By James Marchiori
Zikru the idea.
He had an idea. During an ordinary day, Zikru, tired as always, was trying to find a revelation, an explanation, a solution. What he was looking for was in his reflection, in the mirror. Was it his in-sight? Maybe it was what he was staring at. He wanted to heal his tiredness throughout his own reflection.
Using it to fill the void, the lack of substance, the wrong facets. To cancel weaknesses, to save from decline. In front of him, just a mirror, a common bathroom mirror. What if he could invent a healing mirror? He thought about what he needed, being not scared by the magic he had to perform, con-sidering that everything had to be complementary to his mirror. An entire world of structures and objects to make it possible. It was not just the specialist, but all the instruments, the tools, the place, and the assistants. It was the whole picture to perform the magic, but of course, everything orbits around knowledge. The primordium. The fact itself made by the invention.
Naturally, he couldn’t miss the first point. Building the mirror from the scratch, being able to have the ‘first draft’ of the project and straight after the first sample. He had enough knowledge to realize it. It was a secret power, amplified by the studies, but born with him. His inner gift, over the bound-aries of knowledge. It could be called genius, but for Zikru, calling it a gift was more than enough.
His scratch point, a piece of mirror. He started an infinite round of calculations to arrive at the point and finally have that little piece of reflecting glass transformed into a magnificent scepter of healing. He focused on a small piece to invest as little as possible. Any investment was expensive under many points of view, but necessary. Zikru had the idea, and he didn’t want to fail, he knew that.
In his garage, everything was ready. I can’t say I assisted; I was there while Zikru made himself ready, but the pact was I would get out before he started his experiment. From the beginning I had the right to tell this story, but never tell how the mirror was made.
From outside I heard a lot of noise, like bangs, blows against the garage walls, powerful air jets like a compressor. Then strange lights from a welding machine, and more intense, like a small powerful aurora.
In a while he was outside, unkempt, his fingertips scorched. A radiant smile. He was holding this little piece of mirror, completely and utterly the same to any other mirror on the planet, but en-hanced with that power. He didn’t try it, but he was sure to complete his journey in the knowledge with a triumph. He now desired to prove the mind-blowing power of that mirror. How? He needed something tangible, out of doubt, and capable to confirm the miracle with no room for questions.
He thought hard, but nothing seemed to come to his mind, until a name reached the surface of his mental jumble. Zid, his old friend. The guy was in bed because of a wound he’d sustained playing football. He would have used his mirror to heal it.
After a brief text to Zid where he claimed to have an instant solution for his wound, Zikru was waiting for an answer. It arrived instantly. His close friend was delighted by his umpteenth eccentricity. At least, Zid would have had a little company for the rest of the afternoon, he thought.
Zikru ran to his home, with his mirror ready for the action. He didn’t even see Zed’s sister, who he was platonically in love with, too excited to show his invention.
Once Zid showed his wound on the instep, Zikru pointed to his mirror. The wound was now framed in the little piece of glass. Once he felt the image was still enough, he passed his finger on the glass surface, and suddenly the wound on Zid’s foot disappeared.
The friend was in awe; he couldn’t believe his eyes. Cautiously, he put his fingers on the foot, where the wound was touching and pressing repeatedly. It was gone. He jumped off the bed, walking nor-mally across the room. Enraptured, he hugged his friend, incredulous. “You’re a healer!” He shouted.
Zikru had the confirmation he wanted. Nobody in the room couldn’t believe what just happened. Zid’s sister's eyes were now looking differently at her brother's friend.
Once out, Zirku was thinking of what he just created. He could not describe his happiness, not even to himself.
Now he had the way, and he could amplify, magnify his invention. A house in decay could have been restored to its former glory in a touch. One day, with funds and means, a monumental mirror could have been placed in the stratosphere to heal the world.
What he concluded was that the power of his invention was in the ability to heal throughout the reflection. The image.
The reflection was the double of the source and the platform on which perform the healing through-out a finger. The vector.
