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The mirror hypothesis
and the black holes paradox,
an essay by Shiho Miyano
in her own mind
There is a villa, somewhere in the English countryside, where her mother used to live. It lays in the background of the picture in which Elena is hugging a girl and smiling at the camera with the same lips Shiho now has, without the smile because Elena has never taught her how to do it, Akemi has taken over, Shiho has learned, Akemi has died, Shiho has unlearned.
She can’t imagine herself living in that villa, it's too big, too empty. She’s afraid that if she only set foot there she would see the allegory of her interior, too big, too empty, and she would burst into tears. A little girl no one cares about, tears bouncing off the walls like a tennis ball. What happened, come here, stop crying, take this handkerchief, tell me, wipe off your tears, just sniffle if you want, tell me, come on, I’m not judging, really: no one would say this to her, on the other hand even if that villa had belonged to her mother and now to her, even if she went to live there, no one would be invited to come along, no one would hear or see her cry.
·
There’s Shinichi. One day Shiho wakes up, looks at the picture, thinks back to the villa, to the image of the villa that she built in her head, and it comes natural to her to picture Shinichi as the landlord. There are twenty-two floors, and they occupy them all. Shinichi and his housemates. Somewhere in these twenty-two floors, on the ninth or seventh or perhaps nineteenth floors, is the writer, the perfect son his father had hoped he would become. Yukiko instead pictured him as an actor or magician—when Shinichi had told her Shiho had laughed, she really had, and she had thought that even if her mother hadn't taught her how to do it and Akemi was gone before she knew how to do it by herself, she could have been capable of it anyway—therefore, somewhere between the twenty-two floors of the villa, she sees the magician arguing with the scientist because one advocates for imagination and the other for reason. Shinichi is a writer, a magician, an actor, even a scientist: he is because he can. But the detective won and left the villa and ruined her life. Hers—Shiho’s. Because she ruined it for him (Shinichi does know), and he ruined it for her (Shinichi does not know).
·
It happens one day. Butterfly effect. A coincidence. Luck, bad luck. It depends on what the randomness entails. Fate, even: favorable, adverse. Who believes it exists, who doesn’t. She doesn’t.
She thinks: if I hadn’t been her friend, I would never have seen him again. Too generic, better: if I hadn’t arrived late that morning of our first lesson in our class, she wouldn’t have sat on my right, silent and embarrassed, at the back of the classroom. If she hadn't sat on my right, silent and embarrassed, at the back of the classroom, she would never have spoken to me. If she had never spoken to me, we would not have become friends. If we hadn’t become friends, I wouldn’t have a dead friend. If I didn’t have a dead friend, he wouldn’t have questioned me.
And again: if he hadn't questioned me, I wouldn’t be here. Again. Him and me, me and him.
She even goes so far as to think that her friend’s death happened because of her. Is it possible that the past has attached to her some sort of malignant entity and that it follows her everywhere, attracting and incorporating in its shapeless mass everything it sees other than itself? Butterfly effect or adverse fate? Randomness or bad luck?
Didn’t her friend come home late by accident? If she hadn’t forgotten her cell phone at Shiho’s, wouldn’t she have returned home earlier? If Shiho had insisted that she stayed in her apartment and didn’t bow to a no but bent her friend to a yes, would she still be alive?
If, if, if, if.
Butterfly Effect. Threads that intertwine and intersect and fray without logic. Call it luck, call it bad luck.
If, if, if, if.
One night she comes home, the image of Shinichi saying ‘it's not your fault, you couldn’t have done anything’ etched in her mind, her skin still hot where he brushed her shoulder with one hand, as if his fingers were hot coals, and she wonders if the simplest solution isn’t to eradicate the problem at its root: weeding, burning the field, killing the virus even before it spreads and infects half the world.
If, if, if, if.
