Kurt Vonnegut — Chapter 2: The hairline fracture in an antique cafe mirror — Novella Movement 1

The mirror behind the espresso machine at the Café Nefelejcs had been cracked since the reign of Franz Joseph, or so the owner said, and the owner said many things.

The crack ran diagonal, from the silvering near the ceiling down through the reflection of a chandelier nobody had dusted in decades, ending just above where a customer's forehead might appear if the customer were tall enough and stood in exactly the wrong spot. Wehling was tall enough. He stood in exactly the wrong spot every morning at nine, because that was where the café's one reliable electrical outlet happened to be, and Wehling needed the outlet for his laptop, and the laptop was how Wehling remained employed by a marketing analytics firm headquartered in Ohio, a state he had not seen in fourteen months.

The firm called this arrangement Flexible Global Presence. Everyone at the firm called it that, cheerfully, the way people call tumors "the situation."

Wehling called it, privately, the Aquarium.

He had come to Budapest the way a man comes to a decision he has already made and merely needs somewhere quiet to announce it to himself. He taught himself, for want of anyone else to teach, the layout of seventeen bridges, four hills, and one island shaped like a comma. He learned which trams ran late. He learned that the woman who sold him strudel on Wednesdays had buried two husbands and disliked neither. He learned nothing whatsoever about the people at his company, whom he saw only as a grid of rectangles twice a day, muted, mostly ceiling fans and bookshelves, occasionally a child wandering through in pajamas like a small ambassador from a country called Elsewhere.

He was, by disposition and by injury, a scholar of surfaces. He had once been paid, in another life, to write a dissertation on the semiotics of shop windows in provincial France, a document four hundred people had read and one hundred had understood. Now he studied the crack in the mirror the way other men study horse racing forms.

"You are looking at that again," said Gábor.

Gábor worked at the Nefelejcs in the sense that he was frequently present and occasionally carried plates. His actual occupation, as far as Wehling had determined, involved the acquisition and resale of items whose provenance was best left uninvestigated: theater tickets, cigarettes, a laptop charger identical to Wehling's own, a set of nesting dolls that Gábor swore, with total sincerity, had belonged to a Soviet cosmonaut's aunt.

"I like the crack," Wehling said. "It divides the room in half. Half of everything is a little bit wrong."

"Everything is a little bit wrong," said Gábor. "This is not news. This is Tuesday."

"Does it bother you? The mirror, I mean."

"Bother me. No. It is old. Old things crack. You want I fix it?"

"Can you fix a hundred-and-forty-year-old mirror?"

"I can fix anything," said Gábor, which was true in roughly the way that a compass is true, meaning it pointed toward a direction and left the walking to you.

He listed his qualifications the way another man might list saints. He had repaired, he said, a church organ in Szentendre. He had repaired a Trabant that had not run since the Kádár years. He had repaired, once, a marriage, though he declined to specify whose, and he had repaired the roof of his aunt's house using materials he described only as "available." He did not mention the mirror again that morning, but he touched the frame on his way past, lightly, the way a man touches a dog he intends to sell later at a profit.

Wehling's video call began at nine-thirty. Four rectangles appeared. Someone's cat crossed a shelf in California. Someone in London apologized for a barking dog that could not be heard. The quarterly numbers were, everyone agreed, directionally positive, a phrase that meant nothing and satisfied everybody.

Wehling watched the crack in the mirror over his own reflected shoulder while his coworkers discussed engagement metrics, and it occurred to him, not for the first time, that he had crossed an ocean to sit in a chair with the exact same view he'd had in Ohio: himself, fractured, discussing numbers with people who could not see the crack because they could not see the mirror because they could not, strictly speaking, see him at all.

"You're on mute, Dave," someone said. His name was not Dave.

"Sorry," he said, unmuting nothing, since he had not spoken.

That was the whole meeting, more or less. Afterward Gábor brought him a second coffee he had not ordered and did not charge him for it, which Wehling understood, by then, to be a down payment on some future transaction whose shape he could not yet guess, but whose cost, he suspected, would eventually be measured in something other than forints.

