Just read
The Dwarf. Thots:
The intro to the collection is epic until it gets to "autumn people", then it's just Halloween spoopy.
I read the story as a kid and remembered the plot, didn't remember the ending (I thought he either died on scene - crashed into a mirror, fell off the pier -- or committed sudoku and was seen dead).
I liked the description of the dwarf (it's disgusting, no "they hate him because he's different" here) and what retards on the onlone call "liminal space ~a e s t h e t i c~" (in this case, 90s despair) that doesn't slide into Indie Horror Spoopiness.
"Normie gets enchanted by a freak" strikes me as a typically-Bradbury motif (?), but I can only remember
Fahrenheit 451 as another example. False memory? dunno.
"A child being shielded from the cruel world" shows up in
The Playground.
The dwarf seeing himself as normal in that specific mirror reminds me of that Japanese mango story with people fitting into holes in a cliff face and a CAS story about a guy who went to an alien world and got his perception adjusted by friendly aliens to not die of dimensional horror there, but then the alien civilization fell to barbarians(?) and he escaped to Earth with skewed perception.
I don't actually know how funhouse mirrors work -- is it true that you can see the other person exactly the way he sees himself (as it happens when Aimee and Ralph are spying on the dwarf)? Seems improbable.
More importantly, I don't think these mirrors are done to specification, they're just made distorted. Therefore it's unlikely that Aimee can order a "make me normal" mirror for the dwarf, he needs that one specific mirror from the maze. I like the idea that for every freak of nature, there potentially exists a [metaphorical] mirror that, purely by accident, makes him look normal -- like a soulmate but inanimate -- but the actual story where you can order one for $35 doesn't support this.
"He should be working in the carny shows but isn't it so inspiring that he's doing real people things?
I emphatically disagree with the "inspiring" part, she explicitly says (in your quote, even!) "he's something we can never be". (In
Fahrenheit 451, Montag can never be "seventeen and insane".) She's not getting inspired, she's a loser and knows it, she's getting angry at the injustice of the world on behalf of the dwarf, because she can't get angry on her own behalf, because she's a shitty loser. "Inspiration" is "if this cripple can hold a job, I, a better [wo]man, can/should be a billionaire". She's "he's a real person in the body of a dwarf, me and Ralph are spiritual dwarves in the bodies of real people, the world is a fuck".
She thinks she understands Bigelow because she read some of the pulp stories he cranked out but instead of using that as a stepping stone to get to know him better, she just made up her mind about what he needed.
?? No, she saw the dwarf go into the mirror maze, every day for a year, to get laughed at by Ralph (who still hasn't tired of it, after a year). She is right about:
- feeling bad about it (compare: doctors or funeral directors who ridicule patients and "customers" on the online),
- Ralph is not a good person and might tip the cow,
- the dwarf does not enjoy being outside where people laugh at him,
- if the dwarf had a mirror at home, he wouldn't be spending money and getting laughed at at the mirror maze.
Where she is potentially wrong is the fix is never snap-your-fingers-magical, she can't switch the universe to the superior alternative where the dwarf has always had the mirror at home. Going from is to ought is a process and the end doesn't justify the means when you don't actually end up where you want to. Like, an extreme example, there are people who are better off not existing, but you (probably) shouldn't go out and shoot them, because that doesn't create a world where they have never existed, it creates the world with a corpse and you with a smoking gun in hand, it's not the same thing and likely not worth it.
Would he have reacted badly to receiving the mirror (assuming it worked)? Maybe, but we don't get to know for sure because he got cowtipped, AND the spokesman for the "yes he would" is the implicitly unreliable cowtipper.
She would have been better off trying to extend a hand in friendship rather than in pity.
Sure, but it's not easy to do in person to a dwarf. Maybe she should've written fan letters.
