The Mirror Thief (60 page)

But he’s out of danger now, or nearly so. Her eyes flit everywhere, everywhere but his face, and the color creeps back to her cheeks like schoolchildren returning after a bomb scare. She’s a little shaky; she keeps fidgeting to hide her jitters. Her tone, too, is shifty when she speaks again: apologetic at first, then accusatory. I guess you probably think, she says, and trails off. Listen, she snaps, don’t think for one hot minute you understand—

Trust me, Stanley says. I don’t.

Cynthia cops a coltish Audrey Hepburn pose on the banister, getting back her cool by acting cool. Her voice is bright and thick and unconvincing, maple syrup dripped over spun glass. They’re not my parents, you know, she says. Claudio told you, right? I’ve just been shacking here for a couple months. I met Adrian on the beach, just like you did. They’re nice people, no matter what you think. Anybody who asks, we just tell ’em I’m Synnøve’s niece. Around here, nobody asks.

She’s staring hard now at nothing; her fingers fiddle with a phantom cigarette while her eyes dice up the empty space before her. Nobody
makes
me do anything, she says. I don’t get what’s wrong. There’s not any harm in it. Just because somebody says. It’s just different, dig? Like you and Claudio.

You don’t know shit about me and him.

She blinks. Then her eyes sweep the stairway—mechanical and eerie, like the eyes of an old porcelain doll—and they settle on his face. She fixes him with a watery sneer. You’re a child, she says. I don’t care where you’ve been, or what you’ve done. To me you’re just a kid.

She holds his gaze for a couple of breaths, then looks away again. Almost like she’s bored. There’s plenty of space now between her and the wall, enough to push through. It’s stupid for him to stay here any longer.

So, Stanley says. What’s with upstairs? The furniture. The marks on the floor.

Her sneer gets sharper, crueler. What do
you
think it is? she says.

He shuffles his feet. Magic shit, he mumbles. An altar.

I bet, Cynthia says, that you would just
love
to see what goes on up there. Wouldn’t you? To be a little fly on the wall. I’ll bet you’d sit there on the bench, and fold your hands in your lap, and you’d never make one single peep.

For a second—just a second—Stanley’s face feels hot.

I don’t
believe
a word of it, she says. Just so you know. All the mumbo-jumbo’s lost on me, dad. It’s all pretty silly, I think. Juvenile. All that time and effort, trying to catch ghosts. There aren’t any
ghosts
. It’s weak-minded
and sad, thinking like that. You read that book
Atlas Shrugged
? That’s where
I’m
coming from, man.

Stanley leans against the wall, crosses his arms to hide the shake. Well, he says. I guess that pretty much makes you a goddamn whore, then. If you don’t believe it.

Her mouth falls open with a tiny gasp. Not shocked: surprised. Like he’s just handed her a flower that he’d kept hidden behind his back.

Then she throws her head back and laughs. It’s not a fake laugh, either. It sounds a little relieved, a little insane. Stanley’s mother laughed that way when his grandfather died, for hours and hours. It was about the last sound Stanley ever heard her make.

It’s a while before Cynthia can breathe well enough to speak. Poor Adrian! she wheezes. He thinks he
conjured
me. Did Claudio tell you that? No joke. It’s
pathetic
, dig? Wanting to
see!
Wanting to
know!
I don’t get it. I mean, it’s not like I
enjoy
what we do. It can be kind of a drag, honestly. But I get home-cooked chow, I get a nice place to sleep, I get some extra pocket change. I make choices, just like anybody. This is a whole lot better than where I came from, believe me.

Yeah? Stanley says. Where
did
you come from?

The question snuffs what’s left of her smile; a flicker of the blankness returns. Then she grins: a broad bottomless grin. She looks like a kid who’s figured out how to burn ants with a magnifying glass. Hell, she says. I came from hell.

That brings on a fresh round of sniggering. Soon she’s doubled over, wracked by hiccups, wiping her watery eyes.
A whore!
she says. That’s
perfect
, Clyde. And not just
any
old whore, either! Oh, no! Man, that’s really good. That’s a regular scream.

Yeah, Stanley says. Hilarious.

He draws the pistol from his belt and tips up the safety-lever and points the slim round barrel at her face. Cynthia looks at it, confused. Her wide mouth closes; her full pink lips curdle into a frown. She doesn’t seem scared. The two of them stare at each other. She hiccups again: a soft fleshy cluck in the dim quiet.

