Sean E. Britten

I’ve always been inspired by music (I know, super original!) and music has always been a part of my writing. Way back in the days of burnt CDs, my mates and I used to put together CD mixtapes and I came up with the idea of a series of short stories based around pieces of music. Mixtape is all short stories sharing their titles with different songs and inspired, to various degrees, by their lyrics, artists, and vibe.

Currently Playing: Billy Idol – Dancing With Myself

Every single day, Sharif trains to be the very best and to beat the best. Weights, cardio, and shadowboxing in front of the mirror for hours. Today, however, he faces an opponent he could have never anticipated. Himself. Actually, a bunch of himself.

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Fists hissed through the air, Sharif’s movements a flickering blur in the mirror. Elbows snapped out like piledrivers. Forearms as hard as iron bars formed an unbeatable shield across his face then scythed through his reflection’s chest. Simultaneously, he tried to strike and block the blows from his reflection. Pushing himself harder and harder to beat the mirror. As if he could move faster than the time it took for light to travel from him to the mirror and back to his eyeballs.

Sharif trained himself to failure every time, every day. Pushups until failure, free weights until failure. Cardio until failure. And then this rapidfire series of punches and knees and strikes and blocks until he couldn’t take anymore. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been at it, sometimes the shadowboxing went on for hours. Thumping, his heart felt like it was trying to push molten lead through its ventricles. His breathing rasped like he’d inhaled a draught of acid. He did his routine in a mirrored alcove in the corner of the gym, surrounded by floor to ceiling reflections of himself. Sounds echoed across the big and empty room. He often had the place all to himself for long stretches of the day on weekdays. One half of the gym was filled with rows of equipment, weights, and boxing bags. The other half was dominated by a practice ring, an octagon. Posters and pennants covered the walls wherever there was free space. While Sharif focused his energy on the mirror in front of him, sometimes he felt like he was fighting back against dozens of identical opponents. All of whom shared his exact build, his exact face. Muscles and sinew stood out like steel cables wrapped around his arms and chest. Ligaments were taut in his joints. Sweat oiled his skin, steam rising from his shoulders. His movements showed no sign of fatigue, however, he was just as fast, just as powerful, his form just as perfect as when he’d begun. The only sign of his growing fatigue were the savage grunts escaping his lips at increasing volume.

“You’re the best! You’re the GOAT, you’re the fucking best, bitch!” Sharif hissed, spittle collecting on his lips.

With a boiling surge of strength, what might have been a final push, Sharif lashed out with a lightning round of strikes and blocks. His hands became blurring propellers. He didn’t plan it, he was in a flow state. Punching and blocking as if he genuinely faced himself as an opponent, trying to anticipate and counter his own moves faster than he could make them. Moving like a blazing inferno. A hurricane of limbs and knees. A machine. A fucking god.

Maybe it was his eyes going fuzzy but in some distant and detached part of his mind, Sharif could swear his reflection slipped and missed a blow. He adjusted without thinking to press his advantage, whipping forward, cutting through the air. Reflections stuttered around him. He saw their collective weight come down at a bad angle. His opposing foot knifed forward. With a real opponent, the blow would have surely knocked the leg out from under them. An animal roar of effort and pain and victory pushed out of his mouth and echoed against the walls of the gym.

The reflection in front of Sharif staggered, and stumbled, and fell to one knee. All around him, the uniformity of the reflections across different mirrors disintegrated. Some fell to one knee as well, or they fell on both, or they let themselves drop backward onto the mats behind them. Some stayed in place but gasped for air, holding their chests. Sharif’s own heart thundered, drumming his ribs so hard he could see his chest leaping. His breaths came short and hard.

“Come on! Come on!” he screamed, voice raw.

In spite of the impossibility of it all, Sharif only felt a screaming sense of victory. Too lost in a stew of adrenaline and endorphins and exhaustion for rational thought. The main reflection, right in front of him, struggled to pull itself upright. One hand, identical to his own right hand but reversed, tried to wave him off. It mouthed words Sharif couldn’t hear, as if the wall of glass between them was simply too thick.

“Get up, bitch! All of you, get up!” Sharif shouted. “I’m the best, I’m the best! You got to be the best too! I don’t quit! I don’t fucking quit!”

