The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  Just how much of your life has he scripted? That scene yesterday between the columns was pure Welles: probably playing in his head the first night you met him. You were running a card game on the boardwalk. I won a dollar from you. Still, kneeling there with the sea at your back, you never felt like a sucker or a patsy—and it was hard not to take satisfaction from it: moving the cards with your old fleet hands, working the switch, there at the very center of the web you’ve been walking.

  Maybe that’s why you weren’t too surprised when you looked up to find Damon watching you: leaning against the marble railing of the loggetta, eating gelato with a plastic spoon, appearing and disappearing in a line of tourists queued behind an upraised umbrella. He wore a new linen suit, a new wool overcoat, and a deeply pissed-off expression: the ensemble of a traveler who’s left someplace in a hurry, who had time to pack nothing but cash. A battered leather shoulderbag hung at his side, flap unbuckled, within easy reach of his right hand. You grinned at him, but you’re not sure he saw it. You have no idea, really, what other people can see.

  For another ten minutes or so you kept the cards going while Damon finished his ice cream, started drifting closer. Just as you began to think about how best to get away, a cop showed up—lithe, poised, runway-model handsome, state-funeral tidy—and answered the question for you, helping you stand, gently shooing you away. Oh, thank you, signore, you said, plenty loud enough for Damon to hear. I’m sorry, but I’m not feeling well. And this city is so confusing! I’m staying at the Aquila Bianca in San Polo. Can you tell me how to get there?

  So now you wait. Damon’s probably bivouacked this very minute at the bacaro across the street, flipping through a magazine, wondering when you’ll come down, or when he should go up. Odds are the bacaro closes for a couple of hours after lunch; most of them do, it seems. It’s getting late. You have a clear picture of what comes next: Damon will knock back the last of his wine as the proprietor motions to the exit, he’ll rub his sleepless eyes and adjust his coat as the door locks behind him, and then, with a few easy steps, he’ll cross the gray flagstone street.

  You won’t be making it back to the Biblioteca Marciana. Probably just as well. You’ve seen what you came to see, well past the point of diminishing returns. The library girls brought them to you on platters, helped you tug on the white gloves that protect their frail pages: the collected correspondence of Suor Giustina Glissenti. You understood hardly any of it, but you knew the one word you were looking for, and you were certain your eyes wouldn’t miss it.

  It wasn’t there. You flipped through again to be sure: backward this time, slower, your nose an inch off the paper. The result was the same: no mention anywhere of anyone named Crivano. Why would Welles lie? Did he lie? Even at this dead end you turned up clues, or what might be clues. The nun’s letters stopped after 1592, the same year Crivano supposedly fled the city. Suor Giustina’s name doesn’t appear in her convent’s records after that date—but it isn’t listed before that date, either, although you did find a record of another Glissenti girl: a cousin, maybe. To make matters worse, some letters that were supposed to be in the box were missing. Why? How long have they been gone?

  It felt something like cardcounting: filling in gaps based on what little you can see. Walter and Donald could probably figure it out in a heartbeat—but they’re not around, and your head doesn’t work like that: if you can’t see it, then you’re at a loss. But you can almost always see it. Almost always.

  Patterns: that’s what you’re best at. Seeing the figure in the tealeaves. You could spot it—you’re sure you could—if you had a little more to go on, a few more dots to connect. Vettor Crivano flees this city one thousand lunar years after Muhammad leaves Medina: some kind of echo there. Ezra Pound is released from St. Elizabeth’s Hospital a few weeks after you depart the shoreline; he dies and is buried half a mile from here, at San Michele, the same year Veronica is born. John Hinckley, Jr. watches a movie, shoots a president—launching Curtis on his own funny trajectory—and then gets locked up at St. Elizabeth’s. All of this must add up to something, must spell something out. You’re running out of chances to put it all together, to see it whole.

  Or maybe soon you’ll see everything.

  At the desk downstairs there’s only the proprietor, visible through the window from the street; Damon shouldn’t find it hard to get around him. You hope he’s careful enough to take that extra step. He’ll lean over the wooden counter, match your name to your room number, and soon he’ll be on the stairs, fixing a suppressor to a pistolbarrel, hiding the weapon with a glossy newsmagazine. The lock—quaint, old-fashioned—won’t slow him down. The well-oiled door will swing open, and he’ll see the neat berm your legs make on the bed.

  By then, of course, you’ll already be in the mirror.

