IN THE CHICANE ROOM

By Ben Greenman

from forthcoming collection, as yet untitled

Avramides’s Mirror, to which Gorham made reference in his speech, is a conundrum developed to illustrate the confusion of the mind between reality and representation: in the hypothetical scenario, a starving man stumbles into a room, sees breads and meats arrayed on a table, realizes that they are merely a reflection, but does not understand which way to turn to locate the original foodstuffs. The figuration is not to be found in Avramides’s work (he was Chair of the Philosophy Department at Panteion) and was probably dreamed up by Gorham to ridicule the professor’s theory of  mimetic disorientation. There is no record of any man, even one compromised by hunger, falling victim to confusion of this sort, and it seems better suited for a slapstick film than for a putatively straightforward lecture. Gotham, after concluding his speech, was the guest of honor at a private reception in the Historical Society’s Chicane Room, named not after trickery but after Alice Chicane, the inventor of the neonatal capsule and one of the chief benefactors of the Society. At the reception, he answered student questions about finance and industry, chatted with several of the society’s members, and flirted with at least two women, both of whom reported that he would, after only a few seconds, turn away from them to look instead at their reflection in the mirror.