Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Away from the road the ground is steep and broken, crowded with wind-scoured monoliths of deep orange that cast long shadows in the oblique light. The cab drives on, winding past campsites and picnic areas, past a visitor center — Curtis checks his watch again — and through the state park’s exit, into the Lake Mead National Recreation Area.

The blacktop soon ends in a T-intersection: another two-lane road, this one running north-south, parallel to the lakeshore. The cabbie brakes to a gentle stop, reaches for his directions again, studies them for a long time. We lost? Curtis says.

The cabbie shuffles the pages. A whine of static comes from the stereo speakers, pulsing with the rhythms of human speech, but no speech comes through. The sun is well above the rocks now. Through the window Curtis sees blue and yellow flowers between the bursage clumps, coming up everywhere there’s dirt. The cab’s engine shifts into idle. No cars pull up behind them. Nothing passes on the other road.

The cabbie slides the pages back onto his dashboard, lifts his foot, and rolls straight across the intersection to the opposite side, off the blacktop and onto a dirt road that Curtis couldn’t see before. When the speedometer hits about twenty the cab starts to shudder, Curtis’s molars clack together, and the cabbie slows down. A cloud of pink dust rises behind them, spread by a stiff breeze. They won’t be surprising anyone.

They’re on the dirt road for about three miles. It ends at the lake, or a steep drop where the lake used to be. The cabbie stops. This is it, man, he says.

Curtis straightens in his seat, looks back and forth. There’s a port-a-john, a wide spot to turn a car around, and not much else. Wind is coming off the lake, whipping the flowerheads and the sagebrush stems. Great, Curtis says.

He gets out of the car, leans back in. Did the guy say where he’d meet me?

You know as much as I do, the cabbie says. More, probably.

Can I have my phone back?

The cabbie gives him his phone. Curtis turns it on as the cab pulls away under the dustcloud it made. The phone can’t get a signal. Curtis switches it off again.

From here he can see the water, its surface aflame with reflected light. Big birds — gulls or ducks — float across its surface like sunspots. Still a long way off. Just ahead the earth slopes down steeply; a gray stain of riversilt shows where the water used to come. It looks like it hasn’t been anywhere near here in a while. There’s been a long drought; Curtis remembers hearing about it. He shades his face with a cupped right hand and scans the flat expanse between the base of the slope and the waterline, but against the glare he can’t make anything out.

The wind whips his ears. He turns, then turns again. Never so mindful of the limits of his vision as when he’s out in the open, exposed. He draws his revolver — self-conscious, like he’s just dropped trou in public — and clears the Port-a-Can with a rough yank on the door. It’s empty, immaculate, reeking of solvents and perfumes.

He’s beginning to worry about how he’ll get back to the Strip when something catches his eye down by the water. A flash to the south. Regular, but not machine-regular. A signal. Curtis grunts, remembering the little mirror the Whistler used in the casino, and starts walking.

He has to poke around the edge of the bluff for a while before he finds a good route to the bottom, a downgrade gentle enough to avoid slips. Once the surface levels out, the trail is pretty clear. Curtis used to be good at eyeballing distances; since his accident he’s not so sure. He figures the flash for two klicks away.

The lakebed is a good five degrees warmer than the bluff. Shrubs and grasses cover most of it, along with scaly saltcedars tall enough to reduce visibility. A few low spots are muddy; elsewhere the ground has cracked into irregular dinnerplate-size tiles, some unsteady under Curtis’s feet. The fissures between them are sometimes better than an inch across, deeper than he can see. A crunch announces his every step: a pale layer of rough alkaline crystals left by evaporated water. The trail branches, then branches again. Each time he thinks he’s lost, the strobe of the little mirror comes over the brush to guide him. It’s getting hot. He owns clothes that would be worse for this hike than what he’s wearing, but not many. His shoelaces bristle with needle-sharp burrs.

In time he comes upon a broad trail with no grass on it, no plants at all. So straight it could have been plotted by a surveyor. The flash comes from the end of the trail: a broad clearing there, what looks like a flat boulder. The reflected light is low to the ground, always in Curtis’s eyes. If Argos wanted to shoot him he’d be shot by now. Curtis approaches slowly, his palms open, his arms out.

He notices something in the grass to his right: a hollow column of bricks, like a chimney, not quite knee-high. As he draws closer, turning his face from the mirror’s glare, he sees that it is in fact the base of a chimney: part of the brick-edged foundation of what was once a small building. Soon he’s able to recognize more ruins nearby: mud-crusted slabs, silted-up wells, splintered beams ghost-white with residue. This must’ve been a town back before they built the dam and made the lake. Underwater for decades. The drought has uncovered what’s left.

Argos’s voice, the whistle harmonizing with the wind: Keep coming, Curtis! he says. That’s good, what you’re doing with your hands. Keep ’em out, just like that.

He’s seated in what looks like a cheap plastic lawnchair next to a parked dirtbike. A second chair is about ten feet in front of him. Unless somebody else is coming, Curtis figures that for his seat. Both rest on the smooth concrete foundation of an old building long since gone, rotted or floated away by rising water. Aside from a few chipped corners where rebar peeks through, the slab looks ready to build on. Curtis can barely see Argos. Beneath the blazing mirror in his upraised left hand, he’s no more than a shade.

Hey, Curtis calls, Could you maybe knock that shit off?

Argos doesn’t answer, and the mirror doesn’t go away. Curtis takes another few paces forward. Slow and deliberate. Squinting. When he’s an arm’s-length from the empty chair, the light disappears, and Argos’s other hand comes up.

There’s a gun in it: a matte-black semiautomatic pistol. Argos holds it like he’s watched a lot of movies. It makes Curtis nervous, but not too nervous. He’s figured on this, more or less.

Come toward me, Argos says. Keep your arms out. Closer. Now turn around, put your hands on your head. Spread your legs. Good.

Curtis steps onto the slab and does as he’s told, letting Argos take away his pistol and ineptly pat him down. Curtis takes off his jacket, hangs it on the back of the empty chair, and sits.

Argos wears white-framed sunglasses with blue lenses, iridescent and opaque. He’s dressed in a sleek padded motocross outfit, so spotless it looks like he changed into it after he got here. He sinks into his own seat, setting the two guns beside him on the closed lid of a Styrofoam cooler. Curtis can see what Veronica meant: the guy’s face is totally unremarkable. He’s white, but not just white. Part Asian, probably, though he could just as easily pass for Hispanic, or Middle Eastern. Staring hard, trying to see around the sunglasses to what’s underneath, Curtis thinks of an illustration from an Intro Psych textbook he had at Cal Lutheran: a blurry picture of a man’s face, made up of the superimposed images of dozens of faces. Curtis can’t remember what the picture was supposed to be illustrating, but that’s what Argos looks like, right down to the blur.

Before we get started, Argos says, I ought to tell you something.