"The Museum of Mirrors and the (Mostly) Dead" - A Dark Magical Realism Story

[This story of mine was published by Punt Volat this month. I'll include an excerpt below, but follow the link at the end to read about how a tiny museum full of strange and decadent mirrors simply pops up into existence and changes an afternoon completely.]

"You can’t remember how you never saw it before. It was so obvious when it was finally pointed out to you, but it was easy to see how the entrance to the museum seemed to blend into everything else around it as if it didn’t want to be found (but secretly kind of did). From afar, the door frame looked newly painted, but a closer inspection revealed that the paint was actually fading and peeling in places, the paint below the exact same color as that which covers it now, itself peeling and revealing a third layer of the same, but faded, color beneath. Apparently the owners loved this shade of dark green.

You stepped back from the door and gave the building another look. The door frame stood alone, framed by the two adjacent apartment buildings on either side built up and over the door, as if the original construction was unable to either destroy the door or incorporate it into the new architecture being built around it. Almost as if it had simply sprouted from the ground between the two and squeezed its way into being. Both belonging there and not.

You didn’t understand the compulsion, the absolute need to find out what resided inside, but you approached it anyway, unwavering in your steps. The door gave way easily as you turned the knob. Despite its seeming age, there was no creak to the door, only a soft swish of the weather-stripping across the base as it slid across the floor. The space within was a long, dimly-lit hallway with deep gray walls and a single black stripe zipping along horizontally at knee level on both sides.

Far off, at the end of the hallway, you could see it open up into a larger, darker room. You walked what seemed an impossible fifty yards before the space opened up into a perfect square bisected by a half-wall in the middle.

No one stood guard to take tickets or money; there felt like an implied trust that lay thick about the room. As if, because of the ten mirrors on display, you were always being watched through one of them anyway.

So, not trust.

Not really.

You looked around the room, a place far darker than the hallway. The half-wall bisecting the room was completely blank, a faceless, nameless white. The walls behind you on either side of the hallway held a single mirror each, all bathed in what felt like intentional darkness somehow; unviewable, save for their outlines against the walls. The full walls on either side of those held three a piece. You walked around the half-wall; a large, single mirror hung on its backside.

You followed the walls around the room, giving each darkened mirror a cursory glance as you walked by. Brief flashes of things exploded inside your memory, light tickles of the past whispering truth on the air. The taste of something long ago and familiar bubbling up at the back of your mouth as the corners of the room seemed to disappear backwards into their own shadows. A feeling came over you once you’d crossed the hallway’s threshold completely, like the room was your own personal cocoon.

Ageless.

Timeless.

In that moment, you forgot where you had originally planned on going that morning, much less if you were headed somewhere intentionally at all. Was it important? Were you meeting someone or just out for a walk? Your purpose had been replaced with the sensation of the world stopping mid-spin so that you (and only you) could live within a frozen moment, within this room, indefinitely while every other living thing waited.

Your pace around the room slowed as you slipped deep into thought.

The half-wall facing the hallway was no longer blank. Across its surface was a painted, malleable grey muddled with streaks of swimming black. It swirled and eddied before turning completely black, the cloud unraveling and materializing slowly into letters, words, phrases, paragraphs, a black and white photograph of a teenager posed on a sand dune, the ocean behind him glistening on the day it was taken. A light sound, like that of time being sucked backward, broke the silence as the final letter solidified on the wall. Then silence again.

You stepped toward the wall and hesitantly ran your fingers across its surface, half-expecting the letters to be…what? Wet? Not real? There was a surface, a thickness, a difference between the letters and the wall itself, the outline of each word prominent and tactile if one’s eyes were closed.

Confused, and strangely satisfied, you stepped back to read the wall:

Alain Silvanestri, Collector
B. – May 7th, 1896 (Udine, Italy)
D. – October 23rd, 2001 (Chicago, Illinois)

From 1916 to his mysterious death in 2001 at the amazing age of 105, Alain Silvanestri traveled the globe, seeking out the ten mirrors in this collection. While Silvanestri never revealed how he found each one (or even found out about them in the first place), he kept painstakingly detailed notes about the particular idiosyncrasies of them all and the stories behind their creation and lives thereafter (at least as far back as his provenance hunting expeditions would allow).

Silvanestri found far more mirrors than appear in this space, however. Because, as he later wrote, he had many small, secure warehouses in several European cities by then, almost half of his collection ended up burned, broken, or passed down Nazi familial lines during the height of World War II. The bulk of his collection, an estimated 243 mirrors, lay strewn about his childhood home in Udine near the Austrian border. Unable to remove them all before the German occupation, he gathered what few he could and left for Switzerland in the west in the hopes that, “If I couldn’t save the entirety of my past, I wasn’t going to allow myself to lose my future as well. Allow myself to get caught and tortured by violent fascists? In the country where I was born and raised and loved? Never.”

In early September of 1943, just days prior to the Third Reich’s invasion of his town, Alain Silvanestri found himself on American shores along with scores of other immigrants fleeing Europe in massive numbers. Through some stroke of luck, as he says, he was able to offload two of the smaller mirrors he’d brought with him as bribes for entrance into the country. Having been born and raised in an oceanside town, he believed New York City might make it feel less like he’d just lost the entirety of his life. After two weeks, Silvanestri couldn’t handle the constant noise of the city. With nothing but the clothes he wore and a suitcase packed with mirrors, a little money, and food, he bought a train ticket to a place called Chicago, where he lived out the rest of his life.

