Brandon wishes he could grow up faster, and thanks to his bedroom mirror, he does.
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| Image generated with OpenAI |
The boy stood in front of his tall, slim, wall-mounted bedroom mirror, grinning like he would for a picture. The jittery adrenaline of childhood wouldn’t let him linger there long. He stood on his tiptoes, tall as he might be next year, stretching towards eagerly anticipated growth. In his peacocking, he slipped and fell forward, right into the glass.
Except the glass accepted him like water, and he slipped through to the other side, leaving silver ringlets circling outwards from the point of contact. He fell onto the floor of the bedroom in the mirror. Wide-eyed, he looked around at his new world, exactly like his old world, exactly what he had seen in the reflection. The mirror still shimmered behind him, casting dancing light.
“Brandon! Dinner!” came his mom’s voice from downstairs. But it wasn’t his mom’s voice, because this wasn’t his upstairs. This was Twin Upstairs, and that was Twin Mom. He panicked, pivoted, and bolted head-first back through the mirror.
It was fortunately as forgiving on the return trip as it had been on the original journey, and he landed in a pile back on the bedroom floor that was actually his.
He stood up and dusted off, but realized his legs didn’t feel the same under him as they had before – longer and wobbly. He turned back to the mirror to discover with a shock that he was staring at a newly minted teenager, long and lanky, pimple-faced, still wearing a boyishly backwards LA Dodgers baseball cap and clothes he had outgrown.
He thought about that moment in his childhood years ago and realized that he now had all the memories appropriate to a boy who had grown up at the normal pace in a normal world. He had clearly lurched forward in time, but he could remember his life as if it had passed at the speed that time should. It had all gone by in a flash. Unbothered, he looked at how satisfyingly tall he had become. He flexed.
The time would come, he imagined, when he was not a boy but a man. He would be bigger. He would know women. He would have money.
“Brandon! Dinner!” Real Mom called.
After dinner and a regimen of homework, he returned to the mirror to consider prophetically what the coming Brandon might look like. It occurred to him that he could repeat the exercise. He held tentative, extended fingers out towards the mirror. Again, it made water-surface circles where he touched it.
He stepped through.
This time, on the other side, he began to explore. All details of the room were the same – red-earth stained socks hanging over a chair, worksheets and rainbowed spiral notebooks spilled across the floor, an unmade bed. Twin Clock reported that it was Twin 7:30. He ventured into the hallway and downstairs. His sister, this other one, was watching Family Ties, and Dad was asleep on the couch.
“Did we win our game on Saturday, Mom?” He thought he would assess the history of this other world, but forgot to consider how the question would come across.
“What on earth are you talking about, Brandon?” she asked. “The game you were in?”
“Um… yeah.”
“Of course you did! Did you forget?” She seemed honestly concerned.
“Never mind.”
He milled around, discovering that everything in this mirror world was much the same as his actual home, until it dawned on him that he could have a Twin rocky road ice cream, which he scooped for himself from the kitchen freezer.
“Didn’t you already have one?” his mother asked.
“Oh,” he said, again only beginning to register the fact that if everything were the same here, he needed to act less like a space explorer on an uncharted planet and more like a citizen. “Yeah.”
“Brandon!”
It then struck him that if he was toying around with Twin Earth, that implied there must be a Twin Brandon who passed through the mirror in the opposite direction at the same time he had arrived. Which meant there was potentially some interloper tooling around with his personal belongings in his own room.
He darted back upstairs. In the mirror, the other him stared back, copying his every move. He wondered if it had the same thoughts and could only do exactly the same things, except in reverse. Just before he walked back through, he looked at the clock and realized that it still said 7:30. No time had passed in this mirror world.
He edged back carefully this time, and Twin Brandon passed him on the way.
Much had changed.
In the other bedroom, the clock said it was midafternoon. The room was different. The mess was gone; it had been cleaned up. He turned and looked at the mirror again and was shocked at what he saw.
In the mirror was now a young man wearing a Cal State Fullerton jersey. All the memories landed upon him at once, everything that had transpired since he was younger. He looked in the mirror and realized how fast time had gone by.
A noticeably grayer dad stuck his head in the bedroom door. “Need help packing, Bud?”
“Nah, I’m good.”
“Well, just let me know.” His father beamed. “We sure are proud of you.”
“Dad?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m going to take this mirror with me.”
The mirror hung on the interior of a dorm room door, then it moved to a fraternity a year later.
One day, he stood in front of it in his first real business suit, tailored to complement his now robust shoulders, tapered at the waist, cuffs crisp at his ankles.
“Sharp!” one of his housemates chirped, passing by in the hall. He was interviewing for an internship at Electronic Arts, a connection his roommate’s family had helped him snag. Almost guaranteed. If it went well, he was on his way to an all-expenses paid orientation in Orlando. Maybe one day he would be the CEO of Disney.
He wondered.
Locking the door, he stepped through the mirror. The room on the other side was the same. He could hear the same music pounding through the ceiling; so it didn’t take him back to the mirror home of his childhood – it followed him wherever he went. The portal was mobile.
He pivoted and looked at himself from the other side. He savored the moment – the course that lay before him with everything he needed, so advantaged, so prepared for life. He wanted to freeze this euphoric spot in time, stay here forever. The glowing red clock on the desk next to him said that he could. He felt his slow, deep breath and smiled. This moment was perfect, but only because of what the future held, and he couldn’t resist returning to that blossoming story.