If she never existed. If she undid the mistake by uprooting its rotten roots, even better the whole family tree, rotten as well. The sins of her mother were the sins of her mother’s mother—perhaps they were or perhaps they weren’t—now they are hers, the sins of the mother that become of the daughter, and the sins of the daughter will become the sins of the mother when she is no longer a daughter but a mother.
She thinks about it, again and again, bursts out laughing, not like Elena never taught her, rather like they taught her: she laughs because she never was a daughter, never will be a mother, therefore to think about her dilemmas is useless. She will die, and her sins with her.
·
It’s a question they often ask her at such an age and she answers without answering, with the carelessness of someone who pretends not to hear with such skill that it seems they haven't really heard.
Why a daughter?
Why think about being two when you're not even one?
Why think about the future when you don’t even have a past?
·
When she saw him again the world stopped, or started spinning again, she couldn’t say for sure, she just knows that whether of the two is the right answer it would still be wrong, the world doesn’t stop or start spinning again to follow the rhythm of one’s thoughts. But something has started spinning again, whether you want to classify it as a world makes no difference: it started spinning again and Shiho, even though she has noticed it, has not been able to stop it. It was spinning and spinning when he turned, saw her, a flash of recognition on his face, and walked towards her with a slight smile muffled by the circumstances. Shiho herself can’t tell what she must have thought, Shinichi is too cryptic for her to be able to predict his moves and she knows him more in her head than in reality.
She thought: no no no no no no. Not you, not you, why you? My blessing and curse, my mirror. Why you? Get out. Don’t come near me, don’t talk to me, don’t look at me.
I.
Am.
Well.
·
She’s not. If being well means getting up every morning to follow a script written, directed and made—according to pre-set directives existing since the dawn of time—by the same person who has to follow it, then she’s well. If being well means anything else, she is not.
·
Since she saw him again she went back to ask herself the same questions, to grind on the same dilemmas. A dog chasing its tail, a clock that goes from zero to twelve and then back to zero, and so on, in a never ending circle.
Her life, reduced to numbers. What she does for life, yet what she understands less.
·
Shiho is a black hole. For herself, for Shinichi, for anyone.
Shinichi is a black hole. Just for her.
She let herself fall in it before it could even suck her with its own force, and she was just (not) fine there.
·
Shinichi is a mirror. Shiho looks at herself and sees her face as the same, but the image is deceptive, a partial truth, a half-told lie.
Shinichi is a photograph. The camera takes the image, distorts it, models it on the eyes of others, who see us better than ours do, and slams it in our face like a slap. It’s everyone’s truth versus one person’s truth, thus making that truth a lie. She liked to think Shinichi reflected the best of her and amplified it beyond perfection, now she knows that Shinichi has only a part of her, the one that was already there before his arrival mixed with the one he left after, irrelevant when compared to the part she has of him.
·
She doesn’t know what love is. She tries to decipher it and then she has lost before even starting because love should not be studied and understood and gutted but only lived, and Shiho has never lived, much less lived with love: she lost before even starting, but she tries anyway. Her mother loved her—why did her mother love her? Why love a cluster of cells that is nothing yet is enough to suck your blood, steal your breath, steal you from yourself? How do you love someone who swells up your stomach and weighs down your legs and makes you throw up in the morning and then, when they are born, when they open their eyes and see the light, see you, they just cry? How can you love someone who does not yet exist, if not by projecting a version of yourself into them, if not by imposing on them a role model that is as close as possible to ours, which for selfishness seems the most correct? In her recordings, her mother talked to her about how she and Akemi would love each other, how Shiho would love this or that, asked her about her studies, her friends, if there was a boy she liked and what was his name. Nothing more than assumptions, speculations based on a stereotypical model, just if, yet even in those there was a shadow of the expectations that Elena had placed on her even before realizing it, when she’d gone from one to two.
