The elevator smells like nothing.
That's the first thing I notice. Twenty-seven floors up, humming past concrete and glass and all that hollow Amsterdam night, and there's just — nothing. No cigarette smoke, no fast food, no other people's bad decisions. Just climate-controlled air that feels slightly too cold to be accidental.
The doors slide open.
Tijjani is already there.
Of course he is.
He's standing in the entryway in black silk pajamas — actual silk, not the cheap kind — arms crossed, one hand swirling a glass of red wine like he's been posing for ten minutes waiting for me to show up and appreciate it. He looks me up and down the way a customs officer does. Not hostile. Worse than hostile. Assessing.
"Late," he says. "As usual."
"Traffic," I say.
"You took the elevator."
He smirks. Then — and this is the Tijjani thing, the thing that makes him impossible to actually hate — he pulls me into a hug. Quick, warm, real. Two pats on the back. Releases me before it gets sentimental.
"Take your shoes off," he says, already walking back in. "You're staying a while."
The apartment is — I don't have another word for it — surgical.
Black marble countertops. Floors so pale they look like pressed snow. Not a single cushion out of place, not a single cup left in the sink. The kind of clean that isn't a habit — it's a philosophy. From the floor-to-ceiling windows, the whole city fans out below us: a grid of orange lights and dark water and bridges, all of it enormous and indifferent and very, very far down.
I stand at the glass for a moment. Twenty-seven floors. The city below is bright enough to see by.
I notice: I can't see my reflection in the window at all.
The city just — goes straight through me.
"Nice view," I say.
"Mm." Tijjani hands me a drink without asking what I want. It's exactly what I would have asked for. I don't mention this.
I look around the room. Really look.
Mirrors everywhere.
Not ostentatiously — not a funhouse, not a bad hotel. It's more like someone made a design decision to use reflective surfaces wherever a normal person would use a wall. A long black-framed mirror in the entryway. A mirrored panel behind the kitchen shelves. Two facing each other across the living room, so when you stand between them, your image repeats down an infinite corridor, each copy slightly smaller, slightly darker, slightly less.
I catch myself looking. Count the versions of me trailing off into the distance.
After about the fourth one, they start to look like someone else.
"Sit," Tijjani says, dropping onto the sofa with the casual authority of someone who's never once been told what to do. "You look tense."
"I'm fine."
"You've been fine all year and you look worse every time I see you, so."
I sit.
He doesn't do anything dramatic, at first. That's not Tijjani's style.
He puts music on — something low and instrumental, the kind of soundtrack that would play in a dream where you're late for something important. He refills his wine. He asks me questions about work, about the others, about nothing in particular, and he half-listens while scrolling his phone, and it is — almost normal. Almost a regular night at a friend's place.
Except.
Every time I move, I check the mirrors.
Can't help it. The apartment forces you to. You turn your head and there you are. You reach for your drink and there's your hand, reaching, reflected in three different directions. You blink and —
— wait.
I blink again.
My reflection blinks a half-second later.
I stare at the mirror across the room. Stare at myself staring. Tilt my head slowly left.
My reflection tilts right.
The wrong way.
"These mirrors," I say, and my voice comes out more careful than I intended, "feel like they're watching."
Tijjani doesn't look up from his phone.
"Maybe they are."
Silence. The music plays. The city lights float forty floors below us.
"Maybe you should ask them what they see," he says, voice completely flat. Like he's reading a grocery list.
I laugh. It sounds wrong in the room.
He doesn't.
I go to the bathroom to wash my hands.
The bathroom is white and perfect and smells faintly of cedar. Single overhead light. Big rectangular mirror above the sink, no frame, edge-to-edge. The kind of mirror that's unavoidable.
I run the water. Look down. Soap. Rinse.
I look up.
My reflection is already looking at me.
Not — looking up. Already there. Already looking. Like it had been watching the top of my head while I washed my hands and waiting, patiently, for me to meet its eyes.
I stand very still.
The reflection stands very still.
I raise my right hand slowly.
It raises its right hand.
Okay. Okay, fine. That's just — mirrors. That's how they work. I'm exhausted, I'm overthinking, Tijjani's whole aesthetic is designed to make people feel like they're in a prestige horror film, that's literally his personality —
I look away.
In my peripheral vision, the reflection doesn't.
I feel it the way you feel something behind you in the dark: not with your eyes but with the base of your spine. That cold animal certainty. Being watched.
I leave the bathroom without drying my hands.
"You doing okay?" Tijjani asks, when I come back.
"Yeah," I say. "Totally."
He looks at me with those eyes he has — the ones that make you feel like he already knows what you're lying about and just wants to see if you'll commit to it — and he nods, slowly.
"Good," he says. "Drink your drink."
I drink my drink.
We watch something on his TV — a documentary about deep sea fish, the ugly kind with the lights on their heads — and it's almost cozy, almost normal, almost the kind of thing I could text the group chat about tomorrow. Stayed at Tijjani's, watched fish stuff, his apartment's still insane, kinda fun.
Almost.
But every time the screen goes dark between scenes, I can see my reflection in the black glass.
And it is never, quite, doing what I'm doing.
I wake up at 3:33 AM and Tijjani is in the armchair across the room, awake, watching.
Not watching me specifically. Just — present. Still. Like he's been there since I fell asleep and sees no reason to explain himself.
The city below is quieter now. The light is different. Everything feels like the pause between lightning and thunder.
"Hey," I say, because what else do you say.
"Hey," he says.
"You sleep?"
"Sometimes."
