Somewhere between his wife’s pastel-colored offices and his mistress’s brass four-poster bed, Jock Canal lost all the words he’d ever known.

He had them well in mind when he arrived at his wife’s psychiatric clinic in Beverly Hills to install her belated birthday gift. He was known for his rough, industrial strength sculptures, but for his wife he’d drawn on a childhood fascination with mirrors and optics to craft a delicate mobile of small, rotating mirrors attached on a cog-wheeled dangle of fragile copper rods. He’d engineered the mobile so that regardless of its spin, or how his wife gazed into it, she would not be able to look herself in the eyes.

Jock was hoping his wife would still be at the radio station, where she had a morning program analyzing personal problems phoned in by her audience, but she walked through the back door as he walked in the front, her auburn hair tousled by the wind. When she saw the mobile, she clapped her hands in delight and said she wanted it in the inner sanctum where she had her couch.

Jock hung the piece at the foot of the couch. She gave the mobile a poke and tilted her head left and right, trying to look at herself. He stood beside her and looked at her reflections. The moving mirrors fractured her face, at all times keeping her eyes averted from his. This was the effect he intended, so why the sharp gassy bubble of panic rising in him?

“Interesting,” she said. “I see how I can use it with patients.”

He glanced at his watch. “I’d better get going.”

She gave the mobile another poke. “To the studio? I’ve got a free hour. I’ll drive you.” Jock’s battered pickup had spent the past two days waiting for a spare part in the mechanic’s shop next to his Santa Monica studio, formerly a warehouse.

“Thanks, but I got some business at Freddie’s gallery. I’ll walk.”

“Freddie’s?” she said. “That’s a mile away, and you never walk.”

“Yeah, well, maybe I’d better use my legs before I forget what they’re for.”

She turned and looked at him. He had fallen into the infinite geometries of her brown eyes years ago and was still lost. Of all the lucky breaks he’d had in his life, she was the most inexplicable and important.

He glanced again at his watch. Why was he risking it all? Come to think of it, why had he made her that specific mobile, deliberately fashioned to unfix one’s gaze?

Because he didn’t want her looking at him?

“Jock, honey, is there something you want to talk to me about?”

Those brown eyes, absorbing secrets. “Just the usual artist’s block. I’ll work it out.” He kissed her goodbye and left the building.

A crimson Corvette convertible stopped beside him, blocking the lane’s traffic. The silk-scarved blond behind the wheel gave him a Marilyn Monroe smile and said, “Hey, you know how silly you look in those shorts?”

Jock clenched his teeth in alarm. “What are you doing here, for Christ’s sake? I mean look, that’s her office window up there. I’ll see you at the gallery.”

“Get in, Jock, before the fashion police arrest you. Eccentric artists are not allowed on the streets here.”

Run, Jock, run. Stop this crazy business right here.

The blond leaned across and opened the passenger’s door. He couldn’t help himself. He got in the car, and they kissed, her tongue searching for his. Horns honked behind them. She broke off and, with an insouciant wave of her hand at the office window above them, drove on.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Jock said.

His mistress wore a red jersey sheath and black sunglasses. The flesh underneath the dress and the plastic across her nose were both works of art. And separate. None of the flesh was plastic. Those were real DNA-engineered breasts. She was a natural blond down to the roots of her pubic hair. She was a tenured biology professor at UCLA. They’d met four months previously at a party in Brentwood, one his wife had to skip at the last minute because of a patient’s crisis. The next day the professor showed up at his studio. She flirted, and he flirted back, as he sometimes did with pretty women, playing the stereotyped role of the bohemian artist while letting them know it was only a role, that he had a wife he loved. But this woman was smart and beautiful and blond, and this time the role imploded, one thing leading to another like a chain reaction going out of control. An hour after her arrival, as they sprawled naked and panting on his bare mattress on the concrete floor, she said, “My genes wanted you at first sight.”

