MIRRORS OF THE SOUL

Chapter 4: Pails, Pigeons, and Pain

"Whyever would Terry think Cort and/or Hando would go in here?"  He shrugged. There was, was there not, only one way to find out?
***************
He opened the door halfway, looking into the space beyond.  "Terrible lighting," he commented to himself. Sighing, he stepped all the way out onto the mesh platform. Not being Terry and therefore no expert in realms of kidnapping and rescue, he called out, "Cort! Hando!"  The words echoed hollowly off the walls. "Terry?" he tried.  Leaning over the railing, he shouted, "Terry! You down there?"

The door closed with a bit of a snap behind him.  Startled, he turned, intending to open it again.  Alas, there was no interior knob, no handle of any kind.  "Ack!" he acked, being a character in an epi and, so, prone to acking.  

He pounded on the door several times, then waited.  No one came, leaving him no recourse but to descend the stairs in the dark.  He made his way carefully, step by step, as the tight spiral was quite disorienting in such complete blackness.  At their base, he could see a series of bright flashes that seemed to be coming from around some corner, so headed in that direction.  

"Jeffrey," Ute said huskily, biting the 3rd button off his white dress shirt, "come with me."  She spat the button straight up where it bounced off the ceiling, coming to rest, in that complete and utter way only buttons can rest,  within a light fixture.

"Is something the matter?" he asked, his long-held secret dread that some loved-one might choke on a bitten button manifesting itself in his question.

"Characters are being wiped out like June bugs on the windshield of a speeding Giamatti," she frowned, looking out the window toward the Botanic Gardens where a cold wind blew the pigeons hither and thither.  "Who knows," she could barely gasp out, "if you will survive the winter."

He narrowed his eyes.  "How do YOU know characters are being wiped out? Have you been reading the script?"

She hung her head.  How could she admit to him that she had found the next few pages scattered damply beside Dess' diaper pail?  Joimus had gotten careless of late, her usual preoccupation with cuirass removal exacerbated by her mounting frustration level at the lack of adhesiveness on the self-adhesive tabbies of Aussie disposable diapers. It had, indeed, been at one such moment of extreme agitation that pages 13 through 15 had been used as emergency absorptive material.  It was,thusly, that Ute had come into possession of certain developments in the plotline that otherwise would have taken her by surprise.  Not really answering his question, she replied, "We must make hay whilst the sun shines," then bit off his 4th button.

"Stop that!" he said.  "It's not safe!  Button biting has a proven record of being hazardous to one's health.  Besides, it's cloudy."

"Piffle!" she piffled, going after the 5th, pushing him down on the sofa, facing him astride his legs.  "Look into my eyes!"

As they were but inches from his, this was practically unavoidable.  Not that, with her sitting the way she was, he wished in any way to avoid... anything.  Looking, then, deep into her eyes, a smile spread across his face.  In their depths, just millimeters from her optic nerve, the sun WAS shining.  "Where's the hay?" he chortled.  She licked her lips, grinning most wickedly.

Finally she spied him!  He was kneeling on the grass not far from a yew. "JOHN!" she called, walking faster in his direction.  Nash stood awkwardly, clutching the front of his jacket.  "Are you having a nice walk?" Franki asked.  

He just pressed his lips together and looked innocently at the sky.  She, however, could not help but notice the large bulges moving atop his chest.  As nice as his pectorals were, especially for a professor of mathematics, even they could not move like THAT!  "What have you got under your jacket, John?"  He kept looking skyward.  "John?" she tried again.  "Your jacket is...moving."

"It IS?" he said, his eyes widening in surprise, as his palms spread out to cover more of his chest.  

"John," she said patiently, "why don't you let them go?"

Did she think it was EASY stuffing twelve pigeons into one's jacket and not letting any escape?  Backing up a couple of steps, he said suspiciously, "I need them."

"Why, John?  Why do you need pigeons?"

"I'm going to take them back to the apartment and let them loose in the kitchen so I can study the algorithmic patterns of their movement on the counter."

"Do you think Himself, were he not so kidnapped and all, would really appreciate pigeons on his counter?"

Such a thing had not crossed his beautiful mind and, even had it, would have been monumentally unimportant.  "I need a more limited study area than this park provides," he explained, quite reasonably.

"John," she said, stepping right up to him and placing her hand gently atop one of his, causing his grip to loosen just enough so that the lowest pigeon slipped down, catching its foot in his belt buckle, dangling then upsidedown and flapping its wings wildly in a delicate area that resulted in his dashing frantically across the lawn with the final outcome being that she completely forgot what the rest of her intended sentence might have been.  She sighed, watching him run, pigeons making their escape right and left.  This having to be part of the comedy to offset the deadly seriousness of the Hall of Mirrors was getting to be a bit...much.

Speaking of which,  Steve just then stepped fully into the Hall.  Such are often the untoward results of following a rolling roll that's rolling where no roll has rolled before.   How innocently he had been led to the doorway of doom.  WAS it leading...or mere happenstance?  The answer to that had, unfortunately, ended up IN the diaper pail and so neither the reader nor the writer will ever truly know.  