Anger flared behind the reflection’s dark eyes. A line of drool ran from the corner of their mouth as if they were too tired to wipe it away. They stumbled back to their feet and seemed to reach for him.

Lost in his victory, Sharif lurched forward and plugged his fist into the glass. A spiderweb crack exploded across the mirror as his knuckles struck. The blow shook his arm. Split into a dozen fragments, the reflection pounced forward. After a pregnant moment, some kind of threshold being crossed, the mirror smashed. Pieces rained onto Sharif, spraying him in the face. Behind them, Sharif’s reflection lunged toward him with hands hooked into claws.

Sharif skipped backward, marvelling for a moment through a haze of adrenaline. The reflection looked exactly how he was used to seeing himself but was all the more bizarre for that when not behind glass. The tattoos that ran up his right arm ran down the reflection’s left arm instead. The small scar beneath his left eye was beneath their right eye. The writing on the reflection’s sweatsoaked singlet was written backwards and looked like gibberish.

The reflection said something, trying to reason with him. The words were garbled, however, like the writing on his top. The sounds were reversed. They reminded Sharif of backmasking, like they used to do on old records to create hidden messages.

The reflection didn’t have a reflection. Bits of broken glass tumbled to the ground from the panel where they had emerged, revealing unpainted concrete. In the other mirrors surrounding the alcove, other reflections just watched.

Sharif bounded lightly on the balls of his feet. His mind spun but this was what he’d always wanted, wasn’t it? Play fighting in front of the mirror. He trained to beat the best so he could be the best. If he could defeat himself, then no one else could stop him.

“Come on, brother!” Sharif said, hands raised, drawing them on. “Unless you’re a bitch!”

Darkness filled the reflection’s eyes again. Inevitably, like a pair of magnets, the two of them were pulled together. Neither bothered to feint, they hurtled into combat with full-bodied blows and strikes, fists and elbows and knees. The smack of flesh on reflected flesh echoed across the empty gym.

As the fight surpassed its initial flurry of strikes and blocks, the pair found themselves evenly matched. Forearms crashed together in a mutual blockade. Sharif’s reflection fired forward with a left elbow aimed at Sharif’s head. Sharif simultaneously stepped in with his right and the two cracked off of one another. The blow numbed his arm up to the shoulder. He ignored it, shook it off, and circled. The reflection emerging from the mirror had given him enough time to catch his breath and slow his heart rate but his chest still burned. Both of them rode a ragged edge of exhaustion.

“Bring it on!” Sharif said.

Both kicked, blocked, the blows deflected off their thighs. The reflection grabbed and tried to wind Sharif up in their arms so they could bring him to the floor. Sharif slipped loose, his body slick with sweat. He did the same, trying to grapple the reflection into submission, but they pulled free as well. As their back was to him, however, he managed to hammer a punch into the reflection’s reversed kidneys.

The reflection swung around, one naked foot cleaving through the air. Sharif stepped backward and avoided it. As the reflection recovered, they made the same error as they had in the mirrors. One foot slid underneath them, their right, Sharif’s left, their ankle unsupported.

Sharif pushed on it without hesitation, slamming a kick into the reflection’s knee. The leg bandied and went out from under them. As they fell, Sharif’s knee was there to meet their face. Their head and neck snapped backward. He grabbed them by the side of the head and clubbed them repeatedly behind the ear. There was no ref to stop him. Gripping the reflection around the back of the skull, he slammed his knee into an identical copy of his own face again and again and again.

Sharif heard a crack like breaking bone, or glass. Although his pulse was thundering in his ears it was enough to snap him momentarily out of his fighting frenzy. He pulled the reflection backward. They reeled, eyes unfocused. A spiderweb fracture surrounded their right eye socket. It looked similar to the impact he’d left in the mirror the first time he’d hit it, its edges jagged. Broken glass not broken skin.

Sharif hesitated long enough to give the reflection time to recover. On their knees, they glared at Sharif then glanced back at the mirrored corner of the gym. They yelled something in their garbled, backward language, sounds that couldn’t really be imitated by a normal human mouth.

