Play dead

1976

With the success of The Magic Show-a magic-themed Broadway musical featuring an overly grand, aging alcoholic, a character not all that different from the Great Cygne-the world of parlor and stage magic all but changed forever. It was now the large scale Las Vegas show that the public demanded. For the Great Cygne, the venues got smaller, the road longer.

At the age of seven, it was evident that Joseph, despite his almost preternatural skills, and his integral part in the stage act, had no interest in following in his father's footsteps. His true interest was puzzles- word puzzles, jigsaws, cryptograms, riddles, anagrams, rebuses. If there was a maze, Joseph found its entry, its egress. Deduction, truth, deception, paradox-these were his sacraments.

But if Joseph's mastery of things enigmatic was evident, so had become the darkness which had taken hold of his father. Many nights Karl went down to Faerwood's basement in the middle of the night, constructing partitions, building and erecting walls, making rooms that mirrored the growing divisions in his mind. He once spent six weeks manufacturing a magic apparatus only to set it afire in the middle of the road in front of the house.

Every night, before Joseph went to bed, Karl played an old French film called The Magic Bricks. The silent three-minute film, made in 1908, showed a pair of conjurers making people appear and disappear, using boxes, bricks, and other props, mostly with rather crude special effects.

By his tenth birthday Joseph knew every illusion in the film, every trick of the lens, every hand-colored frame. He saw it nearly one thousand times.