A Cup Of Coffee In The Evening Roger moved into a new apartment at the corner of 73rd Avenue and Vine Street, a standard one-room with white-washed walls and standard, if plain, furnishings. Shortly after moving in he felt slightly ill, and it was with some pleasure that he called in sick to the burnt sugar factory where he daily earned his paycheques, looking forward to a minor reprieve from his routine. He was surprised by the stillness he felt in his new home, the unshakable feeling of absence that permeated the very air. It scared him, yet it was invigorating to be frightened. Roger was unaccustomed to drinking coffee in the evenings, knowing full well the toll that it took on his nerves. And yet this particular evening he was unable to resist. He took up a string of minutes watching it percolate, studying the process which resulted in his steamy drink. He took little sips so as not to burn the lips and roof of the mouth. Through the window the sun was threatening to set. It loitered murkily over the horizon, a shadow of its former self, bleached by the haze manufactured by the ever-present city lurking in wait beneath. Roger absent-mindedly stirred his coffee with a finger, sniffling wretchedly and trying to catch a glimpse of his own factory far in the distance. It was no use. The haze was simply too thick. Positioned opposite the kitchen window was a long and narrow mirror. Roger lifted the rim of his upper lip to expose the gums, which he thought to be suffering from discolouration. "The key to health lies in the gums", mum had often recited, mentioning as verification that her cousin's gums had been simply yellow the day he passed away from some silent disease. Standing in front of the mirror, the entirety of his upper lip flipped up grotesquely, Roger noticed something curious. The sun was considerably brighter in the mirror than it was through the window. In the mirror it shimmered and sparkled merrily... why, it even winked at him. Roger took another good, hard look out the window to confirm this impression. The sun itself was as drab and monochromatic as ever.

Roger shifted around some boxes until he found the one in which he had packed his set of encyclopedias. "If you own a set of encyclopedias" the salesman had boasted "you don't need any other books. They're all contained in here! But with... concision!" And it was the truth! Roger had never heard the word 'concision' prior to that moment, but he remembered it even now. He opened the box with a straight-edge razor and found the volume marked 'L-M' in gold-embossed lettering. It pleased Roger to finger the pages of such a heavy, such a meaningful and above all well-bound volume. Mirror.

'Invented quite by accident by Sir Alfred Cartwright, mason, who one evening noticed a charming effect when... etc., etc.,... types of mirrors include... mirrors in literature generally foreshadow... etc., etc.,... peculiar properties of the common household mirror abound...'

"Ah, here we are", thought Roger, rubbing his yellowish hands together.

"...Reginald Wilkit first noticed what he was to thereafter label the 'Wilkit Effect', whereby a beam of light striking a mirror at a very particular angle actually enters the texture of the mirror's surface and rebounds, plays off of itself, and eventually creates a sharper or sometimes more vibrant image than the source itself. Wilkit confirmed this hypothesis by placing a second mirror across from one already impregnated by the Wilkit Effect, and the second mirror reproduced the image with an even more enhanced verisimilitude than the first. As Milton once so poetically stated..."

Roger slapped the book firmly shut with a satisfied smile. He knew that there had had to be an explanation. The Wilkit Effect!

He slept very badly that night. Certainly the coffee hadn't helped things, but on top of that he felt as though something were tugging at him from the back of his mind, something imperative, which could spell trouble for him if he weren't cautious. But what on Earth could it be?

As Roger awoke, he noted with displeasure that his condition had worsened. The simple act of raising his throbbing head from the pillow resulted in a kicking pain and a sense of uncontrollable vertigo. He wasn't able to summon the strength to leave the moist sanctuary of his bed until one o'clock in the afternoon. "Well" he muttered with a philosophical gravity, "age steals up on us all, eventually". Only then did he recall the Wilkit Effect, and hurried to the kitchen to see if perhaps there was further evidence of it in today's mirror.

And indeed, there was. The dismal townscape appeared as apocalyptic as ever through the fly-blown window, but under the mirror's lyrical afternoon sun the building-tops glimmered as though dappled with pixie-dust. It pleased Roger to see them there, iridescent and smiling, and he congratulated himself on his discovery of the Effect. At which point something odd caught his attention. He thought he noticed a small, cumulo-nimbus cloud which appeared in the mirror, but was not actually in the sky proper, that is to say, through the window. At first he was certain that he had merely gotten confused, that because the mirror was reflecting everything backwards, or front to back, that he was simply looking for the cloud in the wrong patch of sky-through-the-window. Yet, after consulting with the window and the mirror four or five times, he was convinced that this was not the case. The cloud was only in the mirror, drifting confidently over the faultlessly polished skyline, just like a cloud would do in real life. He sat and watched it for some time, but in no way did it do anything surprising. He sat with his eyes fixed on it though, until it floated outside of the frame of the mirror. Cloud.

