In Glass

A

fter she disappeared, leaving behind a band at the height of their popularity and a final album that would make Best Of lists for years to come, Julia Bryce went to Guam. She threw herself off the Golden Gate Bridge and washed up miles down the coast a few days later, her eyes eaten by crabs. She received extensive plastic surgery and became a state senator under an assumed name. She took flying lessons and crashed her plane into the side of a mountain, leaving nothing behind but metal and smoke.

Paul has heard all the theories. Some he stumbles upon, and some people tell him—weirdos, usually, their faces glossy with obsession, their hands plucking at his coat sleeves. Over the years, he has learned to recognize the signs, detect the mania in their body language. At this point he can look around a room and pinpoint the person who will approach him later and whisper news of some recent sighting. She was on a boat in Panama. She was selling oranges at Chelsea Market. She is part of a traveling exhibition of human remains, her face split down the middle and peeled neatly away on either side to expose her exquisite skull.

He can never decide which theory he likes best, although he suspects the state senator one will win the day. He stares into the mirror as he shaves and imagines Julia boarding private jets, shaking hands with foreign diplomats. It’s better than the alternative.

Paul doesn’t like to think about the person he was back when he met Julia. He’s always been an asshole—he’s got dozens of ex-friends, a few ex-girlfriends, and two ex-wives who will tell you that in no uncertain terms—but in those days he was an asshole’s asshole, the kind of man who would start a fight before he finished his first drink. He does that less now, which is not to say he never does it.

He was drunk, and there was a party. He saw a dark-haired girl across the room, stumbled through the crowd, and said something so vile to her that he still can’t remember it without slipping under a nauseating wave of shame.

The girl was furious. The anger did not show on her face—her expression, he would later learn, was always placid and calm except in moments of intense pain or joy—but he could feel the steam of it curling off her shoulders.

She didn’t hit him, though. Instead she took a deep breath, leaned toward him, and said, “Okay. You’re an asshole.”

This was presented as a statement of fact, one that didn’t particularly interest her. That had bothered Paul. The point of being an asshole was getting people interested.

“What are you going to do about it?” he asked, and gave her the toothy grin he’d perfected for moments like this. The person on its receiving end would be either cowed or enraged by the cocky, gleaming whiteness of it. They smiled back, or they took aim.

But the girl just shrugged and said, “Let me know how that works out for you.” Then she turned around and disappeared into the crowd, a pale wisp of cloud blowing into nothingness.

Paul fully expected never to see her again. He was surprised, therefore, when he opened his door the next day and saw her standing there, rumpled and hungover.

“I thought I should give you a chance to prove me wrong,” Julia said. Her smile was brief and spare, the barest curve of her thin lips.

He never did figure out how she got his address. It is one of the many things he does not know about her.

Paul can’t remember when he brought up the fact that he played guitar. It might have been that first day as they sat in a cafe and made wary conversation over steaming cups of black coffee; it might have been sometime later, when they’d become more comfortable with each other and she had more or less forgiven him. But he remembers Julia’s response, the way her eyes had sparked and burned, the conspiratorial way she had leaned forward in her seat.

“We should start a band,” she said.

The rest was not history. Paul hates that phrase, the way it writes off the meat of a story with a waved hand. History is a complicated and fascinating thing; history cannot be easily dismissed. The history that he and Julia built together—and Tate and Oliver, when they found them—was one of late nights and bad food, screaming fights in sound booths and moments onstage when they thrummed with the ecstatic perfection of their union.

So: the rest was not history. But the rest followed.

Really, Paul thinks that the word “disappear” gives the whole thing more dramatic weight than it deserves. Security footage showed Julia checking into a hotel one night, her huge black sunglasses and stick-thin arms giving her the air of a fragile, exotic insect, then going upstairs to her room. No shadowy figures appeared to abduct her. No crazed fan descended on her with a gun. As far as anyone knows, she simply stepped through the door of her suite and into nothing.

Paul has watched that footage more often than he will ever admit to anyone. In the few first days he played it over and over again, each time hoping to see something new—a gesture, a look—that would explain it to him somehow, make it all make sense.

