Rust and Bone: Stories

THE APPRENTICE’S GUIDE TO MODERN MAGIC

Fakery #17: The Reanimate Fly. An illusion popular among street-corner mountebanks. Purporting to spot an expired fly on the sidewalk, the “magician” will bet a passerby he can resurrect it from the dead. The cunning fraud sets the fly in his palm and launches into his “act,” muttering garbled incantations, rolling his eyeballs about, frantically flailing his limbs, other shameless hocuspokery. After a minute the fly stirs, then buzzes away. The deceit: the fly is placed in a freezer, whereupon the cold stuns it into a state of suspended animation. The crafty sod then drops it on the sidewalk and waits on a rube. The heat of his palm raises the fly’s internal temperature, bringing it miraculously back to life … or so it seems.

—Excerpted from Hexers, Charlatans, and Miracle Mongers: An Exposé, by Herbert T. Mallory, Sr.

[1]

ST. CATHARINES, ONTARIO. JUNE 5, 1979.

The Knights of Pythias’s seventy-third annual Spring Salubritorial was in full swing. Banquet tables littered with congealed puddles of gravy and beer bottles smirched with greasy fingerprints were pushed to the corners of Lodge #57, chairs lined in haphazard rows facing a raised stage. The membership of the fraternal brotherhood milled about in aimless, meandering circles, bumping into one another, shaking hands, exchanging trivialities about children, jobs, the day’s unseasonable fogginess.

Norman Greene, newly elected Grand Chancellor of the Judea chapter, stepped hesitantly onstage. Beneath a fall of snowdrop-white hair, a pair of tri-focal glasses sectioned Norman’s eyes into dull brown strata resembling ever-darkening layers of soil.

“Welcome, brothers.”

No one noticed Norm until Hal Stapleton spied him out of the corner of his eye and said, “Sit down—show’s about to start!”

The group seated themselves with giddy expectation. With their faces shadowed by the stage footlights, they resembled choirboys at midnight mass.

“Welcome, brothers,” Norman, used to repeating himself, repeated. “Without further ado, may I introduce Herbert T. Mallory—The Inimitable Cartouche! ”

A man materialized through folds of thick velour draped behind the stage. A tall figure, suave as a toreador, with strong sharp features and eyes of flawless emerald. His hair was sculpted back with mint brilliantine, face clean-shaven save a neatly clipped Mephistophelian Vandyke. Wearing a spotless tuxedo with a frilled olive cummerbund and polished wingtips, he opened an alligator-skin valise to remove a flattened black disk, transforming it into a top hat with a brisk flick of his wrist.

Sid Tuttle, more than slightly tipsy after four Harvey Wallbangers, elbowed Hal’s ample gut. “What’s this four-eyed fool spent our dues on?”

Two smaller figures stepped through the velour, a boy and a girl. The girl, a few years older than the boy, crossed the stage in lurching, timid steps on account of the high-heeled shoes she wore. Her taffeta dress was held up with thin spaghetti straps, arms clad in evening gloves that sagged off the ends of her fingertips like withered petals. The boy was a miniature version of the magician. Tall for his age and thin, he wore an immaculately tailored tuxedo with matching olive cummerbund; his chin sported a grease pencil Vandyke. The boy strutted about in a manner that might have been seen as arrogant had he been a few years older—instead, it was merely precocious.

“What’s all this?” Hal was baffled: last year, when he’d been in charge of the evening’s entertainment, he’d lined up an exotic dancer, Countess Carissa, who’d bounded out of a packing crate wearing tasseled pasties and a smile. She got those tassels spinning like the propellers on a Piper Cub, twirling them one way then back the other to upbeat boom-boom music. “Where’s the … the real entertainment?”

“You know what they say, Hal,” Norman mumbled. “Variety … ah—spice of life.”

The truth was slightly less philosophic: Norman’s wife—who’d gotten wind of the Countess’s performance last year—warned her husband that if she discovered an entertainer of similar ilk had taken the stage this year, well, he’d better buy a warm toque, because it’d be damn cold sleeping in the garage.

“This is a … travesty!” Sid Tuttle moaned. Sid’s wife, a stern Pythian sister, only let him out of the house once or twice a month— frittering away a precious evening on magic was sacrilege! He shook his bald head, which, being shiny and oddly planed, reflected thin blades of light like the facets of a poorly cut gemstone.

