Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

That’s right.

I’m from Hicksville. You know where that is?

I know where it is, Stanley says. I never been there.

Don’t bother, she says. It’s the absolute pits .

She spreads the napkin, lifts it before her face. Red dots of various sizes appear between its folds. Alex is the greatest writer of his generation, she says. You may not care about that, but I think you should know.

Stanley does not care, Alex says. He is not sentimental. And what is writing if not sentimentality? Unless it’s the dropping of a few slick turds to mark one’s passage. I’m not certain that I care myself.

Don’t say that, Lyn says.

Stanley takes another sip, then swallows. I heard you typing, he says.

Yes. I was. I like that: typing . Much better than writing . And I’m very glad you didn’t say working . That’s what Stuart and his friends always call it. They imagine themselves to be in sympathy with the proletariat. The truth is that they want their labor to be acknowledged by the marketplace, no matter how they pretend otherwise. That’s a difficult thing not to want. So let us not condemn them. But neither let us call it work . It’s play, or it’s nothing. Minstrelsy at best.

Okay, Stanley says. So what are you typing?

I’m not sure, to be honest. I’m trying to remain unsure. What was it Antonin Artaud said? We spend our days fretting over forms, when we should be like heretics at the stake, gesticulating as the flames engulf us.

Stanley nods toward the tall stack of papers on the floor. It looks like you got a bunch of it, he says. Whatever it is.

Alex frowns, then considers the stack with narrowed eyes. The way somebody might look at a strange animal they’ve taken in, uncertain about what to feed it, how big it might grow.

It’s not poetry, he says. Nor is it a novel, though I have written novels, and published them. It is not artful in any way. During my time in Paris, I became involved with a group of young — how shall I describe them? Revolutionaries? Avant-gardistes? Criminals? To be any one of those, you must exert a plausible claim on the other two. My young friends were convinced that art in all its forms is counter-revolutionary. So-called avant-garde art most of all. Thirty years ago, the Dadaists called it the safety-valve of culture: it eases internal pressure, averts the transformative explosion. Instead of demanding adventure and beauty in our own lives, we seek their simulacra in films and cheap paperbacks. Instead of doing battle with cops and their finks, we sit home and recite our slogans into mirrors. The most skilled evocation of the most perfect society may help us to imagine it, but it brings it no closer to fruition. Quite the opposite. It’s a substitute. It makes our dissatisfactions tolerable, when they must not be tolerable. We rejected all that. We practiced a kind of auto-terrorism. We took as our main objective the construction of situations, and we walked the streets of the city with the demand that they reshape themselves according to our desires. Sometimes — very rarely — they did.

Stanley looks up, interested. How did that work? he says.

Alex doesn’t answer. The three of them sit in silence. The air grows thick with steam from their mugs and the electric kettle.

Stanley’s about to ask again when footsteps scrape the sidewalk outside. The door lurches in its frame; the deadbolt stops it with a clunk. A rapid knock follows. Stanley tenses, turns. The shadow of someone’s elbow appears and disappears at the edge of the painted-over glass.

Stanley looks at Alex, then at Lyn. Lyn is examining the veins in her arm. Alex lights a cigarette, shakes out the match. After a moment, without knocking again, the person at the door goes away. Muttering unintelligibly to himself. The voice is one that Stanley knows: the poet, the ad man, the drunk.

Lyn looks up with a sad smile. Charlie, she says.

Yes, Alex says. I suppose he’s forgotten again.

He leans forward, like a tree bent by ice-caked branches, and slides a mayonnaise-jar lid closer on the tabletop.

Perhaps, he says, it’s only a diary that I’m writing. A catalogue of impressions. A psychogeographical atlas. A rutter of drift. It’s the thread that I’ve unwound through the invisible labyrinth, in case anyone should care to retrace my steps. Such reports are not without value. Often I have relied upon them myself. The explorer who reaches a summit and curses to find another’s ice-axe already there is no explorer at all, but only a conqueror and a thug. Every worthwhile initiative is a collaboration, a conspiracy, a series of coded messages passed across the years from hand to anonymous hand. Such was the nature of our endeavor in Paris.

Stanley can’t tell if that was intended as an answer to his question. A long curl of sour smoke rises from Alex’s cigarette; he draws on it just enough to keep it lit, tips the ash into the mayonnaise lid. The passage of time inside the room seems keyed somehow to that cigarette: like Alex has smoked the clock down to a crawl. Stanley fidgets on his crate. He’s forgotten how much he hates junkies.

As concerns method, Alex says, we simply took to the streets. With no intended destination, no expectation of what we might find. Accident and chance were our means of clearing the slate. We sought out signals and traces with the unerring antennae of our desires. If this sounds effortless I promise that it was not. It required dedication and tremendous fortitude, because the enemy was always present within us. Desire is treacherous, it wants only to be satisfied, and thus it is always ready to accept ruinous compromises. We hoarded our dreams like pirate treasure, and like all proper treasures, they generated maps. In those days we spoke often of a city — imaginary, but still realizable — that would be built with no objective beyond the facilitation of play. The chief obstacle, of course, was architecture. Desire is fleeting; architecture is not. So desire learns to accommodate itself to architecture. Play becomes professionalized. Pleasure becomes rote. We had no solution for this. We believed that in the city of our dreams, every man would inhabit his own cathedral. But through the years the best I’ve ever been able to manage—

Alex puts the cigarette in his mouth, lifts the needle and the eyedropper from the table, shifts them into his left hand, and plucks the cigarette from his lips again.

— is a fortress, he says. A citadel. You see, the best thing about having a habit is that you always know what your desire is, and that it is your own. It’s not like wanting a new Oldsmobile. It seals those other lesser desires in amber, so you can look upon them with a cool eye. I have not forgotten the city that we sought. I once walked its streets, and I believe that one day I will do so again. I must confess that I have very high hopes for Las Vegas. They are certain to be disappointed.

Lyn sighs, leans forward, opens the pack of Luckies on the low table, lights one. She rolls her head as she exhales her first puff, like a gangster’s moll in a movie. Then she picks up a book from the floor— Listen, Little Man! it says on the spine — and returns to the bedroom, untying her silk belt as she goes. As she turns the corner, the kimono slips from her shoulders to the floor. Alex doesn’t look at her, or at anything else. He puts the cigarette to his lips, and its tip glows. It’s not yet a third gone.

Say, Alex? Stanley says. I don’t suppose I could borrow your john for a minute?

The lightsocket hung over the commode is empty. Stanley finds a box of matches and a votive candle on the toilet tank, then shuts the door. Almost before he’s dropped his pants the typing has resumed: a quick initial burst, followed by sporadic chatter, and the occasional hiss of the carriage return. Long silences creep in. Soon Stanley can count the letters of each word so easily that he’s tempted to guess what they are. He thinks of Welles, picturing the fat man seated at his own desk. The triangle formed by his eyes, his fingers, the shuttling page. Stanley closes his eyes, stretches out his arched fingers over an imagined keyboard.