Beginning with the Mirror: Ten stories about love, desire and moving between worlds

Praise for the work of Peter Dubé

On The City’s Gates

...a philosophical, metafictional work whose form is as quirky as its characters. Perception and language are key themes in this somewhat noir novel that contains elements of detective and speculative fiction...

— The Montreal Review of Books

"The City’s Gates, which could be described as speculative protest fiction […]an eerie, fanciful take on the kinds of issues that have dominated headlines since Quebec’s student crisis began."

— The Gazette

On Subtle Bodies: A Fantasia on Voice, History, and René Crevel, a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novella

Dubé finds the lushness hidden in everyday events, even making public sex in a Parisian park sound elegant.

— Lambda Literary Foundation

Is this book worth buying? Yes, of course it is, you cheap bastard....Before, I’d never heard of René Crevel. Dubé’s book made him a brother. If you are sufficient in siblings, buy something else.

— Strange Horizons

Contents

Introduction

Blazon

Tides

Funnel Cloud

Furrow

Egress

Echo

Needle

Drifts

Corvidae

Vision

Acknowledgements

Peter Dubé

Introduction

by Elizabeth Hand

If it were possible to map the innermost chambers of the human heart — not the biological organ but that dark whirlpool where desire and beauty and terror all meet — it might resemble Peter Dubé’s beautiful, sinister story collection, Beginning with the Mirror. Whole worlds open up from tiny things, and we get lost in them, the author writes in Corvidae, his homage to the works of Angela Carter and Edgar Allan Poe; and so it is with all Dube’s tales.

Echo, Funnel Cloud, Furrow, Tides — the one-word titles of each of these ten stories serve as both warning and invitation, to his gorgeously written, often frightening depictions of sexual and artistic obsession.

Again and again, Dubé’s characters are both compelled by erotic yearning and trapped by it: in the mirror which serves as the focal point for Echo, and the movie screen where a porn flick unfolds later in that story; in the computer screen that absorbs (symbolically and perhaps literally) the object of desire in Corvidae; in a phrase inscribed by the tattoo artist in Needle.

Say welcome. Say surrender, the narrator of Corvidae commands: words that might come from Dubé himself.

Violence pulses beneath the skin in many of these tales; sexual violence, consensual and non-, often paired with the uncontrollable, glorious fury of weather — tornadoes, the sea, the endless snowstorm which engulfs the inhabitants of an unnamed city in Drifts. Like Algernon Blackwood and Brian Evenson, Dubé has a rare gift for depicting the sublime, that moment where beauty and terror ring out at once, and become indistinguishable.

And as with the best visionary writers, he knows not to explain the dark mysteries that propel his work — who could ever explain desire? Obsession? That moment when breathing stops? Instead, Dubé captures it for the reader, in hallucinatory prose that can become a litany of erotic yearning and release, and in so doing he also captures the reader, him- or herself, so that we become complicit in the obsessive, violent affair in needle (perhaps my favorite of all these tales), and experience a visceral shock at its final words.

There is a hole in the world, he writes in Furrow. "A hole in

the world through which something has moved, something has passed either into being or from it."

Peter Dubé’s beautiful, elliptical stories allow us to travel through this portal, into a universe as strange and terrifying — and also as moving — as our own.

BLAZON

Iam a metaphor, I want to say. Or perhaps I am a metaphor, because like all figures of speech, I am exploratory, empty in myself, waiting to be perceived, completed by your participation. The I is more accurate the more tentative it is, thus the helpful quotation marks, since, like all metaphors, I am making reference to some space of language and to a host of incidents, experiences, events; to stories, in fact, which knit such information into something manageable. Story. Metaphor. What a way to begin, but there is no other so…off we go.

I am a metaphor, like the dove of peace, the hounds of war, the lamp of freedom, or—the flames of passion, which for most people are a harmless image, a figure of speech. My case, however, is not so simple. Those analogical flames mean more to me. In my life, my story, they have been lambent and lovely, they have flickered in spaces of uncommon darkness, cast tiny, faint spheres of light, peeled back a little of the shadow that covered hidden things. They have warmed me, frightened me, burned me and the people I loved and hungered after. That figure of speech has been actual, a part of me—and, since they are at once words and a real thing in my life—that means I too am a metaphor. So, whatever their multifarious qualities, the flames of desire are very much part of the story in which I, metaphorical I am embedded, so perhaps we should get to the telling and lend myself at least that much normalcy. I should start with my childhood. With my mother, who loved candlelight and raised me in it.

From the earliest, my memories include a warm, unsteady glow. My mother would light candles to lend our dinner a little magic, to calm me down when my toddler temper erupted, to play the piano when the mood took her, or to fill the window on holidays or special occasions. Most of all she would light candles when the time came to tell me (even here, the trap of narrative awaits) stories; that she would do always. So—as this was a constant habit of my mother’s—it was only natural that I should do the same.

As a small boy I had a friend, one I loved very much; his name was Jeremy. He was the son of neighbours and was a warm, energetic, voraciously intelligent boy. Jeremy had the most amazing laugh, bell-like, swooping in the upper registers. (Neither of our voices had changed yet.) His tone, however, was full and resonant in addition to being high-pitched. When he laughed his mouth opened and white, regular teeth would show, perfect as the lines down the centre of a new road leading somewhere wonderful: a city filled with perpetual fairs and friendships, every one of which would teach you something more about courage and defiance. In moments of joy, Jeremy threw back his head and fabulous sound came out—silvery, high notes that were never shrill. His laughter would ring and ring, and I in my dizzy joy could only join him. Time and time again.

