The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  The president speaks, Saad says. You are awake, so I will turn it up, okay?

  Peaceful efforts to disarm the Iraq regime have failed again and again because we are not dealing with peaceful men, the radio says. Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.

  Saad exits on Spring Mountain Road. Hey, Curtis says, can we just cruise the Strip for a little while? I’d like to hear this.

  Of course, my friend. Whatever you wish. Shall we say one dollar for each five minutes?

  Curtis unties the arms of his jacket from his waist, finds the envelope in the inner pocket, opens it. Why don’t I just give you three hundred for the trip, he says, and you can tell me when you need to go home.

  The United States and other nations did nothing to deserve or invite this threat, but we will do everything to defeat it. Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety. Before the day of horror can come, before it is too late to act, this danger will be removed.

  When it hits the Boulevard the Honda turns south, past Curtis’s hotel, past the pirate ships and the volcano, past the Bellagio’s dancing fountain. After all the walking Curtis has done it’s nice to be on wheels, nice to see all this stuff—the neon and the incandescents, the signs and the readerboards, the grab-bag casino entrances and the mirrorglass towers behind them, shiny masks with empty eyeholes—and to know that he’s not part of it. It took him a while to find the right table out here, but he figures he broke even.

  All the decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end. Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.

  Okay, Saad, Curtis says. I’ve heard enough. You can turn around.

  Saad hangs two lefts and hits the Strip again across from the Luxor, north of the crouching Sphinx. The boulevard seems busy for Monday afternoon. As they roll through the light at Trop Ave, Curtis sees a crowd gathered on the sidewalk by the Statue of Liberty—a keening pipe-and-drum corps, shamrock-green T-shirts and plastic hats—and he remembers what day it is.

  Many Iraqis can hear me tonight in a translated radio broadcast, and I have a message for them. If we must begin a military campaign, it will be directed against the lawless men who rule your country and not against you. As our coalition takes away their power, we will deliver the food and medicine you need. We will tear down the apparatus of terror and we will help you to build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free. In a free Iraq, there will be no more wars of aggression against your neighbors, no more poison factories, no more executions of dissidents, no more torture chambers and rape rooms. The tyrant will soon be gone. The day of your liberation is near.

  On the sidewalk south of his hotel, some motorcycle cops and security officers are arguing with five or six young LaRouche canvassers who’ve been hassling passersby with placards and brochures. The kids point and shout; one of the cops talks into his radio. THE METHODOLOGY OF EVIL, the kids’ placards read. STOP OLIGARCHS IMPEACH DOGE BUSH! CHENEY’S NUKES OR GREENSPAN’S DOLLAR – WHICH WILL *BLOW* FIRST? Curtis imagines Walter Kagami in his Cosby sweater, chanting through a bullhorn as the police load him into a paddywagon. Curtis isn’t sure yet how he feels about the war, but he doesn’t envy Walter. It’s got to be hard to hate something so much when you know there’s no chance in hell you’re ever going to stop it.

  The speech hasn’t ended by the time they pull into the porte-cochère, but Curtis has gotten the gist. He passes the envelope of bills over Saad’s shoulder and opens the door. Your eye is okay? Saad says. You are sure? I can take you to a doctor.

  It’s fine, Curtis says. I’ll fix it when I get topside. You working tomorrow?

  Yes, Saad says. Tomorrow I will work.

  You might hear from me again. I may need a ride to the airport.

  You have my number. Good luck, my friend. Stay out of the casino!

  Thanks! Curtis calls. Keep off your roof! But Saad is already pulling away, and can’t hear him.

  When he slides the keycard and opens the door, Curtis spots a steady flash on the nightstand: the phone’s message-light. Jersey cops, no doubt. They’ve been waiting three hours, probably, for a callback. Curtis figures another few minutes won’t kill them. Or anybody else.

  He throws his jacket on the bed, opens his suitcase, unzips the mesh pouch on the underside of its lid and removes the Ziploc that hold his saline and peroxide and suction device. Then he carries the bag into the head and turns on the light.

  He takes off his safety glasses, washes his hands, washes his face. Then he scrubs his hands again, past the elbow this time. When he’s done, he unwraps a glass tumbler and spreads one of the hotel’s fluffy white towels over the sink.

