The Mirror Thief(87)
Lust and war! The Gorgon’s stony gaze
masks the inner limit of the body—
adulterers ensnared by such silk thread
as spiders hoist upon the rafter-beam.
Web-spinners, mirror-makers, Athena
Parthenos and her ill-shaped sibling
shield the lexicon of craft and trick:
the redirecting flash, the circle-step
made sideways on back-turned feet, as
the logarithmic nautilus records.
Crivano, too, moves along such spirals.
Curtis is sure there are clues that he’s missing. At the beginning, for instance, a page has been razored out—the second printed page, the title page, with publication data on the back—cut evenly, close to the spine, so just a sliver of paper remains. Tomorrow, when the libraries are open, he’ll call around, see if he can’t scare up an intact copy.
He throws off the covers, makes the rack. No faxes, no messages. He opens the curtains, drops to the deck, and does two minutes each of pushups and situps. Fast, not counting. Timing himself off the little clock on the CNN crawl. Onscreen, Chinese people in surgical masks. Girl run down by a bulldozer in Palestine. Still no war. Curtis sits up, cycles through channels: BET, USA, Disney, PAX, History, Travel, TV Land.
He showers, shaves, gets dressed—gray slacks, brown crewneck pullover—and checks himself in the mirror in the sunken livingroom. He remembers the weird hallucination from last night, then thinks of the dead Stanley in his dream. Curtis steps closer, watches his own reflection for a long time. As if expecting it to offer him advice. The sky over the Strip is deep ultramarine with a dusting of high cirrus, and the shallow crescent scar to the left of his nose is prominent in the sidelong morning light. He slips on his glasses and it vanishes under their slender black rims.
Curtis steps into the bedroom, strips down the rack, makes it again. Stretching the sheets tighter this time. Bouncing a Louisiana statehood quarter off it when he’s done. He sits in the chair by the window to think, spinning the coin on the wooden table. At first he’s doing this to keep his hands busy; then he’s just doing it. He flips the quarter off his thumbnail, tries to follow the arc, to catch it in the air. Listening to its fluttering chime: a perfect sound when he connects just right. It comes down with a slap in his cupped palm: heads or tails. It’d be nice if there was something he could decide this way. He comes up with these new systems that don’t make any sense at all, that have nothing whatsoever to do with probability. A coin toss is fifty-fifty; the odds of a natural twenty-one are—what? Five percent? Curtis can’t remember. In Stanley’s mind, about the least interesting thing you can do at a blackjack table is win money. Curtis’s attention wavers; the coin drops, he stoops to pick it up. Running the pad of his thumb over the outlines of its little pelican, its tiny trumpet. He thinks about phoning his dad, but then doesn’t.
At ten o’clock the maid knocks on the door. Curtis puts his blazer on and lets her in, chatting a little in Spanish. She’s quiet, her gaze tightly policed. If she’s surprised at the tidy rack it doesn’t register. When she disappears into the head, Curtis clips his revolver onto his belt, closes the safe, and goes below to look for Stanley.
He buys coins from a change dispenser in the slot area, not far from where he spotted the Whistler, then exits through the Doge’s Palace to catch the trolley south. He swaps his glasses for shades as he hits the sidewalk, surprised by the coolness of the outside air. The pedestrian overpass takes him across to the Treasure Island side, where he passes the two frigates becalmed in Buccaneer Bay, the dormant volcano fountain. The massive right-angled fa?ade of the Mirage doubles itself in its mirrored windows, and Curtis stops under its covered entrance to wait. The sun is still climbing. The sky below is flat, muzzy, lemondrop-yellow, a screen behind the mountains. Duststorms somewhere to the east. Curtis thinks of the painting in his room: its muted colors and indistinct shapes. Across the Strip, through the palmtrees and the fountain-spray, his hotel’s grooved brick belltower is frontlit by the Mirage’s reflective glass; he watches the golden light play across it. The trolley pulls up to the curb, then pulls away, and Curtis is still standing there, jangling coins in his closed fist.
He had the right idea in choosing his hotel. Everything he’s done since then has been wrong. There’s not an inch of sidewalk here Stanley hasn’t stepped on, not a single table he hasn’t taken money from. Every time Curtis wakes up in this town, he walks out into Stanley’s head. He’s got to start hearing the echoes, seeing the ghosts.
But this isn’t Stanley’s Vegas anymore. The old city is masked, vanished into itself. Curtis remembers the old guys bitching about it: a smoky circle of them in his dad’s Irving Street walkup. Carlos Huerta, Jim Press, Cadillac LaSalle. Goddamn developers gonna kill that town, with their palm trees and their goddamn volcanoes. Henry Tsai, once dealt five consecutive aces out of a six-deck shoe at the Hacienda. Won six thousand dollars on the hand. Walked away, never cracked a smile. You can’t hardly find a decent table no more. Hell, most people ain’t even looking. Slow Tony Miczek, who gave up a thumb in ’66 rather than pay his stake back to a loanshark. Turned around and quadrupled it at the Sands in sixteen hours of continuous play, same day he left the hospital. Detouring to the washroom every couple of hours with fresh bandages and a bottle of Bactine. Settled his debt. No hard feelings. College students. People with kids. Squares and lightweights. Stanley staring out the grimy window at the university clocktower, the Capitol dome and the white obelisk beyond. Silent, then speaking. There’s no way to get in the game anymore, because it’s all a game. His dry clucking laugh. They do all the dreaming for us now. Nothing’s left to chance.