One time, the first in this imagistic tale, that laugh was particularly memorable. I lit a bunch of candles in my bedroom and sat opposite my friend. We were cross-legged, and each, in the soft light, whispered nervously. We were there to tell ghost stories, to frighten one another. Seated, the shadows behind his back were long. Were mine?

I can still see us building up steam, motionless as the clock ticked, getting ready. The tension accumulated; I wondered if he would crack and that bright, bell-like peel of laughter shatter all the magic, but it didn’t.

In the candlelight his eyes were gentle, not bright, but glowing. The radiance of his irises was the blue of perfect twilight coming down. I looked at him. He looked at me.

Then he spoke: Well?

No, you first, I answered.

He leaned forward, smooth face growing serious. His hand touched me. Blood rushed to the spot.

Listen, he said. Then pulled back.

Jeremy recounted a long, uneasy tale of a graveyard from which a small town’s youngsters heard forlorn singing every month on the night of the new moon. He described how a fine mist, yellow as the absent moonlight, invariably accompanied the keening. Month after month they heard it, until, unable to resist they chose to investigate. When the children entered the graveyard in search of the mysterious sound they saw nothing at all. They wandered through the night and the mist with no success, calling out to the voices they heard, getting only more scraps of song in return. The whole time they walked through the cemetery shouting for unseen presences their shapes, their bodily substance, dissolved into a fine yellow haze, amplifying the one they stumbled in, leaving less and less physical form as they went. They, too, became nothing but the sound of their voices, now raised in song to comfort them as they disappeared. And they would sing again one month hence.

Jeremy had a poetic soul for a ten-year old. He stopped and waited for me as I shuddered.

That was really cool, I said, face frozen.

My story was far less lyrical. I was determined to frighten the habitually unflappable Jeremy. I sat on the floor, consciously forcing my voice to be more sombre. My story turned on a hideous man, scarred, disfigured in childhood by friends grown careless in their play…who grew to adulthood nursing a hatred of all children on their account. How he watered his rage and made it flower into a series of grisly murders of the neighbourhood kids. He would lure his victims; trap and torture them in the basement of a large house and then dispose of the cadavers in a fiery furnace. Great, leaping flames like hot red sheets would wrap themselves around the diminutive bodies. Darting tongues of fire, hypnotic in their wavering, were hungry to eat up whatever was offered. They consumed all the traces of his obscure rage, leaving nothing but faint ash once the murdered innocents passed from the world.

I told Jeremy all of this; every syllable of horror articulated carefully, and then paused, holding my breath for a moment. I said, And it all happened here, in this town, Jeremy. In this house. Just downstairs.

Jeremy’s jaw dropped. His widening eyes betrayed the effort it took to keep from looking behind him.

Then, that clamour bright as crystal, he laughed and leapt forward shouting, You’re such a liar! He landed on top of me, knocking me over.

I felt his weight from chest to knees. His hands grabbed at my wrists, gripped them, held me down. He smiled broadly, open-mouthed and I could feel his breath on my face, making me pant in return, struggling.

Jeremy lay atop me in a long, tense, nearly motionless strain of muscle, his breath came in deep waves, his profound blue eyes swam above me. I couldn’t move my gaze from him and a feeling utterly unknown before that night rose up; a crimson heat brightened in the pit of my stomach and shifted. A fiery snake uncoiled, stirring from long torpor, looked around for prey and began to ascend my spine. A smooth, deliberate, muscular heat climbed inch by cautious inch towards my head. I wanted to shut my eyes and track the movement but wouldn’t, unwilling to lose the image of the eyes that burned in mine.

And that’s when I saw it. Just as Jeremy’s body shifted against me and the serpent of flame hit the base of my pre-adolescent skull, the candles behind my friend’s straining shoulder flared –minute eruptions; they tumbled from the shelf on which they stood.

Jeremy,! I shouted into his face, as it came an inch closer.

You giving up already? The timbre of his voice was darker.

No! The candles fell over!

He jumped off me. Quick, nimble. I leapt up in his wake and the two of us ran to snuff the fire out. In the dim light, and through drifting wisps of smoke, Jeremy blinked compulsively.

That was the first time and it is fixed in my memory. You could say it was an accident. I did for a while; it eased my conscience and it made me feel safe. It let me look at sun and stars without thinking every time they’re fires — vast, terrible conflagrations. Massive lusts for self-obliteration. I told myself the fire meant nothing. It was random. An accident and not a sign. No act of will. But I knew better.

My mother told me, around that time, that the day I was born, the neighbors’ house burned to the ground. They rebuilt a bigger house by the time of my first memories. When she told me the story I thought, what would I build then, born into ashes? On top of which there was the matter of the fiery serpent living in my guts that woke to Jeremy’s body pressed on mine. How random was that?

Though I would see Jeremy after that night, and feel a memory of warmth, a twinge each time, we saw each other less often and soon, less still. We never lit candles and never told each other stories again. Once in a while, though, something in Jeremy’s eyes would speak—that blue, a fragment of a tale.

Over time I learned how to half-see news of fires on the television and in the papers as mere facts. Mastered