  The spotless mirror and the bright overhead lights don’t make it any easier to see where the problem is. Could be an allergic reaction, or maybe he’s just dehydrated. He pulls back the lids to take a good look.

  It’s still amazing to him: the tiny pink fibers in the offwhite sclera, the individual cords in the mouse-gray iris. The ocularist at Bethesda did a hell of a job. Between the bumpy ride south from Gnjilane and waking up blind and terrified in Landstuhl he remembers next to nothing, certainly nothing of the accident. Things get a little clearer later: sitting on the runway at Ramstein, trying to understand through the painkiller haze why the plane wasn’t taking off. We are not flying, Gunnery Sergeant, because nothing is flying. The FAA ordered a ground stop of all flights, civilian and military, within or bound for U.S. airspace. No sir, nobody knows, because this has never happened before. At the time it seemed like everything was wrecked, like nothing would ever be the same. And nothing has been, really. But it’s been surprisingly easy to forget the specifics of what’s changed, to forget exactly how he got hurt, to forget what he can and cannot see.

  Curtis wets the suctioncup with a squirt of saline, pinches its rubber bulb, and presses it to his acrylic cornea. Then he pushes down his lower eyelid with his thumb, and the prosthesis drops into his damp left palm.

  He puts it in the hotel’s tumbler and covers it with peroxide, then parts his lids again to peek at the blank curve underneath: the orbital implant’s white coral sphere, filmed with conjunctiva. On the countertop, the prosthesis stares up through the peroxide bubbles. Thin, hard, curved. Its smooth edges nearly triangular, like a worry-stone.

  As he’s flushing his empty socket with saline, his cell rings. He towels his face, steps into the bedroom to pick it up. A local number, not one he knows. He thinks for a second about what Argos told him. Then he presses the green button. Yeah, he says.

  Curtis, it’s Veronica. Where are you right now?

  A swirl of ambient noise around her voice. Nothing he recognizes. At my hotel, he says. What’s up?

  Listen, I just talked to Stanley. He’s flying back from AC tonight.

  Curtis blinks. Okay, he says.

  He’s been dealing with Damon. Curtis, your buddy is fucked. The Point put an exclude-eject on him, and now I’m hearing about an arrest warrant, too. I don’t begin to follow what’s going on, but Stanley is coming back, and he wants to meet with you.

  Curtis hears a PA behind her voice: pages, security announcements. She’s at the airport. At the end of the suite evening light pours through the windows, making a golden band across the final feet of the left-hand wall. Not much of it is getting to Curtis. He switches on the bedside lamp. The moment he does so, the fax machine across the room begins to hum.

  Curtis? You still there?

  Yeah. I’m here.

  Did I catch you at a bad time?

  No, Curtis says as he moves across the room, reaching for the paper as the machine spits it out. No, it’s fine. Hey, uh—is there any chance you could call me back on a landline? On my hotel phone?

  No time. Sorry. Stanley’s plane is gonna be wheels-down in li
ke five minutes. Can you meet or not?

  The paper in Curtis’s hand is mostly black. Its thick border seems at first to be squiggles—like someone was trying to get a cheap inkstick started—but resolves instead into a grisly thicket of anatomy: cunts and cocks and balls, unspooled intestines, shattered skulls spilling like cornucopias. Each corner is adorned with the image of an eyeball, trailing an optic nerve like a kite’s tail. In the middle of the crowded page is a message. YOUR FUCKT TRATER, it reads.

  Sure, Curtis says. I can meet. When and where?

  The Quicksilver. Walter hooked us up with a room. Just go to the bell-desk and give your name. They’ll have a keycard for you. If we beat you there, they’ll just give you the room number.

  You won’t beat me there, Curtis says.

  He crumples the fax as he looks out the window. A plane, maybe Stanley’s, is dropping toward McCarran now. On the wall by Curtis’s shoulder the murky painting is bathed in amber. Most of its vague details vanish in the glow, but others emerge. In a lower corner there’s a sea-monster that Curtis never noticed before.

