Free The Reflection by Hugo Wilcken

novels I liked, cars I’d driven, the layout of my apartment. Occasionally the doctor would press me for more detail on a particular subject, for no apparent reason: I’d start to approximate, to fabricate. Then after he’d gone, the bits and pieces of our conversation would filter back through my mind, blend together, distort, like fragments of a dream that lingered well into the waking hours.
    Could this banal accumulation of facts really be a life, my life? If so, it seemed a poor thing, lacking all imagination. The interrogations had left me feeling alienated from my past, as though it were in fact someone else’s. One of my patients’,perhaps. Indeed, it had occurred to me that my interrogator was much more of a psychiatrist than a hospital doctor. And why ever not? I looked at myself in the compact mirror that the nurse had left me. I’d changed, certainly. From a reasonably attractive man to an odd-looking one. From an active professional, to an invalid, confined to bed. Each change had closed doors to myriad futures that would now never be. I picked up the photograph the doctor had left me, of the young woman. I’d worked it out now, of course. It had been in the wallet that I’d taken from the man in my apartment, and stuffed in my pocket. They’d found it on me.
    Biographical detail was the glinting, hard surface, reflecting meaning away from the subject. It said nothing of a life, the inner life, the real life. I remembered sifting through the jumble of papers my parents had left behind after they’d died—my aunt and uncle had ceremoniously handed me the box on my eighteenth birthday. Birth certificates; old passports; train tickets; receipts for important purchases; worthless bonds; ancient photos of people I couldn’t identify; letters from relatives I didn’t know, replete with references to events of great significance at the time, now sunk into obscurity. I’d been too young to remember my parents when they were alive, and they’d rarely been alluded to as I was growing up. An outline of their lives might be surmised from this detritus, but I would never have a feeling for who they’d been.
    I looked out into the courtyard and the building opposite. I could often sense when the woman on the balcony was about to appear, and sure enough, a few moments later, there she was. Shaking her head of black hair, reaching for the packet of cigarettes from the pocket of her housecoat. Staring out once again into the void. Other people’s lives were impossibly mysterious, when one knew nothing of them. She looked European to me, but since I could make out so littleof her, this could only be whimsy. Nevertheless, on this slender thread I’d begun to construct a story, one that became increasingly embellished each time I saw her. She was a war refugee. Perhaps her husband had been killed in action. Or executed for treason. Or for resistance activities. She’d somehow managed to escape, to make it to New York, where she knew nobody. An immigrant with little English, and a child to care for, she’d had few options but to find herself a new husband, which eventually she did. A kindly, older man, prepared not only to marry her but provide for a child that was not his own. The woman had grown fond of her husband, but she could never bring herself to love him. The ghost of her former husband was there, although in what form I didn’t yet know … I would lose myself in this invention for minutes at a time. Of course, I could always pull back when I wanted to. I knew well enough that the intensity of this vision—its sheer realness—was illusory. I knew that when I finally left the hospital, if I went knocking on her door, I’d find someone quite different, just an ordinary-looking Manhattan housewife, no tragic past, not elegantly blowing smoke into the emptiness of the city.
    “Now, tell me about your wife.”
    The words shook me. My marriage had barely been mentioned in conversations with the doctor