“People don’t just drop off the face of the earth for no reason,” Tate said to him once, shortly after it happened. They were still talking then, just barely. “There must have been something wrong.”

It was meant to be of all of them, that picture, but the photographer cropped the rest of the band out. Paul doesn’t blame him. The photo had been nothing much to look at when featured all of them; when it was Julia alone, you couldn’t stop looking.

And Paul agrees, and so does everyone else, which is why every few years he’ll be in a bookstore or a supermarket and see a picture of her on the cover of some music magazine or other. They always use the same photograph, one from a shoot they did in the early '90s: Julia in white, hands empty, stark shadows beneath her eyes and collarbones. It was meant to be of all of them, that picture, but the photographer cropped the rest of the band out. Paul doesn’t blame him. The photo had been nothing much to look at when featured all of them; when it was Julia alone, you couldn’t stop looking. That’s why the magazines use it, he supposes, even though by the time Julia left her hair was different and her eyebrows were thinner and her face had a hungrier look.

It is always a profound shock to him to see her out in the world, rather than his mind. The black freckle on the side of her nose always startles him. The Julia that lives in his memories doesn’t have it. Sometimes when he’s a few drinks in he wonders how many other details he has forgotten, what other tiny, perfect things he will never see again.

Only a few clips of the band playing live remain, but there is one he has bookmarked on his laptop. The footage is grainy and the camera bobs up and down so violently it makes him seasick, but he likes the way it feels like he is his own audience, both spectator and spectacle. Julia stands at the front of the stage, one hand reaching out to caress the microphone, and he can just hear the sweet rasp of her voice over the noise of the crowd. The song is one of their early ones, but the show is from the late '90s. Close to the end.

“In glass,” she sings, “in glass, in glass I find myself, but never you.”

In the comment section he finds more theories, more conspiracies. She’s in Berlin running a sex club that specializes in erotic reimaginings of the Stations of the Cross. She walked into Epping Forest and swallowed foxglove. She never disappeared at all, and the band has been releasing albums all these years under a different name. He gives that one a thumbs up, wishing like hell it was the truth.

There’s a trick you can do with mirrors. You stand before one in the dark, alone or with friends, and repeat a chant meant to summon some ghost or spirit. The most famous of these is Bloody Mary.

Julia had done the Bloody Mary trick at a party once. She told him about it once in the early days, the two of them pressed up close to the bar and nursing the weak beer that the club owner had offered them in lieu of pay. Oliver and Tate were a few seats away. Even in those days there had been a split down the middle of the band: Julia and Paul on one side, everyone else on the other.

“I was nine, I think,” Julia said, half-shouting to be heard over the band they’d opened for only half an hour before. Her hands, he recalls, were trembling violently, as they always did after a show. “It was at a slumber party. Not mine, someone else’s.”

Paul tried to picture Julia as a nine-year-old, with braids and a sleeping bag under her arm, and failed utterly.

“The girl whose party it was, May, she loved that shit,” Julia went on. “Ghost stories, horror movies, Halloween, whatever. She was always the one to suggest we do ‘light as a feather, stiff as a board,’ even though it never worked. She had a Ouija board, too. We only got to use that once before one of the girls told her mom about it. Turned out that her family went to one of those crazy churches where you speak in tongues. They called May’s mother, and she had to throw the Ouija board away. It was brand new.” Julia shook her head, as though she still mourned the loss.

“Did it work?” Paul asked.

“Nah,” she replied. “The Bloody Mary thing … that was before the board. I can’t remember whose idea it was. It might have been mine. But May pounced on it.”

Paul watched Julia’s hands. They were surprisingly square, those hands, especially in contrast to the elegant lankiness of her body, and they held her beer a little more tightly than they needed to. Slight dents appeared beneath her fingertips, prints melting into the condensation on the aluminum.

“We turned off the movie we were watching,” she said, “and went into her bathroom. It was tiny, just a toilet and a sink, but there was a mirror in there, so we figured it would do the trick.”

Later that night, when they were both less sober, they crowded into the men’s bathroom together and flicked off the light, chanting 'Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary' until the bouncer threw them out.

