Mirrors Read online

  “That’s better. You see? It’s all okay.”

  But Christy wasn’t hearing anything that comforted her, because she now knew some things about herself.

  She knew that the room she’d seen was real; she’d been there in the dark days, before she’d turned thirteen. She’d been a victim with a tragic past.

  She knew that she really was ugly, inside and out.

  And she knew just how deeply she despised herself.

  Beyond that, she didn’t know too much.

  ON HIS fifteenth birthday, July 10, Austin traded his childhood for whatever freedom his modest trust fund stipend could buy. He was free, and he had an official court document that said as much. No longer a ward of any state, person, or organization.

  Paul Matheson, the orphanage headmaster where Austin lived in New Jersey, had insisted on going to the courthouse with him, but after a long discussion, Austin convinced him that he should go alone. Figure it out.

  He was an adult now, after all.

  The bus trip across town was short. He’d navigated the courthouse halls without getting lost and, dressed in dungarees and a button-down shirt, stood before a judge who was quite taken with the articulate teenager.

  All told, the proceeding took precisely fifteen minutes. Fitting.

  On the way out, a portly woman in a loud flower-print dress snapped a photo of him that she promised to e-mail as soon as she got home. Just her way of paying it forward, she’d said. “It’s a sad shame that no one had the decency to be here on your special occasion.”

  She told him with great enthusiasm how she and her rail-thin husband were there to finalize the adoption of the blue-eyed five-year-old who clung to the man. Sweet Bethany, their angel from God. The kind of child every family wanted to adopt.

  The e-mail never came, of course. He didn’t expect it to.

  Austin thanked her for the photo and wished her well, suddenly overwhelmed. What family did he have? None. Never had, never would. Sweet Bethany didn’t know how good she had it.

  He’d sat on the courthouse steps for a long time, fingering the embossed seal on his document, staring at the world as it flitted by—people coming and going, rushing about like mice in a field. How many of them sensed the meaninglessness of their lives—here today, gone tomorrow, forgotten the day after that? The boredom of such an existence might kill him.

  And yet, they all belonged. To someone, somewhere.

  In that moment, in every way that counted, Austin had felt strangely lost. Lost to his past. Lost to the world. Lost in thought. He was free, but he wasn’t sure what that really meant.

  For a brief moment he considered turning east and just walking until he hit the ocean. Then taking a boat to the far side of the world and walking some more, all the way around in search of nothing, or something. Sooner or later, though, he knew that if he walked long enough he’d end up exactly here again, in the same place he started.

  Here.

  Here, where he was no longer a child but not yet old enough to be considered an adult. Living in two worlds but belonging in neither.

  That thought boiled his emotions until hot tears welled up in his eyes. He’d wiped them with his sleeve before anyone could see and left the courthouse steps chiding himself for breaking down so easily.

  Allowing emotions to control him was ridiculous. Irrational. How many times had he explained this to Christy during one of her many emotional tailspins? They were dangerous. Master your thoughts, he’d told her, time and again, and the emotions will follow.

  That was then.

  Here he was now, drowning in emotion, unable to hold it at bay. Smothered by his own weakness and totally lost to the world, he was without friends or family to even know he was in terrible trouble.

  Trouble so deep that he was unsure he could survive it.

  Fisher had secured him to the wheelchair with straps and wheeled him down a vacant hall with checkerboard floors to the room adjacent to the morgue, which he’d accessed by pressing his right wrist against a security pad. He’d checked Austin’s restraints and left him without explanation.

  Austin found himself in a stark white operating room. Why would a psychiatric ward have a surgical space? Lawson had said they employed progressive therapy, but by invasive means?

  Medical equipment on mobile stands lined the far wall. Heart monitors and ventilators. Something like a dentist’s chair sat in the corner behind a state-of-the-art operating table, which was surrounded by clusters of light stands.

  A door on the room’s far side suddenly swung open and Fisher entered, pushing another wheelchair.

  At first the operating table blocked Austin’s view. He couldn’t see who was in the wheelchair, only that it wasn’t empty. But when Fisher rounded the operating table in three long strides, the wheelchair came to a halt directly in front of him, six feet away. The solitary figure sat motionless, hands cupped almost prayerfully in his lap.

  Jacob.

  The boy’s pale face was neither surprised nor perturbed. His slight frame and slumped shoulders made him look weak. Jacob was oblivious to the world around him.

  Fisher engaged the wheel brake and walked toward a cabinet across the room.

  Austin tried to steady his trembling hands, but they weren’t obeying so well. The air conditioner hissed too loudly in the cavernous room.

  Fisher returned, a pair of blue surgical gloves dangling from his hand. He stopped and gazed down at Austin.

  “You should know that no patient has ever escaped from the facility. Like you, several have tried, of course.”

  Austin didn’t reply.

  “I can assure you, you won’t succeed. Still, I appreciate your initiative. It’s”—he paused—“enlightening.”