Shiho, she has more reasons to love her mother. She knows, through Akemi’s words—the only one she trusts, trusted—and then through the words of the same mother (an echo overdue by eighteen years), her past, her anxieties, her fears, her hopes. The Elena Miyano of her sister’s tales and the Elena Miyano that she herself left to Shiho have a form, these two forms coincide and by coinciding they give proof of the veracity of this form, unless one wants to admit that both Akemi and her mother were liars, but since Shiho excludes it, she can only believe and love them. Akemi who she knew, Elena who she would have liked to know. A daughter who has known a mother, albeit indirectly, has more reasons to love her than a mother has reasons to love a daughter who has not yet formed, let alone born.
How a mother loves a daughter, she does not know.
How a daughter loves a mother, she thinks she knows.
How a sister loves a sister, she knows.
(If a mother is the one who raises you, no matter your age, no matter how older she is and how desperately in need of a mother she is as well, then how a daughter loves a mother, she knows.)
But how another person, how a woman loves a man and a man a woman, how a woman loves another woman and a man another man—this much Shiho does not know.
·
Something is missing, and she knows this too, she realized it with the same ease with which she learned to walk and chew the first words—“Akemi”, not Mom, not Dad, only Akemi, only she who was there, not Mom and Dad who never were. She is missing too many things, and she understood this later: each experience is a piece that is added but which in turn leads you to realize that another is missing. If she had her first real friends after eighteen years of life, she had no friends for eighteen years. If in Professor Agasa she saw a father, she never had a father. If she wonders if she ever loved him, she never really loved him.
·
Shinichi. It is him who she wondered if she loved, it is him who she wonders, again, if she loves when she sees him again. She has so many women to rely on—her mother in the recordings, her sister in the memories, the others on television, in books, on the internet—and yet every single one of them sounds wrong, yet another lie stitched on reality. If it’s really a big, huge lie, a temporary pleasure to distract yourself from the inevitable, she would like to be as good at believing it as others are.
·
She had gotten used to looking at him in secret, fake children united by a secret separating them from real children, a barrier between us and them. There never was, in reality, one single ‘we’ or ‘them’, a couple of two that included just her and Shinichi, but she rejected reality and embraced lie—yes, yes, how had she liked to embrace it: she and him, me and you, united in the strangeness of a condition that only the two of them in the world could understand. For the first time she had acquired the certainty of having found a mirror from which she could draw some comfort.
A lie stitched on reality.
·
Shinichi is a man. Brilliant, yes, intelligent, yes, charismatic, yes: still a man.
Shinichi is a black hole.
Shinichi is a mirror.
Shinichi is a camera.
Shinichi is the photo that he takes of her and tells the lie of one person opposed to the truth of the whole world.
Shiho, her, me. Alone.
·
She had gotten used to looking at him in secret, fake children united by a secret separating them from real children, but now that they are alone she cannot hide behind others, invisible among many. She hopes Shinichi doesn’t notice that she looks at him as if at any moment he could reveal to her the secret to happiness, but it’s a useless worry, she has never meant to him what he has meant and means to her.
“Jealous ex-boyfriend kills the girl for revenge,” she hears him muttering so softly that for a moment she wonders if she hasn’t just imagined it, and might as well believe it if only she hadn't seen him move his lips. “A common scenario, for as sad as it is.”
Shiho nods but doesn’t answer. Death is something that the more you know it the more you don’t know what words to use to describe it. It is the merit of death, if one can speak of merit, if Shiho knows she is capable of loving, because only by loving a person can you cry when that person goes away. Like she cried for Akemi, and for her friend at university. She even cried for her mother and father, as a child by convention, because people had taught her that a mother and a father were essential and then she cried for them because she had never known them, as an adult she really cried for them, or at least she cried for the image she had of them thanks to her mother’s tapes and other testimonies scattered around like clues in a detective story.
If Shinichi died she would cry. Thus she cares for him, she loves him. But even by looking at him, she does not understand how, and it is in the how that she gets lost, that she despairs in search of an answer that if it were to be found could restore her life or give her one if it is true, as she suspects, that she does not have, nor never had, one.
·
“You could come back.”
“Come back?”