Laboriously and with great groanings, the gears of the epi shifted as Steve found himself gazing straight ahead at Monica.  Her face was white, strained with emotion.  "You asked for one minute," she said, her voice flat except for little jagged blips of pain here and there.  Instantly he remembered the scene on the sidewalk in front of his apartment building.  "One minute, you said, one minute."  A tear tracked down her cheek.  "I waited, Steve.  I waited for you to say something... anything...that would matter...that would change things."Wiping her hand across her cheek, she continued.  "It was one minute.  One minute that could have made all the difference."  Her dark eyes began to flash with anger.  "And what did you do, Steve, what did you DO with that minute I gave you?  You sat on the open door of the stove in the trash pile and you said...NOTHING!" She fairly spat the word.  "You threw it all away.  Everything. You sat there on that stupid door and let it all flow down the drain."  She stared at him, her face all hard and cold. "After that minute was gone...was wasted...it all died.  All of it.  YOU did that, Steve.  YOU did it!"

He stood there, blinking, listening to her, remembering.  She was right. He knew she was right.  Suddenly she was gone, replaced by a giant reflection of his own face.  The very last frame of Breaking Up.  His right cheek rested atop her dark hair, his face tilted up, his eyes closed. He watched as his lids squeezed tight then tighter still with the awareness of loss that pierced him completely.  Years had passed since that one minute, but that one minute had led him straight to this moment.  That one minute was the hinge of his life.  It was the summation of his indecision, his fears. That one minute had cost him..her.

His jaw worked as he looked at his own face. The pain of that ending had followed him for years in his aloneness.  He had come into epilife… alone...had spent all the years in it since...alone.  Until...Laura.  As suddenly as his face had appeared, it was gone, and Laura was there, standing not far in front of him in her light pink suit, looking like she had that day he'd first seen her in Himself's office on the farm in Nana Glen.  Through his mind passed the scenes of him carrying her in his arms after she'd sprained her ankle, of long hours of companionship on their treks and in their various campsites, of how he'd been so surprised by her skills with Karate and her expertise with the rifle in the battle in the Simpson Desert with the Mongolian gunrunners.  But most of all he remembered Sydney...the sunset photographs, the kiss atop the harbor bridge with the flag snapping beside them.  He looked at her now, his heart in his eyes.  How he had come to love this woman.  She meant everything in the world to him.  With her he felt whole at last, able to "be" for her.  He had matured so much in the last few months.

"Laura," he said, her name round and full with his love.  He held out both hands toward her, his lips curved in a smile of greeting.

"I'm leaving," she said coldly, firmly.  

"W...what?" he stammered.

"I'll be flying back to LA tonight.  I don't want to be with you anymore...not ever."

"W..why? What HAPPENED?" he cried.

"I've finally seen who you really are," she frowned.  "You're... pathetic!"

He clapped his palm over his mouth in sheer disbelief at what she was saying.

 

"Laura?  You...can't...."

"Watch me!" she snapped, picking up a small suitcase he'd not noticed before.

"WAIT!" he called desperately as she started to turn away.  "I LOVE you!"

"You don't know the meaning of the word," she replied.  

Next to her in the mirror, he saw himself appear, heard himself saying, "Being here with you, everything else was far away, just...gone.  Me and my life...everything that I do, who I am.  I was losing that here.  I'd wake up and I'd think, 'It's gone! I'M gone!'  I've got to get back to see if it's still there.  See if I'm still there."

Her lip curled in disgust.  "Go back, Steve.  Go back and see if you are still there. I won't be!"

"NO!" he cried.  "NO!  Those are lines from my movie! Lines I said to Monica! I'd never say that to you!"

"It's who you ARE, Steve.  You can't help it.  It's who you truly are."

His reflection spoke again.  "But suppose this doesn't last?  I gotta hang on to what I have besides this...who I am...away from this.  Because if this isn't going to last and this is all I have and it doesn't last...who AM I?"

"Yes, Steve," Laura continued.  "I'll tell you who you are.  You are that jerk sitting on the oven door in the trash who can't think of a thing to say that will really matter.  It DIDN'T last, did it, Steve?  And all you have and all you are is...nothing."

The thought of being alone again rose up within, around him, enveloping him so terribly that he sank to his knees.  "No," he said softly, repeating it over and over and over...."no, no......no."  Finally he buried his face in his hands, not able to bear the sight of Laura walking away from him.

Unseen by him, she stopped, looking back at him, smiling with pleasure at his distress.  Gradually she morphed into the figure in the dark, hooded robe and turned back, stepping out of the mirror and walking around behind him, hand turning to dump the red powder from the ring.  As the powder sifted down, the figure's eyes moved to the two-way mirror where he knew Himself was watching.  Saying nothing, he just nodded toward his captive.

Nash sat on the couch in Himself's apartment looking glumly at the empty countertop.  It had been such a good plan, it had.  He cocked his head, looking toward the main door.  What was that?  It sounded quite like a pigeon's coo. Getting up, he crossed the room, unnoticed by its other occupied occupants, and went out into the hallway.  He smiled.  A large white pigeon with brown markings was wandering in a seemingly irregular pathway toward a distant doorway he'd never really seen before.  He, however, knew that what seemed irregular to uneducated minds really had a most unique, mathematical pattern to it.  No one was about.  He chuckled.  Maybe he couldn't study a dozen patterns on the kitchen counter, but he surely could study one here in the hallway!