Emilio yawned. ‘All right,’ he surrendered.
Just then, Mr Capelli came stomping into the kitchen, wrapped up in a gleaming striped satin bathrobe in chrome yellow and royal purple. Underneath it, Martin glimpsed gray woolen ankle socks.
‘Emilio!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’ve been searching for you everywhere! I walked all the way down to Highland!’
‘You’ve been walking the streets in
that
robe and they didn’t arrest you?’ asked Martin with pretended astonishment.
Mr Capelli tugged his bathrobe tighter. ‘Mrs Capelli gave me this robe for Christmas.’
‘Don’t tell me, tell the judge. Thank your lucky stars they don’t send people to death row for premeditated bad taste.’
‘And what do
you
call taste,
anh
? Your wreck of a car, parked outside my house?’
Martin lifted Emilio off his stool and gave him a good-night kiss on the top of the head. Funny how kids’ hair always smells the same: fresh, alive, pungent with youth, chestnuts and hot pajamas and summer days.
‘Here,’ he said, ‘you’d better take this young somnambulist back to his bed.’
Mr Capelli took hold of Emilio and clasped him in his arms. ‘You’re a crazy person, you know that, just like your mamma.’
Martin said quietly, as Mr Capelli carried Emilio toward the door, ‘Listen, Mr Capelli …’ but he realized when Mr Capelli turned around that there were tears in his eyes, one of those sudden unexpected pangs of grief for his dead daughter; one of those moments of weakness that hit the bereaved when they’re least expecting it.
Emilio’s mother, Mr Capelli’s daughter, had died three years ago. Her husband, Stanley, had walked out on her. (Mrs Capelli had told Martin all about this, like a soap opera, complete with actions: you should have seen the fights, you should have heard the cursing, how two people could
hate
each other so much, you’d’ve never believed it.)
Sad, disoriented, feeling that she had somehow fallen from grace, Emilio’s mother had overdosed one Sunday morning on Italian wine and Valium. She had been found dead in her apartment white as Ophelia, her arms outspread, her hair outspread, almost beautiful, but smelling like hell itself, and the whole apartment thunderous with blowflies.
Stanley had gone to Saskatchewan to chop timber. Mr and Mrs Capelli had been given custody of Emilio. Garlic, dust balls, and all.
Mr Capelli said, ‘It’s all right, Martin, he has to get back to bed.’
‘Mr Capelli, I have to talk to you,’ Martin insisted. ‘Could you come right back?’
‘Talk?’ Mr Capelli demanded.
‘About Emilio, please. Can you spare me five minutes?’
‘It’s gone three o’clock.’
‘Sure, yes, I know, but please. I don’t know whether it’s going to keep until tomorrow.’
He tore off a piece of kitchen towel and handed it to Mr Capelli, and Mr Capelli wiped his eyes. It was an act of acceptance, an act of reconciliation.
‘Okay,’ Mr Capelli promised. ‘But five minutes, no more.’
Martin looked at Emilio resting against his grandfather’s shoulder and Emilio was already asleep.
Mr Capelli came up ten minutes later and rapped at the door.
‘Hey, come on in,’ Martin told him.
Mr Capelli stood in the hallway in his yellow and purple bathrobe, looking tired and embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I shouldn’t’ve sounded off. It just gets to me sometimes, you know what I mean, Andrea and all.’
Martin slapped his arm. ‘I know. I’m sorry, too. You know what scriptwriters are. Smart-asses, all of us. It’s the way we make our living.’
Mr Capelli nodded, oblivious to Martin’s irony. ‘She was so beautiful, Andrea; and Emilio looks just the same way; nothing of Stanley; that jerk; Stanley had eyes that were too close together, you know? But Emilio is Andrea. Beautiful, Italian, what can I say?’
Martin suggested, ‘How about some coffee?’
Mr Capelli said, ‘No – no thank you. I don’t sleep good already. Just talk.’
‘Okay,’ said Martin, taking a deep breath. ‘This isn’t easy okay? Try to bear with me. But even if it doesn’t sound logical, try to accept that I wouldn’t be telling you if I weren’t worried about Emilio.’
