The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Stanley feels dizzy again, feverish. His vision is tunneling. What the hell do they want a kid for? he says.

  Beats me, man. You’re asking the wrong chick. I don’t know what anybody would want a kid for. But I guess it’s all part of their—

  She waggles her fingers in the air, jerks her head toward the candlelit room over her shoulder. You know, she says. She hiccups again.

  Cold sweat drips down Stanley’s temple, along his stubbly jaw. What are they gonna do with it? he says.

  Cynthia shrugs. She fans the black curtain before her like a lacy petticoat, or a Dracula cape. Her huge-pupiled eyes lock on his. Do you think I should do it? she says.

  Stanley looks at her. Then he looks at his hand, pale against the door’s black edge, its veins too clear under the skin. It seems detached, lifeless. Nothing to do with him. Surfaces seem flat and static, equidistant. Like this room is just a painting of a room. He’s getting sick again, passing out.

  So, he says—his voice hollow in his ears, too loud—who’s the proud poppa gonna be? Your dear old Daddy Warbucks, right?

  Now she has the curtains pulled tight against both sides of her face, bunched in her hidden hands. She’s a talking mask, afloat in a void. I guess that depends on who you ask, she says. And what you believe.

  Stanley blinks hard, shaking his head, trying to regain his bearings. Cynthia’s disembodied face seems to rise, to advance toward him, a cold moon in starless dark. The sight of it already feels like a bad dream, one that he’ll have many more times.

  Well, Stanley says, good luck to you, Cynthia.

  He swings the door shut on her cute button nose and slides the big bolt home. Then he sinks to the floor—gulping air, trying to get blood back to his brain—and presses his forehead to the smooth wood.

  From the other side comes the girl’s muffled voice. Hey, she shouts. My name isn’t really Cynthia, you know.

  Stanley swallows, moving a trickle of spit around his cottony throat. Yeah? he says. Well, get a load of this. My name ain’t Stanley, neither.

  A few seconds of silence. Outside, the rain has stopped, or nearly stopped. She speaks again, quieter. Okay, she says. I guess I’m pleased not to meet you, then.

  Stanley closes his eyes, smiles. His lips feel numb and rubbery, like he’s drunk. He presses his nose to the crack between the door and the jamb. Sweetheart, he hisses, I couldn’t even tell you that I’m pleased.

  He grabs the doorknob, hoists himself to his feet. The room disappears. He sees red, then white, then wild explosions of color, then black, and he grips the knob and grits his teeth and doesn’t move and waits for the vertigo to pass.

  Eventually it does. The first thing that comes into focus is The Mirror Thief. It sits on an eye-level shelf an inch from his nose, as if Welles set it down while unlocking the door and forgot about it. Stanley puts out a hand to touch it, then stops.

  It’s identical, of course, to the beat-up book that he’s toted around the county. But this copy looks like it’s never been touched, or hardly touched. Its pages are flat and compact, its flaps uncreased, the silvered letters of its cover unpitted. It could have been printed yesterday. This is his book, but it is also not his book—and the fact of its barely read existence seems to mean that the copy he found in Manhattan, the copy he’s been carrying, isn’t entirely his either. Anybody could pick this thing up. Stanley remembers what Welles said that first night—three hundred copies, a hundred of those still sitting in my attic—and he pictures that latent automaton army crated overhead. For the second time today he wants to burn this fucking house to the ground.

  He rushes downstairs instead. In the john off the master bedroom he finds what he needs to remake himself: iodine, rubbing alcohol, fresh clean gauze. He rolls up the waterlogged cuff of his jeans, peels away the reeking bandage. The barbed-wire wound looks bad: slimy, edged with pus. He retches over the commode a couple of times as he cleans it, but nothing comes up, not even liquid. From the mirror above the sink a wasted stranger watches: blue lips, waxy skin, skull-sunk eyes. This is the face of God you see.

  On the laminate countertop sits a pair of cheap ceramic mugs in the shapes of animal heads: a white cat, a black dog. Stanley fills the dog-head from the tap and drinks from it. Then he pukes in the sink. Then he fills it and drinks again. In a lower cabinet he finds a bristly wicker basket full of old medicine-bottles; some of them look like they might be sulfa drugs. He swallows a few, pockets the rest.

