Martin Seay - The Mirror Thief

Welles is on the stairs, singing in a deep buttery voice as he climbs. O Fortuna , he chants, velut luna statu variabilis. Semper crescis aut decrescis, vita detestabilis—

Stanley keeps his eyes on the framed map, hunting out details: domes and belltowers, plazas and sailing ships. A couple of smaller outlying islands are labeled; their names are almost familiar. IVDECA, one says. MVRAN, reads another.

Welles’s voice. Recognize it? he says.

Sure. It’s the city in your book.

That’s right. I don’t suppose you’ve ever been there?

Stanley squints, leans closer. His nose nearly touches the paper. I don’t think so, he says. Where is it?

It’s in Italy. On the Adriatic Sea. If you had been there, I suspect you would remember.

Italy, Stanley says. That’s in Europe. Right?

Yes. Europe. Correct.

No, Stanley says. I never been to Europe.

Welles steps forward, puts a cold bottle in Stanley’s hand: a Goebel. You should go when you can, Welles says. You would find it intriguing. If nothing else, my modest lecture on local history of two nights ago would accrue broader resonance. The city — the original, I mean — is built on the water. Directly on it. There is no earth to speak of, not really. It sits in the midst of a lagoon. Do you know what a lagoon is?

Sure. My dad was at Eniwetok.

Then of course you do. Our word lagoon comes from the Latin root lacuna , which refers to a gap, an absence, an interruption. Which may explain why this city throughout the years has become a locus of such diverse and vigorous species of desire. It has deliberately situated itself in a void.

Stanley steps back from the wall. A beer is about the last thing he wants right now, but he sips the Goebel anyway. It’s a nice place you got here, he says.

Thank you. At this point, I suppose, Synnøve and I can afford to move up in the world, as they say. But this feels like home. Along the waterfront, we are left to our own peculiar devices. And frankly I can’t abide the thought of moving all these books.

Stanley nods toward the bolted door. What’s in there? he asks.

That, Welles says. He takes a long sip of beer. That is Cynthia’s room, he says.

Stanley looks at Welles with upraised eyebrows. Then he takes a long stagy glance at the sliding bolt, and looks at Welles again. You scared maybe she’ll get loose while you’re sleeping? he says.

Welles forces a laugh. Ah ha ha! he says. It looks a bit eccentric, I know. Often I have wondered why the previous occupants saw fit to install such a door. The realtor claimed total ignorance. I used to imagine all sorts of things. A bootlegger’s storeroom. A white-slave dungeon. The asylum of some grown idiot son. All plausible in this neighborhood. Nowadays I hardly think of it at all. Shall we have a seat on the lanai?

The what?

The lanai, Welles says, opening the french door to the deck. I was afraid that we’d have rain again tonight, but for now it looks to be lovely. We’ll come back in if we get chilled, of course.

Outside there’s a stumpy wooden table ringed by folding canvas chairs, the kind of chairs that Claudio’s screen magazines always show movie-stars and famous directors sitting in. The deck doesn’t afford a view of much except the side of the neighboring house, but Stanley still has a sense of the ocean’s closeness. An armada of small dense clouds sweeps across the dusk-blue sky, and the moon hangs among them like a bruised apple, its perfect circle on the wane.

Welles gives Stanley the chair with the best west-facing vista. Stanley doesn’t want it — it’ll put Welles in silhouette; he’d rather to be able to read his face — but he takes it anyway, because it seems rude to decline. So, Welles says, getting comfortable in the creaking chair. You have some questions for me.

Yeah, Stanley says.

They sit in silence for a while. The hi-fi downstairs must have played through the LP’s side. Overhead, the buzz of an airplane grows and fades.

Well, Welles says, there’s no rush. Take whatever time you—

I want to know about magic, Stanley says.

All right. What can I tell you?

You can tell me how to do it. How to get it to work.

Welles is quiet. Then he chuckles. The sound is smug, patronizing — and fake, too. You’re asking the wrong fellow, I’m afraid, he says.

Whaddya mean?

I don’t know anything about magic, Stanley. I learned a few card tricks in the Army, but I’ve forgotten even those. I’m sorry.

Stanley shifts his beer from hand to hand. Crivano knows about magic, he says. You wrote about him. So you must know something.

Welles seems to think about the question for a while, but Stanley can tell he’s not really thinking. It courts banality to make the point, I suppose, Welles says. But I am hardly Crivano.

Like hell you’re not. C’mon, Mister Welles. I’m not talking here about the real, historic Crivano. I ain’t interested in that. I’m talking about your guy.

Welles opens his mouth to reply, then closes it again. He leans forward in his seat, puts his beer on the table, steeples his fingers across his lips. He seems irritated, but also — somewhere deeper — nervous. Stanley takes long breaths. He’s closing in, but this next turn will be tough to make.

Is that really what you wanted to ask me? Welles says. You want to become a magus. An alchemist. A magician. Is that right?

That’s pretty much it, yeah.

I can’t tell you how to do that, Stanley.

Stanley nods, sips his beer. I don’t believe you, he says.

Welles is blinking fast, trying to work himself up, to maintain his front. This is fantasy, Stanley, he sputters. I mean, come now. You are not a child. These are not things that happen in the world. They exist in our imaginations.

Bullshit, Stanley says.

Stanley.

Bullshit. That is bullshit. I’m sorry, Mister Welles, excuse me, but it is. I know. I have read your goddamn book many, many times, and I know what is real and what is not real, and I know that that is bullshit. I know magic ain’t about sawing ladies in half, or telling the future, or changing Coca-Cola into 7-Up. I know it’s about seeing a pattern in everything. I want you to show me how.

Welles stares at him. There’s a flat warning in his eyes, one Stanley hasn’t seen since those first moments when they met on the beach. Here at last is the Welles he’s wanted to talk to: the Welles with barred doors in his house, the Welles who keeps guns in his desk-drawers.

Their eyes remain locked for what seems like a long time. Then, without blinking, Welles flops back in his deckchair and sighs heavily. He puts his hands behind his head, interlacing their fingers. You have my apologies, he says. Indeed, you are not a child. Childhood’s end arrives when we realize that the world is unacceptable. Am I right? It’s unacceptable! It’s corrupt! It is a vale of sorrows, a kitchen full of smoke, a perpetual travail. What can we do? We can capitulate. We can give up our expectations, and accept what is the case. Or, we can fight. We can resist. Here, I think, is where the desire to create originates: from this great visceral disgust with the world, and with the experience of living in it. I’m not speaking of a desire to reform or reshape the world, mind you. I’m talking about the desire to negate it entirely, to replace it with something better, more suited to ourselves. In recognizing this desire, of course, we find ourselves in the company of our two friends, the poet and the magus.

Welles stands, lifts his beer from the tabletop, walks to the deck’s wooden railing to gaze toward the sea. When I was a young man, he says, I admit I entertained the notion that the poet and the magus are somehow unified by this refusal. That they are, in fact, identical. I thought that a poem, properly made, can become a magic spell, and can transform the world. I have matured somewhat, and I now see that I was mistaken. The poet changes nothing. He creates palatable alternate worlds, and he invites others to take refuge in them. From such vantage we can sometimes look upon our own base and quotidian existence and see it with a clearer eye, but this is accidental, and beside the point. The poet’s trade is illusion. I am a poet.