"The mirror," Gábor said, sitting down uninvited, "I have been thinking. Cracks like this, they don't get worse by themselves. Something has to lean on them."

"Is that a proverb?"

"It is a fact," said Gábor. "I am a very factual person."

Outside, the tram bell rang twice, which meant nothing, except that it always did.

Some days later, on a Thursday, Gábor came back with a man named Zoltán, who carried a leather satchel and the general demeanor of someone who has fixed many things that were not supposed to be fixed.

"This is Zoltán," said Gábor. "He does mirrors, glass, sometimes teeth."

"Teeth," said Wehling.

"One time," Zoltán said. "It was an emergency."

Zoltán studied the crack the way a doctor studies an X-ray he has already diagnosed and is now examining only for the pleasure of being right. He touched the silvering. He held a small flashlight to it, then a magnifying loupe, then simply his own face, close, breathing on the glass so it fogged and cleared and fogged again.

"This can be repaired," he announced.

"How much?" said Wehling.

"That is not the question," said Zoltán. "The question is whether it should be repaired."

The owner, whose name was Ilona and who came out from the back only when transactions of unusual gravity were underway, said that her grandmother had told her the crack appeared the night the mirror was delivered, before it was even hung, and that the delivery men had blamed each other, and that her grandmother had never had it fixed because a fixed mirror is just a mirror, but a broken one is a story, and the café did a better trade in stories than in espresso.

"Directionally positive," Wehling said, before he could stop himself.

Nobody understood this. He did not explain it.

That evening his four-thirty call ran long. A colleague named Brianne, whom he had worked beside for six years and met in person twice, held up a slide showing a graph that trended upward and to the right, the universal shape of good news, and said the word "synergy" without apparent shame. Somewhere behind her a ceiling fan turned. Wehling watched his own reflection in the black rectangle where his camera feed would have been, had he turned it on, which he had not, for fourteen months, on the grounds that the bandwidth in Budapest was unreliable, a lie so old it had grown a beard.

He unmuted himself once, to say "agreed," and muted himself again.

After the call he sat with the laptop closed and looked at the real mirror, the cracked one, and found that he could not, from his usual chair, locate the exact spot where his forehead disappeared into the fracture. He stood. He sat. He stood again. Ilona watched him with the patient contempt of a woman who has seen men do stranger things for less coffee.

"You want I ask Zoltán to leave it," Gábor said. He had appeared, as he always appeared, from a direction that did not correspond to any door.

"I don't know," Wehling said. "I think I need it a little wrong."

"Everybody needs something a little wrong," Gábor said. "Otherwise how do you know it is you looking, and not somebody else."

He said this the way he said everything, as a fact, filed alongside the Trabant and the church organ and the marriage he would not name, and Wehling could not tell whether it was wisdom or merely the kind of thing a man says while calculating what a fixed mirror versus a broken one might fetch from an American who did not know the exchange rate on nostalgia.

In the end Zoltán fixed a different crack, a small one near the bottom nobody had mentioned, in the frame rather than the glass, so that the mirror could be said to have been repaired, technically, for a fee that Ilona and Gábor negotiated in Hungarian at a volume and speed clearly designed to exclude him. The original crack, the diagonal one, the one that ran through the dusty chandelier and ended above a tall man's forehead, remained.

Wehling paid for the second coffee this time, and the first one from two weeks before, and Gábor accepted the money the way a priest accepts a donation, gravely, as if the true payment had already occurred elsewhere and this was merely the paperwork.

The next morning he stood in his usual spot for the outlet. Four rectangles appeared. Someone's dog barked in London and could not be heard. Numbers were, again, directionally positive.

He watched the crack divide the chandelier from itself, one half floating a little higher than the other, forever arguing about which one was real, and he thought that this was, on the whole, a reasonable arrangement for a mirror, and possibly for a man who had crossed an ocean to sit in the one chair in Budapest with an American view.

"You're frozen, Dave," someone said.

He had not moved.

"Sorry," he said, and did not fix it.