Growing up, I believed that breaking a mirror would bring seven years bad luck. Unlike believing in God, which I questioned from dozens of angles, I accepted it the way I accepted gravity, or the chemical plants that lined the Kanawha River and might one day leak a deadly gas—unseen and beyond my control. I thought of it as a law discovered rather than created. Only when I learned more about mirrors, the carefully guarded secrets of making them, the expense when they were a new, luxury item, did I think the superstition might have a practical purpose—to guard a precious object. Before glass mirrors, we relied on pools of water and metal for our reflections. It must have been startling for our reflections to suddenly become so fragile.
We judge whether an animal is self aware with a mirror test. In it, an animal is anesthetized and a red dot is painted above its eyes. As they come to, a mirror is placed near them and observers watch to see if they notice the red dot. If the animal stares at the spot a long time or tries to rub it off, they pass. We infer this to mean that they can also deduce interior states of other beings.
What do we see when we look in the mirror? At the very least we see the illusion of a unified self. What will we do to protect that illusion? Maybe those actions are what become the self and the original self—the one we’re trying to protect—gets buried, invisible, forgotten.
I was barely out of high school and working in a bookstore in the Charleston Town Center. I had just written a paper about the dangers of malls for downtown shopping districts and local businesses but I took the job with the chain anyway. Years later when I went back and saw the downtown, looking sick and abandoned—all weeds, ramshackle buildings, and twenty-somethings nodding off in cars—I felt deeply sad and also a twinge of guilt, as if a girl spiraling into debt who’d lived in poverty her whole life should have refused the best job she could get and that act would have somehow saved the town. It was maybe my first real lesson in civics—that knowing how things should be without the power to influence how things are is just depressing, is misery. And aren’t we all miserable now?
The country had just elected Reagan, the actor, to the White House, and he was playing the role of Cowboy President to enthusiastic reviews. Nick Nolte, another actor, came into the bookstore. He was playing a despondent homeless man in a comedy (the movie, in which the suicidal man tries to drown himself in a rich family’s swimming pool, grossed $62 million in the U.S.—could there be a better analogy for the 80s?) and wanted to study Aqualung, our locally famous street person. This was before social media, when we all became actors (or at least publicists), before the Internet with its vast hunger for images, and before cameras were everywhere. There’s probably one watching you as you read this. When cameras were first introduced, many people believed they would steal our souls. Maybe they have—that would explain a lot.
In the movie, the destitute middle-aged guy goes on to fuck all the women because they are part of the riches, and our culture teaches us that every white man in America is worthy, entitled to women’s bodies and attention no matter how worthless his own life and body have become to him. This includes the anorexic nineteen-year-old daughter who—like so many women in our stories—is miraculously transformed by the main character’s “magic wand” (the moral seems to be that a woman will literally waste her body if a man doesn’t come along to properly utilize it).
The movie, it turns out, was based on a 1919 French play, Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudou Saved from Drowning) which was also made into a film in 1932. In that movie, the vagrant is saved from drowning in the river, the family dedicates itself to making him middle-class respectable, he seduces the maid and rapes the wife, wins the lottery, and ultimately floats away with his freedom intact. It’s interesting to note that America in the 80s took away the rape but added a barely of-age daughter to the mix (along, of course, with wealth and a swimming pool).
I didn’t know any of that then. I only knew that Nick Nolte was a famous, handsome actor and so when I heard that he was in the mall, I stood at the front of the store in the hopes of seeing him pass by. For some reason, I expected him to be alone, but of course he wasn’t. If he had been, I probably wouldn’t looked long enough to recognize him.
His people were filling him in on local facts. It was easy to eavesdrop on them because they couldn’t see me, not really. Like the rich family in Beverly Hills couldn’t have really seen Nolte’s character until he was floating face-down in their pool.
I overheard one of the women in Nolte’s group refer to our county as Kan-a-wah, pronouncing it like a brand name for a can of whoop ass. Our valley had other names, more pronounceable ones, like Chemical Valley, because of the twenty chemical plants that lined the Kanawha River, or Magic Valley—either a modern cynical twist on the other name or an older nickname from the time the salt beds, which helped make chemical production so cheap, were first discovered there. Either way, the “magic” resulted in a devastated landscape, a colonial system of corporation-controlled government, and high cancer rates.
