The Perfect Mirror

New Year's Eve 1959. Sean Sullivan is in the Marin county Jail charged with smuggling contraband into San Quentin Prison. He is thirty-year-old counselor who meets Cassie Buzbee at his birthday party during the spring of 1956. He is reluctant to pursue a relationship with Cassie due to his birth defect. She is attracted to him. The Perfect Mirror is a love story. The reader is a witness to three murders, and six executions. We follow Sullivan's courtship of Cassie - their affair and the singing of songs his mother never taught him. We listen to Sullivan's memory flashbacks wrapped in death and the long road to Cassie's suicide in Fairbanks, Alaska. We feel the agony of Sullivan's visit to his father in a state hospital. Sullivan loses his counseling job and they move to Eureka, California where happiness is in the present tense. Fun visits to San Francisco find him dancing at the Claremont hotel in Oakland. After two years Sullivan is terminated. They move to San Francisco and try communal living with the beat generation. Sullivan works for public welfare and witnesses a murder in the office. He quits and finds night work as an admission clerk in a medical center. His job includes taking id bracelets from the deceased when 'death disrobes us all.' Christmas 1958, Sullivan reports for duty as a correctional counselor at Vacaville, California. He enters a new world. The facility houses 1800 criminally insane patients. He listens to neurotics who build sandcastles and psychotics who live in them. Day after day, he tries to hear no evil but the system is slowly rendering his sense of morality. His marriage is coming apart. He observes a parole hearing as the unclean try to find God. His gofer, Manuel, is mentally seducing Sullivan. He agrees to a smuggling operation. The charges are dropped November 1960. Cassie divorces Sullivan. On April 16, 1964 she looks into The Perfect Mirror and pulls the trigger.