Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

The typing stops. After a long silent moment, the door swings open, and Alex’s sharp nose appears. Small eyes glint behind it, like mica on a cave wall. Room service, Stanley says.

Of course. Please do come in.

Alex is dressed in boxershorts and a white A-shirt; his sandaled feet scrape the smooth cement floor. He gestures toward an orange-crate draped with an Indian blanket, which Stanley sits on. The place is dark, practically bare. Not much better than the squat on Horizon. Stanley spies the typewriter in the far corner, a black lozenge perched on a rickety folding table. A forty-watt bulb hangs over it, shaded by butcher-paper screens glued to stretched wire hangers, thick with red and violet gouache. The bulb casts light on the typewriter and almost nowhere else. A pile of looseleaf notebooks sits on one side of the tabletop; a neat stack of typed pages sits on the other. As Stanley’s eyes adjust to the gloom he sees more typed sheets on the floor below, arranged just as tidily, though this paper is old, well-handled, warped and cured by fingertip oil. Stanley guesses the stack on the floor would come halfway up his calf.

Alex seats himself on a second orange-crate. Behind him a door opens onto a slightly brighter room, where indirect daylight falls through a window Stanley can’t see. Sheets and blankets, the edge of a mattress, a slender extended arm. The arm goes away; bare bruised legs appear. Then Lyn is backlit in the doorframe. A pale band describes her upper arm and shoulder, the sharp relief of ribs, the curve of a breast and the hollow of hips, like the hint of craters in a crescent moon.

Who is it? she says. Her alto voice is muggy with sleep.

Why, it’s our new friend Stanley, Alex says. Fix us some tea, won’t you?

She falls back, vanishes around the corner. What does he want? she says.

Alex has produced his kit. He unsnaps the folded leather, lays out the contents on the low table between the crates: cotton, eyedropper, needle. He wants to help us, Alex says. What have you brought for us, Stanley?

Stanley stands, pulls the bindles from his pocket, sits, drops them to the tabletop. Each hits the wood with a resonant splat. Alex tilts forward like a dowsing rod. Nothing in his face suggests excitement, but his eyes are as bright as Stanley has ever seen them. May I? he says.

Stanley nods. Alex unfolds a packet, moistens a fingertip, dips and licks. Lyn emerges again, wrapped perfunctorily in a short satin kimono, and crosses behind Alex to the sink. It’s no more than a tin basin nailed to the wall, a rubber hose run into it. Her kimono falls open when she bends to turn the valve of the spigot, and she doesn’t bother to fix it. She fills an electric teapot, plugs it in.

Alex cuts a strip from a dollar bill with a pair of scissors, then measures powder into a spoon. I had imagined, he says, with all the rough boys and their motorcycles, that some shit must have come into town.

Another splash from the basin, and Lyn comes back to set a pink Depression-glass tumbler on the table. Alex dips the eyedropper, fills the spoon, strikes a match. Lyn switches on an ancient Zenith console radio in the corner, and a watery classical-music broadcast seeps from the loudspeaker. The vacuum-tubes glow blue against the wall, through the tuner dial.

We’ve been hung up for shit for some time now, Alex says. Quite difficult to come by. Stuart and his friends can always find dolophine, paregoric, goofballs. But of course they are no real substitute.

He puts the cotton in the spoon. While the solution leaches though it, he screws the needle onto the eyedropper with the dollar-bill strip. Then he ties off his arm.

The teakettle whistles. Lyn picks it up. Stanley, she says, would you like some milk and sugar?

Her accent is Long Island Irish, though she doesn’t look Irish. The single turn that holds the ends of her belt together has slipped below her navel. Stanley wonders why she even bothered to put the robe on. No thanks, he says.

Alex squashes the eyedropper’s bulb, puts the needle in the cotton, and draws up the fix. Then he hits a vein in the back of his left arm. The liquid in the dropper moves up and down with his heartbeat, gradually darkening. He pumps the bulb, then loosens the belt. Stanley keeps his expression cool, bored, but he’s thinking about the overjolted biker, getting ready to make tracks if Alex hits the floor.

Alex just sighs and sits back on his crate. As if the fix was of less consequence than downing a glass of icewater. He holds the rig out to Stanley, raises his eyebrows.

No thanks, Stanley says again.

Alex looks surprised, then smug. Ah, he says. I see. You prefer the rapture of your own perceptions. For one of your relative youth, that is not surprising. You’ve not yet been made aware of the force and the dimensions of the historical currents arrayed against you. Perhaps you’ve even managed a few small victories. It’s possible. What separates the savagery of the juvenile delinquent from the transformative gestures of the Cabaret Voltaire is precisely that awareness. When at last it does find you, junk will begin to make sense.

Stanley gives Alex a cool once-over: his heavy brow, his sunken eyes, his sleep-tangled hair. Mister, he says, I don’t have a damn clue what you’re talking about.

No? Alex says with a constricted smile. My apologies. I’m afraid there’s a junkie protocol to which I am not adhering. I’m supposed to say that you’re wise not to have a habit, that you’d be foolish to start one. Well. That page of my script must have been left in the mimeograph.

Lyn brings mugs of tea. She knots the belt of her robe, sits on another crate, pushes up the sleeve, ties off her arm. Stanley lifts his mug, blows across it, sips.

Alex has opened his billfold; he counts out a wad, hands it over, and leans back in the shadows. His nose as sharp and protuberant as the dorsal of a shark. Stanley fans the bills, folds them, puts them in his pocket. It’s more than he’d expect to get in New York, but probably less than it’s worth. He doesn’t know the local market, and Alex knows he doesn’t know, so Stanley’s not going to gripe. You’re leaving town, Stanley says.

That’s correct. For Las Vegas. Within the week.

Okay. What do you need?

Alex shrugs. What’s your connection good for? he says.

Can’t say exactly. Anything shy of an ounce should be no sweat.

Alex pinches the opened bindle, lifts it from the tabletop. It’d be the same shit as this? he says.

You bet. But he’ll be shipping out soon, so we gotta move quick.

Your connection is with the motorcyclists, I suppose?

Stanley sips his tea.

Ahhh , Lyn says. The leather strap slides from her arm to the floor, and she slouches on the orange-crate with a dull bleary grin. At least her robe stays closed. Her crate is topped with a cushion, not a blanket, and Stanley sees a logo upsidedown on one end: the same company that bought the harvest that he and Claudio worked in Riverside.

A quarter-ounce should suffice, Alex says.

Two yards I’ll need for that. Up front.

Alex purses his thin lips. I can manage one-fifty now, he says.

Stanley pretends to think about that for a second, then nods.

I’ll have it for you tonight, Alex says. Some of the resident shoreline poets — Stuart and John and a few others — are fêting me. A bon-voyage of a sort. You should come. We’re to meet here at ten. Bring along a pail, and your dark handsome friend. We’ll all catch ourselves some fish.

Alex stirs his tea. The spoon makes lazy peals against the sides of the mug, like a windchime signaling a storm’s approach. Lyn wipes away a daub of blood with a paper napkin. Good clear veins in the crook of her arm: she hasn’t been using long. Alex tells me you’re from Brooklyn, she says.