They put me in a room and locked the door. I do not know who they are because their faces are covered with masks. I was supposed to be here by myself. Yet, across the room a man peers back at me. He stares at me through a mirror. Where did this man come from? He was not here when I was first put in the room by the people with masks. He appeared only after I noticed the mirror. He looks just like me, but he is not me. His dark curly hair has the same matted features and the same streaks of gray. His nose is curved in a sweeping arch like mine, rising swiftly from the middle of his face then descending to a point above two flared nostrils. The face in the mirror certainly looks like me, but it must be only a bad copy, the work of inferior design and imperfect detail. This is proven by the fact that for the man in the mirror, the black hairy mole sits on his right cheek. On me, the mole is on the left!
I try to walk away, but there is no place to go. The room is small, and I cannot leave. I can feel the man in the mirror staring at me. His eyes are locked on the back of my neck. I feel the hair on my nape stiffen. I try not to look at him, but there is something familiar and compelling in his face. I look back at him, then look away. I look back again.
The man staring at me through the mirror is waving at me hesitantly. “Come sit by me,” he says. I retreat to the far end of the room.
“Come sit by me,” he says again. His eyes are calm and intelligent. Cautiously, I pull up a chair and sit by him. The air is strong with his aroma, the scent of a man who has not bathed. I can feel his fetid hot breath on my face. The odor nauseates me, and I want to leave.
“What do you want?” I ask him. He does not answer. I ask again, and he responds with silence.
“Can you understand me?” I say.
“Of course,” he says, exposing his crooked yellow teeth in a great grin.
“What do you want?” I ask him again. The man in the mirror looks at me with his beady bloodshot eyes.
“The same as you,” he says. “To leave.”
“You cannot leave the mirror,” I reply.
“But still, I can wish it. I want to leave just as you do.”
I squirm in my seat. The air in the room is hot and stale, and I am sweating. I look around for a window, but the room has none. I look at the man in the mirror and past him. I can see that he is a room not too much different than my own. Like mine, his room is spartan. His bed is made to perfection, each corner creased precisely, though in opposite directions from mine. In both rooms, the dresser rests against the wall, exactly three feet from the corner of the room. Between the dresser and the corner is a small round table covered with a dingy yellow doily. Exactly in the center of the doily is a metal lamp. The lamps are identical in both rooms. A chair sits partially out of view. The only difference between the two rooms is that his prison is exactly reversed from mine. We are identical opposites.
“There is no way out,” I tell him.
“There is always a way out,” he replies.
The two of us think for a while, meditating on escape. I tried it once, the first time I was put away. I carefully removed a spring from my bed and slowly uncoiled it. Over the course of days, I shaped it and sharpened it. When I was ready, I began to work away at the lock on my door. I had almost figured out the lock when the door opened suddenly, and the guards were upon me. I stabbed one with the bed spring before the others restrained me. Whether through bad luck or sorcery, my timing betrayed me. The men in the masks seem to know everything and seem to be everywhere.
Perhaps I could try again. The man in the mirror encourages me. I walk over to the rusty bed and look beneath it. There are no springs--just wooden slats. I search the room for anything I might use, but I find only an old scrap of rumpled paper sticking to the side of the waste can. I could use the lamp on the table. It has no bulb, and it is fastened to the table and the table is fastened to the floor. The man in the mirror calls to me. “Come, sit by me some more,” says he. I do not want to talk to him, but his face is compelling. There is something comforting in its familiarity. There is something hypnotic in his voice.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“The same as you. I want to go home. I want my freedom.”
“There is no freedom here,” I remind him.
“There is no freedom outside either,” he replies. “One can never be free from the men with masks. Still, I wish it.”
“As do I,” I admit.
“Then we must find a way.”
