The Mirror Thief(149)
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 Synn?ve 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.
But not him. Not tonight. No such luck.
When after a few minutes the car hasn’t appeared, Stanley adjusts the pack on his shoulder, unlatches the gate, and walks into the wet narrow street.
REDVCTIO
MAY 22, 1592
Thus in the end we find all divine nature reduced to one source, even as all light reduces to that first self-lit brightness, and images in mirrors as numerous and varied as there are particular substances reduce to one ideal and formative principle, which is their source.
—GIORDANO BRUNO,
from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
49
With a short laugh Crivano wakes himself, then sits open-eyed in the breath-warm darkness, trying to recall what in his dream so amused him.
It was quite late last night when he left the Morosini house. Still, he now he feels entirely restored, scornful of more slumber. He kicks his blankets aside, rises to stretch, withdraws the chamberpot from beneath the bed.
As he’s pissing, he notes a dim indigo sliver of sky between the closed shutters and wonders at the hour. In his memory the Nolan’s voice persists—odd, since Crivano granted the lecture but a modicum of attention. In Cecco’s commentary on Sacrobosco, we read of the demon Floron, who can be apprehended in a steel mirror by means of certain invocations. So spoke the Nolan. Or did he? Could this still be the dream-voice of Crivano’s imagination, limpeting fast to whatever daylit surface will hold it? He can’t be sure.
Ten bells ring from San Aponal as he lights the lamp, fills the basin, splashes his face and neck. In half an hour the sun will be up. He’s to present himself at Ciotti’s shop by the stroke of twelve: plenty of time for a stroll through the Rialto, an inspection of the new bridge. Last night his passage into sleep was hampered by anxieties over the day’s strange events—Trist?o’s insistent introduction to Ciotti, and the unexpected emergence of the girl Perina before that—but this morning these concerns seem distant, as if stifled by some antic reassurance received in his dreams. Crivano feels vigorous and reckless, like a vessel running before the wind.
Among the wise Egyptians, the mirror evokes Hathor the Cow, she who rings the sky as the Milky Way, the Earth as the Nile. The comparable Greek figure, of course, is Amphitrite. The Nolan spoke last night for perhaps two-thirds of an hour. It seemed longer. Crivano might have followed more closely had he not been so unnerved by Trist?o’s conduct: his indiscreet mention of the silvered alembic, his suggestion of the mirror as the Nolan’s topic. This, surely, is why Narkis directed him to associate with Trist?o in the first place—the man’s imprudent dabbling in secret knowledge is the thrashing shark that will feed the swift remora of their own conspiracy—but Crivano can’t help but feel exposed, compromised, by such rash gestures. Last night Trist?o retired from the chamber only minutes after giving the Nolan his subject: a whisper to Ciotti, and he was gone. While no doubt eccentric, it’s unlike Trist?o to be rude, even to a popinjay like the Nolan.