The Face of Days
I had forgotten much of that quality, of that first love. I had forgotten it till this moment. The unadorned walls and carpeting of the hotel room took on magical quality. In their very plainness wonder resided. Faint light emanated from every surface. Most radiant of all, Jacqueline’s face hung before me and pressed close and merged with mine in an eerie glow cast by her own flesh.
I would not say the light was entirely visible. I feel closer to truth in saying she cast invisible light, and that I grew sensitive to radiations normally beyond perception. I beheld the wondrous creature that love had made, and called her by name, and held her as she held me, slowly warming in the knowledge that in love I too had become a wondrous creature, an impossible creature that could exist now, at this moment in the barely furnished hotel room, because the space we occupied partook of dream. We hardly floated toward bed—we walked—but where we walked, we trailed dream behind us and threw it before us.
When she touched me my flesh flushed. Where her clothes fell away, warm landscapes arose inviting exploration, and promising that even while discovered, they would remain undiscovered; even while explored, they would remain untouched; even while reached, they would vanish from reach. I would never find these places again yet could venture near by different paths again and again, if I so to choose.
Her hand rose along my thigh as we pressed into the bed, and tightened and pulled me closer. My head burned.
I became aware of a family of dead tenants, poor people who had lived in an old ruin in this spot centuries ago, who stood in the other room. They stood silently, staring at one another while Jacqueline and I turned upon the bed. Dead people, long gone, they were as dimly aware of us as we were of them. They would not interfere, I knew. Jacqueline and I wrapped ourselves in a rite of sanctity.
I felt the dream shift like a fog that might lift and burn away beneath uncongenial light.
The bed beneath us lurched, edging toward the apartment’s door.
The ball of crystal floating above me I had bought in Turkestan, from an old trader blind in one eye, wearing ratted coat and dirty silk trousers.
I could still hear him: “It’s pure crystal, utterly pure, this one without a flaw, look through it, you can tell a good stone, Mr. Elwin, you can tell craftsmanship, this one polished by hand, can you tell that, Mr. Elwin, in your years, have you seen so fine a one?”
I had seen many as fine.
The sphere hung over me while I lay in bed. Perfectly clear, it allowed me to see through it, even with eyes closed: opened, my face stared back.
I saw the face I see in the mirror, not the face of normal days but of the worst days. You know the face. The face of days you doubt if you are alive, the face of days you wonder how many months or days or minutes are left to you on Earth: in the mirror you see your mortality, you realize how tightly that pallid skin clings to the skull underneath, how readily that skull would rise to sight with the peeling back of that thinnest membrane.
To see the approach of death in one’s own face: that is the horror of aging without confidence that one has accomplished anything in life. When it takes the contours you thought were uniquely your own, when it appropriates your cheekbones, your jawline, your hair, your stubble, your neck, your shoulders, your adam’s apple, your tongue, your nostrils, your ears, and your eyes, especially your eyes with the textures and colors of their retinas and whites, then you perceive what a personal entity death is, for it comes in the guise that means the most to you, the guise that above all you would never give to another being on earth or in the universe. That violation occurs in a split moment and shakes you to the bottom of your being. You have no defenses: none, against yourself. You realize how close that fate is. It is upon you. It is around you. It clings to you as that pale, vein-lined flesh clings to the rounded bones of the skull. It is within you. You realize it is not in the mirror at all. For that mirror reflects back on you, and you realize with clarity, even when it is impossible to think of any other thing at all, that the picture in the mirror is the true picture, the picture that you have avoided seeing all your life, the one that speaks not of what you are at that precise moment but what you have been and, worse, what you will be. It shows you that all falls away: the flesh is nothing, the hair is nothing, the eyes are nothing: and the mind contemplating itself in horror—that, too: nothing.
It stared at me out of the sphere carved of rock crystal, hanging above me in the hotel room.
