The Mirror Thief (55 page)

He moves his beerbottle in a wide circle, indicating every solid thing surrounding him. Welles’s back is still turned; he doesn’t see.

—what if it isn’t real? What if it’s just a reflection of something else? What if there’s another world?

Welles doesn’t answer at first. He sags forward a little, like he’s tired. Can you think of any reason, he says, to believe that that might be the case?

It feels right, Stanley says. It feels possible.

It does, doesn’t it? But then it would. Of course it would. I will say this: if you choose to believe it, then you are in very distinguished company. After all, that was the charge that Plato levied against us poets, wasn’t it? That we are pretenders of wisdom, copiers of copies. Perhaps we are. Who can say? Perhaps we’re wasting our time on fancies, while the real conquest of the invisible world is being carried out by modern-day alchemists, wearing the white smocks of atomic scientists and aerospace engineers. Perhaps we’re being sentimental: we cannot bear very much reality. We say we long for it, but when it finally emerges and fails to present us with our own pretty reflections, we recoil. We retreat to our islands in the river, and we pine away like the Lady of Shalott.

Have you ever killed anybody, Mister Welles?

Stanley catches his breath, blinks in surprise. He hadn’t intended to ask the question, wasn’t even thinking it. Was he?

At the edge of the deck, Welles is motionless and silent. Almost invisibly, the stiffness has moved from his elbows to his back. Stanley’s breathing fast, scared at first that he’s said a bad thing—and then he’s just scared, he’s not sure of what. Somewhere below a treefrog has started to chirp. Now Stanley can hear dozens of them, all over the neighborhood, that he hadn’t noticed before.

No, Welles says. No, I have not.

Stanley has a fast out-of-control feeling, like he’s going to vomit. I have, he says.

Welles is half-turned, still facing away. You have, he says. I see.

Probably a lot of guys would tell you something like that just to
impress you, Stanley hears himself say. And maybe that’s partly why I’m telling you. But what I’m saying is true. When I was thirt—

His voice catches and breaks. He clears his throat, starts again.

When I was thirteen, he says, this Puerto Rican kid tried to stab me. And I broke his arm with an iron pipe, and I took his knife away, and I cut his throat.

Stanley’s face is hot; his cheeks are dripping. He has no idea where this is coming from. All of a sudden it’s like he’s been carrying another person inside him without knowing it: some pansy little kid, curled in his guts like a worm in a fruit.

Welles has turned around to look at him; he’s inching closer across the deck, with the moon in his hair. You had no choice, he says. You were defending yourself.

Sure, Stanley says. I guess. I guess anybody who ever kills anybody thinks he’s defending himself from something. Last year I threw a guy off a roof. That’s the two I know about. There’s other guys I hurt real bad in fights who maybe died and I don’t know. Last year I was on this burglary where this cop got shot, so according to the law I killed him too. That’s mostly the reason I had to leave New York.

Welles steps over the little table, then sits on it, facing Stanley. Stanley doesn’t look up. Why do you want me to know these things? Welles says. Why are you telling me this?

You probably think, Stanley says, that I’m just a smart kid who liked your book, and who maybe got some funny ideas from it. I don’t blame you for thinking that. In your shoes, it’s what I’d think, too. But what I want you to understand, I guess, is that I have seen and done some pretty fucked-up stuff in my life, excuse me, and I have been through a hell of a lot to get out here, and there are some questions that I would really like to get some answers to, Mister Welles. Now, maybe you don’t know the answers. Or maybe you knew ’em once, and then you forgot. But I been thinking a lot about something you said the other night, about how a book can know more than whoever wrote it. Because I think your book knows, Mister Welles. I think it knows that this kind of magic is really possible.

Welles looks at him for a long time, leaning close. For a while Stanley thinks Welles is going to touch him, put a hand on his leg, and he wonders how he’ll handle that. Then Welles speaks.

