by TJ Price
It was an unbearably hot and humid day. The clouds were starting to mass in the west, slowly but surely rolling their way into the city and darkening as they came. For sure, it would rain a deluge by mid-afternoon. The skyscrapers were already quivering with the anticipation of it, as though their mirrored façades had become liquid and were trembling with wavelets. I was to meet Tom Nero at a location he has asked me not to reveal—suffice to say that, when first I saw him, he stood between two of these towers and on either side of the street, I could see manifold copies of both him and I reflecting. When we shook hands, there was a brief, electric frisson that passed through our fingertips. I was alarmed, but only for a moment, and his wry, self-effacing smile put me instantly at ease. This calm was to be disturbed only by the answers to my questions. Unfortunately, Tom (as he prefers to be called) specified that I was not to record his answers, so what is reported here may not be entirely accurate. I have tried, to the best of my memory and ability, to represent the spirit of his responses. Phrases quoted verbatim are in bold.
TP: Thanks for meeting with me today, Tom. I understand you have been missing for quite some time, so welcome back.
TN: I should be the one welcoming you. Have you been to the city of dreams before?
TP: Yes, I lived here for many years, mostly during the pandemic. I didn’t care for it very much. I don’t think that this many people should all live in so small a space. There’s no room.
TN: Every city—even the largest—is made up of lots of little smallnesses, all of which combine to create its largeness. Enormity, after all, can only be defined as something which is beyond our scope, something which surpasses our ability to describe. Not to mention that what is small to you might be big to me, and on and on, and vice versa, et cetera. There are many empty rooms in the city of dreams.
TP: This brings to mind another question: if this truly is the city of dreams, then who is the one asleep?
TN: There is no singular person responsible for the city, its rooms, or even its inhabitants. We are all factories of dreaming, even when awake, and that constant production is what gives the city that sobriquet.
TP: Do you plan to revisit your old haunts? Maybe reunite with friends, while you’re here? Are you staying long?
TN: No. Well, maybe. I feel bad about how everything happened, but it was really out of my control. You should know that better than anyone. It’s your fault, after all.
TP: I was just a conduit. You don’t blame the match for a house fire, do you? No, you blame the person that struck it.
TN: But without the match, there’s no burning at all.
TP: You can’t blame the artist for their art, same as you can’t blame the dreamer for their dream. It happens to them, not as a result of them.
TN: What I want to know is, how did you find me?
TP: Many years ago, in a different city, I wrote your name down for the first time. It came to me out of the blue. I knew, somehow, that you had disappeared. That you had only left a notebook behind. It was partially out of an urge to explore my own misery at that point, to try to define my own insignificance. How small I felt, against the bigness of the world. Like a crumb that could be flicked off the tablecloth at any moment.
TN: So you used me to … what, disappear vicariously? To vanish while still remaining seen? Sounds like cheating.
TP: Actually, I disappeared before you did. Well, a different version of me did. It’s why, for a long time, I had neither reflection nor shadow.
TN: And now?
TP: They’ve both grown back. See?
I stood up at this point in the interview and moved into the blazing sunlight, shoving my hands into my pockets as if searching for my keys. Behind me, my shadow, clearly visible, waved at Tom like an old friend.
TN: There’s a Latin saying, you often see it on sundials. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Docet umbra?
TP: The shadow teaches, yes. What have you learned from your shadow, Tom?
TN: Fear.
TP: Can you say more?
TN: The shadow fears the light—as you see, it flees in the opposite direction—and yet it also lives in terror of the dark, too, for then it disappears.
TP: Or maybe it’s still there, we just can’t see it.
TN: Does your reflection continue to exist when you no longer stand in front of a mirror?
TP: We’ve taken rather a solipsistic turn here, and I think I’ve let the interview go a little off the rails. Can we get back to the topic at hand—your sudden reappearance?
TN: Sure.
