by Martin Seay
Okay, the guy says. Got it.
His pen scratches across the little notebook; Curtis reads upsidedown. POINT = SPECTACULAR, the guy writes.
Later he holds a cup of water for Curtis; Curtis sips, keeps talking. As he gets tired and hurts worse he starts to explain things that probably don’t matter, to repeat whatever details stick in his brain. The ripped-up faxes on SPECTACULAR! letterhead. The machinegun in Albedo’s car. The cellphone Damon gave him. The calls he made from the visitor center at the state park. The cufflink torn from Damon’s sleeve. Jay Leno in the hotel lobby. The Mirror Thief left in the Quicksilver suite. Did anybody pick that book up? Curtis asks. Somebody should go over there and pick that book up.
By now the agent has all but stopped scribbling; the look on his face says he’s waiting for something. Curtis tries to think of what that might be, to think of questions he’s been ready for that the guy hasn’t asked yet. He comes up with quite a few. One big one. Where’s Damon now? Curtis says.
The agent doesn’t answer. He leans back slowly in the steel-tube chair, retracts the point of his rollerball with a soft click.
You don’t know, Curtis says.
The guy smiles. It’s not a happy smile. For the first time Curtis can tell that he’s operating on not much sleep. Do you have any thoughts, the agent says, as to where we might find him?
Curtis squints, shakes his head. Shaking it makes him dizzy. I figured NJSP’d have him by now, he says.
The guy stares evenly, his eyes expressionless. Monday afternoon, he says, two NJSP detectives met Damon at his townhouse. Follow-up visit. They’d interviewed him before; he’d been cooperative. Damon invited them in, put on some coffee, shot them both in the face. One died at the scene, the other’s on life-support. Probably not coming off it. Local uniformed patrol found them within the half-hour—somebody must have known something was wrong—but by then Damon had already cleared out.
Curtis tries to take a deep breath but chokes on it, and for a second he’s afraid he’ll puke. The room spins, like the restaurant at the Stratosphere, and he shuts his eyes to make it stop. He’s thinking back, trying to recall: what time he phoned his dad, what time Damon’s last fax came. What he might have caused, or failed to stop.
Damon hadn’t shown up for work that day, the agent says. Risk Management conducted a search of his office. The story is, they found nothing on his computer but porn videos, and nothing in his filing cabinets except dirty cartoons. Pretty disturbing stuff, from what I hear. People are wondering why it took so long to realize he was a problem. He must be a real charming guy.
Curtis hears a rustle as the agent flips through his notebook, maybe looking over what he’s just written. Do you have any thoughts, he says again, as to where we might find him?
Curtis keeps his eyes shut, steadies his breath.
I have to say, the agent goes on, he picked a pretty good time to be a fugitive. As of Monday night, law enforcement nationwide is on orange alert. That’s because of the war. With everybody on defensive footing, investigations are going to slow down. An elevated alert can make it harder to hide a vehicle, though. Damon probably knew that. His Audi turned up a few hours ago, at a park-and-ride in Maryland.
Curtis opens his eyes. Maryland where? he says.
College Park. We’ve got CCTV of Damon boarding the inbound Green Line. I know what you’re thinking, and don’t worry: your dad and his wife are safe. We’ve got them in a hotel. Their home is under surveillance. If Damon shows up there—
He won’t, Curtis says. He’s gone. If Damon went to D.C., it was to get help traveling. Visas, passports. People there would do that for him.
The agent doesn’t like that answer: he looks irritated, confused. He opens his mouth, but Curtis cuts him off. You understand who we’re talking about here, right? Have you pulled his DD 214?
His what?
His service record. You ought to look at that. Look at what he’s done, where he’s been. He’s not in D.C., man. He went to BWI, or to National. He got on a plane. He could be anywhere by now. South America. Asia.
The guy is about to argue the point, but then gives up, deflates. His mouth hangs open for a second; he shuts it, rubs his face. Curtis feels bad for him, feels bad generally. He doesn’t want to believe what he’s just heard—habit works his brain hard, plugging in scenarios and explanations that put Damon in a better light—but he knows it’s true. His whole life he’s never understood anybody, not even himself. Himself maybe least of all. He wants to go to back to sleep, to slip out of a world where shit like this can happen.
