Even Then

It came for him on a Tuesday night, at the end of the ordinary motions, which is when things come for men who keep their days in order.

The club was down. The lights were off section by section, the till counted and right, the chairs up, the evening entered in the notebook beneath its heading, and he had gone up his stairs and out through the black door and locked up in the right order, and walked home through the half past midnight streets, and let himself into his own place, and made a mug of tea, and he was standing in his front room with his coat half off one shoulder when the line arrived.

That he had never liked mirrors. Even then.

She had said it on the Monday, weeks ago now, in the middle of the small things, between the towels and the tea, one key on a ring of keys she was handing back to him, and he had filed it and gone on, because there had been a great deal arriving that night and a man takes deliveries in the order the van is packed. It had sat in the stack since. Tonight, for no reason the trade required, it came to the top.

He put his coat back on his shoulder. He did not decide to cross the room. He crossed it.

The mirror lay where it had lain since the winter he brought it home, on the chest by the wardrobe, glass side down, its brown paper long gone, its back looking up at the ceiling the way the backs of things look at everything, which is not at all.

He had turned it over himself. That was the thing he stood there holding. The first night, at his desk, with the three of them in a row and the string untied, he had turned the mirror over once, glass side down, and left it that way, and not commented on it, even to himself. Nobody had asked him to and there had been no reason, no reason he could have entered under any heading, a good glass, a gift, and he had put its face down the way you’d rest a card you had no intention of playing, and he had done it before the photograph, before the telling, before he knew there was anything to know. And when he had carried it home in the winter, wrapped in its own cloth, he had set it down the same way, without deciding that either. He had done it the way he did everything he could not source. Without thinking. Meaning, as he understood tonight, with the whole of himself, thinking all the way down, in a hand he could not read.

He had never liked mirrors.

Even then.

The two words did their work standing up, the way heavy words do. Because the man in the shirtsleeves at the black door, a hundred years deep in a drawer at the club, had not liked mirrors, and the man holding a cooling mug in this room did not like mirrors, and no war stood between those two men, no gap, no white space, nothing missing that mattered to the not-liking, and that was the fact he had been circling for weeks without letting it land, and it landed now, all of it, at once, in the quiet, with his coat half on.

Nothing had been taken that made him him.

He was not the something that came back. There was no something. There was him, all the way through, him at the door in the old light and him on the stairs tonight, one man, one hand, one dislike of one ordinary object, continuous, unbroken, and the years the war had eaten had been eaten out of the record and not out of the man, and he had been himself the whole time, the whole time, every day of the lost and every day of the found, and he had not known it, and the not knowing had not stopped it being true for one single minute of any of it.

He put the mug down because his hand had begun, very slightly, to disagree with him.

He took the pen out of his inside pocket. That was the trade in him, reaching for the trade. A thing this size got entered, that was what entering was for, you wrote it under its heading and it stopped being weather and became stock. He stood with the pen in his hand in the middle of his own room. The notebook was in the same pocket. His fingers had passed it taking the pen out, the way they passed it a dozen times a day, and he did not take it out, because the notebook was for debts, for the things he could not afford to forget, and this was not a debt, and there was no forgetting it, and no heading either. This was the whole of a man arriving at once, and the count, for the first time in the whole of his found life, would not come.

He could not enter it.

There was no column. There had never been a column. You cannot carry yourself as a figure in your own books, and every man who has ever kept a ledger knows it, and he stood there knowing it, pen in hand, paper in the room, and nothing anywhere that would hold it, a barman in his own front room at one in the morning with his whole life true at the same time.

He put the pen away.

He went to the mirror, and did not turn it over. He knew now why it lay face down, and the knowing changed nothing about the lying, because the not-liking was his, had always been his, was perhaps the oldest thing in the room including the room, and a man does not evict his oldest tenant on the night he learns its name. He reached out and wiped the dust from its back with the flat of his thumb, one pass, the way you square a beer mat, the way you keep a thing you are not ready to use.

His hand stayed there, resting on the small cool back of it.

It stayed there for a long time, longer than any entry had ever taken him, and the room stood around him and let it, and the street below said nothing, and somewhere in the building the pipes ticked as the water cooled, counting in their own ledger, which never balanced either, and nobody minded.

After a while he took his hand off the mirror.

He finished taking off his coat. He drank the rest of the tea, cold now, and did not remark on it, and stood at the window with the mug in both hands and looked down at his own street, which was not the street in the photograph, and held no gas lamps and no dray horse, only parked cars and a skip and the ordinary orange dark. That was the street he lived on. The other one was also the street he lived on. Both things were true at once, and would go on being true, and that was the whole of it, really.

And the ledger, working on its own in the dark the way ledgers do, put the last of it in front of him, unasked.

Every entry he could not source had a thing in common. The key that fit no lock and fit his ring. The pen that had made itself at home. The coffee liturgy older than his memory of it. The photograph that had crossed a century to a drawer he kept. The small things handed back one at a time on a Monday night by a woman who had them to hand back.

The thing in common was not him.

He stood at the window for a while longer, not counting, letting the shape of a question assemble itself at its own pace, the way he let everything arrive, and when it had assembled as far as it was going to assemble tonight, he washed the mug, and turned off the light, and went to bed, the same man he had been the night before, and every night before that.

The question kept until morning. Questions did, in his keeping.