When I was young, I always used to talk about the man inside my mirror. He was a plain man—completely unremarkable, really, if you ignored that he was made of glass and contained to the world behind my wall.

I remember the first time I saw him. I was alone in my room, always alone, playing N64. Super Mario flung himself across my screen, shouting Ya-Hooo! with every long-jump, fighting fantastical beasts in hopes that he might pocket enough stars to rescue the princess. Something like that. I never did beat that game—didn’t feel much like playing it after what happened. It used to make me sick, anyway, the way the camera rotated and pulled against your will. I always ended up motion sick.

That’s what happened the day I first saw Len. That was his name, the man in the mirror: Len. I didn’t name him. That’s what it was. I didn’t know that then. I had paused Mario, was taking a break with my head down, breathing slowly through my mouth and out my nose, hoping to best the rolling waves of nausea currently rocking my brain against the inside of my skull. Something caught my eye—movement, off to the right. I turned. Saw myself, sitting in my red chair positioned two feet from the small tv where Mario was frozen in action. And behind me, peering around the corner of my bed, a man. His hair was dark. His face was nondescript. I thought he needed a shave, or thought my dad would have said something like that, had he been around to see. He wore a long-sleeved gray shirt, rolled halfway up his forearms. His fingernails were very dirty. He looked scared.

I was not what many would consider a fearful child—although I have grown into a fearful man. The world takes from you, each day you’re part of it. But it also gives. It gives anxieties and phobias and scars. But even then, even as the weird, somewhat stupid ten-year-old boy I was, the kid who liked collecting bugs in jars to watch them die, or lighting fires behind the elm tree in the backyard, I experienced a jolt, a sickly curious twist inside my stomach, at the sight of him.

Immediately, I turned, expecting to see him in my room. But there was no one. I advanced a few steps, and after steeling myself with a deep breath, glanced around the corner. Nothing. No scruffy-faced man crouched behind my bed. I looked back at the mirror and there he was, peeking between my legs, making eye contact in the reflection.

A funny thing happened then: it’s as if the world stopped turning, just for a moment. I saw him; he saw me. That was really the end of it right there. He ducked behind the bed and disappeared. I searched every corner of my room, under the bed, behind my desk, inside my closet, looking for him, before eventually giving up and going back to my game. I was no longer nauseated. Felt better than ever, actually. The world had lost its gray hues. I was seeing color for the first time.

I told my parents about the man in the mirror, although they weren’t particularly interested. My mother thought it was another of my games; I was quite the imaginative child. My father took a long drag from his cigarette and grunted. He said to tell the man he’d have to pay rent if he wanted to stay here.

I’d seen him a few times by then. At first he only watched from corners, sometimes from the far side of my bed, where I’d first seen him, sometimes from the dark section under my desk, his eyes reflecting light the way a cat’s will at night, sometimes through the crack in my closet door. He stayed in hiding until one day I turned and said, “You might as well come out if you want to watch.” I thought he was interested in the game. I’d taken to playing Madden ‘98 and thought he might be a Jets fan too.

He disappeared that day, didn’t come back for a while. He put his hands over his face, like a baby that thinks it’s hiding, and rolled backwards, slithering under my bed. I didn’t see him for two weeks. When he finally reappeared, he came through my bedroom door. The door in the mirror, that is—not the real one. That was when I first wondered about him. Where he went when I couldn’t see him. Who he was. What he was. His face was still shy, but there was a new confidence in his posture; he walked in, took off his shoes, and sat on my bed. We locked eyes in the mirror. He nodded toward the tv as if to say, Go ahead. I unpaused the game and started playing. Occasionally I glanced at the mirror. He was leaning forward, smiling, watching as Vinny Testaverde and Wayne Chrebet carved up the New England Patriots’ defense on a snowy, animated field. It felt good to have an audience. He was rooting for the Jets, rooting for me. When I finished the game he nodded, stood up, and left the room. I tried to play another match, but the appeal was gone. It wasn’t as fun without someone watching.

