Unable any longer to bear the pressure of its gaze, you flinch. You glance away from the mirror and toward the bathroom wall, where, at just this moment, an apricot-colored spider is emerging from behind the right-hand side of the mirror’s frame. It crawls slowly into view, its orange body grotesque against the raw logs. You realize that it must live there, behind the mirror, in that dark centimeter of space. It crawls in a jerky, stop-motion way that is terrible to watch. Its body is coin-sized and finely jointed and where the garish bathroom light catches in its hollow legs, flooding them with warm amber, they look like straws of honey. The fact that the spider lives behind the mirror strikes you as unnatural and unnerving. It lives behind the mirror the way monsters live beneath beds.

Soon the sight of the spider becomes less bearable to you than the memory of your reflection, and you return your attention to the mirror. There the reflection is, still enmeshed in the intersecting streak marks. Remarkably, the face has remained estranged. It is still an other’s face. But now the meshwork of blurred lines resembles a spiderweb, not a dreamcatcher. And you cannot help picturing the spider that has spun it: this sinister spider emerging from behind the mirror at night to crawl across the mirror’s surface, dragging one back leg behind it to streak the glass. You imagine the spider tracing an entire web this way, its apricot body moving over the mirror in the great loops and curves it is used to—instinctively reproducing, with its leg, the pattern programmed into its very being.

You are certain that the apricot spider is responsible for these streaks. It has woven this web of misrecognition in the mirror: where faces get stuck in its threads like flies, they can no longer be recognized. A face is caught in it right now. It is not your face. And before you can witness the spider clambering onto the mirror to begin feeding on this face, you flee the bathroom.

In the bare light of the next morning you return to find that the mirror’s streaks do not look like anything anymore. You can discern no organizing design in them—just a random arrangement of stray lines. With a wet paper towel you wipe away the grime. When you have finished, you lift the mirror a few inches off the wall, leaning around to peer behind it. But of course there is no trace of the apricot spider. It was foolish, you tell yourself, to let yourself get whipped into such a frenzy last night. Scared of your own reflection! You resolve to spend the day swimming laps in the pond. You need to get out of the house. For the space of an hour, it seems, you thought the kinds of thoughts the owner would think, and believed in the superstitions that he believes. As if you were contracting not cabin fever, but the owner’s very madness.