“Come on, Norm!” Hal’s fingers compassed his nipples in concentric spirals, a reminder of the Countess’s considerable charms. “This is a man’s night, not some kid’s birthday party!”

“Yeah,” a shrill voice piped up. “I want magic, I’ll watch Circus of the Stars! ”

“Oh, my god!” someone else sputtered. “What next—a pinata? Loot bags? ”

“He’d better be pulling a naked lady out of that hat!”

“Where’s my coat? I’m going home.”

“Silence!”

The magician’s assistants had erected various stage props: two chairs with a wooden board balanced on the backrests, three black cubes stacked one atop the other, a scarred tea chest.

“I find your communal behavior boorish,” the magician said. “How would you like it were I to arrive at your places of business and ridicule you?” He glared down upon the grumbling throng. “I am the Inimitable Cartouche. For the next hour I will dazzle you with feats that will cause you to disbelieve your own eyes.”

The Pythians settled into a state of muttering acquiescence. A few even looked mildly excited. A voice from the back asked, “What sorta tricks d’you do?”

“I’ll perform no tricks! You will be privy to acts of mystery and wonderment that will shake the very bedrock of your belief concerning the laws of nature and the spiritual realm.”

“Oh, that’ll do nicely,” the voice chirped.

While the Pythians had been bickering, Cartouche surreptitiously dipped his left hand into his pocket, rubbing palm and fingers with potassium permanganate. Next, he’d slipped his right hand behind his back, where the boy sprayed it with a fine mist of glycerine from a bottle stashed in his cummerbund. When the magician clapped his hands the chemicals reacted, sending twin cones of red fire up from his palms, while smaller tongues leapt off his fingertips.

“That was quite something,” Sid Tuttle had to admit.

“Smoke and mirrors,” Hal muttered.

Cartouche led the Pythians through a host of standard illusions with the air of a man scattering pearls before swine. First he levitated the boy, passing a Hula Hoop over and above his hovering form—the magician’s hand obscured the hoop’s missing portion, allowing it to pass around the black iron pipe supporting the board. Next he performed the Zigzag: after locking the girl in an upright rectangular box with sections cut out for her face, hands, and one foot, he thrust wedges of sheet metal through. Dislodging the middle section, he made it appear as though the girl were divided in three. Though bent nearly double to effect the illusion, the girl managed to smile gamely, wriggling her toes and waving the red silk hankies clutched in each hand.

“I received this trunk,” Cartouche said, indicating the tea chest, “from an aged swami in the hills of Vindhya.” This was a considerable embellishment: he’d traded it for a crystal radio and a ship in a bottle at the Stittsville flea market. “Anyone who enters is transported to a dimension the polar opposite of our own, where black is white and hot is cold, where men toil under the light of the full moon and sleep in daylight, where—”

“Where droning windbags turn into big-breasted strippers,” Hal offered.

“Silence!” Cartouche knelt before the young boy. “Well, son?” he whispered. “Think you can do this without screwing it up?”

The boy nodded without meeting his father’s eyes. Cartouche said, “Alright, then. I hand you the reins.”

The girl pried the heavy lid up. Cartouche stepped inside. She clasped the lock as the boy waved his hands over the chest.

“Floobidaa, floobidoo, floobidee …” the boy chanted.

Standing off to one side, the girl watched and listened carefully. She did not hear the soft snik as the hidden latch disengaged, or the gathering outrush of air as the chest’s false back levered down. She’d watched her brother practice this escape for hours in the basement, amidst the mismatched golf clubs and dusty boxes piled to the ceiling beams, and, no matter how many times he’d repeated it, he’d never effected a silent escape: the latch would snap audibly or not open at all, his head would bump the lid or the false back would strike the floor with a clatter. She didn’t see the magician scurry from the box, or the drapes part even slightly in the wake of his passage.

The boy tapped the lid three times. “I banish you from this realm!” He nodded to the girl. “My assistant will now open the lid.”

She shot her brother a compressed acid look. She lifted the lid. The chest was empty.

“Feast your eyes—banished!”

“Whoop-de-doo,” said Hal.

“Now to bring him back,” the boy said, brandishing the wand like a fencer’s épée, tapping the chest three times. “Return to this realm!”

