The Mirror Thief(29)

Best wishes to a fellow lunatic! May fortune speed you toward your own opus magnum.

Regards,

Adrian welles

6 March 1958



Stanley knew this guy?

I don’t know how well he knew him. He tracked Welles down when he was living in California. Stanley never told you this story?

Curtis flips to the next page. Turn away, you spadefingered architects of denunciation! it begins.

Turn, you stern merchants of forgetfulness,

you mincing forgetters of consequence, turn!

Tend to your sad taxonomy, your numb ontology,

your proud happenstance of secular wheels!

Nothing thirsts after your pungent spray. Nothing yearns to dry its hands in your grim catalogues.

Cast your auditing stares elsewhere! Bold Crivano,

the Mirror Thief, skips quicksilver on your ancient stones,

trundles his dark burden through viscera of cloud,

swaddled in the damp folds of linden-scented night.





Harry him not with your snares of causality!

Spare him the gnashing of your mad abaci!

Grant him safe transit, you squat sundial kings

(all of you polishing gold to shame silver)

for the treasure he bears in his butterfly sack

is none other than that foremost reflector itself,

the genderless Moon!

Let him pass, and mark not

his passage,

save by sleep-talking

a quiet threnody

in your dreamvoided dark.



What in the hell is this, Curtis says.

Adrian Welles, Veronica says—sounding bored, automatic, like she’s spoken or heard this many times before—was a poet active in the 1950s and early ’60s, loosely associated with the Los Angeles Beats.

Curtis flips ahead, across pages of verse, some in neat columns, some sprawling on the yellowed paper. Toward the end, his eye alights on a line—his flute conjures a harvest of sleep from the little fields of the dead—that he can hear clearly in Stanley’s voice. He’s sure he’s heard Stanley quote it, though he can’t recall when, or why, and after a moment the memory is lost. Curtis riffles backward, as if to shake Stanley’s voice from the book again, until he’s at the beginning; then he shuts the covers, presses them between his palms. The old wraps smooth, like taut skin. He almost expects to feel a pulse.

Veronica is looking out the window. Her eyes are bright, full, like she’s on the verge of tears or panic, but her breath is steady. She’s pulled her legs into full lotus, and she’s absently waggling the big toe of her left foot between her thumb and her index finger. Its shadow appears and disappears on the cushion beside her. Its red nail glistens like a coral bead.

If you want to figure Stanley out, she says, which I do not recommend trying, then that book is probably as good a place to start as any.

This guy—Welles—he was some kind of beatnik?

More like a proto-beatnik. He was an older poet, sort of an also-ran, and he gave the bandwagon a push in the early days. He was on the scene, but not really of the scene.

Curtis shakes his head, sips his drink. The bourbon is sneaking up on him. It feels like he, the book, and Veronica’s eyes are the only motionless things in the room. Everything else is drifting, leaves on a pond.

And Stanley got this from Welles?

Veronica closes her eyes. He thinks for a moment that she’s gone to sleep. When she opens them again, they’re trained on Curtis’s face.

I can’t believe Stanley never told you this story, she says.





SEPARATIO


FEBRUARY 1958


Nothing out of place and yet everything was, because there existed between the mirror and myself the same distance, the same break in continuity which I have always felt to exist between acts which I committed yesterday and my present consciousness of them.

—ALEXANDER TROCCHI, Young Adam





14


Low clouds gather over the Pacific, cushioning the winter sun as it drops, and the beachcombers are coming in. For a moment the colonnades are unshadowed, and a rosy glow lights the winged lions on the frieze of the St. Mark’s Hotel.

Across Market Street there’s a boarded-up gaming parlor—FORTUNE BRIDGO in faded letters on its southern wall—and this is where the boy has set up his game. The king of hearts, the seven of hearts, the seven of diamonds, each creased lengthwise up its middle. Three tiny roofs, gliding across a flattened Wheaties box.

Picture him there, kneeling under the roman arches: small and muscular, maybe sixteen years old, cropped curly head already balding. He’s dressed in bluejeans and a freshly stolen pair of crepe-soled Pedwins; his pink seercheck sleeves are rolled past his elbows. A battered workjacket rests within easy reach, but though the evening air is cool and gooseflesh rises on his arms, the boy doesn’t put it on. The pavement is gritty with sand, littered with shards of windowglass and chunks of stucco from the crumbling fa?ade. The boy rests his knees on a folded-over tabloid, a Mirror-News from last week. FAISAL, HUSSEIN PROCLAIM ARAB FEDERATION, it reads. DODGERS CLOSE TO COLISEUM DEAL. It’s seawater-warped, already yellow from the sun.

The boy has lately taken to calling himself Stanley. When he hopped the southbound B&O in Staten Island last April he began using the alias Adrian Crivano, and that name carried him as far as Little Rock before he was rousted by cops twice in five hours and had to come up with something else; he pulled STANLEY off the side of a Rollorama coach parked at a mechanic’s shop. He was Adrian Stanley in Oklahoma and Missouri, Stanley Welles in Colorado and New Mexico, and when he finally crossed the California state line in mid-December he briefly considered taking the name Adrian Welles—like certain spiders that lure their quarry by resembling it—before deciding that that could only cause problems for him.