Your life is a story. My life is a story. Our collective stories could be told in a poem or a book, or on film via Hollywood and Netflix, or in the theater on Broadway, or in a grand opera or ballet. The performance mediums for storytelling used to be outré and accessible, but have now become orthodox, jaded and prohibitive— too many people have to be involved and too much money is at risk. Imagine your life unfolding in a cast of thousands, actors with meaty roles, and the extras playing people whose lives you encountered for such a fleeting instant that you can no longer remember their names.
Life unfolds noisily at the warp speed of a page-turning mystery novel. With many nuances, twists and hairpin turns, you never know what is around the next bend. Things are calm, then suddenly tragedy drops into your life like a visit from a foul-mouthed and mean stepsister. Love, suspense, grief and uneasy moments of boredom are always upended by random violence, moral dilemmas, outright terror, and an unexpected turn of events.
Every mystery novel begins with a dead body or two, maybe more, on the floor. You are compelled to find out who committed the crime, i.e., who did it. Every mystery has a hero. A hero is always a good guy but not every good guy gets to be a hero. Some good guys end up dead early in the story. The hero commits infinite acts of courage and is often saved by sheer luck. You identify with the hero in the mystery novel and follow her on her hair-raising adventures, clamoring to find out who did it.
Good guys and heroes know that they don’t know everything. Good guys and heroes are always learning, finding out what happens next, and are often surprised by what they find. They might have a hunch about who did it, but they never lock into their own preconceived notions. Make a mistake like that in a mystery novel and someone ends up dead. What a good guy doesn’t know often kills him. Heroes aren’t supposed to die and rarely do, unless it’s in a Greek tragedy, but in a mystery novel—that never happens. Heroes live forever.
Every mystery has a villain or two, or more. There are bad guys and guys who are badder still, but not every bad guy rises to the stature of being a villain. One way to distinguish the bad guy from the villain is that run-of-the-mill bad guys always think they have all of the answers because they’re idiots. A great villain is smart and unequivocally evil. The villain only pretends to know the answer to everything, so he can manipulate unsuspecting victims and lure them into his web of deceit. A mere bad guy does bad things because he might not know any better. The villain does bad things because he will do anything to get what he wants.
As you explore the mystery of your life, you encounter good guys and bad guys, heroes and villains. Sometimes you can’t tell the difference. Sometimes there might not be much of a difference. There are people on death row right now whose crimes are remarkably lightweight when compared to people in power who have committed massive atrocities. I don’t have to name them; you know who they are.
Your life is a story. My life is a story. In our individual stories, we see the world as a mirror of our own image and likeness. The funny thing about mirrors is that the images they project are the reverse of what exists in reality. Your good side in the mirror is really your bad side and vice-versa. A mirror image is a mirage, a distortion of reality. One mirror flatters your height and weight; you appear more svelte and in possession of a long line with remarkable carriage, and in another mirror, you are quite ugly, fat and squat.
I haven’t studied the properties of mirrored-glass to know why one mirror makes you look grand and another makes you look not too good. It has nothing to do with natural lighting or artificial light—the lights that are on or off in the room. I only know that mirrors are unreliable as a force for reality, but they do make great vehicles for storytelling. In a great mystery, what is good can turn out to be bad and what is bad might reap human kindness and bonafide redemption.
Life unfolds noisily at the warp speed of a page-turning mystery novel. With many nuances, twists and hairpin turns, you never know what is around the next bend.