by Martin Seay
THE MIRROR THIEF
Copyright © 2016 by Martin Seay
First Melville House Printing: May 2016
Melville House Publishing
46 John Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT
mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61219-515-5
Design by Marina Drukman
v3.1
For
Kathleen Rooney
and
in memory of
Joe F. Boydstun
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Solvtio
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Separatio
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Preparatio
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Svblimatio
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Calcinatio
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Redvctio
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Coagvlatio
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Acknowledgments
About the Author
“Did you ever happen to see a city resembling this one?” Kublai asked Marco Polo, extending his beringed hand from beneath the silken canopy of the imperial barge, to point to the bridges arching over the canals, the princely palaces whose marble doorsteps were immersed in the water, the bustle of light craft zigzagging, driven by long oars, the boats unloading baskets of vegetables at the market squares, the balconies, platforms, domes, campaniles, island gardens glowing green in the lagoon’s grayness.
• • •
“No, sire,” Marco answered, “I should never have imagined a city like this could exist.”
—ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities
1
Listen. This is what you see:
A tall casement window. Floorlength drapes of green brocade, parted along the curtainrod. Gray halflight seeping through. Tasseled valance, sheer lace beneath. The wind shakes the glass, and the curtains sway into the room.
Chairs. Desk. Chest of drawers. Wardrobe—they never have closets, these old places. Whitewashed walls. Polished parquet floor, too slick for socks. Nightstands, frilly lamps. White telephone. Tacky glass chandelier: aqua petals, frosted forty-watt bulbs. Hotel shit. The type of shit they always put in hotels. Doesn’t matter where.
The bed, of course. Queensize. Canopied. Fancy pillows stacked in the corner, like somebody’s weddingcake. Linen sheets. Every blanket the innkeeper can spare. Coperte, per favore! Più coperte! Still, it never gets warm.
Coperta. Add it up. Two hundred ninety-nine: to overthrow. Or twenty: to breathe, to hide, to sweep away dirt. An illness. A sickness at heart. In Hebrew, מעטה: that’s a hundred and twenty-four, which can mean a torch, or a lamp. A forsaking. A passing-by. A delay, maybe. How long?
Clothes laid out on the dresser: gray slacks, black socks, blue oxford shirt. Hat. Wallet. Bunch of weird coins. On the floor, your new white sneakers and your suitcase. Propped in the corner, your ironheaded cane.
Another minute and you’ll sit up. Stand. Go to the window. Steady yourself for the long look across the rooftops: the sliver of the Calle dei Botteri on one side, the Calle dei Morti on the other, emptying the quiet campo. You’ll stand there and you’ll watch. Like you always do.
In this city, nobody’s supposed to know you. Though you’ve walked its streets in your head a million times, you’re a stranger here, a tourist. That’s a big part of why you came. But somebody down there knows you, and he’s headed your way: a bug crawling up your pantleg, making it tough to concentrate. Before he shows up at your door you want to spot him, to sieve his shape from the sparse Lenten crowds. Buzzcut head. Cadenced step. Muscled frame. Easy enough to notice. Just go to the window and wait.
But not right now. Maybe in a while. Not feeling too good now. No pain, just a funny heavy feeling. The layered blankets rise and fall.
On the wall above the headboard—upsidedown at this angle, can’t quite see—there’s a framed print. Muddy watercolor. Rickety boats. Smeared sky. San Giorgio Maggiore in the background. A view from the Riva degli Schiavoni, probably. J.M.W. TURNER: black letters in the white margin. Some guy who didn’t know when to quit. Looks like he tried to erase it with a wet toothbrush.
Turner. That’s five hundred and five. Drinking vessels. To declare perverse.
Another gust: the sashes rattle. Three days of cold, late in the season. At low tide the canals are bled out, the gondola-keels stuck in the mud. The whole city kashered. Yesterday at noon you could just about walk to Murano from the Fondamenta Nuove. Imagine it: wading through the muck under the white stones of San Michele. God, what a smell. Slick worms and snailshells. Black ooze between your toes.
Through the angled glass, the fat brick belltower of San Cassiano, dark against damp gray clouds. Crumbling apartments under it: painted stucco flaking from red bricks. Pigeons coo under the eaves; pale shit glues downy puffs to the sill. Seagulls glide by like kites, their little heads moving. So white they seem cut from a different sky.
What did this place use to be? Everyplace here used to be something.
On the wall opposite the window is the mirror. Big, in a heavy wood frame. Nothing special about it. More than adequate to your needs. In some crazy way, it’s what started everything.
What does a mirror look like? What color is it? Who ever really looks at one—and how would you, anyway? You know when it’s there, sure. But do you ever really see it? Sort of like God. Or maybe not. But that’s the mirror, all right. Invisible commonplace. Machine for unseeing.
That’s pretty much what you’ve wanted all along: to see the mirror. Only that. Not too goddamn much to ask. Is it?
