The Mirror Thief(20)

Not that I know about.

Well, you wouldn’t know, would you? Damon’s the only one you’ve been talking to. Right? When’s the last time you saw Stanley, kid?

Curtis looks down at his plate. Picturing Stanley on a bench by the Tidal Basin, fanning a deck of cards for Mawiyah’s little cousins. Mawiyah and Curtis’s dad shouting from their pedalboat in mostly mock disapproval. Foamy clumps of cherryblossoms adrift on the water. Danielle beside him, laughing, invisible, on his left. Her fingers laced in his own. It’s been a couple years, Curtis says.

Kagami looks off into the sun for a while. He’s changed a lot, you know.

How do you mean?

For one thing, he’s sick. I don’t know what’s wrong, but he was walking with a cane when I saw him on Wednesday. He didn’t look too great.

Stanley’s never been sick a day in his life.

For another, Kagami continues, he’s crazy. For the past couple of years, Stanley has been losing a tremendous amount of money. Just throwing it away at the tables. He comes up with these new systems that don’t make any sense at all, that have nothing whatsoever to do with probability. He’s gotten really strange, Curtis. He dropped six grand in here the other night without batting an eye. I shouldn’t have done it, but I pulled him aside, asked him what the hell he thought he was doing. I told him to knock it off with the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. I told him to stop believing his own bullshit.

You told him that?

That’s what I told him.

What did he say?

He told me a Zen story.

Say again?

He told me this story about a famous archer who lives in Japan. The guy is known universally as one of the great masters of his art. People come from all over the world to study with him. And although he’s very old, and he’s been shooting for many years, the guy has yet to hit the bullseye.

That’s the story?

Yeah. Stanley likes telling me Zen stories. It’s a little joke we have.

Is it true?

Kagami gives Curtis an exasperated look, opens his mouth to say something, closes it again. Stares down into the valley.

Walter, Curtis says, Stanley is always going on about that mystical stuff. It’s all just part of his act. He doesn’t really believe any of it.

Kagami shrugs. Maybe when he first started it was an act, he says. Maybe there was always a grain of truth in it. Sincerity. Fantasy. Wishful thinking. Maybe he’s been doing his act for so long now that it’s become who he really is. Or, hell, kid, maybe all any of us do is just an act. Who knows?

Kagami swirls a bit of duck in its blueblack sauce, lifts it to his mouth. You ever counted cards, Curtis? he asks. Seriously?

No sir. I understand how it works, but I’ve never tried to do it myself.

Kagami chews very slowly, washes down the mouthful with water and wine. If you’re running hot, he says—and when I say hot I’m not talking about luck; I mean you got a solid true count, you’re shuffletracking, you got a weak dealer and nice deep penetration in the shoe—there comes a moment when you are in complete control of the game. You know what your cards, the dealer’s cards, even the guy down at first base playing basic strategy’s cards are going to be, as well as how they’ll be played, until the cutcard comes up. It is very difficult to describe this feeling. It’s almost like—

—and here Kagami looks up and reaches abruptly into the air above their heads, as if to pluck a word floating there, his face at once alive and very old, the sunset igniting his gold rings and wire-rimmed glasses and thin black hair, a few stars peeking out of the deep blue behind him—

—omnipotence, he says. Take it from me, kid, this feeling can do funny things to your head. It becomes very easy to fool yourself into thinking that the whole world might be a big blackjack game. If you could just recognize it, see the correspondences, learn to read the cards. Even the best players—and I hope you’ll forgive me for saying that I am one of them—hit this moment only very rarely. Stanley lives there. In that moment. All the time. And I believe that this has gradually driven him out of his mind.

Curtis isn’t sure what to say to this. He nods, looks away.

I’m not making a lot of sense, Kagami says. That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. All I’m saying, Curtis, is that you should never underestimate people’s capacity to believe weird things. I mean, let’s just take a look around.

Kagami jerks a thumb toward the Mormon temple. The folks in that building, he says, believe America was first settled by a lost tribe of Israel. Your dad thinks white people were created by an evil scientist. You never know what somebody’s going to grab onto when he starts to sink, kid. Don’t be too sure you know where Stanley’s coming from these days.

Curtis thinks about that for a moment. I figure it like this, he says. Maybe Stanley’s lost his mind. Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he was part of the team that hit the Point, and maybe he wasn’t. None of that really matters to me. What matters is, he’s either running from me, or he’s not. If he’s running, then there’s no way in hell I’m ever gonna catch him. If he’s not, then I believe he’ll talk to me.

A sudden gust comes down the mountain, flapping the tablecloths and toppling an empty tray; somewhere nearby one of the ravens squawks in surprise. For the first time since he arrived, Curtis is glad he’s wearing a jacket.