Yes, I am tired. Tired of waiting, tired of thinking. I am tired of myself.
My Alicia: how good you have been to me. Solamen miseris socios habuisse doloris: “It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in misery.” When I think of you, Alicia, and what we are to each other, I am reminded of my first trip to a barbershop as a boy. Indulge me—memory is my method in all things, and the story has more bearing than you think. In my boyhood town, there was only one. It was a kind of clubhouse. On a Saturday afternoon, escorted by my father, I entered this sacred masculine space. The details were intoxicating. The odors of tonic, leather, talc. The combs lounging in their disinfecting aquamarine bath. The hiss and crackle of AM radio, broadcasting manly contests upon green fields. My father beside me, I waited on a chair of cracked red vinyl. Men were being barbered, lathered, whisked. The owner of the shop had been a World War II bomber pilot of some renown. Upon the wall behind the cash register hung a photograph of his young warrior self. Beneath his snipping shears and buzzing razor, each small-town cranium emerged a perfect simulacrum of his own, on the day he’d donned his goggles, wrapped a scarf around his neck, and crossed the eaves of heavens to blast the samurai to smithereens.
My turn arrived; I was summoned forth. Many smiles and winks were exchanged among the witnesses. I took my seat—a board balanced upon the chair’s chrome arms—as the barber, like a toreador flashing his cape, shook out the curtain with which he meant to dress me, wrapped toilet paper around my neck, and draped my body in decapitating plastic. That was when I noticed the mirrors. One on the wall before me, one behind, and my likeness—a reflection of a reflection of a reflection—caroming down the corridor of cold eternity. The sight brought forth an existential nausea. Infinity: I knew the term, yes, but the world of boyhood is finite and firm. To gaze into the heart of it, and to see my likeness stamped a million-fold upon its face, disconcerted me profoundly. The barber, meanwhile, had set blithely about his task, simultaneously engaged in lighthearted conversation with my father on various adult subjects. I thought that focusing my eyes solely upon the first image might somehow banish the others, but the effect was the opposite: I was made even more aware of the innumerable shadow selves lurking behind him, ad infinitum, infinitum, infinitum.
But then something else happened. My discomfort waned. The lush sensory package of the place, combined with the delicate tickling of the barber’s shears upon my neck, eased me into a state of trancelike fascination. The idea came to me: I was not just one small thing. I was, in fact, a multitude. Looking farther, I believed I detected among my infinite fellows certain subtle differences. This one’s eyes were a bit closer together, a second’s ears were positioned a fraction higher on his head, a third sat just a little lower in his chair. To test my theory, I commenced to make small adjustments—angling my gaze, wrinkling my nose, winking one eye and then the other. Each version of me responded in kind, and yet I discerned the tiniest lag, the barest hitch of time, between my action and its manifold duplication. The barber warned me that if I did not hold still he might accidently cut my ear off—more virile laughter—but his words made no impact, so thoroughly was I enjoying my new discovery. It became a kind of game. Fanning says: Stick out your tongue. Fanning says: Raise one finger. What delicious power I possessed! “Come on, son,” my father commanded, “quit your fussing,” but I wasn’t fussing—far from it. Never had I felt so alive.
Life wrests that feeling from us. Day by day, the sublime glimpses of childhood pass away. It is love, of course, and only love, that restores us to ourselves, or so we hope, but that is taken away. What is left when there is no love? A rope and rock.
I have been dying forever. That is what I mean to say. I have been dying as you are dying, my Alicia. It was you I saw in the mirror, that long-ago morning of boyhood; it is you I see now, as I walk these streets of glass. There is one love, made of hope, and another, made of grief.
I have, my Alicia, loved you.