When he strode back to the other side, he found himself looking into the eyes of a man in his late twenties, recently married, but also startlingly, abruptly unemployed. For the first time, the mirror wasn’t where he had left it. It was now in a house. A house with a big mortgage, he was suddenly reminded. This wasn’t right. Behind him was not the frat house decor of a glowing, neon beer sign and concert posters, but a tastefully arranged country home style bedroom, softly lit, with a woeful looking wife slumped on the bed behind him.
“What did they say?”
He shrugged like he didn’t know. He knew.
“They said I was late too much. I’m not focused. Or whatever. I guess.”
“You told them it’s ADD, right? Don’t they have to offer accommodations or something?”
His face was blank and his eyes were empty. “They said this isn’t school anymore.”
When she went to bed, he hovered around the mirror. He stared into it and reflected on the itinerary that had gotten him here – the pine-scented backyard of his childhood home, heart-searing track meets, a nervous first kiss, two mighty graduations, that proud opening handshake when he was brought on-board, the pomp and anxiety of his wedding. Already all behind him. He remembered when thirty-year-old men in business suits had seemed ancient to him, and now he was old to that teen Brandon’s eyes. He wondered how he had arrived here so quickly.
Every mirror is a guerrilla hourglass.
The next time he stepped through was to relish a moment of seeing his little baby playing in a crib behind him, to make it last. He stayed with her an hour on the other side. When he returned, she was ten and running out the door.
Then he tried to freeze time when his wife was bowling-ball-round with their second one, and again at a birthday, and later for a graduation. He stopped time for a family reunion, for a promotion, for a publication. He wanted everything to slow down. Time consumed him as he chased it, the ouroboros.
He paused it every time he looked in the mirror and hardly recognized himself. He tried to hold onto the moments of grace in which he felt a sense of transcendent blessings. But each time he returned to his own world, he had lost so much. The present moment was always the Medusa turning the approaching future into a statuary of frozen memories. On this one, Perseus’ trick would not work.
There were adverse side-effects of the time travel that his family picked up on before he did.
He returned from a transworld journey. “Dad, you look ridiculous!” his daughter chided him.
“What?”
“Those shorts.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“No one wears those anymore!”
His world-shifting had made him miss out on the more subtle points of fashion, and though styles had changed, his had not.
“If they were good enough for my granddad, they’re good enough for me,” he joked.
“Maybe we need to go shopping.”
He successfully avoided ever doing so.
Another time, his bright-eyed grandson said to him, “Grampa, this music is old.”
“The Eighties was the best decade in human history, Jimmy.”
“Eighties?”
There is something that only grandfathers understand about the inoffensive purity of toying with a child’s naivete. It is both diabolical and angelic at the same time, a craft for one who is simultaneously a devout saint and determined sinner.
“The Eighties. Historians say that we will never again have a decade as good as the Eighties, and many of them say we should give up trying.” He turned up the volume. “That’s why you need to know who John Cougar Mellencamp is.”
Seven-year-old Jimmy did not know what a historian was or how decades worked, but he was sure his grandfather was the most knowledgeable man there was.
“You don’t have to turn the dial,” Jimmy said.
“What?”
“To the music. Just tell it.” He turned to the speakers. “Astrid. Volume five.” The music got louder.
“Who is Astrid?” asked Grandfather Brandon, lost in time as he was.
Then came a lump. Then a diagnosis. Shortened breath. Sleeplessness. A teetering between worry and resolve.
She would watch him through the window when he went out, like she hadn’t done since they were first married.
One day, on a walk, she grabbed his hand firmly. It had been some time since she had done that too.
“I don’t know what to do,” she whispered.
“This is how life goes,” he said, as if he were narrating a documentary.
“I want to go first.”
“Can’t help you there.”
That night, he tucked her into bed and kissed her forehead.
“Are you not sleeping?” she asked.
“Not yet.”
“Don’t stay up late.”
She drifted off while he read a book, one that he had still been able to find printed on paper, solid in his hands.
Then it occurred to him.
He walked through the mirror one last time. On the other side, he went and gently nudged his sleeping Mirror Wife. “Kimberly, wake up.”
“What is it?”
“Come sit with me. I’ll show you.”
She shook the fresh sleep from her eyes and waited as blood and air rushed back to their proper places, at least enough that she could stand.
“Are you ok?”
“Come here.”
He guided her over to the mirror, in front of which he had placed two of the kitchen chairs, side by side.
“Sit.”
“What are we doing?”
“Sit,” he said. “Look at us.”
She took a deep breath, indulging what she thought might be one of his philosophical whims, and sat beside him.
“See how time is frozen?”
“Time is what?”
“Right now. Time is frozen.” She looked at the two of them looking back at the two of them. He was right. The stillness of the moment felt like it couldn’t be ruffled. She reached out and took his hand and tried to hold onto him and onto time. “I think maybe we can just stop it and stay here forever,” he said.
She yielded with grief to the idea that this was some sweet, acceptable kind of decline. “Ok,” she agreed. They sat for a long time. Nothing moved. Nothing changed. Eventually he felt sleepy, but he wasn’t going back through to the other side to go to bed. He wasn’t going to let time start up again. He leaned over and placed his head in her lap. She ran her fingers through the thin wisp of hair that still remained.
“I love you,” he said.
She held her breath.
In the morning, he was gone. She climbed out of bed to find that he had passed gently in his sleep. Except something strange had happened. Apparently, before he went, he got up in the middle of the night and rearranged the furniture. She found him at the foot of the bed. Just before he died, he had leaned over and placed his head in the seat of an empty chair.
