Pete's Mirror Maze

 “I need to pee,” was the first thing I’d said in nearly an hour. I kept staring out the passenger window at the north ridge of the Columbia Gorge looming above the river.  It was starting to drizzle again.

“There’s nowhere to stop until we get to Troutdale.”

“OK.”  I didn’t want to hold it for another hour, but there was nothing else I could really say.  

We were on our way back from a long hike.  It was supposed to be a solo hike, but my boyfriend had insisted on coming.  So instead of the peaceful outing I’d imagined, I got to watch him almost slip and fall for two hours uphill and 90 minutes back down.  I should’ve warned him it was going to be muddy.  He got increasingly huffy as the hike went on, but I stopped myself from reminding him that he didn’t have to come.  Right before we got back to the car, he finally slipped and landed on his ass.  That’s when I reminded him.  We hadn’t spoken since.  

I watched an eagle glide over the river and land on a freeway exit sign.  

“Hey, pull off here.”

“That’s just the old highway.  There won’t be anywhere to stop.”  

“Just pull over somewhere.  I can go behind a tree.”

He grunted and merged into the exit lane.  We followed the off ramp to an intersection with the Old Highway.  Instead of turning, he just kept going straight.  Whatever little road the ramp had turned into would probably dead end and I could just get out and pee there.  I watched the endless rows of fir trees from the passenger window.  

After a mile of bouncing on countless potholes, the road still hadn’t dead-ended.  

“Just pull over anywhere.”  He didn’t respond.  “Seriously, just pull over up there.”  I pointed up ahead.  He still didn’t say anything or pull over.  “Hey, seriously –”

“Stop distracting me while I’m driving!”  he suddenly exploded.  “I’ll pull over when I see a safe place!  I’m not going to drive off a cliff so you can piss, Lucas.”  I gripped the door handle hard enough to break it.  

“Where do you see a cliff? It’s completely flat here –”

“STOP distracting me.” 

He pulled over two minutes later at an abandoned building with a faded sign out of front.  I got out without another word and went behind the building to relieve myself. 

It was a long, narrow, windowless, one-story box made out of cinder blocks.  I would’ve assumed it was some old Forestry Dept building, but the badly faded paint was neon pink with green trim.  I decided it might have been a diner.  

I did my business and headed back around to the front, where I found my boyfriend staring at the weathered sign outside the building.  I stood a few feet back from him.  I could just make out the words “Pete’s Mirror Maze”.

“Must be an old tourist trap,” he said without looking back at me.  Instead of answering, I just turned and headed back to the car.  When I got there, I turned around and realized that instead of following me, he’d gone up to the front door.  I huffed and was about to get in the car when I saw that the idiot had managed to open the door.  

“Hey!  What the fuck are you doing?”  He definitely heard me, but he went inside without saying anything.  Apparently he wasn’t as cautious around creepy abandoned buildings as he was around phantom cliff edges.  

I pulled out my phone and immediately put it back in my pocket.  No texts.  I chewed my thumbnail and fantasized about little things I could do for the rest of the week to hurt my boyfriend’s feelings: say “oh, neat” and walk away when he told me something he thought was interesting, ask him if he’d started focusing on cardio instead of strength training at the gym when he was changing into his pajamas, tell him “I can see where your dad’s coming from” when he ranted about their next argument.  

My boyfriend’s a good guy.  The one shitty thing he does is, when he’s in a bad mood, he likes to shock-and-awe me.  If he has a bad day at work, instead of just telling me he needs some time to cool off when he gets home – like a normal person –  he’ll pretend everything’s fine.  I’ll try to make conversation while we’re making dinner – like a normal person – and he’ll just be talking to me like everything’s fine.  He’s setting his trap.  He’s waiting for me to say something he can leverage for his shock-and-awe campaign.  

Last Friday, it was “I keep buying avocados even though I know they’re gonna be disgusting this time of year,”  just a small, self-deprecating comment that was supposed to make him laugh.  Or not laugh, whatever.  Unfortunately, I’d given him what he needed to launch his campaign.  He immediately started berating me for being “frivolous” and “wasting” our money.  He was out here scrimping and saving so we could buy a house, and I was pissing it all away.  Clearly, I didn’t understand the value of money because I’d never had to struggle like he had.

There were several obvious counterarguments I could’ve made here. He spends way more money than I do on clothes, his car payment, etc.   His idea of “struggle” is apparently being cut off by his parents for six months after college when he came out to them.   I’m the one who decided we had to stop eating out more than once a week to help cut our expenses.  I could’ve screamed all these things back in his face, and it would’ve been a normal couple’s spat we laughed about later.  

I didn’t do that, though, because I’m terrible at fighting.  Whenever someone yells at me, my whole body starts tingling, my brain empties, and I just stand there like a deer in headlights.  Then I apologize profusely until they stop yelling.  It’s reflexive.  I’ve been like this ever since I was a kid.  

After that, he goes back to normal.  He blows off the steam, and it’s like nothing ever happened.  Last Friday, he was jokingly telling me about his day while eating tacos with mealy, out-of-season guacamole.  I nodded along and laughed at the appropriate moments because you can’t suddenly launch a counterstrike fifteen minutes later.  That would make you the instigator.  Besides, it would be obvious you’re only arguing now because you’re mad that the other person got mad, which would mean you’re overly sensitive.  So, all you can do is: quietly seethe for the next 7-to-10 days, announce you’re going on a solo hike the next weekend, and, when you can’t say no to him joining without him realizing that you’re mad, neglect to suggest he pick up some new hiking boots because it’s going to be muddy.

