That’s right. He does.
My light conceals nothing, Stanley recites. You are my rescue, my restoration. I seek you in constant carnival, masked Crivano, along the waterline.
You have a good memory.
Or when he has his dream. I labor with the blind surveyors of night, Selene, and with bricks hewn from sleep I raise your city.
Welles shifts the leash from hand to hand. That’s another one, he says. You are quite right.
There at the beginning, even. In the malediction. The treasure he bears in his butterfly sack is none other than—
The foremost reflector itself. Of course. The book is, after all, called The Mirror Thief. The mirror is not meant to be understood literally. Not exclusively so, at any rate. Crivano is an alchemist. His mode of thought is Neoplatonic, derived from the sacred texts attributed to your patron deity, the Thrice-Great Hermes. To Crivano, the world is itself a reflection, the material emanation of an idea in the mind of God. We cannot know the mind of God any more than we can look directly upon the sun. We look at the moon instead, made visible to us by the sunlight that it reflects. The moon represents the Opus Magnum, the alchemist’s indirect means of discovering God’s thoughts in order to become like God. All mirrors contain something of this lunar essence.
Yeah, Stanley says. I got all that. It’s in your book. I read it.
I—I don’t think I stated it quite so explicitly in the book.
It’s clear enough. You can put it all together. This equals this equals that. I’m ignorant, all right, Mister Welles. But I ain’t dumb.
Welles opens his mouth, closes it, and sighs in exasperation. My apologies, he says. It is difficult to speak of these things without seeming pedantic or obscure. Especially since I’ve no way of knowing what you know.
Stanley shoves his hands into his jacket pockets. The fabric pulls tight across his back, pressing the blackjack against his skin. Yeah, Stanley says. Sorry. I guess the thing is, I ain’t never been too good at asking questions. Thanks for being patient.
Spooked by something, a pair of gulls takes off from the crown of a derrick a block south, yelping and beating their wings, and Stanley and Welles both jump. The dog freezes, raises its head. We should move on, Welles says. The place I want to show you isn’t much farther.
They cross the boulevard’s eastbound lanes and pass once more into a street of battered bungalows. Derricks rise from empty lots, sometimes from lawns. The houses are dark, tumbledown, with broken windows. An abandoned Kaiser-Frazer sits on the left side of the street, perched haphazardly across the curb; it’s ringed by shards of glass and crushed cigarette butts, and three of its tires are slashed. Stanley’s shoreline rivals have left their marks here, painting crude snarling canines on the car’s doors and hood. Dashed-off letters twist in the spaces between, advertising the illiteracy of their authors: D O G E S. Stanley smirks to himself.
We spoke earlier of wars, Welles says, and of great battlefields. I believe that battles can take a number of forms. One could even say that we are walking through a battlefield right now. Often it has occurred to me that what is being fought over in these conflicts—be they great or subtle—is the right to memory. And not only the right to remember, but the right to forget. To selectively forget.
They’ve come to a steep bridge over a canal. Looking down, Stanley sees the reflection of the fog-shrouded moon in the stagnant water, filtered through an iridescent glaze of oil. About fifty yards to the right, this canal joins a wider waterway that parallels the street they walk on. A block ahead is a second bridge, then a third beyond that one, and Stanley becomes aware of a network of brackish canals that runs throughout the neighborhood, scum-filmed and overgrown, a liquid shadow cast by the grid of streets. Welles and the dog walk alongside the bridge railing; Stanley follows them. As their footsteps echo below he hears the scurry of rodents, the percolating cluck of mallards roused from sleep.