Watch. We’re getting younger. We are. We’re getting stronger. We’re even getting taller. I don’t quite recognize this world we’re in. Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring. Far from it. This is a world of mistakes, of diametrical mistakes. All the other people are getting younger too, but they don’t seem to mind, any more than Tod minds. They don’t find it counterintuitive, and faintly disgusting, as I do. Still, I’m powerless, and can do nothing about anything. I can’t make myself an exception. The other people, do they have someone else inside them, passenger or parasite, like me? They’re lucky. I bet they don’t have the dream we have. The figure in the white coat and the black boots. In his wake, a blizzard of wind and sleet, like a storm of human souls.
Each day, when Tod and I are done with the Gazette, we take it back to the store. I have a good look at the dateline. And it goes like this. After October 2, you get October 1. After October 1, you get September 30. How do you figure that? . . . The mad are said to keep a film or stage set in their heads, which they order and art-decorate and move through. But Tod is sane, apparently, and his world is shared. It just seems to me that the film is running backward.
I’m not a complete innocent.
For instance, I find I am equipped with a fair amount of value-free information, or general knowledge, if you prefer.
E = mc2. The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. It ain’t slow. The universe is finite yet boundless. As for the planets, it’s Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto—poor Pluto, subzero, subnormal, made of ice and rock, and so far away from the warmth and the shine. Life is no bowl of cherries. It’s swings and roundabouts. You win some, you lose some. It evens out. It measures up. What goes around comes around. 1066, 1789, 1945. I have a superb vocabulary (monad, retractile, necropolis, palindrome, antidisestablishmentarianism) and a nonchalant command of all grammatical rules. The apostrophe in “Please Respect Owner’s Rights” isn’t where it ought to be. (Nor is the one in the placard on Route 6 that locates and praises “Rogers’ Liquor Locker.”) Apart from words denoting motion or process, which always have me reaching for my inverted commas (“give,” “fall,” “eat,” “defecate”), the written language makes plain sense, unlike the spoken. Here’s another joke: “She calls me up and says, ‘Get over here. There’s nobody home.’ So I get over there, and guess what. There’s nobody home.” Mars is the Roman god of war. Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection—with his own soul. If you ever close a deal with the devil, and he wants to take something from you in return—don’t let him take your mirror. Not your mirror, which is your reflection, which is your double, which is your secret sharer. The devil has something to be said for him: he acts on his own initiative, and isn’t just following orders.
No one could accuse Tod Friendly of being in love with his own reflection. On the contrary, he can’t stand the sight of it. He grooms himself by touch: he favors an electric razor and does his own barbering with a brutal pair of kitchen scissors. God knows what he looks like. There are several mirrors in our house, as you would expect, but he never confronts or consults them. I get the occasional hint from a darkened store window; sometimes, also, a chance distortion in the burnish of a faucet, of a knife. It has to be said that my curiosity is heavily qualified by trepidation. His body is not all that promising: the epic blemishes on the back of the hands, the torso loosely robed in flesh smelling of poultry and peppermint, the feet. We come across some fine old Americans in the avenues of Wellport, keglike granddads and strapping sea dogs, who are “marvelous.” Tod’s not marvelous. Not yet. He’s still pretty wrecked, all bent and askance and ashamed. And his face? Well, it happened, one night, between bad dreams. He had inched his way to the dark bathroom, and stood slumped over the sink, feeling lost, depersonalized, and trying to soothe or tether himself with the running water. Tod moaned, and straightened before the dark mirror, and reached for the switch. Easy does it, I thought. It would have to happen at the speed of light. Steady now. Here goes . . .