I peered around the corner of the patio to the inside of the house. The hairs on the back of my neck could have only been straighter if I’d been shocked by the Levantines’ security system a second time. I felt an inkling of wind, the draft causing the door to crack open and close, over and over, each time generating that click-clack sound. Now or never. I pushed the door open ever so gently, but it creaked ever so loudly.
The living room was also empty, but I could see drops of blood leading into the kitchen. I followed the trail, going down a flight of stairs and finding myself in an empty basement winery. The whole place appeared to be deserted and quiet. I continued tracking the blood until I reached a small door set into the red mountain rock.
Steeling myself and clutching my defibrillator, I pushed open the wooden door.
Inside was a mosaic of violence.
Oh no.
There were at least four distinct human bodies, all of whom appeared to be dead. Blood was all over the place. Furniture had been broken and tossed around. Near the center of the room was a severed arm, blasted off at the shoulder. It was repulsive, but I forced myself to look closer at the corpses. An old man, a Costa Rican guy with only one arm, an old lady with a huge hole in her chest, and a slumped-over man in a chair whose face I couldn’t see. No Sylvia. If she’d been here, it appeared she was gone now.
I couldn’t hold back anymore. I stumbled outside of the room, dry heaving against the wall. A few coughs and a good amount of spitting later, the terrible thoughts hit me.
I’m too late. What if she’s not alive? Do not think that.
I had to go back into the room. If there was any clue as to where Sylvia was, or whether or not she was—don’t think that—still kidnapped, I had to find it.
Despite more loud inner voices encouraging me to flee, I stepped back into the room. Carefully avoiding the copious puddles of blood, I moved closer to the slumped man in the chair. I didn’t recognize any of the other faces, and his seemed to be the least splattered in gore.
At close range, he seemed about my size. Fresh blood still oozed from a wound in his temple. His head hung downward, but I could tell his right eye—in fact, the entire right side of his face—had been decimated by whatever had hit him on the side of the head. Something strange about this one. Slowly, I lifted his head back with one hand, keeping my defibrillator at the ready.
Something really strange about this one.
I angled his head to the left, studying what I could make out of his face.
My face.
“Oh God.” I was looking at a bloody, bruised replica of myself.
My words echoed all around me, bouncing off the bricks, wine bottles, and the pulpy face of my dead other.
MAGIC MIRROR GATE
When a Pawn has reached the eighth square, the player has the option of selecting a piece, whether such piece has been previously lost or not, whose names and powers it shall then assume, or of deciding that it shall remain a Pawn.
—Rule XIII, The Modern Chess Instructor, Wilhelm Steinitz, 1889
HAVE YOU EVER LOOKED INTO A TRUE MIRROR? Regular mirrors, as you know, show a reflection of whatever’s held before them. An inversion. That’s why writing will appear backward in a mirror. But true mirrors show things as they really appear to others.
They had one at the New York Hall of Science, and seeing yourself in it was a head-trippy experience. For the first time, you get to see yourself not the way you’ve seen your face your whole life, but the way others see you. The result is startling and bizarre.
Now, imagine taking that feeling and applying it not to a mirror but to a real version of yourself, who also happens to be dead. Multiply that by a thousand, and it still won’t come close to the horror I felt as I stared at my own dead body.
No.
I froze, uncertain of my place. So many emotions elbowed their way to prominence in my mind as I stared at him, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. I’d been so focused on getting to Sylvia, I hadn’t dared to consider what it would be like to meet—him. Me. Especially now that he was dead. Was this what happened when you died? If so, I wasn’t ready for it. I wasn’t ready to look upon the ruined, bloody face of myself. My… remains.
At the same time, part of me felt relief. He’s already gone. There wouldn’t have to be any existential crises to unpack, no painful discussions to decide who would end up with our wife. I could just leave. No one would ever need to know he existed. Only me, Sylvia, Taraval, Corina—okay, a few people would know. All I had to do was find my wife, reactivate my comms, and our lives could return to semi-normal.
I heard a drop of his blood hit the gray stone floor.
Wait, was that movement? Did he just flinch?
I raced to check his carotid pulse, then paused. Is it okay to touch him? I decided I didn’t have a choice.
Is he alive? Why didn’t I check his pulse before?
My fingers touched his neck. The universe did not explode. Instead Joel2’s left eye snapped open, scaring the crap out of me. I instinctively jumped back.
Holy shit, he’s alive.
“Sylvia?” he mumbled.
“Did you see her? Is she alive?” I sputtered back. But he just moaned softly and closed his eye again.
I nearly broke my neck sprinting back down to the ambulance outside. I collected all the medicinal supplies I could carry: Band-Aids, shots,23 a bunch of other stuff I had no idea how to use. I even kept my defibrillator spooled around my hand—just in case.
Back in the basement, I affixed the biggest Band-Aid I had to the gash in his head, then administered one of the shots into his thigh.
Almost instantly, his face twitched and his knee spasmed. I could never properly express in words how surreal it was watching my copy convulse uncontrollably like that. Seeing him in pain made me twinge. Talk about your out-of-body experience.
“Don’t you fucking touch her!” His good eye was wild, straining to focus on what he thought was his attacker. He pulled at his bindings like a trapped animal. “I’ll kill you, asshole!”
“Hey, hey!” I yelled back, then lowered my voice. “Calm down. You’re okay.”
A little color came back into his face, though his left eye, the intact one, still seemed vacant. His pupil dilated, seeing me. “Who the fuck?” He tried again: “You’re—”
“Me. Yes.”
He looked me up and down. I knew what he was going through, and “confused” didn’t begin to cover it. He was waking up from the most existential nightmare you could conjure to find out it was reality. I opened my mouth to explain, then decided there was too much to go over. Keep it simple, stupid. “Is there a knife or something around here?” I asked him.
“On the ground”—he indicated with his ruined head—“next to the dead bruja.”
Realizing he meant the old woman with the hole in her chest, I scooped up the hunting knife and cut through the ropes binding his wrists to the chair. He winced in pain as the blood flowed back into his hands.
“Where’s Sylvia?” I said. “What happened here?”
“Sylvia.” His eye was fully focused now. He tried to stand, but didn’t yet have the strength. “Taraval. That motherfucker, I thought he came here to rescue us. Guess he had other plans.”