Wait a minute, Curtis says. What about Stanley Glass?
The agent’s eyes open; his inkstick clicks again. Stanley Glass, he says.
Where is he?
The agent shrugs. Still in Atlantic City, he says. Last I heard, NJSP was looking to bring him in. They didn’t have him yet, but they were getting close. I understand he’s seriously ill. His mobility’s restricted.
Curtis shakes his head. If Stanley’s still breathing, he says, then NJSP is not as close to him as they think they are. And I highly doubt that he’s still in AC.
Okay. Where do you think he is?
He’s wherever Damon is. And vice versa.
The agent makes a skeptical face. I know it doesn’t make much sense, Curtis says. But that’s how it is with those guys. They’ve got the goods on each other. They’ve got something to settle, and they’re gonna settle it. The question is where.
The guy’s rollerball hasn’t touched his notebook. So your advice on how to find Damon Blackburn, he says, is basically to find Stanley Glass. And vice versa. Have I got that right?
My advice, Curtis says, is that I hope you have better luck than I did. That is pretty much my entire advice.
The agent pulls his tie from his pocket, smoothes it across his breastbone, replaces it with the inkstick. Mister Stone, he says, I should let you know that I am not anywhere close to being done with you. But I do wish you a speedy recovery, and I thank you for your cooperation today.
No problem, Curtis says. Hey, do me a favor, though. I’m starting to hurt pretty bad here. If we’re done for now—
Sure thing, the agent says. I’ll get the nurse.
The nurse comes, messes with Curtis’s IV, and soon everything’s flattening out, becoming dull and vague. For a second, he has an answer to the agent’s question—it’s obvious: he pictures The Mirror Thief lying on Veronica’s coffeetable, dropped on the Quicksilver carpet—but then the drug snatches it away, and he lets it go. He wants to quit thinking very soon.
A warm swell of tears fills his half-empty eyes. He waits quietly and thinks of Damon until the medicine finally finds his brain, until he can’t remember anything anymore except the weightless surge of planes taking off—out of Ramstein, out of Philly—until he knows nothing of his own past, until time seems to have stopped and he feels like he is no one at all.
Curtis. Add up the letters of the name, they come to four hundred eighty-two. Autumn leaves, it means. Or, believe it or not, glass. Add those three numbers—four plus eight plus two—you get fourteen. A gift, or a sacrifice. To glitter, or to shine.
Sometime later—minutes or hours, it’s hard to know for sure—a telephone somewhere nearby will start to ring.
When the cops and nurses burst into his room, Curtis won’t even be aware of the sound. He’ll wake grudgingly, blinking at the overhead lights as cops gather: whispering into cellphones, setting up a recorder, stretching the cord of the hospital phone until the base rests next to Curtis on the mattress. He’ll watch their busy mouths as they talk to him, and he’ll nod, although he’ll understand nothing they say. And then, as someone’s finger mashes the phone’s SPEAKER button, he’ll angle his head, and he’ll try to listen.
Somehow he’ll know right away. He’ll hear the ghostly whine and hiss—long distances, strange satellites—and know exactly who’s calling, and from where, and why.
But he’ll ask anyway. He can
’t help himself. Stanley? he’ll say. Is that you?
And then, after a long moment, you will answer him.
Good morning, kid, you’ll say. Or good evening I guess it still is, where you are. Been a long goddamn time, hasn’t it? I’m glad to hear your voice.
You won’t keep Curtis long. Not because of the cops—what can cops do to you now?—but because there isn’t much to say. Or there’s too much. Anyway, you’ll keep it simple. You’ll say thank you. Then you’ll say you’re sorry. Then you’ll say goodbye.
Another gust: the hotel window rattles. You hear churchbells ring, the scream of a gull. You draw the blankets tight around your chin.
In another minute or two you’ll get up, make the call. You put the kid in a bad spot, so it’s the least you can do. You should phone Veronica, too, while you’re at it. See if she found what you left her in the airport locker. Her inheritance. That’ll be a tough goddamn conversation. But you guess it ought to be done.
