Names changed to protect the guilty. Except me and I. That's still me.
I'd known Bemis a few years at this point. Two. Three. Long enough that I knew the important things. We named him after a toilet seat brand, which tells you more about us than about him. He likes shock value humor and messing with people. The kind of guy who will set a fuse and walk away so he can hear it go off from the other room.
Long enough that he knew some important things about me too. I don't like the dark. I don't like horror movies. I am, for the purposes of psychological horror, a complete pussy.
I don't need a sign from the universe to teach me that I scare easy. My brain reminds me all the time. For free. Usually at 2 a.m. Usually about something that isn't even in the room.
My roommate, Playa69, was moving out. Getting married. Boxes. U-Haul. Future!
I wanted a roommate who wasn't crazy. You know, not the kind of person that has a bunch of insects pinned to one of his walls. Oh, also, I wasn't interested in a dude trying to sell me Amway.
Bemis had already lived in the same complex for years. I didn't want to change complexes, and he was really fucking cool. Bemis needed someone who paid rent and didn't complain about the lack of furniture in the apartment.
I needed someone I already knew well enough to steal food from.
We were the perfect match.
Hippie had been in Bemis's extra bedroom, then moved back to Minnesota for work. Gone back to the great white north, climate of his Viking ancestors. Don't worry. He eventually comes back. When he left, a room opened up.
It worked out the way obvious things work out. Anybody one step back could see the solution. Bemis and I thought we got lucky. I moved into Hippie's old room.
First night.
You know that first night in someone else's long running apartment. New keys to an old lock. Your boxes in a room that still has the other guy's air in it. Bemis's place was already a place, lived in and settled. My half of it was empty except for whatever I dragged in. Nowhere to put a drink down except the floor or a box.
I hauled the boxes into Hippie's old room, found the bathroom, and decided a shower would make me feel like a person again instead of a man who lived out of cardboard boxes for twelve hours.
I took a long hot one. The kind that steams the whole room until you can't see the towel rack. I washed off the move. I stood there like an idiot enjoying city water pressure. Then I shut it off and stepped out.
Right there. Whole mirror. Fogged glass and capital letters. Obvious the second I was on the bath mat.
My brain tried to read it straight and bounced. Backwards. Backwards?
Backwards!
What the actual fuck? Is that message for the people on the other side of the glass?
I stood there dripping, staring at it.
Bemis obviously wrote that.
Three options. That was the whole night.
One: is Bemis a psycho? Legit? Roommate interview scared. The kind of scared where you recheck the lock and wonder if you should sleep with a chair under the doorknob. I had lots of indicators that Bemis was quite crazy. The mirror was not the first data point. It was just the one on the glass. In front of me. Right now.
Two: is Bemis messing with me? He knew I hated the dark. He knew I didn't enjoy horror. He has a sense of humor that doesn't always check whether the other person asked for a joke. This would be peak Bemis if peak Bemis was a hate crime.
Three: Bemis is sane. There are people on the other side of the glass. He is communicating with them. HELP ME! is mail. What does he need help with? This is the one that really stuck with me, and kind of broke my brain.
I know how that sounds. I don't like horror movies, so I haven't watched a lot of horror movies. That was my problem. My brain had no training for "ignore the impossible." People who watch horror for fun get training in "this is fake, go back to bed." I didn't. So option three didn't get immediately laughed out of the room. It got a permanent desk in the office of my brain. I stood there dripping, running all three on a loop. I could not get a clean answer.
For the record, here's how the rest of that night went.
I finished drying off on legs that weren't working properly yet. I checked the lock on the bathroom door even though whatever was on the glass was already behind me. I opened the door a crack and listened to the apartment. TV murmur. Bemis, somewhere, being Bemis. Normal sounds. The kind of sounds that prove you're not in a movie . . . until they don't.
I went to my room with the hall light on. I left my bedroom door open more than I wanted to, because closed doors are where plots happen.
My closet had sliding doors. Mirrored sliding doors. Floor to almost ceiling sheets of glass looking back at me from the wall where a normal person stores shirts. So after the bathroom had a note for the people on the other side, I got to lie down six feet from a whole mirrored wall of the same idea.
Every time I rolled over, there it was. Every time the hall light cut a stripe across the room, there they were. Closet people. Mirror people. Same job description.
And what if HELP ME! was on the closet doors too, and I just couldn't see it because the glass wasn't fogged. I breathed on the doors. Nothing showed. That didn't mean it wasn't there. It meant I couldn't make enough fog with one scared pair of lungs.
I didn't have a bed that night, or for a long time after. I slept on the floor on a nylon sleeping bag from whatever camping aisle sold sadness in bulk. Whole adult life reduced to camping indoors, facing a wardrobe that was also a portal if you watched too many movies as a kid. Or if you didn't, and your roommate put a note on the glass.
I tried to sleep in a place where the bathroom mirror had filed a missing persons report.
Sleep didn't come easy. Sleep came in pieces. Every time the AC kicked on I did the whole animal scan again. Window. Hall. The dark corner that had no business looking that deep. The closet doors, which I did not open, because opening them felt like accepting a meeting.
I'm a grown man. I've paid taxes. I've held jobs. I've crossed streets too drunk to spell my own name. It has three letters. Still too many. And on night one of living with Bemis I negotiated with my own nervous system like it was a landlord.
In the morning the bathroom mirror was clear and innocent again, the way dry glass lies. I knew better. Next long shower and that thing would come back. You don't unsee backwards capital letters aimed at the other side of the glass. The closet doors were still closet doors. Still mirrored. Still terrifying.
I made coffee. Bemis came out looking like he had slept fine. Of course he had. In every version of the story, his night was easy. He said something normal about work or cereal or nothing. I said something normal back. We were roommates now. That was the deal. Rent and silence.