The band they had opened for finished one song and started another with minimal fuss. Paul glanced at them over his shoulder and felt a curious mix of jealousy and pride. They had opened for these people, had played second fiddle to them and most likely would again—it was a small town, a small scene, one they had yet to break out of. But he already knew that their band was better. He and Julia had owned that stage. These people were just standing on it.

“So what happened?” he asked, turning away again.

Julia shrugged. “We turned off the light. Said a few words, watched the mirror. Of course, someone said that they saw something, and we screamed, and then we started laughing, and then May’s mother came downstairs and yelled at us. Turned out there was a vent in that bathroom that went right into the master bedroom.” She paused, then added, “Bloody Mary was real, you know. Mary the First. She burned Protestants at the stake.”

She leaned back and tossed the rest of her beer down her throat, and Paul watched the line of it as she swallowed, her skin painted blue and red from the stage lights. Later that night, when they were both less sober, they crowded into the men’s bathroom together and flicked off the light, chanting “Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary” until the bouncer threw them out.

Music journalists still ask Paul about Julia, especially when the anniversary of her disappearance comes around. They call him, or email him, or DM him—he is no fogey, he knows what a DM is and how to answer it—and pester him for details about what they insist on calling “her last days.” Was she emotional, volatile? Was she unusually calm? Did she give away possessions, or withdraw from loved ones?

Answering these questions is humiliating, because the honest response to most of them is “I don’t know.” He does not remember if she withdrew, gave things away, cried more or less, because at that point he was so wrapped up in himself that he barely noticed what Julia was doing. So he usually tells whoever is asking to fuck off, then hangs up. Or hits send, which is never as satisfying.

What he really remembers about those days is drinking. Before shows, after, during. He had drinks to fall asleep at night, drinks to wake up in the morning, drinks to get him through the tedious slog of interviews, photo shoots, meet and greets. His life stayed afloat on a sea of alcohol.

It’s not that different now, he supposes. He still drinks to wake up and to fall asleep, although he has switched to red wine instead of gin, because it supposedly has antioxidant properties and the men in his family are prone to prostate cancer. He tells his old manager Ryan this during one of his increasingly rare visits, and the guy laughs at him, actually laughs.

“That’s if you drink in moderation, Paul,” he says. “Not if you black out every night.”

And so Paul tells him to fuck off too, because he doesn’t black out every night. Blackouts are for weekends. During the week he keeps it to less than a bottle a day, and he buys the good stuff. That has to count for something.

Ryan is the only one who visits. After Julia left, their drummer Tate went a little crazy, became a Christian, renounced the evils of pop culture and the devil’s music. He has a podcast now. Paul downloads an episode of it and listens to about five minutes of the guy railing against promiscuity and drug use before deleting it, appalled by the hypocrisy.

“You remember what he was like when we were on tour,” he says to Ryan during another visit. “If he couldn’t snort it or smoke it, he’d fuck it. Where does he get off?”

He hopes that Ryan will nod and agree, but he just shrugs. “I guess if anyone would know about the danger of sex and drugs, it’s him,” he says, and Paul tells him to fuck off again.

Journalists occasionally ask about Paul’s career, too. When this happens, he does not tell them to fuck off. Instead he tells them about all the projects he’s been involved with since the band: the movie and television scores, the features on other people’s records, the solo album he’s had on the shelf since 2008. It’s not that no one is interested in it, he assures them, it’s just not the right time to release it.

It’s crap, is the truth. The first time he listened to the whole thing from beginning to end, he was appalled to hear the cliches he’d employed in his lyrics, the passionless arrangements of his songs, the weakness of his voice when it rang out without Julia’s to prop it up. Without her, he is not an artist. He’s just a drunk who can play guitar.

There are 11 guitars in the living room of his condo, acoustic and electric, standing at attention in a long metal rack. Behind them is a mirror that takes up the whole length of the wall. It was not a feature he particularly liked when he bought the place—the previous owner purchased it from a dance studio and installed it himself—but removing it alone is impossible, and he doesn’t want to deal with the hassle and expense of paying someone to take it away. He takes his morning and evening wine on the couch opposite the mirror every day, watching himself swallow and sip. He notes the bald patch on his crown that seems to get bigger every day, the belly spilling over the top of his jeans, the creases radiating from the corners of his mouth and eyes.