He panicked and said, “Wait a sec, you want me to father a baby?” She mussed his hair and said, “No, silly, that’s just how we evolutionary biologists speak.” He said, “I have a wife. I love her.” She tightened her grip on his hair and said, “Don’t feel bad. Biology sometimes just can’t help itself.”

He slouched in the passenger seat of the crimson Corvette, heading for the four-poster bed. The warm wind on his face and the blowsy Los Angeles sky above him started to loosen all the words in his head. He told his mistress about his wife’s latest and strangest patient, a trial lawyer who could not pass a mirror without standing mute before it. He would stare at himself for however long it took for someone to tug him away and was then unable to speak for hours afterward.

“Losing all his words like that,” Jock said, “a trial lawyer for Christ’s sake, a guy who makes his living by talking with both sides of his tongue.”

“The gift of language is really nothing more than an accident of evolution,” his mistress said as she downshifted into third, turning her head to glance at the adjacent lane. Jock caught in her sunglasses a momentary, double-barreled glimpse of his face. He felt uneasy, a faint see-through dread snuffling at the edges of his awareness as he stared at the twinned reflections of himself.

He looked away into the Corvette’s side view mirror. “Apparently he’s got this big case coming up real soon,” he said, fiddling with the mirror, moving it in and tilting it up. It stuck, and he was afraid to force it. He could only see the right side of his mouth, his upper lip freshly shaven as his mistress demanded, and his lower lip sporting that tiny mole on the left side she loved to kiss. “His firm’s in a panic. What if the DA’s office finds out about this? What if the prosecutor casually brings out a mirror at some strategic point? There goes the case.” Jock kept looking into the side view as he spoke and then squinted in alarm. The lips were identical to his, sure, but the mole was on the reflection’s right side, not left.

We’re not the same person here.

That was when Jock Canal started losing his words. “But maybe, you know, I shouldn’t be . . . shouldn’t be. . .”

“What?”

Damn, what was the word he was looking for? “You know, shouldn’t be . . . shouldn’t be . . .”

“You shouldn’t be talking about it?”

“Right.”

“Perhaps your wife shouldn’t be talking to you about her clients in the first place,” his mistress said. She braked for a red light. “But what the hey, hello, she talks to people on the radio and gets them to spill their guts out live, so why not talk about her in-house patients too?”

“No,” Jock said, “not her, her receptionist told me.”

His mistress laughed. “Receptionists know everything. And you don’t fire the good ones, no matter how much they gossip.” They were stopped beside a veterinarian’s office with silvered glass windows. Jock was only a sidewalk away from the flat image of a redheaded man slouched in the passenger side of a Corvette the color of oxygenated blood, his arm draped out the window, the muscles lean and long underneath the rim of a rust-stained T-shirt, the muscles and the stains from handling heavy gas bottles and sheet iron and granite boulders.

Or maybe not. Maybe that other guy in the window got his stringy muscles from bowling five nights a week, maybe he played semi-pro league in Ames, Iowa.

His mistress said she had two tickets to the Barry Manilow concert. “It’ll be great retro fun. When I was a teenager my first true love took me to one of his shows.”

Jock, trying to smother his uneasiness, sang, “Feelings, nothing more than feelings, feelings of love.”

The light turned green. “Manilow doesn’t do ‘Feelings’.” His mistress spoke loudly over the rush of wind as the Corvette hurtled onto the freeway.

A twenty-foot high picture of Jock’s wife raced towards them, an encouraging smile complete with dimple on her round face, an engaging softness to her brown eyes. The radio station blurb on the billboard said: “If God isn’t listening, try the Doctor.” One of the Christian fundamentalist gangs had had another go with a paint bomb, staining her blue dress with a black splotch. Jock, after a fleeting look at his wife, stared ahead. That first time, well, okay, biology triumphing over reason and all that, but the times after? Today? He was throwing paint bombs at his marriage. Why the hell was he doing this? He didn’t know. He honestly didn’t. Maybe he should find a psychotherapist to, ah, you know, interface with.