When the girl opened the lid, the chest was still empty.

Hal said, “Good riddance.”

The boy glanced at his sister. Desperation twisted his features. “Jess, what …?”

The girl slipped behind the curtain. The magician was nowhere in sight. She pushed through a swinging door into a narrow kitchen, hating the clumsy sound of her heels on the glossy tiles, turning the knob on another door opening into a narrow alleyway.

“Daddy?” she called softly. “Dad?”

The girl stood in a jaundiced sheet of light cast through the kitchen door, the warm humid night pressed to her temples. Her father’s Datsun was still parked at the mouth of the alley, next to four or five garbage cans dragged to the curb for tomorrow’s pickup. She smelled, or believed she could, a lingering trace of his cologne, a foreign brand ordered in ten-bottle lots.

He was gone. He’d … vanished.

A great clamor suddenly arose from the Pythian congregation. She hurried back through the kitchen and slipped through the curtains.

“Oh, no …”

Her brother had decided to push on with the show. He’d dipped

into his father’s valise, where the chemicals and powders for his most stirring illusions were hidden. He’d obviously attempted the Fiery Orb, in which a golden fireball explodes from the magician’s chest towards the audience, extinguishing mere feet from their faces. Expertly performed, the trick is thrilling: spectators experience a brief but disconcerting heat as a fireball rocketed at their eyes. But the novice conjurer hadn’t anticipated the remarkable combustive properties of powdered camphor.

The front row was in sad shape. The men’s faces were flushed red, clear globes of perspiration clinging to their foreheads. Leaning slightly forward in anticipation, Sid Tuttle had gotten the very worst of it: a merry golden flame danced atop the flat peak of his tarboosh.

The boy looked at his sister, at the red-faced Pythians, back at his sister.

Then he started to cry.

Fakery #59: Mister Sweet Touch. The practitioner approaches his target in a busy thoroughfare, ideally an open-air café. Before the rube sugars her tea, the swindler snatches the cup, inquiring how many teaspoons she favors. Depending on the answer, he dips his fingers into the cup for up to five seconds (only if very sweet tea is desired). Urged to drink, she will discover that, magically, the tea is sweet. If further demonstration is required, the rascal may touch anything—the table, the parasol, his target’s skin—all rendered cloyingly sweet. The deceit: the magician washes his hands in a strong solution of saccharine, a compound five hundred times sweeter than sugar. For hours afterwards, anything he touches turns sweet. Beware the counterfeit Midas with his sugary touch. Beware! Beware!

[2]

ST. CATHARINES, ONTARIO. OCTOBER 29, 2003.

Jessica Heinz glanced at the red digital numbers on the bedside clock. Quarter past eleven. Late morning sunlight streamed through the limbs of the backyard maple, broomstick-thin rays falling across the sheets. Squirrels dashed along the buttonbush hedge, cheeks fat with nuts. Her neighbor was burning leaves and the acrid smell wafted through an open window.

There seemed very little reason to get up. The time one rose was largely dictated by the amount of work one intended to complete during a given day. The fewer duties each day presented, the less reason one had to rise at a reasonable hour. Six months ago Jess would’ve risen at six-thirty to watch the line in the sky separating night from day peel away in ever-lightening shades, a thin band of gold touching the rooftops and telephone poles. Now she’d become accustomed to the position of the sun at her present waking hour, its bottom convex barely visible below the eaves.

On the kitchen table, a note in Ted’s pushed-together handwriting read: The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. Her husband left similar inspirationals each morning, cut out of magazines or copied out of books. She often thought he’d missed his calling as a motivational speaker.

Ted wanted desperately for her to be happy again. After the shooting—the Incident, as it was referred to at the precinct—after the TV reports and newspaper articles, after the Ontario Provincial Police placed her on voluntary suspension, she and Ted sat before the fireplace, talking about the places they might go and what they might do. In the darkness Ted spoke of a future she could no longer conceive of, planning the furnishings of their new house in a new city, the Persian rugs they would buy, the brass lamps and calfskin sofa, the exact shades of paint with names like Crab Bisque and Big Sky and Postal Green. Even though these things were unreal and unattainable, he endeavored to make them possible. What he didn’t understand was that Jess no longer felt deserving of that happiness. It was as if she could no longer comprehend happiness; its shape and texture, once so familiar, now possessed jagged edges and thorns, impossible to grasp. She sat before the fire listening to Ted’s voice, the reassuring and resolute words washing over her, burying her.

