Chapter 7.3 - The Dark Path

“Who left the door open?” Claire asked herself. Both panes hung flush against the walls, almost touching the mirrors. She’d never realized before how close the doors got to their beveled edges and wondered how come in the long years the house had seen they had never been chipped by the random activities of the household. She pictured children slamming the doors in their tantrums, people carrying bulky furniture, her grandfather always leaving the doors open behind him. The last thought made her smile.

The wind had brought in a glut of dark leaves, all wet from the cold drizzle outside. Their make-shift carpet extended out into infinity in both directions, endlessly reflected by the mirrors. 

“It’s a path,” a message fell inside Claire’s mind clear as a bell, too clear to be dismissed. It didn’t make any sense, of course, so she shook her head to chase the thought away, but her gaze was spellbound to this path that led into the virtual world; she lingered between the mirrors again, in front of the wide open doors.

She felt kind of sad about not being able to experience what it was like to be in that world behind the glass, but when she looked at the mirrors again, she saw that a few of the Claires were returning to her an aggravated stare. Not only did she have a delegation of selves represent her in mirror land, but it did not have any more access to the real world than she did to the virtual one. This understanding enriched the onion of Claire personalities with another layer: that of the virtual Claire collective.

The differences between the real world and its reflected counterpart are subtle and the brain normally shuts them down as irrelevant, but Claire took notice of them and made a game of finding as many as she could. In the process one of the Claires, who was so far into the distance that her countenance was barely visible, turned around and followed the path of leaves deeper inside the mirror. Real Claire didn’t even react, as if she expected this to happen, as if this was just a mundane occurrence to see her reflection act independently, an event no more startling than seeing her grandfather walk through the door. She reached out her hand to draw that Claire’s attention somehow, but the transparent boundary between worlds stopped it with a muffled thud.

“Were you just punching the mirror right now?” her grandfather blurted, confused and staring at her in dismay. “And can you please close that door? The wind is blowing in all the leaves and the rain.” 

He’d been standing there for a while it seemed, long enough to notice Claire engage in silent conference with her own reflection.

“Aah,” Claire turned around, “no, not really.” She wished she could find a rational explanation for her earlier behavior but there was none, so she took the last step towards the doors and struggled to push the heavy panes shut but the wind didn’t allow it, like it didn’t want a barrier in its path.

“Look at this mess!” Grandfather followed her into the alcove, displeased. “All the mud got tracked into the house!”

Claire looked at the floor, and then at her grandfather, like she didn’t understand: there wasn’t any mud, just the sparkle of the raindrops on the dark cover of leaves. 

She painted again that evening, she painted the longing for that forbidden journey, turned liquid in the rain.

“Is that the pond?” Grandmother asked her, watching from behind.

“No, not really. It’s just an abstract piece.”

“It looks like the pond. Look, there are even waterlilies on it,” Grandmother smiled, pleased to recognize some real objects in her granddaughter’s conceptual art.

The surface of Claire’s emotions did look like a lake indeed, a dark liquid clear that let the vague shapes of her submerged feelings shine through, amplified by the contrast. Claire smiled vaguely and kept to herself the fact that somewhere underneath that surface, below the feelings, there was another Claire, a liquid Claire, a being of emotions she’d kept hidden all these years, safely tucked away in her watery world and free of the shackles of rational thought. Liquid Claire was happy, she was shocked to discover. She couldn’t explain how she knew that, but she didn’t doubt it, maybe liquid Claire had told her. She giggled to the thought and turned around to meet her grandmother’s probing gaze.

“Bebelle, get out of your head, you’re spending way too much time in there.”

The old lady looked out the window, absentminded. The November sky was heavy with clouds and their thick blanket kept warmth trapped underneath, defying the season. Everything looked purple filtered through their light, the wet tropical air was filled with purple fragrance.

“It’s almost time for the opening,” she said. “How is the exhibit coming along?”

“Everything is in place, we just need to install some of the lighting.”

“How about this piece?” Grandmother asked, nodding towards the half finished painting.

“Next time,” Claire replied. 

Grandmother smiled, pleased.

“I see you have decided to stick with it, I’m very happy about that. I wasn’t sure…”

Claire wrapped the shawl tighter around her shoulders, more for comfort than for warmth. The image of the door left wide open, the way it had been that afternoon, haunted her. It was the way it framed the image of the wide alley in the shade of the oak trees like a painting one could enter at will. For a second she remembered a fragment of her serial dream, and she remembered them being there, her unseen kin, waiting for her patiently in this very image framed by the open door. A wild emotion she couldn’t identify, something between elation and dread, fired up all her nerve endings and gave her an irrepressible urge to run away.