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

when she saw her eye caught in the artist’s.
    We walked down the hall of old arms and armor, reliquaries and goblets. A shield with a gun’s muzzle pointing out its center. Saint’s tooth in a glass box.
    â€œThere was something awful about that, wasn’t there?” Lydia said.
    â€œAbout those mirrors?”
    â€œYes.” She looked to her side at a rifle whose butt inlaid with ivory depicted a unicorn fleeing hunting dogs and the hunters behind them. “To see yourself as someone else. To be a stranger like that. But more: It’s intimate .” She said the word as if in awe and disgust. “You stand in front of a mirror every day, and every day it shows you exactly whom you’ll know you’ll see—justyourself. It’s good to know, somehow, isn’t it, that you’re yourself and no one else?”
    â€œI’m kind of taken by the thought of being someone else,” I said, trying to recover my humor, to find a way to remove us from the strangeness of the hour.
    But Lydia kept along the lines of her thought, tucking a strand of hair back behind her ear. “We think we’re checking our hair, checking to see if anything is stuck in our teeth, if we look presentable—but it’s a different question, one we’re always asking but never say.” She stopped talking, but she wasn’t quiet. There was an inward noise in her face. We walked past a gallery in which I saw a woman in a painter’s smock, easel in front of her, exactly reproducing on her canvas the painting she was looking at, a lioness with a blood-red mouth drinking from a pool. “The eye doesn’t know it, but sight is anonymous.” She said this with finality, as if she had reached a scientific certainty.
    â€œWhat’s the riddle?” Exasperated, but trying to hide it. “You’re speaking as if you’ve answered the riddle.”
    She pointed into a glass case where a face painted on a porcelain platter had cracked in half. “Just that. I don’t know how else to say it. It’s not just seeing myself through another person’s eyes—that’s fine. I get that. Psych 101. It’s—it’s seeing myself see, seeing him see. It’s seeing sight. It’s thinking that my eye isn’t me. That it has no personality. That it’s anonymous. That my eye wonders who I am—.” We walked past a row of figureheads leaning out from the wall: an Indian chief, a mermaid, aPuritan woman holding a Bible to her chest, a griffin with glass eyes. “It’s being incomplete, asking ‘who?’ when you think you’re saying ‘me.’”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œAnd I could be anyone.”
    â€œBut you’re not anyone. You’re you . Lydia, astronomer, teacher. Lydia with a freckle on her eyelid.”
    We’d walked up a set of stairs hardly noticing the steps and into the hall where the special collections hang.
    â€œI’ve seen that look before, that look of looking, blank and not blank.” Lydia paused, smiled at me—a strange, inexplicable smile, the smile someone gives you before telling you they’re ill. “My first summer home from college I had taken to practicing the violin in the attic at night. My father thought I was doing it to be dramatic, to be an artiste . But I played in the attic to be in the only place in the house that felt unfinished, unformed. I went to play among all the things that through the years had been discarded. The violin, I knew, was something I was going to discard. I was going to get rid of the life I was supposed to live, stuff it in a trunk, let the moths live on it, not me. My father—he would sit on the top of the steps and listen. One night, practicing the same piece over and over again, Vinteuil’s Sonata , the little theme, I kept missing a note—something I almost never did—missing a note in the simplest theme. The