Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

On the long downhill ride back to the Strip he thinks of Stanley. He thinks of what Kagami said about blackjack — about the illusion of total control — and then he thinks of the bingo ladies in their quiet room, their fierce mastery of cards and daubers. It all begins to make a kind of desperate sense to Curtis, and as the shuttle slows to a stop in front of his hotel, he remembers a late-season football game from his junior year — how he saw the blitz coming well before the snap, saw it in the faces of the Banneker kids, the way they carried themselves. Recalling with his whole body the calm that came upon him then, the clarity. Empty and weightless. Everything moving on rails only he could see. He pivoted away from the defensive end that mirrored him across the line of scrimmage, just letting the guy drop. Shaking himself loose. Backpedaling into the path of the blindside. Arms windmilling. Unpretty. In the way. The cornerback running flat out — helmet down, rocketlike — right over him. Knee dropping on his wrist. The dull crack somehow right, somehow perfect. The sweetness of it. Hammerblow on a box of chalk. The pain transfigured him, lit him from inside. He knew without looking that the pass got off, connected. His cast stayed on until the end of February.

A month after it came off, Reagan got shot coming out of the Washington Hilton, and Curtis knew then exactly what he wanted to do with his life.

The elevator has never seemed so slow, rising balloonlike and unhurried through twenty-eight floors before discharging him. By the time he reaches his door he’s already unbuckled his belt, and he slides his keycard and drops his trousers and tears the paper ring from the sanitized toilet in one smooth motion. He sits for a while in the scented dark — goosepimpled, tasting vitriol, wiping his clammy scalp — before shrugging off his blazer and setting his holstered revolver in the marble sink. The curtains are drawn from the windows at the end of the suite, and a dim wedge of light leaks through the door, multihued and pulsing. Watching it, Curtis thinks of Christmas lights, Christmas trees, and he thinks for probably the twelfth time today that he really ought to call his wife. He thinks about what he’d say, what she’d say, how he’d explain. Imagining her on the phone in the kitchenette. Warming milk, maybe, for hot chocolate. Her short white robe falling open. Fuzzy red socks. Tomorrow’s uniform pressed and laid out on the dresser. Leaning against the fridge with one stiff arm, like she’s holding it shut. Cowrie shells clicking against the handset. Her brow furrowed. The little wrinkle there. That and a couple of rings are all he’s given her.

I’m real sorry, Dani. Hell yes, I miss you. I just can’t talk right now . That’s about it: the extent of what he’s got. Can’t say what the plan is because there is no plan — hasn’t really been one since he got hurt, since he shipped home from Kosovo, since before he met her. Two years adrift, reacting. He’d have to be able to explain it to himself first. He flushes, undresses, showers, lies down on the rack and thinks about it.

He’s thinking about it when his cell chirps to life, his home number in Philly on its display. He thinks about it as it rings, and as it stops ringing, and a minute later when the phone beeps and the message symbol appears, he’s still thinking about it.

He turns on the TV and mutes it and tries to concentrate on the text that crawls across the bottom, flipping between CNN and CNBC and Fox, dozing off from time to time, until a few hours have passed and he’s hungry again. Then he rises and dresses, locks up his pistol, heads down below to get a sandwich.

The elevator puts him out on the second floor, the shopping level, and he strides over black cobblestones toward the cool light of a painted sunless sky. At the wide terminus of the hotel’s indoor canal a gondolier is bringing his craft around, shouting songs over his passengers’ heads as they film him in wobbly digital video. The blue of the water is uncompromised, void, a screen for projections.

An arcade opens to Curtis’s right, and he follows it toward the food court. Somehow he makes a wrong turn; even after he realizes it he keeps moving forward, letting himself be swept along by tourists and conventioneers into the great indoor piazza of Saint Mark’s Square. Browsers fondle trinkets in umbrella-shaded carts; a string quartet duels with an unseen opera singer on a balcony; sidewalk patrons dine on gnocchi and tuna niçoise. Up ahead, in the middle of the square, a knot of people surrounds a living statue.

Curtis draws closer. The statue is dressed entirely in white — white gown, white sash, round white cap, a fat little loop of fabric — and white makeup pancakes its arms and face. Curtis can’t guess its sex with any certainty. For a few minutes he watches it between the heads of the people in front of him; he never sees it blink. Its eyes are empty, focused on some invisible thing. After a while he realizes that many of the spectators, himself included, are nearly as motionless as the statue. A creeping paralysis. Curtis shakes himself, turns back the way he came.

He wonders whether he should try to find something for Danielle — a guilt gift — but everything he sees is handmade and imported, too expensive, nothing Dani would want anyway. Jeweled masks, leatherbound books, glass pelicans. A silver mirror framed in crystal. A wooden marionette with a footlong nose.

As he’s going through the menu at Towers Deli he starts to get nervous, worried that he’s in the wrong spot. Stanley might be in the building now, but he’d never be up here. There’s another food court down below, just off the gaming floor. Curtis doubles back, retraces his steps.

As the escalator carries him down, the classical music on the shopping level’s PA fades into a Phil Collins ballad, and the white noise of the gaming area engulfs him like a steambath. Everything seems vague and equidistant. With the war brewing, and all the active-duty guys either in Kuwait or locked down on base, Curtis figured tonight would be a slow night, but it doesn’t look slow. He doesn’t see any crewcuts or high-and-tights in the crowd, but there are lines at all the ATMs, the high-roller area looks active, and traffic to and from the cage is steady. This isn’t a jarhead joint anyway, Curtis thinks, so it probably doesn’t matter. By the entrance to the washrooms, a group of men waits for wives and girlfriends, rattling coinpails or studying basic-strategy cards to pass the time. Most of them are Curtis’s age or younger.

He makes his clockwise loop on autopilot, picking out details he’s missed along the familiar route: massive chandeliers, colors in the carpet, the placement of surveillance cameras overhead. He checks the tables, the machines, the sports-book room, the high-limit slots, the video poker games in the Oculus Lounge. Stanley’s not here, and neither is Veronica, at least at the moment.

He buys a Philly cheesesteak at the San Gennaro Grill and finds himself a table near the food court’s entrance. He finishes half, washes it down with a gulp of iced tea, checks the message on his cell while starting in on the rest. Danielle’s voice, punctuated by the soft clicking of his teeth. Sammy D, it says, this is your wife calling again. You remember you got a wife, right? That thing we did at the church, with the music and the flowers? You had to wear a tux? You remember that? See, since I hadn’t heard from you, I’m wondering if maybe you got hit on the head or something. It is Saturday, nine o’clock in the p.m. Philadelphia time, and I would sure as shit like to hear from you, Junior. I know we’re supposed to be in a fight, and if you don’t want to talk right now, I guess I understand. But call and let me know that you’re okay, at least. If you can’t—