“To Professor Agasa’s. He asked me to tell you.”
So many unspoken words hidden behind two sentences of pure conventionality, made even more cumbersome by a person who, like her, cannot handle his own feelings, let alone those of others. She feels she hates him. Such compassion, such pity. Ai Haibara, Shiho Miyano, a child who never grew up, a child who never even was one—that’s who she is for him. A dark parenthesis in an existence that is a never ending flash of light, yet another paradox that works for Shinichi and not for her.
“Why?”
“You shouldn’t be alone in such a situation.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time.”
Shinichi falls silent and Shiho feels guilty. She wanted to come out as some sort of a bitch and instead she feels only pity for herself, it’s so obvious that she’s trying to mask the pain with arrogance, as if masking it were enough to turn it into real arrogance and not cry. For Akemi, for her mother and father, for her friend. For herself, the woman she is, the woman she will never be. (They are not interchangeable, one cannot be the other—the broken can’t be the healthy.)
·
It exists only in fantasy, the other Shiho, the healthy one. They exist only in fantasy, the other Shiho’s. Not in the twenty-two-story villa, that’s reserved for Shinichi. All his alternative versions are based on a single model, a starting point from which a thousand paths branch off, many equations united by a constant: they, the Organization, do not exist. Shinichi isn’t there either. A life without the Organization is a life in which Elena and Atsushi do not die. A life in which Elena and Atsushi do not die is a life in which Akemi does not die. A life in which Akemi does not die is a life in which there is no drug. A life in which there is no drug is a life in which there is no Conan Edogawa. A life in which there is no Conan Edogawa is a life in which there is no Ai Haibara. No us, no them. And even if she met him in an alternate reality, in this phase of her happy life she would be too different, too changed in her very essence, equal to herself only in form. You are formed by others, you can only try to make sense of what they create, and without the chaos that deforms her on the inside, Shiho would not need mirrors or black holes. She looks for them only because she is missing something, she is missing something only because she has always missed everything.
·
Her head hurts. It makes no sense to wonder about an alternative reality that, if it existed, would cancel the questions it poses every day, questions that Shiho on the other side would never ask herself because she does not need to look for the reverse side of her emptiness in others.
·
Shinichi is a black hole.
Shinichi is a mirror.
Shinichi is a camera.
Shinichi is the photo that he takes of her and tells the lie of one person opposed to the truth of the whole world.
Shinichi is the reverse of her emptiness.
Shinichi is a lie stitched on reality. The most beautiful to believe, the most painful to let go.
·
A villa with twenty-two floors would not be enough to contain all the alternative versions of Shinichi Kudo from all over the world, instead a villa with infinite space would be required because infinite are the alternative versions of Shinichi Kudo. Any person who tries to split themselves into two or seven or thirty entities is wrong, for those are in reality a thousand and even more, they are infinite, enclosed tightly in one body only, in one consciousness only.
She can’t imagine herself living in that villa, it's too big, too empty. She’s afraid that if only she set foot there she would see the allegory of her interior, too big, too empty, and she would burst into tears. Not the reverse of her emptiness, the opposite: the mirror of her emptiness. A mirror much more faithful than Shinichi is, however faithful a mirror may be, according to the mirror hypothesis: then, even better, the photograph of her emptiness.
·
He offers her a coffee, she accepts, he talks to her about his work, she listens: they are joking. He tells her that it’s nice to be able to talk again, that talking to her is easy because she understands such things and, when she guesses the identity of the culprit even before Shinichi reveals it, there’s a flash of approval on his face. He says: yes, exactly, very good, just him, the banker.
The strangeness of their condition returning. It’s not just the inconvenience of both being stuck in a six-year-old body that didn’t belong to them in the same time span, no, it’s the fact that that six-year-old body never belonged to them in the first time, they were already too big, they fit tight. Shiho had thought: here, you are like me. A boy alien to the conventions of adolescence, an overgrown child, but like a hologram that reveals his deception as soon as you pass a hand through it, now she understands that no, that’s not Shinichi, not the real one.
