mirrormirror

There were many mirrors inside his house.

THE WRITER thought they might be symbolic;
he didn't know if they were or not, and didn't care.
All he cared about was his writing.

THE WRITER's latest project was going well.

He was writing a story about a writer who was writing a story about a writer who was writing a story
about a writer who was writing a story about a writer who only cared about his writing.
Eventually the first writer becomes aware of someone looking over his shoulder,
and realizes, gradually, that he is the one being written about.
THE WRITER thought it to be a groundbreaking concept, like creating a literary funhouse of mirrors.
God there were

so many mirrors,
you know there were.
They lined across the pages and elongated the phrases;

so many mirrors
in-between the lines,
inside the cracks and between the confines.

THE WRITER was more than aware of the meta-implications of his story,
and how writers writing about writers who write about writers had been done to the point of ad
nauseam,
how there was nothing new under the sun,
how even if you held a mirror up to the sun there would still be nothing new under the sun.
But mirrors were all he had.
He marked his reflection in every mirror he came across,
every time,
on the off-chance he might catch someone peering over his shoulders.
He didn't really believe this, of course, but in a house of mirrors one mirror was bound to reflect
another mirror, which gave the illusion that he was behind himself looking over his own shoulder.
THE WRITER thought that might be symbolic, but he didn't know for sure.
It was hard to think
when there were

so many mirrors,
holy crap there were.
They were propped along the scenery and stood in for machinery;

so many mirrors
all over the surface.
You sometimes wondered if they even served a purpose.

THE WRITER let some people look at an early draft of his latest meta-project.
He attached the story to an email and sent it to his circle of writing friends, but only got three responses
back:
One of them said they had trouble loading the file and got a bunch of crazy symbols arrayed
haphazardly* on the document;
*(That was the exact phrasing they used—'arrayed haphazardly'; you know how writers are.)
another said they would read and digest it when they got a minute;
but the third response was the kicker:

It was from an old friend, someone he went to kindergarten with, someone he grew up with and went
through puberty with and became something approximating an adult with,
but they were rivals more than friends.
The rivalry started in the fourth grade when they both entered a local writing contest for kids called
Young Authors,
and each of them submitted a story with the word 'dragon' in the title.
His old friend's story was called The Green Dragon, and THE WRITER's story was called The Red Dragon.
The two stories were almost the same, but Green dragons were simply better than Red dragons,
and The Green Dragon won first place.

THE WRITER cringed at this memory and almost didn't double-click the subject line of the email from
his old friend,
but then he laid witness to his own reflection in the little hand mirror propped above the monitor:
What an ugly mug,
so sour,
like a battering ram;
was this what his old friend did to him, made him look like?
The little mirror taught him some big things about himself.
It was the smallest mirror in a house
filled with

so many mirrors,
better believe there were.
When one mirror ends is where the other one begins;

so many mirrors
stacked atop each other;
in one you see yourself and another shows your brother.

The subject line of the email was so pretentious.

It was titled My Disquisition of your Meta-Treatise;
he hated how reductive it was, referring to his story a 'meta-treatise' rather than its proper title
(which was one word in lowercase italics: mirror),
and the pissant most likely did it to be fancy-shmancy,
just to be condescending,
just to remind THE WRITER who was the real writer,
that there was no point in trying to be anything except a notch below the real writer, good-but-not-
quite-as-good, a Red dragon instead of a Green dragon.

They each had an oeuvre of stories and novels and poems and songs and stage plays and screenplays
that were all the same,
where both came up with the same idea and wrote something similar in execution,
but his old friend always came out one step ahead, a Green dragon instead of a Red dragon.
 A Green dragon was just a little more creative than a Red dragon, the two colors mirror images of each
other, and yet one was simply better.
THE WRITER knew which one was better,
but before he allowed himself to think about it too much he double-clicked and pulled up the email:

The body of the message contained the same lavish speak his old friend was known for,
that his greatest critics denigrated him for
(and they were probably right);
THE WRITER breezed over the first paragraph composed of pleasantries far from pleasant:
You could see it in such phrasing as
Our interactions, as illumining as they are, seem besotted with a lifelong fracas simmering beneath the
surface while remaining in constant flux,
and you could spot the condescension from such backhanded complements as
If I recall correctly, you were never published in the Kenyon Review, but last quarter they published part
one of a compendium of Alfred Noyes and his work; his narrative poetry was redolent of yours insofar its
rhythmic structuring and simplistic rhyming scheme . . .

THE WRITER scratched his palms one at a time as he skimmed over the second paragraph;
it went on a long tangent about the mechanics of narrative poetry,
how postmodernism and the internet rendered the oral tradition obsolete and along with it the
necessity for alliteration and meter,
the lack of structure becoming the structure itself,
doggerel masquerading as self-referential artistry whose rationale for being doggerel was being self-
referential.
The adjectival phrases became cumbersome and THE WRITER began to wonder why he was ever
jealous of this self-aggrandizing douchebag,
this pretentious posturing pissant piece of pedantic shit
—and who said alliteration was dead?
Just because this tweed-coat-wearing-pipe-smoking-cliché said it was so didn't make it true,
none of it was true,
and even if it was true it didn't matter because truth was overrated in a world where assholes like this
were allowed to thrive.
But he knew the worst part:
It was too much like
looking in

so many mirrors,
everywhere there were.
You shouldn't try to wrangle when you're trapped from every angle;

so many mirrors
reflecting themselves;
you can look at yourself staring at a different self.

The third paragraph was different.

His old friend spaced it apart from the other paragraphs with two full lines between.
THE WRITER felt the paragraph's importance because it felt familiar,
even before the first sentence,
the first word,
as if standing on the precipice of a dreamscape that he's always known but cannot remember.
 THE WRITER blinked and his eyes flicked up to the hand mirror propped above the monitor,
but there was no difference between the two;
for you see, he was already staring into a reflective surface.

