Chapter 8 — Five Minutes

The flat was dark when she went in.She didn't turn on the main light. She went to the table and picked up her laptop. She went to the shelf and took her journal. She had the bag open and both items in it in under two minutes.She should have left.She did not leave.She stood in the middle of the dark flat with her bag on her shoulder and she looked at the covered mirror and she felt the pull of it the way you felt the pull of the edge of something high — not desire, not exactly, but the acknowledgement that the edge was there and was available.She thought: I should not look.She thought: if I look now, when I know what it is, when I'm not tired and not off-guard — I can see it clearly. I can know what's there. I can know what's been happening.This logic felt extremely sound.It was the logic she had been being given.She understood this even as she reached out and took the corner of the shawl.She understood it and she did it anyway.She pulled the shawl off.The mirror stood in the dark flat and her reflection stood in it and she looked at herself looking at herself.At first: nothing. Her face. Her own face, doing the thing it was doing — alert, wary, the expression of a person who has been told something frightening and is taking it seriously.And then.Not immediately. Not dramatically. The way dawn happened — not a moment but a process. A gradual arrival of something different in the quality of the reflection.The face was hers.The eyes were not.The eyes in the reflection were looking at her with an expression that had no name in the vocabulary of human expression, because it was not an expression that had evolved in human faces for human purposes. It was the expression of something that had been studying faces for a very long time and had gotten very good at most of them but not this one. The expression of — attention, of focus, of a specific and directed hunger that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with the specific kind of consumption that happened through proximity.It was not her.It was wearing her face.And it was smiling.Not the contained, private smile of the first morning. A wider thing. The smile of something that had been patient for a very long time and had found the patience rewarded."Who are you?" Tanvi said. Out loud. To the mirror.The reflection opened its mouth.