The Mirror Thief(55)
Welles opens his mouth, closes it, and sighs in exasperation. My apologies, he says. It is difficult to speak of these things without seeming pedantic or obscure. Especially since I’ve no way of knowing what you know.
Stanley shoves his hands into his jacket pockets. The fabric pulls tight across his back, pressing the blackjack against his skin. Yeah, Stanley says. Sorry. I guess the thing is, I ain’t never been too good at asking questions. Thanks for being patient.
Spooked by something, a pair of gulls takes off from the crown of a derrick a block south, yelping and beating their wings, and Stanley and Welles both jump. The dog freezes, raises its head. We should move on, Welles says. The place I want to show you isn’t much farther.
They cross the boulevard’s eastbound lanes and pass once more into a street of battered bungalows. Derricks rise from empty lots, sometimes from lawns. The houses are dark, tumbledown, with broken windows. An abandoned Kaiser-Frazer sits on the left side of the street, perched haphazardly across the curb; it’s ringed by shards of glass and crushed cigarette butts, and three of its tires are slashed. Stanley’s shoreline rivals have left their marks here, painting crude snarling canines on the car’s doors and hood. Dashed-off letters twist in the spaces between, advertising the illiteracy of their authors: D O G E S. Stanley smirks to himself.
We spoke earlier of wars, Welles says, and of great battlefields. I believe that battles can take a number of forms. One could even say that we are walking through a battlefield right now. Often it has occurred to me that what is being fought over in these conflicts—be they great or subtle—is the right to memory. And not only the right to remember, but the right to forget. To selectively forget.
They’ve come to a steep bridge over a canal. Looking down, Stanley sees the reflection of the fog-shrouded moon in the stagnant water, filtered through an iridescent glaze of oil. About fifty yards to the right, this canal joins a wider waterway that parallels the street they walk on. A block ahead is a second bridge, then a third beyond that one, and Stanley becomes aware of a network of brackish canals that runs throughout the neighborhood, scum-filmed and overgrown, a liquid shadow cast by the grid of streets. Welles and the dog walk alongside the bridge railing; Stanley follows them. As their footsteps echo below he hears the scurry of rodents, the percolating cluck of mallards roused from sleep.
The name of this place, Welles says, is not an affectation. Or not an unearned affectation, at any rate. Nearly every street that you and I walked upon this evening, and more besides, were at one time canals. The roundabout on Windward was once a lagoon. Rialto Street, Grand Boulevard, the St. Mark’s Hotel: these names were originally descriptive, not merely allusive. But the city of Los Angeles filled in most of the canals in 1929—to make the area more easily accessible by automobile, I believe—and the original character of the place has been all but lost since that time. I was quite conscious of that history while I was writing my book.
Welles takes the pipe from his teeth and thumps it against his palm, emptying the ash into the canal. His tobacco tin reappears. The intellectual tradition in which Crivano participated, he says, was syncretic, millenarian, utopian. Like all utopian traditions—think here of Plato, Augustine, More, Campanella—its metaphors are inevitably urban. We find this throughout the Hermetic literature. In the Asclepius, for instance, we see prophesized a city founded toward the setting sun into which it is said the whole race of mortal men shall hasten by land and sea when the gods of Egypt return. In the Picatrix, we read of Hermes Trismegistus’s city of Adocentyn, wherein the display of magical images—images, mind you!—assures the virtue and the prosperity of every inhabitant. The architecture of the city’s structures reflects the architecture of the heavens. Think of the implications of this. In the perfect city, we become our perfect selves. It is literally heaven on earth.
The moon’s reflection on the canal’s surface is split by a swimming rat; the smooth V of its wake expands toward the banks with geometrical precision. Welles packs his pipe as he waits for it to cross. When he’s finished, he lights up, then lets the burning match drop to the water. A circle of blue-green flame forms where it falls, flares for a moment, and dies out.
We think of cities as places, Welles says. They are not. Mountains are places. Deserts are places. We are, in fact, standing in a desert right now. Cities are ideas. Independent of geography. They can vanish, suddenly or gradually, and reappear thousands of miles away. Changed, perhaps. Reduced. Always imperfectly realized. But still somehow the same. Retaining the essence of the idea. As above, so below, as the alchemists would say. To perfect the wonders of the One. This, for me, is the heart—the real kernel—of Crivano’s story. It’s what I had in mind when I wrote it, anyway. And it’s why I wanted to show you this place. We should go back now.
They return to the boulevard the way they came, then make a left to pick up the boardwalk again. Stanley replays what Welles has been saying in his mind, looking for threads that might connect to the questions he wants answered. He’s glad the guy’s on a roll, but it’s making him nervous, too. It almost seems like Welles is talking about a different book than the one he read. What was it you said a minute ago? Stanley says. About my patron? What was it you meant by that?
Hm? Oh. Yes. Hermes Trismegistus. Do you know who he is?
I know who he is in your book. He’s some kind of god, or a wizard, who lived a long time ago.