It is amazing what goes on in mirrors.
Cruz felt for certain that when he moved left to the side of the mirror, his image persisted. But on the other side, the other Cruz, the Cruz that persisted in the world of the mirror, was making faces or giving him the middle finger. So Cruz gave the other Cruz, the Cruz just beyond him, the finger too. He turned, yanked down his pants, and gave the other Cruz a good look at his hairy ass.
Later, with his girlfriend, Maricela, he said, “It doesn’t make any sense. The same rules have to apply to our mirror doubles. Or the notion of a mirror is false.”
“People have been worrying over mirrors for ages,” Maricela said, hovering in a corner. “What does this business matter?”
Cruz poured himself a glass of wine. He glanced at the paintings on the wall, the glassware above the fireplace; he watched Maricela pass across the surface of the mirror. “Yes, the same rules must govern life behind mirrors,” Cruz went on. “It has been posited that mirrors might contain whole societies, whole worlds, slices of which we observe when we encounter a mirror. In horror movies, a mirror comes alive. A protagonist turns to a mirror and sees his likeness smiling at him and the next moment, the protagonist is cut into pieces by a demon.
“In this case, Maricela, the mirror becomes a tool, an apparatus for the augmentation of mystery; it takes on a life of its own. But in reality, the mirror and its life can’t work this way, or the world would, our world, would make very little sense. No, the Cruz in the mirror does not follow me across the other side of wall and flip me off. He can only flip me off, if I flip him off.”
“That would make sense,” Maricela said. “But that would merely be an extension of the theory of mirrors.”
“Perhaps,” said Cruz. “Consider the problem in physical terms. If it was indeed so that the Cruz on the other side of the mirror, the Reflected Cruz, the Mirror Cruz, merely followed my movements even when I passed from the mirror’s reflected surface, this would imply that matter is redundant. It would suggest that the universe is drowning in wasted energy–the mirror world as superfluous carbon copies–dragging the expansion of the universe to a screeching halt.
“No, it’s better to consider that the Mirror Cruz, the Doppleganger Cruz, lives on, waits for me to depart the wash room, then turns to his own doings. Or,” Cruz continued, “that I myself am that Mirror Cruz, that I am the affectation of the life on the principle side of the mirror; that I, the false Cruz or the Cruz of the Mirror, have entered the mirror not of my own volition but of that of the Principle Cruz and that all my actions–goings to the bank, depositions before the Court, my daily traversals of the world in taxis, buses, and cars–are all the impulses of the Principle Cruz and that my feelings, inquiries, and experiments are merely the shadow of He Who Begets Them, distant impulses, the slime trailing the ass of a snail, and that I am drawn to the mirror, drawn to a life of sin or spectacular accomplishment not because I wish it or make such things so, but because the Principle Cruz has succeeded before his own judge, made love to his own Maricela, popped the cork on his own bottle of wine, or, worse, failed before his own judge, is about to go bankrupt, awaits the approach of his own murder on a bridge, or leaves his life behind for a new one in China.”
“Then you contradict yourself, my dear Cruz,” Maricela said. “The later case would mean that you would be able to measure some difference in time between your appearance in the mirror and the appearance of the Principle Cruz, which is impossible.
“No, better to consider that Cruz in the mirror as merely Cruz, the Cruz of the Now and Never Before, the Cruz that Cruz must live with no matter the mirror or despite the mirror or bankruptcy or failure. The Cruz that not even I, and you, can escape.”
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