The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Curtis lowers himself into an armchair and looks at her. He sweeps a finger before his eyes like a tiny windshieldwiper. Could you take that off, please? he says.

  She reaches back and unties the black ribbon knotted under her ponytail. The mask sinks to her lap. She’s wrecked. Curtis thinks of a truckload of Romany refugees he stopped one time near the Serbian border: sleepless for weeks, shot at by everyone, they’d been stealing gas when they could, hiding in barns, traveling by night, with no notion at all where they were going. Veronica’s not that bad yet, but she’s on her way.

  Stanley bought this for me in New Orleans last week, she says. It’s a gatto. A carnival mask. We were there for Mardi Gras.

  I heard you were in Atlantic City for Mardi Gras.

  She gives him a cool glare. We were in AC on Vendredi and Samedi, she says. We were in New Orleans for Lundi Gras and Mardi Gras. Stanley was pissed we didn’t get to see the Krewe of Thoth march. But what can you do? Gotta earn a living.

  Veronica winds the ribbon around the mask, blindfolding it. She shifts it to her left hand, keeping her right hand near the gun, and sets in on the table. Curtis’s vision has grown accustomed to the dim light, and he notices two more objects there: a glass tumbler, mostly empty, and a slender brown chapbook. The book seems familiar. He tries to remember where he’s seen it before.

  Here’s a suggestion, Veronica says. Why don’t we quit fucking around? Tell me what Damon wants.

  Curtis looks up from the table. Far as I know, he says, it’s like I told you before. Damon just wants Stanley to get in touch—

  No. Please do not start with that skipped-on-a-marker bullshit again, Curtis. It’s insulting. Let’s do some business. What’s Damon’s offer?

  Curtis shakes his head. I don’t mean to insult you, he says. But I can’t make any deals for Damon. He didn’t send me out here to negotiate. Just to deliver the message.

  I don’t believe this, she says. She leans forward, furrows her brow. Stares hard at his face, like she’s about to pick an eyelash off his cheek. You’re fucking serious, she says. Stanley skipped on a marker. That’s why you’re out here. That is seriously all Damon told you.

  No. He also told me about the cardcounters that hit the Point.

  Did he tell you that Stanley put the counters together?

  No, Curtis says. He didn’t tell me that. Did Stanley put the counters together?

  Veronica ignores the question, sinks back into the couch. Are you absolutely sure, she says, that you’re the only one Damon sent out here?

  I can’t be sure of that, no. I’m the only one I know about.

  Curtis looks down at the table, at the dull rectangle of the book on the glossy wood. Somebody else is looking for you, he says. But Damon didn’t send him.

  Veronica has grown very still. Really, she says. Do tell.

  I ran into him about an hour ago. Little guy. Gap between his front teeth.

  White guy?

  I’m not sure. I didn’t get a good look.

  You don’t know if he’s white, but he’s got a gap between his front teeth?

  He called me on my cell. He whistles when he talks.

  Wow, she says, raising an eyebrow. That’s good. I am very impressed.

  I was downstairs in the casino when he called me. He was, too. He could see me, but I couldn’t see him. Not at first. When I spotted him, he cleared out in a hurry.

  How fucking adorable. How delightfully Foucauldian.

  You feel like telling me who he is?

  Foucault? He was a French philosopher. Looked like Telly Savalas.

  She lifts the tumbler from the table and drains it. Using her right hand this time. Curtis relaxes a little. He can tell she’s thinking hard, and he lets her think. His eyes keep drifting back to the book. It’s bothering him like a song he can almost remember the words to.

  He’s nobody, Veronica says after a while. Nobody I’m worried about.

  You sure about that? He knew to look for you in the casino.

  Well, he didn’t find me, did he? she says. Neither did you.

  She’s smiling sweetly to herself, staring into space. Rocking back and forth like she’s trying to stay awake.

  Point taken, Curtis says. But I was just thinking. Most folks I know tend not to answer the door with a gun in their hand unless they’re worried about something.

  Well, that’s a charming bit of folk wisdom, Curtis. You should cross-stitch it onto a pillow.

