An Impenetrable Screen of Purest Sky by Dan Beachy-Quick Page A

rabbit’s eyes should have been, as if he was using us in order to see us.
    â€œReason and Appetite,” I said, reading the title on the placard on the wall.
    Lydia took me by the hand and guided me through a milling crowd of students to a side room in which the museum displayed objects from its permanent collection, curators selecting objects according to a theme. The word REFLECTION was written in bright metal above the door. Against a sheet hanging in the middle of the room a film loop showed a cupped hand filled with water, and on the water’s surface, the face of the man holding it; every second or two small ripples would disrupt the portrait of himself he was holding—his heartbeat—and then his face would appear in his own hand again. A broken mirror on the floor. A pair of mirrored shoes on a pedestal, each on a separate motorized cylinder that, at regular intervals, clicked the heels together. A string dripped water onto a mirror flat beneath it: its surface, perfect elsewhere, is slightly marred by the water dropping onto it; the eye works out the process in reverse, imperfection in the perfect surface, noticing the water drop that out of its own destruction builds an instantaneous crown, to the string from which the water dropped; and looking at the string, seeing a mirror on the wall directly behind it, a mirror that had been through the same process, which had on its surface a dark crater that, when standing before it, water dripping off the string in front of your gaze, put a hole in the middle of your face. A painting of a man looking in a mirror and seeing the back of his own head. And setagainst an entire wall, a series of different-sized mirrors each in a different frame, some ornate, some austere, one with no frame at all, an oval mirror hanging by a string tied around a nail in the wall.
    â€œIt’s called Family Portrait ,” Lydia said, reading from the pamphlet accompanying the show. “The artist asked each member of his family, parents, wife, children, to choose a mirror of his or her liking. He placed the mirror on the wall and asked each person to look at herself. He borrowed a machine from the psychology lab at the University that recorded the motion of each person’s eye as she looked at herself—the ‘saccadic motion’ it says here. Then for parents and wife and children he etched those lines—the eye’s motion when one looks at one-self—on the mirror each had chosen.”
    I walked over to a mirror in golden baroque frame, clusters of grapes in gold, sparrows and finches in gold, ivy twining in gold that on closer inspection was a golden paint chipping off from the wood in many places; I could see the grain of the wood on the finch’s beak whose wing tip was broken. On the mirror’s surface were a bunch of lines, hundreds of lines, a chaos at first that began, on looking closer, to take order if not shape. There was no outline of head or of face. Only lines clustered together, hinting at what was being seen: thick crosshatches marking what must be the mouth, and linking the mouth, in a series of jagged diagonal lines, the right eye, marked by the overarching brow, and with a set of compact circular lines that marked whatlooked like two pupils in a single eye. And then the eye was my eye, and I was seeing my face through the face of another. I felt suddenly awful. I had put on the mask of another person’s eyes. Then Lydia’s face was next to my own. She said, “Look,” pointing at the small placard next to the mirror, a placard I hadn’t noticed, “this is a self-portrait.”
    â€œIt is?”
    â€œYes. It’s titled Me.”
    I looked back in the mirror, my face inside his face, my eyes in his eyes.
    â€œSo, that’s ‘Me,’” I said, and walked out of the room by myself, turning around at the door to see Lydia absorbed by the same portrait, and a slight step back of shock