“Do I look like me?” Joe asked suddenly. Finnegan thought he had fallen asleep in a sunbeam.

“Do you look like you?” Finnegan asked, confused. “Of course you do. Who else would you look like?”

“T-t-t-t-t-t-wit-” Joe stuttered and compensated by feebly whistling a notification sound. “Some, they, people saying I’m Joe but not Biden.”

“Twitter is a sewer, Grandpa,” Finnegan said. “You can’t believe anything on there. It’s misinformation.”

Joe groaned and stood, shuffling to a mirror on the wall. “I don’t think I look like me.”

He pawed at his reflection in the glass. He raised his eyebrows. They went far too high on his forehead. He stuck out his tongue, pasty and white, rimmed with sores from where his white white white giant teeth kept biting it when he chewed. He kept touching the glass so he could remember it was all real.

“Do I look like me?” he whispered.

“Am I someone else?” he asked his cold reflection.

He lashed out with arthritic knuckles.

“Grandpa?” Finnegan asked. “What are you doing?”

“That’s NOT ME!” Joe wailed, pointing at himself in the mirror.

“It’s you, Grandpa!” Finnegan said.

Joe tore the horror from the wall and smashed it against the Resolute Desk, finger-long shards flying, Finnegan yelping in shock.

A Secret Service agent burst into the room.

“We’re OK, we’re OK!” Finnegan told him as he took in the shattered mirror and twisted brass frame.

“I’ll send up housekeeping, ma’am,” he told Finnegan and was gone, the curved door closing behind him like a sigh.

“Why aren’t I me?” Joe asked in anguish.

“You are you, you are you,” Finnegan said tugging on Joe’s arm to get him away from the broken glass.

“I don’t want to see him again,” Joe said quietly. “That’s not me, all-all-all old.”

“Did you cut yourself, are you bleeding?”

“Bleeding?”

“Did you cut yourself on the glass?”

“Glass?”

“I’m going to get you something to help calm you down.”

Joe nodded and smiled up at her from the couch she had steered him to. The thin tight skin stretched over the bones of his face pushed up and then fell down, spotted, grotesque. He wanted for one wild second to tear it off, just to see who would be in the mirror afterward.