His mistress chuckled and reached out a hand to rub his hair. “I love how you always get that little guilty look right about here. I love that adultery makes you feel guilty. Shows character. You should leave her, you know. She’s too small for your world, your sensibilities. You ought to get a loft and a life in Manhattan and develop some existential angst, including an abandoned lover who may or may not be stalking you.” The billboard flashed by, his wife seeking other drivers with sins to confess, his wife, whom he was betraying, what was her name—God Almighty. He’d forgotten the name of his . . . of his. . . God Alfuckingmighty he’d forgotten her twice over, her name and the word for who she was. Kin of some kind. Jock was getting scared now, and what was really scary wasn’t that he was forgetting these words like he sometimes misplaced his welding goggles, but that there was something deliberate about the abandonment, like the words had packed up their bags and checked out.

His mistress said, “Doctor Rachel Isaacs. She doesn’t even want to take your name. There’s something just not right about a wife who does that. It isn’t evolutionarily correct, you know.” She flashed him a mating smile. “It’s in our genes to be Mrs. Alpha Male. Mrs. Jock Canal. Oops, I want to turn off up here, get some wine. But you can’t stay too long today. Hubby is coming down for a long weekend in the city.”

Jock clutched the side view and yanked. Something in the mechanism snapped, and the upper corner of the mirror cracked. He was able to move the rear view closer. The crack in the mirror sliced the top of his head into two pieces, but he was able to take a look at his whole face. Yes indeed left was right and right was left and this guy was turned all around why hadn’t he ever noticed this before he was an artist for Christ’s sake he was supposed to be, supposed to be, you know, observant about these things.

Maybe this other guy was stealing all his words.

His mistress pulled into Nick’s Lost and Found Fine Foods and parked across two slots. She gave him another deep kiss and asked if he wanted to come in or wait.

He came in. While she headed for the wine rack, he wandered down the aisle and stopped underneath one of the convex security mirrors. “Okay, what’s going on?” he said. A scrawny boy about twelve with no hair, not even eyebrows, and with a cell phone pressed to his bejeweled ear, gave him a strange look and a wide berth. Jock squinted up at the ginger-headed man in the mirror. In the background, his mistress’s red jersey dress was a pheromone on his consciousness. Her genes had his genes by the balls. It was as simple and stupid and shallow as that. Jock made love to his wife, tender wholesome satisfying love, but his mistress he just . . . he just. . .

“ —fucked,” the boy said into the cell phone while glaring at Jock. “Situation’s all fucked. This undercover cop is stalking me.”

His mistress purchased a fifty-dollar Shiraz. Outside in the parking lot the hairless kid leaned against the hood of the Corvette. “Bitchin’ car, bitch,” he said. Jock’s mistress hissed him away. She rubbed the place where the boy’s tattoos had touched the paint.

As she drove to her gated community, she ran sharp fingernails along Jock’s thigh and across his crotch. He slumped lower in his seat, staring out of the corner of his eyes at the side view, trying to catch a glimpse of the other man without the other guy noticing, but the guy was too sharp, always catching Jock at it.

At the condo building’s entry, the valet spirited away the Corvette and the doorman opened his portal. In the door’s glass Jock caught a glimpse of a leg extending from a pair of paint-splattered beach shorts. Those were his shorts, but whose limb was that? This was Southern California, for Christ’s sake, who was this wasting the land’s sun? It was too pale to be his . . . his. . . What was it called again, that limb? Jock knew from his anatomical studies all its muscles from the sartorius to the peroneus longus, but what was the whole assemblage called, this lower appendage, this. . .

