Simulacrum

Muriel examined her own image using a variety of different methods, and in each one her reflection seemed to take on a different identity each time. It was almost as if she were several different people at once.  Muriel often thought that she wasn’t altogether sure who she was at all anymore.  If her own reflection could deceive her in this way then how could she be really sure of who she was? She would often feel her face and stroke her features slowly of an evening so that she could be reassured by the tracing of those familiar lines of nose, mouth, and cheeks, so that she could see and feel that she was really herself and not someone else. She wasn’t sure who she was and if she wasn’t Muriel,  (and she knew that she was starting to believe that she could in fact be several different people at once), then who were all these different reflections staring back at her?

 Each image seemed different and unique in its own special way and at the same time achieved its own grotesqueness.  Who were all these people, these ghostly images, why were they impersonating her? Was this some kind of vile mimesis, some fraudulent sprite she could not escape from?

 She seemed to be spending an inordinate amount of time examining each reflection producing different poses and angles to look at various parts of her face in detail, each one seemed to have no verisimilitude to who she thought she was and who she expected to see.  Muriel came to the conclusion that perhaps she was spending far too much time alone and that she was going quite mad.

 For some reason the bathroom produced the most flattering image of herself. Here was the youthful woman she was most familiar with and it was the one image in the house that frightened her the least.  Also, and perhaps most importantly, the most truthful image of herself in the house, and one that gave her great comfort. And yet at the same, Muriel realised with a little unease that she could not still be this young, her face glow in the way that it did in the soft light.

 Her bedroom mirror produced a rather unflattering image of her face. Here she could pull a range of faces and each one would produce a rather loose and colourless mask that looked bloated and misshapen. Although she would often try to convince herself afterwards that anyone would look that bad if they pulled such ridiculous faces, some part of herself told her that those faces would not look anywhere near as ugly in the bathroom mirror. Was it the light? Why did her face look so bloated in this mirror and not in the bathroom? How could two images lie to her in this way?  Sometimes she would compare and contrast her image with the one in her bedroom mirror and the one in her laptop’s webcam.  This could sometimes take several hours of her time. Sometimes she would stare in frustration at the mirror and then take sidelong glances into the laptop’s webcam, compare and contrast she used to call it. In this way, Muriel could compare herself from the side and from the front while staring wide-eyed, although she found it hard not to blink.  She was sometimes surprised at how different she looked from the front, and how different she looked from the right side of her face, especially when she stared like that.

She saw nothing abnormal in her behaviour.

 Sometimes she would catch her reflection in the kitchen window especially around dusk.  She looked quite attractive in the soft glow of the window, although not as attractive as she did upstairs in the bathroom.  She looked mysterious and her eyes seemed more prominent, you know, the way men liked it, or so she thought. She would look from the left, and then from the right, all the time checking for jaw definition and saggage, and nose alignment from both left and right. Following this she would apply either lipstick or lip gloss and either pout or smile. She would try out different poses and check to see how they looked. This could take up to an hour sometimes. She knew that the person she saw here was not the beauty in the bathroom mirror, but was at the same time an attractive woman.

 Her mobile phone gave off the most hideous image of herself. It did not seem like her at all. It seemed like someone else altogether, someone much older and much uglier than her true self. This was the most warped image yet. This could not be her; it bore no relation to who she saw in the mirror upstairs, the one in her bedroom, or the one on her laptop webcam. Well perhaps that wasn’t entirely true; there were some identifiable features and a vague familiarity in and about her eyes and nose, but that was it. This person was grotesque.  The nose from the side was hooked almost; her real nose wasn’t like that, not really. It had small thread veins and it looked much larger than it did normally. Her jawline definition was deeply flawed; there was definitely some saggage there and some flushing around the jaw area. Her eyes appeared sunken with bags directly underneath which gave her a rather hangdog expression. Her eyebrows drooped downwards somehow, and her eyelids were more hooded. Her whole face looked as if it was travelling downwards on a slow melt.  

She was starting to feel quite disturbed by all of these multiple and warped images of herself. She needed to guarantee that she (if this was in fact her and not some a collection of ‘others’ that were trying to impersonate her) could look the same in any reflection at any given moment regardless of which angle she looked at.

