I woke up in Paris on a Tuesday, which was wrong because I'd gone to sleep in London on Monday night, and I'd been in London for three weeks, and the man I'd been for those three weeks—the man who was Edward Blackwood, barrister, member of the Inner Temple, son of a retired army colonel and a French mother who'd died when I was twelve—had a meeting with a client at nine o'clock.

But the man who woke up in Paris was not Edward Blackwood.

The man who woke up in Paris was Henri Duval, painter, resident of the Rue de la Huchette, smoker of absinthe and eater of bread soaked in wine, with memories of a childhood in Brittany and a apprenticeship under a man named Moreau who'd once said, "Your colors are too sad. Sadness is easy. Joy is the difficult art."

Henri's apartment smelled of turpentine and wet canvas. Edward's townhouse in Mayfair smelled of polish and leather and the particular stale air of a room that's been closed for days because the servant hasn't been paid and hasn't come to open the curtains.

I sat on Henri's bed—a narrow iron frame with a mattress that had lost its resilience years ago—and I tried to remember who I was.

Edward remembered being Edward. He remembered his father's uniform, the smell of starch and brass buttons, the way his father looked at him with an expression that was somewhere between disappointment and resignation. He remembered his mother's piano—she'd played Chopin with a precision that made people uncomfortable, as if her exactness were an accusation. He remembered passing the bar exam at twenty-four, the first in his family to do so, the first person in his father's generation to do anything that couldn't be described as military.

Henri remembered being Henri. He remembered the coast of Brittany, grey water and grey sky and the sound of gulls that sounded like people arguing. He remembered Moreau's studio, the smell of linseed oil and the way Moreau would critique a painting by throwing it across the room and saying, "Now do it again and don't make me throw it this time." He remembered the first time he'd looked at his own face in a mirror and not recognized it—not because the reflection was wrong, but because it belonged to someone he didn't know.

Both memories were complete. Both felt as real as the bed I was sitting on, the turpentine in the air, the grey Paris morning pressing against the window.

The mirror was an antique, bought from a Venetian dealer in the Rialto market during a trip I'd taken six months ago. I can't say "I'd taken" because "I" is a pronoun that has ceased to mean anything useful. The dealer had called it a vanity mirror from the eighteenth century, with a frame carved with figures from mythology. The glass was old—actually old, not the fake antiquing that passes for real in London's antique markets—and it had a quality that I can only describe as depth. When you look into it, you don't see your surface. You see something underneath.

The first time I looked into it—Henri looked into it, Edward looked into it, Tomás—there was no change. I saw my face, which is to say I saw a face that was mine and not mine, twenty-eight years old, with brown hair that was starting to thin at the temples and eyes that were a color that doesn't have a name because they're neither blue nor grey nor green but some indeterminate mixture that changes depending on the light.

The second time I looked, the face was different. Not dramatically—just enough. The eyes were heavier, the lines around the mouth deeper, the expression more worn. It was as if the mirror were showing me not who I was but who I might become if I kept living the life I was living, which was to say: eroded.

The third time I looked, the face wasn't human at all. It was a face that belonged to a man I'd never met and would never meet, a man with dark skin and a scar across his left eyebrow and a expression of such profound weariness that I had to turn away.

That was the beginning.

Lady Victoria Ashford came to visit on a Thursday. She was my cousin on my mother's side—my mother's sister's daughter, which makes her a first cousin, though our families haven't spoken in ten years, since the time Victoria's husband lost a fortune gambling at a club in St. James's and my father refused to help them recover it.

Victoria sat in Henri's apartment—the Paris apartment, which was also the London apartment, which was also the Madrid apartment, and which all three places were simultaneously because the geography of my life no longer obeyed the rules that govern other people's lives—and she looked at me with an expression that I've come to recognize as the look people give when they're trying to decide whether to love someone or fear them more.

"I don't know who you are," she said. And then, after a pause: "And I don't think you do either."

"I'm Edward Blackwood."

"No. You're not. Edward Blackwood doesn't paint. Edward Blackwood doesn't speak French without an accent. Edward Blackwood doesn't look at me the way you're looking at me—the way a man looks at someone he loved once and can't remember when."

"I don't know what you mean."

"You do. You know exactly what you mean. You just can't say it."

She was right. I knew exactly what I meant. I meant that I was standing in a room that was in Paris and also in London, looking at a woman who was my cousin and also a stranger, and that the person she'd loved—Henri Duval, the painter—was not the person she knew—Edward Blackwood, the barrister—and that both of these people were me and neither of them was.

Comtesse Solange came on a Sunday. She was French, aristocratic, married to a man whose name I knew and whose face I couldn't remember. She'd met Henri at an exhibition—the same exhibition where I'd also been present as Edward, standing in a gallery on Bond Street, looking at paintings I'd never seen and feeling a strange recognition for things I'd never made.

Solange and Henri had an affair. I know this because I found the letters—three of them, written in a hand that was Henri's and also mine, packed with passion and confusion and the particular agony of a love that exists in a context where it shouldn't. She didn't know about the others. She didn't know about Edward, or Tomás, or the face in the mirror with the scar across the eyebrow. She knew only Henri, the painter who painted with colors so vivid they hurt to look at and talked about life with the fervor of a man who'd never had to pay a bill in his life.

"You paint like a man who's trying to remember something," I told her once, after she'd left the apartment and I'd been alone with the canvases, which covered every wall, which filled every surface, which spilled onto the floor and the bed and the chair and the windowsill.

"I paint like a man who's trying to forget," she said. "There's a difference."

I didn't know there was a difference. But looking at the paintings now, I think she was right. Henri's paintings weren't celebrations of life. They were obituaries for moments that had already ended by the time he painted them.