He still hadn’t come back out of the mirror maze after five minutes.  There was a 60% chance he was doing this to be childish, and a 35% chance he’d found something genuinely interesting.  On the 5% chance he’d hurt himself, I got out of the car and up toward the front door.  I nudged it open.  It was completely dark.  

“Daniel?”  No response.  “Daniel!”  I was starting to worry a little now.  I stepped just inside.  It smelled exactly as moldy as you’d expect.  I turned on my phone flashlight.   I shouldn’t have been so surprised to find myself in a hallway made out of mirrors.  It was hard to tell how far it went or in what direction in the narrow diameter of the phone light.  

I looked directly into the mirror to my left.  My reflection was more like a fuzzy technicolor silhouette, like there was a layer of grime on top of the mirror.  I turned forward and shouted “Daniel!”  down the hall again.  No response.  

I was steeling myself to head further down the hall when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and flinched back to the left.  I quickly realized it was just me in the mirror, and felt stupid.  Except – except I was looking back into the same mirror, and my reflection wasn’t fuzzy anymore.  It was perfectly clear.  I shrieked when I felt a hand grab my shoulder.

“Jesus, Lukey.  Calm down.”  It was Danny, of course, laughing.  I caught my breath and hated him for seeing me act vulnerable while I was mad at him.   

“Where were you?  Didn’t you hear me yelling for you?”  

“Oh, sorry.  I went out the back.  I needed to pee too.”  

“Ah.”

“This place is pretty cool, though.  I really did get lost for a minute there.  They set up the maze really well for such a small space.”

“Oh, neat.”  I was already walking back toward the door.  He stopped me with his hand on my shoulder. 

“Hey, wait.  I want to talk to you for a second.”

“We can talk in the car.”

“Just – wait.  I want to say I’m sorry.  I know I was a dick last Friday.  And today.”  I flipped around and looked at him in the dark.  “I know it’s not OK for me to take out my anger on you like that.  I’m…I’m really going to try to work on it, OK?  And I’m sorry I made today so miserable.”  I couldn’t believe he was actually acknowledging it – let alone apologizing.

“It’s…it’s OK.  I mean, it sucks when you do that.  But I love you, and thank you for apologizing.  That means a lot.”  I felt like I’d just taken off a heavy backpack after a long day.  

“Of course, Lukey. I love you, too.  So much.  Thank you for putting up with me.”  We hugged in the dark.  I broke the hug when I felt my phone buzz in my pocket.  I pulled it out and blinked at the screen.

“Uh…how are you calling me right now?  Danny?”  He suddenly wasn’t in front of me.  What the fuck?  I scanned the flashlight around, but he wasn’t anywhere nearby.  Unsure what else to do, I answered the call.

“Danny?”

“Where the fuck are you?”  His voice was flat, but I’d known him long enough to hear the notes of worry.  

“Uh…where the fuck are you?  You were here a second ago?”

“I’ve been waiting in the car for five minutes.”

“You’re not funny.”

“Neither are you.  Come back so we can leave.”  

“OK.”  

I walked back out the front door and got in the car.  He wouldn’t look at me.  It was like our conversation in the maze hadn’t even happened.  We rode back home the last hour in silence.  I was too pissed to ask him how he’d made it back out to the car and called me so quickly.  

After we got home and went to separate rooms, I was dicking around on my phone and decided to Google Pete’s Mirror Maze.  There was almost nothing, but I did manage to find a page about it on an old Geocities site called Jeanine’s Haunted Cascadia.  

It was built in the fifties by a married couple and recent Oregon transplants from back east.  It was a moderately popular tourist attraction for a few years, except visitors often observed the owner couple arguing with each other at various points in the maze.  Then the state announced they were building an interstate to replace the old highway.  Despite copious promotional signs around the new exit, business plummeted.  The few remaining visitors encountered the couple in increasingly heated arguments.  They owed tens of thousands to their creditors, and the building was about to be foreclosed on.  They never showed for their final court date, and when the bank went to padlock the building, they found it abandoned.  They didn’t bother doing anything with it because the land was basically worthless at that point.  Everyone assumed the couple had gone back east.  

In the next few months, passing loggers and park rangers would report seeing a single wisp of smoke stretching from behind the building up to the sky.  The Sheriff’s office never found evidence of any campfires when they went to check it out, though.  It became a legend around the Gorge communities that either the husband or wife had murdered the other, and was living in the woods behind the building and practicing witchcraft.  Curse on the building. Sightings of the single smoke strand to this day.  If you drive past the old building on a clear, moonless night….

OK, this was dumb.  I opened up TikTok and watched some skincare-routine ASMR.  

The next day, Daniel was in a better mood.  While we were eating breakfast, he mentioned something weird that happened to him while he was exploring the maze.  He must have bonked his head and had some kind of weird hallucination.  In the hallucination, I came up behind him and apologized for being passive-aggressive and bad at communicating and promised him I’d work on it.  (I made a face at my cereal while he said this part).  We were hugging, but he happened to glance into the nearest mirror and saw his arms wrapped around nothing.  When he looked back in front of him, I’d vanished.

“Oh, neat,” I said, and went to put my cereal bowl in the sink.  It was only day nine.