Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

He thinks of the long walk he took with Welles the night they met, and all the gobbledygook the guy spouted along the way. What if it was all intended to put Stanley off the scent? What if the secret wasn’t in Welles speech, but in his steps, in the path he took over the filled-in canals? Stanley thinks of a word he saw on a streetsign that night, a word he keeps seeing: RIALTO. What does it mean? In The Mirror Thief it’s a place, a neighborhood in the book’s haunted city — not the same as this city, but not completely different, either. The word points toward something. What?

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.