Get up here, Stanley says.

He marches her into the study, then across it, to the black door. Where are we going? she says. What are you gonna do?

We’re
not going anywhere, toots. I’m dusting out. First I gotta lock you up.

Where is everybody? Did you kill them?

She asks the question in the same mildly curious tone that she might ask
Have you heard the new Johnnie Ray album?
or
Is that a new Van Heusen shirt you’re wearing?
It wrongfoots Stanley for a second. My buddy got hurt, he says. Synnøve and Adrian took him to see a doctor. I got cops looking for me. A lot of cops. I don’t want to be around when people get home.

As Cynthia draws the black curtain aside, she stops and turns to face him with a toss of her hair. Her eyes are wide, thrilled. The boardwalk? she says. That was you?

What? Did you see something?

I saw cops. Some ambulances. They said it was a gang brawl, that three guys got hurt real bad. Was one Claudio?

No. The kid’s fine. Just a little knocked-around is all. Did they say—did you hear if anybody died?

She pivots on her heels, still hiccupping quietly. The curtain’s draped like a toga over her shoulder, her left breast. She shakes her head no.

Stanley looks at her. Then he looks at the floor. Then he sighs. Okay, he says. Step back. I’m gonna shut the door.

They want me to have a kid, Cynthia says. Did Claudio tell you?

Stanley stops. His left hand rests on the smooth black wood near the doorknob. The heavy door sways easily with his touch. Is that a fact, he says.

If I do it, she says, they’ll get me my own pad. They’ll pay the rent, for six whole years. They’ll pay my tuition to UCLA if I want to go. I just have to have the kid, and give it to them. Do you think I should do it?

Stanley feels dizzy again, feverish. His vision is tunneling. What the hell do they want a kid for? he says.

Beats me, man. You’re asking the wrong chick. I don’t know what
anybody
would want a kid for. But I guess it’s all part of their—

She waggles her fingers in the air, jerks her head toward the candlelit room over her shoulder. You know, she says. She hiccups again.

Cold sweat drips down Stanley’s temple, along his stubbly jaw. What are they gonna do with it? he says.

Cynthia shrugs. She fans the black curtain before her like a lacy petticoat, or a Dracula cape. Her huge-pupiled eyes lock on his. Do you think I should do it? she says.

Stanley looks at her. Then he looks at his hand, pale against the door’s black edge, its veins too clear under the skin. It seems detached, lifeless. Nothing to do with him. Surfaces seem flat and static, equidistant. Like this room is just a painting of a room. He’s getting sick again, passing out.

So, he says—his voice hollow in his ears, too loud—who’s the proud poppa gonna be? Your dear old Daddy Warbucks, right?

Now she has the curtains pulled tight against both sides of her face, bunched in her hidden hands. She’s a talking mask, afloat in a void. I guess that depends on who you ask, she says. And what you believe.

Stanley blinks hard, shaking his head, trying to regain his bearings. Cynthia’s disembodied face seems to rise, to advance toward him, a cold moon in starless dark. The sight of it already feels like a bad dream, one that he’ll have many more times.

Well, Stanley says, good luck to you, Cynthia.

He swings the door shut on her cute button nose and slides the big bolt home. Then he sinks to the floor—gulping air, trying to get blood back to his brain—and presses his forehead to the smooth wood.

From the other side comes the girl’s muffled voice.
Hey
, she shouts.
My name isn’t really Cynthia, you know
.

Stanley swallows, moving a trickle of spit around his cottony throat. Yeah? he says. Well, get a load of this. My name ain’t Stanley, neither.

A few seconds of silence. Outside, the rain has stopped, or nearly stopped. She speaks again, quieter.
Okay
, she says.
I guess I’m pleased not to meet you, then
.

Stanley closes his eyes, smiles. His lips feel numb and rubbery, like
he’s drunk. He presses his nose to the crack between the door and the jamb. Sweetheart, he hisses, I couldn’t even tell you that I’m pleased.

He grabs the doorknob, hoists himself to his feet. The room disappears. He sees red, then white, then wild explosions of color, then black, and he grips the knob and grits his teeth and doesn’t move and waits for the vertigo to pass.