·
Shinichi is a black hole.
Shinichi is a mirror.
Shinichi is a camera.
Shinichi is the photo that he takes of her and tells the lie of one person opposed to the truth of the whole world.
Shinichi is the reverse of her emptiness.
Shinichi, who’s not empty, is empty only in her head, only in the villa of twenty-two floors that Shiho has arbitrarily assigned him: there, an (empty) envelope to be filled, Shiho has vomited into him thoughts and preconceptions that have never belonged to him. Shinichi said Mom and said Dad; he loved, still does; he had friends before Conan, he still has them. Shinichi does not see her as a shard of broken mirror, his, theirs, which together they can fix so they can finally look into it and say, scream: here, it’s me, it’s us.
·
Shiho checks herself in the mirror one morning, doesn’t recognize herself, doesn’t even know what she’s like.
She thinks: here, it’s me—nobody.
·
She often thinks about the villa, she just has to close her eyes to transport herself to any point she desires, the only person who appears different in a world of same-looking people, yet as different from each other as they are from her. Shinichi is a writer, a magician, an actor, even a scientist: he is because he can. But to have triumphed and to have left the villa is the detective, it is he who won, he won because he deserved it. Shinichi Kudo of an alternate reality would be as swashbuckling and intelligent as the detective, he was born this way, the life he has chosen is based on what he has always been.
Shiho didn't choose anything. She’d chosen to die, and yet that choice was stripped away from her arms. Free will, what free will? Life was chosen by others for her, they stitched it on her, a solitary path from which it was impossible to deviate.
What she’s now is what she’s been, what they forced her to be, but what she is nonetheless. Here she goes again fantasizing about that same twenty-two villa with infinite housemates, but this time they all have her face, her name. Shiho Miyano, non-scientist. But if she said Mom and she said Dad, if she and Akemi went to school together for years, if Akemi, stripped of the role of the mother, lived her adolescence according to convention and for a short period of that phase rejected Shiho because younger sisters have nothing to do with older sisters, then Shiho Miyano is just a name to stitch on any girl or woman.
·
Shinichi is the reverse of her emptiness.
Shinichi is a puppet that she has filled with apparently random lies but which follow a meticulous logical connection. Someone who can look at her and say: here, it’s me, it’s us, I understand you. Someone that she can look at and say: if it weren’t for you—you who are just like me—I’d feel like I was crazy (empty).
·
Shinichi, the real one, is the reverse of her emptiness. Two paths once similar that by deviating they become the opposite of the other, the same concept but applied in reverse, like a word that is read from right to left.
·
Shinichi, the real one, is a camera. He takes a picture of himself, takes one of her too, shows both of them to her and says: that’s who I am, and that’s who you are—do you see how we really are? More different than similar.
·
The mirror, the black hole, she invented them: they don’t look alike, Shinichi and her, and if Shinichi, the imaginary one, swallows her whole it’s only because she lets him do it, no, she begs him to do it. Swallow me, tear me into a thousand pieces, assimilate them and make them part of you, show me that you need me as much as I need you.
·
“But I don't need you.”
They’re in the villa. On the sixth floor, where the library is.
There is none of the Shinichi’s, only the detective.
He must have come back to tease her.
“I'm not here to tease you.”
She snorts, sits cross-legged and arms folded as if to shield herself from something, from someone. From him, who knows her just as much as she does.
“You’re more annoying than the real thing.”
He shrugs. “You created me. You know I don’t really exist, let me go.”
“Is this by any chance a therapy session?”
“Oh, you can find the therapist on the sixteenth floor", he says pointing at the ceiling. “You can go talk to him if you prefer, it wouldn’t change anything, he would say the same thing.”
Shiho hears the words before he even opens his mouth.
“You don’t need me any more than I—the real one—need you. The person who appears out of nowhere to solve all our problems exists only in fiction, in the imagination of people, a more optimistic kind than this villa. You love me, you don’t love me, who cares? That's not the point. Look over there.”
