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

I set down these observations—compiled, let me say at once, in the fullness of a solitude so complete, so architecturally perfect in its isolation, that I have come to regard my own handwriting upon the page as the sole remaining proof of a continuous identity—that I set them down, I repeat, not from any vanity of authorship, but from the conviction, daily hardening into certainty, that the fracture I am about to describe was not a defect of glass but a symptom of something considerably less inert. I had come to this foreign capital, as so many of my late profession have come, carrying with me no luggage of consequence beyond a laptop, a leather notebook, and the peculiar species of employment that requires a man to labor for institutions he will never enter, among colleagues he will never meet in the flesh, so that the whole apparatus of his working life is conducted through a screen no larger than a folio volume, in a language of icons and intervals, while his actual person sits marooned in a rented room three thousand miles from any voice that knows his name. It was in the third week of this arrangement—an arrangement I had, with the perverse optimism peculiar to men who mistake solitude for liberty, congratulated myself upon securing—that I first took to frequenting the café at the corner of the Rue des Trois Frères, an establishment of a certain faded distinction, its zinc counter worn to the color of an old coin, its walls hung with mirrors whose silvering had begun, in patches, to blacken and recede like the retreating gum of an aged mouth; and it was in the largest of these mirrors, positioned directly opposite the corner table I had, by slow accretion of habit, come to regard as exclusively my own, that I first observed the fracture.

I must be exact, for exactitude is the last luxury permitted to a mind that suspects itself; the fracture ran diagonally from a point some four inches below the upper frame to a point perhaps eleven inches distant along the lower edge, describing not a straight line, as one might reasonably expect of glass struck or strained, but a line of three distinct inflections, so that the whole resembled less an accident of impact than a character out of some forgotten alphabet, or the diagram of a nerve laid bare upon a surgeon's plate; and what troubled me—what troubles me now, in the writing—was not the fracture's shape but its situation, for it crossed my own reflected countenance at the precise level of the left eye, so that whenever I sat in that chair, in that light, at that hour which had become, without my willing it, invariable, I beheld myself divided, bisected, the one half of my face given over whole to the room's grey daylight and the other half interrupted, refracted, subtly displaced, as though some portion of the man before the glass had contracted an arrangement with some portion of the man within it that the rest of him was not privileged to know.

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I might have dismissed the matter—I confess I attempted to dismiss it, employing against my own perception all the resources of a training that has taught me to regard optical anomaly as the most explicable of phenomena—had it not been for the young man who occupied, with a regularity matching my own, the table nearest the counter; a person of perhaps thirty years, dressed with a shabbiness so precise, so evidently calculated, that I took it at once for the costume of design rather than the honest poverty of circumstance, and who possessed, moreover, the singular habit of watching not the room, nor the street beyond the window, but the mirror itself, and within the mirror, though I could not at first credit the observation, that particular fracture upon which my own attention had, by now, become so helplessly fixed. Twice our eyes met in that cracked field of silver, and twice he smiled—a smile devoid of warmth, calibrated rather to the exact temperature of complicity—before returning his gaze to the glass; and it was upon the third such occasion, when he rose at last and crossed the narrow space between us with the unhurried confidence of a man who has long rehearsed his entrance, that he addressed me in English inflected with no country I could name, and said: "You have been counting the days since you last heard your own name spoken aloud by another human throat. I can tell you the number, if you like." I did not answer him. But I did not, though every faculty of reason urged it, look away from the mirror.
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That I did not answer him is true; and yet the not-answering was itself a species of admission, for silence, in such a strait, communicates with a precision that speech only blurs; and he, perceiving this—perceiving it, I think, before I had myself acknowledged it—drew out the chair across from mine with the unhurried economy of a man to whom hesitation has never once been useful, and seated himself so that his own reflection fell, by what I could not then credit as accident, exactly athwart the fracture, so that the line which had divided my countenance now appeared to divide his, the left half of his face given to the room's grey light, the right subtly displaced into that other silvered country whose geography I had by now spent the better part of three weeks attempting, and failing, to chart. "Forty-one days," said he, and folded his hands upon the zinc with the composure of a physician delivering a diagnosis long anticipated by the patient though never before spoken; "forty-one days since a voice not manufactured by a machine has pronounced the four letters of your name; I have watched you count them, though you have not counted them consciously, in the particular attention you pay each morning to the barista's greeting, which is not your name, and in the small disappointment—you will forgive

He spoke then, for some quarter of an hour, of matters I will not here transcribe in full, for their substance, upon reflection—if I may permit myself so treacherous a verb—reduced itself finally to a single proposition, urged with the soft and patient insistence of a man selling not goods but relief: that solitude of my particular species, the solitude of the disembodied laborer, the man who works for institutions he will never enter among colleagues he will never meet, produces in time a fissure in the very apparatus of selfhood, a fissure which the mind, starved of external confirmation, will project outward upon whatever surface presents itself, and that the mirror's crack was no crack at all but the visible signature of my own dividing attention, and that he, the stranger, offered—for a consideration he did not trouble to specify—a remedy consisting in nothing more than his continued company, his voice, his willingness to speak my name aloud at whatever hour I should require it spoken. I confess that for the length of three or four breaths I entertained the proposition with something approaching gratitude; and it was precisely in that interval of gratitude, that treacherous relaxation of the analytic faculty, that I observed—the observation arriving with the swiftness and the finality of a struck match—that his hand, resting upon the counter, cast in the glass no shadow whatsoever, though the grey light of the window fell upon it as plainly as upon my own; and that the fracture, which a moment before had crossed his reflected face at the level of the eye, now ran clean through the throat.

I did not scream, nor did I rise; I record this with the same exactitude I have applied throughout, for it is precisely the absence of any gross physical demonstration that I find, in retrospect, most difficult to countenance—I merely closed, with what I believe was a perfectly measured deliberation, my leather notebook upon the table, gathered my laptop into its case, and walked from the café into a street already darkening toward evening, resolved never to return to that corner, that table, or that particular arrangement of silver and shadow; a resolution I have, in the six days since, maintained with what fidelity I could command, though I will confess that this morning, shaving before the small and mercifully unblemished glass of my rented room, I paused a long while over the reflection of my own left eye, searching it, I hardly know for what—a fracture, perhaps, of a kind that travels not through glass but through the man who gazes into it, and finding, or fearing that I found, the faintest suggestion of a line.