  It’s not easy, but you’ve practiced. Quick trips at first: a few seconds, in and out. Then longer stretches, deep dives into un-space. Not unlike learning how to swim. What you recall from the other side is the hugeness of it. And the unity: coming back, the idea of separateness becomes laughable. If passing through is hard; returning is much harder. Because, why bother, frankly?

  But you do come back. Surfacing in Curtis’s suite, in Veronica’s room, in the suite at Walter’s joint. Letting people see you when you got confident enough. Their startled reactions proving that what you felt was true. Proving something, anyway.

  This time will be different. More like learning to breathe water. You have been very patient. You have waited a long time.

  Damon will stand over your body for a while. Sniffing the shitty air. He’ll step to the bedside, sit lightly on the mattress. Watching you. Then he’ll set his gun on the stacked blankets and flick a finger hard against the tip of your nose. He’ll find a penlight in his coat, lift your eyelid with his thumb, and shine the beam into your slack clammy face. Then he’ll sigh, and turn, and look out the window at the campo below.

  Eventually he’ll stand, pick up the pistol. He’ll press the thick barrel against your head, resting it in the orbit of your left eye, and he’ll hold the newsmagazine above it, opened to catch the spatter. Der Spiegel: you’ll be able to read the cover over his shoulder. In Göttlicher Mission, it says.

  He’ll shoot your eyes out, one at a time. He’ll drop the wet red magazine on your chest, wipe his hands on the blanket. On his way to the door he’ll pick up the passport that he had his friends in D.C. make for you: it’s on the chest of drawers, easy to find. On his way back to his own hotel he’ll drop it in a canal, fastened with an elastic band to a palm-size chunk of stone.

  You will not get the chance to make those two calls.

  If Damon looks in the mirror on his way out of the room—is he the sort of person who would?—you won’t let him see you. Not just yet.

  Mirror. Three hundred twenty-nine: a sharp disciplinarian. Or: those exhausted by hunger. Or: in the land beyond the sea. In Hebrew, הארמ, which adds to fifty. Unwedded. Completeness. A citadel.

  This is what you’ve wanted all along: freedom from what’s trapped you in this world. Freedom from yourself. At the end, they say, your whole life’s supposed to flash before your eyes. Flash: that’s the word they always use. You hope like hell it isn’t true. It’s been a long time since looking last held any interest. Lately, what jazzes you is what you can’t see: the way the spell of vision gets broken, the way your breath fogs the glass when you get too close. All these years, dragged around by your eyeballs: you’ve had about enough. A goddamn slideshow! What the hell kind of death is that for a person? You don’t want it. You’re ready for whatever’s next.

  Eye. Four hundred ten. A mounting-up of smoke. To be hindered or restrained. To lay snares.

  That was Crivano’s escape: it says so in Welles’s book. Took you long enough to figure it out. Part of you wishes you’d brought The Mirror Thief along—although that’s silly, sentimental. Curtis will take care of it; here it’d just get thrown away. Besides, it’s not like you don’t r
emember every word. Over the years you have become the book: a lifetime of dreams and memories, braided through its lines.

  In a way, it’s not so bad that the trail in the Biblioteca ran cold. Isn’t that exactly what you wanted to hear the night you stalked Welles on the beach? That he’d made Crivano up? That the world of his book overlapped with the real world hardly at all? Finding out otherwise became a problem for you, one you’ve been working for years to solve. But even if Welles did lie, even if Crivano never really existed, this trip hasn’t been a waste of time. There’s something here: you’ve felt it, even if you haven’t seen it. Can’t somebody still be a ghost, even if they were never born? Why not? Who made up that rule?

  Yesterday, a final clue. You mentioned the name of the ship to a librarian—the ship Crivano escapes on—and she came back with something: a letter from a young merchant captain to his father, bringing news from the Dalmatian coast. Very bad are the uskok pirates, the librarian translated. Last month they robbed two small ships en route to Spalato, and they burned a trabacolo—a trabacolo is a boat, yes?—that fought them with great valor.

  The Lynceus. You kept the girls busy till closing time, but they found nothing else: neither the date the ship was lost, nor where it had sailed from. It might have already stopped at Split, let Crivano off. Maybe, as its wreck lit up the ocean, he was already intriguing his way through the Croatian port, dodging the Council of Ten’s assassins, seeking passage to Turkish lands. No doubt that city would have felt dreamlike to him: both strange and familiar. Diocletian’s ancient palace was the model for this city’s Piazza; the belltower in this city’s Piazza is duplicated there. You would like to have seen that, too. But no matter. Cities appearing in other cities: a map of echoes, a pattern you know well.