  I’m also starting to feel like there’s something going on that I don’t know about. Something heavier than cardcounting and delinquent markers. If you know what I mean.

  Oh, I know exactly what you mean, she says. But you, on the other hand, have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about. And I’d be more inclined to buy your Miss Marple routine had I not just pulled a .357 snub off your belt. If you’re confused, you can take it up with your buddy Damon. I am not going to explain this shit to you.

  She’s looking around the room now, everywhere but at Curtis, and he thinks he sees an opening. She’s been on her own for a while now, and she doesn’t like it. She’s ready to talk to somebody.

  So, he says, you’re telling me Stanley didn’t borrow any money from the Point?

  I’m not telling you anything. Look, Curtis, use your head. Why would Stanley ask Damon for a marker?

  Curtis shrugs. Why would anybody ask anybody for a marker? he says. I had lunch with Walter Kagami today. Walter told me that Stanley’s been on a real bad streak lately. Losing a lot at the tables.

  Veronica laughs. Walter! she says. Christ. Listen, Curtis, Walter Kagami is a very sweet man. But he has a tendency to talk out of his ass.

  Stanley’s not hurting for money?

  She’s giving him a strange look. As if she can’t decide whether he’s being extremely subtle or extremely stupid. Curtis, she says, how well do you actually know Stanley Glass?

  Curtis thinks about that. He doesn’t really know how to answer. Stanley’s like my uncle, he says. He’s my dad’s oldest friend. My mom died when I was real young. And my dad had some troubles. So Stanley helped me out. He found my mom’s folks living in Shaw, and they took me in and raised me. He helped out with money, and with other things. I owe him a lot.

  So you know him as family. Not so much as a friend.

  I consider him a friend.

  But you don’t know him in any professional capacity.

  No, Curtis says. I guess I don’t.

  She sits quietly for a moment. Tallying something in her head. You’re the one who introduced him to Damon Blackburn, aren’t you? she says.

  Curtis nods. Veronica looks at him. Her face so blank it’s like another mask. Then she picks up her gun.

  Curtis shifts his weight to his toes, ready to tip the chair and roll, but the barrel is pointed at the ceiling. Veronica ejects the clip and sets it by the lamp on the endtable. Then she clears the chamber and puts the pistol and the loose round next to the clip. You probably think of Stanley as a professional gambler, she’s saying. That’s not correct. Gambling is not Stanley’s profession. It’s his mode of existence in the world. Do you understand?

  I don’t think I do, no.

  She settles back on the couch, lifts her feet from the floor, crosses her legs. Her toenails are movie-star pink, and look freshly painted. You know he doesn’t count, right? she says.

  Say again?

  Stanley doesn’t count cards. Did you know that? You know how cardcounting works, right?

  I know the basics, sure.

  A while back, Veronica says, Stanley and I were working Foxwoods. I signaled him into a table that was heating up. When I came back twenty minutes later, he was into the next shoe, with this enormous pile of chips in front of him. Completely in control. Making perfect bets every time. The pit boss was starting to sniff the air, so Stanley colored up and we split. I asked him what the count was when he left, and he had no idea. He laughed at me. You have to realize how natural this is to him
, Curtis. The man’s formal education stopped in the fifth grade. He has no theoretical understanding of probability whatsoever. He doesn’t even believe in it.

  He doesn’t believe in what?

  Probability, she says.

  She leans forward, lifts the tumbler from the coffee table. Stops, realizing it’s empty. Stares at it, as if she can’t figure out how it got that way. Want a drink? she says.

  No thanks.

  You mind fixing me one? I’d do it myself, but I’m still afraid you’ll shoot me.

  Curtis takes the glass from her hand. There’s a bottle of bourbon by the minibar, the red wax peeled from its neck, and he pours her a couple of fingers. Then he unwraps a second tumbler and pours himself some, too. In Stanley’s mind, Veronica’s saying, about the least interesting thing you can do at a blackjack table is win money. Gambling without any goal beyond making smart bets is like—

  She takes the tumbler from Curtis.