Later that year, he told me his name. He didn’t speak—I’m not quite sure the people behind the glass can vocalize. Instead, he told me the way he told me everything: he wrote it down. I had been lying in bed, foam headphones covering my ears, listening to Linkin Park on my portable CD player. Daydreaming. Making movies in my heads to the songs. I wasn’t exactly waiting for him, mostly I was doing what I always did. Finding ways to pass the time in my small, wood-paneled bedroom. The windows were half open; it was spring and the sun had just come back from its seasonal vacation. The breeze was still languishing in winter.

He came from the closet that day. Not that I could see the closet from where I lay—the mirror closet, that is. The real one was directly in front of me, but Len’s closet was perpendicular to the glass, set into the same wall as the mirror. One moment the back wall and a corner of my bed were all I could see in the reflection; then, without warning, always without warning, his head came around the corner. He saw me; I saw him. He was bolder than ever, but there was still something in his eyes, the way he looked at the ground if you held eye contact more than a second, that made him feel like a kid in a man’s body. He called me over.

I got up, approached the glass. I walked slowly; Len was a regular part of my life, but I’d never gotten close to the glass when he was around. I wondered what would happen if we both put our hands on it. Would I feel his skin? Could he pull me through?

He pressed some form of identification up against the glass. It had his picture, some words. At the time I assumed it was a drivers license, but what did I know? I was years away from driving. Looking back, I know one thing: If it was a license, it was issued in a state I’ve never been. The colors were wrong.

I got close, stood on my toes so my eyes could be level with it. He was watching me, smiling, nodding. I asked him, “What? I don’t get it.” He frowned. Pulled the card back, pointed at the top line, pushed it against the glass again. I couldn’t read it. The words were all backwards. When I said so, his smile dropped. He turned around, put his hands on his hips, scratched the stubble on his neck. Then he crossed the room and dug through my desk. I watched as if peering into a connected room, a perfect mirror image of my own, as behind me my desk, my real desk, sat still, drawer closed, same as always.

Finding what he wanted, he threw his hands in the air as if to say, Eureka! He took a pen from the cup and started writing. This time, when he pressed the paper to the mirror, I could read it. The words were looping and awkward, the way it always looked when I’d try to write my name with my left hand, but I could read it. Two lines:

Len
my name

“Your name is Len?” I asked. He nodded, beaming again.

“Hi, Len,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I felt better or worse knowing that he had a name. Something about how plain it was comforted me, but its very existence seemed to elevate him, to make him solid.

He pointed at me. Then he pointed at the paper. Pointed back to me.

“Oh, I’m Chris.”

He mouthed it. Chris. Smiled, shook his head slowly. I got the impression he liked it. Then he stuck his hand out as if to shake. His black nails struck the glass with a small sound, like a pebble shifting place inside a fish tank. Len pulled his hand back and looked at it, confused, as if it had shot from the end of his arm without consulting his brain. He looked at the hand, looked back at me, and shrugged as if to say, How strange, huh? Then he bowed. I reciprocated with an awkward half-bow myself and laughed. It really was quite funny.

Len plopped onto the edge of my bed. I turned and looked for a depression where he sat, couldn’t help it. But there was nothing. No disturbance. He was on the mirror bed, in the mirror room. He pointed to the tv, nodded, pantomimed a controller in his hand.

“I don’t feel like playing right now,” I said. “I was listening to music.”

He tightened his face, drew down his eyebrows, brought his hands to his eyes and pretended to wipe them.

“You’re a pest, you know that?” I said, turning on the N64 and dropping into my chair. “Fine. Just one game.”

He fist pumped silently in the mirror. As the game loaded, I said, “Do you have music? Do you know what music is?”

Len stared blankly. There was nothing behind his eyes. He held my gaze, mouth slack, hands hanging down between his knees.

