The Mirror Thief(2)
You wish like hell you’d brought the goddamn book.
SOLVTIO
MARCH 13, 2003
All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks draw us constantly toward the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surrealist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caverns, casino mirrors.
—IVAN CHTCHEGLOV, “Formulary for a New Urbanism”
2
A little farther up the Strip the pirates are at it again: their last cannons boom as the taxi drops him at the curb, and he crosses the Rialto Bridge to the sound of distant applause. A whiff of sulfur in the scattered air turns the early-evening breeze slightly infernal. He wrinkles his nose, fights the urge to spit.
Picture him there, on the moving sidewalk: short and broad-shouldered, high-yellow skin and black freckles, around forty years old. He wears wraparound sunglasses, new bluejeans, a leather blazer and a slate-gray T-shirt. A Redskins cap perches on his freshly shaven head, brim low on his brow. His feet move across the walkway’s textured surface, weaving around tourists who stop for photos, cluster at the rails. Below, somewhere out of sight, a gondolier sings in a high clear voice—o mia patria sì bella e perduta—as he turns his boat around. A gust comes from the west, and the song fades like a weak broadcast.
The man—his name is Curtis—enters the hotel beneath the lancet arches of a portico, then walks through the slot machines to the elevators. A blast of perfumed air from the HVAC raises gooseflesh on his sweaty neck. He eyes the blackjack tables as he passes, studying every gambler seated there. He’s tense, fretful, afraid he’s missing something.
He punches the button for Floor 29 and begins to rise. Alone for a moment. His reflection wavery in the copper-tinted doors. He swaps his shades for a pair of black-rimmed safety glasses, fishes his keycard from an inside pocket.
His suite sports two televisions and three telephones, a canopied kingsize rack, vast curtained windows looking south down the Strip. A murky and puzzling painting—the brass plaque on the frame reads. J.M.W. TURNER—hangs over the fold-out couch in the sunken living area. At six hundred fifty square feet, this is the smallest room the hotel offers. Curtis doesn’t like to think about what it’s costing Damon to put him up here, but Damon won’t object; they both know he’s in the right place.
He checks the phone and the fax machine, but nothing’s come in. He pulls the new box of hollowpoint hotloads from his jacket pocket and puts it in the little safe in the armoire, then sets his snubnosed revolver on top of it. It’s getting dark: the city’s vanishing from the windows, replaced by the reversed image of the room itself. Curtis switches off the overhead lights, looks out at the view: Harrah’s and the Mirage down the Strip, the belltower and turquoise canal below. A flash of memory, from three years ago: Stanley leaning on the balustrade above the moored gondolas. Tweed driver cap cocked on his bony head. Stirring the air with small gnarled hands. The new moon low in the west, a washed-out circle in the black. Stanley reciting a poem: Burn, thief of images, on the amnesic sea! Something like that. Before Curtis can get a fix on it, it’s gone.
Lights are coming on all over the city, trembling in the rising heat. The blue-white beam of the Luxor is just visible in the distance, a streak in the indigo sky. Curtis thinks about home, wonders whether he should call, but Philly is three hours ahead: Danielle will already be asleep. Instead he undresses to his boxers, folds his clothes, tries to find something sexy on the widescreen TV, but all he seems to get are computer graphics of cruise missiles and 3-D rotating maps of the Gulf. After a while he puts down the remote and does pushups and situps on the carpeted deck as the talking heads drone on above him, speculating eagerly about the war to come, their jerky pictures freezing up from time to time, glitching out into flat digital mosaics.
When he’s done, Curtis mutes the television and opens the safe again. His wedding ring is there, next to the box of ammunition, and he slips it on, takes it off, puts it in his mouth and sucks on it, clicking it against the backs of his teeth. He unholsters the little revolver, unloads and checks the cylinder, and dry-fires it at the flickering TV, one hundred times with his right hand, eighty with his left, until his forearms burn and his index fingers are raw and chapped. It’s a new gun; he doesn’t know it as well as he should.
His stomach turns over with a gurgle, still upset by the long flight and the many sleepless hours before it. He locks up the ring and the pistol and walks into the fancy marble head, where he sits on the commode and fishes through his shaving kit for his nailclippers. His hands smell like gun-oil and are cracked from the dry air, and for the first time today Curtis remembers, really remembers, what it was like being in the Desert.
3
Later that night, on his way back from dinner, Curtis spots Stanley’s girl at a blackjack table downstairs.
He stops for a second, blinking in surprise, then begins a slow clockwise orbit of the gaming floor, keeping her on his good side, in his periph. Picking up a ginger-ale along the way to busy his hands. She’s looking around, but not at him.