  —it’s like using the Yellow Pages exclusively for pressing flowers. Or it’s like using an English-to-Latin dictionary to translate Latin into English.

  Wait. Say that again.

  Never mind. Bad example. It’s more like William Blake’s optics. May God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep! Right?

  I wouldn’t know anything about that, Curtis says.

  Okay. What do you know about the sephirot? Or gematria?

  Curtis gives her a blank look.

  What about kabbalah?

  Just what Madonna tells me, I guess. Never paid it much mind.

  Veronica pulls an ugly face, sips her bourbon.

  It’s a Jewish thing, right? Curtis says. Some kind of mysticism?

  Originally Jewish. Primarily Jewish. Although goyim have been piggybacking on it since at least the Fifteenth Century. Primarily mystical, too, although it’s also a system of practical magic. That’s what most interested Stanley.

  When you say practical magic, Curtis says, I get the feeling you’re not talking about Siegfried and Roy.

  No, I’m talking about the practice of using talismans, formulas, and incantations to invoke angelic and demonic entities and to cause them to do your bidding.

  Curtis blinks. You have got to be bullshitting me, he says.

  I’m not bullshitting. Is Stanley bullshitting? That is the sixty-fucking-four-thousand-dollar question.

  Curtis isn’t sure what to say to that. He sets his tumbler on the table. Then he reaches for the book: a paperback octavo, sewn at the spine. Its weathered wraps feel like soft leather, or an old dollar bill, and Curtis knows it belongs to Stanley the moment he touches it. It’s dense in his hand, heavier than he’d have guessed. He loosens his grip, feels the downward tug against his fingers.

  Walter’s worried, Curtis says. He seems to think Stanley’s gone off his rocker. You’re saying he’s just getting religion in his old age?

  Lots of people get religion in their old age, Curtis. They go to church. They don’t hit the tables at Caesars Palace. This is more complicated.

  Veronica’s eyes are locked on the book. Curtis can’t tell how she feels about him holding it, but he’s definitely got her attention. Maybe Walter’s right, she says. Maybe Stanley ought to be locked up. Off playing cribbage in a home someplace. Maybe that’d be the best thing for him.

  How long has he been interested in this stuff? Magic. Kabbalah.

  Veronica smiles wanly. It’s not totally accurate to say he’s interested in it, she says. I’m interested in it. So I fall back on it to explain Stanley to myself. That’s how I got mixed up with him in the first place. He was one of my regulars when I was a dealer at the Rio. We got to talking. He wanted to know about the post-Pico Hermetic-Cabalist tradition in early-modern thought. I wanted to know how to exploit the gaming industry to pay off my student loans. So we were pretty much thick as thieves right off the fucking bat. Stanley’s never been hung up on specifics, though. The notion of creating a system or being enslaved by another man’s—that’s not what Stanley’s about. He doesn’t give a shit about gematria. He’s only interested in what it can do.

  What can it do?

  According to the tradition, it can divulge correspondences hidden throughout all of creation, and ultimately reveal the secret names of God. Since the universe was created through the godhead’s utterance of its name, knowing these names theoretically gives you direct access to the divine essence, and the power to transcend space and time. Which comes in pretty handy when you’ve got clients in from out of town and you need a couple dozen tickets to Cirque du Soleil.

  You believe in that stuff?

  Fuck no, Veronica says. But I am interested in what happens when people do believe it. When I was in grad school, I thought all those people dropped off the face of the planet not long after 1614, when Isaac Casaubon determined the correct date of the Corpus Hermeticum. Now I find myself raiding America’s casinos with one of them.

  She sips her drink and watches Curtis’s hands. He tracks her gaze back to the book. Its coffee-brown cover looks blank in the dim light, but Curtis feels imprints in the thick paper, and leans toward the lamp to read what’s stamped there.

  THE MIRROR THIEF, it says. The writing must have been filled with something silvery at one time; tilting the book forward, Curtis can make out a few starlike flecks clinging to the edges of the letters. He remembers, or imagines, Stanley’s fingers dusted with that fugitive silver, twinkling in the halflight of a smoky club, some dive in Chelsea or Bensonhurst or Jackson Heights. Stanley laughing, cutting the cards.

