No time. Sorry. Stanley’s plane is gonna be wheels-down in like five minutes. Can you meet or not?
The paper in Curtis’s hand is mostly black. Its thick border seems at first to be squiggles—like someone was trying to get a cheap inkstick started—but resolves instead into a grisly thicket of anatomy: cunts and cocks and balls, unspooled intestines, shattered skulls spilling like cornucopias. Each corner is adorned with the image of an eyeball, trailing an optic nerve like a kite’s tail. In the middle of the crowded page is a message. YOUR FUCKT TRATER, it reads.
Sure, Curtis says. I can meet. When and where?
The Quicksilver. Walter hooked us up with a room. Just go to the bell-desk and give your name. They’ll have a keycard for you. If we beat you there, they’ll just give you the room number.
You won’t beat me there, Curtis says.
He crumples the fax as he looks out the window. A plane, maybe Stanley’s, is dropping toward McCarran now. On the wall by Curtis’s shoulder the murky painting is bathed in amber. Most of its vague details vanish in the glow, but others emerge. In a lower corner there’s a sea-monster that Curtis never noticed before.
Hey, Curtis? Veronica’s saying. One more thing. Can I ask a favor?
Yeah. Sure.
Can you bring Stanley’s book when you come? I think he’d like it back.
No problem, Curtis says, but Veronica is already gone. He stares at his dead phone for a few seconds, then pockets it.
The Mirror Thief sits on the circular table, inches from his hand. Although Curtis didn’t get much from it aside from a headache, he somehow wishes he’d read more. As he lifts it through the sunbeam, the flecks of leftover silver on the binding flash gold.
On his way back to the head to replace his prosthesis, Curtis notices the tracks that his desert-filthy shoes have made across the carpet: pale alkaline rings for every step, like the footprints of a ghost.
CALCINATIO
MARCH 1958
And the waters richer than glass Bronze gold, the blaze over the silver, Dye-pots in the torch-light,
The flash of wave under prows,
And the silver beaks rising and crossing Stone trees, white and rose-white in the darkness, Cypress there by the towers,
Drift under hulls in the night.
—EZRA POUND, Canto XVII
41
Gulls’ voices wake Stanley. His eyes open to the sight of motes adrift in the pencil-slender sunbeams that pierce the boarded-up back window of his and Claudio’s lair. He wasn’t dreaming about New York just now, but the light still seems wrong, like it should be coming from the other direction. He sits up, rubs his face, listens to noises from outside, sharp in the cool spring air.
On some mornings, a full understanding of the distances he’s covered arrives in a rush that knocks the wind from his chest, and this is one of those mornings. He used to open Welles’s book and marvel at the catalogue of faraway lands and exotic cities that Crivano passed through: Nicosia, Ragusa, Iskanderun, names that meant nothing to Stanley, that conjured nothing in his head but unfocused images of incense smoke and winding alleys and veiled faces and sharpened knives. During his long ramble across the country he’d often pretended to be retracing the steps of the Mirror Thief, and only now and then did he realize that the places he visited were no less strange to him than any named in the book, the expanses traveled no less vast. He’d sit quietly for a moment and imagine his own journey recorded in some neglected book, and he’d consider who years from now might take the time and the care to read it.
Eight full months it took to get here. His progress random and inexorable as a crack working its way across a windshield. He hitchhiked, hopped boxcars, rode buses, walked for miles in all kinds of weather. Gravel truck in Indiana. River barge in Memphis. Local accents as alien to him as other languages. He crossed from Arkansas to Oklahoma in the back of a Willys Overland among crated peaches, glued by spilt juice to the sugary truckbed, stung by ants the whole way. He slept in an Indian pueblo in New Mexico, a whorehouse in Denver, a county jail in Amarillo, a monastery in Juárez. Often as not, he slept outdoors. And one twilit evening, making camp on a cactus-clumped roadside after being dumped by a pervert, he saw the eastern sky sundered by a terrible ball of fire and watched spellbound as a cloudhead rose, lightning flickering in its dark crown, until the noise and the wind reached and flattened him, leaving crusts of salt on his cheeks where there had been tears of wonder.