Note: Tom was agreeable through the interview process, and even deigned to answer a few questions regarding the book. As I probed deeper into the reason for his disappearance, though, he became taciturn and furtive, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. During the latter part of the interview, he began to chainsmoke. His hand shook appreciably while lighting each cigarette, and I could tell he was struggling to maintain an even keel in his voice. As the clouds moved in and the temperature dropped, his gaze flickered skyward with increasing frequency, like someone agitatedly checking a clock. As I began to ask him to recapitulate the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, he abruptly ended the interview. It was strange, however—as he stood up, he swung his backpack around and drew out a white mask. He gave me a rueful, chastising glance, and then slipped behind it.
In that moment, I knew what stood before me was no longer—perhaps never even had been—Tom Nero.
You see, I had to ask myself: did his face continue to exist, now that I could no longer see it?
Before I could marry voice to question, however, the wind kicked up a skirl of seeds from a nearby tree, and he was gone.
In his 1930s text Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia (<<Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire>>) the writer Roger Caillois opens with a brief epigram:
“Prends garde, à jouer au fantôme, on le devient.”
(Beware: by playing at being a ghost, you eventually become one.)
I was determined to write about identity and mutability of self for this entry. Of being perceived and of perceiving, and of viable means to escape the sweeping purview of the Gaze (in the Lacanian sense). Of masking, and of being masked. This is not a new phenomenon—we have sought to hide our faces for as long as we have had them. Nature determines, through a complex melange of biology and psychology, that the most effective way to hide, is to become inconspicuous. To escape notice. To disappear. Bizarrely, however, the more I seek to avoid being perceived, the more attention I feel I draw to myself—a cognitive distortion brought on by a confluence of certain mental predispositions.
Caillois’ text goes on to discuss the phenomenon of ocelli, the eye-like spots formed by the kaleidoscope of a certain butterfly’s wings when extended. In his 1964 book The Mask of Medusa, Caillois elaborates on the ocelli, repeatedly using the word ‘hypnotic’ to describe this morphology, and insists upon how important it is that the ocelli appear suddenly—that they are not there one instant, and in the next, are staring right at you. “Where there is nothing there is suddenly a horror,” says Caillois (translated by George Ordish.) These ocelli pierce, transfix, still, like a lepidopterist with a glinting pin. Who would not wish to escape such a gaze?
Caillois includes a table of elements in The Mask of Medusa to explain the different classes of biological mimesis—disguise, camouflage, and intimidation. Disappearance, Caillois reasons, is a type of camouflage—something designed to avoid conspicuity—but, as in the fragment of my doomed interview with Tom Nero above, if something has disappeared, can one really be sure that it is not still present?
It is worth noting, too, that “masking” (as a psychological phenomenon) is now also a term used to signify a kind of social assimilation, to deny oneself (whether consciously or otherwise) behaviors which might present as neurodivergent. This is a coping mechanism, and though it feels necessary to erase any possible stigma, it is often exhausting and frustrating, especially when these mechanisms begin to break down under repeated use. Caillois mentions (via translation from John Shepley) that “It is with represented space that the drama becomes specific, since the living creature, the organism, is no longer the origin of the coordinates, but one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privilege and literally no longer knows where to place itself.”
I wonder if this is true for Tom, or, at least, if it was true. If it had anything to do with his disappearance. I wonder if his vanishing was an attempt to camouflage himself in represented non-space. To become absent by becoming congruent with absence—or, as Caillois says, “depersonalization by assimilation to space … a sort of instinct of renunciation that orients toward a mode of reduced existence…” (Shepley) This is something I feel I understand. The anniversary of Tom Nero’s initial disappearance—two years, now—is very soon.
I am reminded of this even as I begin to walk away, thoughts tumbling toward the possible construction of an article with only this fragment of interview. Doubts and misgivings swirl. Rain has begun to fall, splattering big heavy drops against the hot concrete. They hiss, or sigh, when they land. One lands on my forehead with enough force to startle me, and I blink.
I reach up. I adjust my mask.
I disappear into the crowd.
Author’s postscript: It has come to my attention that the man representing himself as Tom Nero may have been an imposter. Nevertheless, I present the fragment of this interview (and its accompanying thoughts) to you as a curiosity.
Think of it as a photograph of a reflection in a shattered mirror.
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