“Nevermind,” I said, wanting to be done with the moment. I waited until the game was in action before looking in the mirror again. I was afraid he’d still be sitting there watching me, staring with that dead-behind-the-eyes look. How was I supposed to play if he was doing that? How was I supposed to do anything?

When at last I checked, I found him leaning forward, smiling, watching along. I let out a sigh. I lost that game, couldn’t concentrate on calling the right plays. As my team marched off the field in digital South Florida, I looked in the mirror and apologized. He seemed as disappointed as me. Then he shrugged. It happens.

Because the silence was suddenly uncomfortable, I grabbed my CD player from the bed and held it up. “If you see something like this in there,” I said, “put these over your ears and press this button. In case you’re like, bored, and I’m not here…or whatever.”

He brought his hands together in front of his chest and shook them to say thank you. Then he walked out of sight.

I started wondering if Len was behind other mirrors, or only the one in my room. I’d only ever seen him there. Maybe that was his room—same as it was my room—and there were other people, if you could call them that, in other rooms.

That was around the time I started high school. A fortunate coincidence helped me avoid suspicion: 14-year-old kids are always looking in the mirror, every mirror they see, self-consciously pulling down their shirt or tousling their hair.

In the locker room I’d look in the mirror, counting bodies, then turn my head, counting bodies. I needed to see if the numbers lined up, or if there was a mirror person, someone like Len, standing among the boys in my grade, the real ones, walking shirtlessly, silently, smiling, keeping an eye on me. I only did that two times. Bradley Yates saw me checking guys out in the mirror and called me a fag. That put an end to that.

But when I was alone, I studied every mirror I could find. I’d put my face close to the glass and look for inconsistencies, differences in the reflection and reality. I did it in the bathroom at home, turning the medicine cabinet mirror out and looking down an infinite hallway of smaller reflections; I did it in the mall, walking past long mirrored walls, counting the people I saw in my world and in Len’s world; I’d go in my parents’ room and sit on the bed, looking at the slim hanging mirror on the closet door that my mom loved so much. It made everything tall and skinny.

I sat there one day, waiting, sure Len would come by if I gave him time. I got home from school and went straight upstairs, hoping he’d show before one of them got home. My leg tapped restlessly. I was becoming obsessed. I could have asked Len, he was still coming to my room regularly to hangout, but something told me not to. I was afraid of that slack-jawed, vacant stare. Afraid if it came back it might never go away.

“Len, are you there?” I asked the mirror. “Is anyone there?”

In the reflection, I saw something behind me, behind my parents’ window. A shadow. It looked like the branch of a tree being blown by the wind, tap-tapping at the glass. I put my ear to the mirror, listened. From miles away, I heard it: tap, tap. I turned my head, looked at the real window. There was no tree out there. Never had been.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” I asked.

“Christopher?”

My mother, in the hallway. She opened their bedroom door and poked her head in. “What are you doing in there?”

Normally quick on my heels, I found myself floundering, speechless. “I was uh….looking for the uh, skateboard. My old skateboard. Have you seen it?”

I pushed past her, crossed the hall to my room. From behind, she said, “This isn’t about the man in the mirror, is it?”

My blood went cold. “No,” I said, without turning.

“I thought you grew out of that. You’re a little old for silly games, don’t you think?”

“Yes, mom.”

I closed the door and fired up the PS2. Len didn’t come.

At least not right away.

I played Madden ‘02, pushing my Jets slowly toward another Super Bowl. I won three games in a row, but there was no audience. Eventually the game started to feel fake, hollow, like an empty world populated by cheering, faceless computers. I turned it off. Went to bed.

A sound like someone lobbing rocks at my window woke me up. It was almost three in the morning; my room was as black as the inside of my eyelids. The blinking green digits on my clock were the only confirmation that my eyes were open. I looked to the window, pulled the drapes aside. A silver crescent moon hung low on the horizon.

Another rock hit the glass. I sat up, my heart racing. All at once I was a kid again, trying to sleep after watching The Nightmare on Elm Street. For weeks I’d had nightmares, false awakenings where I’d find Freddy tossing rocks at my window, trying to lure me outside into an alley where he’d walk with his stilt arms outstretched.