Above the couch hangs a blown-up version of the band’s first big magazine cover. A young Paul stares out of its tasteful silver frame, blue eyes made bluer by retouching. He is angular, sharp-jawed, poised and lithe. Julia stands just slightly behind him, as if she wants him to shield her from the photographer. But there is no fear in her eyes, only the mildest curiosity.

That is the version of himself he recognizes, the one on the cover of the magazine, the one standing next to Julia. The one in the mirror is nobody at all. Just some old man, drinking himself to death.

In hindsight, it’s a little odd that he and Julia never slept together. Everyone assumed that they had, or would, or were currently doing so; they noted the way they pressed their foreheads together as they leaned over to sing into the same microphone, the hard and fast lock of their eyes across a crowded room, the casual way they laid hands on one another, and came to the obvious conclusion. But it never happened.

They were not just friends. Paul could think of Julia as many things, but he could not think of her as his friend.

This was not to say that their relationship was platonic. They had kissed on more than one occasion, usually while drunk. They had slept curled around one another, like spoons, on others. They had fought like lovers, their closeness giving them the ability to wound with depth and precision. They were not just friends. Paul could think of Julia as many things, but he could not think of her as his friend.

There was one night, a little more than midway through the whole thing, when they found themselves stranded at some A&R guy’s miserable house party. Tate and their bassist, Oliver, had left earlier in search of greener pastures, and any friends they brought with them had fled the scene as well. They decided to make the best of things by locking themselves in an upstairs bathroom and doing an enormous quantity of cocaine. Paul didn’t like cocaine, but there was a lot of it around, and it helped pass the time.

Julia sat on the bathroom counter to watch him snort a rail, her feet gently tapping a rhythm against the cabinet beneath it. Her back was pressed into the mirror over the sink, she and her reflection joined at the spine. The bracelets on her left arm chimed like bells whenever she moved. He came up gasping for air, still feeling the sting of the powder in the back of his throat, and she smiled and reached out to tangle her fingers in his hair. It had been long then, and thick. He’d been young, still.

“Any left?” she asked. The lights over the mirror were the kind that made everything look softer and prettier than it was. Beneath them Julia looked romantic, her pale skin touched with gold, her hair a deeper black. Her thinness was less startling than it was in the real world, the hollows of her cheeks less prominent. Even the jutting shelf of her collarbone looked soft, as though it might actually be covered in flesh instead of just skin.

Driven by impulse, Paul leaned forward and pressed his mouth to it. The bone was hard beneath his lips.

Julia’s response to this was a long, slow intake of breath, almost a hiss, and then she was pulling him up by the hair and pressing her mouth to his, all teeth and heat. Her legs folded around him and drew him in, their hips slotting violently together as she clutched at him, her nails digging deep into his scalp. It would hurt later, he knew, but he didn’t care, he couldn’t, not when Julia’s tongue was in his mouth, not when he could feel her pulse beating in her lips. His fingers grazed the hem of her t-shirt, then slid beneath it, and he devoured the rough silk of her skin with his hands.

She pulled away from his mouth a little, just enough so that there was an inch of air between them, and she whispered, “I saw something in the mirror.”

He started, looking behind her. There was nothing there, just his own reflection staring back at him with wild eyes made wilder by pinpoint pupils.

“Not today,” she clarified, breathless and amused. “Not here. In the hotel, last week. I was getting out of the shower, right before soundcheck, and I saw something. Through the steam.”

“Yourself, probably,” Paul replied, struggling to speak through a dense fog of want. He pressed himself close to her, trying to catch her mouth, but it evaded him.

“It wasn’t my reflection,” she said, and a little smile wavered across her face. “The light was off. I shower in the dark, these days.”