Veronica. Three hundred eighty-eight. A hard stone, like flint, or quartz. To veil. To conceal. To spread out. To be set free.
First things first: you should go to the window. Slide your feet to the slick hotel floor, grip your cane, rise. Somewhere down there—among the fruit- and flower-vendors in the Campo San Cassiano, the bundled old women on the bridge’s dainty steps, the black gondolas that slide down the mucus-gray canal—Damon is hunting you. He must know he’s running out of chances to do this his way: with each passing minute you slip farther from him. So you expect him soon. When he turns up, you want to be ready.
He’s an annoyance more than anything else. A distraction. You had big plans for coming here, but you waited too long. You’d hoped to make a last trip to the Bibiloteca. The lady librarians are probably relieved today to get a break from your questions. What’s this mean in English? How do I locate that?
You’d like to have seen more of the city, too, of course. So far it’s been mostly Disneyland bullshit: cameras and fannypacks, glossy maps and flapping pigeons. But every so often there’s a moment—a name on a sign that you know from Welles’s book; columns and windows that echo buildings on Windward and the boardwalk—that’ll freeze you in mid-step: trying to peek through the gap before it closes again, trying to see past overlapping screens of truth and fiction to Crivano. But it’s hard to catch these moments, hard to keep yourself loose and open to them when you’re looking over your shoulder all the time. Damon has spoiled this for you, too. You tell yourself it doesn’t matter, but it does.
In your younger days—not so long ago—you’d have fixed this by now. Sipped espresso at the Caffè Florian till you picked him from the crowd. Tracked him till the sun went down. Plenty of secluded spots. Bricks fall in this city all the time.
The strange thing is, part of you is glad to see him. Glad he’s here. The parting fuck-you that you delivered in AC on Sunday afternoon—I’d like to tell you gentlemen a funny story about your shift boss, Mr. Blackburn—seemed cheap, inadequate, like a copout. But this feels right, feels earned.
Besides, you’ve found a few safe places where you don’t have to think of him, where you can seek what you came here to find. The closest you’ve come to Crivano was yesterday, on the powerboat you hired to get a look at the city from the lagoon: belltowers emerging from late-winter mist, just as he might have seen them. Well, maybe not quite: in his day San Michele wasn’t yet a graveyard; the Fondamenta Nuove hadn’t been built. More of your cash sent the boat around Santa Élena into the Canale di San Marco, and there you saw Crivano’s city at last—somewhat sunken, with a few extra buildings, but otherwise much the same. The driver killed the engine, the boat began to drift, and as the fog and sea-smell settled around you a memory came, as clear as a punch to the forehead: playing cards with your dad on the Staten Island Ferry, looking up as the skyline of Lower Manhattan appeared through the clouds. Nothing natural in sight but water and gulls. Pure invention, imagined into being.
You stayed out on the lagoon too long, caught a chill, needed to piss. Pushing yourself to your feet, you leaned on the gunwale, unzipped, tugged your diaper down. The driver rose from his seat in alarm—Ao! he barked—but he shut up in a hurry when he saw the hot stream you splashed across the sea’s surface turn from yellow to red.
He dropped you on the Riva degli Schiavoni, and you wobbled toward the twin columns, your balance still troubled by the memory of waves. Lying here now, you can almost feel them again, an echo of the ebb and flow of your own sluggish blood.
Sniff the air: you’ve shit yourself. You’d like to change before Damon comes. It won’t be messy; you hardly eat anymore. Not being in control used to upset you; these days, not so much. You can get used to anything, or stop caring. As you’ve gotten sicker you’ve grown almost to enjoy it: it feels good, the warmth and the weight. Alive. More alive than you feel. You’re always a little surprised to find that something so strange and vital can still come from what remains of you.
In another minute, you’ll get up. You’ll go to the window. You’ll make the two calls. In just another minute.
