Through a distant mirror

He figured it must be the drugs, or the lack of them. He couldn’t remember what the movie had been called. Maybe it had been a book? Or a comic. He couldn’t remember any of the scenes, or panels, or chapters or whatever they had been. He only remembered the idea. Another world, with its own time, like that book with the girl who went through the closet his mom used to read to him. Narnia. But in this book, you go there, and it’s all dreams. Anything you can think of, you can do if you think hard enough, but people still wanted things, to go places, to have something.

It didn’t make any sense, but he was sure that had been how it worked. Couldn’t remember the name. The square of floor in the corner of the pod, flanked by two planes of wall rising upward, told him nothing, but he kept staring at it anyway, searching. He could see himself there, in that other world. Must have dreamed it. Read it, watched it, played it so much while getting loaded that he misremembered being there.

Or…

JP. Rowland. Zipper. All caught, one by one. No word from Ooma, but she couldn’t have been long behind them. JP had been put in a Hardworld. Heard they shot him in front of a Door. Imagine, an absolute poverty case like JP being escorted to a Door. Maybe it was a lie, the Door. Darla said they couldn’t exist, just a legend that some Hardworlder had made up to boost his own ego.

Probably right. She had always been the smartest one, in her own way. Maybe her storming off just before they had gone out and found the mouse trap had been more than just luck. Maybe she had sensed something.

Must have been a book. He saw some faces he recognized but couldn’t place. He must have read it and given random faces from the streets or work to the characters. But how did it end? What did the cover look like? Couldn’t even remember the title or—

All those others flying around, smiles shining on their faces, had seemed like holograms projected from a place he could never go. Their smiles were the stars of that world, where all was black void without them. He had gone into the void to try and find something meant for him, but only found old resort worlds, and more drugs.

He had never found any real happiness in that world. Darla had said that people like them could never find happiness in the afterlife (she was one of those people) because their souls were tarnished. We brought Hell here with us, she said. Maybe if that first dreamer had remained alone it would have been all right, but with two people it was impossible and any more didn’t make much of a difference. A paradise forever denied because when people get together, they become the devil tryin to get to heaven, as her mother or someone used to say.

“We get in the way of each other, and us especially, we get in the way of ourselves, like those Chinese guys with the long chopsticks.” (whatever the fuck that meant).

She had said all this after getting back from selling every last memory she had of “anything getting within an inch of my pussy.” She had been crying and naked, saying it was all for the best she wanted to make new memories here. But when he went to touch her, his hand went right through her or past her and she screamed and he wanted to drop out of that god damned dreamland and never return, but eventually it worked, and she was just as flesh and solid under his hands as anything else and she kept on whispering “I can feel it” like a mantra to make it so.

The hotness of that memory, or fantasy or cutscene or whatever it was, burned itself out and she started talking about heaven and hell of our own making again in his head.

At the time, when she had been sobbing about memories and pulling her clothes off, he had ignored her. She might as well have been talking about particle physics, struggling with that last button, as he wondered if her tits were that big in the real, and why she had any problems taking off clothes that, essentially, weren’t even there. But, now here he was, in a life gone wrong as if by sentence, hunted by demons armed with guns and arrest warrants.

He let his life expand to its full breadth in his mind, and tried to find a way out of it, tried to get that sideways-angled view on it that had shown him something else just hours ago.

And there it was, for an instant. That other him. The one he had seen briefly during the interrogation. Not an addict or a thief, but something else, mundane. That other life felt like waking up, like remembering, but he could only see it in pieces, through angled mirrors, a memory of a recollection of other already worn-out memories, distorted by the facets and density of another version of himself, standing in the way.

This time, he remembered talking to his uncle when they had gone for visitation, his cousin stone-faced on the ride over and crying like a baby on the way back, and his uncle had asked him, through the cracking phone, face half hidden by a glare in the glass, what he wanted to do with his life, and Cooper, that other Real Cooper, had skimmed through his life in an instant, like looking in a book for a sentence he had misremembered, and unable to come up with an answer, had realized just how lost and dull it all was.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

And in an instant, it was gone, like how when looking through a slim gap in a fence, you can see everything on the other side if you move back and forth, but the moment you stop moving there’s only a single line again, unrecognizable.

Someone laughed loudly and he glanced at the rest of the pod. Men sat at the tables or on the bunks, but no one looked at him. When he had come in, someone had asked him “how much they got on your head, bruh?”, and someone else had talked loudly about the news that might have been meant for him, but that was it. Now the bunks and tables and jumpsuits seemed to be the only things in existence.

He felt time drop away behind him and stretch out in front of him. How did he get here? The last few days were blotches of a bland work week broken up by nonsensical dreams.

“You’ll forget, think it's real down there, but you have to remember, alright? Or else they’ll get you before I can set up a deal. Just remember, man, all this, there’s no way you coulda made all this up,” The man had said, before sending him running down a river of hallways.

