The Mirror Thief

by Martin Seay

  It could be something from history, but Stanley doesn’t think so. History is just more books; the secret he’s after has nothing to do with books. It’s either in the world—hidden there somewhere—or it’s not worth knowing. The closest Stanley’s come to it was on that walk: the way the old man, caught off-guard, pointed to the city to explain himself. Welles wrote the book, sure, but he didn’t build the city. The city is the key. Stanley needs to get outside, to take another look around.

  He laces up his Pedwins, slides quietly to the street. Part of what’s put him in a sorry mood is the air pressure: he can feel more rain coming in, though the sky’s clear. As he turns onto the boardwalk he catches a sour sickly smell—bad familiar, rhyming somehow with the odors from the oilfield—and he remembers that he forgot to change the dressing on his leg. Thinking about it brings back the ache; he feels woozy, slows down. The last time he cleaned the wound was yesterday afternoon, at the showers in Santa Monica. It looked all right then; now he’s not so sure. He thinks about going back to the squat, but then figures it’ll keep for a couple hours.

  He picks out a spot by the water to sit and watch the boardwalk and think. After a while, when the streets and buildings haven’t disclosed anything, he turns around and looks out to sea instead. The sun is just overhead; the waves are dark translucent blue. Sometimes at the limits of his vision he can see the flash of a garibaldi among the rocks on the bottom, like a ripe Riverside tangerine lost in the waves.

  Stanley pulls Welles’s list from the pocket of his jeans and goes through it again, one name at a time, puzzling over each slip of a letter in turn. One name he knows from the book—Hermes Trismegistus, of course—but the rest are gibberish. He stares at them, half hoping they’ll wriggle to life on the page like millipedes and spell out something other than what they say. Before long Stanley has a fierce headache, and they’re no different than they were.

  He folds the page, pockets it, and walks north, shoeless along the sand where the ocean breaks. The tide is out. The beach is long and flat and smooth, specked at odd intervals by flotsam that leaves straight comet-trail paths to the water: scattered moon-jellies and by-the-wind sailors, the shells of periwinkles and jackknife clams, the creepy fudge-brown egg-cases of skates, lengths of yellow kelp bowed seaward by the tug of waves. As Stanley looks inland toward the arcades—a couple of shiftless drunks by the Fortune Bridgo, a well-dressed old Jew with a violin case, a woman pushing a baby-carriage and towing a kid with a white balloon—his foot finds something hard buried in the sand, and he stops to uncover it.

  It’s the skull of some crazy bird: a light-brown beak, forearm-long, and huge hollow orbits where eyes once were. Beach-grains have pitted and polished the beak, and a single barnacle adorns its blade near the midpoint. Stanley studies it, then looks down at the cavity it left in the sand. Bulbous at one end, tapering to a point, it looks like a letter from some archaic alphabet. The wave-graded sand around it is blank and uniform, seemingly empty, though there’s no telling what else it might hide.

  Stanley stoops to the smooth beach-surface and makes a deep slash with the beak’s downturned tip. Then he makes another one—longer, curving—next to it. The three marks look like they might spell something in some language, though Stanley doesn’t know what language, or what it might mean. In The Mirror Thief Crivano writes on the beach to summon the moon, which rises and talks to him. The book never says what marks he makes. Welles probably doesn’t even know. But the book knows.

  Stanley bends again, slicing long furrows through the sand. He thinks of the old apartment on Division: the white wall across from his pallet, the first thing his eyes met every morning. How he hated that fucking wall. He begged his mother to ask his grandfather for permission to hang something there—a hamsa, a painting, anything—but she never would. The wall always seemed to be watching, although it would never acknowledge him. Eventually he had enough. He considered wrecking its pure surface with the letters of his name, but even then he was trying to detach himself from it, to leave it behind. Instead he wrote SHIT, the most powerful word he knew. To blind the wall. To keep it from judging. Thinking of it now, he remembers the handprints and footprints in the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese, and the memory makes him smile. He straightens, stretches, sidearms the bird-skull back to the sea.

  For a long time he walks the wet sand, eyeing the boardwalk, eyeing the water. His shadow precedes him as he goes. To the east almost everything he sees was made or placed by human hands; to the west almost nothing was. The pale void of the beach stretches between. A gull flies by with a dead grunion curved in its beak. Stanley thinks of the fish swarming in the waves, and wonders what switch the moon flips to summon them to the land—whether they’re aware of it in themselves, whether any among them ever opt out, want no part of it, choose to remain below, lurking and lonesome and proud.

