Reflections in a Window

Cástulo Aceves
Translated by Michael Langdon

Two men appear at the door of the airport. The first of them is the client; the second, much older, an investigator. They feel the cold air of the country they are visiting, on a continent where they are foreigners. The flight across the ocean lasted many hours. While they were flying, the client reviewed the details of the case: his failed marriage, his children that he could never see. The old man pretended to listen; in reality, he was sleeping.

They take a taxi. The client gives the name of a hotel. Up until this moment, he has organized everything. It had been difficult to convince the old man to continue with the case. “I don’t travel; I’m not that kind of investigator,” he had repeated in his office.

“But you yourself told me that you need to be there, that it’s the only way to find her.”

“That it could be,” the investigator corrected him. “We can’t be sure that we will find any trace of the girl. We can’t be sure that she even exists.”

The old man has a name, a real name, but long ago, he abandoned it. He has spent many years living without a past. The name he uses now has become real; everyone knows him by it, his clients, his employees, his contacts. “Deitel,” he repeats to the confused receptionist in the hotel, “just write Deitel.” The man beside him makes a gesture of affirmation with his head. He has become accustomed to the investigator’s eccentricities.

The middle-aged man is named David Pillar. When he first got in touch with the agency of private investigators, he simply said: “I’ve asked around, and everyone agrees that only you guys can help me.” The secretary had been trained to detect real clients; it was her job to take care of the firm’s security, and above all, that of the boss. She asked the routine questions, not merely requesting information about the case but conducting an interrogation. Occasionally, the questions seem ridiculous, but they enable her to collect data and, to a certain degree, corroborate the information provided by the caller. “Why so much mystery?” David asked the young man who welcomed him to talk about the case. “Many people don’t agree with what we do. On several occasions, one of the agency’s investigators has been chased. Above all, the old man has taught us to stay hidden—as much as we can—in order to avoid problems.” It was the first time David had heard of the old man Deitel, and also the first eccentricity that he became aware of.

2

The old man enters through one door, the younger man through the adjacent one. Now that he’s settled into his room, the first thing Deitel does is open his personal computer. When the scarcely detectable buzz of the device’s internal fans reaches his ears, the old man sighs. He feels more at ease, and his heartbeat slows. He is so accustomed to being in front of a monitor that he feels anxious when he’s not connected. “It has been many years,” he says to himself as he adjusts his glasses.

The client, in the meantime, pulls out the girl’s photo so that he can look at her again, as he has done many times during the past twenty-two years. He sighs. He can’t believe he is so close to her. The first time he read her story, not only was he moved, but he also began to dream about her. He was barely seventeen years old, but that narrative, that photo, have accompanied him for more than twenty years. The image of the girl reappeared in his mind in every relationship, every courtship, at his wedding, during every night with his wife. “Meghan,” he says in a loving tone as he lies down naked.

David reconstructs the scene in his mind—just as he has been doing for years since reading the story. He creates a meticulously detailed movie. He knows each word, each sentence of that original story that he came across by accident while surfing the internet of that time. “Meghan,” he repeats as he masturbates. He imagines her older now, not at what would be the girl’s current age but as a twenty-something. He predicts with precision how the fourteen-year-old girl’s body matured to that imaginary age. He savors her; he desires her.

3

He is awakened by knocks on the door. Still nude, he approaches the peephole and sees the old man. “What’s happening?” he asks. “We have to go,” answers Deitel. “This is the time we agreed on.” David asks him to wait a few minutes. He gets dressed and puts the girl’s photo in a drawer. “At midnight?” David says when he feels the cold air of the street. “We sleep during the day,” Deitel answers. The client doesn’t know if he is referring to investigators, old men, or eccentrics.

The city is even more bustling at this hour than it is during the day. The address that they gave the taxi driver takes them to the outskirts of the town. They stop in front of an office building. The client follows the investigator, who moves slowly, as if he is surprised to find himself in motion. On the first floor, they run into another old man. He and Deitel greet each other. “Reunited at last,” says Mothis. “How long has it been?” “Many years,” the investigator responds. “So many that the world in which we met is now a faded memory of what technology was capable of back then.”