‘Why are you worried about Emilio?’ Mr Capelli demanded. ‘Why should
you
worry about Emilio?’
‘Listen, Mr Capelli, Emilio is your grandson, but Emilio is also my friend. Well, I hope he is. I don’t think it matters very much how
old
anybody is, do you? I mean the difference between your age and my age is a lot more than the difference between my age and Emilio’s age. So you can’t say that he and I don’t have any right to be buddies, can you?’
‘No, I didn’t say that,’ replied Mr Capelli stiffly, his hands resting on his knees.
‘All right, then,’ said Martin. ‘What I’m saying is in Emilio’s best interest, believe me. If Emilio comes up to my apartment anymore – well I don’t want him here anymore.’
Mr Capelli leaned forward, his hands still clutching his knees. ‘You’re not saying … what, you’re gay?’
‘Oh shit, Mr Capelli!’ Martin shouted at him, slapping at the hallway wall. ‘I’m not talking about me! Gay! What the hell is the matter with you? It’s that mirror you helped me to carry upstairs.’
‘The mirror, hah? Boofuls’ mirror? What did I tell you, you shouldn’t give it houseroom.’
‘Maybe you were right,’ Martin admitted. ‘I don’t know what it is, but there’s something wrong with it,’ Martin told him. ‘It’s hard to say what. But it’s not your usual kind of everyday mirror.’
‘It’s a trick mirror,’ said Mr Capelli, trying to lighten up this dire and ominous conversation before Martin started talking about death and hackings and all the other gory topics of conversation that (along with
saraghine alla brace
) invariably gave him nightmares and agonies of indigestion. ‘You look in the mirror and what do you see? You don’t got clothes on.’
‘No, Mr Capelli, it’s nothing like that. I mean, it’s a kind of a trick mirror, but it doesn’t make your clothes disappear or anything like that. It’s – well, when you look at it, you don’t always see what’s really there.’
Mr Capelli said nothing; but waited on Martin to explain; his eyes blinking from time to time like a pelican at San Diego Zoo.
‘The thing is,’ said Martin, ‘if Emilio plays with it, he might start to see things –
people
, maybe, who don’t really exist. And – well – if he sees things – people – stuff that doesn’t exist – it could be kind of –’
He paused. Mr Capelli was staring at him in that same pelicanlike way, as if he believed that his tenant had completely flipped.
Martin added, ‘Dangerous,’ and then gave Mr Capelli an idiotic grin.
Mr Capelli tugged at the bulb of his fleshy nose and thought for a while. Then he said, ‘Martin, I like you. You’ve got a choice. Either that mirror goes, or you go, whichever.’
‘You’re throwing me
out
?’ asked Martin in surprise.
‘Of course not. Just the mirror.’
‘Mr Capelli, I’m not at all sure I can do that.’
‘Why not? Are you crazy? One minute you’re saying it’s dangerous; you see things in it that aren’t there; you’re worried about Emilio; the next minute you’re saying you can’t do that; well, you
can
do that, it’s easy, just do it. Am I asking too much?’
Martin laid his hand on Mr Capelli’s shoulder. Mr Capelli peered at it from very close up. ‘There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the mirror, Mr Capelli,’ said Martin, and Mr Capelli echoed, ‘Fundamentally.’
‘All I’m saying is, it has this vibe. I don’t know, you can call it what you like. It’s like a visual echo. An echo you can see.’
‘An echo you can see?’ Mr Capelli repeated and Martin could see that he was vexed and tired, and that he didn’t even
want
to understand. Mr Capelli’s answer to everything that he didn’t like, or wasn’t sure of, was to turn his back on it.
‘All right,’ said Martin. ‘Boofuls has come alive. Don’t ask me how. He’s in the mirror, and Emilio has been playing with him, and Emilio has come within an inch of getting inside the mirror, too.’
Mr Capelli stood up. He glanced quickly at Martin, almost casually, then nodded. ‘Mumh-humh,’ he said, and nodded again. Martin watched him with increasing tension.
‘Good night, Martin,’ said Mr Capelli at length, and turned to leave.