For now, it was a matter of healing, a noble matter. In Zirku’s head, it had to remain the primary matter of his project. But he couldn’t avoid to think about another aspect. His mirror could change any image, not substantially, not yet, but correcting it. If a wound was considered as a defect, the mirror would correct it. So, it could correct the defect. Defect, from the Latin defectus, lack, defi-ciency, or what is missed.
The mirror was a lack-checker, it could not transform but refine. The gift to work on the image and likeness to heal the present. Image and likeness was a territory that always intrigued Zirku, not only from the point of view of the double but also because the concept was a way to work on the subli-mation, trying to reach the sublime. The correction.
It was not anymore the image and likeness of the existing, just the reflection.
The image and likeness was a concept itself, a canvas to fix the present. Everything was subordinated to a superior faculty and complementary to any functionality. The real matter factor in everyday actions. The Will.
He needed to define whether a bigger healing, bigger than Zid’s wound, needed more time to be effective. If the surface was enlarged, the finger or any other tool would have required more time to cover the affected area. Thus, presumably the healing power wouldn’t have been immediate. That was a problem. His idea needed a womb. A neutral place where the alteration would find an area to become real. A sort of limbo of procreation where the finger, who changes the image under the will, would have his modification completed.
He called the modification ideation, and its gestation, inception. He wasn’t sure a bigger interven-tion would have taken more time to be achieved, but that was a possibility. The focus was the will. The will was the primal engine of the movement in the world. The will must materialize in equal proportion between the healer and the healed. The operator and the believer. The will was the Big Mother, he thought. The control over the idea, especially during the inception process.
The father's role was attributed to the mirror. It was the father of the likeness. The likeness could be altered throughout the willingness, the Big Mother action, and her neutral womb of transfor-mation. He concluded the womb was the session itself, the time, the process for which the miracle happened, for the time needed to make it happen.
Another crucial point, just before the perfection, was in doubt. The process of perfection has to be studded with doubts, they were the key to the sublime. If they were well founded, they needed a correction. The process was well known.
The doubt was represented by the likeness. Was it a concrete defect? The world was the place where likeness was the keyword. People were fighting to achieve the model. The ones that undergo cosmetic surgery, they are all the same. Cheekbones like knobs, noses unrealistically small, lips in-flated like life jackets. Also, all the people imitating this or that celebrity. A platoon of obsessed lookalike. The satisfaction to reach the goal being a cornucopia of somebody else. The tendency was to buy a new winter jacket to be like the friends, not to gather all together, but to show it on the social media, to have the same phone, avoiding to be out of the bunch.
He confirmed to himself the similarity was a lack of originality. The maximum defect. The hugest hoax ever. What he was offering for now was to meet their own counterpart in the mirror land. He healed Zid, but probably the wound would have come back, because the whole thing was based on the mere appearance. He needed something deeper and stable, something to grip the inner part of the human being, looking for the purity, the truth.
So, the additional question was: can the mirror heal the error throughout the error itself?
While he was absorbed in considering every possible way to improve his invention, a phone call interrupted his day, confirming what he already knew. On the phone, a shy Zid was trying to find the right words to use with his dear friend. Unfortunately, the wound was back. Not deep and pain-ful as it was before, but unpleasant enough to put him in bed again.
Zikru was incredibly sorry to hear it. His primary goal was to heal. He tried to explain to his friend what he was doing, working day and night on his creation. He offered him another session as soon as his mirror was ready to heal without failure. He would win. It was the first and the only experi-ment, so far. Another few days and the inerrancy would have been reached. Zid was happy to re-ceive this second attempt, once the mirror would have been refined.
Apparently, the only solution was to create a negative of the reflection. An image that could enhance the integrity of the essence, helping to exalt the power of the will. The positive image was a simple reflection. It was a distraction for the will; the healing was effective, but not definitive. He needed to create what, in physics, the scientists used to call the particles that made the antimatter. The partners. He needed a partner image where to penetrate the root of the human being, where his finger could act, changing the inner part of the error, eradicating it.
