The Mirror Thief(120)

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.