That book, he says, is now entirely perplexing to me. It took me ten years to write it. Did I tell you that? I started it in Italy, during the war, when I was still relatively young. At the time I had—or I thought I had—a clear sense of how to proceed, of what form it would take. I felt as though I were standing on a mountaintop, looking down on the valleys and forests through which I would pass in the days to come. Straightforward enough, it seemed. But of course it’s very different when you’re
inside
the dark wood, beset by briars and quicksand, distracted by meanders, fearful of wolves and brigands and god knows what else, unable at any given moment to see more than a few feet ahead. By the time I finished it I had forgotten largely why I’d begun, what I had wanted it to be in the first place, why I’d been interested in it at all. I don’t mean to be evasive, or to flatter you, when I say that you have a better sense than I do of what it’s about.

Stanley opens his mouth to reply, but Welles is off again, speaking in a torrent, rising from his seat, leaving his empty beerbottle on the table. He seems eager to forget what Stanley just confessed. The whole house shifts and groans as he crosses the deck.

It wasn’t just my conception of the book that changed, he says. It was my belief about writing itself, about what it means to write. As I said before, I abandoned early on the notion of poem-as-incantation. I adopted instead a scarcely less romantic theory that poetry is a sort of lovemaking—a series of gestures designed to produce in another a release, an orgasm, an egoless rapture—and hopefully also some corresponding pleasure in oneself. But I eventually came to realize that this analogy is not apt. Because the pleasure of the other is deferred, you see. And because it happens at a distance. The experience is not shared. You evidently derived some pleasure from my book, and I am gratified by that. But by the time it found you, I had moved on to other concerns. So I am forced to conclude, with Flaubert, that the urge to write is essentially masturbatory. Onanistic. These are hardly new metaphors, of course, but they are rich, and worthy of contemplation.

Welles is at the rail again, leaning on his elbows. His slippered foot taps the base of the woodstained slats. Stanley can tell that he’s not done yet, so he waits, drying his face with the yellow sleeve of his new shirt.

For me, Welles says, it’s like shitting. It really is. To pretend otherwise is stupid. Shit is fertilizer, of course. And shit is
prima materia
. But to the shitter, it is simply shit. Properly construed, the distance of which I spoke between the writer and the reader—the deferred pleasure—is no impediment to the success of a poem. The poem depends on it, in fact. I imagine, to my great chagrin, that you are learning this even now. You read my book, and in some way it excited your imagination. But when you found its author, you discovered him to be a fat bourgeois, a pompous blowhard, and you realized that he is—as the expression goes—full of shit. The book cannot help but be diminished by this encounter. How much happier for you if I had remained a mystery! How much better if the book could go on existing only as you’d imagined it! Isn’t it the case that the works which most move and inspire us are the most formless—the most irredeemably fecal—that we stumble upon? Because they leave to us the task of completing them, of wringing meaning from them. Because, in so doing, we always encounter ourselves. Their degraded chaos resolves gradually into our own image, projected and made strange. It is ever thus. The reader—not the poet—is the alchemist.

Stanley’s nose and throat are clear now. The night smells sweeter and sharper. He can’t remember the last time he cried like that. Not when his father died, or his grandfather. Maybe when his dad left for Korea. Even then it was only later, alone, when nobody could see. What I want, Stanley says, is to get inside your book. All the way in. I want to tear it apart. I want to know everything Crivano knows, whether you know it yourself or not. I want you to tell me how to figure it out. Where to get started.

Welles turns around, folds his arms, leans back on the rail; it creaks and bows with his weight. For a second Stanley thinks he’ll fall through, but he doesn’t. Welles fixes his eyes on the deck, creases his brow in half-interested concentration, like he’s trying to recall the names of old friends from grade-school.

Then he slips a hand inside his cardigan, into his shirt’s breast pocket, and comes out with his pipe. You’ll have to do a lot of reading, he says. The
Corpus Hermeticum
, of course, in its entirety. Also the
Picatrix
, and the
Tabula Smaragdina
. Plato and Plotinus, in order to situate the tradition in proper context: Crivano certainly would have read both of them. Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola are major figures. Who else? Abulafia, I suppose. Llull. Reuchlin. Trithemius. Agrippa. Cardano. Paracelsus, certainly. You may wish to explore John Dee and Robert Fludd, as well, although they were contemporaneous with Crivano, and he would not have been aware of them.

All that stuff is old, Stanley says. Right?

