The collection had begun with a single mirror. Professor Hardin often traced it back to that afternoon in the auction house — a minor sale, provincial, attended mostly by dealers and a few bored pensioners — when he had paid eleven pounds for a Victorian dressing mirror with a foxed glass and a walnut frame that was missing one of its finials. He had bought it because it was cheap and because his study was a room that needed a mirror and because he was thirty-four years old and had not yet learned what the mirrors in his possession were capable of showing.
He discovered it by accident, as you discover most things that subsequently alter your understanding of what the world contains. He was sitting at his desk, working on the paper that would eventually establish his modest academic reputation, and he glanced up at the mirror and saw it: not his study, not the window behind him, not his own reflection in the afternoon light. He saw himself at a hospital bedside — his father's bedside, he understood immediately, though the scene was not a memory of any particular visit — and what he saw was himself leaving. Turning away. Walking toward a door that was already closing.
His father had died two weeks after that actual visit. Hardin had not been in the country. He had been at a conference in Vienna, where he had given a paper that had been warmly received, and for eleven years the reception of that paper had competed in his mind with the knowledge of where he had been when his father died. The mirror showed him the leaving — just the leaving, precisely framed, with a quality of light that was not the quality of memory but something sharper and more deliberate, as if lit for examination.
He turned away from it quickly. By the end of the week he had covered it with a cloth. By the end of the month he had taken the cloth off again, because the question of whether it would happen again was more urgent than his preference for not seeing the answer.
It happened once more, with the same mirror, and then not again. He concluded — provisionally, in the manner of a careful academic — that the event was either a property of the object or a property of his relationship to the object at a specific time. He began acquiring other mirrors to test the proposition.
It took him six years and thirty-one mirrors to establish the pattern. Each mirror showed something once, to each person who looked into it at what Hardin came to think of as the right moment — not a moment of the mirror's choosing, precisely, but a moment when the viewer's unresolved history was available to the glass in some way he could not quantify and did not try to. The images were always scenes of departure, of turning away, of the precise moment at which something had been left unfinished.
The mirrors showed regret, but only the specific kind: not the regret of having done the wrong thing, but the regret of having been present at the right moment and having looked away from it.
He began keeping records. He invited colleagues, cautiously, under pretexts that were not precisely dishonest, to sit in his study and describe what they saw. He photographed and catalogued each mirror with the same methodical attention he gave to archival material. He submitted nothing for publication. He was a rational man in a profession that valued rationality, and he understood that the question of what to do with knowledge that could not be contained within existing frameworks was itself a problem that required more thought than the knowledge itself had yet produced.
By the time of his retirement, the collection comprised forty-seven mirrors. They occupied an entire room of his house — the largest room, formerly the sitting room, now lined floor to ceiling with frames in oak and mahogany and gilt and wrought iron and plain pine, each one placed at a slight angle so they did not reflect each other. He had learned early not to let them see each other. The one time he had positioned two mirrors in mutual reflection by accident, both had shown images simultaneously, overlapping, and he had not been able to look away for eleven minutes. He had not attempted to describe what the overlap had shown him. Some things were more efficiently stored in the body than in language.
He did not look in the mirrors himself any longer. He had made this decision at fifty-seven, after the fourth mirror produced an image that he had not had the faculty to process without a period of some weeks' difficulty. His doctor had attributed the difficulty to overwork. Hardin had not corrected this assessment.
What he did instead was sit in the room, occasionally, in the chair he had placed at its centre — facing no mirror directly, equidistant from all of them — and read. He found that reading in the company of forty-seven objects that were each, in some sense, attentive produced a quality of concentration that his study no longer provided. It was not comfortable. But it was, he had come to believe, accurate. The mirrors had taught him one thing with more consistency than any other: that looking away from something did not change its shape. It only changed who was looking.
He had learned to sit with what he knew. He considered this, at seventy-one, to be a late but significant acquisition.