  As he nears the quiet amusement pier at Ocean Park he spots Charlie ambling along the beach. Charlie’s wearing tatty business attire—white shirt, silk tie, jacket and slacks, fedora—but he has no shoes or socks, and his pants are rolled to his knees. He holds a tube of paper in one hand, a bottle in the other, and he cuts a crooked path across the sand. Hey! he shouts. Hey, Stanley! Bwana Lawrence was just asking about you!

  Hey, Stanley says, raising an open palm. Who?

  Bwana Lawrence. Lawrence Lipton. Lipton teabags. Hip, fun glad-rags. You know who I mean, man. He said he met you the other night, at the jazz canto.

  Stanley squints, shades his eyes. He an older guy? he asks.

  An aged man! That’s right. But not a paltry thing. Larry’s the chief cantilever of the canto, in fact. He’s the most load-bearing, soul-clapping old coot you’ll likely find here along the mackerel-crowded sea. And he wants to meet you.

  How come?

  Because of his book. You’ve heard about his youth book, right? His monument of unaging intellect?

  Stanley shakes his head.

  He’s tape-recording us, Charlie says. All of us. He’s writing a book about what’s going on here.

  Stanley looks at Charlie, then pivots on his ankles, trying to put his own face in shadow. It must be past three by now. Okay, he says. What is going on here?

  Oh, disaffiliation and reaffiliation. Dedicated poverty. The last outpost against the approach of Moloch. Lots of stinkweed, and not too many baths. An entirely new way of life. Depends on who you ask. Larry wants to ask you.

  Why me?

  Charlie sips from his bottle with a sly wiseacre smile. Bwana Lawrence is interested in your unique perspective, he says. Id est, why would a hardnosed juvenile delinquent travel clear across the country to meet an unknown poet. Id est, word has gotten around about your visit to good Doctor What’s-His-Name. I think Larry’s jealous, to tell you the truth.

  Yeah? Stanley says. Do I get anything out of this deal?

  From the deal, Charlie says, you get a meal you don’t have to steal. Probably half the guys who talk to Larry just do it for the chow. Then they badmouth him behind his back. It makes me sort of sick, honestly. I always tell them: stow your romantic bullshit, because that is what a real writer looks like. Larry’s published novels. He’s written for the movies, and for TV. I have to admit, it’s not always pretty. It’s not always subtle. But he chose to be here. He didn’t just wash ashore, like the rest of us. He believes in the reality of Moloch, and he came here to resist him.

  A thin shrill sound comes from the boardwalk—a child crying—and a small spherical shadow sweeps over the sand. Stanley glances up in time to see a white helium balloon pass overhead; then he loses it in the sun. By the arcades the woman with the baby-carriage is stooped, talking to her bawling kid. He can’t hear what she’s saying. The kid wails louder. Well, Stanley says, thanks for letting me know. I’ll look him up.

  Charlie’s demeanor has shifted. His mouth works like a rabbit’s; he seems sickly-pale beneath his tan. Larry gets Moloch, he says. He understands how he works, what he wants. Larry thinks you c
an steal the language back from Moloch and use it against him. I’m not so sure. I think it might be spoiled for good. Because I’ve seen Moloch, you know? I’ve seen him in the world. It isn’t hard, once you know how. I saw him when I was just a child, in the library in Boston. Bull-horned. Furnace-fisted. As in the gold mosaic of a wall. Later I saw him in Europe, too. I’d look down from the ballturret, and there he’d be. Lit by hellfire. Accepting his sacrifices. I think he comes to eliminate the surplus children, and that means he’ll be everywhere soon. Trot out all the sociology you like: I’m talking about a literal demon. A demon that lives off complacency and fear.

  The kid on the boardwalk is stamping its feet in a tantrum, screaming like it’s being murdered; the kid in the carriage has started to cry, too. Stanley shifts his weight, impatient and uncomfortable. So, he says, pointing to the tube of paper in Charlie’s hand. What’s that you got there, Charlie?

  Charlie’s confused for a second. Then he brightens, passing his bottle to Stanley, unrolling the tube. A going-away present for Alex, he says. See?