There was no one out there. The sound came again, from my left. It wasn’t coming from the window, it was coming from the mirror.

Two eyes glowed in the reflection. From the corner of my mirror room. With the blinds open there was enough light to see him, crouched on my desk. Len was smiling, taking pebbles from a pile at his feet, lobbing them at the mirror.

Tap. Tap.

I stopped looking for him in other mirrors after that.

I said I wasn’t waiting for him that day with the CD player, the day he gave me his name, and I suppose I wasn’t. Not consciously, that is. But in a way I was always waiting for him. Maybe it wasn’t top of mind, maybe I wasn’t thinking about it, but you don’t always have to be thinking about something to be doing it. He was company, and to a lonely kid, any company is usually better than none, even when that company is strange or uncomfortable or unexplainable.

There came a time when I started to value privacy. For most kids, that time tends to coincide with puberty. Self-exploration is a solo venture, not something that demands an audience. I never knew if I was alone. The same thought that had comforted me so many years had become a nagging anxiety. I was paranoid, but that never stopped a teenage boy—at least not any I’ve known.

A kid at school sold me a Girls Gone Wild DVD for twenty bucks. Steep, but the heart wants what it wants. The same can be said for other organs. It’s not that there weren’t other options when it came to porn, but I had been seeing the late-night advertisements for GGW since I was a little kid. If you were up past one in the morning, flipping through the channels, they were impossible to miss. The commercials were censored, of course, but that only made you want—need—to see what you were missing. That’s a universal fact, I think, a key part of the human experience: A little taste is often worse than no flavor at all. Ask the girl giving out free samples outside the smoothie shop, or ask the guy who signed up for a free trial of some service now taking monthly bites out of his bank account. Ask Len.

It was fall, chilly; the sky was losing its light before four in the afternoon just as the trees were gaining their own spectral vibrancy. A color swap. I rushed the quarter-mile home from where the bus left me, happy that mom had volunteered to stay late the rest of the month. I would be alone until dinner. As alone as I ever was.

Inside the house was warm, a blessed relief after the blustery, uphill walk, fighting wind that seemed intent on stripping me of the meager heat my blood provided. I threw my backpack down, stripped off my coat, and held my hands over the radiator that ran along the baseboards. When an acceptable sense of dexterity returned to my fingers, I opened the backpack, eyed my prize.

I went to my bedroom. Closed the door. Turned on my Playstation. The DVD slid into the disc tray and began booting up. I checked the driveway from my window, just to be safe, and pulled the drapes. My eyes threw one last glance at the mirror. I scanned the room—Len’s room—but there was no sign of him. Not under the bed, not in the corner; the closet door was pulled shut. I sat in my chair, unbuckled my pants, pressed play.

My face, still red from the cold, grew warm. I was happy I’d taken a moment to warm my hands. I had lotion (for my dry hands, of course), tissues (for the sniffles, of course), entertainment. The world melted away for a bit. I lost track of time. The volume was on, but low. I liked listening to the inebriated girls, the way they shouted and cheered as they took their shirts off, but I needed to be able to hear a car pulling up the driveway or the front door opening. He was behind me, leaning over my chair, face spellbound, watching the screen.

“What the fuck!” I screamed, pulling my pants up.

I startled him. Absurdly, it took me until that moment to realize that just as I couldn’t see him in my room, he probably couldn’t see me in his. Neither of us had been looking at the mirror; we’d both been fixed on the screen. His face was confused and apologetic, like a dog caught with its head in the trash—sure it’s done something wrong but not understanding why it’s wrong.

“What are you fucking doing man?” I was buttoning my jeans, bending over to try and close the zipper. Len looked from my face to the screen back to my face. He was flustered. He opened his mouth, threw his hands up, stammered silently. He looked the same as he had the day I met him: same clothes, same five o’clock shadow, same age. His face held the same juvenile questions, like all of this was new to him. He scrambled to the desk, began scribbling on a blank page. I watched him start, stop, draw lines through what he’d written, start again. When he was in a hurry to tell me something he often forgot to write backwards.

