The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

Let me actually describe the place to you now, properly, rather than just circling it the way I've been circling it so far, the way a cat circles something it isn't entirely certain it wants to touch yet.

Picture bubbles. Not the small, ordinary kind that pop the instant a careless finger gets too near them, gone in a single breathless second, leaving nothing behind but a faint wet warmth on the skin and the small, forgettable disappointment of a child watching something pretty disappear — picture bubbles the size of an entire universe, each one holding, inside its own curved and glimmering boundary, the whole scope of everything that universe ever was, is, or will ever manage to become before its own particular clock runs down. The Between. The Nothing. Something itself, in whatever configuration it happened to take in that particular bubble's version of events — every choice made and unmade, every soul that ever crossed from one state into the other, every small, ordinary Tuesday afternoon that never once suspected it was being kept. Sounds dangerous, doesn't it? I promise you, it's every bit as dangerous as it sounds, and I don't say that lightly, given how casually I tend to throw the word "dangerous" around when I'm bored and looking for a reaction from whoever happens to be listening.

I want to try to give you a better picture than simply "bubbles," because I think the word alone doesn't do the place justice, doesn't carry the weight of standing inside it the way I have, more than once, more than I've ever admitted to a single soul in that household. Imagine walking through an endless gallery, except the gallery has no walls in the ordinary sense — only these vast, curved surfaces, stretching up and out in every direction farther than any eye, even mine, has ever managed to trace to a proper edge. There is no ceiling that announces itself as a ceiling. There is no floor beneath your feet that behaves, exactly, the way a floor is meant to behave — it holds you, certainly, in the sense that you don't fall through it, but it does so with a faint, unsettling give, the specific texture of standing on something that has agreed, provisionally, to be solid for exactly as long as your visit lasts and not one moment longer.

Each surface holds its own reflection, except the reflection isn't of whoever happens to be standing in front of it, the way an ordinary mirror is vain enough to insist on showing you only yourself. It's of an entire timeline. An entire branch of existence, complete down to its smallest, most forgettable detail, hanging there, silent, waiting for absolutely no one in particular to come along and look at it — a version of a war fought one negotiation differently, a version of a marriage that never happened because a carriage arrived four minutes later than it was supposed to, a version of a single afternoon on a colorless hill where a certain silhouette never once turned its face toward the light at all, and simply stayed rooted, and stayed silent, and never became anything the rest of you would recognize. I looked at that particular surface longer than I meant to, the first time I found it. I haven't gone looking for it again since. Some things are better left un-revisited, even by someone with as little natural restraint as I've built my reputation on.

Some of those branches are close cousins of the one we're currently living inside — nearly identical, differing by nothing more than a single choice made differently, a single soul turning left instead of right on some otherwise unremarkable afternoon, the sort of difference so small you'd need to stand in front of the reflection for a very long while before you noticed it had diverged from your own life at all. Others are so far removed from anything I recognize that I've stopped trying to make sense of them at all. I simply let them exist, the way you let a stranger's life exist without needing to understand every detail of how they arrived at it — a courtesy, I suppose, extended to versions of reality too foreign to be anything but strangers to me, however closely related we might technically, structurally, be.

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The Mirror World is enormous — I want that understood plainly, because I think most people, hearing "Mirror World" for the first time, picture something closer to a single looking glass propped against a single wall, some quaint enchanted object out of a story told to children at bedtime, rather than what it actually is: a vast, silent architecture built specifically to hold the memory of every single timeline that has ever branched off from wherever the great, original fork in existence first happened, back before there was a word yet for "first," back before the concept of "before" had properly finished being invented. That's what troubles me about all this, if you want the honest shape of my concern rather than the entertaining version I usually prefer to give you, the version with better jokes and fewer long silences. I have never once, since I first stumbled onto the existence of this place, felt anything quite like what I'm feeling now. Not since I first uncovered the true origin of our own little corner of it, all those centuries ago, back when curiosity was still a mostly harmless hobby of mine rather than something that occasionally keeps me up at an hour like this one, turning a stranger's mid-air sentence over and over in my hands like a coin I can't quite decide is real.

I know there's a power that usually keeps the whole apparatus in check — something patient, something old, something that has clearly been doing this job for longer than I've been alive to notice it being done, longer, possibly, than anything currently walking around and calling itself a person has been alive to notice anything at all. I don't know its name. I'm not certain it has one, in any sense that would translate cleanly if I tried to write it down for you, the way certain words simply refuse to survive the crossing from one language into another and arrive on the far side smaller than they left, missing whatever gave them their original weight. I only know that its presence has always been there, in the background, the way a held breath is there even when you've stopped consciously noticing you're holding it, a low, steady pressure at the very edge of every perception I've ever trained myself to have. And lately — this is the part that actually unsettles me, underneath all my usual performance of not being unsettled by anything, the performance I have spent centuries perfecting precisely so that no one, not even the people I love most in this world, would ever have to watch me be genuinely afraid — I haven't been able to feel it as clearly as I used to. Whether that means it's simply resting, the way even the oldest, most patient things occasionally need to rest, curling into whatever passes, for something like that, as sleep, or whether it means something considerably worse, I genuinely don't know yet. And I want you to sit with that admission for a moment, because I don't make it often, and I don't make it lightly: I don't know. There is very little in this entire long existence I've been willing to say that about out loud.

But if that power ever fails to show up when it's needed, we are, to use the plainest and least dignified phrase available to me, thoroughly and completely stuck.