  It’s a promotional notice for a movie called Cowboy, starring Glenn Ford and Jack Lemmon. The long yellow poster shows the two men in their cowboy duds, one huge in the foreground, the other tiny in the background; Stanley can’t remember which actor is which. He has a hard time believing anybody would make a movie with a title as boring as Cowboy. The poster’s tagline reads, It’s really the best because it’s really the West!

  Nice, Stanley says. Alex likes horse operas, huh?

  Charlie rolls up the poster, takes the bottle back, and grins. No, man, he says. I don’t think he gives a damn about them one way or another.

  He takes another sip. The woman with the baby-carriage slaps her screaming kid across the face, and it shuts up. Stanley’s aware of the waves at his back; they sound like distant fireworks. Well, he says, I better move along. I’ll see you later, Charlie.

  Be sure to visit Larry Lipton! Charlie calls after him. Get your free meal!

  Stanley doesn’t turn around. He makes his way to the boardwalk, angling toward the penny-arcade where he played pinball two nights ago while waiting for the fish. He wonders for a second if Claudio’s made it back to the hideout yet—if he’s wondering where Stanley is, if he’s been having a great goddamn time—but then he puts it out of his mind. By now the boardwalk has filled with slumming weekenders: beachcombers with metal-detectors, respectable Lawrence Welk fans, junior-grade officers and their girls. In another few hours the sun will drop and the moon will rise, these people will disappear, and all the usual werewolves will come out.

  The penny-arcade is bustling, but nowhere near packed. Stanley hopes the Dogs will be around—he wants to get moving on the junk for Alex—but it’s all flattops and crewcuts inside, nary a duck’s-ass or a dollop of grease to be seen. Funny, he thinks. They’ll probably turn up later.

  He walks around to look at the machines—Domino, Hayburners, Meat Ball, Dreamy—but nothing grabs him. Then, in the corner, he finds a row of ancient nickel-vend Mutoscope peepshows, with FOR GROWN ADULTS ONLY – NO KIDS stenciled on the wall above them, a few degrees off parallel with the layered bricks. Stanley isn’t normally interested in peepshows, but he also doesn’t like being told that something’s off-limits. He saunters over, drops a coin.

  It’s pretty standard fare, maybe a little sleazier than average: AN ARTIST IN HIS STUDIO, the title card says. Stanley puts his face to the viewer—rising a little on his toes—and turns the crank. It rotates, with each turn making a steady clunk at about six o’clock, and pictures flicker into view: the bearded bohemian artist dabbing from his palette to his canvas, and his nude model wrapped in a strategically placed white drape. Dab-dab, dab-dab; this goes on for a while. The model is flush-cheeked, curly-headed, maybe twenty years old. She’d be—what?—fifty now, at the very least. She stands still, blinking, clutching the flimsy drape to her chest. Suddenly the painter drops his brush and his palette and rushes to embrace her, and the door behind him bursts open as the girl’s fiancé barges in. For an instant, the drape falls below her nipples. The reel ends with a thump. Beginning to end, the thing lasted about a minute.

  Stanley leans back, sinks to the floor, looks around. Nobody seems to give much of a damn that he’s using the machines. Maybe they figure him for older than he is, but he guesses he could put a toddler in a highchair in front of one of these and get the same amount of guff: the sign is for cops, not customers. With boredom already tugging at his sleeve, he moves to the next viewer.

  THE PRINCESS RAJAH, this one says: it’s an Arabian “princess” in an outlandish outfit, doing a wriggly belly-dance, then picking up a wooden chair with her teeth. Stanley’s no expert on Arabian princesses, or on their dancing, but the whole production strikes him as phony and laughable.

  The next Mutoscope asks a dime, not a nickel; Stanley’s inclined to skip it, but then he notices the title card: THE BATHING GODDESS, it says. IN COLOR!

  His dime drops with a soft click onto a hidden mound of other dimes. The picture starts: a smooth-faced young guy in a toga peeks through a bush; a woman swims around in a pool, her coiffed head above water, her white body a shapeshifting blur underneath. The images have been laboriously hand-tinted: pink cheeks, green leaves, blue water. The goddess rises dripping from the pool, showing her bare ass for a moment, and then turns forward, plucking a towel from a branch to dry her chest. The guy in the bushes gasps and trembles in open-mouthed ecstasy. The goddess hears him; her face twists in shock and rage. She aims an angry gesture his way, and he explodes in a cloud of yellow smoke. Thump: the end.

