Mirror World

When you’re old, you either accept it with grace, grow incredibly bored, or you begin the slow process of losing your mind. Sometimes, all three can occur at once. Rare, but possible.

Khichar finds himself identifying most with the loss of mind. He can never remember where any of his glasses are, and he has at least eight of them. Try as he might, he also can never remember the names of any of his lovers.

“Stacey? You look like a Stacey.” Says Khichar, looking up blearily from his bed.

“I’m not your one-night stand.” Says Ren Qigang.

Khichar sits up, rubbing his face.

“No, you’re right. Not Stacey. Stacey was much prettier than you, in a willowy sort of way. What was it…? Benson? Galileo? Ah, my head hurts. I’ve had too much to drink.”

Ren Qigang glares at him in a disgusted sort of way.

“My name is Ren Qigang. We spoke the previous night and the night before that. You said you would tell me about the Mirror Angels.”

Khichar looks at the mirror by his bed, and neither of them is reflected in it. His memories are starting to come back to him.

“Give it up.” He says, flopping back down onto his bed and closing his eyes. “You’ll never win with those bastards.”

“That’s not what they seem to believe.” Says Ren Qigang.

“Oh, what do they know? Adam is gone. He’s probably trapped in some little mirror with cartoon characters on it, previously owned by a small child, and now it’s hidden away in some attic.”

“I don’t think they had those 1000 years ago.”

“Ah, fuck me. Wrong era. How could I forget? I really am losing it, aren’t I? First the glasses, now this. Could I trouble you for that bottle over there?”

“If we’re going to drink, let’s do it at a pub. Your apartment reeks of terrible perfume.”

“What pub will be open at this time in the morning?”

“It’s 5 in the afternoon, Khichar.”

“Ah. Right.”

They sit at the bar, Khichar nursing a whiskey and Ren Qigang sipping a beer.

“You a lightweight?” Khichar asks.

“I didn’t come here for small talk. Tell me about the angels.” Ren Qigang replies.

“No one wants to small talk anymore. It’s all serious stuff. I miss when the most important thing to me was the weather. Oh, lovely, it’s sunny. Oh, no, it’s raining and I can’t have a picnic. Times were simpler then.” Khichar complains.

“Things are about to get a lot more complicated if you don’t tell me what you know about these angels.”

“I was the first one,” Khichar says. “The first to ever enter a mirror world, you know? Adam showed me how. But he couldn’t do it himself. He couldn’t enter the mirror worlds, I mean. Only me. We didn’t know why.”

“He must not have had a near-death experience like you.” Says Ren Qigang.

“That’s exactly what the angels told us when they first arrived,” Khichar replies.

“But why did you enter if you had no reason to? We all go to the mirror worlds to look for Adam now, but what were you looking for?”

“The one piece of knowledge no one has.” Says Khichar. “The forbidden fruit.”

Khichar tosses back his whiskey and slowly sets the empty glass on the countertop. The orange remnants of the drink look red in the setting sunlight.

“We were looking for the key to immortality,” He says.