I squirreled away the mispronunciation, wrapping it in my inability to correct her (how they’d later talk about the rube who’d interrupted their discourse!) to examine later, weaving my inferiority and superiority tightly together. I knew how the wider world viewed people in my state. I knew the jokes about us, which have only gotten worse since then. I’d recently heard a comedian, one I’d been devoted to, talk about how West Virginians are so dumb they formed critique groups after watching Cannonball Run 2. It’s a strange, painful experience to see family, friends, and neighbors mocked by people who can talk to you but you can’t talk back.
To my surprise, Nolte’s entourage turned into the bookstore, and I went to my perch behind the registers and watched. Nolte lingered in the fiction section and brought a book to the register to pay for it himself. It was Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky. I had recently read Crime and Punishment and fallen in love with it. I thought Nolte must have read it too. I felt a jarring sense of connection, even as my mind raced for something I could say so that when I told my friends I’d met Nick Nolte they wouldn’t say, “and you didn’t even say anything to him?” I also wanted to show that I wasn’t just a dumb hillbilly. I think I blurted out something like, “I like Dostoyevsky too!” My self in that moment, in many memories, is as invisible to me as it was to Nolte’s entourage. He glanced sharply at me, as if I had suddenly materialized in front of him, and seemed to search my face for something he didn’t find.
Months later, the street person that Nolte had come to observe also visited the bookstore. Unlike Nolte, he was alone, though that isn’t to imply that he didn’t have friends, or a home even. Though the man had been given the cruel nickname Aqualung after the perverted bum in the Jethro Tull song, there were many people who cared about him. I would learn later that a Christian woman had even given him use of an apartment nearby, though he still kept his shopping cart piled with bags and with even more bags tied to its handle. Like the valley, he had more than one name, and he didn’t share his other name, as far as I know, with anyone. Then though, “Aqualung” was all I knew and my mind kept circling the impossibility of saying, “Hi, Aqualung,” though I’d been taught to greet people with their names whenever possible.
Mostly I was thinking, I admit, about how really bad he smelled—the sharp sweetness of piss with a muscular bass of rot thudding behind it. I stood on my perch and watched as he went through each and every book in the bargain bin up front. I saw a woman start to turn into the bookstore, literally wrinkle her nose and look at the man with naked revulsion. It occurred to me that maybe I was supposed to make Aqualung go away. Maybe, I thought, he would shoplift and I would get in trouble. I watched him, saw how tenderly, how reverently, he picked up each book and knew he wouldn’t steal them. Besides, they cost 99 cents each and though my credit card was beyond maxed, I would gladly pay to let him keep a few books. I watched as more people approached the store, saw him investigating the books, and veered away. He was oblivious to them. I wondered if Nolte had talked to him about books, what this man thought about the actor, and if the character in the movie is incredibly smart and well-read and maybe just a little mentally ill.
The time was a revery with him at the front keeping away any intruders and me free to simply observe and think my own thoughts. He wasn’t yet gone, having left town for good after an artist painted multiple portraits of him and put them on display in the state Capitol—they even ran the portraits in the newspaper. I think about him, deeply private, being looked back at not just by the community and people he had grown mostly used to, but by himself, seeing what they saw.
I think about the movies and books and other media that all distort to some degree who we are, what our lives are like. Sometimes representation means turning a poor, shy man in a downtrodden state into a character who baptizes himself in the swimming pool of the wealthy and emerges reborn as a sexually charismatic American hero. Sometimes it enacts the skill and sensitivity of a local artist. Sometimes our images just reassure our co-workers that we aren’t doing something more interesting than work, or at least more private. Or our friends and family that we’re having a good time and wish they were here (or at least want them to wish that).
It could be that no man is an island but we’re all increasingly becoming carceral archipelagos, in the words of Michel Foucault. The more marginalized the community you come from, the more likely it is that the carceral network is less metaphor and more grim and recursive reality.
Maybe the mirror test was a mistake. Maybe it’s useful to remember that Narcissus, shares a root with words like “narcotic,” coming from the pre-Greek word narkao, “I grow numb.” Narcissus literally represents not only the excessive need for admiration and attention but also a lack of empathy. Isn’t narcissism a sort of growing numb that comes from an addiction to a perception of yourself? An inability to see others because you only have eyes for yourself? Maybe seeing the red dot and trying to wipe away never signified the ability to recognize the interior states of others, or maybe the red dot on our reflection is all we can see.
