Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Why do I have to do these things? Claudio says. Why, Stanley? I do not want these things. You want them. Tough? God damn you and your tough . I do not want to be tough. I want to be brave. I want to be beautiful. I want to be famous.

Stanley rocks back on his heels in the little kitchen, rubbing his arm with his thumb where Claudio struck it. Tomorrow he’ll have a bruise there. Okay, he hears himself saying. That’s fine. We can do that. I’m sure there’s ways we can do that.

Claudio settles in his chair, picks up the icepack, puts it on his hand again. There are one million ways we can do it, he says. One million times did I try to tell you. But you did not listen. You did not listen.

In the next room the phone returns to its cradle with a soft chime, and Synnøve rushes back into the kitchen, opening cabinets and closing them. I reached Adrian at the office, she says. He’s leaving work early. He’ll be home soon, and then he’ll drive you to the hospital. For now, let’s keep the ice on your hand. And — here, Stanley, here’s a bottle of Tylenol. Get Claudio some water, and have him take two. I’m sorry, I’d do it myself, but I’m filthy from the studio. I have to clean up before Adrian gets here.

Where’s Cynthia? Stanley asks, but Synnøve’s gone from the room before she hears him. As he opens the bottle and shakes the white pills onto his palm, Stanley hears her move through the house: running water, opening drawers.

He puts the Tylenol and the dripping glass on the tabletop next to Claudio’s hand. Claudio’s fingers release the icepack, pinch each pill in turn, bring them to his lips. Then he washes them down with sips of water. He moves very slowly. His eyes are closed.

Not talking to me, huh? Stanley says.

Claudio slouches in his seat. His lips and eyelids are bluish. A vein flutters in his forehead, shrinking and growing like the belly of a snake. His bloody inflated face hangs on his skull, and for a second Stanley can’t remember what he really looks like.

I had so many things to tell you, Claudio mumbles. But you never listen.

For a long time Stanley watches him like that: sipping from the crystal glass, fighting to keep his head up. He’s sideswiped by a memory of the long rainy days that closed out their February: the kid reading his stolen screen magazines while Stanley read The Mirror Thief . Stanley was combing his book for clues; Claudio was just killing time. That’s what Stanley thought, anyway. In Claudio’s head, of course, it was the other way around. Stanley’s known this before; maybe he’s always known it. Now he understands it differently — harder, colder, more serious — and it feels like he’s met a high wall, or a fork in the road. This kid has his own warm body, living and dying, and a black-box mind that cannot be seen: just the same as Stanley, or anyone. And Stanley can’t know him; he can barely know himself. There are many questions that Welles’s book can aim him toward the answers to, but this is not one of them. The best it can do is convince him that questions like these don’t matter, and Stanley hopes one day it will.

He stands behind Claudio and stares at the back of his skull until he can’t take it anymore. Then he steps to the side door — his rubber soles soundless on the linoleum — unlatches it, and slips onto the porch. He does this without so much as creaking a plank, but Claudio must feel the air change when the door swings open. Stanley? he says.

Stanley leaves the door ajar behind him. He’s pretty sure that Synnøve’s in the bathroom, not anyplace where she’ll see him leave, but he rushes across the yard anyway, vaults the fence, jogs the half-block to Pacific Avenue. He’s breathing hard now. His own pulse hammers his eardrums like the footfalls of pursuers.

By the time he makes it back to the squat the wind has picked up, levitating loose papers from ashcans, rocking streetlamps into herky-jerky pendulums. Below the wall of incoming clouds a sliver of red sun has dipped into the ocean. Stanley glimpses it for a second as he passes Horizon Ave; when he turns onto Horizon Court he loses it again.

Before he left this morning he put his things away with care, just like always; it doesn’t take him long to find the items he needs. After a minute of packing up Claudio’s stuff he’s on the street again, dodging oncoming cars on the Speedway, moving with tunnel-visioned ease, like he’s lived in this neighborhood for years. Even with the sun gone and bad weather coming, the world feels disenchanted, shrunken. Stanley’s on familiar ground now, comfortable and sad.

The first big drops catch him on the boardwalk, as he’s settling onto a bench; they flash under the streetlamps, leave jagged silver-dollar-size sunbursts on the wooden planks. When they strike his skin they’re heavy and cold, like shoulder-taps from a ghost.

He watches the windows of the penny-arcade — still a block away — until he’s good and soaked, and his wet shirtsleeves have become loose reptile-skin on his arms. At this distance he can just make out faces: Whitey with a fat lip and a swollen eye, his two junior punks with minor scratches. All three look sullen, unhappy with each other and with themselves.

People pass between Stanley and the arcade in a steady stream, moving quickly in the rain: some share umbrellas, some huddle under newspapers. Their silhouettes pulse across the windows like gaps between cards on a Mutoscope spool. From time to time someone joins Stanley on his bench — a drunk, a grifter, a pervert — but Stanley won’t look and won’t say a word, and eventually they all go away.

Stanley thinks of Welles’s list of names in his pocket. He should have left it at the squat; the ink will run when it gets wet. Not much to be done about it at this point. It was probably bullshit anyway. It was a bad move, trying to play the game on Welles’s terms instead of his own. He can see that well enough now.

One of the two punk Dogs — the one farthest from the door — finally steps away from his machine, headed for the john. Stanley rises from his bench. He closes the distance in a hurry without breaking into a run, and he takes deep breaths as he goes. A couple of the people he passes must be able to read the intention in his face; they avert their nervous eyes, give him a wide berth. Soon he’s standing in the door, puddling the concrete with the rain he’s accrued. The punk is just a few feet ahead, his back turned. Whitey’s clear across the room, facing Stanley, blinded by the game he plays, or by whatever he’s thinking about. For a flickering instant Stanley thinks what he always thinks at these times: You don’t have to do this. You can walk away . The idea slows him up more than he’s used to. He feels like he’s at the first tall drop of a rollercoaster track; his eyes are squeezed tight with the effort of imagining himself elsewhere. But of course he is not elsewhere. He is here.

He takes a few quick steps, passes behind the first punk, stops, and elbows him in the kidney. A half-human moan bursts from the guy’s lips as his knees fold. Stanley drops with him, fingers tangled in his greasy hair, to drive his face into the steel coinbox.

Stanley scrambles on all fours to the corner, past the row of machines, then stands up as he circles around to Whitey. A couple of people are staring at the fallen punk; a few more hotfoot to the exit, but Whitey plays on without looking up. Stanley is close enough now to see his score: two million points, one ball left to play. The guy isn’t bad; he knows what he’s doing.

As Stanley comes up behind Whitey he peeks over his shoulder for a second at the bubbling seahorses and topless mermaids of the playfield, the flash of the silver ball. He lets Whitey keep playing until the guy feels eyes on his back, realizes that something is wrong. His concentration wavers. The ball drains.