Edgar Allan Poe — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

I set down these pages—not for publication, nor for the idle consumption of any who might chance upon them in some drawer after my effects are catalogued and dispersed—but rather as a species of ballast against the drift of my own reason, which I have observed, over the course of some four months' residence in this foreign capital, to list gradually and with increasing velocity toward a single fixed point of contemplation: namely, a fracture, hairline in its dimension yet absolute in its consequence, which traverses the surface of an antique mirror bolted to the eastern wall of the café in which I have taken to conducting the whole of my professional and, I confess, my spiritual existence. That I should have arrived at such a pass—I, who was accounted in my own country a man of sober habit, methodical in labor, immune (as I then believed) to the several morbid fascinations which afflict men of excessive solitude—is a circumstance I attribute in no small measure to the peculiar geometry of remote employment as it is practiced by men who have severed themselves, whether by choice or by the tyranny of circumstance, from the daily commerce of familiar faces; for it is one thing to labor alone in the house of one's fathers, surrounded by the accumulated furniture of a known life, and quite another to labor alone in a city whose very language falls upon the ear as a species of pleasant, meaningless music, in rooms rented by the month, among strangers who regard one with the mild and passing curiosity reserved for foreign objects of no particular value.

Let me be precise, for precision is the last luxury permitted to a mind conscious of its own disintegration: the café is called, in the vernacular, by a name I need not transcribe; it occupies the ground floor of a building some three centuries old, its walls the color of old tobacco, its floor tiled in a pattern of black and ochre lozenges worn smooth by the passage of feet long since returned to dust; and upon its eastern wall, between a case of pastries perpetually renewed and a coat-rack perpetually empty, there hangs the mirror—gilt-framed, foxed at the edges with that peculiar silver blight which afflicts old glass, and bearing across its lower third, running diagonally from a point some four inches from the frame's left edge to a point perhaps eleven inches distant upon the frame's lower rail, the fracture of which I have spoken. I do not know its age. I do not know the occasion of its making—whether some falling object struck it in an hour of domestic violence, or whether it is merely the slow confession of glass that has borne witness, standing, to a hundred years of faces. I know only that I have taken to arriving at this café each morning at the hour of eight, that I have taken to seating myself always at the same small marble table positioned so that the mirror commands my direct line of sight, and that I have taken, over the accumulating weeks, to conducting the whole of my labor—correspondence transmitted to employers who exist for me now only as disembodied signatures upon electronic missives, reports composed for the benefit of readers I shall never meet, the entire machinery of my professional survival—beneath the silent supervision of that fracture, which I have come to regard, in defiance of every rational scruple, as possessed of an intelligence, or at minimum an attention, directed with peculiar constancy toward myself.

"It was in the third week of this arrangement that I first observed the man—I shall call him, for want of his true name, which I never with certainty ascertained, by the appellation of the Rogue, a term I employ not in censure merely but in a species of grim admiration, for I have since had occasion to measure the precision of his opportunism against the vagueness of my own drifting attention, and have found the comparison unflattering to myself. He entered without ceremony upon an afternoon of unremarkable weather, seated himself at the table adjoining mine though the café stood otherwise empty, and remarked, in the accented but fluent English of a man who has made languages his commerce rather than his inheritance, that I appeared much occupied with the mirror. I had not supposed my scrutiny visible to another. This observation—so simply rendered, so devoid of any apparent design—struck me nonetheless with the particular horror of a diagnosis pronounced by a stranger upon a malady one had believed private; and it is from that utterance, delivered across a marble table by a man whose motives I would spend the following weeks attempting, with diminishing success, to construe, that the whole of what follows must be understood to proceed.

He did not, as a lesser operator might have done, press his advantage upon that first afternoon; he permitted three days to elapse before he returned, and upon his return he spoke not at all of the mirror but of trivial matters, the quality of the coffee, the erratic behavior of the municipal trams, so that I began to persuade myself the earlier remark had been mere idleness, the small talk of a man practiced in the art of filling silence; it was not until the second week of his acquaintance that he mentioned, with the studied carelessness of one dropping a coin he does not trouble himself to retrieve, that he had made some study of the building's history, that the café had occupied its premises since the previous century, and that the mirror—here he paused, here he permitted his eyes to travel to the fracture with an attention so exactly calibrated to mirror my own that I felt, for the first time, the cold suspicion that I was not the sole object of study in that room, but rather a specimen already pinned and labeled—the mirror, he said, was reputed among certain old residents to hold within its crack the reflected image of whoever had first caused it to break, a superstition he offered with the faint smile of a man who does not himself credit the tale but who has observed, with professional interest, its effect upon those who do.

I will not burden this account with the full catalogue of the stratagems by which, over the ensuing month, he contrived to fasten himself upon my solitude: the borrowed sums represented always as trifling and always, by some fresh accident, unreturned; the introductions to persons who might advance my professional interests and who proved, upon inquiry, to possess no more substance than the mirror's own silvering; the steady, patient cultivation of a dependency I mistook, in my isolation, for the first friendship I had formed in that city of polite strangers. Let it suffice to observe, in the manner of a man reconstructing after the fact the geometry of his own undoing, that his method proceeded by three stages, each more exact than the last: first, the establishment of a shared fascination, so that my derangement should seem to him not derangement merely but a taste we held in common; second, the gradual substitution of his interpretation for my own, until I could no longer regard the fracture without also regarding, superimposed upon it like a second and more legible crack, his account of what it signified; and third—this the operation whose precision I have come, in the retrospect of my present solitude, most bitterly to admire—the calculated withdrawal of his presence at the precise hour when its absence would prove most unendurable, so that I was left one morning at my accustomed table, the marble cold beneath my hands, the coffee untouched and cooling in its cup, to discover that he had settled his account with the proprietress the previous evening and had not, in the four mornings since, returned.

I do not know what sum he extracted from me in the whole course of our acquaintance; I have not had the fortitude to reckon it; I know only that when I asked the proprietress, in my halting command of her language, whether the gentleman had left any word, any direction by which he might be found, she regarded me with the particular blankness of one who has been asked to recall a face among a thousand faces, and answered that she recollected no such gentleman at all. It was upon that morning, seated alone before the fracture which had first drawn me into acquaintance with my own solitude and had then, by some declension I am unable fully to trace, become the very emblem of that solitude's depth, that I observed—with the clinical exactness which is, I have said, the last luxury permitted a mind conscious of its own disintegration—that the crack had not lengthened, had not altered by so much as the breadth of a hair, in all the months of my observation; that it was I, and not the glass, who had proceeded from soundness toward fracture; and that the mirror, indifferent alike to my attention and to my abandonment, would continue to hang upon that wall, gilt-framed and silver-blighted, reflecting whatever solitary figure next elected to seat himself within its commanding line, long after the pages I now set down have been gathered, folded, and consigned—as all such confessions must at last be consigned—to a drawer that closes, and having closed, is not again opened.