Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Two packed charter buses are unloading in the porte-cochère as Curtis enters the lobby of his hotel: conventioneers with rolling suitcases and sheathed laptops sweep through the glass doors, an unbroken column from the sidewalk to the registration desk. Curtis isn’t quick enough to find a gap; he stops under the armillary sphere to wait them out. They collect their keycards, break away, recombine in cheery clumps, crushing hands and clapping shoulders, calling back and forth in sportscaster voices, shooting each other with finger-guns. Somebody passes bearing a huge foamcore placard—

9:00 a.m. — The Three Most Powerful Skills For Success In Sales

9:45 a.m. — How To Achieve Your Personal Best In Times Of Turmoil

10:30 a.m. — A Soft Sell Opener Guaranteed To Get You A “YES!”

11:15 a.m. — Four Ways You Will Leave Your Comfort Zone

— and Curtis can see nothing of the person who carries it aside from a pair of white sneakers and eight curled fingertips.

Another big fake painting stretches overhead; Veronica, no doubt, could tell him what it’s a copy of. A hero on a winged horse, about to harpoon a fire-breathing monster. A man with chains drooping from his mouth. A guy with a broken-stringed violin, his arm around a naked lady. Another guy who plucks a lyre in front of a thick city wall while stone blocks levitate all around him. Curtis gets that the lyre music is lifting the stones, but he can’t tell if it’s supposed to be building the wall or taking it apart. The painting’s midpoint is a field of blue sky. A pair of gods floats there: Mercury with his snake-twisted staff, Minerva with her gorgon-faced shield.

The crowd of conventioneers thins and Curtis moves forward, then gets snared by a plainclothes security guard blocking the exit. The guard holds the door for a tall silver-haired man in a black bomber jacket who looks exactly like Jay Leno, and it takes Curtis a second to realize that it’s Jay Leno. Then he realizes that he’s standing in Leno’s path. Curtis’s hand is still extended from where he’d been about to push through the door, and Leno grabs it and shakes it. Hi! he says with a broad grin.

You’re Jay Leno, Curtis says.

Yeah, Leno says. Have a great conference!

He passes Curtis on the left. The security guard is right beside him, and gently eases Curtis out of the way. Leno and his small entourage pass through the lobby — Leno waving, shaking more hands, walking the same way every famous person Curtis has ever met has walked, quick and restless, like if they stop moving they’ll die — and then they all disappear through a passage to the left of the registration desk. Curtis watches them go. More people with luggage push past him into the lobby, chattering excitedly. Jay Leno! most of them seem to be saying.

Outside, Curtis climbs into the first idling taxi. It’s another Fortune Cab, black and white and magenta, and Curtis wonders if it’ll be the same cabbie who took him to the lake this morning. But when he sits down and sees the eyes in the rearview mirror, they’re Saad’s. Saad? Curtis says.

I’m sorry?

It’s not Saad: this guy is younger, less relaxed, not Arabic. Bangladeshi, maybe. But the white hair is the same, and the wrinkles. Can you take me to the Quicksilver, please? Curtis says.

In Henderson?

No, Curtis says. In the hills east of here, the edge of the valley. It’s a new place. A few blocks off North Hollywood, above the Mormon Tem—

Yes, the guy says. Now I know. Thank you.

He makes good time to the freeway and Lake Mead Boulevard, using the same route Saad took. He doesn’t try to make conversation, and Curtis appreciates that. In the fast-failing light, Curtis opens The Mirror Thief one last time, wanting to read a little more before Stanley takes it back. Curtis isn’t thrilled about how things have gone out here, but he figures at this point he ought to be satisfied. He’s not satisfied, though. Not even close. Maybe once he sees Stanley he will be.

Be secret, Crivano! This poisoned world,

blown out like an egg, hides nothing.

No cross for you, no Campo de’ Fiori—

be not covetous of such monuments,

sad fictions of kingdoms deferred. Nothing

here is saved, nothing worthy of saving.

Evaporation is your legacy,

your ecstasy, your escape. All matter

is mere shadow, swept over dark glass.

Your moment, Crivano, is done: a bubble

hung in history’s slow amber, a seed

in silica suspended, then fed back

to the furnace. Burn, thief of images,

on the amnesic sea!

As Curtis reads, he tries to imagine finding the book the way Stanley found it, to guess what strange pull it could have exerted on a fifteen-year-old Brooklyn kid with a dead father and a crazy mother and a fifth-grade education. Curtis can’t fathom it. He thinks of his dad’s stories about growing up in Shaw in the Fifties, then of his own fifteenth year — what it felt like, what went on in his head — but he can barely recall, and the memories suggest no new route into the book. Instead Curtis just winds up thinking about Jay Leno: how friendly and cheerful he seemed. How that friendliness and cheer seemed to close him off like a stone wall, and how that wall could have been hiding anything. Or nothing. He thinks about the conventioneers performing for each other in the hotel lobby, and of the cocktail waitresses performing for the well-heeled grinds in the Oculus Lounge. He thinks about the bartender at New York with the Staten Island accent, and about Saad —you do this rap for all your fares ? — and about Argos’s blanked-out features, shifting in the hot light off the lake surface. He thinks of himself in high school, practicing his game-face in his grandparents’ bathroom mirror. Trying to be convincing. Trying to convince himself.

Every substance, Hermes says,

must fashion its own reasons.

Even now, oligarchy’s thugs

unmuzzled stalk Rialto’s corridors.

To hide what can’t be seen, Crivano,

install it in plain sight, everywhere.

Invisible commonplace! Machine

for unseeing! Submerge your name,

weighted with your past. Wall-hung,

neglected, the moon-skin lies in ambush.

And then, one unexpected day, you meet

the stranger you have always been.

A couple of UNLV co-eds dressed as leprechauns are stationed between the Quicksilver’s riverstone columns; they grin and wave as Curtis’s cab pulls up, bend to pin plastic shamrocks to the cardigans of wheelchair-bound gamblers. Curtis pays his cabbie, steps onto the rubbery sidewalk. At the valley’s opposite edge, Mount Charleston is a blue shadow on the purple dusk. The setting sun lights its snowcap like a brand.

Welcome to the Quicksilver! one of the leprechauns says. Need some luck?

No thanks, Curtis says. I’m not playing tonight.

The PA in the lobby has swapped its New Age flutes and rainsticks for New Age bodhráns and uilleann pipes. The kid behind the counter wears a green plastic bowler hat, keeps himself busy by adding links to a six-foot paperclip chain. Hello, Curtis says. I’m Curtis Stone. Walter Kagami is holding a room for me.

The kid hands over a keycard in a small paper envelope. Top floor, he says. First door on the right. It’s a suite.

The elevators are on the far side of the gaming floor. There’s not much traffic at the tables or the slots, but what traffic there is moves awfully slowly, and Curtis doesn’t feel like navigating it. He tracks the right-hand wall to the bow windows that overlook the sunken courtyard, then follows them across the length of the casino. Lights are coming on below: in the palmtrees, under the recirculating fountain and the waterfall. The guineafowl that he saw last time are not to be found — gone wherever they go at night — but a peacock has climbed atop one of the stone picnic tables, and as Curtis passes, he spreads and shakes his tailfeathers into an oscillating iridescent screen.