“Then how could you see anything?” Paul did not understand why they were having this conversation, why their lips had parted. He wanted to keep kissing her, to let his hands continue roaming up her shirt. It would be crossing a line, he knew. If he kept touching her he would not stop, and God, he didn’t want to. He could imagine the relief of sinking into her, seeing the pink flush rise on her chest as they—

“I don’t know,” she said, and the fact that she was speaking so calmly, was so clearly unmoved by what had just happened, suddenly made him want to scream. “But I could. It was just a shape—I couldn’t make out any details. But I knew it wasn’t my shape, not my reflection. It was something else. Like Bloody Mary. Remember?”

That was the moment when someone began to pound on the door, complaining that they needed to piss. Paul wanted to tell them to fuck off and find another bathroom—it was a big house, there was bound to be one somewhere—but then Julia’s hands were on the counter and she was pushing him away with her hips, not roughly, but firmly. Paul watched as she smoothed down her hair and adjusted her shirt, aching, needing.

“We’ll be right out,” she called, then said to Paul, quietly, “That was close.”

Somehow that made Paul angrier than the painful throb of his erection. Without bothering to answer, he shoved past her and stormed out of the house, waving down a cab as he stumbled onto the street. When he got back to his place he masturbated furiously and joylessly, coming twice before falling into a thick, angry sleep. The next day he did not talk to Julia, and she did not meet his eyes. It was a month before he could look at her and not imagine her teeth sinking into his lip.

That month they wrote most of the songs that would become their third album. Their final album. Their best, if you want to believe the reviews. Every note Paul wrote that month was a paean to that vision of Julia sitting on the bathroom counter, her eyes smudged dark with kohl, the jingling of her bracelets filling the air.

Only now, older and blessed with the dubious wisdom granted by dozens of failed relationships and two failed marriages, does he think he understands what she meant by “that was close.” What they had, her words and his music and the way they slotted together, was better than a quick fuck in a stranger’s bathroom. If they had crossed that line, something vital and urgent between them would have been lost. She had saved them.

She saved them, but a year later she was gone, and there wasn’t a them anymore. He can’t square the two things in his head.

Oliver plays in another band now. They occasionally pop up in magazines, and the covers show him older and heavier, with a thick brown beard. In interviews he is thoughtful and serious. He talks about Alcoholics Anonymous, chainsaw sculpting, his daughter, who he credits with saving his life. “That’s who I live for,” he says, and Paul rolls his eyes even though there is no one there to see him.

Oliver never talks about Julia. Never talks about Paul, either.

Paul has no children. He never got around to wanting any, and never managed to make any accidentally, even during those first few years after Julia when he rutted with desperate abandon in hopes of forgetting her. He wonders sometimes what it would be like to have a child, something to love and protect, but he knows better than to pursue that line of thinking too far. He would not be able to take care of something helpless. He’s too helpless himself. Or hopeless, maybe.

“Hopeless” is the opinion of both of his ex-wives. Lara he married shortly after Julia, when he was looking for anyone to fill the void she’d left in his life. She looks a lot like her, he realizes in hindsight, tall and thin, dark hair, light eyes. Unlike Julia, Lara has no patience for bullshit, and it took her very little time to tire of his. She lives in Vermont now, remarried to a woman with broad hands and dimples. They send him a Christmas card every year, and the messages inside are always a little meaner than is seasonally appropriate.

The statement they made after that last leg of their last tour, when they’d hobbled along without Julia even as the investigation into her disappearance drew more and more media attention, was that they were on 'indefinite hiatus.' They never did break up. The marriage is over, but no one ever signed the papers. Sometimes that gives Paul a little kick of hope.

The second wife, Katy, is Julia’s opposite, small and fair, with a round, freckled face. She was a kind and considerate partner, always gently puzzled by his inability to remain faithful to her. Even when he eventually told her that he didn’t see anything changing and she should probably leave, she couldn’t bring herself to file for divorce. He had to be the one to do it. He resents her for that, still.

Katy still calls him sometimes, asks how he’s doing, if he’s still drinking. Every couple of years they get together for a how-you-been dinner that ends with him in her bed, or her in his. One of them usually cries afterward. It is not always Katy.