  When he’s done he stands in the entryway and listens to the hiss of cars along the wet pavement, the impatient pacing of the girl upstairs. He tries to think of what else he might need. There’s probably some cash lying around—maybe some jewelry, too, or a nice watch—but at the moment he’s pretty flush. He could take some canned goods from the pantry but they’re probably not worth the extra weight. He turns in a slow circle, scanning the walls and the furnishings. Around him the house rises like a dead thing, an emptied-out shell repurposed by the girl: she occupies it like a hermit-crab.

  He came too late. That’s the goddamn problem. Maybe if he’d gotten here a few months ago, before she came, it would have made a difference. Probably not, though. Probably by the time he picked up The Mirror Thief in that Lower East Side dive the game was already over: Welles had already given up, lost his nerve. He’d swapped whatever led him to write the book for desires that were easier to keep straight in his head: a home, a wife, a family. He’d made peace with his own wild strangeness, found a way to tame it with magic circles and black curtains and barred doors. He no longer understands his own book. But Stanley understands it. To follow where it leads he’ll have to go alone—at least as alone as Welles was when he wrote it. Maybe as alone as the girl is now. A day may come when that seems like a hardship, but at the moment Stanley couldn’t care less.

  Beside the front door is a coat-rack crowned by upcurved horns; hats hang from the horns. Among them is the tweed driver’s cap that Welles wore the night Stanley first met him. Stanley takes it, puts it on his own head. It fits better than he expected.

  He pulls on his wet jacket and takes up his father’s fieldpack and leaves the house through the side door in the kitchen. He stands in the yard with mist slicking his bare neck and imagines the car pulling up: Welles and Synnøve on the walk, their dear boy Claudio between them, hand in a plaster cast, a grin splitting his battered handsome face. The three of them sweep to the porch, eager to get indoors, to free imprisoned Cynthia, to chant their spells and bare their bodies and commence their beautiful life together: the perfect family in a perfect world. Stanley pictures himself, too: creeping after them, toward the creaking bedsprings and the moans and the laughter, the black pistol heavy in his hand, and every whispering shoreline ghost gathered at his back.

  He’s fleetingly aware of who he is at this moment: distinct from people he used to be, people he’ll one day become. In times past he would have torched this house with no second thought. Most of his future selves would do it, too; even now he understands that about himself. Years from tonight—in idle moments, half-asleep—he’ll imagine the blaze he could have made, the ending he might have written. Picturing it as seen from the sea, or from a passing plane: the house a bright unsteady flare on the dark shoreline, throwing shadows in every direction. The girl the raw fuel hidden at its heart. Hell, he’ll think, looking back on this moment. I could have showed you hell.

  But not him. Not tonight. No such luck.

  When after a few minutes the car hasn’t appeared, Stanley adjusts the pack on his shoulder, unlatches the gate, and walks into the wet narrow street.

  REDVCTIO

  MAY 22, 1592

  Thus in the end we find all divine nature reduced to one source, even as all light reduces to that first self-lit brightness, and images in mirrors as numerous and varied as there are particular substances reduce to one ideal and formative principle, which is their source.

  —GIORDANO BRUNO,

  from The Expulsion of the Triu
mphant Beast

  49

  With a short laugh Crivano wakes himself, then sits open-eyed in the breath-warm darkness, trying to recall what in his dream so amused him.

  It was quite late last night when he left the Morosini house. Still, he now he feels entirely restored, scornful of more slumber. He kicks his blankets aside, rises to stretch, withdraws the chamberpot from beneath the bed.

  As he’s pissing, he notes a dim indigo sliver of sky between the closed shutters and wonders at the hour. In his memory the Nolan’s voice persists—odd, since Crivano granted the lecture but a modicum of attention. In Cecco’s commentary on Sacrobosco, we read of the demon Floron, who can be apprehended in a steel mirror by means of certain invocations. So spoke the Nolan. Or did he? Could this still be the dream-voice of Crivano’s imagination, limpeting fast to whatever daylit surface will hold it? He can’t be sure.

