The Thursday afternoon sessions had six students this term. Anel ran them from the studio on the fourth floor, which had mirrors on three walls and good afternoon light, and she had been teaching the vocabulary here for three years. In that time no student had made contact.
Pave had been attending for eight months. He came to every session, practiced between them, asked careful questions. He was thirty-four. His mirror showed him at around twenty-five, she estimated from what she could see across the room.
The practice round began at half past two. The standard opening: face your mirror, hold a neutral position, wait until you have the other's attention. Then gesture fourteen. I am here.
Anel watched from the center of the room.
Pave made gesture fourteen.
His mirror self was still for a moment.
Then it made gesture fourteen back.
The room went quiet in the particular way of a room in which something has shifted and everyone present knows it and is waiting to understand what it means.
Then the mirror self made gesture thirty-one: I know something you do not yet.
Nobody moved.
Pave stood at the mirror with his hands at his sides. He was breathing carefully. Anel watched him process what was in front of him. She had thought, before this happened, that she knew what her response would be: systematic, procedural, document the exchange. She found, watching Pave stand at the mirror, that she had no clear thought at all.
She stepped forward.
"What do you want to do?" she asked.
He said: keep going.
He made gesture fourteen again. The mirror responded with thirty-one. Then fourteen. They exchanged for a few minutes, the vocabulary at its most basic, back and forth. I am here. I know something you do not yet. I am here.
When it stopped, the mirror self had gone still again. Pave stood looking at it for a while.
After the session most of the students stayed. Nobody wanted to end the afternoon. Pave sat in the corner and did not speak.
Before he left, he found her.
"What do I do now?" he asked.
"Keep coming," she said.
She locked the studio after everyone had gone. She stood alone in the room with the mirrors on three walls and the light going.
She faced the center mirror.
She had been practicing this vocabulary for five years before she began teaching it and had never made contact. Not once. Her mirror self looked back at her from whatever life it was in — she could see a kitchen, a different kitchen, the one that had given the transmission its name, and it had never acknowledged a single gesture she had made.
She made gesture fourteen.
Her mirror self looked at her. Made no gesture.
She held the position. She waited in the particular patience of someone who has learned that the waiting is not strategy but practice.
She made gesture thirty-one: I know something you do not yet. She had never made this gesture before. It felt presumptuous and then less so.
Her mirror self was still. Then, slowly, it moved.
It made a gesture she did not recognize. Not from the vocabulary. Not any of the forty-seven. A gesture Solen had not documented, that she had never seen.
She wrote it down.