He never said a word about it that night, the next morning over coffee, or a year later when we were both still there and all three options should've expired. He didn't ask if I saw it. He didn't say "gotcha." He didn't offer a medical history or a guided tour of the silver mirror kingdom. He just existed in the other room being Bemis, which is already a full time job.
I didn't bring it up either. What was I supposed to say. "Hey, are you crazy? Are you messing with me? Are you the postman for the people in the glass?" If he says joke, I've given him the win. If he says crazy, I'm living with a man who just admitted it. If he says mirror people, I'm the guy who asked. There is no good outcome. So I said nothing. For years. Until right now.
The message stayed for months in that apartment. Shower. Fog. HELP ME!
Closet doors catching me while I put on socks. I'd walk past my own reflection and for a half second my brain would file it under "possible staff." The three options still had desks in my head. Especially three. Horror averse brains are bad at closing the portal once someone writes a note on it.
To this day I'm a little creeped out by mirrors. Just that half second where the glass looks thicker than it should and I wonder if anyone on the other side is waiting for mail.
People ask why I stayed. Easy. Four hundred a month, my half of eight hundred. I had been paying seven hundred at the old place. That means I saved three hundred dollars a month by moving in with a man I was slightly unsure about.
I already knew him. Moving twice in a month is for people with better spines and more money. Plus, every place has fucking mirrors. You don't get away from mirrors by signing a different lease.
Once you've survived night one, night two is just real estate. I got friendlier with the bathroom fan after that. Shorter showers. Less sauna. Whatever was on the glass could wait until I was ready to host. Bravery, for me, is a scheduling problem.
So let's break it down. Same three options. Now with the honesty I should have had while I was dripping on the mat.
Bemis is crazy.
This is the "I live with the 'White power, my brother' guy" theory. Same dude, who might also be the postman for the silver mirror kingdom. Who says "white power" in a room where we are the only whites? Out loud? Like a greeting?
In this version I should have left. Packed the sleeping bag. Called Playa69. Slept in a U-Haul. Instead I made coffee and asked him how work was. If he was crazy, I was the supporting character who hands the axe back and says "here you go, boss."
I also slept with my door open. Great plan. Invite the possible psycho to a free look at the soft target on the sleeping bag. The hallway light stayed on for at least a month. I opened closet doors like they might call HR on me.
I'm exactly the kind of person who would do all of that and still pay half the rent on time.
The mirror people are real.
This is the one that proves I'm a freak, and I'm fine if you point and laugh. I don't watch horror. When something horror shaped shows up on my glass, my brain doesn't go "movie." It goes "documentary."
HELP ME! is mail. Bemis is the postman. I'm the new guy who walked into a pre existing postal route without a forwarding address. My lifelong half second of mirror dread isn't trauma. It's customer service awareness.
And notice what this option actually is. The other two are about something being wrong with Bemis. This one is about something being wrong with me. I wrote all three.
If you're laughing at me right now, good. That laugh was available free of charge on night one and I still took the lease.
Bemis is messing with me.
This is the one that fits. He knew I hated the dark. He knew I didn't enjoy horror. He has a sense of humor that doesn't need an audience. The best Bemis moves don't require him to be in the room when they land. They require you to stand there alone, dripping, inventing a civilization behind the silver. All the while, the toilet seat man down the hall sleeps like a baby, with a clean conscience.
For years, if I had to put numbers on it:
95% Bemis was messing with me. Personality fits. Silence fits. Adult brain fits.
4% The crazy slice that stuck. The "I have a correspondent in the silver" kind.
1% He was the only sane person in the building, and he just happened to be super chill with the scary ass mirror people.
I'm not proud of that third option. The one at 1%. But I can't get rid of it either.
That was the whole story, in my head. What my soft little horror averse brain did with a 95 / 4 / 1 split while a roommate I was sure was laughing slept great either way.
----------------
That was the ending. I had it typed. 95, 4, 1. Roll credits. Twenty two years of being sure.
Then I showed Bemis this story. The people who were there read these before I publish them, so I don't leave something out.
He insists he didn't write it. And after everything, I believe him. Shock value guy or not, this one wasn't his fuse.
He only said he didn't write it.
He never said he didn't see the message.
So I ran it past the rest of the friend group. Turns out Hippie wrote HELP ME! on the mirror on his way out the door to Minnesota. Not for me. For Bemis. A going away present for the roommate who was staying. He left the state with a nuke staged in the bathroom.
I assumed he had done some kind of Viking magic to make it stay. Turns out, it is just chemistry. Skin oil off a fingertip sits on the glass, and water will not condense on it the way it condenses on everything around it. The message does not fade. It waits for humidity. It keeps waiting until somebody cleans the mirror with something stronger than a paper towel, which is not a thing two men in their twenties are ever going to do.
I moved into Hippie's old room, took a long shower, and walked into a prank that was never addressed to me. Collateral damage. Softest possible collateral. I spent the better part of my adult life prosecuting Bemis in my head while Bemis, the actual intended victim, either never saw it or ignored it. I don't know which. I know I breathed on the closet doors for a message that wasn't even mine.
So Bemis: you already read the first half of this. You already told me it wasn't you. I believe you. I still owe you the rest. I blamed you 95 percent. I'm sorry about that part. You don't realize how long I wrestled with a crime you didn't commit. Twenty two freaking years. Three options on a loop while the guy who wrote the mail was already in Minnesota.
Hippie: if this gets back to you, nice shot. You lit it in 2004 and left the state. It went off as soon as the fog hit. The fallout had a twenty two year half life. Wrong soft target answered the door. Fuck you too. Quietly. With a whole lot of respect.
The 1% is still on the table. I'm still a little creeped out by mirrors.