  Stanley drops a second dime, then a third. The photo-cards inside the machine turn on their spool; some arrangement of lights and mirrors carries each picture to the viewer, then in an instant the turning crank whisks it away. Stanley becomes aware of the separateness of the individual images, each one a small colored jewel in the interior light. He tries to crank slower—to see between the cards, to cancel the trick his eyes are playing—but past a certain point the viewer just goes black. He drops a fourth dime. The naked goddess’s image is doubled, cut to pieces on the rippling surface of the pool. The toga-clad watcher vanishes, replaced by the plume of smoke. The branches around him disappear, then reappear with a jerk a half-inch from where they were.

  The machine won’t take nickels; Stanley’s out of dimes. In a minute he’ll have the attendant break a dollar, but in the meantime there’s one last nickel show left.

  The label has worn away, or been removed. The title card just says JULY 4, 1905. Stanley’s nickel falls with a hollow lonely clank.

  The first thing he sees is a long black boat, making its way down a broad canal, a massive rollercoaster in the background. That image is quickly replaced by others: camels and pachyderms, a miniature railroad, bathing beauties in bizarre swimsuits, bowler-hatted men and their corseted wives strolling through shaded arcades. Then Stanley spots a familiar sign: ST. MARK’S HOTEL.

  His hand freezes on the crank; the viewer goes dark. He starts it again, and soon other familiar sights emerge: buildings along Windward and the boardwalk, though the names of just about all the shops—Harry A. Hull Billiards, H. C. Burmister Grocery, Frasinelli Fruit Co.—are strange to him. Most disorienting of all, in this film Windward doesn’t stop at the boardwalk: it crosses the beach to become the midway of a thronged amusement pier, with bathhouses and dancehalls and lit-up carnival rides. When the spool ends he feeds the machine more nickels. Eventually he spots the building that will one day become the Fortune Bridgo parlor, and then, a few doors down, the building he’s standing in right now. He presses his face to the brass viewer, inches the crank forward. Tiny silent figures march erratically along the pier, black-garbed and plume-hatted, flickering like the ghosts they are.

  A moment of panic seizes Stanley: the sensation of being watched. He straightens up and turns to scan the room, but he meets no eyes. The air has changed, grown heavy. Beyond the open windows, the sky over
the ocean has gone gray and solid. He has a creepy Rip-Van-Winkle feeling, like something just slipped past him. He stands stock-still, eyeing the boardwalk and the shore, waiting for whatever’s coming.

  Soon he sees it. Charlie again, slouching across the beach, his expression sober and serious. He has an arm around somebody’s waist, somebody he’s helping to walk. Their approach through the clotted air is nightmare-slow.

  Stanley dashes out the door, onto the boardwalk. Wanting to see, though by now he knows. The figure with Charlie stumbles forward as if half-blind; his eyes, Stanley sees, are swollen nearly shut. He cradles his right hand against his chest as if it’s a bird stunned by a flight into a windowpane; Stanley can tell right off that the hand is broken. As messed-up as he is, the figure measures his steps, keeps his chin high, and it’s mostly from that—and from the blue rayon shirt he wears, now flecked down the front with rusty dried blood—that Stanley is able to recognize him as Claudio.

  47

  At a luncheonette on Market they get Claudio a glass of water and an icepack for his hand. Claudio sips the water through a drinking-straw. Stanley’s worried at first that his jaw is broken, but when he finally speaks his voice is clear enough. Thank you, he tells Charlie. It is okay for you to go. I will be fine.

  Charlie’s nearly in tears as they walk away, kneading his hands in the middle of the boardwalk, as if Claudio were his own wounded son. Stanley clenches his teeth, holding something in, though he’s not sure what: curses maybe, or puke. His stomach feels like it’s dropped into his thigh.

  They’re no more than a hundred yards from the hideout, but Claudio won’t go there. It takes them just about forever to pass the four blocks of boardwalk to Wave Crest. The crowd parts around them, passing on both sides. Stanley watches the faces light up as they draw close and see Claudio: startled, sympathetic, disgusted, amused. A few servicemen on dates stop to offer help, but Stanley waves them off. At the corner of Club House a beat cop detains them for a couple of minutes with questions. My buddy just had a bicycle accident, officer, Stanley says. He ran into a telephone pole. No, nobody else got hurt. He’s gonna be okay.