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Water. Water, bellowing blackness, rippling like muscle on the back of a beast. Water rushing closer, roaring, spewing spindrift from the surf which reflects in the pupil of the widening eye.
The house they occupied these days was perfectly symmetric and designed in what Hannibal told him was the Haussmann style. Through two sets of eyes he watched his patchwork of bruised skin shamble up the steps. It angered the bullet hole in their abdomen significantly.
His room had bare herringbone floor and a silver standing mirror in the corner. When he looked into it, his reflection was absent. This was not a surprise; selfhood had always held an unfamiliar shape. He had lived his whole life this way and it seemed he would go on doing so.
He put the mirror outside his room and intended to get rid of it.
Naturally, Hannibal brought it up over breakfast: pain perdu with orange juice, courtesy of Chiyoh’s ventures into wider Versailles.
“Not a fan of mirrors, Will?”
Spoken aloud, Will was a four-letter word on the tongue. He watched the sun’s reflection pinball around his cup of water. “I’ve always found them to be . . . profoundly lonely places, that’s all.”
“You become a man alone with himself.”
“Not even that.”
Hannibal’s eyes narrowed, then flooded with realisation. “Would I be correct to assume this is not strictly metaphorical?”
“What do you think, Doctor Lecter?” he asked. “Can’t you hear the rhythm and syntax of your speech in mine?”
Although the greenery in the Château gardens was dark, the fountain reflected the sky in perfect ocean-blue. Nobody saw him sitting there; Will Graham, the mirror neurone, did not exist. This was why he could leave while Hannibal, too famous for his own good, remained confined in the house. Still, he couldn’t help but wonder if Hannibal hadn’t gotten the better deal in the end.
He had no reflection in water either. To see himself had always required other people’s eyes. Later, only Hannibal’s. He recalled hot, aching summers on the Mississippi with Dad, drifting after the money to keep moving, to keep staring down the brown river in vain. Adults would tell him they were just alike, not knowing they were witnessing a blind reflex.
Chiyoh’s silhouette blotted out the sun’s reflection.
“You should not linger in this place,” she said. “You will be caught.”
“No one has seen me. I blend in well.”
“This is arrogance.”
Her anxiety dripped down his throat. Had she known him in Maine, she might have seen how carefully he shaped himself to fit Molly’s styptic gaze. But she had only known him to leave firefly trails wherever he went; she could be forgiven for thinking it was a perpetual state of being. He blended in well, after all.
“He trusts you, and so must I.” Strapped under Chiyoh’s coat was her rifle. It dug into their skin, gelid. “I remind myself that Hannibal’s nakama would not be chosen without heed.”
“Hannibal is more than your estimation of him.”
“And less, if you are right.” She crouched down. “You are not.”
“Sometimes I would look in the mirror and see Hannibal looking back,” he said. “Sometimes not. Felt real bad either way.”
She narrowed her eyes. “You do not see him now.”
“I don’t see anyone. Take a look.”
She inched forward. Through her eyes, he met his own gaze in the water. It surprised him immensely.
“I do not understand.”
He frowned. “Molly couldn’t see me.” Only once had he seen himself, in the water Hannibal had used to wash his hands of Randall Tier. “You shouldn’t.”
“Perhaps you are less invisible than you think.” She glanced at him sidelong. “It is more reason for you to go home.”
On Chiyoh’s tongue, home was a four-letter word. It was Maine, snow-smothered under the gibbous moon; Louisiana, the mouth of his mise en abyme ; Baltimore, warm and dark, showing him his reflection in water for the first time. Now, Versailles, where he had caught it again.
Reflex had made him like Dad, and every hand that had touched him, but it had taken a will to differ to leave Louisiana. Water will carve its own path in the end.
All that evidenced him when he stood up was his faceless silhouette blotting out the sun. “I’ll see you back home.”
Chiyoh remained crouched by the fountain, face bowed over the ocean-blue.
The mirror had been walked back into his room in his absence. He turned it around without looking into it and went into the restroom, where he found Hannibal running a bath. Leaning against the jamb, he said, “You can’t return something you didn’t take, Hannibal. Selfhood has always held an unfamiliar shape.”
The bath was almost full. Hannibal, perched on its edge, gently stirred the warm water with his hand, scattering the sun’s reflection across the surface. “You do us both a disservice to pretend you don’t exist.”
“There is no ‘us’. There’s only you. You, and what you make of me.”
“When you searched for yourself here, did you find me?”
Hannibal’s gaze felt like an infinity mirror. He looked at the water. “No.”
“If you looked again, I wonder what you’d find.” As he spoke, Hannibal turned off the faucet and stood up.
“Is that for me?” he asked, nodding at the tub.
“I thought you would appreciate some warm water.”
“I do. Thank you.”
Hannibal inclined his head and left him alone. Stripping, he considered turning off the lights like he would have done at home. Home, he thought derisively; he closed his eyes and pretended the steam was sun-soaked humidity. When he opened them again, he looked down and saw his face in the still water. He regarded himself in silence, tracing Hannibal’s scars.
Will Graham turned off the lights and got into the tub, where he lay languidly in the warm dark. Salt stung his cheek as he sank beneath the water, which quickly sealed over his closing eye.