Free Adeline by Norah Vincent

sheer pleasure of watching it shatter like the looking glass itself might once have done had I had the gall to put my little head through it. Except that shattering is not actually what happened. It was a transformation far more subtle and strange, a sort of liquefying, I would say, as if the glass had dissolved into quicksilver.”
    “Hmm,” Leonard interjects a little breathlessly from his perch, where he is wrestling free a tangled branch. “That
is
strange.”
    “Yes, I thought so. Anyhow, that is how it came through. It was as if I had stumbled upon an entirely new way of seeing. And when I say seeing, I mean not only the incident in the past, but the whole, the absolute whole of everything. There I was, seeking it without knowing, and then, well—then it simply came.”
    Leonard makes another murmur of interest, like an accompanist punctuating a singer’s voice, though this time he seems to be taking the matter in. He has frozen with the shears in the act of making a cut, and lowered his head thoughtfully.
    Seeing that he has stopped, she says, “This is where it gets a bit involved.”
    “All right,” he says, snipping off the branch and tossing it to the ground. “Try me, then.” Raising his arms again above his head and grasping the tree so that he can lean back and turn himself all the way round on the stepladder to face her, he adds, “I’m listening.”
    She smiles fondly at him. She has decided to abandon the dying cigarette at last, and snuffs it between her thumb and finger, enjoying the mild sear of it on the stained, toughened skin of her fingertips.
    “I saw at once,” she says, “in that image of myself as a child, looking at myself in the looking glass, the revised vision of myself as an adult. Do you see?”
    Leonard nods, but he is clearly not seeing, and she shakes her head.
    “No. I have said this far too simply. It was more than that. Much, much more than that.”
    Leonard is wise enough to say nothing, but his eyes are fixed expectantly on her.
    “How can I explain this properly?” she says. “I saw myself, you understand. I was there. A person of surfaces in the glass. But then, dizzyingly, ecstatically even, I plunged below that surface and saw myself
as a self
, a multiple, layered, simultaneous self that could not be contained in the two dimensions of the looking glass.”
    She seems more pleased with this rendition, and he nods again, as the rest of her thought tumbles out.
    “And then, beyond this even, I saw that this self of mine was—like every other self—almost endlessly myriad and diverse, and as phantasmagoric as the spaces and times through which it flickers and flits.”
    Glancing at her briefly as she is finishing, he can see that her eyes have turned a little wild. He will encourage her discovery, but he wants this whiff of mania to subside. He is still standing on top of the stepladder, balancing with his hands gripping the branches above, but now he is looking off, over and past the orchard. His mouth is set firmly, the lips pulled tightly, as if he is confronting a problem that has just arisen in the fields.
    She has stopped speaking. She, too, can feel that her energy is high. She looks to see how Leonard is taking this. “What?” she asks innocently.
    “You have had one of your revelations,” he says proudly, but there is a note of caution there, too. “How wonderful.”
    “An overwhelming revelation,” she corrects.
    “Yes, yes, I see that.”
    “
The
breakthrough.”
    “For the next book?” he asks.
    “For everything,” she cries. “This is the novel I am to write,
and
this is how I am to write it. It is the subject and the form. Do you see?”
    “Yes, quite,” he says stiffly.
    “Here is the multifoliate self on its journey through the dream of time, in language that shimmers and billows and flows with the narrative of experience.”
    Her enthusiasm is carrying her right away, just as he feared it might, and the words are coming too fast