  You prefer to believe that Crivano burned. It’s an end that fits him, a doom you can imagine. Trapped belowdecks, flames arcing overhead, his mind would have returned to Lepanto: what he did there, what he did not do. His lonely secret life would have seemed a peculiar circuit, beginning and ending in the hold of a burning ship.

  With nothing to do but await the agonies—the blistering flesh, the smothering outrush of air—how would he have passed his final moments? Tincture of henbane, probably: to slow his pulse, to dull his senses, to free his mind to wander. And the magic mirror, of course: the trick he taught you. To meditate upon the talisman—to gaze upon the mirror’s surface—is to arrange your mind to resemble the mind of God. You pass through the silvering, beyond all earthly torment, into the realm of pure idea. At last, all mysteries become clear.

  By that point, you imagine, it’ll be hard for you to care about any earthly thing: hard to convince yourself to come back, to finish your remaining task.

  But when Damon returns to his own hotel, you’ll be waiting. It might take him a moment to notice you, especially if he’s avoiding his reflection; you’ll bide your time until he does. With the benefit of perfect knowledge, you will not be unkind. If he shoots out the glass—as well he might—you will remain with him, even in the fallen shards. There was a time not long ago when you felt something for him akin to love.

  Only one result is possible, so you hope it will come easily. Your ghost-hands will guide the pistol to his mouth, then steady it while his thumb locates the trigger.

  Then it will be time for you to join Crivano: to stand with his shade on the blackened foredeck of the Lynceus while he signals to the full moon. The moon will answer through the smoke: Imagine me not as a mirror, but as an opening, an aperture, a pupil admitting light. Imagine the earth curves around you, not under. Imagine this world to be the eye of God, and the ocean its retina. Know that you are always seen.

  But you are indeed a mirror, Crivano will say. And I, a stranger to myself, would be seen by no one. That is all I ask, and far more than I deserve.

  The pillar of smoke will blot the moon; the flames will rise to erase him. The ship will burn to the waterline: hissing, then sunken, silent. Once the sky has cleared, the sea will betray nothing. The Mirror Thief will be gone.

  So, in the end, only we two will remain: you and the ocean, you and the mirror, you and the story you’ve dreamed.

  Listen, now: footfalls in the corridor. A cautious hand upon the knob.

  No time remains to doubt. This, then, is the end of you—what you’ve feared, what you remember. All of it flashing. The faces and the colors. Watch closely: here they come.

  Acknowledgments

  It took me five and a half years to write this book, and another seven and a half to find a publisher for it. During this time I benefited to a nearly immeasurable degree from the patience, guidance, and generosity of others, without whom this would not have been possible. I’d like to express my thanks to my spouse, Kathleen Rooney; my parents, David and Barbara Seay; my late grandfather Joe F. Boydstun; to Michael Seay, Jen Seay, Beth Rooney, Nick Super, Richard Rooney, Mary Ann Rooney, Megan Rooney, J. Mark Rooney, Karen Rooney, Cliff Turner, Kelly Seal, Richard Weil, Hester Arnold Farmer, Andrew Rash, Angela McClendon Ossar, Scott Blackwood, James Charlesworth, Carole Shepherd, David Spooner, Matthew MacGregor, Elisa Gabbert, John Cotter, Carrie Scanga, Jason Skipper, Warren Frazier, Mitchell Brown, Bob Drinan, Olivia Lilley, Shane Zimmer, Tovah Burstein, Timothy Moore, the faculty and my fellow students at Queens University of Charlotte’s low-residency MFA program, and my colleagues at the Village of Wheeling, Illinois, especially Jon Sfondilis, Michael Crotty, and Lisa Leonteos.

  As my collection of pages has grown closer to becoming a book, I have benefited from the hard work and good judgment of my agent Kent Wolf and my editor Mark Krotov, as well as his colleagues at Melville House, including, but not limited to, Dennis Loy Johnson, Valerie Merians, Julia Fleischaker, Liam O’Brien, Ena Brdjanovic, Chad Felix, and Eric Price.

  A substantial portion of the manuscript was written at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where I had a 2005–2006 fiction fellowship. It’s impossible to overstate the value of the support and encouragement that I received from this organization, its staff, and the other fellows.

  Finally, I’m eternally indebted to Richard Peabody for starting me down the path that led here, and to Jane Alison for helping me map my route. If they’re willing to claim it, this book is theirs as well as mine.

  About the Author

  Martin Seay is the executive secretary for the village of Wheeling, Illinois. The Mirror Thief is his first novel.