I sit up. The room has that particular 3 AM quality where the shadows seem to be leaning toward things instead of away. The mirrors catch the city light and give it back in pieces.
"You wanted the truth," Tijjani says. Quiet. Matter-of-fact.
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to." He takes a sip of something. Still up, still drinking, still immaculate. "You came here, didn't you? You always come here."
I don't have an answer to that.
He nods at the mirror behind me.
I don't want to look.
I look.
My reflection is standing.
I'm sitting on the sofa. I can feel the cushions under me, my own weight, my own tiredness. I'm sitting.
My reflection is standing, two feet behind the glass, arms at its sides, and it is looking at me with an expression I recognize — I know that expression — it's the face I make when I'm thinking something I don't want to say. Something ugly. Something true.
The reflection's mouth starts to move.
I can't hear it.
But I know what it's saying. The way you know things in dreams, without needing the words.
You know what you are.
You've always known.
"Tijjani," I say.
"Mm."
"What the fuck is happening."
He tilts his head. Almost amused. "Which part?"
I find the bedroom. Need space. Need a room without mirrors.
There are no rooms without mirrors.
The bedroom has a closet — full-length mirrored doors. I avoid looking at them. Look for my bag, my jacket, my exit. I need to leave. The apartment suddenly feels like a thought I can't stop thinking: the more I try to stop, the louder it gets.
I grab the closet handle.
Open it.
Inside: my clothes. My bag. My jacket.
And behind all of it — standing upright, still, in the back of the closet like it had always been there —
Me.
A perfect copy. My face, my height, my hands. The same small scar on my left chin. The same dark circles. But it's — off. Like a photograph left in the sun too long. The color is slightly wrong. The stillness is absolute in a way that flesh and blood can't quite manage.
I stand there looking at it.
It doesn't look back.
Its eyes are closed.
I reach out — don't know why — and touch its face.
Its eyes open.
I screamed. I don't know if sound actually came out. I fell backward into the bedroom and hit the floor and my heart was doing something medical and wrong inside my chest, and from the living room, calm as a man reading the news —
"Don't touch things," Tijjani called.
I came out shaking.
He looked at me over the rim of his glass.
"The closet," I said.
"Mm."
"There's — there's something in your closet —"
"There's you in my closet," he said, patient, like he was correcting a mildly confused child. "That's the version of you that stays."
"That's not possible —"
"A lot of things aren't possible." He stood, set down his glass, straightened his silk pajama top with one smooth pull. "And yet."
I backed up toward the hallway. He didn't move to stop me. He just watched, and there was something in his face — not malice, not amusement. Something almost sad. Like watching someone make the same mistake for the hundredth time.
"I'm leaving," I said.
"Already?" he said. "But you haven't finished your part."
"My — what does that mean?"
He didn't answer. Just looked at me the way he always looks at me: too directly, too long, with that slight tilt of the head that means I already know the answer and I'm waiting to see if you do.
I walked down the hallway.
I did not look at the mirrors.
I did not look at the mirrors.
I did not —
I looked at the mirrors.
My reflection was walking toward me. Down the corridor of glass, through the infinite copies of myself, the reflection that was mine — the one that had always been mine — was walking forward while I walked away from it. Closing the distance. Reaching out one hand.
I ran.
The elevator was open. Like it had been waiting.
I hit the lobby button four times. The doors closed. I stared at the steel panel, which was just reflective enough to show me a smeared version of my own face — pale, sweat-sheened, eyes too wide.
This reflection, at least, moved when I moved.
I exhaled.
The floors ticked down. Twenty-six. Twenty-five. Twenty-four.
Tijjani's voice came through the elevator speaker — or maybe just inside my own skull, I honestly don't know, the line felt pretty thin right then —
"Come back anytime," he said. "The mirror will remember you."
I stepped outside into cold Amsterdam night.
Exhaled. Real air. Tram lines. Cobblestones. A drunk guy twenty meters away doing something complicated with a bicycle.
Real. All of it real.
I turned to look at the building's glass facade — just to confirm, just to ground myself, just to see my own face doing exactly what my face was doing and nothing else —
My reflection was smiling.
I wasn't.
I had not smiled in at least an hour.
My reflection stood there in the glass of Tijjani's building, twenty-seven floors of dark windows behind it, and it was smiling at me with my own mouth.
And then it turned —
turned its back to me —
and walked away. Into the building. Into the dark.
I stood on the street for a very long time after that.
They say reflections are harmless.
Just light. Just angles. Just physics doing what physics does.
But I think about it sometimes — what it must be like. To spend your whole existence copying someone else. Watching someone else's life through glass. Mimicking every gesture, every expression, every stumble. Never the thing itself. Always the echo.
And I think: at some point, something like that would get tired.
Would start to wonder.
Would press its hand against the glass from the other side and think —
why them?
Why not me?
I've been here the whole time.
Tijjani texted me the next morning.
"Good night?"
I stared at my phone for a long time.
Then I went to check my reflection in the bathroom mirror.
It was there. It was copying me. It was doing everything right.
I smiled at it.
It smiled back.
But there was something in its eyes that hadn't been there before.
Something that looked, if I'm being honest, like patience.
Like waiting.
Like it was getting ready for something I hadn't agreed to yet.
I put a towel over the mirror.
Then I texted Tijjani back:
"Yeah. Fine."
Three seconds later:
"You sure? You look a little off."
I looked at the towel over the mirror for a long, quiet moment.
Typed back:
"How would you know?"
He left it on read.
He's still leaving it on read.