Bells again. One church always starts up as another’s nearly finished, so it’s tough to keep the count. Plenty late, anyway. The girls at the Biblioteca are probably worried. Wondering where you are. Wondering whether today is the day. Well, ladies, maybe it is.
After the window, the commode. Then dressed. Bite to eat. The phone, maybe. Couple of calls. Night now in Vegas. No sun yet on the East Coast. Wait a little longer. No big rush. You’ve got time to settle things. A few good cards left to play. No matter w
hat your friend outside thinks: the lovely soldierboy sniffing your trail from the narrow streets, who’s worked so hard and come so far just to kill you.
Plenty of time to deal with him, and with the rest. To go to the window. To look. Meantime, think, why don’t you? Put it together, as well as it’ll stick. Shut your eyes. Listen. The old voices. There’s a trick to it, just like everything. Never too late to learn. Remember everything you can. Imagine the rest.
You wish like hell you’d brought the goddamn book.
SOLVTIO
MARCH 13, 2003
All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks draw us constantly toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
—IVAN CHTCHEGLOV, “Formulary for a New Urbanism”
2
A little farther up the Strip the pirates are at it again: their last cannons boom as the taxi drops him at the curb, and he crosses the Rialto Bridge to the sound of distant applause. A whiff of sulfur in the scattered air turns the early-evening breeze slightly infernal. He wrinkles his nose, fights the urge to spit.
Picture him there, on the moving sidewalk: short and broad-shouldered, high-yellow skin and black freckles, around forty years old. He wears wraparound sunglasses, new bluejeans, a leather blazer and a slate-gray T-shirt. A Redskins cap perches on his freshly shaven head, brim low on his brow. His feet move across the walkway’s textured surface, weaving around tourists who stop for photos, cluster at the rails. Below, somewhere out of sight, a gondolier sings in a high clear voice—o mia patria sì bella e perduta—as he turns his boat around. A gust comes from the west, and the song fades like a weak broadcast.
The man—his name is Curtis—enters the hotel beneath the lancet arches of a portico, then walks through the slot machines to the elevators. A blast of perfumed air from the HVAC raises gooseflesh on his sweaty neck. He eyes the blackjack tables as he passes, studying every gambler seated there. He’s tense, fretful, afraid he’s missing something.
He punches the button for Floor 29 and begins to rise. Alone for a moment. His reflection wavery in the copper-tinted doors. He swaps his shades for a pair of black-rimmed safety glasses, fishes his keycard from an inside pocket.
His suite sports two televisions and three telephones, a canopied kingsize rack, vast curtained windows looking south down the Strip. A murky and puzzling painting—the brass plaque on the frame reads. J.M.W. TURNER—hangs over the fold-out couch in the sunken living area. At six hundred fifty square feet, this is the smallest room the hotel offers. Curtis doesn’t like to think about what it’s costing Damon to put him up here, but Damon won’t object; they both know he’s in the right place.
He checks the phone and the fax machine, but nothing’s come in. He pulls the new box of hollowpoint hotloads from his jacket pocket and puts it in the little safe in the armoire, then sets his snubnosed revolver on top of it. It’s getting dark: the city’s vanishing from the windows, replaced by the reversed image of the room itself. Curtis switches off the overhead lights, looks out at the view: Harrah’s and the Mirage down the Strip, the belltower and turquoise canal below. A flash of memory, from three years ago: Stanley leaning on the balustrade above the moored gondolas. Tweed driver cap cocked on his bony head. Stirring the air with small gnarled hands. The new moon low in the west, a washed-out circle in the black. Stanley reciting a poem: Burn, thief of images, on the amnesic sea! Something like that. Before Curtis can get a fix on it, it’s gone.
Lights are coming on all over the city, trembling in the rising heat. The blue-white beam of the Luxor is just visible in the distance, a streak in the indigo sky. Curtis thinks about home, wonders whether he should call, but Philly is three hours ahead: Danielle will already be asleep. Instead he undresses to his boxers, folds his clothes, tries to find something sexy on the widescreen TV, but all he seems to get are computer graphics of cruise missiles and 3-D rotating maps of the Gulf. After a while he puts down the remote and does pushups and situps on the carpeted deck as the talking heads drone on above him, speculating eagerly about the war to come, their jerky pictures freezing up from time to time, glitching out into flat digital mosaics.
When he’s done, Curtis mutes the television and opens the safe again. His wedding ring is there, next to the box of ammunition, and he slips it on, takes it off, puts it in his mouth and sucks on it, clicking it against the backs of his teeth. He unholsters the little revolver, unloads and checks the cylinder, and dry-fires it at the flickering TV, one hundred times with his right hand, eighty with his left, until his forearms burn and his index fingers are raw and chapped. It’s a new gun; he doesn’t know it as well as he should.