The funniest part of it all is that they’re still a band, technically. Him and Tate and Oliver. The statement they made after that last leg of their last tour, when they’d hobbled along without Julia even as the investigation into her disappearance drew more and more media attention, was that they were on “indefinite hiatus.” They never did break up. The marriage is over, but no one ever signed the papers. Sometimes that gives Paul a little kick of hope.

“Do you think they would do it?” he asks Ryan in the middle of a phone call in which they have both waxed a little too nostalgic. “If I called Oliver and Tate, I mean? Would they want to get back together?”

Ryan snorts and says, “Since when are they taking your calls?”

He doesn’t really want to get back together anyway. The crowds hadn’t responded to them at those last, sad gigs without Julia; she had been the draw, the spark, the magic. If they suddenly reunited and started another tour, no one would come. Not without her.

Still, whenever one of the journalists who calls asks about the possibility of a reunion, he toys with them a bit. He’ll throw out tantalizing maybes, hint that he would be open to the idea, muse aloud that the 25th anniversary of their third album is coming up, and if the others ever expressed interest in a reunion gig, well …

The others never do. He doesn’t blame them.

One of the last professional photographs taken of Julia shows her standing in front of a cement wall, her arms crossed and her eyes raised to show the whites beneath the irises. The angle makes her look elongated, inhuman, a shadow at sunset. Her mouth is creased in a way that could be the beginning of a frown, but the rest of her face is serene, and her eyes are laughing as though at some private joke. A single light bulb sways above her head.

Paul hates that picture more than the rest of them. Part of the reason, he will admit, is that he is not in it. That happened more and more toward the end—he and the other boys would show up to a shoot or event and find themselves gently crowded out of frame, waiting on the sidelines as the photographer pressed his lens as close to Julia’s face as he could.

He remembers resenting it the day that picture was taken, standing in a nearby corner with Tate and Oliver, taking sullen pulls off a bottle he’d smuggled into the studio. Occasionally someone would come up and introduce themselves, congratulate him for winning some award or landing some cover. Sometimes he would respond like a human being. More often he would spit an obscenity at them, and they would stumble backward as though shot, pierced through by his unwarranted aggression.

The photographer, an old man with a thick Austrian accent, was brusque and demanding. He barked instructions at Julia as though she were just another assistant in the swarm that surrounded him, tilting reflectors and adjusting lights. She looked sick, Paul realized, all her bones sticking up from beneath the skin, the red tank top and black miniskirt she wore enhancing her fragility rather than her sexuality. He looked at her, then at the photographer, and suddenly his resentment found a new target.

How dare this stranger order her around as if he knew her, as if he had a right! How dare he stand there and swallow her with his eyes, spitting out whatever he couldn’t digest!

Paul wobbled up to the photographer and told him this, and the photographer responded, and there was an altercation that ended in he and Julia running out of the venue to hail a cab, his head spinning and his lip split and bleeding all down the front of his vintage Stooges t-shirt. In the moment, he found that more distressing than the photographer’s threatened lawsuit.

The two of them did not speak in the cab. He waited for her expression to crumple into fury or disappointment, for her to start shouting so he could shout back. They hadn’t had a proper fight in months. It would do them good.

But it wasn’t until they got back to their hotel that she said anything at all. She led him into the elevator with his arm slung around her shoulder, patiently guiding his feet with her own, and nudged him along the hallway to her room. Inside, she pushed him toward her bed, where he sat with his back braced against the headboard, worried that if he lay down the world would start to tilt and spin.

She brought him a glass of water from her bathroom and stood next to the bed, watching him drink it. When he was done, she took the glass from him and said, “You need to stop this, Paul.”

“Stop what?” he muttered. By then shame had started to set in, as well as panic about what Ryan would have to say about the whole affair, but he’d kept up the sulky little boy act for this long. He felt that he ought to keep going.

“This,” she said, gesturing to him. The light from the window behind her turned her into an inscrutable silhouette. “The drinking. The fighting. You were an asshole when we met, you stopped for a while, now you’re an asshole again. Why?”

Paul didn’t know what to say to that. His head ached. His mouth stung. He wished he had more gin.