Eventually he held the paper to the glass:

sorry i didn’t know

“Didn’t know what?” I shouted. “Not to be a creep?”

He pulled the paper back, wrote frantically:

anything i’ve never seen this

“Not cool, man. Not cool.”

I paused the DVD, sat down on my chair, caught my breath. I sat there for a few minutes thinking. Len stood in his room, watching me in the mirror. I felt violated. Pissed off. I also felt bad. He looked like a reprimanded child.

“I want you to go away,” I said. Truthfully, I’d wanted that for a while, just hadn’t had the nerve to say it out loud. I wasn’t sure that what I wanted mattered. I’d never asked him to come in the first place. He looked at me a moment longer, dropped his head, nodded, and then sulked away. I watched as he climbed on my bed—his bed—parted the drapes and climbed out the window.

A few minutes passed. I felt strange. Sad and lonely, the way I sometimes had as a kid, but more pronounced. More defined. That’s part of growing up—your emotions gain clarity, the blur around the edge starts to come into focus. Feelings become easier to label. Not to control, though.

I still had at least twenty minutes before mom would be home. Despite the awkward encounter with Len, my blood was still up, as was the bulge beneath my belt. I pressed play. Sat back down. It took a few minutes, but soon enough the world started to melt away again.

As I edged closer and closer to delirium, my hand slipping up and down, up and down, my breathing coming in quick, raspy gasps, I saw motion in the corner of my eye. My window, in the mirror. Len’s mirror. His forehead and eyes were poked over the edge. They weren’t pointed at the screen—the screen that played the same image in my world and his—they were fixed on the mirror. On me. I tried to stop but it was too late. I finished in my hand, staring at the man in the mirror. 

He slipped beneath the windowsill and out of sight and stayed there for a long time.

The following year I started dating Jennifer Wyatt, my first real girlfriend. I lost my virginity to her in the back of my Buick, parked behind the AMC. We spent a lot of time at her house. She met my folks, but we never stayed at my place long. She asked once why we always had to do it in my car or at her house if it was a long weekend and her parents had taken to the coast.

“You’re an only child,” she said, “it can’t be hard finding some alone time over there.”

I laughed and told her I had a nosy roommate. She thought I meant my parents. She thought it was funny. I didn’t. Even though I hadn’t seen Len in over a year, I didn’t think it was funny at all.

The next time I saw Len I was thirty-eight years old. It had been over twenty years. It had been longer since I’d seen him than I’d been alive the last time he made an appearance. I won’t tell you that in the intervening years I had managed to convince myself it had all been a dream, or the bleeding-into-reality sort of waking dream that might have been a symptom of an overactive imagination; I won’t tell you that because it wouldn’t be true. But I had managed to stop thinking about him every day. I no longer put my face up against the cold glass anytime I saw a mirror, inspecting the reflected world. I stopped expecting him to pop up every time I took my pants off. I can’t tell you that I had grown up into a normal man with a normal life, but I was getting by. Doing well, all things considered.

I was in the restroom at work. My office was in a high-rise downtown. Each floor was divided into two suites. My company was big enough that we occupied the whole floor. There was one men’s room for each suite. The restroom was long; a counter interrupted by five sinks ran the length of one wall, while stalls lined the opposite. A wide, room-length mirror sat above the sinks.

I was working late. The sun had long departed, and the office had mostly cleared out. I often volunteered for the beefy assignments, the ones that meant clocking overtime. Most of my colleagues had families to get home to; I had an empty house filled with empty rooms. Often I was the first into the office and the last out. They joked about giving me the keys. I ate all my meals there. Slept there a few times. Got dressed there every morning, although that was more a practicality than anything else: It’s hard to put on a suit and look composed without using a mirror.

