At 7:12 a.m., I woke to an infomercial about copper-infused face masks for those who either wanted to be prepared for the next pandemic or had taken a fancy to this stylish head accessory that had been made popular in the previous crisis. This was not yet the aforementioned terror.
Having showered before going to bed, I had only unmentionable bathroom tasks to attend to. As was my habit, I took a book with me. In Phoenix days earlier, when I had been compelled to pack a suitcase to flee I knew not what, I included a memoir by a famous actor. The word “love” was in the title, but judging by the first chapter, the book seemed to be about all the many people whom he hated and why he hated them with such seething passion. Welcome to utopia.
After setting the book on the vanity beside the sink, I washed my hands and shaved with my cordless razor. As I studied my face, vigilantly seeking any missed stubble, my peripheral vision alerted me to the fact that the actor’s memoir did not appear in the mirror. It remained on the counter, but in the reflection, the counter was without a book. My disquiet was related more to perplexity than to fear. I put a hand on the tome, not because I doubted its existence, but as if to rectify the curious difference between reality and the image in the looking glass. With my hand on that memoir, I regarded the mirror again and found that the book I could feel was still absent from the image.
As I stared in disbelief, both I and the motel bathroom around me faded out of the reflection. The mirror became a window into a shadowy subterranean passage only partly revealed by eerie light pulsing from rooms along either side.
What followed seemed like a blend of the real and metaphorical, as if I was drawn into some revelation so complex and profound that the truth of it could not be conveyed by ordinary images and not by words at all, only by resort to visual symbolism of the most extreme and urgent kind, which would speak to my subconscious and provide it with answers that it might understand not now but in the weeks and months to come.
The mirror that had become a window now morphed into a door. I was drawn across that threshold without taking a step, as if I were weightless. I doubt that I went anywhere physically; the sensation of movement was illusory. My viewpoint became that of a video camera mounted on a drone as I plunged through a labyrinth of tunnels wide and narrow, through the warren of chambers they served, through vast caverns and across dark lakes that I knew to be pools of time. The structure changed continuously, a surreal architecture in which every horror ever imagined might lurk in anticipation of being fed what it most relished. Walls of raw earth molded themselves into mortared stone; stone became steel; the steel became organic, a fleshy construct pulsing with menace; flesh became magma, molten and fluid; magma hardened into walls of bones compacted with shattered skulls, acrawl with pale glistening forms that I’d never seen before, which might have been worms or insects or something else unthinkable. There were rooms in which men and women, evidently dead, hung from the walls or else reposed on catafalques, spectral light emanating from their open mouths and breathless nostrils and sunken eyes. In half-lit chambers, people writhed in the grip of grotesque men and women with large misshapen heads, ghouls that were devouring them much as was depicted in the painting by Goya, Saturn Devouring His Children. In bleak passageways, crowds of naked people surged in terror, panicked by some menace behind them or called by something far ahead; sometimes they hurried alongside racing trains of cattle cars, from the slatted sides of which the people within reached out in desperation. In tunnels as smooth as polished wine-dark glass, people flowed by the hundreds, tumbling slowly, as if they were beyond the gravity of Earth. All this occurred in silence, but for the tympanic thunder of my heart, as if I must be in an airless void incapable of conducting sound.
A last tunnel abruptly turned upward. I soared at a terrible velocity, as though ascending a long missile silo, in the grip of existential dread. When I erupted out of the earth, I was in a city afire from its center outward to every borough, under a low sky that reflected the flames as if even Heaven were ablaze. Sudden sound burst through streets iced with broken glass: screams of terror, howls of wordless rage, curses, pleas, lunatic laughter, rattling gunfire, explosions, sirens, horns blaring, vehicles racing from nowhere to nowhere—a celebration of nihilism in the name of justice that is really vengeance. Everywhere, outrages were committed without fear of consequences: savage gang rapes, beatings with clubs and tire irons and chains, vicious murders in a war of all against all, the crowds driven by lust and bloodlust, by lust for power and lust for money, and by the lust that is known as envy. A shrieking horse galloped past me, pulling a burning carriage. A sobbing woman ran with a bloody baby in her arms. A boy of five or six wandered shell-shocked toward one mortal fate or another, as civilization collapsed in a sea of fire. And throughout the chaos moved those creatures that Bridget called the Screamers, scanning the carnage with what eyes they might have. Their slithery tentacular fingers writhed as if they could feel the misery in the cries of their enemies. Their maws worked as if they were greedily drinking the pain of the dying, themselves without a wound, as though they operated under some royal imprimatur that made them untouchable.