Fractured Obsession: Dark Mirror

Dark Mirror A Novel Contents Chapter 1: The Second Chair I keep a clean apartment. People say that like it's a small thing, a personality quirk you mention on a first date to seem low maintenance, but I mean it as a fact about how I have arranged my survival. Everything I own has a place, and everything in its place has a reason, and if you moved one item six inches to the left I would know before I could tell you how. The mugs face the same way in the cupboard, handles at four o'clock. The shoes by the door are squared to the baseboard. There are two chairs at my table and I have never, in three years, needed the second one. The rituals are load bearing. I fill the kettle to the same line each morning, the small dent in the metal where the water should stop, and I warm the cup first with a splash from the tap so the coffee does not lose two degrees to cold ceramic, and I rinse that splash and set the cup at the right of the machine, handle out, so my hand finds it without my eyes. None of this is fussiness. Fussiness is decoration. This is structure. A day is a long corridor of small decisions, and I have already made every one of mine, sanded every corner a stray choice could catch on, so that when I walk the corridor I do not have to feel it. I only have to move through it, arriving at each hour already knowing what the hour holds. People think a life like that must be a cage. They have never lived in the other kind. They have never known what it is to wake without a corridor, in a room with no already made decisions in it, and have to build the whole day from nothing while something you cannot name watches you from just behind your own eyes. This is not sad. I want to be clear about that at the start, because I've watched people decide it's sad on my behalf, their faces doing the soft thing, and I have learned to head it off. It is not sad to want 1 less. It is efficient. A life with fewer moving parts is a life with fewer places for something to go wrong, and I have organized mine down to almost nothing, which means almost nothing can. My name is Brooke. I'm twenty nine. I reconcile accounts for a midsized logistics company, which means I spend my days making sure that what a spreadsheet says happened is what actually happened, that the number here matches the number there, that money which is supposed to exist does, that the story the ledger tells is true. I am good at it. I am good at it the way some people are good at holding their breath: not because it's pleasant but because I've had a great deal of practice, and because the alternative frightens me more than the discomfort. The morning I want to tell you about began the way they all begin. My alarm at 6:15. Water, then coffee, then the shower running hot enough to hurt a little, which is the only luxury I permit myself and the only pain I choose. I dressed in the clothes I'd laid out the night before, I always lay them out the night before; a decision made in advance is a decision that can't ambush you, and I went into the kitchen to make my second coffee before the walk to the train. And there was a glass in the sink. I stood and looked at it for what was probably a long time. A water glass, one of the four I own, sitting in the basin with maybe an inch of water gone cloudy at the bottom, a faint clouded ring where the level had been and dropped. Used. Rinsed halfway and abandoned. I don't drink water from a glass at night. I keep a bottle by the bed, blue cap, and I fill it from the tap before I sleep, and in the morning I rinse it and turn it upside down on the rack to dry. This is not a preference. It is a system, and the system does not produce a glass in the sink, because the glass is not part of the system, the 2 glass has no reason to be there, and I stood in my clean kitchen in my pressed clothes and felt the first cold thread of something I did not yet have a name for. I told myself I'd used it. Obviously I'd used it. I'd gotten up in the night, thirsty, half asleep, and I'd taken a glass instead of the bottle, and I'd drunk from it and left it, the way ordinary people leave a glass in a sink and think nothing of it, the way a person who is not counting would never even file the event. That's what I told myself, and I rinsed it and put it in the rack, and I made my coffee, and the whole time some quiet clerk in the back of my mind was writing it down in a ledger I didn't know I kept, because the thing about a glass in the sink is that I could not remember getting up. Not a fragment. Not the cool of the floor or the dark of the hall or the tap running. There was the night, and there was the alarm, and between them there was the clean, sealed nothing I had come to think of as sleep. I had always been proud of my sleep, if you can be proud of a thing you do not experience. Other people described their nights to me the way they described their dreams, full of texture and interruption, the two in the morning waking, the churn of the unfinished day. I had none of that.