She came up with a variety of ideas on how to achieve this and finally whittled them down to two final ones that were the most engaging and workable (at least in Muriel’s mind).  The first one was to purchase more mirrors and place them strategically around parts of the house that could chart her reflection from any angle at any given moment. Then she could check how she looked and whether or not she was metamorphosing into someone else, and catch it in time. But she would always look different in each reflection wouldn’t she because this was how it worked? Therefore, what would be the point, and if she did catch herself changing then what could she actually do about it?

Her second idea was far more radical than the first. If she had some kind of surgery perhaps to certain parts of her face, (the aim would be to make it more symmetrical), then perhaps her image would look exactly the same then in each reflection she caught herself in.  All she needed was perhaps a half face-lift to the lower half of her face to give her jaw better definition and then she realised that her eyelids where perhaps more hooded than she realised and that the mirror was not deceiving her, or was it? She would need the top part of her face lifting as well. Therefore, she would have a full face lift; this would make everything clearer to her.  Then she WOULD look the same in every reflection because her face would have been stretched to accommodate any given reflection or mirror image.

There was also the small issue of how she was going to finance this. She could take out a modest loan, something which would tide her over and pay for any work to her face and also provide enough to pay for any extras just in case there were complications, for after care and such like, not that she foresaw anything untoward happening.

Muriel suddenly felt her stomach tighten and she felt clammy all over, she had caught another perhaps an even more grotesque image of herself reflected in the coffee table, she was almost too afraid to look. What kind of sick joke was this? This was wrong, her mind felt violated. Her chin was dropping and her face looked puffy and swollen, and why wasn’t her face staying where it was? Her chin hadn’t done that before, and those wrinkles around her lips were vile, they were more than vile,  they were enough to make someone sick. How could she go outside looking like that? Why the shock of it would be enough to kill someone.

If that was in fact her.

She stopped for a moment. Perhaps it was someone else, something else, some maleficence, some twisted creation from hell.  What if she was possessed?  There were some things that couldn’t be explained, things that even the laws of physics could offer an explanation for. She knew, she’d read about it on the internet.  Dear God this was getting too much.  The confusion she was feeling filled her with the kind of dread and terror she could barely cope with.  Something could be living within her, residing within her very being, clawing their way through her intestines, squeezing their way through her veins.  Their occasional appearances were carefully staged in order to show her their insidious powers and how much sway they held over her.  She knew that she did not look this bad really, she had always been an attractive woman and she had now come to realise that these sick visions from hell bore no relation to how she knew she really looked.

She would go ahead and book the surgery. She rested her plump fingers on her knees; she was starting to feel much more relaxed now. She felt she had made a sensible if monumental decision about her future, but this would be the best way to deal with it and her terrible situation. 

She also thought that she could put a mirror on the ceiling just above her head as she faced the front door, this was almost an afterthought really. When she looked up she would see a true likeness of herself because when she looked up she saw the person she really was – the tight skin, the familiar expression, the bright eyes.

She eventually decided upon nine extra mirrors and also invested in a rather expensive Nikon Coolpix P510 Bridge Camera which was just under £300, but was a rather handy piece of equipment for taking pictures of her real self ,and also, this camera was clever enough not to lie to her like all the others did.

However, she found that there was always somewhere in some part of the house where she found a rather startling image or reflection of herself which took her by surprise and filled her with terror.

Muriel also went ahead and had the surgery as well as investing in the camera and the mirrors, and her face was stretched into a blanched mask of smoothness, a perfect one dimensional symmetrical mask of blemish free skin, a blank canvass of youth. She was pleased with what it gave her, hope and certainty. The mirrors, the frightful reflections of the horror masks that had visited her without mercy would be a thing of the past. It would no longer matter from which angle she looked, only the face she had put there would stare back at her, those sprites of terror, those mimesis of the night would no longer haunt her dreams or invade her mirrors.

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This sometimes unpleasant and often compulsive psychological glow of illusion had almost consumed Muriel to such lengths that her neighbours and a few of her friends had become increasingly concerned.  Although they had seen her go into her house once or twice a while back, they hadn’t seen her come out for some time.

When they eventually saw her they were so shocked they could barely speak, whoever had done this to her face must have been blindfolded; Jesus, had she paid someone to do this her?

Of course Muriel took this reaction to mean something completely different. From what she understood, these ghouls of terror, these representations of horror had returned, to fill her days and nights with terror.

 Muriel would have to regroup, a full on attack on these unknown assailants would be the only answer…….