This game of negative and positive was dangerous. Exactly as it was for matter and antimatter. The risk was the destruction, the annihilation of the image. If you destroy the image, there is no exist-ence because everything nowadays is based on the image. All he would have to do was to use the partner as a canvas to restore the plain copy. The image made of anti-image, but also a work in the deep realms of the insight. The new improvement was successfully the double, he thought. It was a revolution of the modern times. Nobody was considering anymore the insight.
Once the image was stripped of the futility frills, he would have reached the marrow, the essence, the starting point of the inception. Mother Will would have worked free from distraction, and Father Mirror would have shown just the essence. The finger could have been the maximum healer, in the deep insight of the human nature. The compliance of this new vision was absolute. With the revision of the matter, his dream to heal wholeheartedly would be fulfilled.
The first thing to do was to go back to the garage and start thinking of what the mirror needed to enhance the negative of the image. As in photography, the matter is the light. The light is the ele-ment of transformation in everything. The colours are one of the first elements highly influenced by the light. We have colours because we have light. Zirku was considering the spectrum and the im-pulse of the brightness as a vector in the transformation. The mirror was the trap. In the mirror the transformation happens, like in a bowl where to mix the ingredients to make an excellent salad. He built a foldable scaffold where he placed a multitude of beacons of various dimensions and shape; the bulbs were coloured in bright and dark, primary, secondary and tertiary colours. Some of them were painted in a mix of colours, so vast, to get a muck tone. The rest were powerful and bright of neutral light. The goal was to point the multitude of beacons on the structure against the subject and the mirror.
Because of the powerful source of illumination represented by the bit player in the healing action, what Zikru was fearing the most, was the blinding reflections. It would represent a weapon against Mother Will, incapacitating her. The orientation of the beacons should be tailored to the situations, making the process more hardworking and time-consuming. Finally, trying on a trial mirror, he real-ized how his body created grey areas, obscuring the lights. For that reason, it was impossible to continue using the finger. He needed a stick. Something as thin as possible, so that just a brief shadow would have obscured the healing field. Of course, he needed a bigger mirror as well.
The following hours were spent in developing all the new tools necessary for the purpose.
I was just a mute witness of the revolution, hypnotized by his incredible genius and creativity. But I was concerned. The lights of the most intense and coloured types were escaping from every crack in the garage. The front door seemed to explode under the intangible force of that beam. I thought for a minute that Zikru could have been annihilated by the light. All his reasoning about the anti-matter, did he reach that goal? Something went wrong? Was he destroyed by his own creature? My fears were nearly to come true, when everything turned dark and silent in a second. Finally, Zikru appeared on the door, once again scorched here and there, dusty and scruffy. But his smile was the evidence of his success. He made it.
He owned a small, discolored and creaky van. Just out of his garage, he jumped on the van, coming backwards to the garage door. Exhausted and with what remained of his forces, he loaded the van with his new equipment. He was ready to heal Zid for good. The van ran limping to his friend’s house. Once there, he started the ritual by placing all his equipment around Zid sitting in a chair.
Once all the beacons reached the maximum power, the light in the room was blinding, Zikru pointed all of them against the friend’s foot and the mirror with a special hook. The operation took a long time; he had to avoid to blind Mother Will and himself. The action of his wand had to be meticulously precise. There was no room for error. This was the time for a reward. He wanted a great one, in terms of satisfaction. Once he could finally see the negative image of Zid’s feet, he was almost blinded, but no glasses or any other alteration was allowed. Shaking, he traced with the magic wand the line over the wound. In the negative, the wounded area was blue, with a greenish outline. He could see it turning grey as the rest, at the passage of the wand.
When he finished, he pushed the six switches, and the lights turned off in an instant. He and Zid were completely blinded. The only thing Zikru could see was a sort of blue shadow. They waited a bit, putting their hands on their eyes, and gradually, they could gain back their sight.
The wound had disappeared once again. Gone. “For good this time!” Added a triumphant Zikru.