Maybe there is no unified self. At least since Confucius, Eastern thought has accommodated the idea of multiple selves that we form in relation to others. In America, particularly in religion and politics, we are still wedded to the idea of individualism, although Western writers, artists, philosophers and psychologists have been catching up with the idea of multiple selves for at least the last hundred years or so.
Perhaps the man who was known as Aqualung wanted to be one self only, or at least wanted the freedom to shed some of the selves he had been before, and “Aqualung” wasn’t a self at all but a shield, a shield in the same way his odor kept others from entering the bookstore that day. I knew him not even really as a customer—a relationship that is completely defined by being transactional—but as a reader, a container of books and worlds I would never know.
There has been a problem in this essay throughout that only becomes less manageable as I go, and that is what to call the man—the reader—who was known as Aqualung. I did find his legal name online—it’s easy enough to do. But that is a name and a self he seems to have rejected. And he never confided it in me, so what right would I have to use it here?
I also have to question my own motives in writing this, and even more so in publishing it. This has made me stop and consider the gulf between those two—writing is private. Why do we choose to make some of it public? Does it shift the intent from exploring a relationship (or idea) to performing it, like the artist who displayed those portraits in the state Capitol? Would I have written this the same way if I hadn’t had the trajectory of publication in mind? Would I have written it at all?
I didn’t set out to write about the reader known as Aqualung. I had set out, simply, to write about strangers mispronouncing “Kanawha,” which is one of those memories that remains unaccountably vivid more than thirty years later. I doubt I would even remember “meeting” Nick Nolte if it weren’t attached to this memory. I don’t know that forgetting that would be any loss. But it led me to the Reader.
I am not a person who believes much in an earlier, simpler time, or in a state of innocence that should be elegized. But the moment I had when I was younger was a touchstone for a life that has grown exhaustingly complex. Paying attention in that context is so different than paying attention in my current life. For one thing, it is no longer my own safety, which then was an afterthought in a life where safety seemed, by and large, outside of my control to begin with, which makes me hesitate, evaluate, hold back. It is my children’s, and I am vigilant about minimizing what risk I can in a country seemingly hellbent on destruction in the midst of a pandemic, political decay, and environmental catastrophe.
The world of Down and Out in Beverly Hills has only grown more so—more entitlement to women’s bodies, more wealth gap. There is still a belief that the rich can pay attention to us, and that their attention will magically transform our lives. Like we were taught by the story of Cinderella, that the rich and powerful will notice us and lift us up with loving arms into their world, a world without care or compromise. I want to make sure my children never fall for that. I want them to own their attention, and to realize when they choose to give it, it is a gift. They don’t owe it to strangers. How can they decide when to give that gift? That is a question they will have to answer over and over again in their lives. I hope they find better answers than I have.
Fairy tales and movies have taught me that my real opportunity to be seen and have my life transformed was when the famous actor came into the bookstore that day. But instead, I was transformed, though I wouldn’t realize how for many years, by that man’s opposite—a destitute man who left town because images were made of him.
Why remember the Reader now? Is it selfish nostalgia for a moment when I felt seen? Maybe it’s because I am finding it hard to look at other people, or at least other people who can look back. Paying attention can be exhausting, and I will use some very flimsy excuses to avoid it, especially now after years of isolation and screens and attention worn thin from constant vigilance. I need to remember what being on the receiving end of that attention meant, what it continues to mean all these years later.
What I can say is: He saw me.
That day, he brought three books to the counter. One, I still recall, was The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher, whom I’d never heard of. I think I must have said something because he focused his entire gaze on me and smiled. I wish I could bring that smile to life for you but truth is that it was only his to give and I can’t recreate it here.
At the time, and maybe still, I couldn’t even see myself. It left me hoping, even expecting, to see him again, and to have him see me. Not briefly on the street but like this, with a silent chorus of books like angels surrounding us.
If the Reader is still alive, can he evade images of himself as he did all those years ago? Or are we all doomed to be always only seeing ourselves and so for none of us to ever really be seen? To drown, like Narcissus, in our own images?