They follow the old man Mothis to a basement. Boxes in columns reach the ceiling, making the room seem like a labyrinth. In one corner, they see several servers in a chaotic heap. One ancient monitor on a metal table illuminates a seat and a keyboard. The client sees how the two old men sit down gingerly to begin searching for traces of the girl he wants to find. Though the men may walk slowly, their hands move with surprising velocity. Their eyes are immobile: they say nothing. Three hours pass. “You’re in luck,” Deitel tells David, who is watching them with boredom. “We found a web server log.” “How?” asks David, immediately regretting the question.

Together, the two old men explain that during the boom years of the internet, servers were where pages were warehoused: millions of them. It was fortunate that the porn site that he logged onto two decades ago was, in reality, hosted on a university computer. It had taken the private investigator two years to discover this. Tracks lost in a forgotten web. None of the young people at the agency even knew how to log in, how to break the rules. “Old hackers,” thought David, remembering the paranoia of his youth, of that era in which they were persecuted.

“This is going to tell me where she is?” asks the client.

“These are just network addresses, which whoever uploaded the story and the photo to the website would have needed in order to connect from their computer.”

“How will we find her location?”

“We need to visit another friend,” the old man responds.

4

When David Pillar met the old man, he repeated the story that he had already told to three of the young investigators. “Two decades ago, I read a story on a porn site,” he said, “one accompanied by a photo.” In the story, a girl called Meghan recounted a family trip to another continent. They were in a coastal city. The girl had gone out for a walk. She came to a deserted beach two miles from the house where she was staying. The sand and the sea were irresistible to her: she wanted to go for a swim, but she hadn’t brought a bathing suit. But the place was so deserted that she didn’t think there was any reason not to swim nude. She left her clothes on a rock and swam to a small island, some meters from the seashore. When she returned, she discovered that the sea had risen and her clothes and other possessions weren’t there. She was scared. She thought about waiting until the night to return to the vacation rental, but she had sneaked out of the house. Her parents might call the police. More frightened of being scolded than of being seen nude, she decided to walk back to the house. Because she didn’t know the area well, she had to take a well-traveled route.

“She said,” David added, “that she lost count of the houses she passed where she could make out a shadow watching her, the cars that slowed down and blew their horns, the boys that whistled in groups, the people she passed in the street, who either laughed at her or seemed embarrassed.” When she got back to the house, she realized she hadn’t thought of something. Her keys were in the pants she had lost in the sea. She couldn’t stay outside. Her parents would probably be home soon. Desperate, she ran to a convenience store that she had seen while crossing through town. It was run by the lady who was renting them the house. Maybe she would have a spare key. Again, there were stares, whistles, catcalls. When she entered the store, everyone seemed paralyzed. She ran to the counter and hurriedly told the old lady her story. The old lady started laughing, and then the girl heard the sound of a camera taking a photo, the same photo that wound up on the website. The old lady not only gave her a spare key but also lent her a dress. It was too big and very old-fashioned, but it was better than remaining nude. The girl concluded by saying that the next day, her family left the town, and her parents never found out. However, in the town her story became a legend. For years, she felt ashamed and kept the story a secret, but now she was publishing it because she had come to see its comedy, and looking at her photo, she was proud of how beautiful she had been at fourteen.

When David finished, he looked passionate, like someone who had just related a great truth about life, like someone who had found something that many others had given up looking for. Deitel only said that he would help him. He closed his eyes. It wasn’t his place to judge his clients. He had seen many crazy things in his years of work. “This could be a waste of time,” he said as he got up. “We might be hunting for a mirage.”

5

The client lies down in his bed. He feels a curious disquiet: he has now spent five nights going to strange meetings, searching for computers in dusty warehouses. He has been lucky, the investigator tells him. When one searches for information from those years, it’s usually the case that it has been erased forever. David knows that they have gone from person to person, verifying addresses, lists, names: that’s how they wound up finding a home and a family. Tonight, they will sleep until noon. He knows that the old man doesn’t like to go out in the daylight. When Deitel proposed that the client go alone, David convinced him that he needed the old man with him.