His friend was now running around again, free from the discomfort, happy as never. Zikru was sure of his success. His negative exposure to reach the insight was the only way to make the miracle possible.
Zikru had his reward in seeing his friend walking, running and dancing. He was drained, he couldn’t imagine what was going to happen to him.
The next morning, Zid’s sister, silent as always, organized a big thing for her brother and his friend. A friend of her was a journalist, interested in everything new and extraordinary. The classic scoop-man. When he knew what happened, he asked for an interview. Zid, happy for the attention, re-vealed to the journalist the mysterious happening, showing him the miracle for which he was the protagonist. For the newspaper it was a jubilee. The editor wanted to know the advocate behind it. Zikru was invited officially to the paper for an interview. He was electric.
Revealing no secret, he exposed his ‘healing-miracle’ invention, passing from an unknown bloke to a star.
The fame was a cage, though. A monumental menagerie of vanity. He wasn’t prepared, and he ended trapped in it. The request for healing was growing up at an exponential rate. Everybody wanted him, from a broken nail to a massive palace in decay. He was the director of the renovations, but the pressure was an enemy, impossible to defeat, and it couldn’t be healed by his mirror, as the spiral of vanity in which he fell, couldn’t. The whole thing was escalating to where Zikru was a more public figure than what he originally was. The machine had kidnapped him, obscuring his aim. He was more proud of himself now than of his invention. The sessions were reduced to the bare bones, therefore the time was too little, and he wasn’t precise anymore. People were idolizing him, so it was not a matter of result now. Everything turned perfect if Zikru was the advocate.
The vortex sped until the mirror stopped working. On his last session he tried and tried, but there was nothing to do. It wasn’t working. He tried again the following day, but nothing. The magic was gone.
He was desperate, falling from the highest of the trees. Some minor papers had already unleashed the terrible label of charlatan. He was saddened, tired and lost.
Thinking of the disaster, he tried to find an explanation, chasing all the leads, asking himself every question, until he realized that the only thing he was really hunting was the glory. The ultimate cage. He made an appeal to Mother Will, sadly discovering that she was trapped in the Glory cage as well. The will was diminished and prisoner and her dark sister was now running the business, the anti-matter particle of the will, the partner particle. Sister Interest.
She had the power to weak the will, channeling it in restricted scenarios, views narrowed by the interest. Mother Will needed to be free of movement, out of rails to be effective. Zikru had lost this freedom, making his invention a medium, and not a scepter anymore. The profit killed the goal and finally killed the idea itself.
The evolution of the idea put Zikru on the wrong path, and now the health of Mother Will was at high risk. To make things worse, he didn’t know what to do to save the situation. While he was desperately thinking of a solution, he heard a tremendous blow that almost deafened him. The ex-cessive pressure made by the interest, finally, smashed the mirror.
His conclusion was brutal. A few glass crumbles as a witness of the brilliant idea, inflated by the glory and finally punctured by the interest in an immense blow.
What Zikru learned in his journey was mainly the ability to divide the concepts in two. Having the two faces of the medal, and not discarding any of them, being able to reach perfection. Like in some millenary traditions, he used the good and the bad, the positive and the negative, to build the su-preme. It was the only way. Supreme was the man able to project the principle of his own vision in the entire existence, to grow without enemies or forces to fear, to use both sides as one force.
Zikru succeeded in this, for a while, until as a human being he chose a side. He felt comfortable in one zone. The comfort zone.
He allowed the interest to detain the will, making it so weak to become indifference. Both enemies of the conception.
The inception of vanities is the end of the will, while the will is the spine of the conception.
That was the day Zikru died.
James Marchiori is a Dublin based poet and writer. He wrote his first verses at nine years old and his last novel, ‘To My Beloved Heart’, a tribute to Edgar Allan Poe, was amongst the nominees for the Saturday Visiter Awards in Baltimore, USA. He’s currently working on a crime novel set in Dublin, Ireland, with fragments of gothic, occult and supernatural elements. Bohemia incarnate, a free soul devoted to Surrealism and Poetry. An independent and critical observer.