Frightened Boy

Chapter Twenty-Two - Magic Mirror

22. Magic Mirror

“The best way I can describe it to you is as a dream. I had a long, long dream that I lived a life in another time. I dreamed about mountains of Italy. I remember learning the seventeen sacred patterns of translational symmetry. I dreamed about the smell of sticky bread and freshly cut wood. I remember coming to America. The last thing I remember is trying to draw Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. I think that may have set this into motion,” the Red King announced.

“What is that?” I asked him.

Escher stared up at the night sky as he spoke, his voice strangely detached. “It’s something a mathematician was working on in my time. It’s mathematical proof that more things will always be true than can be proven—proof that we can’t understand the world around us. Sometimes I can still see the work I used to do. It just appears to me. Like when I saw Whisper, I knew I’d seen her somewhere before. She was from this past dream. So are you, Clark, and you, Lux. You’re all people I once knew, all part of my old life somehow.

“It all used to be so clear to me. As time passes, everything becomes less certain, and it starts to make too much sense. That’s why I take my own blood—it’s recursion. Recursion reminds me of what brought me here. It’s more of the math that made me.

“I woke up in a plain white room. No one was around, and I thought I must be in Heaven. I had no body. I just simply was. I thought I must be going crazy. I’m certain I still am.

“It seemed like weeks. I’d see patterns everywhere I looked, infinite loops climbing up into themselves. First it was my hands, then my body, and soon I was recreated in my entirety. Eventually moebius strips built themselves into lamps, into a bed…

“Reality was like soft clay. I could bend it however I wanted. It became clear to me that I was trapped in my own head. And I wasn’t simply moving things with my mind. I just worked really hard to believe they were a different way, and they would be—at least for a while. The patterns that’d turned themselves into a bed and a lamp continued to develop into carpet, windows, a doorway. I was building the world around me.

“I was here. This reality had begun to construct itself in my mind. The world was taking shape, but almost immediately, things started to go wrong,” Escher said. His speech had picked up speed as events became clearer to him, and now he spoke in hushed, excited tones. " The area around me turned into a military base. I was terrified by what I saw, and that influenced everything around me. I could still see the pattern that bound it all together, but the figures it was making were all sharp, dangerous angles and polygonal pandemonium.

“And then, the first doctor came. He looked so real. I marveled at his skin, still with a few rough parallelograms visible below the surface but mostly looking like the real thing.

“They made me watch television. It was a window into the darkest part of my mind. It said to never trust anyone. Never trust a Stranger. Never help someone in need. Mind your own business. In all that, my own paranoia was made tangible. This is what the television was telling me, but why was it letting me know these things? Why would my own mind want to show them to me? How sick with paranoia was I?

“After a while, a doctor started interviewing me every day for a week, trying to see if I was fully functioning I guess. I didn’t ask. I could see right through him. He was so basic, such a bad facsimile of a living person.

“‘Who are you?’ he’d ask. We sat on either sides of a giant metal table with heavy metal chairs bolted to the floor.

“‘I’m Escher.’ I knew that much. And when I looked at something, I knew how to use it. The television remote, doors, cars, and whatever else I saw was like I’d already known how it worked before. Or, more accurately, I’d just made the entire thing up in my head.