Of course, his travels didn’t stop there.

Chicago became the new hub for his discoveries, the central point where all the collected mirrors came to be stored. He’d heard rumblings from old compatriots from the old country about new mirrors (perhaps some of his previous collection, they hinted) floating around Europe and Asia.

While Alain Silvanestri worked numerous odd jobs to build up his travel budget again, he spent his free nights scanning newspapers for odd news and library books for any mention of a mirror that might be worth collecting. The entirety of his notes were gone as well, burned or confiscated by the SS, so he started over again as if this were simply the beginning of his obsession rather than its second act. He searched stateside first, realizing it would not only be cheaper to do so, but would familiarize himself with the American landscape. After a slow decade, Silvanestri was finally able to consider himself a citizen and began travelling to the outside world again.

Lisbon, Cuba, Germany, Switzerland, Iceland, South Africa, Argentina (for hadn’t there been rumors of Nazis moving there shortly after the war?); the world was no longer off limits to him.

“In 1974, just before the Worli rioting occurred, I found myself lost in a Mumbai marketplace. I had been chasing this particular ghost of a mirror for almost fifteen years. The seeds of self-doubt burrowed themselves deep in my gray matter; what was I doing? Was it worth it? Out of the last hundred mirrors found, only one or two were remarkable enough to even mention. The climate played havoc on my headspace, the language of the Indian people a constant buzz in my ear from sun-up to sundown. I felt confined in a strange kind of vertigo that kept me wobbly. Ironically, I never found my center in India.

The sun had been too much. They told me I’d passed out right there in the middle of the market. I had to believe them because, when I came to, I was lying inside the home of a friendly older woman who kept bringing cold, wet rags for my forehead as they dried quickly in the equatorial heat.

She took care of me for a several hours. Eventually I was able to explain to her what I was doing in Mumbai. She seemed excited for me and then ran out of the home. She returned with an older gentleman, his beard a long and stark white against the darkness of his skin. By some incredible stroke of bizarre luck, he was the owner of the mirror I’d been looking for. He seemed to be relieved of it when I left with it beneath my arm, wrapped in older, unused fabrics to protect it.” (See: Mirror 2 – “The Twin Sister of the Desert”)

This collection first appeared in Oslo, Norway in 1992. While several of the mirrors are from the original first appearance, a few of the artifacts have been swapped out for others multiple times over the seven years that followed as Silvanestri continued to hunt down pieces containing near-mythological aspects.

No one heard from Alain Silvanestri in 1999. Or the year after that. For whatever reason, he had stopped traveling and didn’t seem to be at his home in Chicago. Many friends assumed he had passed on, having been over 100 years old then. And while they shed a tear and mourned his passing, they knew he’d lived an incredibly long and fascinating life. When he finally made his presence known again in the summer of 2001, it was through a full-page ad he’d taken out in the Chicago Tribune.

Both fans and critics of his work wondered what the paranoid rambling signified in Silvanestri’s life. Having removed himself from the public eye two years previous, many believed it couldn’t possibly be him as everyone simply assumed he had died. Was this some imposter posing as Alain Silvanestri? What possible reason could there be to do so? Who would benefit the most from his name floating across newspaper pages and appearing all over the internet?

As the world buzzed over the possibilities and theories, Silvanestri returned to radio silence until his body was found two months later on the alley side of a hotel. Detectives at the scene found that he’d been staying at the hotel under a pseudonym, Elias Jakobsen. When they searched his room, they found it in shambles. Bed sheets were scattered across the floor, along with mattress springs and pillow stuffing. The closet had been ransacked; clothes torn and luggage ripped apart. His wallet lay open and face down on the floor by the bathroom, each slot devoid of identification, the wallet itself devoid of any cash or credit cards.

It was first presumed that he had jumped from his 8th floor balcony, but the sliding glass door was found to be locked from the inside of the room. Upon further inspection, there was no way to do so from the outside.

While the hunt continues for the rest of his collection, his case remains open as cold case experts hunt down leads as to who (and why) someone would murder a 105-year old man. Was his two-year silence a way of hiding from these people? Had he simply lost his mental faculties completely and fallen into a deep state of depression? What happened to the rest of the collection that was not bequeathed specifically to this museum and has never been found since?

We have no answers, but we do have these remaining ten mirrors as monuments to a monumental life.

– The Curators

Each letter seemed to be sucked backwards into the white of the wall, turned into thin, fluid filaments before turning to grey, then eventually disappearing. The wall became a perfect white again, all trace of Alain Silvanestri’s story gone, poof, like magic, as if he himself had never been. You touched the wall again; the tactile nature of the letters was gone. The wall was completely flat and empty, lit up by a single bulb in the dark room.

Behind you, a light shined brighter on your left, further illuminating the first mirror.

And so you began the tour, reading the informational placard to the right of each mirror as you went along..."

To continue reading, follow the link below:

https://puntvolatlit.com/adam-bucho-rodenberger-the-museum-of-mirrors-and-the-mostly-dead/

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