of pneumonia, it might be an inconvenience to other people – to her father, for example, or to Reverend Thatcher – but to her it would not make the slightest difference.
This was going to be one of those nights when she could feel herself fading out of existence like an inane dream.
If she sat where she was and closed her eyes, it would happen. First she would hear her father talking past her as if she weren’t there. Then she would notice the behavior of the servants, who treated her as a figment of her father’s imagination, as someone who only lived and breathed because he said she did, rather than as an actual and present individual. And then her mother –
Her mother, who was herself as passive, as nonexistent, as talent, experience, and determination could make her.
In her mind, with her eyes closed, Terisa would be a child again, six or seven years old, and she would hobble into the huge dining room where her parents were entertaining several of her father’s business associates in their best clothes – she would go into the dining room because she had fallen on the stairs and scraped her knee and horrified herself with how much she was bleeding, and her mother would look at her without seeing her at all, would look right through her with no more expression on her face than a waxwork figure, and would make everything meaningless. “Go to your room, child,” she would say in a voice as empty as a hole in her heart. “Your father and I have guests.” Learn to be like me. Before it’s too late.
Terisa had been struggling to believe in herself for years. She didn’t close her eyes. Instead, she went into her living room and pulled a chair close to the nearest wall of mirrors. There she seated herself, her knees against the glass, her face so near it that she risked raising a veil of mist between herself and her reflection. In that position, she watched every line and shade and flicker of her image. Perhaps she would be able to keep her reality in one piece. And if she failed, she would at least be able to see herself come to an end.
The last time she had suffered one of these attacks, she had sat and stared at herself until well past midnight, when the sensation that she was evaporating had finally left her. Now she was sure she wouldn’t last so long. Last night, she had dreamed – and in the dream she had been as passive as she was now, as unable to do anything except watch. The quiet ache of that recognition weakened her. Already, she thought she could discern the edges of her face blurring out of actuality.
Without warning, she saw a man in the mirror.
He wasn’t reflected in the mirror: he was in the mirror. He was behind her startled image – and moving forward as if he were floundering through a torrent.
He was a young man, perhaps only a few years older than she was, and he wore a large brown jerkin, brown pants, and leather boots. His face was attractive, though his expression was foolish with surprise and hope.
He was looking straight at her.
For an instant, his mouth stretched soundlessly as if he were trying to shout through the glass. Then his arms flailed. He looked like he was losing his balance; but his movements expressed an authority which had nothing to do with falling.
Instinctively, she dropped her head into her lap, covered it with her arms.
The mirror in front of her made no noise as it shattered.
She felt the glass spray from the wall, felt splinters tug at her shirt as they blew past. Like a flurry of ice, they tinkled against the opposite wall and fell to the carpet. A brief gust of wind as cold as winter puffed at her with the broken glass, then stopped.