It’s identical, of course, to the beat-up book that he’s toted around the county. But this copy looks like it’s never been touched, or hardly touched. Its pages are flat and compact, its flaps uncreased, the silvered letters of its cover unpitted. It could have been printed yesterday. This is his book, but it is also not his book—and the fact of its barely read existence seems to mean that the copy he found in Manhattan, the copy he’s been carrying, isn’t entirely his either. Anybody could pick this thing up. Stanley remembers what Welles said that first night—three hundred copies, a hundred of those still sitting in my attic—and he pictures that latent automaton army crated overhead. For the second time today he wants to burn this fucking house to the ground.
He rushes downstairs instead. In the john off the master bedroom he finds what he needs to remake himself: iodine, rubbing alcohol, fresh clean gauze. He rolls up the waterlogged cuff of his jeans, peels away the reeking bandage. The barbed-wire wound looks bad: slimy, edged with pus. He retches over the commode a couple of times as he cleans it, but nothing comes up, not even liquid. From the mirror above the sink a wasted stranger watches: blue lips, waxy skin, skull-sunk eyes. This is the face of God you see.
On the laminate countertop sits a pair of cheap ceramic mugs in the shapes of animal heads: a white cat, a black dog. Stanley fills the dog-head from the tap and drinks from it. Then he pukes in the sink. Then he fills it and drinks again. In a lower cabinet he finds a bristly wicker basket full of old medicine-bottles; some of them look like they might be sulfa drugs. He swallows a few, pockets the rest.
When he’s done he stands in the entryway and listens to the hiss of cars along the wet pavement, the impatient pacing of the girl upstairs. He tries to think of what else he might need. There’s probably some cash lying around—maybe some jewelry, too, or a nice watch—but at the moment he’s pretty flush. He could take some canned goods from the pantry but they’re probably not worth the extra weight. He turns in a slow circle, scanning the walls and the furnishings. Around him the house rises like a dead thing, an emptied-out shell repurposed by the girl: she occupies it like a hermit-crab.
He came too late. That’s the goddamn problem. Maybe if he’d gotten here a few months ago, before she came, it would have made a difference. Probably not, though. Probably by the time he picked up The Mirror Thief in that Lower East Side dive the game was already over: Welles had already given up, lost his nerve. He’d swapped whatever led him to write the book for desires that were easier to keep straight in his head: a home, a wife, a family. He’d made peace with his own wild strangeness, found a way to tame it with magic circles and black curtains and barred doors. He no longer understands his own book. But Stanley understands it. To follow where it leads he’ll have to go alone—at least as alone as Welles was when he wrote it. Maybe as alone as the girl is now. A day may come when that seems like a hardship, but at the moment Stanley couldn’t care less.
Beside the front door is a coat-rack crowned by upcurved horns; hats hang from the horns. Among them is the tweed driver’s cap that Welles wore the night Stanley first met him. Stanley takes it, puts it on his own head. It fits better than he expected.
He pulls on his wet jacket and takes up his father’s fieldpack and leaves the house through the side door in the kitchen. He stands in the yard with mist slicking his bare neck and imagines the car pulling up: Welles and Synn?ve on the walk, their dear boy Claudio between them, hand in a plaster cast, a grin splitting his battered handsome face. The three of them sweep to the porch, eager to get indoors, to free imprisoned Cynthia, to chant their spells and bare their bodies and commence their beautiful life together: the perfect family in a perfect world. Stanley pictures himself, too: creeping after them, toward the creaking bedsprings and the moans and the laughter, the black pistol heavy in his hand, and every whispering shoreline ghost gathered at his back.
He’s fleetingly aware of who he is at this moment: distinct from people he used to be, people he’ll one day become. In times past he would have torched this house with no second thought. Most of his future selves would do it, too; even now he understands that about himself. Years from tonight—in idle moments, half-asleep—he’ll imagine the blaze he could have made, the ending he might have written. Picturing it as seen from the sea, or from a passing plane: the house a bright unsteady flare on the dark shoreline, throwing shadows in every direction. The girl the raw fuel hidden at its heart. Hell, he’ll think, looking back on this moment. I could have showed you hell.
But not him. Not tonight. No such luck.
When after a few minutes the car hasn’t appeared, Stanley adjusts the pack on his shoulder, unlatches the gate, and walks into the wet narrow street.
REDVCTIO
MAY 22, 1592
Thus in the end we find all divine nature reduced to one source, even as all light reduces to that first self-lit brightness, and images in mirrors as numerous and varied as there are particular substances reduce to one ideal and formative principle, which is their source.
—GIORDANO BRUNO,
from The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast
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