"Composition of... significance when beheld... various types of... how to read... affiliated optical illusions:

Clouds not perceptible to the human eye may from time to time appear in transfigurations of sky (see also: the theories of A. Schoenberg). This phenomenon was first observed by Sir Edwin Grant, who took a photograph of an airplane traveling through a clear blue sky, and developed the negatives to find the whole of the image of the aircraft obliterated by clouds. The theory applied may strike us as overly straight-forward, yet it holds. The rays of a sun shining through an ultra-fine cloud-surface renders the latter translucent to the normal series of optical processes, as an over-accumulation of sunbeam clogs up the lens of our vision, not leaving us the requisite 'space' with which to perceive the cloud. A camera, however, is not so easily swindled, and will record the errant cloud every time. The same process has been noticed on the surface of lakes, as well as in mirrors (see under: Mirror; Peculiar properties: 'The Wilkit Effect')."

It was with some inner tribulation that Roger ever-so-carefully replaced the 'Ca-Ex' volume of the encyclopedia. Despite the assurance of an overly-simple explanation, Roger had read the passage three times over and still felt unsure. How, in fact, did one's eyes get 'clogged up'? Nonetheless, he was comforted that the sudden appearance of clouds had found its way into the vast corpus of human knowledge, that a precedent had been set.

In the days that immediately followed, Roger became more and more preoccupied with the strange machinations of the Wilkit Effect. His whole days were spent in careful study of the increasingly brazen confabulations of the reality that was represented by his window in the slender room of his mirror. One afternoon a small framed picture appeared on one of the reflected walls of his kitchen. Close scrutiny, aided by a magnifying glass, revealed it to be a painting, a landscape bestrewn with trees, an over-hastily rendered sky with its electric blue and two misplaced clouds loitering one-dimensionally to the fore. Finally, there was a doe in the moment of gentle prostration so inevitable in such paintings, its lithe neck curved in the act of lapping water from the nearby brook. A signature at the bottom of the painting was so faint that one could not be certain that one was reading it correctly: H. Gulya. The indubitability of the reflection of the painting, i.e. its presence in the mirror, was alone sufficient to make Roger a shade uneasy. But what was more; there were no clouds or frolicsome deer reflected on the surface of the brook.

But this was not to be the most extraordinary event. The window in the mirror gradually became a surrealist landscape, to which Roger became daily more and more transfixed. He witnessed violent crimes on the streets below, a man walking tightrope between two buildings, a flurry of bats which knocked each other about and then vanished to the unknown country outside of the frame. When a deep scarlet fog drifted in and covered his view for a few hours he continued watching, not wanting to be away for a moment if the view should all of a sudden clear up. His patience was rewarded when his view returned with a sky full of silken threads. He no longer bothered to ascertain if the image in the mirror correlated with the view from the window. One cannot be certain if the distinction was any longer relevant.

The threads sparkled and swayed in the mid-morning sun. Roger vaguely recognized a light breeze playing twixt the hairs at the back of his neck. The sunny air caused a peculiar tingling sensation. He had maintained his vigil all through the night, and his head hurt like the Devil, owing in part, no doubt, to the illness that was preying on his marrow. A Brigadoon of armed soldiers was wending up avenues like the tail of some enormous rat. Tiny green caterpillars began spiraling down the threads hanging from the sky, some of which began cocooning in midair.

Roger gave his head a shake and had an unexpected moment of lucidity. The events accumulating, amassing before his blood-shot eyes, began to make him feel uneasy once more. He would have to slip on his coat and go to the library, that was all there was to it.

Roger made his way down identical boulevards, through the inevitable morass of humanity spilling like sludge from an unblocked pipe out of doorways and from around corners, their boots gathering filth from the street. He felt out-of-sorts, after a few blocks he already yearned for his chair in front of the mirror. He felt unsteady on his feet, and a dull throbbing below the left ear kept ruining his concentration. Happily, the library was nearby.

