Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Stuart looks over his shoulder. Get ready! he barks. Here they come.

Within minutes the sand swarms with writhing fish. The crowd on the beach rolls their trousercuffs, rushes forward with whoops and cheers; Claudio hits the cold ocean with a gasp, then wades forward to fill his pail with seawater. The first wave that sweeps Stanley’s bare ankles numbs his skin, seizes his shivering body. He can hardly put a foot down without something squirming under it. Saltwater soaks through his bandage, stings his cut. He stoops, clasps slick scales between his stiff blue fingers, lifts and drops his catch into Claudio’s waiting bucket.

More fish sweep in on each wave, flipping and thrashing, burrowing tail-first into the sand. Patches of beach all along the waterline glitter in the moonlight, as if mirrors have shattered there, their shards come to wriggling liquid life. Stuart and his friends splash past, laughing through chattering teeth. Don’t take more than you’ll eat , Milton says. Leave some for the next new moon . Alex has a small fish cradled in his palm, its head clamped in the crook of his thumb; he whispers something to it, then puts it back into the waves.

The buckets fill, and people amble back to the dry sand. Someone’s playing a blues shuffle on the guitar: I wish I was a grunion, swimming in a cold deep sea , she sings. I’d have all you pretty people fishing after me . Stuart chases one of the women through the knee-deep water, trying to slip a fish down her blouse. Charlie has stolen Alex’s shoes and slipped them on; they’re too small for him. He dances on tiptoe, waving his bottle in the air, shaking his hips and bellowing in an unsteady Scottish burr. Iamb trochee! he shouts. Dig my metrical feet, man! They’re longfellows!

Stanley’s half out of breath — from the cold, from the effort of scrambling after the fish, and also from something else: an unfamiliar feeling that’s hard to name. A wakeful amazement. A sad fragile sense of presentness, of moments passing. The low moon breaks through the clouds for a second, and Stanley thinks of the fireball he saw that time in the desert, and how he felt when he saw it. He thinks of The Mirror Thief , too — thinks of it in a way that he used to think of it all the time, but hasn’t really been able to since he made it out here, since he got close to Welles, as if Welles has been blocking it somehow. Now Stanley remembers. There are certain moments that open onto another world, onto the world that Stanley’s sure he belongs in. The book is a map that will take him there, a password that will unfasten the locks.

He walks back onto the beach for a moment and sits. Claudio rests the bucket on the sand and crouches next to him. Stanley? he says. Are you okay? Are you sick?

Stanley looks at him. Then he looks away. He watches the moon multiplied in the water, the silent buildings along the boardwalk. Streetlamps and the lights of oil-derricks have reshaped the inhabited ruin of the waterfront into a maze of shadows, a hidden web that links a set of illuminated stages. Each empty stage glows like a diorama viewed through a peephole, the scene of a cancelled performance, and hints at something that this place once tried to be. Stanley can feel it reverberate around him, as if he’s inside a struck bell. I’m great, he whispers. I’m doing great.

After a while he rises again. By now they’ve crowded Claudio’s pail with as many fish as seems reasonable, but the bucket that Charlie brought is lying nearby, forgotten on the sand, so Stanley picks it up, and he and Claudio fill it too. What will we do with so many? Claudio asks.

We’re gonna eat ’em. Whaddya think, we’re gonna train ’em to do tricks, like in a flea circus?

How will we do this? We have no place to cook.

Leave that to me, kid. I got a place in mind.

The pulsing silver carpet keeps coming, but soon everybody’s done, loaded with all they can carry. Alex and Lyn have become fidgety, eager to get indoors. They dust themselves off and drift toward town, and the crowd follows them, angling first one direction, then another, pausing sometimes for no reason Stanley can see. The stops and starts spook the captured fish; they ping their snouts against the tin sides of the bucket.

Stuart and the woman he chased hang back, arguing quietly. At Windward they split: Stuart stops to light a cigarette under the Center Drug portico; she continues down the boardwalk with their bucket. Except for Lyn all of the women go with her, and most of the fish go with the women. The men stand around, hands in pockets, watching them walk away. Everything cool, Stuart? one of the guys asks.

Stuart shakes out his match like a movie tough, draws deeply, exhales a volcanic plume through his nose. Can we go someplace, he says, where I can just cool out and think for a goddamn change?

They wind up at somebody’s pad: the upper floor of a rickety old house, now subdivided into a triplex, in the neighborhood that Welles and Stanley walked through last night. The buckets are lined up on the landing, their silvery surfaces broken now and then by a tiny fin or a gasping mouth. Inside, a new bop record rotates on the hi-fi, and the sleeve gets passed around: a photo of a white altoist posed with his horn in the shade of trees, cool and blank-faced, eyeing something offstage right that could be the setting sun, could be approaching doom, it’s all the same to this cat. Stuart and Tony sit on the floor by a cinderblock bookcase, smoking and complaining. I go home, and it’s the kids, the bills, the rent. How am I supposed to get any serious work done? Women don’t understand how hard it is to keep an idea in your head, especially when it’s a dangerous idea, one that nobody wants you to be having . At the kitchen table Alex has settled in: matches, dropper, spoon, needle, the dead biker’s junk. Some of the guys are rolling up their sleeves. Lyn drifts from room to room like a shade, ignored by everyone. Charlie’s propped in a corner, trying to open a bottle of beer, talking loud in his radio voice: Are you risking your life — or the life of your child — by using dirty syringes?

Stanley aches all over, in his leg most of all, and his skin is raw and filmy from the sea. He can’t stop thinking about the fish outside, tapping their noses against the sides of the pails, sucking air off the top. Whatever moment he felt passing before has now definitely passed. He and Claudio slip outside as the moon sets, saying goodnight to no one, lugging their heavy buckets home.

Adrian Welles lives in a clapboard bungalow on Wave Crest, a big house for the neighborhood: two stories, custard-yellow eaves and siding newly painted, long second-floor deck ringed by a wrist-thick wisteria vine. The slab has settled unevenly over the years; from the street, the front door seems slightly off plumb, tilted at a funhouse angle. The house sits on its wide sandy lot like a lunatic on a parkbench, tricked out in his best suit, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but fix passersby with a silent crooked smile.

Stanley and Claudio have spent the day in a frenzy of primping, hauling their filthy clothes to the coin laundry, then hiking north along the beach into Santa Monica to shower and shave at the communal washroom there. By the time they got back to Horizon Court, the wrinkles had fallen from Stanley’s stolen clothes; Claudio slicked his hair back and donned a loud rayon shirt. Then they crowded together as Stanley held out his steel pocket mirror in an outstretched hand. The two of them could pass for horn-players in a hot hotel combo — or film stars, Claudio insisted. We are like two young stars of film.

They headed up Pacific as the sun began to sink, moving through the shadowed mercantile valley of liquor stores and shuttered warehouses and careworn Jewish bakeries, slowed by the weight of the buckets they bore and the risk of splashing seawater on their clean trousers. Stanley’s greatest fear — an encounter with the Dogs that would end, at best, with their catch spilled — did not come to pass, and as they made the corner onto Welles’s street they paused for a moment to relax, to flex their cramped fingers, to feed the gathering neighborhood cats with the handful of fish that died in the night.