The Mirror Thief(86)
A general murmur of assent follows, then builds in volume. Until this academy refuses to suffer such frauds, Crivano hears someone say, we hardly deserve to be taken seriously. How has this self-important clown been twice invited? It’s the fault of that idiot Mocenigo, I think.
The Nolan flushes a deep red, casts his eyes down, squeezes them shut. After a moment he turns out his palms, looks heavenward, and begins to rise on tiptoe. As if rehearsing his eventual deliverance from the base ignorance of his earthly tormentors. His face grows calm, he sinks back to the floor, and he fixes the room with the sad and sickly smile of a martyr.
For a moment, his lean features are half-lit by pink flares launched from a passing galley, but no one seems to pay these small fraudulent comets any mind. They trace fiery arcs across the night sky, then perish with a hiss on the surface of the canal.
Very well, my friends, the Nolan shouts. As promised, I shall grant your request. Let us now consider the mirror.
SVBLIMATIO
MARCH 16, 2003
I speak of the American deserts and of the cities which are not cities. No oases, no monuments; infinite panning shots over mineral landscapes and freeways. Everywhere: Los Angeles or Twenty-Nine Palms, Las Vegas or Borrego Springs …
—JEAN BAUDRILLARD, America
32
In Curtis’s dream his head is bandaged, his eyes taped over with balls of white gauze, and somehow he can see right through them.
He’s walking away from his overturned Humvee, cracked and hissing on the cobblestone street—although the crash really happened on a dirt road south of Gnjilane, not anyplace that looked like this. Italian marines from the San Marco Battalion squat in the shade of a row of palmtrees, watching him with grim sympathy. Curtis raises a hand to them, and now he knows this place: Split, in Croatia, where he came ashore during Dynamic Response back in ’98, three years before the accident.
The blue harbor is stretched behind him. The blue sky is punctuated by a line of Sea Stallions, their rotors muttering in the breeze. Green mountains to the north. A couple of belltowers poking over tiled rooftops. Ahead, the Iron Gate of Diocletian’s palace, framed by low arches. The pavingstones are slick beneath his slippered feet, worn down by centuries of passage.
Someone is on his left, leading him, someone he can’t see. At first it’s Danielle; then he remembers that he can’t have met Danielle yet, that he’s still months and miles away from Bethesda, and the realization thrills him: he’s moving under his own power, safe and unafraid, gliding through the wide and shifting world. The person leading him speaks low, at the threshold of his hearing. He can’t make anything out. The voice guides him like a silver thread in a labyrinth.
They’re moving quickly through twisting streets, past the Byzantine arches of a Gothic loggia, beneath a boxy white belltower, through an ancient peristyle. Twinned stone lions. A granite sphinx. The passageways narrowing. The walls filmed with shimmering esophageal ooze. Everywhere now the tang of the sea.
The crown of a second tower—brick, square, topped by a steep pyramid—appears and disappears in the spaces between rooftops. As they draw close, it seems to grow taller, thicker, greener at its tip. They cross jade canals, slosh through puddled corridors, and emerge into a colonnaded square swarming with white doves. Startled into flight, the birds ripple like foam across the gray sky. The great belltower catches their shadows. Curtis knows this place, too.
He’s alone now, moving forward between the tower and the domes of a gilded basilica, rounding the corner of a grand hall and looking out at the churning sea beyond. There’s a small group of ragged gamblers on the quay up ahead, gathered between two marble columns, throwing dice below the stinking corpses of hanged men. As he approaches, Curtis sees Stanley crouched over the tumbling cubes. Stanley looks up and smiles, and Curtis can see that he’s dead: his flesh sagging, his eyesockets black voids. He offers Curtis the dice with a withered hand, and Curtis declines. The dead Stanley turns and hurls them with tremendous force, aiming at an island on the lagoon’s distant edge. If they hit the water, Curtis doesn’t see the splash.
The gamblers are gone. Curtis pushes through crowds of camera-slung tourists, self-conscious in his hospital gown; he crosses a bridge to the entrance of the Doge’s Palace, and he’s in the casino again, just left of the high-limit slots. He works his way toward the elevators, eager to get back to his bed. As he passes the Oculus Lounge he scans the tables for Veronica, then for Stanley, and finally for the kid he chased last night. Thinking back, replaying it in his head, Curtis is embarrassed for both of them. The Whistler with his little mirror, Curtis with his fumbling pursuit. Grown men playing at being detectives, spies, criminals. Damon too, with his scheming and his faxes. And Stanley. Stanley with his whole life. But Curtis—who has seen misery and death in seven countries, who has been broken and imperfectly rebuilt, who should at this point know better—Curtis worst of all.
33
He’s awake now.
It takes him a minute to find the book in the sheets. He spent most of last night reading it: in Veronica’s room, after she fell asleep on the couch, then here, until he dozed off himself. He wipes his eyelids, reaches to turn off the lamp on the nightstand.
The Mirror Thief. Curtis can’t make heads of tails of it. So far as he can tell, it’s mostly about a guy named Crivano who’s some kind of wizard. Other people are in it, too: somebody called Hermes, somebody called the Nolan. The moon has a speaking part. Sometimes it seems like a plot is coming together, but then a six-or seven-page poem comes along—about the business of alchemy, or the technology of glassmaking, or the relationship of metals to planets—and the story gets put on hold. It’s all supposed to be very smart and serious, but at the same time there’s something goofy and Dungeons-&-Dragons about it, too.