Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

He punches the button for Floor 29 and begins to rise. Alone for a moment. His reflection wavery in the copper-tinted doors. He swaps his shades for a pair of black-rimmed safety glasses, fishes his keycard from an inside pocket.

His suite sports two televisions and three telephones, a canopied kingsize rack, vast curtained windows looking south down the Strip. A murky and puzzling painting — the brass plaque on the frame reads. J.M.W. TURNER — hangs over the fold-out couch in the sunken living area. At six hundred fifty square feet, this is the smallest room the hotel offers. Curtis doesn’t like to think about what it’s costing Damon to put him up here, but Damon won’t object; they both know he’s in the right place.

He checks the phone and the fax machine, but nothing’s come in. He pulls the new box of hollowpoint hotloads from his jacket pocket and puts it in the little safe in the armoire, then sets his snubnosed revolver on top of it. It’s getting dark: the city’s vanishing from the windows, replaced by the reversed image of the room itself. Curtis switches off the overhead lights, looks out at the view: Harrah’s and the Mirage down the Strip, the belltower and turquoise canal below. A flash of memory, from three years ago: Stanley leaning on the balustrade above the moored gondolas. Tweed driver cap cocked on his bony head. Stirring the air with small gnarled hands. The new moon low in the west, a washed-out circle in the black. Stanley reciting a poem: Burn, thief of images, on the amnesic sea! Something like that. Before Curtis can get a fix on it, it’s gone.

Lights are coming on all over the city, trembling in the rising heat. The blue-white beam of the Luxor is just visible in the distance, a streak in the indigo sky. Curtis thinks about home, wonders whether he should call, but Philly is three hours ahead: Danielle will already be asleep. Instead he undresses to his boxers, folds his clothes, tries to find something sexy on the widescreen TV, but all he seems to get are computer graphics of cruise missiles and 3-D rotating maps of the Gulf. After a while he puts down the remote and does pushups and situps on the carpeted deck as the talking heads drone on above him, speculating eagerly about the war to come, their jerky pictures freezing up from time to time, glitching out into flat digital mosaics.

When he’s done, Curtis mutes the television and opens the safe again. His wedding ring is there, next to the box of ammunition, and he slips it on, takes it off, puts it in his mouth and sucks on it, clicking it against the backs of his teeth. He unholsters the little revolver, unloads and checks the cylinder, and dry-fires it at the flickering TV, one hundred times with his right hand, eighty with his left, until his forearms burn and his index fingers are raw and chapped. It’s a new gun; he doesn’t know it as well as he should.

His stomach turns over with a gurgle, still upset by the long flight and the many sleepless hours before it. He locks up the ring and the pistol and walks into the fancy marble head, where he sits on the commode and fishes through his shaving kit for his nailclippers. His hands smell like gun-oil and are cracked from the dry air, and for the first time today Curtis remembers, really remembers, what it was like being in the Desert.

Later that night, on his way back from dinner, Curtis spots Stanley’s girl at a blackjack table downstairs.

He stops for a second, blinking in surprise, then begins a slow clockwise orbit of the gaming floor, keeping her on his good side, in his periph. Picking up a ginger-ale along the way to busy his hands. She’s looking around, but not at him.

Two hundred eighty degrees later he parks himself at a video poker machine, breaks a roll of quarters, wets his lips from his clear plastic cup. He’s been worried about recognizing her — he has no photo to go by, and only saw her once before, nearly two years ago, at his dad’s wedding — but now he’s surprised to find he knows her right away. She still looks like a college student, although she must be near thirty by now. She reminds Curtis of some of the white kids who used to Metro in from College Park to hear his dad’s combo play in Adams-Morgan, or on U Street. Cool, smart, a little cagey. Toughened up by a few hard knocks — brought on by bad decisions, not by circumstances or bad luck. Thin. Wavy brown hair. Big eyes, widely spaced. She should be pretty but she’s not. A mistaken idea of pretty. Pretty sketched by somebody who’s never seen it, working off a verbal description.

Curtis watches her for the better part of an hour: her shifting eyes, the trickle of people behind her. Waiting for her to move, or for Stanley to materialize from the crowd. Stanley never does, and she doesn’t budge. She’s definitely counting cards, but she doesn’t seem to be after a big score; her bets don’t change much as the count goes up and down. She seems distracted, like she’s just killing time.

The machine deals Curtis three queens, and he dumps one, afraid of hitting a big payout and drawing attention to himself. The girl is playing just like he’s playing. Does she know she’s being followed?

Then, off to the right, an old man in a sportcoat, slender and compact, hurrying along the patterned maroon bulkhead. It’s not Stanley — too gawky, too nervous — but the girl stops in mid-play, her eyes widening. She tracks the old man for a second, her brow furrowed, and then slumps in her seat. The dealer says something to get her back in the game, and she shoots him a glare. It’s all over in an instant.

But now Curtis knows: he’ll be able to find her here whenever he needs to. She’s looking for Stanley too.

He drops the last of his quarters and heads back to his room. A fax is waiting for him: a cartoon drawn on SPECTACULAR! hotel letterhead, showing a muscular dark-skinned man sodomizing an older guy with exaggerated Semitic features. The cartoon Curtis’s expression is grim, determined; his face and arms are densely shaded with slashing diagonals. Comma-shaped teardrops shoot from the panicked Stanley’s wrinkled eyes. Across the top of the page, Damon has written in block capitals, GO GITTIM!!! Across the bottom, THAS MAH BOY!!!!!

Curtis crumples the fax and drops it in the trash. Then he fishes it out, rips it into small pieces, and flushes the pieces down the toilet.

It rains overnight. Curtis wakes to see lightning flash against the bathroom door, rolls over to get a better look, and dozes off again right away. He remembers hearing drops against the glass, but in the morning there’s nothing, no sign of moisture at all.

He’s already dialed before he thinks to look at his watch — it’s Friday, nearly noon now in D.C. — but Mawiyah picks up anyway. Curtis! she says, a broad smile in her voice. As-Salaam-Alaikum , Little Brother! I didn’t recognize your number on the Caller-ID. You get a new phone?

I did, Curtis says. I sure did. Say, I just remembered what day it is. I’m surprised to find you home. I figured you’d be on your way to the temple by now.

Well, we’re running a little late this morning. And thank God for that, or we would have missed your call! How are you?

I’m doing all right. I don’t want to hold you up too much, though. I was hoping to catch my dad. He’s around?

Curtis hears a soft tap as Mawiyah sets the receiver down. Her whippoorwill voice grows distant, abstract, as she moves through the house. As he waits, Curtis is struck by a couple of memories in quick succession. First, her photo, hung outside the library at Dunbar: six years ahead of him, still a legendary presence there. Four days a week he passed it on his way to the practice field and another asskicking courtesy of the defensive line. Second, years later: her singing “Let’s Get Lost” in a tiny 18th Street club, eyes closed against the blue light. His father behind her, in shadow, leaning on his bass. Out of prison, not yet cleaned up for good. She was Nora Brawley then; his dad was still Donald Stone. Curtis had come straight from National, on leave from Subic, jetlagged and exhausted, still wearing service-alpha greens. He remembers a beerbottle’s sweat beneath his fingers, and the way everything seemed to be tipping over. Stanley was there somewhere, too. Invisible. His voice a loose thread in the dark.