  You know what you’ve got there? Veronica says.

  I’ve seen it before.

  That’s Stanley’s favorite book. He’s had it since he was a kid. These past few months he’s been reading it just about all the time.

  Funny that he didn’t take it with him.

  Yeah. It is.

  Curtis opens the book. On the first page, there’s a handwritten message in faded blue ink. Crazy antiquated script.

  Stanley—

  Remember this always:

  “Nature contains nature, nature overcomes nature, and nature meeting with her nature exceedingly rejoices, and is changed into other natures. And in another place, every like rejoices in his like, for likeness is said to be the cause of friendship, whereof many philosophers have left a notable secret.”

  Best wishes to a fellow lunatic! May fortune speed you toward your own opus magnum.

  Regards,

  Adrian welles

  6 March 1958

  Stanley knew this guy?

  I don’t know how well he knew him. He tracked Welles down when he was living in California. Stanley never told you this story?

  Curtis flips to the next page. Turn away, you spadefingered architects of denunciation! it begins.

  Turn, you stern merchants of forgetfulness,

  you mincing forgetters of consequence, turn!

  Tend to your sad taxonomy, your numb ontology,

  your proud happenstance of secular wheels!

  Nothing thirsts after your pungent spray. Nothing

  yearns to dry its hands in your grim catalogues.

  Cast your auditing stares elsewhere! Bold Crivano,

  the Mirror Thief, skips quicksilver on your ancient stones,

  trundles his dark burden through viscera of cloud,

  swaddled in the damp folds of linden-scented night.

  Harry him not with your snares of causality!

  Spare him the gnashing of your mad abaci!

  Grant him safe transit, you squat sundial kings

  (all of you polishing gold to shame silver)

  for the treasure he bears in his butterfly sack

  is none other than that foremost reflector itself,

  the genderless Moon!

  Let him pass, and mark not

  his passage,

  save by sleep-talking

  a quiet threnody

  in your dreamvoided dark.

  What in the hell is this, C
urtis says.

  Adrian Welles, Veronica says—sounding bored, automatic, like she’s spoken or heard this many times before—was a poet active in the 1950s and early ’60s, loosely associated with the Los Angeles Beats.

  Curtis flips ahead, across pages of verse, some in neat columns, some sprawling on the yellowed paper. Toward the end, his eye alights on a line—his flute conjures a harvest of sleep from the little fields of the dead—that he can hear clearly in Stanley’s voice. He’s sure he’s heard Stanley quote it, though he can’t recall when, or why, and after a moment the memory is lost. Curtis riffles backward, as if to shake Stanley’s voice from the book again, until he’s at the beginning; then he shuts the covers, presses them between his palms. The old wraps smooth, like taut skin. He almost expects to feel a pulse.

  Veronica is looking out the window. Her eyes are bright, full, like she’s on the verge of tears or panic, but her breath is steady. She’s pulled her legs into full lotus, and she’s absently waggling the big toe of her left foot between her thumb and her index finger. Its shadow appears and disappears on the cushion beside her. Its red nail glistens like a coral bead.

  If you want to figure Stanley out, she says, which I do not recommend trying, then that book is probably as good a place to start as any.

  This guy—Welles—he was some kind of beatnik?

  More like a proto-beatnik. He was an older poet, sort of an also-ran, and he gave the bandwagon a push in the early days. He was on the scene, but not really of the scene.

  Curtis shakes his head, sips his drink. The bourbon is sneaking up on him. It feels like he, the book, and Veronica’s eyes are the only motionless things in the room. Everything else is drifting, leaves on a pond.

  And Stanley got this from Welles?

  Veronica closes her eyes. He thinks for a moment that she’s gone to sleep. When she opens them again, they’re trained on Curtis’s face.

  I can’t believe Stanley never told you this story, she says.

  SEPARATIO

  FEBRUARY 1958

  Nothing out of place and yet everything was, because there existed between the mirror and myself the same distance, the same break in continuity which I have always felt to exist between acts which I committed yesterday and my present consciousness of them.