Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

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 after. 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.