The man in the mirror appears perplexed. His brow, half hidden by his hair, is wrinkled in thought. He picks at his mole. “There must be a way.” We search our rooms again. I wonder if the light above my head might be put to some use. The man in the mirror has the same idea. I watch him climb on the chair and reach for the light. It dangles just a few inches above the tips of his oily fingers. He seems to want to leap and capture the bulb, but the chair is unstable and the fall would hurt too much. I want to try on my side--I can reach it--but I realize that I am tired and want to sleep.
“I am tired,” I confess to the man in the mirror. “I want to sleep.”
“Me too,” he says, but he does not stir. I also do not move. All that I can think of is the freedom of escape, or at least the freedom of trying. My mind races with ideas--elaborate plans for picking the lock, taking down the door, breaking through the wall. I imagine making a run for it. I would not get far. I imagine killing the guards.
“You should not think such things,” says the man in the mirror.
“I cannot help how I feel,” says I, gritting my teeth and locking my jaw. I stand up on my chair and reach for the light bulb. I am too short by three inches. I stand on my toes until they ache, but still I cannot reach the bulb. I leap from the wobbly chair and grab for the light. I miss it and the chair breaks beneath me. I scream in frustration.
“Why are you so angry,” asks the man in the mirror. That is the same question that the masked psychiatrist asked me before I was locked in this little room with the man in the mirror. The old doctor had the most elaborate mask of all. He reminded me of Richard Nixon with his crooked jowls and his jet-black hair and his sternness. He asked me about my anger I shrugged off the question just as I do now.
“I feel the way I feel,” I say. “I do not know the reason.”
“Don't you?”
“What if I do. It does not change the way I feel.”
The man in the mirror cracks a smile. He is missing a tooth. “Perhaps if you understood why you feel the way you feel, you can control it,” he says.
“The men with masks make me angry,” I tell him.
“Why?”
“They are only imaginary. They are not real. They do not allow me to be free. That is why I hate them.”
“If you were free you would still be in prison,” says the man in the mirror. “You cannot run from them, and they cannot run from themselves. They cannot be what they are not.” His words confuse me.
“Perhaps I like my anger,” I reply.
“Why?”
“It is genuine. It is the only real thing about me.” We are taught--each of us--to abhor such feelings. We are not allowed to like hate or violence. We must not give in to anger. We learn that we must be happy, and to love and to be giving. We believe that we must have hope. They insist that we show gratitude. We are told, and so these things are not real. They are only masks that we wear, forced upon us by others. They are not who we are. We are not permitted jealousy. Disgust is not allowed. We are taught to despise frustration and anger and so they exist behind the masks and thus are real.
“But what about them,” asks the man in the mirror. “They will not let you have your anger.”
“That is why I want to kill them. They want to take away the last and best of me. They want me to die.”
My mind races with possibilities of freedom. I would kill them all if I could, but they keep handing me masks and demanding that I wear them. If I were free, I would burn all the masks in anger and force them to see themselves for what they really are. I would force them to look in a mirror and confront their own fears. I would make them crave jealousy and disgust. Confronting themselves would kill them with fear and so then I would not have to kill them. They are alive only because of their masks; I am alive despite mine. The man in the mirror watches me, waiting.
“You cannot run from them,” says the man in the mirror. It always seems to come back to that. It is the masks that I am fleeing, though I cannot escape them. I flee the makers of the masks and the givers of the masks and the wearers of the masks. I want only freedom from them. I want only what is real. Anger, frustration, violence are the acids that dissolve masks. The self is that which wears no mask. I want an authentic act—just one—and there is only one authentic act left.
I know what I must do. I explain it to the man in the mirror. He seems resigned to his fate.
“Do what you must,” he says. “Do what you must to be free.”
I pick up a piece of the broken chair. Wielding it like a club, I bludgeon the man in the mirror. His mask shatters in a thousand bits. I take a sharp piece of the mirror and run it across my wrists. As I bleed my freedom on the floor, I think about the man in the mirror until my face becomes blank darkness and the mask falls away.
