Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Maybe so.

Well, the guard says, if you find out what building he’s in, and then you have him phone me and put your name on the cleared list, I can let you through.

Stanley has been trying to figure out what he’ll say if the guard asks if he’s got an appointment, but now it’s clear he isn’t even going to ask that. You can always tell a man who’s been to war , Stanley’s dad used to say, although he never said exactly how to do it. Stanley’s pretty sure this guy has been to war.

I don’t want to make no hassle for nobody, Stanley says. If you just let me and my pal poke around a little, I’m sure we can hunt him down.

The guard gives him a tiny smile. Well, he says, I’m not so sure. I got better than two hundred acres of property over my shoulder. I don’t want to have to come looking for you when you get lost.

Stanley nods, looks down at the concrete. Tiny hairs left by the barber’s electric razor are pricking him around his collar. He looks up again. Listen, he says. I came a long way to see this man. And I’m not going to bullshit you. I know your whole job is to keep people like me out. But I’m giving you my word. If you let us through, we are not gonna be a problem for you. Okay?

The guard’s expression doesn’t change. You know, he says, your friend’s probably going to be punching the clock soon anyway. Maybe you fellas should just meet him someplace for a drink. The guard’s eyes move from Stanley to Claudio, then back. Or a milkshake, he says.

Thank you for your time, Stanley says.

He and Claudio turn and walk. A few hundred yards south along the Hollywood Freeway a road climbs the western edge of Cahuenga Peak; they hike its incline through a eucalyptus glade into a quiet neighborhood of narrow streets and widely spaced houses. One house that backs up on a scrubby rise has three days’ newspapers scattered in its weedy lawn; Stanley crosses the flagstone path and opens its wooden gate.

The backyard is strewn with gnawed tennis balls and dry lumps of dogshit, but there’s no dog. A gap interrupts the picket fence — two boards wide, worn on both sides, tufted with black hair in its rough spots — and Stanley slips through while Claudio vaults over. A short scramble among yucca and needlegrass brings them to a wedge-shaped cliff over a small arroyo, a vantage from which they can watch the sun nestling into the mountains, the Los Angeles River in its concrete channel, and the great oval of the Universal property just below. A chattering swarm of bushtits bursts from a sumac, disappears down the slope. Swallows streak the air, returning to roost along the freeway. Far below, a pale stretch of cyclone fence peeks between sagebrush and liveoak; Stanley sees a spot a quarter-mile northeast where it’s sagging inward. Scanning the streets between the studio’s lots and buildings, he sees nothing moving at all.

They sit for a while, eating bruised apples as the shadows of the mountains creep over them. Then they throw the cores into the arroyo and start their descent.

For another half-hour they hide in the bushes, watching the studio property through the fence until the sky goes deep blue and the streetlamps inside glow. Aside from a single sweep of headlights against a faraway building there are no signs of life. Stanley and Claudio take off their jackets. Stanley puts one inside the other, pulling the sleeves of Claudio’s through the sleeves of his own. Beach sand left over from their first night in town trickles from the pockets, and he thinks for a moment about places he’s been, distances he’s crossed. Then he hands the jackets to Claudio and runs hard at the fence, hitting it square on its leaning post.

Claudio catches his foot, boosts him upwards. The concrete plug at the linepost’s base shifts in the dirt, and Stanley tips forward. When he’s reached the four strands of barbed wire over the toprail, Claudio hands up the jackets; Stanley drapes them over the three lower strands, pulls himself over the topmost, and drops, rolling on the dusty incline. By the time he’s upright and brushing himself off, Claudio is over too, jumping to pluck the jackets from the wire.

They pass a courthouse’s imposing façade — no building behind it — and detour around a paved lakebed, its sides slick with black algae. A breeze blows through Cahuenga Pass, swaying the crowns of trees; the screen of their leaves sieves the light of scattered streetlamps. More façades emerge as Stanley and Claudio head west: thatched jungle huts, a decrepit mining town, a rustic Mexican village. Here and there they find scatterings of cigarette butts, slashes of black graffiti: they’re not the first ones to hop the fence. Headlights wash over them from somewhere in the distance — the double-tap of a slow pulse — and they freeze for a moment before moving on.

A rushing hum is everywhere around them; it seems to come from falling water, or the rumble of hidden machines, or just the wind, though they’re never able to decide which. They pick up their pace, crashing through a ribbon of trees to discover more fake buildings, more elaborate now: the hulk of a steam locomotive, the parapets of a medieval fortress, a quaint city street. Hey, Stanley whispers as he hurries over the cobblestones. Is this supposed to be Paris?

Yes, Claudio says, glancing around nervously. Europe. I believe Paris.

You ever been to Paris?

I have never.

Well, then how do you know it’s supposed to be Paris? There ain’t no Eiffel Tower. There ain’t no whaddya-call-it.

Claudio doesn’t look at him. You said Paris, he says. I said Paris only after you.

Do we think it’s Paris just because it looks like Paris does in the movies? Maybe the Paris in the movies has got nothing to do with the real Paris. Maybe the real Paris looks like China. How’d we ever know?

There’s a circular fountain ahead, decorated with four winged lions, its dry basin filled with stray tumbleweeds from the fake mining town nearby. The wind wavers, shifts, and a charred smell comes from somewhere in front of them, stinging Stanley’s nose. It all seems deserted, he says.

No one lives here. Everything is not real.

Yeah, no shit. I know. That ain’t what I mean. I mean it’s like nobody’s been using this stuff. Like everything’s shut down.

Claudio looks around, preoccupied. The films of today often shoot on location, he says. To seem more true. Do you smell a burning?

Around the next bend they find themselves in front of a mountain of scorched plasterboard and twisted girders: a fake city block, recently up in flames. The street and its gutters are silted with black mounds of ash and soot; it hisses around their ankles when the wind blows. The air is painful to breathe. Stanley looks at the adjacent structures to figure out what this used to be — what it was supposed to be — and sees department stores, theaters, the granite bases of skyscrapers. New York.

Stanley and Claudio push ahead to get past the burn. They come to a block of brownstones with black banisters and barred windows and crooknecked streetlamps lining their sidewalks: a looking-glass Brooklyn. It’s nothing like the city he grew up in, not really, but Stanley knows that if he saw this place on a movie screen he’d buy it as New York, no questions asked. He thinks of movies he’s seen that were supposed to happen on streets he knows well. Some of them were probably shot right here. Looking back, they always looked fake, every time, but he never questioned it. It makes him feel like a sap.

Stanley! Claudio hisses, motioning him toward the stoop he’s crouched behind, but it’s too late: headlights catch him. They pass over, leaving him in darkness again, but then jerk to a halt with a squeak of brakes.

He and Claudio dash around the corner, across a street, and hide in the bushes beside a fake New England church. Behind them a car door slams, then another. Did they see you? Claudio asks.