Wonders Series 1
by
Stan I.S. Law
MIRROR
FLASH
A MAN WHO COULDN’T DIE
“Thank you for The Mirror. I'm always looking for a mentor or a teacher. While reading this story, I suddenly realized that—I don't need one. I have me. (well, I'm not quite that self-reliant in all aspects of my life, but I got the philosophical concept) I think.”
Patricia A. Guthrie, Author, Chicago, USA
Published by INHOUSEPRESS
ISBN 978-0-9813015-5-6
Also by Stan I.S. Law
Sci-Fi Series 1 (Thirsty Work, Acorn, Dare)
Copyright © Stanislaw Kapuscinski 2000, eBook 2010
https://www.stanlaw.ca
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, titles, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE MIRROR
by
Stan I.S. Law
I sat staring at it for hours. Timeless hours, just as he had taught me. My back straight, my chin up, legs crossed in a half lotus, which my stiffening joints still permitted without excessive discomfort.
I pinned the mirror to a curtain, directly in front of me, just above the eye level. A small, oval mirror, less then four inches at its widest, hardly two on the narrow side. The glass was held in a delicate carved frame, which looked like golden vine surrounding a deep pool of crystal water. But the frame could not have been made of gold. After all, where would a ancient vagabond, who spent his life begging for a bowl of rice, get the money to buy a gold frame.
It seemed a long, long time since he gave me this single gift—just before he left me. Before he left this world; dissolved, perhaps, is a better word. The small rug on which the old man sat, day after day, regardless of the weather, was all that was left. One day the Master, for such he had been, disappeared—only the rug lingered behind. As with the Cheshire cat. And, even as with the Cheshire cat, I still remember, his slow, enigmatic smile lingering carelessly, effortlessly, on his parched lips, then on, or was it in, his pale, sun-bleached eyes. The smile lingered on, even after his lean, brown face, the thin, beaklike nose, his grey, mottled hair, probably never combed, began to loose its definition. Then, an impossible, nonexistent fog descended to cover his ageless, emaciated, undemanding body, which too became diffused, suffused into that shimmering, hazy, mist, gradually dissolving into the pure, golden rays of the rising sun. It had been those transient, still horizontal, dawning rays that he had awaited with profound peace and joyful acceptance.
And then he wasn't there. He was gone.
Dissolved.
In time, I remember, I withdrew my eyes from the now empty, dissipating mist. As I looked down, I held in my hand a small, oval mirror. And even as the last wisps of the shimmering mist cleared, I heard, or more likely imagined, his voice. His words had always been sparse, meager, even as his body, his habits, when he had walked the reddish, baked soil in his battered sandaled feet. His voice seemed equally as wondrous, not quite belonging to this world, or to any other, beyond the confines of time or space. The words which formed in my mind, whether or not they penetrated my cerebral cortex through the apertures of my ears, told me about the mirror. The thoughts had been clear, at the time, of this I am sure, but a moment later they seemed to waver, hesitate, even as I always did. Later, hour after hour, I attempted to reconstruct that ephemeral moment when the Master had imparted to me that which I had since lost, yet I still feel, indeed, I am certain, will regain, when the time is ripe.
On that, he had always insisted.
He had said that there is never any need to look for a teacher, a Master. He said that the pupil and teacher are like two sides of a single coin. The two are inseparable. Periodically, mysterious, invisible alchemists melt all the coins and transmute their material into ever more precious metals. Then, as a new, more noble coin is struck, the teacher, of the very same mould, is ready to resume his teaching, to impart a higher truth, a higher understanding. The celestial mint is inexhaustible, he had said, so very, very long ago. It seemed like yesterday?
I looked into the mirror. Each eye staring directly forward. Left eye into the reflection of itself, likewise with the right eye. The image I saw in this manner, was ever a single eye, in the very centre of my forehead, staring back, asking for an answer, even as I had been and continued asking.
What? What mysteries of life had drawn me into their tantalizing vortex?
This question had been and remained the greater part of my problem. I wasn't sure what was it that I had been searching. Satisfaction? Forever I felt hunger. An inner peace? This implied a state of eternal boredom. A state of happiness? This sounded, and was, much too relative.
No. I wanted a challenge. Yet, I had to know where and why I had embarked on this barren journey. Why had I developed this unquenched craving, thirst for the unknown. Surely, not unknowable? Would it lose its allure when it became unknown no longer? Would the instant of discovery be paramount to the instant of death. The death of no more challenges? Of nothing new to conquer?
Each time I had asked these and many like questions of the ancient Master—he only smiled. That in itself would not have been so frustrating, if it hadn't been for the fact that I was deeply convinced that the man had known the answer. He knew it. He had found it. And having found it—he left. He dissolved into the realm unchallenged by mere, confused, mortals.
That realm was perhaps the real, nagging enigma. What was it that lay beyond the scrutiny of our senses? Beyond our effervescent, boisterous, uncontrolled emotions, our marginally used, yet even then, so often abused mind. What lay beyond the constant, persistent noise of our thoughts? A unremitting noise, sweeping in relentless waves through the trillions cells imprisoned in our cranium, the countless, minute discharges passing like endless running streams of electrons, from one synapse to another, stimulating, ongoing, never ending, a mental clamor which, per force, precluded conditions conducive to greater understanding. The taunting, blatant, living pandemonium, relentless, till finally, it seems, all functions defining our physical existence must cease before we might reach beyond and learn the origin of this demonic clatter.
I looked into the mirror.
The single eye stared back at me. It was vapid, empty. Surely, not my eye. I began to wonder why the sage had imparted this strange gift upon me. I could achieve the single eye effect by staring into any reflecting surface. What then was so special about this particular mirror? Did it conceal within its echoing surface some strange, mysterious powers?
The single eye looked back, limpid, undemanding.
Why did the old man give me this fatuous talisman? Was it yet another enigmatic test I had been supposed to pass before taking the next step on the scale? The scale of evolution advancing at an insipid rate of a paraplegic snail, or reversal to some kind of primordial, pre-physical state of being? I no longer knew what is it that I had been searching. I was lost in an ocean of apathetic indifference. Not an indifference resultant from a serene state of emotional detachment, rather a lax listlessness towards my fate, to the divine plan which had kept me ignorant of Its purpose.
Then came some months, followed by years, during which, the offensive mirror remained unobtrusive, half hidden within a fold of the curtain. The flat, rectangular pillow, upon which I had spent hours, cross
legged, in silent meditation also remained neglected. I had not even glanced at the mirror's surface. I didn't need anyone or anything to tell me of my guarded discontent. Instead, to my own surprise, I began—living.
My involvement with life, with my immediate environment, began as a spectator, almost a stranger, a reluctant, transient tourist. I looked, I watched, until gradually, even as a humming-bird is drawn to a honeysuckle, I too, unwittingly, had been drawn into the stream of life. First slowly, then with an increasing current. Once again, perhaps for the first time since my distant childhood, I felt blood coursing through my veins. My atrophied, or at the very least, dormant emotions stirred. I began caring.
Not to the point of emotional exhaustion, but caring enough to take a risk, to stick my neck out for whatever cause. Even if the narrow appeal of such a cause could upset my previously long-sought equilibrium.
It had been by shear accident that I chanced upon the old mirror. I had long since placed it, with other memories of my now distant past, in a side drawer of my desk. It lay there, ignored, forgotten, for more years than I care to remember. I chanced upon it while looking for some old papers I needed to write an article for a local weekly.
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