The Delphi Room (5 page)

I reached out my hand, resting the palm against the man’s in the glass. His eyes were liquid with wonder. He was a stranger to me, and yet as familiar as my own shadow.

Dear Velvet,

Was it you I saw? Did you see me? A beautiful woman appeared in my mirror and placed her palm to mine. You? Very black eyes (bluish borders) and brown, sort of curly hair, cut kind of like Clara Bow’s, if you know who I mean. She looked so familiar to me, even though I didn’t recognize her, like someone I knew so long ago that I remember only the feeling of knowing them, not the actual person. And then she disappeared and I was left with my own reflection, which I hate. I cried to see it, and not the woman, standing before me. She must be you, Velvet. I am sure of it. Please come back to me.

My own reflection—perhaps you saw it?—is as disappointing as ever. I still cannot lay claim to a chin, or a smaller nose. But since this is clearly not Heaven, what can I expect? I suppose I should be grateful that I do not have plague welts sprouting from my cheeks. (I just knocked on wood, though the protective effects of that are doubtful.) My eyes, like yours, are turning blue and, like you, I cannot begin to guess why. It is a very strange thing to be terrified by the sight of your own eyes. But then again, when I think about it, I realize that this feeling is nothing new.

My hands are killing me—no pun intended. I pushed back two of my knuckles trying to pound my way out of here. I have never punched anything before. Once I started, I could not stop. It was like some manner of frenzy possessed me, the way animals become possessed without care or reason. My right hand split open and I got blood on my white shirtfront, and some on my suit jacket, but it is black—the jacket, not the blood—so it is not visible. Not that it matters. But I really hate blood, and I have this thing about being clean—I always washed my shirts twice in scalding hot water (and my dresses, but that is a different story)—so I have taken off the jacket and shirt and put them in the closet. Although I suppose scientifically speaking blood is not unhygienic, but it might be once it makes contact with wool and cotton—forgive me, I digress. I closed the closet door, but I know the bloody stuff is in there and it is really driving me crazy. I have always been a pacer when I get upset, but in here—well, what else is there to do? I get so frantic at times that I throw open the closet door, thinking there is something for me to organize, and then I am confronted with the pierce of space between the empty shelves, and the blot of bloody jacket and shirt. I have been remaking the bed, trying to get the bulges out, but the lumps keep coming back. The sheets have red and blue and yellow cars all over them, like the kind I had when I was a child. A painful sight. I still like them.

Will you describe your neighbourhood to me, please? How long had you worked at that café? Did you live alone?

Yours very truly,

Brinkley

His dresses? Was he a drag queen? Somehow, I doubted it. So did he play dress-up alone in his room? Well, I can hardly fault anyone for that. Maybe I’m next door to a nouveau version of Ed Wood.

I sat in front of the Chinese screen cross-legged, tracing the green flicks of bamboo leaves with my finger. There were characters on the right side, which I imagined comprised a poem, or instructions on how to escape. At the bottom, two small birds, nearly invisible in shades of green and brown, their beaks delicate needlepoints, gazed at one another as if across a bamboo-filled chasm.

My mother had kept a similar screen in the living room, with the same bends of foliage and tea tones tinged with gold, except there were three birds instead of two. She said it was the only gift that my father ever bought her.

I ran my finger over the characters, as though I might decipher their meaning by touch. The single eye on each of the birds shone satiny black. I wished for some sort of post-mortem mail delivery system, a vent through which I could push a letter to my mother. The flats of my hands came to rest on the cool parchment, as I imagined them against her face.

Dear Brinkley,

I saw you too! It must have been you. Green eyes (bluish borders), brown, very neatly parted hair. (How does your hair stay so neat when you’re trying to punch your way out of the room? Obviously, you have hair tips that I’m missing.) You looked so familiar to me as well, familiar and strange at once, like the picture of a longing for some fragile figment of memory.