“Come on Jock, shake a leg.” His mistress stood in the lobby with her own lower appendages spread and thrust forward, taut as a cocked slingshot. That bedroom smile sucked him in. In the elevator, she dropped her bag and threw herself at him, smothered him with gasping kisses and wild hands. When the elevator doors opened, they spilled across the hall into her condo. She yanked him through a chrome and stainless steel living room with reflective surfaces showering his senses with a hundred different images of various body parts he no longer had names for. He wheezed with panic. His mistress spun away from him into the bathroom. He found himself standing naked in a well-lit bedroom in front of a full-length mirror, all body parts loosely reassembled as though with puppet string, at the center of which was a rigid . . . a rigid. . .

I know what it is, I really do, it’s mine, not yours, it’s mine mine mine MINE . . .

She came out of the bathroom, nude and flushed, and stood beside him. All his words were now gone, except for four words that closed the door behind them as they left.

“I am not me,” he murmured.

She laughed and grasped the rigid thing. With her other hand she pushed him onto the bed to straddle him. He had no words for any of this, or for what followed. He understood without any of the vocabulary of lust that she took such pleasure from his unyielding flesh that at last she could no longer sustain her own greed and swooned beside him.

He rose from the bed to stand staring before the mirror. The light outside the bedroom window reddened and then faded. She stirred and lifted her head to look at the clock on the bedside table, its yellow numbers flashing in the dark. She jerked upright and said alarmed things that made him think without words of a hazardous man stepping into the lobby. She threw him crumpled garments into which he thrust various body parts. She said something that conjured a window, a fire escape, a taxi, and a house in the hills.

After a taxi ride during which he instinctively nodded and pointed by way of directions — the driver refusing a tip with an expression that suggested charity for handicapped who could not speak—he got out in front of a house on a hill, a simple house spread out under the evening sky. His sterile nothingness became absolute. He was not only no longer himself, he was nothing at all.

He made his way into the house without any sense of passage. He stood before a pallid mirror, waiting for his words to return, watching for a glimpse of himself. He had nothing else to do, nothing whatsoever to do for the rest of his life except wait, except watch.

The light in the mirror rippled, and a woman he knew with a round face and soft eyes stood beside him, looking with him into the mirror. His skin felt her warmth, his nose smelled her fragrance, but he was watching for himself, and so could not acknowledge her presence for fear of missing his own return.

The phone rang. She returned with a cordless. “It’s her,” she said, the words coming from far away, but words they were at last, although they were not words he wanted to hear, not from this woman and in this place, words with fuel enough to thaw out all the frozen fear in the world. He took the phone and held it to his ear, watching the mirror, the mirror watching him, hearing a distant voice as though a little woman resided within the ear piece, a mistress-muncule casting forth anger, and there came to his mind the image of a mirror, a broken side view mirror, and he let the phone drop to the floor, its clatter followed by a small screeching and then a tiny slam and a beep-beep-beep.

The woman—the woman who was his wife—this woman who was his wife who was the most inexplicable and undeserved mystery of his life—stood beside him again, looking into the mirror with him.

“You smell of her,” she said. The quiet steady voice was strong enough to break Jock’s gaze into the mirror and make him turn and look at her.

And in her eyes he saw himself, not lost at all, but where he had always been, whole and complete. The feeling that poured into him, with the unbearable pain of life and wonderful weight of being, the feeling that would sustain him through all the searing emotions to come was the feeling of . . . feelings of . . . Love.

And all the words he’d ever known appeared over the softening horizon. They returned to him, led by the three he should have been saying. Surely it was never too late to be saying them, even now, when all that was truly important lay in mortal danger.

“I love you,” he said.

§ § §

Richard Lewis was born and raised and currently lives in Indonesia with his wife and four children. When he isn’t writing, he’s most likely surfing. Several of his short stories have been anthologized. He has a young adult novel forthcoming from Simon and Schuster (“The Flame Tree”, release date July 4, 2004). He can be reached at rlewis@indo.net.id

This piece was first published in INK POT #3 - 2004, a literary journal.