“You need to get it together,” Julia said, enunciating each word slowly and carefully. “You need to start controlling yourself. You need to act like a goddamn person! I won’t always be there to pull you off whoever you want to punch, Paul.”

There was a catch in her voice that made him sit up and pay attention. “Yes, you will,” he said. “You’ll be there. You promised.”

(And no, she had promised no such thing, but wasn’t her presence a promise in itself? If she had been there all those years, despite everything he had done, everything he continued to do, wasn’t that a sign that she would be there forever?)

Julia sighed. Her voice was very tired when she said, “I want to show you something.”

She walked into the bathroom without waiting for him. The sheets tangled around his feet as he tried to climb out of bed, and he nearly fell onto the hotel floor before catching himself on the night table and following her.

He could just make out her profile, staring intently into the mirror in front of them. When he looked in the mirror all he could see was the vague whiteness of her body beside him, her pale skin glowing a little in the dark.

The bathroom was dark, but Julia grabbed his hand when he reached for the light switch. 

“Don’t,” she said, and leaned past him to close the door. “It doesn’t work when the lights are on.”

A shameful part of him hoped for a redo of that night at the party, but Julia did not touch him. He could just make out her profile, staring intently into the mirror in front of them. When he looked in the mirror all he could see was the vague whiteness of her body beside him, her pale skin glowing a little in the dark.

The vagueness twisted and writhed, and Paul jumped. Beside him Julia was perfectly still, her breath audibly quickening.

The thing in the mirror was Julia’s reflection. He was looking at something else.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, his voice too loud in that confined space, and Julia shook her head.

“Just watch,” she said, so low he could barely hear her.

The shape was not any one thing that Paul could name. It moved like a sea creature, graceful and dreamy; its parameters shifted as it did, expanding and contracting, lengthening and shortening. It reminded Paul of the fluid mechanics of oil in water, or the slide of magma down the side of a volcano. As he watched, it nearly resolved itself into several almost-shapes before shifting again into something new. A pair of hands, the fingers greedily tangled. A tree with knotted branches and roots as intricate as a spiderweb. A bird with melting wings, the feathers drifting off into nothing. A face, ageless, sexless, its mouth wide open in a scream of horror. A woman, her skirts trailing behind her as she fell endlessly through nothing. One of Julia’s hands found his and held it tightly.

“It started out so faint I could barely see it,” she said, the merest whisper, and he remembered being small and going to church with his grandmother, how the height of the ceilings and the smell of the incense so overwhelmed him that he could not speak at a normal volume for the rest of the day. “But it’s clearer every day. Closer. And I see it all the time. Sometimes … sometimes I feel like I can reach out and touch it. Like my hand will go right through the glass and it’ll pull me in.”

“Into what?” Paul asked, but she did not answer. He felt like he could feel the intensity of her eyes locked on this strange apparition, her whole being vibrating with some strange desire he recognized but did not understand.

“Do you get it now, Paul?” she whispered. “Closer and closer every day. Who knows what’s going to happen, where I’ll be in a year or a month or tomorrow morning. So you have to be better. Do you see?”

He did not get it and he did not see, but he nodded anyway, and she gave his hand a small, grateful squeeze.

Two weeks later she was gone, and he was not better. Never would be.

Julia Bryce married a Russian mobster and bore him seven children. She took a vow of silence and wandered into the Mojave Desert alone. She started a window cleaning business in Cincinnati. She went back to school and became a criminal defence lawyer. She moved to New Zealand and lives a quiet life in the countryside with a husband who loves her, raising sheep and baking bread and hiking in the cool hours of the morning.

That last one is Paul’s own creation. Sometimes he passes it on to the people who approach him with their theories, and they walk away radiant and overwhelmed, staggering under the burden of this new information.

Only once do any of these people surprise him. It happens in New York, a city he hates but still finds himself in once or twice a year, while he is lost somewhere past 34th Street looking for a restaurant someone recommended to him. It should be impossible to get lost in New York, it’s on a fucking grid, but he manages it every time, and he is cursing out the GPS on his phone when someone taps him on the shoulder. He swings around with his fist raised, ready to attack.