That night I was alone. Frank, the IT guy who sometimes burned the midnight oil with me, had left at sundown. His wife was coming into the city and they were going to dinner. No train for Frank that night. I told him to enjoy his dinner and watched him leave. Two hours later and I was about to burst. I was usually able to avoid using the restroom those nights that I was alone, to hold it until I got home, but I’d drank two extra cups of coffee to help power through the budget I was supposed to be cleaning up and still had an hour train ride waiting at the end of my fifteen-block walk.

The restroom was long and narrow; it ran almost a quarter length of the floor. It had motion sensor lights and at that hour it was always dark when you opened the door. You had to take a few steps in and wait for them to wake up. I did my business and washed my hands, careful to keep my eyes low. I rarely looked at my own face in the mirror then, didn’t like what I saw. I could see the sinks and the bottom of my reflection. I saw my belt and my tucked shirt, pulling up in places, and behind me I could see the row of stalls set into the back wall. One started to slowly push open.

Dreading, knowing what I’d see, I found myself helplessly raising my eyes. Len was in the stall, palm on the door, slowly pushing it open. His face was timid, same as it had been the first day I saw him. We made eye contact and he smiled. Waved. Then he came leaping out into the bathroom. I couldn’t move. He came up behind me, pretended to dust off my shoulders and straighten my tie in the mirror, doing everything with a comical exaggeration, the way he always had. He placed one outturned hand on his hip, put on a bewildered, gosh-what-do-we-have-here face, and blew air out of his lips as if trying to push aside a misplaced lock of hair dangling on his forehead.

When he pulled a small pen and pad out of his pocket and began writing, I managed to break my paralysis. I turned, ran for the door, suddenly sure the lights would go out and I’d be stuck in this dark room, blindly groping for the exit, hoping my hands didn’t find themselves squeaking over cold glass. I took one last look over my shoulder. The restroom was empty. I looked at the mirror. He was shaking his head and wagging his finger at me. As I turned to leave he started to wave, opening and closing his hand like a child.

For the next year or so, Len would pop up in random places, always when I least expected or wanted to see him. I saw him in the fitting room at Brooks Brothers, sitting in the corner, fiddling with a pair of mirror loafers. He was at the empty table behind me in Lazarro’s, his chin resting on his knuckles, pouting, watching me eat dinner with my boss. Once, I saw him in the reflection of my monitor at work, carrying a stack of papers back and forth as if he had somewhere to be, grinning, laughing his silent laugh, keeping his side-eye on me. Anytime I saw him reach for his pen and pad, I’d leave, or look away if leaving wasn’t an option. I’m not sure that looking away made much of a difference; usually I had the feeling that he was still there, that hairs on the back of your neck feeling you can’t shake when someone is watching you. I never allowed myself to look back and find out. I was too afraid he’d be staring with his mouth open and his eyes empty.

I couldn’t avoid him forever. There were no mirrors in my home, not even in the bathroom, but he’d show up in anything that showed a reflection. A clean dinner plate, a wine glass, my phone. It was futile and I was tired. So tired.

The day finally came. He got on the train with me—I saw him standing in the crowd behind me as it pulled up, its windows slowly pulling to a stop in front of me. He waved. I got in. Minutes later I was sitting, paper in my lap, looking at my reflection across the train. He was standing in the center, holding onto the rubber loop, leaning drunkenly. Our eyes met. He came and sat next to me so that I could see him, see us. I was starting to look like him. The same dark hollows around the eyes, the bristly beard stubble. He took knuckles to his cheeks and pulled upward, giving himself a clown’s grin. I shook my head. His mouth opened in a wide O and he put a hand in front of it. Then he turned to his left, to the person sitting next to me, and began brushing her hair. Running his hands through it, turning every few seconds to smile and wink at me. She didn’t react. Why would she have? In the real train, the one I was sitting in, her hair was still. I wonder, even now, what she would have seen if she’d looked up at that moment, looked at her reflection.