'The Wilkit Effect: An Appraisal' had been misplaced and he wasted fifteen minutes in tracking it down. At long last the librarian located it in the Astronomy section... Someone had evidently mistaken it for a book about the Witkins Effect, which concerns visible shifts in sky conditions, wherein stars appear to move while in fact remaining stationary. Roger put the Wilkit book under his arm and stole off to a corner of the library. CHAPTER 14: Super-abundance of the Wilkit Effect:

'In an extreme minority of recorded cases (which are themselves in the minority of daily recorded events), the Wilkit Effect has assumed greater proportions, thereby blooming into something unforeseen. Mr. Howard Pilkins of Zig-zag, Alabama, and Miss Ilona Konrad of Pecs, Hungary, have likewise reported what began as standard Wilkit Effects but then turned into more dramatic displays of mirrored illusion. We may doubt that Mr. Pilkins actually saw his deceased grandmother dressed in a rose-coloured wedding-gown, but Miss Konrad's detailed description of the Gulya painting that suddenly came to adorn her bathroom wall surprises us, as she was otherwise unfamiliar with art of the 18th century. Curiously, both Pilkins and Konrad have reported the onset of strange and disorienting attacks of illness after their respective experiences of the Super-abundant Wilkit Effect (S-aWE). If we were to express what we have discussed mathematically, we would arrive at the following theorem:...'

Thereafter, Roger's eyes blurred horribly as he scanned alien symbols whose significance he was not capable of divining. All of the carefully arranged X's and Y's and %'s smoothed together into a pulpy mush of confusion. Exasperatingly, he could not recall if his illness had begun before or after he had first observed the Wilkit Effect. Before leaving the library he consulted one final book.

'Hrath Gulya - The Man, the Paintings' was the only relevant title available, and a slim volume at that. His fingers blundered through the glossy colour reproductions until they rested at the very one he had seen in his mirror such a short time ago. A thorough examination showed it to be identical, in every detail, save that the deer was facing the other way, and the forested part of the landscape was to be found on the left-hand side, not the right. On the opposing page, Roger read the following-

'...and yet, however, what strikes us in Gulya foremost is that which is conspicuously lacking. The artist consciously omits innovation, invention... creation, even, one might say, replicating a stock assortment of pedestrian images that in lesser (i.e. more one-dimensional) hands would result in mere sentimental humbuggery. And it is precisely in this self-censorship that lies the genius of Gulya's craft. One is forever aware of the percolating mastery that is persistently withheld from the surface of the canvas, forever denied the art admirer's searching gaze. And thereby the viewer is liberated from the conventional hierarchy of artist and audience... one is in fact blissfully at liberty to create the substance of the implied, unexecuted painting for oneself, unrestrained. Gulya's real paintings, then, achieve perfection in the whirling infinity of their non-existence.'

Roger's eyes shot back and forth in his skull. He absent-mindedly replaced the book in a hole in the Selenography section and left the wanton confusion of the library, vowing not to return.

On the reeking flight of stairs leading to the door of his apartment, Roger stopped to feel the temperature of his forehead with the back of his hand. He found it to be radiating a sickly warmth. Moreover, there was an odd rattling inside the cranium like a gourd containing a few dried beans, and the vein below his right ear felt as though it were threatening to burst.

The key turned, the door swung open on faultless hinges, and Roger was at once assailed by a smell like that of a great accumulation of mouldering books. His room was filled with a thousand monarch butterflies, a hopeless, breathless, utterly silent cacophony of fluttering that did not even disturb the leaden air of the apartment. A hundred or so had found the encyclopedias and were diligently chewing holes in them with the aid of little mandibles. Roger felt a trembling in his heart as the little creatures all lifted ceiling-ward in unison. The pounding of his pulse resonated through the whole of his disease-enfeebled body, with the shadow of his fever hanging over it all. He grasped at the left, then the right side of his chest, trying to feel the thump of his distressed heart behind the collision of bones, and then his legs gave way and he fell helplessly to the shallow carpet, either dead or in an exhausted faint.
 

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Soren Alberto Gauger is a Canadian writer who has been living 5 years in Krakow, Poland, working as a translator, essayist and lecturer. His fiction (will) appear in the Capilano Review, Snow Monkey, Spork, Jacob's Ladder, Judy, etc. At the end of 2003, Ravenna Press will put out a chapbook, Quatre Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus, in which of 4 of his stories reside. His first book-size collection, Hymns to Millionaires, will be published via the American-run Twisted Spoon Press (Prague) in 2004.

 

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