Dr. Mordecai Vane was the first person who gave the fragmentation a name. He was a neurologist at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London—Edward's London, not Henri's Paris or Tomás's Madrid—and he'd been recommended to me by a colleague who'd noticed that my speech patterns sometimes shifted mid-sentence, as if the speaker were changing channels.

"I don't understand," I told him. I was sitting in his office, which was Edward's office, in Edward's city, wearing Edward's clothes. Dr. Vane was a small man with sharp eyes and an expression of professional interest that bordered on the personal.

"You've been experiencing what we call dissociative phenomena," he said. "Episodes where your sense of identity, memory, and personal continuity breaks down. In extreme cases, this is called dissociative identity disorder. But—"

"But?"

"But your case is unusual. Most patients with DID have two or three distinct personality states. You seem to have more. And these states aren't fragmented or dysfunctional. They're complete. Each one has its own memories, its own skills, its own social relationships. They're not symptoms of madness. They're alternative versions of a self."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Nothing about this makes sense. But here's what I think is happening. You're not losing yourself. You're finding yourself in multiple directions simultaneously. Think of a prism—white light enters one side and exits as a spectrum of colors. Each color is real. None of them is the whole. You are the light entering the prism, and Henri and Edward and Tomás and the man with the scar are the spectrum."

I left his office and walked through the hospital garden, where the roses were blooming and the pigeons were fighting over crumbs and the world continued with its indifferent continuity. I thought about Dr. Vane's metaphor—the prism, the spectrum, the light entering and the colors exiting.

It made a kind of sense. It made a dangerous kind of sense. Because if Dr. Vane was right, then there is no "real" self. There is no core identity that can be found and recovered and restored. There is only the light entering the prism, and the prism itself, and the spectrum that comes out the other side—a spectrum that changes as the light changes, as the prism changes, as the angle of entry changes.

The mirror was the crisis. I knew this the way you know a storm is coming before you see it—by the pressure in your chest, by the quality of the light, by the silence of the birds.

I'd bought the mirror in Venice. I'd brought it to Paris, to London, to Madrid. I'd hung it in every apartment, and in every apartment, I'd looked into it, and in every mirror, I'd seen a different face.

On the night of the crisis, I was in Paris. Henri's apartment. The canvases covered every surface. The absinthe was on the table, half-empty. The mirror was on the wall above the mantelpiece, and its glass caught the gaslight and threw it back in a way that made the room feel larger than it was, or smaller, depending on how you looked at it.

I stood in front of the mirror.

I saw Edward. The barrister. The man in the suit. The son who'd disappointed his father and honored his mother. The man who passed the bar exam and believed that justice was a real thing that could be achieved through procedure and argument and the careful application of precedent.

I saw Henri. The painter. The man in the smock. The son of Brittany who'd learned that joy is difficult and sadness is easy and that painting is the art of making sadness beautiful.

I saw Tomás. The bullfighter. The man with the scar. The son of Madrid who'd learned from his father that courage is not the absence of fear but the decision that something else matters more.

I saw the man with the scar. I didn't know his name. I didn't know his story. He was a face I'd seen in the mirror once and never seen again, and now he was here, looking at me with eyes that said: you know who I am. You just don't want to.

I knew. I knew that he was me. Not the me I knew—the me that existed beneath all the names and all the memories and all the social roles and all the languages and all the countries. The me that was pure possibility, unchosen, unconstrained, unformed. The me that was not a person but a potential for persons, an infinite multiplicity condensed into a single face that the mirror showed me and then hid again.

The weight of that knowledge was unbearable.

I picked up a heavy bronze candlestick from the mantelpiece. I held it for a moment, feeling its weight, feeling the cold metal against my palm, feeling the absurdity of the gesture—attempting to destroy a mirror as if destroying the mirror would destroy what the mirror showed.

Then I swung.

The mirror cracked with a sound like ice breaking on a winter lake. The glass spiderwebbed from the point of impact, and the image fractured into a dozen faces, each one distorted, each one real, each one telling a different version of the same story: a man looking at himself and seeing a man looking at himself and seeing a man looking at himself, infinitely.

I stood in front of the broken mirror and looked at the fractured faces and felt something I hadn't felt in months—clarity.

Not the clarity of certainty. The clarity of acceptance.

If every self is real, then every self must bear the consequences. Henri cannot escape Edward's responsibilities. Edward cannot escape Henri's passions. Tomás cannot escape the scar man's silence. And I—the I that stands here now, holding a candlestick in front of a broken mirror—cannot escape any of them.

Tomorrow, I will wake up and I will be someone. I don't know who. I may be Edward, sitting in his office at the Inner Temple, preparing for a case that will determine the fate of a factory worker who's been fired for organizing. I may be Henri, standing in front of a blank canvas in a Paris apartment, trying to paint the color of a feeling that doesn't have a name. I may be Tomás, walking the streets of Madrid in a suit that doesn't fit, carrying a passport that might not be accepted at the border. Or I may be the scar man, standing in front of a mirror that doesn't exist, looking at a face that has no reflection.

And whichever one I am, I will choose. And the choosing is the only thing that's real.

The mirror is broken. The faces are scattered across the shards. But I am not. I am the one who holds the shards. I am the one who decides whether to sweep them away or keep them, whether to throw them out the window or press them into the garden path where people will walk on them and remember, however briefly, that beauty and danger are the same thing seen from different angles.

I put down the candlestick. I picked up the largest shard of mirror. In it, I could see one face clearly—my face, or one version of it, distorted by the crack but still recognizable, still mine.

I held it up to the gaslight and looked at myself, fractured but present, broken but here, and for the first time in months, I didn't wonder who I was.

I knew. I was the man looking.