Eventually it does. The first thing that comes into focus is
The Mirror Thief
. It sits on an eye-level shelf an inch from his nose, as if Welles set it down while unlocking the door and forgot about it. Stanley puts out a hand to touch it, then stops.

It’s identical, of course, to the beat-up book that he’s toted around the county. But this copy looks like it’s never been touched, or hardly touched. Its pages are flat and compact, its flaps uncreased, the silvered letters of its cover unpitted. It could have been printed yesterday. This is his book, but it is also
not
his book—and the fact of its barely read existence seems to mean that the copy he found in Manhattan, the copy he’s been carrying, isn’t entirely his either.
Anybody
could pick this thing up. Stanley remembers what Welles said that first night—
three hundred copies, a hundred of those still sitting in my attic
—and he pictures that latent automaton army crated overhead. For the second time today he wants to burn this fucking house to the ground.

He rushes downstairs instead. In the john off the master bedroom he finds what he needs to remake himself: iodine, rubbing alcohol, fresh clean gauze. He rolls up the waterlogged cuff of his jeans, peels away the reeking bandage. The barbed-wire wound looks bad: slimy, edged with pus. He retches over the commode a couple of times as he cleans it, but nothing comes up, not even liquid. From the mirror above the sink a wasted stranger watches: blue lips, waxy skin, skull-sunk eyes.
This is the face of God you see
.

On the laminate countertop sits a pair of cheap ceramic mugs in the shapes of animal heads: a white cat, a black dog. Stanley fills the dog-head from the tap and drinks from it. Then he pukes in the sink. Then he fills it and drinks again. In a lower cabinet he finds a bristly wicker basket full
of old medicine-bottles; some of them look like they might be sulfa drugs. He swallows a few, pockets the rest.

When he’s done he stands in the entryway and listens to the hiss of cars along the wet pavement, the impatient pacing of the girl upstairs. He tries to think of what else he might need. There’s probably some cash lying around—maybe some jewelry, too, or a nice watch—but at the moment he’s pretty flush. He could take some canned goods from the pantry but they’re probably not worth the extra weight. He turns in a slow circle, scanning the walls and the furnishings. Around him the house rises like a dead thing, an emptied-out shell repurposed by the girl: she occupies it like a hermit-crab.

He came too late. That’s the goddamn problem. Maybe if he’d gotten here a few months ago, before she came, it would have made a difference. Probably not, though. Probably by the time he picked up
The Mirror Thief
in that Lower East Side dive the game was already over: Welles had already given up, lost his nerve. He’d swapped whatever led him to write the book for desires that were easier to keep straight in his head: a home, a wife, a family. He’d made peace with his own wild strangeness, found a way to tame it with magic circles and black curtains and barred doors. He no longer understands his own book. But Stanley understands it. To follow where it leads he’ll have to go alone—at least as alone as Welles was when he wrote it. Maybe as alone as the girl is now. A day may come when that seems like a hardship, but at the moment Stanley couldn’t care less.

Beside the front door is a coat-rack crowned by upcurved horns; hats hang from the horns. Among them is the tweed driver’s cap that Welles wore the night Stanley first met him. Stanley takes it, puts it on his own head. It fits better than he expected.

He pulls on his wet jacket and takes up his father’s fieldpack and leaves the house through the side door in the kitchen. He stands in the yard with mist slicking his bare neck and imagines the car pulling up: Welles and Synnøve on the walk, their dear boy Claudio between them, hand in a plaster cast, a grin splitting his battered handsome face. The three of them sweep to the porch, eager to get indoors, to free imprisoned Cynthia, to chant their spells and bare their bodies and commence their beautiful life
together: the perfect family in a perfect world. Stanley pictures himself, too: creeping after them, toward the creaking bedsprings and the moans and the laughter, the black pistol heavy in his hand, and every whispering shoreline ghost gathered at his back.

He’s fleetingly aware of who he is at this moment: distinct from people he used to be, people he’ll one day become. In times past he would have torched this house with no second thought. Most of his future selves would do it, too; even now he understands that about himself. Years from tonight—in idle moments, half-asleep—he’ll imagine the blaze he could have made, the ending he might have written. Picturing it as seen from the sea, or from a passing plane: the house a bright unsteady flare on the dark shoreline, throwing shadows in every direction. The girl the raw fuel hidden at its heart. Hell, he’ll think, looking back on this moment. I could have showed you hell.