The Mirror Thief(35)
On the book’s second printed page—a poetic narrative by Adrian Welles, Seshat Books, Los Angeles, copyright 1954—is a brief inscription: a message from whoever gave it away to the person they gave it to, somebody called Alan. Stanley’s never been able to make out what the fiercely slanted handwriting says; one word looks like salad, another naked. He’s long since given up on deciphering it. Above the message, Adrian Welles’s printed name has been struck through with a curving slash of black ink. Stanley used to flip to this page and wonder why somebody would cross the name out like that, but lately he doesn’t think about it at all.
Sometimes he’ll close his eyes and close the book, balancing its spine on the mounts of his palm. He’ll picture a dark figure—Welles, Crivano, himself—slinking through the streets outside, cloaked in a slicker and a dripping hat, in pursuit of some unfathomable objective: a void errant in the blurred landscape. Stanley will hold this image as long as he can, until other concerns encroach—what if Welles has left this place? what if he’s dead?—and then he’ll let the book fall open and he’ll read the first line his eyes fall on, hoping it will contain a clue as to where he should go, what he should do next. Stanley knows there’s no real logic to this practice—or, rather, that the logic is the book’s logic, not the world’s—but this is as it should be. The point where the book and the world intersect is exactly what he’s looking for.
Sometimes a line offers clear direction: I seek you in constant carnival, masked Crivano, along the waterline. More often not: Omphale’s husband has rendered his judgment! You sully your hands with occult burrowing, but the goldmaker’s shame still whispers from the reeds! Sometimes a passage seizes his attention for no reason he can name—
Aqua alta: Crivano’s feet
fuse with those of his watery double.
Look not upon your confederates,
the knaves hung from the columns!
Two-headed, in two worlds,
your facedown likeness
finds his silent image in the sea.
—and lures him in, propelling him to the final page, the final lines. 17 February 1953, followed by two names: this town, this state. The map that guided him here.
Whenever Stanley and Claudio become bored with reading, bored with each other and themselves, they go to the movies. The first-run theaters in Santa Monica are the best place to see the lush and earnest melodramas that Claudio favors, but Stanley prefers the Fox on Lincoln: it’s nearby, half the price, and its B-grade westerns and horror movies are more suited to his taste.
But the Fox isn’t safe in the rain. Stanley and Claudio visit it a few days after their run-in with the Dogs, crossing Abbot Kinney and Electric, following Fourth to Vernon, seeking shelter under the crowns of eucalypts and rubber trees, still soaked to the skin by the time they spot the theater’s neon sign. Stanley shivers in his seat as the first reel begins, distracted as always by the projector’s machinegun stutter, the quick drip of images splashed on the screen.
It’s a monster movie: a volcano releases giant scorpions from their underground lair, and they attack Mexico City. Stanley picked this one because it has lots of Mexican actors in it that Claudio probably knows; also, he wants to see how the scorpions work. He doesn’t generally have much patience for sitting in theaters, but giant movie monsters like the Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth and the dinosaur in The Beast of Hollow Mountain fascinate him. The first time he saw one—it was Mighty Joe Young at the Lido on Fordham Road; Stanley was eight years old; his father had left him there while meeting a girlfriend around the block—he’d understood immediately how it was done, could sense the invisible hands reaching between the frames to imbue the figures with life, and he knew he’d discovered something important, a small secret that opened onto bigger secrets. The trick wasn’t in the fake monsters, or even in the riffling spool of film, but right there in his own head the whole time. The eye that tricked itself.
This movie begins with a corny fake-newsreel opening—stock footage of volcanoes—and then the two heroes take the stage: a wisecracking American geologist and his handsome Mexican sidekick. Stanley finds himself drawn in by their cool daring and easy banter, and for a while he’s caught up in the story, because after all aren’t he and Claudio just like these guys? Two explorers in a dangerous land, with only each other to fall back on? Stanley half-wishes the movie could go like this forever: the men taking turns at the Jeep’s wheel, passing gnarled jungles and smoldering ridges under the weird light of an ash-laden sky; the killer scorpions always sensed but never named, never visible, and the whole landscape vivid and mysterious in their uncast shadows.
Soon, of course, the leading lady shows up—followed by the inevitable little kid with a dog, acting cute and making trouble—and Stanley’s interest gutters. Things don’t get any better when the scorpions finally make the scene. They look pretty good at first, creepy and realistic, but the filmmakers don’t have much footage, so they keep repeating shots: one goofy closeup of a popeyed scorpion head drooling poison ooze gets reused so many times that Stanley loses count. The producers must have run out of money or something, because by the last reel they’re not even using models half the time, just a black scorpion silhouette laid over shots of Mexicans panicking in the streets.
Stanley’s barely even watching the movie—he’s trying to remember if the guy playing the American geologist is the same guy who played the geologist in The Day the World Ended, and wondering whether this is a coincidence, or if maybe the actor has some geological expertise in real life—when a lit cigarette stings him in the back of the neck. He slaps his skin and turns around, but no one’s behind him. As he scans the half-empty theater, shielding his swelling pupils from the bright screen, a second butt strikes his seatback and sends a spritz of orange sparks past his arm, and now he can see them: six Dogs, seated across the aisle a few rows back. Whitey’s hair glows in the projector’s pulse, but Stanley can’t make out any faces. Some have their dirty All-Stars propped on the seats in front of them, and they’re all smoking or lighting up, readying their next broadside.