Mirror maze

When she was a child, she used to like to arrange herself just so between two mirrors, so she could see the herselves stretching out into forever. She’s less entranced now. Infinite hallways wind in front of her, and infinite mirrors reflect infinite hallways, and she doesn’t know where to find herself.

She doesn’t run through the mirror maze. She walks, her hands in front of her face, so she touches the glass before she sees it. She tried running once, but the mirror maze is treacherous, and soon she’d crashed against what she thought was a hallway. Mirror after mirror reflected the blood she’d smeared, upside-down and flipped and too-large and too-small and crazily distorted and so similar that she had to touch the image to know it was a mirage.

She doesn’t know when she saw the blood for the last time. She mostly doesn’t pay attention to what’s in the mirrors. Everything that she sees in the mirror maze she’ll see again, everything but the blood.

Her nose had throbbed, but none of the mirrors had shown an injury. In the mirrors, she never bleeds. In the mirrors, she’s never so snotty from crying that the mucus drips into her mouth and she swallows it. In the mirrors, she never wears the sullen flat look of someone too exhausted for despair. Her face—when she sees her face, and not hallways—is bright and happy and smiling, a smile that crinkles the eyes.

Her face isn’t the only thing she sees in the mirrors. The mirrors reflect elegant sketches like Chinese brushwork. Up close, she sees nothing but three or four confident lines, but if she steps far enough away they click: the moon, a mountain, birds in flight. None of the paintings have people in them. She hasn’t found the original painting, or couldn’t tell it apart from the reflections. She wonders how many drawings there are, if the birds and the moon and the mountain are all different angles, warped beyond recognition, on a single ur-drawing.

She also sees an EXIT sign, glowing an incongruous neon green. The EXIT sign is always upside-down, or backwards, or so small she can barely see it, or so large all she can see is one angle of the T or possibly the X. She pursues the EXIT sign when she sees it, for lack of another way to choose a fork. But it disappears whenever she gets close, like a glimmering silver fish darting away from her hand.

The mirror maze has no source of light other than the EXIT sign. But nothing is tinted greenish, and she sees her hands as clearly as if she were walking at noon in a desert. She wonders if the mirrors trapped the photons of some primeval light, which has bounced between mirrors for kalpas.

Sometimes, she forgets herself enough that she comes up with a rule to tell apart hallways from reflections of hallways. But the maze falsifies every rule. Her face can smile at her identically from a mirror two inches away or two miles. The EXIT sign is never the EXIT; that is all she can rely on.

She tried to reason out where the EXIT must be from its distortions, but she never understood optics.

She had heard, before, about the right-hand rule for solving a maze. You always chose the route that was farthest right, and then if you ran into a dead end you retraced your steps to the last fork. Or so she thought, anyway. She couldn’t check.

So she’d tried the right-hand rule, arms outstretched and fingertips tracing along each mirror so she didn’t miss a fork. But she’d messed it up, or given up too quickly, or the maze didn’t care to be bound by the laws of Euclidean geometry.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been here. She isn’t hungry. She’s never felt sleepy, although she’s so tired that the air feels as heavy as water. Her nose doesn’t hurt anymore. When she touches the area above her lips, it doesn’t feel wet.

She wishes her smiling face could be said to be smug or taunting. It isn’t. Its expression holds nothing insincere. She’d say her face was as simply joyful as a child, but children in her experience have rather complicated emotions and desires. As joyful as adults would like children to be, maybe.

A heavy just-ripe plum in one mirror, poised at the moment before it falls. In another, a waterfall, so sharply drawn that she can almost hear its roar. A winter scene: a rock powdery with new-fallen snow, bare-branched trees bent by the wind, a snowflake so delicate that it promises that, if she doesn’t blink, it is sure to move. All desolate, or all peaceful, as she prefers.

She wonders if the maze knew it would be too much to chase a real-looking EXIT six hundred paces only to discover glass, as it would be too much to see her own face. She wonders if the maze is, in its own way, merciful.

Sometimes she hears snatches of voices, almost inaudible. She fancies that she’s caught a noun or an adjective—mirror, possibly, or trapped, or way out—but she has no way to corroborate her interpretation. She never sees faces other than her own.

She screamed until her voice cracked when she was first in the maze. She doesn’t know if anyone heard. She doesn’t know if they’re screaming, the people whose voices she hears. Sometimes she hears laughter.

She feels, though she doesn’t know why, that the paintings and the EXIT are opposites; that as the EXIT is at the end of the maze, the paintings are at its center; that perhaps the whole maze exists for the paintings; that she will forever hover between them, painting and EXIT, like the second-to-last note of a song eternally reverberating in a silent room, like a too-tight rubber band quivering with anticipation of a snap that never comes.

The face in the mirrors, she decides, reminds her of a bodhisattva. The face has achieved an inner peace, but not an insipid or banal one. The face isn’t crude or simplistic in the way that, in others, always made her wonder whether society had overrated this happiness thing. The face takes pleasure in each moment of life, and has much to take pleasure in.

If she bled now, she wouldn’t walk away from the smear, convinced that the EXIT was somewhere and somewhere wasn’t here. She’d watch the blood until it evaporated, then watch the bloodstain until the air eroded it. And then one of the women with the smiling faces would step out of the mirror, and brush the lint off her shoulders, and set her hat straight, and without glancing at the woman crouched by the mirror, go out surefooted past the EXIT into her life.