  Fisher considered him for a moment, stone cold, void of expression. “Curious, isn’t it? At first glance, you appear complicated. Not all people do, so please take that as a compliment. You relish the fact that people see you as complex. It’s your mask. It’s what makes you different from those around you, but the truth is you’re really quite simple.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “Oh? I think I can read you like a book, Scott. It’s not that hard, really. Despite what most people believe, hiding behind our own skin is impossible. Every day, we betray ourselves in a thousand ways without realizing it. The true self always claws its way to the ugly surface.”

  He shoved his chin at Austin and glanced at his hands.

  “Take your mannerisms, for instance. Even a moderately observant person could deduce that yours is an obsessive mind, always thinking, thinking, thinking. That nervous tick you have with your hands is a manifestation of such angst.”

  Austin realized he had been mindlessly touching his fingertips. He stopped abruptly and balled his hand into a fist.

  Fisher continued. “If you have an obsessive mind, you also probably suffer from a bit of insomnia, the bane of a brain that won’t shut off. I suspect yours is quite severe. I can only imagine how many nights you’ve suffered in an endless loop of data, questions, and reasoning as you stare at your ceiling in the dark, lost in thought.” He paused. “How am I doing so far?”

  Austin shifted his weight in the seat.

  “You’re an avid reader, I presume,” Fisher said, pacing now, eyes on the walls as if only half interested. “Most obsessive thinkers are. You likely devour a wide variety of subjects, doggedly in search of pieces to the puzzle in your mind that never quite seems to come together. That driven nature is what makes you special, but it’s also what drives you from others. And that’s lonely for you, isn’t it? Have many friends?”

  “Enough.”

  “And yet you and I both know you’d choose a book over a friend any day.”

  Austin sat quietly. Heat spread across his neck.

  “So you could say that, yes, I do know you. I would guess that you have a deeply rooted addiction to your mind. You find your identity in you
r intellect. Knowledge is your drug and without it you’re afraid you’ll die. At the very least, your life would feel meaningless.”

  “An arrogant diagnosis informed by only a few observations,” Austin said.

  “Is it?”

  “Everyone thinks. It’s what humans do. Our ability to think separates us from the animals. Everyone pursues knowledge.”

  “A romantic notion, but let’s be honest, shall we? You ride high enough on your horse to think that most people traipse mindlessly through life without asking a single meaningful question. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  A beat.

  “Unlike most people,” Fisher said, “questions are what make you tick. Knowing is what gives you a reason to roll out of bed in the morning, because you’re not just in search of knowledge. Facts are never enough. You’re after something else, something more fundamental. You’re after the truth.”

  Fisher stopped his pacing and regarded Austin directly. “But the problem with believing you can think your way to the truth is that you can’t know the unknowable.”

  “All things are knowable.”

  “Is that so?”

  “With enough time, yes.”

  “Then tell me, where did you come from? In the very beginning.”

  The question caught in Austin’s mind.

  “It’s a simple question,” Fisher said. “Surely you know the answer.”

  The question turned over in his mind. “No one knows.”

  “Of course not. Just as you can’t know with certainty the other questions that drive you to the brink of madness. Is life eternal and if so, where were you before you were born? Does God exist? Do you even matter in this great big universe of ours?”

  “Esoteric questions,” Austin said, wondering why Fisher was taking the time to give him a philosophy lesson.

  “But those are the ones that will eventually drive you crazy. Our minds ask questions we can’t know the answers to with certainty. Our answers depend on when and where we were born, which myths and legends we were taught to believe, our perceptions that mold our very small realities. A few hundred years ago, you would’ve believed the world was flat and sickness could be cured by leeching the blood from your body. And you would’ve been right as far as you knew. Which of your beliefs today will turn out to be obviously false tomorrow?”

  The blue surgical gloves in Fisher’s hand were starting to concern Austin.

  “You’re obsessed with figuring out the truth, but you can’t. It’s unknowable, a mystery sunken so deep in the universal ocean that the only way to reach it is to die. You’re going to spend the rest of your life chasing illusions of certainty, but you will never find peace. You see, it’s not what you know that matters, it’s how you are. And you, Scott, are ill.”

  A thick silence passed between them.

  “You say I’m ill,” Austin said, “but where’s your data? In the file you fabricated, of course.”

  “Fabricated? Tell me, how are your headaches?”

  “What?”

  Fisher lifted his index finger to his left brow. “They radiate from here, don’t they? Is it a throbbing pain or more like a jagged ice pick?”

  Austin could hear his own pulse in his temple. How could Fisher know about his headaches? From his file? Scott’s file.

  No. He could have found Austin’s medication in his jeans pocket. It wasn’t too much of a stretch.

  “Frontal lobe lesions are quite common in patients who suffer from delusional maladies, particularly those of a grandiose or schizophrenic nature. Severe headaches are quite common among patients like you.”

  “You keep saying I’m delusional.”

  “Like you, I follow the data wherever it leads. But rest assured, I’m here to help you. I want to help you find peace.”

  Fisher crossed to Jacob. Stepped next to the boy and placed a hand on his shoulder. “What do you think Jacob knows? Hmm?”

  “He doesn’t know what’s going on around him,” Austin said. “He’s in his own little world.”

  “And yet he is quite happy.” He turned to Jacob. “Tell us, Jacob. Are you afraid?”

  The boy blinked. Slowly shook his head.