Before you appeared to me, I smashed the mirror. At least I think I did, though the only evidence of that now is the bloodstain on my dress. The mirror is once again whole and perfect on the wall (obviously, or I wouldn’t have seen you), and the gashes on my hands are healed, with only faint lines where I remember gushing wounds. I can’t trust my memory—could we trust it before? It’s like I’m trapped in my own mind. There’s nothing more horrible than being left to the vagaries of one’s head
—
what a capricious enemy! And even if you tell the enemy to fuck off, even if you know her as you know yourself, you can never kill her. The mind shifts like the tides. What a splendid Hell.

Right at present the mirror shows me nothing but a faithful reflection of my room, and myself, a reflection tuned, as always, to the frequency governed by a prevailing sense of self-hatred, despair and now-justified phobias. You’re the only one able to see my new, shockingly stick-figured self. (Finally I’m in fashion but the audience has grown so scant.) Back in life, I always had a figure that I categorized like clothing: vintage. I kept pictures of women from the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s all over my walls, to remind myself that the fleshy hourglass is beautiful. Stuck on my fridge with a
Sunset Boulevard
fridge magnet were the words: “Today’s Miss America contestant is 23% thinner than contestants in the 1960s.” Not that I care at all about the Miss America pageant, but it helped me keep modern society’s rot in perspective. However, looking in the mirror now I can say that I look even thinner than today’s pageant girls. I can see my ribs, several Mona Lisa smiles, which were certainly things I once had to conduct a concentrated search for.

I want to see you again. I didn’t think it was me at first that you saw . . . you described the woman as beautiful. But then you mentioned the Clara Bow hair. Actually, I was thinking of Louise Brooks when I cut it. Or maybe I wasn’t really thinking . . . I was following instructions. What can you do with hair that resembles offshore storms on the Weather Channel, or with a face like an inverted egg, eyes shadowy as an absinthe addict’s? Though I was never an absinthe addict. I decided it must be me that you saw, unless there’s some poor loony on the other side of you who spent her final moments attempting to channel a silent film star through a pair of dull scissors.

Here’s some more info, if you like: I lived alone in a lower floor suite of a “heritage house,” which is really just a polite term for an old place in need of repairs. The street I lived on was lined with trees, including a very large one in my front yard. I loved to watch the sky pool in the branches in the early morning. For as long as I can remember, I dreamed about living on a tree-lined street. So the sidewalk forest was the thing that spurred me into renting the place (that and the fact that I had no money), when my senses were assaulted by the rather crumbling suite with its splintery hardwood floors. The house itself was 1920s clapboard with frilly latticework. It was purple, with unfortunate hot pink trim. Purple is my favourite colour, but it belongs in a closet, not on a house.

Commercial Drive is a bohemian street, although it falls way short of Montparnasse-circa-1910’s definition of bohemian. It’s full of artists and good restaurants and men with dreadlocked hair and women carrying loom-spun purses. It used to be Little Italy—all in all, it’s kind of like “Socialism Meets Gelato.”

I had worked at the Thai café for a year, long enough to become addicted to coconut milk. Before that, I did some time in the coat check of a bar, which, aside from allowing me the opportunity to test out some inventive outfits, was a nightmarish cave of sweaty-fleshed, sex-hungry mongrels. I prefer to stay away from that sort of thing. I was planning to quit, but before I had the chance I had a panic attack and broke a bottle of Glenlivet, and was told in a not-very-nice-way never to return. So my friend Davie came over to talk me down from the eaves, so to speak, because I was slightly hysterical about being jobless and behind in my rent. But, as usual, he smoothed everything out. He called his friend Mrs. Wong, who owns a photocopy place, and told her to call up her brother and tell him that she had found the perfect waitress for his new café. So that’s how I got the job. Davie saved the day again. Then he wanted to talk about his relationship problems—as per usual. And yes, the owners, Harry and Carrie, are Chinese, but they felt that the Vancouver market was a little saturated with Chinese restaurants.