  Ten bells ring from San Aponal as he lights the lamp, fills the basin, splashes his face and neck. In half an hour the sun will be up. He’s to present himself at Ciotti’s shop by the stroke of twelve: plenty of time for a stroll through the Rialto, an inspection of the new bridge. Last night his passage into sleep was hampered by anxieties over the day’s strange events—Tristão’s insistent introduction to Ciotti, and the unexpected emergence of the girl Perina before that—but this morning these concerns seem distant, as if stifled by some antic reassurance received in his dreams. Crivano feels vigorous and reckless, like a vessel running before the wind.

  Among the wise Egyptians, the mirror evokes Hathor the Cow, she who rings the sky as the Milky Way, the Earth as the Nile. The comparable Greek figure, of course, is Amphitrite. The Nolan spoke last night for perhaps two-thirds of an hour. It seemed longer. Crivano might have followed more closely had he not been so unnerved by Tristão’s conduct: his indiscreet mention of the silvered alembic, his suggestion of the mirror as the Nolan’s topic. This, surely, is why Narkis directed him to associate with Tristão in the first place—the man’s imprudent dabbling in secret knowledge is the thrashing shark that will feed the swift remora of their own conspiracy—but Crivano can’t help but feel exposed, compromised, by such rash gestures. Last night Tristão retired from the chamber only minutes after giving the Nolan his subject: a whisper to Ciotti, and he was gone. While no doubt eccentric, it’s unlike Tristão to be rude, even to a popinjay like the Nolan.

  Hathor is the wife of Ra, who is the Sun. So too, as Isis, is she the wife of Osiris. So too, as Seshat, is she the wife of Thoth. Crivano hears a buzz of snores as he makes his way through the corridor. No other lodgers seem to be astir. In the parlor downstairs, a yawning Friulian girl in a nightshirt feeds the fireplace with split wood. Good day, young woman, Crivano says. Has Anzolo yet risen?

  The girl turns, startled, then averts her eyes. Not yet, dottore, she says. Shall I fetch him?

  He takes a moment to look her over: limp hair, wide hips, fourteen or fifteen years old. They always seem a bit frightened of him, these girls. Never charmed or smitten, as they are with Tristão. Stupid to be envious, of course. No need, Crivano says. Give him a message. Last night he helped me carry a small strongbox, which we locked away in a closet. I am going out now; I plan to return to the White Eagle by the fourteenth bell. At that time I will need a dependable and able-bodied gondolier to take me to Murano with that box. I trust that Anzolo will be able to make such arrangements.

  I’m sure he will, dottore. I’ll see that he gets your instructions.

  Outside, the sky has ripened to a yellow-tinged blue. Shutters open, carpets drape sills, and the smell of leavened dough trails from the baskets of women on their way to the fornaio. Crivano idles under the White Eagle’s sign to formulate his route to the Mercerie—closing his eyes to assemble the city’s image in his head, imagining himself afloat above it—and as he sets off, the sun’s first rays flare across the belltower of San Cassian.

  Halfway along the Street of the Coopers a blue-flowered bunch of pennyroyal in an apothecary’s window distracts him, and he misses the turn onto Swordsmen’s Street. Not till he smells the fishmarket ahead does he realize his error, by which time he’s disinclined to turn back. He can see bright air over the canal, a wall of light where the buildings fall away, and he continues toward it. Suspending his purpose for a moment. Luxuriating in the ravel of possibilities, the sensation of being neither lost nor certain.

  The Babylonians speak of Hathor as Ishtar. The Hebrews call her Astarte. The Greeks also know her as Io, beloved of Zeus, guarded by a giant with one hundred eyes who is, of course, slain by Hermes. Crivano steps over puddled seawater and piles of offal, moving among the fishmongers’ stalls to see what the ocean has divulged. Much is familiar from his visits to the Balık Pazarı during his years at court, but much is also new, or forgotten. Gangly spidercrabs. Coral-hued langoustines. Frogmouthed monkfish. Razor clams in neat rows, like the spines of books. A tangle of octopodes, their purple arms pocked with white suckers. Mullet and seabream stiffening in the warm air, their eyes gone foggy, like inferior glass. Behind the booths the water is a weave of pulsing lozenges, borrowing blue from the sky, orange from the palaces along the Grand Canal. A bragozzo moored at the white limestone quay is emptying its hold, spilling out sardines in a slick mirrored torrent.