He points to a mirror, she looks inside of it: it’s empty.
·
They meet again because Shinichi wanted to let her know in person that it was really the jealous ex-boyfriend who killed her friend. He murmurs: I’m sorry, she nods softly, a silent thank you that she hopes he can grab as if it had fallen from her lips just before being uttered.
“Are you going back to Tokyo?”
“Yeah, I have to.”
Say Professor Agasa I say I, she thinks of saying. She doesn’t say anything else because she knows how he is, how they are—when it comes to this, they are really equal, Shinichi and her, one the mirror of the other—she knows that he doesn’t want to talk about it. So she stays silent, but when she can’t hold her words anymore, she says: I hope everything turns out for the best for the two of you.
Shinichi looks at her as if another person has appeared before his eyes.
“How—How did you know?”
“I didn’t. Just guessed.” She shrugs, trying not to make it sound like a big deal because if she doesn’t then he won’t either, at least on the surface, and they will be able to talk about it. “Not a single message or a call. But if you had split up, you wouldn’t have a photo of the two of you as your screensaver.”
For a moment she can read on his face the same admiration that others have when it’s up to him to lay them out with a deduction and, even if lasts only a moment, Shiho is surprised to find even a trace of it, all it took her was connecting the dots, something he would’ve done just as easily, if not more—this, he does not need to hear.
“I see you learned from the best.”
“Do I know them?”
He laughs, then falls quiet. “I thought it was easier.”
“What?”
He raises his hands, as though he could express himself with gestures where words don’t come to his mind. “Everything.” He pauses. “Between me and Ran. I love her, isn’t it enough?”
Shinichi is a writer, a magician, an actor, even a scientist: he is because he can. Something that he’s not, is an ordinary man, if by ordinary man you mean whoever understands basic emotions. Shinichi would be able to unravel any skein, but two threads intertwined in a knot are enough to throw him into panic if only those threads are not inanimate beings but rather think, breathe, have consciousness. He is even less capable than her, and that’s saying a lot.
“Why are you asking me?”
“Who else, if not you?”
Shiho hears the unspoken words squeezed between the said ones: yes, I ask you because you are like me, you don’t fully understand these things but you understand well enough to tell me what I’m doing wrong.
As if she could open his chest, tear his entrails and by reading them understand what Shinichi himself can’t.
She shrugs, he brings his lips together in a thin line.
There’s a long pause. Silence.
“Just—forget it. I’ll walk you home.”
·
They walked together until they reached the supermarket open all hours, the one in front of the playground, then Shinichi had to leave earlier than expected. Before she could see the apartament from a distance, a high school boy stopped her, approaching her shyly, darting his gaze from her to the ground as if attracted by two magnets, until finally he said: I took a picture of you—you and your boyfriend. He gave it to her, then ran away embarrassed.
She put it in the bag with a quick gesture, she thought: I’m throwing it in the garbage as soon as I get home.
·
It ended up in the bottom of a drawer.
She pretends it doesn’t exist, then when she gets tired of pretending she takes it, holds it between her fingers, observes it, thinks: it’s beautiful.
But also: a lie stitched on reality.
·
Shinichi, the real one—is he a camera? She is not so sure anymore. He too seems convinced that the two of them are more alike than different, not the other way around. And then the truth, what truth? What truth does the camera tell that mirrors can’t? A filter, some adjustions on the computer, and the imperfections go away, they disappear. Even less: just take a photo of a beautiful villa, show it to everyone and say: you see, it’s my house—and they’ll believe you. A lie stitched on the representation of reality.
·
The villa, the reverse of her emptiness—twenty-two floors becoming twenty-three in a month, and yet the villa is, and always will be, empty.
·
It is the black holes paradox: they should absorb everything around them, instead they absorb first and only themselves and never, ever, everything else.
·
Shiho is a black hole.