‘That’s it? Good night?’
‘All right, a
very
good night. What more do you want?’
‘I just want you to promise me that you won’t let Emilio come up here for a while. I mean, tell him he mustn’t. This whole apartment is strictly no go.’
Mr Capelli said, ‘In the morning, Martin, you make up your mind. That mirror goes, or you go. The first thing I told you when you brought that mirror back here, what did I say? No good is going to come out of it. That was the first thing I said. And now what’s happened? No good has come out of it.’
‘Mr Capelli, it could very well be that there’s a real boy trapped in that mirror.’
‘That’s right and it could very well be that some clever people can train a pig to fly straight into a bacon slicer, and another pig to drive the bacon down to Safeway.’
‘Mr Capelli –’
‘
No!
’ replied Mr Capelli. ‘That mirror goes by tomorrow night, otherwise you go. Now, it’s late, I don’t want to talk about it no more.’
He left, closing the apartment door sharply behind him.
Martin remained in the kitchen, feeling drained and somehow diminished, as if his dream of being a mollusk had shrunk his consciousness down to a microscopic speck. Tired, probably, and anxious, and unsettled by what had happened in the mirror.
He went back to bed and fell asleep almost straightaway. He had no dreams that he could remember, although he was aware of blundering through darkness and wondering if it would ever be light, ever again.
It was nearly eight o’clock, however, when he thought he heard a child’s voice, close to his ear, whisper,‘
Pickle-nearest-the-wind
’.
He sat up. He looked around the room, which was quite bright now. Everything looked normal, although he had the oddest feeling that the drapes and the furniture had jumped back into place when he opened his eyes, as if the whole room had been misbehaving itself, right up until the moment when he had woken up.
The drapes stirred a little as if a child were hiding behind them, but then Martin realized that it was only the morning breeze.
Pickle-nearest-the-wind
. What the hell did that mean?
But all the same, he went through to the sitting room, and found a scrap of typing paper on his desk and wrote it down in green felt-tip pen. The phrase had a peculiar quality about it that reminded him of something, although he couldn’t think what. Some childhood storybook with drawings of clouds and chimney pots and faraway hills.
He glanced toward the mirror. The grinning gold face of Pan presided over a scene that appeared to be a scrupulous representation of the real room. Only the blue and white ball on his desk remained uncompromisingly different from the gray tennis ball on his reflected desk.
Still holding the scrap of paper in his hand, he walked right up to the mirror and stared at his own face. He looked quite well and quite calm, although he didn’t feel it. He wondered if there really was a world beyond the door, a different world, a world where Boofuls had survived after death, a Lewis Carroll world where clocks smiled and chess pieces talked and flowers quarreled, and you had to walk backward to go forward.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
…
He remembered with a smile the words of ‘Jabberwocky’, the mirror-writing nonsense poem in
Alice Through the Looking-Glass
; and how it had always amused him as a small boy to hold the book up to the mirror and read the words the right way around.
It had always seemed so magical that the lettering obediently reversed itself and gave up its secret, every time.
He held up the piece of paper on which he had written ‘Pickle-nearest-the-wind’. Perhaps the words meant something if they were reversed: after all, everything
else
that had been happening to him seemed to have some connection with this damned mirror.
But to his slowly growing astonishment, the words weren’t reversed at all. In the mirror, in his own handwriting, the words clearly said, ‘Pickle-nearest-the-wind’, the right way around.
He stared at the real piece of paper, his hand trembling. ‘Pickle-nearest-the-wind’, the right way around.
The words refused to be reversed by the mirror. He crumpled the paper up and then uncrumpled it and held it up again. No difference. For some reason beyond all imagination, those words that had been whispered to him in the early hours of the morning completely denied the laws of optical physics.
He stood still for a while, looking at himself in the mirror, wondering what to do.
My God
, he thought,
what kind of a game is going on here?
He left the sitting room, step by step backward, keeping his eyes on the mirror all the time. He shut the door behind him, and locked it, and took out the key. Then he went back to his bedroom, stripped off his bathrobe and dressed.