The Mirror Thief(138)
I’m sorry, Welles says. I must have enunciated so poorly that whatever I said sounded foreign. I’m sure I spoke only English. And that badly, it seems. My apologies.
Stanley nods. Okay, he says. Goodnight, Mister Welles.
Goodnight, Stanley.
On the way to the boardwalk, maybe two lots down, Stanley passes an overgrown yard with a cat in it. The cat has something in its mouth: a sandy fishhead, trailing scraps of viscera. It watches him with glassy green eyes.
Stanley clenches his jaw, aims a kick at the cat’s skull, then pulls it at the last second. The cat hunches, flattens its ears, and tears off through the grass, darting under the porch. Stanley’s vision is blurring again; a tremor gathers in his throat, and his breath comes heavily.
He looks over his shoulder at Welles’s deck, just visible through a spearpoint row of juniper trees. There’s a dark shape on the rail that must be Welles, though Stanley can’t tell if he’s watching or not.
You’re a lying sack of shit, Stanley hisses through his teeth.
46
When Stanley wakes the next morning in the squat on Horizon Court, Claudio isn’t there. Stanley sits up, wipes his eyes, looks around. Wondering if maybe the kid knocked at some point and he didn’t hear it. Then he remembers last night—Cynthia and her frog flick, Synn?ve and her murphy bed—and he knows exactly where the kid is.
He flops down again, pulls up the blanket. Trying to get mad, not quite managing it. The kid is soft; of course he’d take the bed. Can’t blame him for that. Stanley’s not even sure why he was in such a hurry to leave Welles’s place himself. Partly because he was embarrassed by his waterworks performance, sure. And partly because the talk had quit paying off. But there was something else: an uneasiness he can’t name, a sense of something compromised or put at risk. Trying to pin it down just makes Stanley sad, and being sad always makes him tired.
It’s late morning before he wakes again; he’s not sure how late. Still no Claudio. He’s starting to feel like he’s made a bad bet: bankroll too small, number taking too long to come up. He shoves away the blanket, brushes his teeth, drinks from his father’s canteen. The list of names Welles gave him is still in the breast pocket of his new shirt; he finds it and flattens it on the counter in the front room, then looks at it from time to time while he gets dressed. It may as well be in Chinese. Sometimes it’s hard for Stanley to say just what he crossed the country to find, but it goddamn sure wasn’t this. Welles has ducked him again, shifting shape like some wiggly undersea thing, leaving Stanley in the usual cloud of ink.
He thinks of the long walk he took with Welles the night they met, and all the gobbledygook the guy spouted along the way. What if it was all intended to put Stanley off the scent? What if the secret wasn’t in Welles speech, but in his steps, in the path he took over the filled-in canals? Stanley thinks of a word he saw on a streetsign that night, a word he keeps seeing: RIALTO. What does it mean? In The Mirror Thief it’s a place, a neighborhood in the book’s haunted city—not the same as this city, but not completely different, either. The word points toward something. What?
It could be something from history, but Stanley doesn’t think so. History is just more books; the secret he’s after has nothing to do with books. It’s either in the world—hidden there somewhere—or it’s not worth knowing. The closest Stanley’s come to it was on that walk: the way the old man, caught off-guard, pointed to the city to explain himself. Welles wrote the book, sure, but he didn’t build the city. The city is the key. Stanley needs to get outside, to take another look around.
He laces up his Pedwins, slides quietly to the street. Part of what’s put him in a sorry mood is the air pressure: he can feel more rain coming in, though the sky’s clear. As he turns onto the boardwalk he catches a sour sickly smell—bad familiar, rhyming somehow with the odors from the oilfield—and he remembers that he forgot to change the dressing on his leg. Thinking about it brings back the ache; he feels woozy, slows down. The last time he cleaned the wound was yesterday afternoon, at the showers in Santa Monica. It looked all right then; now he’s not so sure. He thinks about going back to the squat, but then figures it’ll keep for a couple hours.
He picks out a spot by the water to sit and watch the boardwalk and think. After a while, when the streets and buildings haven’t disclosed anything, he turns around and looks out to sea instead. The sun is just overhead; the waves are dark translucent blue. Sometimes at the limits of his vision he can see the flash of a garibaldi among the rocks on the bottom, like a ripe Riverside tangerine lost in the waves.
Stanley pulls Welles’s list from the pocket of his jeans and goes through it again, one name at a time, puzzling over each slip of a letter in turn. One name he knows from the book—Hermes Trismegistus, of course—but the rest are gibberish. He stares at them, half hoping they’ll wriggle to life on the page like millipedes and spell out something other than what they say. Before long Stanley has a fierce headache, and they’re no different than they were.
He folds the page, pockets it, and walks north, shoeless along the sand where the ocean breaks. The tide is out. The beach is long and flat and smooth, specked at odd intervals by flotsam that leaves straight comet-trail paths to the water: scattered moon-jellies and by-the-wind sailors, the shells of periwinkles and jackknife clams, the creepy fudge-brown egg-cases of skates, lengths of yellow kelp bowed seaward by the tug of waves. As Stanley looks inland toward the arcades—a couple of shiftless drunks by the Fortune Bridgo, a well-dressed old Jew with a violin case, a woman pushing a baby-carriage and towing a kid with a white balloon—his foot finds something hard buried in the sand, and he stops to uncover it.