Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Stanley and Claudio run through a grassy traffic circle, across a parking lot, aiming themselves toward whatever pockets of darkness they can find. They make a right, then a left. The wide street ahead is all residential: small weathered bungalows, sagging porches with steel-pipe railings. The waterlogged air traps the city lights, and the sky glows seaweed-green; Stanley can see shaggy crowns of palmtrees figured against it, and the derricks of the oilfield maybe a quarter-mile farther on. There’s no sound coming from behind now except the drone of distant traffic. Stanley slows down, lightheaded, to get his bearings.

Who was making that noise? Claudio says. He’s not even winded.

The guys chasing us. Who do you think?

Claudio looks at him. But they were lying on the ground, he says.

Not those guys, shit-for-brains. The ten hoods coming right behind ’em. You didn’t see ’em?

Claudio wrinkles his brow, takes a skeptical look over his shoulder. What hoods? he says.

The avenue is joined by a smaller street just ahead, and Stanley checks the streetsign in the corner lot: Cordova Court, running into Rialto Avenue. They’re only a block off Windward, but the neighborhood feels different, quieter. Maybe half of the nearby houses are lit up inside, some by the haunted flicker of television screens. Cool jazz plays on a hi-fi somewhere to the right. Through an open window, Stanley hears a woman laugh softly.

That was a real nice move, by the way, Stanley says. Grabbing that thug by the head. That was pretty slick.

You liked my move?

No, Stanley says. That was what you call sarcasm. Buddy, we are gonna have to do something to toughen you up.

Claudio’s opening his mouth to object when a scuffle of shoes comes from behind them, and then a voice, wordless and half-human, baying like a bluetick coonhound, like hounds in movies bay. Stanley and Claudio turn and run across the untended lawns, Stanley’s vision tunneling and going white, his footfalls hollow in his ears, like he’s hearing them through an empty coffeecan. Cordova angles to the right, but Stanley continues straight ahead toward a dark and sagging cottage, grabbing Claudio’s sleeve to make him follow, casting a glance backward to see whether the Dogs have made the corner yet. They haven’t.

To the left of the bungalow there’s a low wooden fence, the rotting slats strung together with wire, and Stanley jumps it, catches his foot, and lands facefirst in a weedy garden; his knees sink into loose earth, and a cedar trellis crunches under his shoulder. Behind him, Claudio hops the fence like an antelope, lands gracefully, and Stanley grabs his feet and brings him down, too.

Another howl comes from the street: the Dogs drawing close; he can’t tell how many. He scrambles on top of Claudio, puts fingers across his lips. Soon he can hear the Dogs in nearby yards, whispering back and forth. Claudio’s chest rises and falls evenly. Stanley’s own ragged breath and pistoning heart beat against it in raucous counterpoint.

The porchlight of the house next door comes on, deepening the shadows in the garden, lighting up two Dogs as they slink past a patchy boxwood hedge. A door creaks, and then a man’s voice: Who’s out there?

The bushes crash as the Dogs retreat. Stanley knows they’ll be in the clear now if they can just lie low for a few minutes. He lets out a long breath to calm himself. When he fills his lungs again, the air is a cloud of odors he knows at once but cannot yet sort out or identify: rosemary, horseradish, garlic, mint, lemon verbena, tomato vine, the plants crushed under their fallen bodies. In the absence of words, Stanley’s mind retrieves a succession of kitchens — his grandmother frying latkes, his mother cubing lamb, the simmering cauldron of red sauce made by a neighbor woman whose name is lost to him — and beneath all these, his grandfather’s hands, tearing bitter herbs for Passover. It’s as if this plot of disturbed earth a continent’s breadth from his birthplace has recognized him, acknowledged him. Welcome, it says. We have been waiting so long.

Stanley is filled with such joy and such certainty that he has to bite hard on Claudio’s lapel to keep himself from laughing, from screaming. Claudio’s black eyes widen in shock, but he makes no sound. He places a smooth palm on Stanley’s cheek, runs it through his tangled hair, and brings his head to rest in the pocket above his collarbone. Claudio’s neck is warm beneath his forehead, sticky with mist. Stanley draws closer to him, and they lie that way for what seems like many hours, long past the time they know it’s safe to rise.

The next week brings rain that drowns what’s left of February and flushes out the waterfront streets. Stanley and Claudio spend the days huddled under blankets in their storefront lair, reading to stave off boredom, books and magazines propped against the hillock of their tangled legs. Claudio works through a stack of glossies that Stanley stole for him from a newsstand on Market Street— Photoplay, Modern Screen, Movie Mirror —scanning them as if in search of clues. He speaks up now and then to report a discovery. The talent agent of Tab Hunter is the same as that of Rock Hudson, he says. Also that of Rory Calhoun. I believe the names of these men are not their true names.

Stanley reads The Mirror Thief . It’s a book of poems, but it tells a story: an alchemist and spy called Crivano steals an enchanted mirror, and is pursued by his enemies through the streets of a haunted city. Stanley long ago stopped paying the story any mind. He’s come to regard it as a fillip at best, at worst as a device meant to conceal the book’s true purpose, the powerful secret it contains. Nothing, he’s quite certain, could be so obscure by accident.

As he reads, his eyes graze each poem’s lines like a needle over an LP’s grooves, atomizing them into letters, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he’s looking for is a key: a gap in the book’s mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings — reading sideways, reading upsidedown, reading whitespace instead of text — but the words always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions. The usual suspects.

On the book’s second printed page— a poetic narrative by Adrian Welles, Seshat Books, Los Angeles, copyright 1954 —is a brief inscription: a message from whoever gave it away to the person they gave it to, somebody called Alan. Stanley’s never been able to make out what the fiercely slanted handwriting says; one word looks like salad , another naked . He’s long since given up on deciphering it. Above the message, Adrian Welles’s printed name has been struck through with a curving slash of black ink. Stanley used to flip to this page and wonder why somebody would cross the name out like that, but lately he doesn’t think about it at all.

Sometimes he’ll close his eyes and close the book, balancing its spine on the mounts of his palm. He’ll picture a dark figure — Welles, Crivano, himself — slinking through the streets outside, cloaked in a slicker and a dripping hat, in pursuit of some unfathomable objective: a void errant in the blurred landscape. Stanley will hold this image as long as he can, until other concerns encroach — what if Welles has left this place? what if he’s dead? — and then he’ll let the book fall open and he’ll read the first line his eyes fall on, hoping it will contain a clue as to where he should go, what he should do next. Stanley knows there’s no real logic to this practice — or, rather, that the logic is the book’s logic, not the world’s — but this is as it should be. The point where the book and the world intersect is exactly what he’s looking for.