The Mirror Thief (49 page)

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.

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.