Deitel gets into the shower slowly. He thinks about the case. He feels some pity for David. In his years in this business, he has seen every kind of obsession. He has made a living from them: those who lived in a video game, emulating a virtual persona; those who had to know about letters their wives had received; those who were searching for a missing family member; those who believed they were being followed; those who wanted revenge. The water runs down his tired body, worn out from the mere exercise of sitting for more than fifteen hours a day in front of a computer. He caresses the scar on his chest and closes his eyes, now almost blind. Knocks at the door rouse him. “I’m coming, Mr. David,” he says with indifference. The day injures him, confirming his detachment from humanity. The environment is cold; the fog challenges the sun. The taxi that carries the foreigners moves forward with caution. They must look for someone in a nearby city. The journey will take three hours. The old man sleeps while his client and the driver talk about sports.

An elderly woman opens the door to them. When they give the name of the person they’re searching for, she answers cautiously. “We’re looking for someone. We’re not the police or anything of that sort,” the old man adds. The next question is uncomfortable: “Do you have a daughter?” “No,” says the lady, and she seems to want to shut the door in his face. “Listen, we know that someone from this house, from this family, shared a very personal story many years ago on the internet. We don’t want to cause trouble,” he adds. “We’re just looking for her.” The woman, nervous and astonished by the request, allows them to come inside.

6

During the first hour, they explain to her the reason for their trip. They tell her the story. David’s enthusiasm when telling the story bewilders and embarrasses his listeners. When he finishes the tale, he shows the photo to the woman, and she smiles. “My mother used to tell this story. She owned some cabins on the beach. My husband always dreamed of being a writer. I guess he must have uploaded this story hoping to get some attention. He turned the anecdote into a short story. The truth is that he exaggerated quite a bit.”

“But what about the photo?” David says to her with a broken expression and watery eyes. The woman blushes. “It’s a photo of me,” she says. Up until this moment, the man hadn’t noticed the woman’s features: it was her, the woman he had dreamed of, the woman he saw when he closed his eyes while reaching orgasm with his wife. He was disarmed. Part of him thought he ought to kiss her right away; the other part was shattered.

To the astonishment of both of them, the woman clarified, “My husband and I were nudists. We went to nude beaches, we went naked around the house, and sometimes we did pranks. This photo is of one of them. He challenged me to go into a store—just a few blocks from here—without clothes.” The woman sighed nostalgically. “Were you fourteen?” asks David. She laughs. “I was twenty-five—and very athletic. Although it may be hard to believe now, for many years I looked quite young.”

“Did this other woman exist?” asks Deitel, seeking to finally bring this case to a close. “Of course,” the woman says. “In fact, my mother told us the story a few weeks after it happened. No one knows if she was coming from the beach, but I’m sure she crossed the central part of the town naked, and she asked for the key, and my mother offered to lend her clothes.” “And was she beautiful?” David asks. “Yes, she must have been. My father claimed she looked like the apparition of an angel. He was also present, though my husband never mentioned him in the story.”

7

In the airport lounge, David says goodbye to the old man. “I’m staying here,” he had said when they returned to the hotel. “I’ll hire another private detective. Someone must know how to find that woman.” Deitel doesn’t try to dissuade him. As he’s boarding the plane, the old man thinks that he will arrive in his country when it’s still daytime. He’ll sleep a bit and then return to his computer in the night. He brings his hand to his chest. The light of the sun entering through the windows is painful to him. He feels unsettled.

When the woman mentioned the girl, the old man saw how David’s pupils subtly grew. The old investigator knew that the woman had saved David from a terrible sadness with that last sentence, but she had also cast him into an even worse destiny: a vain search, abandoning everything to follow a reflection in a window. As the plane takes off, Deitel thinks that in reality everything is a mirage. “I’m too old to philosophize,” he reproaches himself. Shortly, he falls asleep.