Smoke and Mirrors

They came
to him every night. They never moved; they never spoke. They just stood there, by the side of the bed, their grave dark eyes fixed on his face. One of the smaller ones clung for support to its mother's skirt. The smallest of them lay cradled in her arms.

She didn't look at all the way he remembered her. She looked old
—
scant graying hair, wrinkled cheeks
—
the way she might have looked if she had lived out her natural life, prematurely aged by poverty and hard work. He had never seen . . . the others. (Don't use the words, don't even think them: the little ones, the children.) The images he saw bore no resemblance to reality, they had shaped themselves from the dark ectoplasm of guilty nightmare. But those cobweb forms were stronger than sleeping pills or liquor or any of the other means by which he had sought oblivion. Shadow shapes, stronger than steel or stone. There was no way he could prevent them from coming.

Every night he lay paralyzed and helpless, waiting for it to happen. It was always the same, and oddly beautiful
—
a bright ruffle of gold around the hem of her ragged skirt. That was when he woke, sweating and struggling for breath and thanking God for sparing him the final horror. But the night breeze seemed to carry a faint, grisly scent, and there was always the fear that one night he might not wake in time.

1

The face
was thirty feet high. Dark hair crowned it, like a hillside streaked with snow. The yard-long lips curved gently, with just the hint of a smile. The eyes were mesmerizing, not only because of their size; by some trick of setting they seemed to stare straight at the viewer, demanding his attention.

Erin turned the wheel slightly; she had been drifting dangerously close to the shoulder of the road. The billboards must be new. She had not noticed them before. They should have been hard to miss; but the eyes and their complex interconnections with brain and nervous system have a disconcerting habit of seeing only what concerns them. Until recently Erin had had only the mildest interest in politics, much less a local Senate race.

She wondered who had designed the advertisement, if that was the right word. But it was just that, an ad designed to sell a product—in this case not so much a person as a carefully packaged image. Rippling folds of red and white framed the giant face, stars floated on an azure background. The printed message, in glaring crimson, was short and simple:
rosemary white Marshall for u.s. senate.
No doubt the anonymous designer had calculated to the letter how many syllables an average reader could absorb while approaching the billboard at so many miles per hour.

Traffic was heavy, as it always was, even on Saturday. The Virginia suburbs of Washington had expanded rapidly over the past decade; housing developments, huge office complexes, and gargantuan shopping centers funneled tens of thousands of cars daily onto the highways. The traffic issue was a hot one in local politics,
with one candidate pointing out the increased prosperity such growth had brought and another pandering to the fury of frustrated commuters who spent hours inching along the crowded roads on their way to and from work. Not until after she had passed the Dulles Airport exit was Erin able to relax at the wheel of her borrowed car. Traffic patterns and routes were unfamiliar to her, and she had not been behind the wheel of a car for almost a year. Fran, who liked to cultivate an impression of carefree affability, was in actual fact extremely selfish about her property, and the car was a prized possession. Only a very special occasion—and one from which, Erin thought uncharitably, Fran hoped to profit—had prompted her generosity on this occasion.

Fran was Erin's roommate, and at times her pet peeve. A friend . . . well, they certainly had not been friends in high school. It was not a question of active dislike back then, just of paths that seldom crossed. Their senior-class yearbook entries made their differing life-styles explicit. Fran's toothy grin appeared on every other page; as a cheerleader, member of the debating society and a dozen other clubs, as "most popular" and "most likely to succeed Joan Rivers." There were four pictures of Erin, in addition to the official senior photo. She had been editor of the literary magazine, a library aide, a member of the choir, and winner of the award for highest senior-class average grade. When they ran into one another at their class reunion five years later, they both had to squint surreptitiously at one another's name tags. It was pure accident that they had started talking.

Or so Erin believed at the time. To Fran, there were no such things as accidents. It was Fate—Karma—that had brought them together. It was Meant to Be. Fran had a way of encouraging people to talk—one of the reasons why she had been voted "most popular"—and Erin had been in a particularly vulnerable state of mind that day. She had talked, all right—spilled her guts, in fact— and Fran had made the right responses: sympathy for the recent death of Erin's father, interest in her plans, helpful suggestions.

"Suggestions" was probably too weak a word. As soon as Erin mentioned that she was thinking of moving to a larger city, where jobs in her field were easier to find, Fran began babbling about Karma. What a coincidence! Her roommate had just left and she
was looking for someone to share her apartment in the Washington suburbs. It was a Sign, that was what it was. New York? You're crazy, love, do you know what a one-room hovel in Manhattan would set you back? Do you have any idea what they pay editorial assistants? And talk about your mean streets—you'd be mugged or raped, or both, within a day. Listen, sweetie, there are thousands of magazines and newsletters and house organs published in D.C------

Erin finally got a word in. "Thousands?"