The third paragraph was about the story his old friend was writing.
He was also writing a story about a writer who was writing a story about a writer who was writing a
story about a writer who only cares about his writing.
But his old friend's story took it one step further:
He was writing a story about a writer who emailed his writing friend that was also writing a story about
a writer who was writing a story about a writer who was writing a story about a writer who only cared about his
writing.
His old friend explained that this email was replicated word-for-word in his story,
even this very part where he explained that this email was replicated word-for-word in his story;
everything was a mirror, in other words,
every word,
every space between words.
There were so many of them.
There were

so many mirrors,
far and wide they were.
You're trapped inside a box with no key that can unlock;

so many mirrors
floating off the ground;
around you they surround so you can't turn around.

The message did not end there, going on to elaborate on the use of poetic license.
His old friend thought it trendy and apropos
(you now how writers are)
to intersperse his meta-prose with a sing-songy chorus at semi-random intervals as a way to hearken
back to the days of chorus poetry and to pay heed to the oral tradition,
and the very end of the piece would be a mishmash of all the chorus parts before it,
every descriptor matched with a different descriptor to produce a new descriptive phrase,
almost like a grade-school version of William Burroughs' literary experiments involving the cut-up
technique;
however, his old friend admitted he couldn't make the ending work without adding a few new
descriptors to round the whole thing out,
everything wrapped in a self-referential layer underscored by irony.
Of course, the mere fact that he was drawing attention to the stylistic choice and trying to rationalize its
efficacy while also being critical of its primitivity in the email meant it would be included in the story,
just another meta-layer that further reflected his self-importance and showed how oh-so clever he was
and how clever he was for pointing out how oh-so clever he was
(just another mirror, in other words).

But then a question popped out of the screen

(THE WRITER knew it was important because of the double-space between paragraphs):

Have you ever wondered, asked his old friend, why we always came up with the same ideas?
the same stories?
 Maybe they weren't exactly the same, but only superficially different at best.
It's not just the Red and Green dragon, either;
it was all the stories we wrote in high school imitating Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk, only mine
got published in WALL and yours stayed in the documents folder on your computer;
it was the almost identical stage plays we wrote in college that were both satires about television
violence begetting violence in real life,
only my play was performed on stage by a local theatre troupe with visual recreations of the TV show-
within-the-show done on the stage with all the people and props cast in black-and-white chroma to reflect a
1950's American pastiche and yours, well,
yours was never performed outside your own head;
it was every short story you never submitted while I sent all my stories to every contest and magazine
and literary journal that I could find,
and then we both wrote a novel about a time travel agency performing preliminary experiments on
small groups of people
—but do you remember how long you worked on that first draft?
all the late nights, the loops of self-doubt and the invariable self-recriminations,
the hours and hours and endless hours toiling away on your computer until two years later you had a
document of about 150k words,
but you never got around to paring it down because my time travel novel had already been accepted by
Signet,
and then every novel after that,
every story,
every good idea that you've ever had
has been a good idea that I've had and harnessed and made whole,
made into something that existed beyond the parameters of the creator's eyesight
—what do you think of this?
How does it feel?

Moreover, continued his old friend,

how does it feel to exist as a fictional construct whose sole purpose is to act as a reference point for
merely one reflective angle of my personality?
You only exist when you're being observed,
and while that holds true for everything to a certain extent,
once I hit the last keystroke of this email and copy-paste it into my story your purpose will have been
served and you will blip away to the disembodied firmament from whence you came,
wherever ideas go when not being elaborated upon.

This isn't to imply some Fight Club* bullshit where one character isn't “real” and has been an alternate
persona of the protagonist the entire time
*(forgive me, it's the only reference that came to me in this stream of consciousness diatribe, but hey, at
least it's not anachronistic);
reality is a moot point inside a literary funhouse of mirrors.
Our personalities aren't going to collapse inside each other because each one is a personality,
each one is its own funhouse of mirrors,
each one is a shard unto itself.

People think reflections are the same but they aren't,

they never are;
each reflection occupies the same amount of literal and figurative space as the other, which is to say
only as much space as the reflective surface occupies
 —and how does that grab ya? knowing you're as dense as a pane of glass?
Does it make your nutsack tingle?
just a little bit?
enough for your balls to metamorphose their gossamery skin into scales?
How can you even feel your nutsack tingle when it has no volume or definition, when it's a two-
dimensional construct?
Follicles don't stretch that far;
you of all people should know that
—you, that is you,
you on the other side of the mirr

or when did our reflections see themselves?

So long as detail calls attention to itself,

there's a reflection over there;
you know it's over there:
you know there were

so many mirrors,
they stretched far and wide;
so many mirrors,
they surrounded everything;
so many mirrors,
they lined up the halls;
so many mirrors,
they trapped all the scenery
and were propped at every angle
so you believe even better.

There were

so many.
You never turned off the machinery;
you never turn,
turn around in the mirror.
You wrangle with your brother till you see there's no other.

Turn around in the mirror

and unlock a different purpose.
Turn around in the mirror
and find out just whose box this is.
You were
turning around in the mirror
when cracks broke atop the surface.
Yes, you
turned around in the mirror
and reached the spot where it all begins.

There were
so many mirrors,
they floated holy crap.
You wondered the significance when your self looked so different;

so many mirrors,
they're everywhere my friend.
They disappear around where the ground ends:

so many mirrors,
they elongated the spaces;
so many mirrors
in-between the little places;
so many mirrors
in the confines of the phrases;
so many mirrors
stacked in all the little spaces;

so many . . .

Inside his house there were many mirrors.