Quite. Crivano, remember, was active in the waning years of the Sixteenth Century. I should warn you that many of the key writings I mentioned may not be available in reliable English translation, but only in Latin, or in various German and Italian dialects. Some may not be widely available at all.

Is there anybody who does this sort of stuff now? Magic, I mean?

Welles has withdrawn his tobacco tin from his trouser pocket; he’s slowly packing the bowl of his pipe. When he’s finished, he lights it, tamps it out, and packs it again, aerating it with a needlelike tool.

Oh yes, he says. People still do it.

Stanley stares hard at his face. The treefrogs are almost deafening; they sound like the string-orchestra piece that was playing downstairs when he and Claudio first arrived. Who? he asks. Who does it?

Another match flares, tripled in Welles’s spectacles, and a stinking cloud rises over his head. Here in Southern California, he says, you can locate them without a great deal of effort. You can readily find Theosophists and Rosicrucians, as well—along with adherents of Dianetics, and the New Thought, and the Science of Mind—although I do not recommend that you do so. In fact, seeking out contemporary practitioners of magic is probably unnecessary. As I discovered when I began my own research, they will find you soon enough.

But talking to ’em is a waste of time, you’re saying?

Once you have a sense of the tradition, Welles says, it will be easy for you to tell who is a charlatan, who is simply insane. There are some who are knowledgeable and serious, I suppose, but they tend to keep to themselves. Also, their interests seem to accrue around industrial abstracts and pulp science fiction, rather than musty alchemical treatises left over from the Renaissance. I worked with one of these fellows at the Aerojet Corporation, believe it or not. Jack Parsons was his name. I had no idea what sort of strange mischief he’d been engaged in until 1952, when he somewhat carelessly blew himself to kingdom come with a large quantity of fulminate of mercury. Evidently Jack spent years of evenings and weekends performing magical rites, literally trying to summon the Whore of Babylon and spawn the Antichrist. This gentleman was one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, mind you. So, yes. People still do it.

There’s a strain in Welles’s voice, a false note, but Stanley can’t think of the right question to ask to decipher it. He’s still feeling shaky, pissed off at himself for cracking up. That list of names you just gave me, he says. I’m not gonna remember it. Could I maybe get you to write ’em down?

But of course. Of course. It would be my pleasure.

Stanley picks up his beer and finishes it. His gut turns queasy as the last of it goes down. You probably think I’m a damn fool, he says. Don’t you? For wanting to do this.

Welles takes the pipestem from his mouth, slowly shakes his head. Not at all, he says. Quite the opposite, in fact. This is a difficult time for you, I can see that. I don’t know you well. But I have confidence in you. I believe in you. And I—Synnøve and I—would like to help in any way we can.

Stanley’s tearing up again, though he’s not sure why, not sure if it’s real or fake. He thinks of an armed robbery he was on a couple years ago where he and his team all wore gauze Halloween masks: he remembers how it felt to hold a pistol on the humiliated nightwatchman, to look him straight in the eye and know that he could see nothing but the crude face of a weeping clown. Stanley feels that same way now—powerful and ashamed—only this time the mask is inside him, and he can’t control it.

I gotta be straight with you, Mister Welles, he says. I don’t think about myself the way you think about yourself. About the reasons why I do things, I mean. There’s never really been a time when I didn’t know what to do, or at least have some idea. So I’ve never had to stop and just think. Sometimes I feel like it wouldn’t be bad for me do that once in a while, but I’m not even sure how. And it’s starting to scare me. Because lately I feel like I’m turning into something, and I don’t know what.

Welles is silent, puffing rapidly. Soon the pipe has burned to ash. For what it’s worth, he says, I am not worried about you.

It ain’t specifically me I’m worried about, Mister Welles. It’s everything else. I just don’t always feel like I belong in this world.

A deep chuckle rises from Welles’s gut. I daresay I know that feeling, he says.

I guess you’re about to tell me that I’m gonna grow out of it.

You might. Though I sincerely hope that you do not.

He steps forward slowly, then grips Stanley’s shoulder in his thick-fingered hand. It’s a cheap and stupid little world, the one we’re given, he says. Don’t fucking
settle
for it. Go out and make your own.