  Hey, Curtis? Veronica’s saying. One more thing. Can I ask a favor?

  Yeah. Sure.

  Can you bring Stanley’s book when you come? I think he’d like it back.

  No problem, Curtis says, but Veronica is already gone. He stares at his dead phone for a few seconds, then pockets it.

  The Mirror Thief sits on the circular table, inches from his hand. Although Curtis didn’t get much from it aside from a headache, he somehow wishes he’d read more. As he lifts it through the sunbeam, the flecks of leftover silver on the binding flash gold.

  On his way back to the head to replace his prosthesis, Curtis notices the tracks that his desert-filthy shoes have made across the carpet: pale alkaline rings for every step, like the footprints of a ghost.

  CALCINATIO

  MARCH 1958

  And the waters richer than glass

  Bronze gold, the blaze over the silver,

  Dye-pots in the torch-light,

  The flash of wave under prows,

  And the silver beaks rising and crossing

  Stone trees, white and rose-white in the darkness,

  Cypress there by the towers,

  Drift under hulls in the night.

  —EZRA POUND, Canto XVII

  41

  Gulls’ voices wake Stanley. His eyes open to the sight of motes adrift in the pencil-slender sunbeams that pierce the boarded-up back window of his and Claudio’s lair. He wasn’t dreaming about New York just now, but the light still seems wrong, like it should be coming from the other direction. He sits up, rubs his face, listens to noises from outside, sharp in the cool spring air.

  On some mornings, a full understanding of the distances he’s covered arrives in a rush that knocks the wind from his chest, and this is one of those mornings. He used to open Welles’s book and marvel at the catalogue of faraway lands and exotic cities that Crivano passed through: Nicosia, Ragusa, Iskanderun, names that meant nothing to Stanley, that conjured nothing in his head but unfocused images of incense smoke and winding alleys and veiled faces and sharpened knives. During his long ramble across the country he’d often pretended to be retracing the steps of the Mirror Thief, and only now and then did he realize that the places he visited were no less strange to him than any named in the book, the expanses traveled no less vast. He’d sit quietly for a moment and imagine his own journey recorded in some neglected book, and he’d consider who years from now might take the time and the care to read it.

  Eight full months it took to get here. His progress random and inexorable as a crack working its way across a windshield. He hitchhiked, hopped boxcars, rode buses, walked for miles in all kinds of weather. Gravel truck in Indiana. River barge in Memphis. Local accents as alien to him as other languages. He crossed from Arkansas to Oklahoma in the back of a Willys Overland among crated peaches, glued by spilt juice to the sugary truckbed, stung by ants the whole way. He slept in an Indian pueblo in New Mexico, a whorehouse in Denver, a county jail in Amarillo, a monastery in Juárez. Often as not, he slept outdoors. And one twilit evening, making camp on a cactus-clumped roadside after being dumped by a pervert, he saw the eastern sky sundered by a terrible ball of fire and watched spellbound as a cloudhead rose, lightning flickering in its dark crown, until the noise and the wind reached and flattened him, leaving crusts of salt on his cheeks where there had been tears of wonder.

  Last night, after all those months and all that distance, Stanley finally found what he was looking for. He found it, and he couldn’t remember a goddamn thing, not any of the things he’d planned to say: nothing to show that he’d gotten the message, that he’d understood. He just followed Welles around like a goddamn dunce while the old man ran his mouth and that nasty little dog peed on stuff.

  Patches of light inch along the floor, and drifts of white powder on the concrete glitter like pixiedust in a Disney flick. Stanley hears car engines, a faraway motorcycle, the faint thud of heavy surf. The gulls sob like old women at a funeral.

  Claudio doesn’t stir when Stanley rises and stretches. They didn’t get in last night until very late, and the kid’ll probably be copping z’s for hours yet. But Stanley can’t sleep anymore. Too much to do.

  The leg of his jeans sticks to his calf. He tugs it free, then winces, remembering the cut. He steps into the front room, pisses in a milkbottle, stoppers it to hide the smell. Then he opens the pack, drinks from the canteen, brushes his teeth.

