Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Oh, come now, audience! the Nolan says. Wherefore this reluctance? Choose! Be bold! You are scholars, are you not? Each of you has a favored subject, held always close to heart. Name it! I may not match the erudition you command while ensconced in your bookish chambers, but note that I will speak with recourse to no library save that resident within my own mind. Doctor Paolini, you have written knowledgably on occult themes in Virgil, have you not? Shall I speak on that? Or mathematics, perhaps? Have we a geometer among us who will demonstrate his acumen?

The Nolan shoots a pointed glace at the lutenist, and receives a melancholy smile in response. The derision rustling through the crowd grows louder, the embarrassed tension more palpable. The German boy crosses his pale arms and takes a protective step toward the friar. Crivano and Ciotti swap bemused shrugs.

But no, the Nolan continues. All too easily I could have prepared myself in advance to confront those subjects. My desire is only to be challenged, for it is by such challenges that truth becomes clear. Stipulate, someone, beyond these suggestions of mine! If the Nolan is to be taken, it must be by surprise!

The mirror, Tristão says. Address the issue of the mirror.

His smooth limpid voice bears a sudden edge that silences the room. The Nolan seems confused: he squints, his eyes spring from face to face. Who speaks? he says. Who has spoken?

Tristão doesn’t respond. His face is blank, dispassionate; his attitude that of a gambler who has placed his wager and now awaits the revelation of the dice. Every eye present has unmoored itself from the Nolan and drifted to him.

After a long moment, Ciotti answers on his behalf. My friend Dottore de Nis, he says, has asked that you discourse upon the mirror.

The Nolan scowls. The mirror, he says. I must confess that this request leaves me somewhat at a loss. At a loss, that is, to judge why your friend would ask a scholar like myself to address that topic, and not seek the expertise of an unlettered tradesman. I had understood this forum to be concerned with higher things.

A familiar voice rises from the room’s opposite end: that of the second musician, the Servite friar. Crivano suddenly remembers where he’s heard it before: it’s the voice of the mountebank alchemist he saw yesterday in Campo San Luca, shortly before the plaguedoctor appeared. But this can hardly be. Friars donning masks to play satire in the streets?

Hold, please, the Servite says. I beg your pardon, Doctor Brunus, but if you will dismiss the mirror — its construction and its function — as a subject devoid of science, suitable only for debate by the guilds, then I grant you will find many who agree with you, but I cannot place myself among them. Philosophers may long for a world in which the artifex’s technique proceeds always from the application of reason, but more often we find that methods simply arise, and it falls to us thinkers to scurry after them, to wring significance from industry and accident. The flat mirrors lately turned out by the Murano craftsmen may indeed present such a case. Who among us has gazed into one of these without the symptoms of wonderment and disturbance?

Now Paolini speaks, his voice quickened with zeal. In the Phaedrus of Plato, he says, as I’m sure Doctor Brunus recalls, we read King Thamus’s remark to the god Thoth: the parent of an art is not always the best judge of its utility. As Brother Sarpi has just suggested, with the mirror this may well be so. Thamus refers, of course, to Thoth’s invention of writing — so this strikes close to your own scholarship, Doctor Brunus, for Thamus’s complaint is that the invention of letters aids not the memory of the Egyptians, but instead causes it to atrophy. Writing promotes not recollection, but reminiscence; it delivers not truth, but only a semblance of truth. In your previous lecture to us, you described the picture-writing of the Egyptians as superior to the alphabets of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Hebrews, for it evokes pure sense, not mere sound. You delineated for us your system of memory based on figures and patterns, which you say will enable the disciplined magus to assemble in his imagination a picture of the universe entire, thereby to gain power over its most hidden correspondences. And now Dottore de Nis has raised the issue of a simple invention which precisely, if fleetingly, captures the images of particular objects placed before it. Should we fear the ubiquity of this device in our dwelling-chambers? Will the image-making capacity of our imaginations sicken in its presence? Surely these are not inconsequential concerns for a philosopher.

A general murmur of assent follows, then builds in volume. Until this academy refuses to suffer such frauds , Crivano hears someone say, we hardly deserve to be taken seriously. How has this self-important clown been twice invited? It’s the fault of that idiot Mocenigo, I think .

The Nolan flushes a deep red, casts his eyes down, squeezes them shut. After a moment he turns out his palms, looks heavenward, and begins to rise on tiptoe. As if rehearsing his eventual deliverance from the base ignorance of his earthly tormentors. His face grows calm, he sinks back to the floor, and he fixes the room with the sad and sickly smile of a martyr.

For a moment, his lean features are half-lit by pink flares launched from a passing galley, but no one seems to pay these small fraudulent comets any mind. They trace fiery arcs across the night sky, then perish with a hiss on the surface of the canal.

Very well, my friends, the Nolan shouts. As promised, I shall grant your request. Let us now consider the mirror.

In Curtis’s dream his head is bandaged, his eyes taped over with balls of white gauze, and somehow he can see right through them.

He’s walking away from his overturned Humvee, cracked and hissing on the cobblestone street — although the crash really happened on a dirt road south of Gnjilane, not anyplace that looked like this. Italian marines from the San Marco Battalion squat in the shade of a row of palmtrees, watching him with grim sympathy. Curtis raises a hand to them, and now he knows this place: Split, in Croatia, where he came ashore during Dynamic Response back in ’98, three years before the accident.

The blue harbor is stretched behind him. The blue sky is punctuated by a line of Sea Stallions, their rotors muttering in the breeze. Green mountains to the north. A couple of belltowers poking over tiled rooftops. Ahead, the Iron Gate of Diocletian’s palace, framed by low arches. The pavingstones are slick beneath his slippered feet, worn down by centuries of passage.

Someone is on his left, leading him, someone he can’t see. At first it’s Danielle; then he remembers that he can’t have met Danielle yet, that he’s still months and miles away from Bethesda, and the realization thrills him: he’s moving under his own power, safe and unafraid, gliding through the wide and shifting world. The person leading him speaks low, at the threshold of his hearing. He can’t make anything out. The voice guides him like a silver thread in a labyrinth.

They’re moving quickly through twisting streets, past the Byzantine arches of a Gothic loggia, beneath a boxy white belltower, through an ancient peristyle. Twinned stone lions. A granite sphinx. The passageways narrowing. The walls filmed with shimmering esophageal ooze. Everywhere now the tang of the sea.