Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

He wants to take Albedo’s hand while looking him in the eye, but he’s tired and rattled and can’t do it: he looks at the hand. Goodnight, he says, shaking it. Thanks for the beer.

He turns on his heel and goes. There’s a band of towering NBA types headed his way; he steps among them and lets himself drift toward the saxophone chandelier, the lobby, the marquee. Hearing Albedo’s lubricated voice somewhere behind him— You’re never gonna find your guy if you can’t stay up past two a.m., marine! — before it’s drowned out by the conversation shouted a foot above his head. A few yards on, he shoulders past a couple of college kids in tennis shirts and vanishes, anonymous again, encoded into the crowd. Everyone looking everywhere. He feels eyes sliding off him, water beaded on wax.

The pack of people just ahead slows to look at a gleaming black-and-chrome Harley on a raised platform, and Curtis turns back for an instant. Albedo’s still standing there, flanked by the two women, scanning the round room with squinted eyes. One big hand is pressed to his left ear, his cellphone is in the other, and he sways like an anemone on his planted feet as passersby jostle him. When Curtis looks forward again his path has cleared, and he steps swiftly and lightly to the hotel exit. Walking into the neon glow, the clean night air.

When the cab hits the Strip about a mile down Harmon, Curtis drops a twenty through the gap in the plastic divider and is on his feet before the wheels have stopped. He doubletimes to the squat twin domes of the Aladdin, through a horseshoe arch and into the Desert Passage mall, zigzagging between shoppers, catching details from the blur of ornaments and signs: tunnel vaults, porticos, jeweled mosaics, screens and lattices, eight-pointed stars. Hookah Gallery, Pashmina by Tina, Napoleon Fine Fashions, Lucky Eye Design. Fake rain falls from a fake sky. Patterns proliferate, as if in terror of blankness: geometric, vegetal, endlessly elaborated. Every surface seems vented, weightless, shot through with numberless holes.

Curtis makes a right at a twenty-foot hurricane glass — he mistakes it at first for a neon minaret — and finds himself in a parking lot on Audrie Street, a block off the Strip, alone and exposed under the humming monorail tracks. He crosses to the back entrance of Paris and takes the skywalk to Bally’s, cuts through their casino to Flamingo Road, hops another cab. He doesn’t think anyone’s following him but he wants to be sure; he’s spending a lot of Damon’s money now but fuck it, fuck Damon for putting some sketchy shitbag onto him without giving him a heads-up. He’s digging out the new phone, dialing the only name on the CONTACTS list.

He’s not sure if the number Damon gave him is home or work or cell or what, and there’s no greeting when it picks up, just a beep. Damon, he says. It’s Curtis. I just met up with some guy called Albedo who says he knows you, and who says you told him to call me. I’ve never seen him or heard of him before, and I hope you’ll call me back and tell me what this is about, because the dude seems wrong to me. All right? It’s five a.m. your time. Sorry if I’m waking you up. Later.

To be careful, and to give himself time to think, Curtis has the cabbie drive him as far south as the airport before turning north again. The cab nudges doggedly through the slow after-midnight traffic; Curtis adjusts his cap, settles in his seat, leans his head against the side panel. Staring at his phone’s display till the blue light goes out. A nasty down-elevator feeling in his gut.

This doesn’t mean anything. Not necessarily. It doesn’t mean anything’s wrong. If Damon’s been making moves without keeping Curtis in the loop, well, that would be SOP for Damon, who is loath to so much as circulate a shopping list prior to a grocery run: everything always has to be need-to-know. It drives Curtis nuts, but it’s also partly why Curtis loves him, partly what makes him such a blast to roll with — and partly why Curtis agreed to come out here at all. With Damon, any routine errand could turn into an adventure you’d tell your grandkids about; being kept in the dark was the price of the ticket. Signing on meant drinking a little Kool-Aid, suspending a little disbelief. By now Curtis should know to expect it.

Not everybody finds it charming, though. Slim Shady : that’s Danielle’s nickname for Damon, and not because he looks all that much like Marshall Mathers. He’s that cracker scoundrel friend of yours when she’s pissed off, which lately has been pretty often.

Curtis squashes the phone’s keypad with his thumb. The display lights up again: 2:06 a.m. Three timezones east, Danielle’s probably leaving for work. This is a good time to catch her, but Curtis can’t bring himself to dial, can’t begin to imagine what he’d say. He’s not even mad anymore, not really. He puts away the phone, presses the heels of his hands to his eyesockets. The taxi rolls to a stop at a traffic signal, rolls forward again when the light changes; inertia tips Curtis forward and back in his seat. He turns to the window, opens his eyes.

The first big blowout since they got married. He’s walked out on her before — a few times, not long after they first moved in — but those times he always came right back: home before she’d changed into her PJs. He had no place to run then, nowhere he could imagine himself going. This time he did. And he went.

To keep himself from remembering the argument, he tries to think of the airport: sleepless hours slouched in the cushioned seats at the concourse gate, alone amid a scattering of laid-over travelers. Concentrating hard on the urgent monotonous drip of news from ceiling-bolted televisions. Barely noticing the sunrise in the windows behind him, doubled by the surface of the Delaware. Watching the war take shape.

That’s something else she said: one of her pent-up gripes. Why can’t you just admit that it’s getting to you? Okay, sure. She’s not wrong. The jumpiness and the short temper, the bad dreams and sleepless nights that he shook off after the Desert, after Mogadishu, after Kosovo — shook them off each time, shook them right off, no trouble — sure, they’ve come back a little bit. I see this at the VA all the time, Sammy D. It’s a normal thing. There’s a war coming on, and you’re not in it, and that’s gonna bother you . But it’s not the war that bothers Curtis: it’s everything else. Everything but the war bothers him. The war he knows what to do with. The war makes sense.

This favor Damon’s asking — this is not how people get jobs, Curtis. Are you even listening to yourself? Flying to Las Vegas, sneaking around casinos: this is not any kind of career track you want to get on. If you don’t want to think about your future, you can think about mine. All right? Because I goddamn sure am not gonna sit around for the next thirty — forty years to watch you cash disability checks. You hear me? This is not the way a grownup man acts. Not in the real world .

The real world: that’s the jab she’s leading with nowadays, the power halfback in her offensive pattern. She always says it like there can be no argument about what it means. But to Curtis, the stuff she talks about — cover letters and résumés, community college classes, refinancing the mortgage — it all seems about a million miles removed from what he thinks of as reality. Six thousand miles, anyway. The fact that these are ordinary concerns for every functional adult in America just makes him feel worse. Still, he can’t shake the sense that there’s something inane, something thoughtless, in worrying over stuff like this while another war is coming on. It feels babyish, inconsequential, like playacting that Curtis never took part in and has now long since outgrown.