  Crivano passes by the moneychangers and bankers at their benches under the colonnades, then proceeds south through the Rialto, pausing to examine red chicory from Treviso, wheels of cheese from Asiago, sheaves of asparagus from Bassano del Grappa. He finds bright-skinned lemons and bitter oranges from the Terrafirma, including the fragrant teardrop fruit from Bergamo, but the handful of sweet citrus available is absurdly expensive, and he asks a vendor why this is so. Uskoks, the man says with a shrug.

  The pungent hemp and pitch in the Ropemakers’ Square are pleasing to his nose, but Crivano has no interest in this merchandise. He turns down the narrow Street of the Insurers, passes through a sottoportego into the Campo San Giacometto, and emerges near the Proclamation Column, surprised to find himself in the spot where twenty years ago he and the Lark heard the news that Nicosia, city of their birth, had fallen. They’d been crossing the square to the Pisani bank to redeem more of his father’s letters of advice: two doe-eyed street wanderers, eager to be corrupted. Those boys seem entirely strange to him now: anxious, smooth-cheeked, full of foolish notions. They stood open-mouthed, their hearts striking the anvils of their ribs, as they struggled to parse the dialect of the comandador atop the porphyry column. In the general uproar they made their way south to the Molo and stood weeping and howling with rage under the arcades of the Doge’s Palace as the clerk copied their names—Gabriel Glissenti, Vettor Crivano—into the register of the Gold and Black Eagle of Corfu. Ravenous as only the young and privileged can be for their own annihilation. It was a clear day in September; they’d been planning a visit to a bookshop. That much, at least, has not changed.

  The Rialto too seems much the same. Crivano crosses the pavement to read the notices posted around the hunchbacked statue at the column’s base. When trading with Dalmatia, captains of state-auctioned galleys must henceforth make port at Spalato. The Serene Republic encourages the Hapsburgs and the Sultan to resolve without warfare their ongoing dispute in Croatia. Uskok pirates have intercepted three merchant vessels of late, murdering the crews and eating the hearts of their captains, as is their custom.

  Not till Crivano turns to check the clock on the façade of San Giacometto does he glimpse the new stone bridge. Its stepped incline rises from the Street of the Goldsmiths and arcs across the Grand Canal in a single broad span, fed from the Treasury and the Riva del Vin by a pair of steeper staircases. A moment ago Crivano had forgotten it; now he hurries toward it as if expecting it to dissolve into air.

  When he and the Lark first came to the city they often heard discussion of the need for such a bridge—a permanent link between the Rialto and the Piazza befitting a great Christian power—but they gathered that such debates had been ongoi
ng for fifty years or more, and it seemed that plagues, fires, war, and the opposition of foot-dragging reactionaries on the Great Council would delay its construction forever. Now, here it is. Ascending along the south balustrade, Crivano surveys burci and trabacoli unloading their cargo below: iron and coal on the left bank, wine-casks on the right. He stands in the apex of the pavilion and looks down at the Grand Canal, watching its dark surface play tricks with the rising sun. When the breeze shifts, he can make out the sharp tang of fresh-cut limestone through the water’s briny stench.

  On his way down, he moves into the double row of shops in the broad central passage to browse the offerings of jewelers and goldsmiths. Toward the bottom he finds a glass vendor displaying beads made in imitation of fine pearls—better than perfect, in gorgeous and improbable colors—and as he looks up from them he’s startled to meet his own gaze in a flat mirror hung on the side wall. It’s a rectangular Del Gallo glass of very high quality, only a few inches long, set in a swirling calcedonio frame; Crivano would swear it to be a window were his own face not watching from the midst of it. He recoils, looks again. His lined skin, his jagged teeth, his jackal eyes. Reminded once more of who and what he is.

  He locates Ciotti’s shop near the Campo San Salvator: the small wooden sign that announces it as MINERVA appears and disappears behind billowing red silks displayed by the mercer next door. Ciotti himself stands in the entrance, consulting in easy German with a man whom Crivano takes to be his printer. When Crivano approaches, Ciotti claps him on the shoulder and waves him inside with a broad smile.

  A fine-boned boy of about thirteen stands in the front room; he greets Crivano warily. Behind him, over a low partition, two bespectacled proofreaders sit at a table by a widow, bent over a stack of unbound pages. One reads aloud almost inaudibly as the other checks the text. Both move their lips; Crivano can’t tell which one speaks.