After a pregnant moment, one of the mirrors bulged and exploded. It was followed by a second, and a third, and a fourth. Mirrored shards rained from ceiling to floor as the panels shattered and gave birth to eight more reflections. Eight more identical but reversed clones of Sharif with the same builds and clothes and tattoos and haircuts and faces. Filling the space, they would have been uncanny to look at even if they weren’t all copies of him specifically. Sneering, teeth gritted, eyes dark, they started to advance. Sharif wasn’t sure what this was to them exactly but it no longer felt like a game. The reflections looked like they’d had enough of his shit and were out for blood. But even so, outnumbered, against impossible odds, backing down wasn’t in Sharif’s nature.

“Okay, okay, bring it on, motherfuckers!”

Sharif’s fight with the first reflection had taken them over toward the collection of free weights and exercise equipment. If they planned on overwhelming him with numbers then Sharif guessed all rules were off. He lunged at one of the racks and picked up a pair of ten kilo weight plates. Clutching one in each hand, he twirled and spun around in place. He released one, staggered, kept spinning, and hurled the other one.

The first plate hissed through the air and crashed into a reflection’s chest. They flipped backward, chest caving in with a sound like breaking glass. The second plate arced even higher then came down like a meteor. It caught another reflection flush across the face. Their features disintegrated into a rain of glittering shards as their head imploded. The plate crashed all the way through the back of their skull and thumped to the ground. Headless, the reflection reeled then fell before scattering into another pile of shards.

Seeing one of their number killed enraged the remaining reflections. The first one, kneeling on the ground with his broken face, scowled. Bunching their fists, the others closed in. Their movements were just as smooth and predatory as Sharif himself.

Sharif lunged at another rack and picked up an unoccupied weight bar. Spinning, he wielded it like a bo staff. He’d had a moment to catch his breath again and felt a fresh jolt of competitive lust.

“Bring it on!”

The reflections spread out and threaded between the weights and exercise equipment. Their numbers worked to Sharif’s advantage in at least one respect, none of them wanted to be the first one to commit to attacking him. Even if they looked like identical copies, they lacked his killer instinct. With a yell of exultation, Sharif leapt forward and swung the heavy bar. The blunt end clubbed a reflection across their upraised forearm. He carried forward, aiming low, and hit another in the knee. Both of them stumbled back, cracks appearing in their limbs where they’d been hit.

A third reflection pounced. An open-handed strike caught Sharif above the ear. He brought the weight bar up and slammed it into the reflection’s teeth. They crunched and tumbled out not as broken teeth but as pieces of mirrored glass. Sharif let out a bark of laughter, half-disbelief, half-victory. The reflection staggered and Sharif swung the end of the bar around in a decapitation strike. The side of their neck caved in with a loud crack. They staggered back, choking, and then dissolved into a shower of glittering pieces.

Two more reflections grabbed either end of Sharif’s weight bar. He tried to wrench it free but they overpowered him easily, working with exactly double his strength. A third reflection stepped in and hit Sharif with a forward kick. He wheeled backward and skipped away before he could be surrounded.

Another reflection followed Sharif’s lead and picked up a weight plate. An even larger one, twenty kilos. Swinging it around in both hands, the reflection spun and released. Sharif saw it coming at the last second and ducked. The plate flew over his head, nearly clipping him, and landed on the body of a treadmill with a smash. In spite of the obvious peril, Sharif let out another laugh.

“You want to play rough?” Sharif said.

Another reflection pounced. Sharif exchanged a series of lightning fast blows and blocks with them. He retreated backward, threading around one of the weight machines. When his reflection lashed out again, he managed to feed their fist between two of the machine’s support pillars. Gripping the reflection by the wrist, he twisted then slammed the arm sideways. Something splintered inside the reflection’s forearm. Sharif hit it again, putting all of his weight into it, and the arm snapped off completely. Jutting spikes bristled from their elbow as their staggered back, somehow screaming in reverse. The section of limb Sharif was left holding broke apart in his hands, cutting one of his palms.

Another reflection hit Sharif from behind, trying to wrap him in a headlock. Sharif ducked and slipped free. He was forced to retreat again as the reflections surrounded him. They began to look like a horde of the living dead. Most of those remaining were injured in some way. One had a missing arm, another with a partially caved chest, while others showed fractures on their limbs. Sharif could recognise the first reflection to emerge by the spiderweb crack covering half their face.

