The next week brings rain that drowns what’s left of February and flushes out the waterfront streets. Stanley and Claudio spend the days huddled under blankets in their storefront lair, reading to stave off boredom, books and magazines propped against the hillock of their tangled legs. Claudio works through a stack of glossies that Stanley stole for him from a newsstand on Market Street—Photoplay, Modern Screen, Movie Mirror—scanning them as if in search of clues. He speaks up now and then to report a discovery. The talent agent of Tab Hunter is the same as that of Rock Hudson, he says. Also that of Rory Calhoun. I believe the names of these men are not their true names.
Stanley reads The Mirror Thief. It’s a book of poems, but it tells a story: an alchemist and spy called Crivano steals an enchanted mirror, and is pursued by his enemies through the streets of a haunted city. Stanley long ago stopped paying the story any mind. He’s come to regard it as a fillip at best, at worst as a device meant to conceal the book’s true purpose, the powerful secret it contains. Nothing, he’s quite certain, could be so obscure by accident.
As he reads, his eyes graze each poem’s lines like a needle over an LP’s grooves, atomizing them into letters, reassembling them into uniform arcades. What he’s looking for is a key: a gap in the book’s mask, a loose thread to unravel its veil. He tries tricks to find new openings—reading sideways, reading upsidedown, reading whitespace instead of text—but the words always close ranks like tiles in a mosaic, like crooks in a lineup, and mock him with their blithe expressions. The usual suspects.
On the book’s second printed page—a poetic narrative by Adrian Welles, Seshat Books, Los Angeles, copyright 1954—is a brief inscription: a message from whoever gave it away to the person they gave it to, somebody called Alan. Stanley’s never been able to make out what the fiercely slanted handwriting says; one word looks like salad, another naked. He’s long since given up on deciphering it. Above the message, Adrian Welles’s printed name has been struck through with a curving slash of black ink. Stanley used to flip to this page and wonder why somebody would cross the name out like that, but lately he doesn’t think about it at all.
Sometimes he’ll close his eyes and close the book, balancing its spine on the mounts of his palm. He’ll picture a dark figure—Welles, Crivano, himself—slinking through the streets outside, cloaked in a slicker and a dripping hat, in pursuit of some unfathomable objective: a void errant in the blurred landscape. Stanley will hold this image as long as he can, until other concerns encroach—what if Welles has left this place? what if he’s dead?—and then he’ll let the book fall open and he’ll read the first line his eyes fall on, hoping it will contain a clue as to where he should go, what he should do next. Stanley knows there’s no real logic to this practice—or, rather, that the logic is the book’s logic, not the world’s—but this is as it should be. The point where the book and the world intersect is exactly what he’s looking for.
Sometimes a line offers clear direction: I seek you in constant carnival, masked Crivano, along the waterline. More often not: Omphale’s husband has rendered his judgment! You sully your hands with occult burrowing, but the goldmaker’s shame still whispers from the reeds! Sometimes a passage seizes his attention for no reason he can name—
Aqua alta: Crivano’s feet
fuse with those of his watery double.
Look not upon your confederates,
the knaves hung from the columns!
Two-headed, in two worlds,
your facedown likeness
finds his silent image in the sea.
—and lures him in, propelling him to the final page, the final lines. 17 February 1953, followed by two names: this town, this state. The map that guided him here.
Whenever Stanley and Claudio become bored with reading, bored with each other and themselves, they go to the movies. The first-run theaters in Santa Monica are the best place to see the lush and earnest melodramas that Claudio favors, but Stanley prefers the Fox on Lincoln: it’s nearby, half the price, and its B-grade westerns and horror movies are more suited to his taste.