direction, all histories and movements occurring simultaneously.
And when I looked away for a second and then looked back, I saw her reflection behind me, in the mirror. I was speechless. Somehow I knew I wasn’t allowed to turn around—it was against the rules, whatever the rules of the place were—but we could see each other, our eyes could meet in the mirror, and she was just as glad to see me as I was to see her. She was herself. An embodied presence. There was psychic reality to her, there was depth and information. She was between me and whatever place she had stepped from, what landscape beyond. And it was all about the moment when our eyes touched in the glass, surprise and amusement, her beautiful blue eyes with the dark rings around the irises, pale blue eyes with a lot of light in them: hello! Fondness, intelligence, sadness, humor. There was motion and stillness, stillness and modulation, and all the charge and magic of a great painting. Ten seconds, eternity. It was all a circle back to her. You could grasp it in an instant, you could live in it forever: she existed only in the mirror, inside the space of the frame, and though she wasn’t alive, not exactly, she wasn’t dead either because she wasn’t yet born, and yet never not born—as somehow, oddly, neither was I. And I knew that she could tell me anything I wanted to know (life, death, past, future) even though it was already there, in her smile, the answer to all questions, the before-Christmas smile of someone with a secret too wonderful to let slip, just yet: well, you’ll just have to wait and see, won’t you? But just as she was about to speak—drawing an affectionate exasperated breath I knew very well, the sound of which I can hear even now—I woke up.
v.
WHEN I OPENED MY eyes, it was morning. All the lamps in the room were still blazing and I was under the covers with no memory of how I’d gotten under them. Everything was still bathed and saturated with her presence—higher, wider, deeper than life, a shift in optics that had produced a rainbow edge, and I remember thinking that this must be how people felt after visions of saints—not that my mother was a saint, only that her appearance had been as distinct and startling as a flame leaping up in a dark room.
Still half sleeping, I drifted in the bedclothes, buoyed by the sweetness of the dream washing quietly about me. Even the ambient morning sounds in the hallway had taken on the atmosphere and color of her presence; for if I listened hard, in my half-dreaming state, it seemed that I could hear the specific light, cheerful sound of her footsteps mixed up with the clank of the room service trays up and down the hall and the rattle of elevator cables, the opening and closing of elevator doors: a very urban sound, a sound I associated with Sutton Place, and her.
Then, suddenly, bursting into the last wisps of bioluminescence still trailing from the dream, the bells of the nearby church broke out in such violent clangor that I bolted upright in a panic, fumbling for my glasses. I had forgotten what day it was: Christmas.
Unsteadily, I got up and went to the window. Bells, bells. The streets were white and deserted. Frost glittered on tiled rooftops; outside, on the Herengracht, snow danced and flew. A flock of black birds was cawing and swooping over the canal, the sky was hectic with them, great sideways sweeps and undulations as a single, intelligent body, eddying to and fro, and their movement seemed to pass into me on almost a cellular level, white sky and whirling snow and the fierce gusting wind of poets.
First rule of restorations. Never do what you can’t undo.
I took a shower, shaved and dressed. Then, quietly, I cleared up and packed my things. Somehow I would have to get Gyuri’s ring and watch back to him, assuming he was still alive, which I was increasingly doubtful he was: the watch alone was a fortune—a BMW 7 series, a down payment on a condo. I would FedEx them to Hobie for safekeeping and leave his name for Gyuri at the front desk, just in case.
Frosted panes, snow ghosting the cobblestones, deep and speechless, no traffic on the streets, centuries superimposed, 1940s by way of 1640s.
It was important not to think too deeply.