  “No, of course not. Is anything upsetting you at all right now, Jacob?”

  A slow response again, but a definite shake of his head. This time Austin was sure that he smiled, although his lips didn’t move per se.

  “You see.”

  “He’s practically a vegetable,” Austin said.

  “Or so you say. And even if that were the case, is that so bad? Look at him. Jacob enjoys an enviable state of being, peace that you can only dream of. You may have read about it in your books, but Jacob… Jacob experiences it.”

  “He’s unaware of any danger, of course he isn’t worried!”

  “He’s very aware, just not of any danger. If he is aware of danger, he doesn’t care, because he sees no threat to his life or his well-being. Survival isn’t a concern to him. He’s practically a Zen master, and yet you see him as a vegetable.”

  The comparison gave Austin some pause, but his mind was still on those blue gloves, which Fisher periodically slapped against his palm.

  “Haven’t you ever watched a bird on a sunny afternoon and wondered what it would be like to live completely free, to have no concern for anything? Or a cat who must accept life only as it is in the moment—no worries, no problems to be solved, nowhere to get to. What must that feel like? Welcome to Jacob’s world. He’s at complete peace.”

  “You can’t know that. You’re not in his mind.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. Emotions are simply chemical responses to thought patterns, the physical manifestation of which can be accurately measured in the body with the proper instruments. I’ve helped Jacob for quite a while, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that he’s at perfect peace. You, on the other hand, are looking at the gloves in my hand, and, filled with knowledge of what they might mean, are filled with anxiety.”

  The simple truth of it hit Austin. Needled him.

  “So tell me, who is better off? You… or Jacob?”

  Austin looked across at the boy. His serene eyes were void of any concern, any confusion, any anxiety. There was a gentle air of peace about him, but what Austin really saw behind those eyes was a detached human with a broken mind.

  “He’s not all there,” Austin said.

  “Not fully human, is that it?” Fisher said.

  “Not really, no.”

  “You think a body part, like a leg, makes you more human than someone who doesn’t have it? If I were to remove your leg, you would be less than you are now?”

  The gloves loomed large in Austin’s mind. With them, a saw.

  “No,” he said.

  “No. Are you your hands? Your face? Your brain? Or are you something else?”

  “I’m my mind.”

  Fisher regarded him for a while, staring directly into his eyes.

  “So then Jacob, with less of a mind, is somehow less human? I don’t think he would appreciate your opinion, frankly.”

  “He can’t even process my opinion.”

  “Maybe not. Which perhaps gives him an advantage over you. He’s at peace.”

  Fisher began to pull on the surgical gloves.

  “Let me ask you a very important question, Scott.” Fisher’s eyes drilled him. “Given the choice, would you rather be in perfect peace, or would you rather be right?”

  Austin’s mind spun. He did want peace. In fact, being right gave him peace.

  Or did it? Actually, in all honesty, the need to know answers with absolute certainty kept him in a constant state of low anxiety.

  “There are two ways we can do this,” Fisher said, pulling on the second glove. “I can sedate you and treat you while you’re unconscious, but I think it would be far more effective if you face your fears now. My data sets indicate that a willing entry into therapy has a marke
dly positive influence on patient outcomes.” He released the tight elastic latex glove and let it snap loudly on his arm.

  “Your choice.”

  Austin’s heart rate was at a full gallop, and he seemed powerless to calm himself. He realized that his knees were bouncing nervously, but he no longer cared about appearances. He only wanted out of this chair, out of this madness. The idea of being sedated terrified him. Images of catatonic patients filled his mind. No mind, no self.

  His anxiety raged unchecked. Part of Fisher’s argument made some absurd kind of sense, which only pushed Austin deeper into fear. The man wanted him out of the way. Fisher wasn’t going to kill his body, he was going to kill his mind, which was worse.

  “Nothing? So be it,” Fisher said. He removed a vial and syringe from his lab coat pocket. Uncapped the syringe and carefully drew a clear liquid into it. Tapped the side to remove the air bubbles.

  “Please…”

  Fisher looked at him. “Please? Please what?”

  “Please don’t do this.”

  “No sedation?”

  His mind didn’t seem to be processing his choices properly. He knew that he was already giving himself over to fear, but he couldn’t stop it.

  “No,” he said.

  The man nodded lightly. “An excellent choice.” The edge of his mouth nudged into a faint smile as he capped the syringe.

  “Let’s help you find perfect peace, shall we?”

  Fisher walked behind his wheelchair and rolled him toward the corner, where a dental chair waited. No, not a dental chair. This one had circular head restraint with bolts above it.

  Austin saw the contraption and knew immediately what Fisher intended. He was going to secure his head in that device and surgically fix his brain. Permanently.

  Terror unlike Austin had ever felt swept down his body in sudden, unrelenting waves. His arms were fastened to the chair, but that didn’t stop the tremor in his hands.

  “You’re going to lobotomize me?” His voice was high and it cracked.

  “Far too rudimentary,” Fisher said, wheeling him. “We’ll use an advanced procedure—a single small-gauge needle through your right nostril up into the brain. The chemicals I inject will kill the appropriate matter. Clean.”