Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

The Shroudy Stranger’s reft of realms.

Abhorred he sits upon the city dump.

His broken heart’s a bag of shit.

The vast rainfall, an empty mirror.

— ALLEN GINSBERG, “The Shrouded Stranger”

Curtis wakes to white light, black dark, a cop’s voice. It’s Coach Banner’s voice from high school, Colonel Gandy’s from Kosovo; he can’t understand anything it says, but he knows exactly what it’s saying. You did okay, Stone, but you screwed up, too . Curtis doesn’t need to be told. His eyes roll back; he’s out again.

Time passes: a slideshow flashed on a flapping white sheet. Doctors and nurses in masks and gowns. The bright OR; the dim recovery room. Interchangeable LVMPD badges. At first there’s no sequence — everything happening all at once — but then events line up, and Curtis starts to make memories again. Albedo rode in the ambulance with him, he’s pretty sure of that, but never made it to the ICU.

Curtis wakes again, realizing that he’s already awake. Taking inventory. Adding up limbs, losing count. He feels like something’s missing, or something extra’s been added. He must’ve twisted left when he the headlights came at him: his right wrist is in a cast. A figure-eight sling pins his shoulders back; that means collarbone . Foam boots on both feet, pendent weights hung from the bed’s edge: traction to keep his legs straight. That means both hips broken .

Curtis takes a breath, lets it out. His throat hurts; his arm itches where the IV needle’s taped. He’s going to bounce back from this. Probably not all the way back, and that’s fine. Nobody ever bounces all the way back. Not from anything. That’s the way it goes, bouncing.

He’s on a bunch of pretty heavy drugs. Even as he thinks this, he can feel them fade: a cold dead tide going out. That’s probably why his eyes are open. Somebody must want to talk to him.

Mister Stone?

A tall thin Hispanic guy, in a steel-tube chair beside Curtis’s motorized rack. Curtis’s age, or a little younger. Patient. Not fed up, or put-upon. Not like most cops Curtis has known. Federal, probably. Somebody in Jersey got his message.

Curtis? the guy says, like he’s trying different frequencies. Mister Stone? Master Sergeant Stone?

Yeah, Curtis says. I’m here.

His own voice sounds harsh and loud, although he knows it can’t really be loud. His throat feels like it’s tearing. He clears it, coughs. His right side aches.

The Hispanic guy gives Curtis his name — Agent Something — then starts with the customary spiel. LVMPD wants to bring serious charges against you, Mister Stone, he says. I asked them for some time with you first. There’s a bigger picture here that I don’t think anybody has seen yet.

Yeah, Curtis says. You got that right.

You want to tell me about it?

Curtis licks his lips. Flecks of dry skin scrape his tongue. There’s a lot of pain inside him someplace; he glimpses it now and again, like a lantern moving through the windows of an old house. The traction on his legs means the docs haven’t cut there yet. Maybe he hasn’t been out so long. I want to talk to my wife, Curtis says.

The agent smiles. Danielle’s on her way, he says. She’s in the air now. Metro’s sending a car for her. Of course, we don’t know yet when they’ll clear you to see her.

I’m under arrest?

You haven’t been arrested. I understand you used to be a military policeman, so you know how this works. I should tell you, though, before we say anything else, that you have the right to remain silent, and to have an attorney present for any discussion with me. You can get an attorney, and I can get a tape-recorder, and we can do this more formally. Do you want to do that, Curtis?

Curtis closes his eyes, toggles his head back and forth. I’m sky-high, man, he says. No judge’ll let you use any of this.

The guy shrugs. He already has an inkstick out; now he flips open a spiral notebook, stuffs his tie in his breast pocket. You want to wait? he says. Sober up?

Curtis shakes his head. No, he says. I want to tell it now.

He tells it as well as he can. It’s hard to keep it all straight. He gets confused, makes mistakes, goes back to correct himself. Even uninjured, unmedicated, he never had a handle on a lot of it. But he does his best.

He tells about the call he got from Damon, about meeting him in Philly at the Penrose Diner, and also about Stanley, and about the cardcounters at the Spectacular. He tells about Albedo, and about Argos, and about the missing dealer, and about what Argos said in the desert, and he tells about the call he had his dad make to the Jersey cops. For the most part he keeps Veronica out of it. He’s not entirely sure why. It’s what Stanley would want him to do, he figures, and she never seemed like that big a part of it anyway. She was about as far outside as Curtis was himself.

Hang on, the Hispanic guy says, scribbling. Wait up a second. What’s the point?

Curtis blinks. Say again? he says. What do you mean, what’s the point? You asked me to tell it, so I’m telling it, goddamnit.

No no no, the guy says. You keep talking about the Point . Like, the cardcounters hit the Point . You wanted to get a job at the Point . I don’t know what that means.

The Spectacular, Curtis says. The Spectacular is the Point. The name’s got an exclamation mark after it. In its logo. The official name. Exclamation point , I mean to say. Before they even opened, this story went around — I don’t know if it’s true — that a PR guy got fired because he forgot to put the explanation point, the exclamation point, on the end of the name. People working there started calling it the Point. As a joke. And it spread. Most people who say it now, they don’t even know how it got started. But that’s how I heard it from Damon.

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.