Len started writing something. I watched him. Then the train stopped and I got off.

The day was bright and hot. Most people wore sunglasses. I saw him trailing me in every passing face. Then I was walking alongside a long office building, its outside windows polished to sparkling mirrors from the perspective of the sidewalk. Inside, there would be people working, people that would occasionally glance up and watch the crowds shuffle past. I glanced to my right, saw him skipping behind me, pumping his arms high above his waist. I stopped. He cartwheeled behind me, came to a stop at my side. We looked long at each other.

He pulled his notepad out and pressed it to the glass:

mirror

“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”

He shook his head emphatically. His face turned sour. He slapped the note against the glass, hard.

“What do you want!” I shouted.

“Hey buddy, you’re in the way. Keep it moving.” The voice from my left startled me. Len was standing to my left, in the mirror. The impatient guy on the sidewalk—the real sidewalk—pushed past me. When I looked back, Len was finishing another note:

your room

“My room? I don’t get it.”

He put the first note back, then the second one, alternating them.

“No,” I said, finally getting it. He nodded his head up and down. “No,” I said again. He just went on smiling and nodding.

Two weeks later there was a long, wide mirror on my bedroom wall, similar to the one I’d had as a child. Things were normal for a bit, like old times. He’d show up on occasion, always unannounced, sometimes entering from the bedroom door on his side of the glass, sometimes crawling out from under my bed or inside my closet. I didn’t pay him much mind until the day I disappeared.

The first time my reflection walked away from me was one month ago. I was reading in bed. Movement caught my eye. I glanced up, expecting to see Len, but what I saw was myself gently setting my glasses on the nightstand, closing my book, lifting the covers, and leaving. I sat where I was, too cold to move, and looked at the empty bed in the reflection. The bed I was sitting in.

I got up, approached the glass, put my face to it. Nothing. Just an empty room.

I thought about getting rid of the mirror right then—I no longer entertain such a foolish idea—of grabbing it from the wall and taking it outside and smashing it to pieces. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I wanted to see if he’d come back. If I’d come back. I called out of work the next morning and sat myself in front of it. Slowly, the minutes ticked by; the daylight swelled and then receded; my room grew shadows. The man in the mirror did not return.

The weeks that followed were long and draining. I couldn’t make myself care about anything else. Work, life—it all seemed suddenly unimportant. So unreliable and fleeting. People speak of their problems, but what problems do they have? They don’t have to wash their hands in the restroom and stare at the empty basin in front of them, the running sink with no hands to interrupt the water. They don’t get dressed blindly and spend the rest of their day hoping their shirt is still tucked in or their tie facing the right direction. It’s maddening. I put in my resignation. I’m not sure anyone even noticed.

This is the part where you probably expect me to say something cryptic, something about how I’m still sitting here now in front of my mirror, waiting for myself to come back. I suppose that would have a certain poetic simplicity. I almost wish that were the case. But I came back. I’d thought having no reflection to be an intractable existence, but it’s so much worse when your reflection is there doing things you’re not, things you’d never. I don’t know where I went, on the other side of the glass, those days I disappeared, just as I don’t know what Len did to me, the me inside the mirror, and I’m not sure I want to. I’d always assumed it was the same for him as it was for me: that we can see each other in the reflection and only the reflection. Now I realize there was a piece of me in there all along, next to him, on his side of the glass.

The day my reflection came back it did not come back alone. I walked in with an old friend in tow, our arms hanging on each other’s shoulders. Len pointed to the mirror, to the real me, and laughed soundlessly. Always without sound. I’m not sure the people on the other side of the glass can vocalize. My reflected self joined in, pointing and laughing. Then I started writing, the me on the other side of the mirror. I tried, scrapped the paper, tried again; all the while Len stood over my shoulder watching, pointing, teaching. Eventually he grew tired of my attempts and took the paper and pen and wrote me a message:

bring people

“I can’t. Please.”

people here

I obeyed.

It was two days ago the first time I watched myself kill someone.