Sharif was determined to fight but forced to retreat as the seven remaining reflections crowded toward him. The other half of the gym was dominated by a caged ring for sparring, surrounded by rows of punching bags. He ran and circled the cage to put some distance between himself and the clones. They split up, however, moving in both directions around the ring. Sharif had to find the entrance and let himself inside.

With the narrow entrance to the ring, the reflections could only enter one at a time. Sharif stood guard. The first to try to enter was the one-handed reflection, lancing at him with the broken stub beneath their elbow. Sharif managed to knock them away but then was driven back by the combined weight of several other reflections. As they forced their way inside, he was forced to concentrate on defending himself but still refused to surrender.

“I’ll take you! Come on, I’ll take you all!” Sharif said. “I’m the best! I’m the fucking best!”

Fists hissed through the air as Sharif fought back, movements a flickering blur. Simultaneously, he tried to strike and block, knocking the reflections back a step. But there were simply too many of them, too similarly skilled. They crowded around him and soon the blows were coming from too many directions at once. He found himself on the mat with a legion of identical fists and kicks raining down on him.

xXx

When Sharif woke up, he found himself floating atop a soft, white bed in a sterile room. A hospital, clearly. His body was riddled with contusions and bruises yet he felt them at a great distance, behind a fluffy wall of painkillers. Although the only thing he seemed to be hooked up to was an IV bag full of clear liquid, he could hear machines and monitors whirring and wheezing and beeping.

“You’re very lucky,” the doctor said when she came to see him. “Two of your friends found you passed out in the gym. They said you all train there together sometimes. You’d collapsed from extreme exhaustion and dehydration.”

“Exhaustion? But, the fight,” Sharif said.

“I don’t know what fight you’re talking about but you can’t drive yourself as hard as you clearly were. You’re obviously very fit but it’s simply not healthy to push yourself that much.”

“But, the mirrors?”

“Oh, yes, they said something about finding you surrounded by broken glass? They told me to tell you that the owner of the gym was going to be very upset, I’m sorry.”

It had all been a dream. A delusion maybe, brought on by pushing his body too hard. He’d smashed the mirrors in the alcove and collapsed. Sharif spent the next hour replaying the whole thing in his mind. His victory had felt so real. Right up to the end, even then he knew they’d only beaten him because they had numbers on their side. But it was all a crazy dream.

The IV bags were full of fluid to help him rehydrate. They must have been working because after an hour, he felt the need to piss. He’d been told to stay put and call a nurse if he needed help with anything like that but Sharif still had his pride and he wasn’t going to piss into a tube no matter how exhausted he was supposed to be. Dragging the IV and stand with him, he slipped out of bed and moved to the bathroom.

As soon as the light flickered on overhead, Sharif noticed something wrong. An absence in the space above the sink. The mirror there reflected the rest of the bathroom but there was no reflection of him. Instead, in the middle of the panel was only a ghostly patch of condensation, as if someone had recently exhaled onto the glass. They had then sketched some letters onto the glass with their finger.

‘Ǝ⅃OHƧƧA TIUϘ ƎW’

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Sean: If you’re familiar at all with Billy Idol, you’re probably already aware that ‘Dancing With Myself’ is not, in fact, a metaphor for masturbation as some would think. That instead it was inspired by Billy Idol and Gen X guitarist Tony James visiting a club in Tokyo where they saw a lot of the young clubbers eschewing one another’s company to dance with their own reflections in the mirrored walls instead.

I know that I’ve seen it talked about as a ‘reflection’ on Japanese social mores and self-consciousness at the time although it’s kind of interesting to think on it now if you’ve seen those recent stories about young people no longer dancing in clubs as much because they’re worried about recorded and made a fool of on social media. There’s something in that, about the endless prism of society and social media, seeing constant reflections back on yourself, being both totally exposed and absolutely alone. Anyway, you can see how that led to a story about a guy beating the crap out of himself.

Actually, I’ve just written another story inspired by a second Billy Idol track! It came right off the back of this one. I think it might be the first time I’ve done two songs by the same artist? Oh, actually, no, I had a look and I’ve got a second one inspired by INXS that will be coming up before Billy. There’s one for your Sean E. Britten trivia card.

Next Track: The Bangles – Manic Monday