It might have been nice to find a table somewhere. But of course that’s the first place Damon would look, and anyway you’ve had enough of that scene. You’re sick of gamblers, with their systems and their percentages. Blackjack is the only table game with a memory. Walter Kagami—still a kid, black-haired and skinny, in his guayabera shirt—explaining it to you for the hundredth time. Cards get dealt, they’re out of play till the cutcard comes up. That’s why cardcounting works. Get it? But you never understood, not really. That wasn’t the world you lived in, or wanted to. Now the very thought of them—fixed to their tables like assembly-line robots, tethered to machines by frequent-player cards, that sorry bunch that fancies itself most free—turns your stomach. Wrong to call it play. Chance is not what makes gambling possible, Walter says. It’s limits. Fifty-two cards in the deck. Six sides to the dice. Limits are what gambling’s about. You’re done with limits. Limits are bullshit. A bunch of fairy-stories, dreamed up to ease us toward sleep.
The casino on the Lido is closed anyway—for the winter, maybe for good. Another’s supposed to be nearby, on the Grand Canal. You must have passed it your first morning in town, on your €250 gondola ride: the thug-beautiful boatman singing his guts out, the colorful competing palace façades like low-tech precursors to the joints on the Strip. But what’s the point? You’ve already been to the Piazzetta, already stood between the famous twin columns: brought to the city from the Holy Land, along with the plague. That’s where it really started, right? Dice-tables pitched on the execution ground.
After the hike from the Riva where the powerboat dropped you, you found yourself lightheaded and nauseous, overwhelmed by the grandeur of that space, by all the history that built and shaped it. The feeling came upon you so fast that you thought: this is it. And what a way to go that would have been! What a spot for an exit!
But it wasn’t. When you came to, you were kneeling on the dark trachyte tiles like you’d stopped there to pray. People were starting to gather. Kids at first, their expressions thrilled and scared. A few mommies and daddies following after. A lot of years gone since you last made a scene like that, since you last felt so visible. Something about the looks you got—wide eyes peering down from lovely foreign faces, worried murmurs in a dozen tongues—put a goddamn lump in your throat. You wanted to hold those eyes forever.
So you did the first thing that popped into your head: you dug a pack of cards from your jacket pocket. Right away your body remembered the posture, retrieved the feel of pavement beneath your knees, put your hands into automatic motion. The king of hearts, the seven of hearts, the seven of diamonds. Each card creased up the middle, lifted and dropped, rising and falling, dancing in midair. Forty-five goddamn years since you last worked a crowd like that. Not since that night on the boardwalk with Claudio.
Claudio. Two hundred eighty-seven. To be fragrant. Or seventeen. Fortunate. To dream. Or eight. To breathe a
fter. To long for.
You’ve seen him every now and then: small speaking parts in movies and TV shows, a face in the corner of a soap-opera magazine. A different name, of course, which makes it hard to be sure. But the sightings have been steady through the years, so you figure he’s doing all right. He could be famous, even; you wouldn’t necessarily know. You hope he’s happy, wherever he is. You hope he got those long brown fingers around some of what he wanted.
It’s all good and scattered now: every piece of those days. If the whole scene had passed out in the sand, been carried off by the tide, you wouldn’t have been surprised. But that’s not what happened: it blew up instead. Larry Lipton’s youth book came out in ’59, and against all expectations it was a big hit. Every poet and painter from Santa Monica to the Marina del Rey became famous for a while, mostly as somebody else’s punchline, and right away the fame started killing them: dope, disease, murder, suicide. Charlie drowned himself in ’67; cancer took Stuart in ’74. Alex published his own book in ’61 and never wrote another. Somehow he kept his junk habit going for another twenty-odd years. His real life’s work.
Welles checked out in ’63, the same week as Jack Kennedy. You didn’t hear about it till months later, passing through L.A. after wearing out your welcome in Palm Springs. You sent Synnøve flowers anyway; Walter helped you figure out how to do it. She sent a nice card back, brief and vague, snapshots from the funeral enclosed. No familiar faces. The girl nowhere to be seen.
Welles’s death sent you back to the book, which for a few years you’d put aside. You half-expected the spell to be broken, but it wasn’t—though the book had changed, shifted along invisible faultlines. Or maybe you’d grown into it, in ways he’d surely predicted. You’re a gambler! You live by skill and fortune. By then it was true. Even today the old bastard finds ways to poke at you, to jerk your strings. He must’ve known you’d find your way here eventually. The city’s been waiting—a trap he baited—and you’ve waltzed right into it.