But the person behind him is not a mugger, just some middle-aged woman with a touristy camera and an enormous purse. Long red hair in corkscrew curls, oversized plaid shirt in different shades of green, a soft and comfortable body. She offers him the most genuine smile he has seen all day.

“You’re Paul Ambrose, right?” she asks.

Great. “Yes,” he sighs, steeling himself for another one of those conversations. No, he doesn’t know what happened. Yes, it’s certainly a shame, she was so young, so beautiful. Oh, your favourite band in college, really? Certainly I can sign that for you. The woman recognizes his lack of enthusiasm and laughs.

“Don’t worry, man, I don’t want anything from you,” she says. The crow’s feet around her eyes give them a warm and friendly look. He wishes his did that, instead of just making him look old. “I just wanted to tell you that I know where she is. Julia, I mean.”

“Do you.” Paul knows that he sounds curt, bordering on rude, but he does not care. He is not in the mood for crazies today. He wants his goddamn lunch.

“In mirrors.”

Feedback squeals through his body, rattling his bones. He stares at her, waiting for her earnest expression to crack. It doesn’t.

“Yeah,” she says, as though she has told him something normal and easy to deal with. “I saw her in the mirror over my kitchen sink last week. Seen her in other ones, too. Just a flicker—a little flash. She looks different, like she’s losing her shape a bit. Kinda like a cloud when the wind blows different and it starts to change. But it’s her, alright. I had her poster over my bed all through my senior year, I’d recognize those eyes anywhere.”

“Mirrors,” he repeats, and the woman nods cheerfully.

“I said her name, and I thought maybe she heard me. She looked up, anyway. But then she was gone, just like that.” She snaps her fingers. “I figured you might know already, but just in case you didn’t.”

And she gives him a little salute and walks past him, taking long strides in her battered Docs. In a moment she will disappear forever.

“Wait!” Paul calls, and she turns to face him again. He does not know what the protocol is in this situation, but it seems wrong to let her just walk away after that. “I … do you want an autograph or something?”

The woman considers it for a moment, then shakes her head. “Nah. No offence, but she was the good part, you know? The rest of you were just there.”

And she sets off again, leaving Paul overwhelmed and a little offended, but only a little. Julia was the good part.

When he gets back home a few days later, it is nearly midnight. His condo is dark and smells of nothing. Abandoning his luggage by the front door, he pours himself a glass of wine without turning on the lights. He knows exactly where the corkscrew is in the cutlery drawer, and this is on his mind as he makes his way over to the couch. Surely only an alcoholic would be able to find a corkscrew in the dark.

In the dark he can barely see himself reflected in the mirror on his living room wall. The row of guitars in front of it look like the teeth of an anglerfish, jutting aggressively forward. He looks at them and finds himself seized with the desire to throw them, one by one, off the balcony. It’s an urge that has plagued him intermittently throughout the years, even back when he only had one guitar. The only time he ever actually did it was on their first European tour. It was a Les Paul, the most expensive thing he’d ever owned at that point, and after he’d tossed it through their hotel window and into the pool outside, Julia rolled her eyes at him.

“I hope you feel like a rock star, Paul,” she said, and the sight of her stretched out on her hotel bed had made him dizzy with gratitude. That she was there, that she was in the band, that she’d come to find him after that stupid party even though he’d said such hideous things to her. That she was in his life at all, by some stroke of unbelievable luck.

To see her eyes again, her slight smile, that freckle on the side of her nose. To know, finally. The thought of it makes his head swim, and he downs the rest of his wine in one long gulp.

“Julia,” he whispers, not hopeful, but hoping anyway.

For a moment he thinks he sees something in the mirror, an underwater flicker behind the vague shape of his reflection. Like a hand, reaching toward him.

Barely breathing, Paul inches forward in his seat, but when he tries to place his empty glass on the coffee table he misses. It hits the ground and shatters like a melody, minute pieces skidding across the living room floor. A slight movement of his bare right foot results in a shard piercing his heel, a howl of pain, precious minutes spent digging it out with his fingers.

When he looks up again the flicker is gone. It is just him, alone in the room.