The man was right. There was no way he could have made it up.

Cooper leaned back on the bunk and tried to recall the name of the book, and figure out how he had been able to read in the middle of such a bad trip.

****

The clouds rolled overhead like things sent from some other world where concrete was unknown and reflections fluttered on water without ever knowing the smooth sterile touch of glass. They were parked on a sloping cracked parking lot at the center of downtown and the slant of the lot and the angled levels of the parking garage ahead of them made it feel like the whole city might go sliding off to the side at any moment, leaving bare earth alone again next to the river.

The exposed faces of cars floating on thin lines of concrete, held back only by steel cables, stacked on top of each other, seemed poised for tragedy. The jail, all brick with coin slot windows, rose behind and to the side of the garage like it would laugh when it all came crashing down.

“Any action, Zoey?” Michael said in their ears. They were all in a single voice room for now.

“I’ve got some that look suspect. Haven’t moved since I started watching, and the plates pull up the usual rap sheets. No radio chatter but that will probably pick up after we get him out.”

“All right. Ashley says it should be any time now.”

“Good Girl!” Luke sat up in his chair and popped his back by twisting to one side then the other. They had been sitting there for almost an hour, mics on mute, Sam and Luke talking about anything from Gunmaze, to real guns, to the best hidden nooks in the Allclub, while Gradie chimed in when he could.

Sam cracked her knuckles. “You think he’ll tell her where it is?”

“Shit, I would.” Luke winked at Gradie.

“That would kill me,” Sam said.

“What?”

“If after all this shit, Ashley clutches the job with her tits.”

Luke laughed. “Wish she would clutch me—” he trailed off.

Gradie wondered at the possibility it might all be over soon, and something in the thought of dropping out and letting all this wash away unnerved him.

“We would still have to go get it right?” he said.

Luke shrugged.

“Zoey would just send her little drone, play some claw game and bring it back. Be kind of a waste. Wouldn’t even have to shoot anyone.” He prodded his riflebag with his shoe. Sam gave him a look.

“Don’t you get enough of that in Gunmaze?”

“Nah. Don’t even piss myself there.”

Sam stretched up in her seat.

“Well, I hope he just hands it over nice and easy and we can all leave.”

“Are you worried about getting into a shootout?” Gradie asked.

Sam turned back and gave him a look that he couldn’t decipher.

“No, I’m just not as big a fan of shooting at people as you psychos.”

Gradie found that hard to believe, but Luke butted in before he could prod her more.

“What you gonna do when we get back, man? And please don’t say train some more, cause Max told me they can’t keep you out of the damn clubhouse.”

“Maybe I’ll come back on my own.” Saying it out loud felt wrong. He had been thinking about it since his talk with Sam last night, and even more so after Philip’s lecture, but it seemed like the kind of impulse he shouldn’t admit to.

Luke looked at Gradie like he was expecting a punch line.

“And do what?”

“Whatever I want. You never wanna just drop in a Hardworld and rob a bank? Or be a millionaire and go to Vegas or something?”

Sam smiled at him and bounced in her seat.

“Oh my god, you make it sound so easy! You’d probably just end up waking up as a desk monkey a hundred times.”

The words ‘desk monkey’ stung him.

“Why, cause all you ever wake up as is a chauffeur?” Gradie glared into the rear view and Sam met him with flashing grey eyes that shifted from shock to anger. Luke tried to get between them with a calm tone.

“We’ll if you do go in solo, you should find Max.” He looked from Gradie to Sam. “That would be funny as—”

“Max would kill him,” Sam said.

“You really buy all his bullshit?” Gradie snapped.

“Hey.” Luke was no longer a peacemaker. “The dude’s not bullshitting. He’s just giving you shit because he thinks you’re not taking it seriously.”

“What the fuck do I have to do to—”

Sam cut him off.

“Also, Boss just threw you onto the team with no notice, and then you act like this.”

She sounded like a disappointed teacher. It was infuriating.

“Act like what?”

“Talking shit about Max, whining cause you can’t have the gun you want, going behind his back and putting one in his safe.”

“I had a problem, I let them know, its resolved. Why do you care?”

“Because I have to deal with it.”

“Oh yeah, you have to deal with me actually being armed if someone shoots at you.”

“I don’t need you to defend me!” Sam whirled around and had her head and shoulders over the center console. Luke backed up towards the window so he wouldn’t ash on her.

“Alright, c’mon Yall,”

“Ashley’s coming out with him. Get ready to move.” EP said on the line.

Luke snapped his hands down to his rifle and scanned the mirrors and the rear camera feed. Sam put it in drive. She looked in the rear view and caught Gradie’s eye.

“Ok, now let’s see what a big boy you are with that gun.”