Fran grinned and ran a careless hand through her fashionably tousled hair. "Hundreds, at least. Honestly, Erin, this is too perfect. I mean, you have to get out of this hick town. You said your mother is all set, living with your aunt and sharing expenses, but you can't stay there, you'll go crazy with two old ladies bitching at you all the time about cleaning your room and getting home by midnight."

Erin was feeling guilty and disloyal for complaining about her aunt's nagging and her mother's helplessness, but Fran's shrewd assessment struck a nerve; her lips curled, and Fran was quick to exploit her emotions. "They can't help it," she said kindly. "You know mothers. But that's no way for you to live. We can have a great time. And I know we'd get along. Just look at us, we're exact opposites. We complement one another perfectly. Yin and Yang, Laurel and Hardy. I'm Scorpio, you're Aquarius—"

"Gemini," Erin said.

"What? Oh." Fran dismissed this minor error with a wave of her hand. "Same thing."

The more Erin thought about the idea, the more it appealed to her. She had only dim memories of the years she had lived in Virginia, but the memories were all happy ones. She told Fran she'd think about it and let her know; and when she got home to face her aunt's probing questions about where she had been and why she was so late and how many beers she had drunk, the decision was made. It pleased everyone. Her aunt wasn't quite rude enough to say so, but her first, unguarded reaction to the news made it very evident that she would be delighted to see the last of Erin. Even her mother adjusted to the idea more readily than Erin had expected—so readily that Erin felt a little hurt.

"Well, but darling, you'd have to leave home sometime, everyone does, and at least you won't be alone—I know Mrs. Blenkinsop slightly, she was on the Library Committee with me, and she seems very pleasant, I'm sure her daughter must be a suitable companion for you—of course I would rather you were going to a home of your own, but you'll surely meet someone soon, there are lots of nice young journalists and congressmen in Washington. '

Erin saw no reason to correct the numerous misapprehensions in this naive speech. Her mother was right about one thing—at least she wouldn't be alone. The transition to independence would be eased by someone who knew the ropes, the shortcuts, the pitfalls to be avoided. There were advantages for Fran too. She had found the ideal roommate—one who was too meek to complain or criticize.

On the whole they got on better than one might have expected. Fran had been right about how different they were, even in appearance. Fran was short and dark and rounded; Erin was six inches taller, with strawberry-blond hair and, in her opinion, a figure embarrassingly flat fore and aft. (She got no sympathy from well-rounded Fran about that.) Fran dressed in clothes she fished out of bins at Goodwill and local thrift shops; Erin's blouses, pants, and skirts were color-coordinated, and she never appeared in public with a button missing or a hem that sagged. Erin's room was immaculate; Fran's was a cheerful confusion of discarded garments, magazines, and newspapers heaped onto the perpetually unmade bed. Fran had dozens of friends; after almost a year in Washington, Erin had made none.

Fran couldn't understand it. "I can't figure you out, Erin. Is it insecurity or conceit that keeps you from opening up to people? You don't go anyplace or do anything—"

"That's not true. "

"Well, maybe it's a slight exaggeration." Fran studied Erin with a speculative look the latter had come to loathe; she knew it often heralded one of Fran's forays into amateur psychoanalysis. "I guess losing your dad was traumatic," Fran mused. "According to that article I read last week, the death of a parent rates nine and a half on a scale of ten, and you were always his little girl—"

"Shut up, Fran," Erin said.

Fran was not offended. "At least you're learning to talk back. Must be my good influence."

Erin had to admit Fran was correct. What she could not admit, even to herself, was that Fran's offhand comment about her father had also struck home. She still dreamed about him several times a week, and often woke crying.

Her job was a disappointment. Fran had helped her find it, on the staff of the newsletter of a national merchandising organization. Erin had not minded starting out in a secretarial position, but after months of typing and filing and making coffee, with no prospect of the promotion she had been promised, she began to feel put upon. Fran listened sympathetically if impatiently to her complaints. "If it bores you, quit. There are other jobs; hell, there's always McDonald's. That bastard isn't going to promote you, not if he can find a man for the job, he's nothing but a goddamn chauvinist. Look what happened last month with the associate-editor job. You said the guy who got it had only been there six weeks."

"He does have a wife and a couple of children," Erin said. "He needs the money more than—"

"Jesus H. Christ! If you insist on walking around bent over, somebody is going to accept the invitation and kick you in the butt."

"I don't want to sound like some strident women's libber—"

"No, you're going to go on being one of those mealymouthed 'please-kick-me-because-I'm-a-woman' types. '