His stomach turns over with a gurgle, still upset by the long flight and the many sleepless hours before it. He locks up the ring and the pistol and walks into the fancy marble head, where he sits on the commode and fishes through his shaving kit for his nailclippers. His hands smell like gun-oil and are cracked from the dry air, and for the first time today Curtis remembers, really remembers, what it was like being in the Desert.
3
Later that night, on his way back from dinner, Curtis spots Stanley’s girl at a blackjack table downstairs.
He stops for a second, blinking in surprise, then begins a slow clockwise orbit of the gaming floor, keeping her on his good side, in his periph. Picking up a ginger-ale along the way to busy his hands. She’s looking around, but not at him.
Two hundred eighty degrees later he parks himself at a video poker machine, breaks a roll of quarters, wets his lips from his clear plastic cup. He’s been worried about recognizing her—he has no photo to go by, and only saw her once before, nearly two years ago, at his dad’s wedding—but now he’s surprised to find he knows her right away. She still looks like a college student, although she must be near thirty by now. She reminds Curtis of some of the white kids who used to Metro in from College Park to hear his dad’s combo play in Adams-Morgan, or on U Street. Cool, smart, a little cagey. Toughened up by a few hard knocks—brought on by bad decisions, not by circumstances or bad luck. Thin. Wavy brown hair. Big eyes, widely spaced. She should be pretty but she’s not. A mistaken idea of pretty. Pretty sketched by somebody who’s never seen it, working off a verbal description.
Curtis watches her for the better part of an hour: her shifting eyes, the trickle of people behind her. Waiting for her to move, or for Stanley to materialize from the crowd. Stanley never does, and she doesn’t budge. She’s definitely counting cards, but she doesn’t seem to be after a big score; her bets don’t change much as the count goes up and down. She seems distracted, like she’s just killing time.
The machine deals Curtis three queens, and he dumps one, afraid of hitting a big payout and drawing attention to himself. The girl is playing just like he’s playing. Does she know she’s being followed?
Then, off to the right, an old man in a sportcoat, slender and compact, hurrying along the patterned maroon bulkhead. It’s not Stanley—too gawky, too nervous—but the girl stops in mid-play, her eyes widening. She tracks the old man for a second, her brow furrowed, and then slumps in her seat. The dealer says something to get her back in the game, and she shoots him a glare. It’s all over in an instant.
But now Curtis knows: he’ll be able to find her here whenever he needs to. She’s looking for Stanley too.
He drops the last of his quarters and heads back to his room. A fax is waiting for him: a cartoon drawn on SPECTACULAR! hotel letterhead, showing a muscular dark-skinned man sodomizing an older guy with exaggerated Semitic features. The cartoon Curtis’s expression is grim, determined; his face and arms are densely shaded with slashing diagonals
. Comma-shaped teardrops shoot from the panicked Stanley’s wrinkled eyes. Across the top of the page, Damon has written in block capitals, GO GITTIM!!! Across the bottom, THAS MAH BOY!!!!!
Curtis crumples the fax and drops it in the trash. Then he fishes it out, rips it into small pieces, and flushes the pieces down the toilet.
4
It rains overnight. Curtis wakes to see lightning flash against the bathroom door, rolls over to get a better look, and dozes off again right away. He remembers hearing drops against the glass, but in the morning there’s nothing, no sign of moisture at all.
He’s already dialed before he thinks to look at his watch—it’s Friday, nearly noon now in D.C.—but Mawiyah picks up anyway. Curtis! she says, a broad smile in her voice. As-Salaam-Alaikum, Little Brother! I didn’t recognize your number on the Caller-ID. You get a new phone?
I did, Curtis says. I sure did. Say, I just remembered what day it is. I’m surprised to find you home. I figured you’d be on your way to the temple by now.
Well, we’re running a little late this morning. And thank God for that, or we would have missed your call! How are you?
I’m doing all right. I don’t want to hold you up too much, though. I was hoping to catch my dad. He’s around?
Curtis hears a soft tap as Mawiyah sets the receiver down. Her whippoorwill voice grows distant, abstract, as she moves through the house. As he waits, Curtis is struck by a couple of memories in quick succession. First, her photo, hung outside the library at Dunbar: six years ahead of him, still a legendary presence there. Four days a week he passed it on his way to the practice field and another asskicking courtesy of the defensive line. Second, years later: her singing “Let’s Get Lost” in a tiny 18th Street club, eyes closed against the blue light. His father behind her, in shadow, leaning on his bass. Out of prison, not yet cleaned up for good. She was Nora Brawley then; his dad was still Donald Stone. Curtis had come straight from National, on leave from Subic, jetlagged and exhausted, still wearing service-alpha greens. He remembers a beerbottle’s sweat beneath his fingers, and the way everything seemed to be tipping over. Stanley was there somewhere, too. Invisible. His voice a loose thread in the dark.