  When he’s done he takes off his pants, removes the bloody bandage, and rinses the wound. It doesn’t look too nice. He finds his bottle of rubbing alcohol, his spool of thread, a clean white T-shirt he can spare. Then he pours alcohol on the cut, yelping through clenched teeth at the sting. There isn’t much left in the bottle, and he uses it all. He wipes his watery eyes with the T-shirt, rips it up, bandages himself again. Finding sturdy satisfaction on the other side of the pain: a pleasure at tending to himself, spiced with earned contempt for the soft squarejohn world that can’t or won’t do the same, that fixes everything with money. Lately it’s not in daydreams but in moments like this—performing grim simple self-sufficient tasks—that he feels closest to Crivano.

  Once the bandage is tied, he bites off a length of thread and sews up the tear in his jeans. Later he’ll rinse off the dried blood in the ocean.

  In the backroom, Claudio rolls over and says something in Spanish. Stanley leans in the doorframe to watch him sleep—a funny smooth shape under the blanket—then reaches through the hole in the gypsumboard to find what he stashed there last night.

  After he and Welles finally parted company, it took Stanley a while to retrace their steps, to find his way back across cracked sidewalks and swampy lawns to the parked motorcycle, the pond curtained by bulrushes, the street he couldn’t recall the name of: Navarre. The motorbike was still there, as was the pair of black boots, poking through the vegetation. After a nervous pause to make sure the coast was clear, Stanley crept to the water’s edge to see. An overjolted biker, just like he’d figured: gaunt face, blue lips framed by a handlebar moustache, spike still in the vein. A strong smell of piss mixed with night-blooming jasmine. Stanley held his breath, leaned down, and jackpot: four cellophane envelopes tucked inside the stiff’s denim vest.

  By the time he made it back to the coffeehouse it was nearly two. People were filing out, the jazz combo was putting horns in cases, and the poets—Larry and Stuart and John—had Alex boxed in a corner, arguing about someone or something called Molloy. Stanley caught Alex’s eye without even trying, like the guy could smell the junk when it walked into the room. As Stanley watched, Alex produced a pencil and a black notebook, scratched on a page, tore the page out, and passed it over his shoulder to Lyn, his black-haired girl. No pause in his monologue. De Gaulle gave him the Croix de Guerre. But his behavior during the war was not heroism. It was simply what one did. No act that’s justifiable by reason should ever be regarded as brave. His b
ooks—the fierce refusals they contain—those are his heroic acts. The girl drifted over, wraithlike, to put the folded page in Stanley’s hand. Stanley roused yawning Claudio from his seat by the door, and they walked into the night with the foreign pulse of Alex’s voice at their backs. Yes, I knew him in Paris. I published him, when no one else would. In some ways he became like a father to me.

  Now Stanley pulls on his mended pants, stuffs the cellophane packets into the front pocket, and unfolds the page from Alex’s notebook. 41 CLUB HOUSE AVE, it says. He moves the pinewood plank from the door, glides into the street.

  Club House is seven short blocks away, north toward Ocean Park. Scant traffic on the Speedway, but Stanley opts to use the boardwalk, to see what the water’s up to. Heavy surf. Uneasy blues in the waves and sky. The shoreline seems limp, collapsed, like an old helium balloon. Somewhere out there the Pacific’s making plans for rain; no telling when it’ll come. The mercury must be in the barometer’s basement. Stanley’s sinuses feel too big for his face.

  The boardwalk had a rough night by the look of things: lost shoes, used rubbers, motorbike tracks on the sand. Gulls and terns fighting over choice vomit. At the corner of Westminster Stanley picks up a trail of dried blood—ruddy sunbursts, widely spaced on the planks—and he follows it for a block before it swerves away. The few faces he meets all seem sleep-starved, punch-drunk.

  He doesn’t like how he’s feeling: rudderless, out of step. Finding Welles last night shook him up, and not in a good way, not the way he expected to be shaken. It’s like the beacon he’s been tracking has turned out to be only a shiny surface, reflecting something else. He needs to know what. Everything the guy said last night was guff, intended to keep the real secret hidden. There’s a question Stanley needs to ask; he’s running out of chances to ask it. Before he sees Welles again he needs to figure it out.