Jess sat on the sofa with a glass of orange juice laced with Belvedere vodka, watching the street through a bay window. Two laburnums were shedding their withered flowers in the opposite yard, the once-golden petals now shriveled and brittle. Seeing Sam’s Chevy pull into the driveway, she picked up her glass and went to the door.

“Good lord, Jess, just drag yourself out of bed?”

Sam Mallory, all five-foot-four of him, stepped through the door. Sam’s most striking feature was his spectacular bristliness, both physically and in manner. A tangled bush of beard covered most of his face, thick and lush, fanning out in all directions and resembling an inverted fright wig. His knuckles, ears, nose, and the V of his openthroated shirt were similarly hirsute. “Son of Sasquatch,” her brother called him. In the few places where the skin was bald—the palms, forehead, below his eyes—it was paper thin and drawn tight to the bone, saddleworn leather.

He glanced at Jess’s clean-pressed OPP uniform hanging in the hall closet next to the winter coats and old Halloween decorations. “If you’re not gonna put it on, why not stuff it in the attic? Damn death shroud hanging there.”

“Coming in, Sam?”

“Since you asked.” He heeled his boots off and poked his nose into her glass. “Bit early for that, isn’t it?”

“Feels about right. Fix you one?”

“Better not. Ole liver’s bound to explode like a hand grenade, and I can’t afford the transplant.”

Sam followed her into the kitchen, where she brewed a cup of tea. Seeing her fetch a fresh teabag, the wrinkles on Sam’s forehead bunched up. “Don’t have an old bag somewhere around?”

“Nope.”

“Awful waste, seeing as I take it weak anyhow. Toss one away lately? I’ll take that, so long as it’s lying on top yesterday’s newspaper.”

“I don’t serve secondhand teabags.” She winked. “Besides, you’re worth it.”

“Quit it, will ya.”

Jess set the cup in front of him, with a plate of digestives.

“You’re not looking good,” Sam said. “Look … worn.”

“Last of the honeydrippers, aren’t you?”

Sam Mallory was Jess’s uncle, her father’s brother. As was the case with many siblings, they were polar opposites: Sam was restrained where her father was flamboyant, straightforward where her father was circumspect, solidly rootbound where her father’s sail was set to every passing wind. When his brother vanished inside a tea chest twenty-five years ago, Sam assumed wardship of the children—their mother, Jeanne, having passed giving birth to Jess’s brother. A solitary and idiosyncratic man, Sam wasn’t the ideal surrogate father. But he’d always cared for his niece and nephew in the manner of a man with much love to give and no one to lavish it upon: fiercely and devotedly, yet ever at one step removed.

What Sam knew about raising children could’ve fit comfortably on the head of a pin, with room left for a dancing angel or two. But, unlike his brother, he was willing to learn. Jess remembered rushing into the kitchen one morning to see him bent over a mixing bowl, whisking its contents into a froth. In a griddle on the stove, a sad misshapen lump sizzled fitfully.

“What’s this?” Jess had woken with a dreadful certainty the house was on fire.

Sam shielded the mixing bowl with his body, the way a mother caught wrapping Christmas presents might shield them from a nosy child. Blobs of yellowish batter clung to his wiry mesh of beard. “Can’t you see it’s breakfast?”

Jess couldn’t recall her father ever fixing breakfast.

“It’s the most important meal of the day, in case you didn’t know.” Her uncle spoke with a huffy knowledgeable air, as though this were a fact he’d recently read, quite possibly in a thick book.

Jess sat at the table, upon which Sam brusquely deposited a plate. The pancake was a charred disk; a single mouthful probably contained enough carcinogens to dispatch an iron-lunged coal miner.

“Tuck in,” he’d told her. “It’s brain food.”

Sam’s small pink tongue now hunted for digestive crumbs in the bristly forest of mustache. “Been doing some reading.”

Jess stared out at the backyard, where a raven and a squirrel quarreled over bread crusts Ted had scattered that morning. “Oh?”

“Read about something called an Act of Erasure, Jess. Happens in the military, when soldiers lose touch with reality and don’t care about anything. Fellow puts himself in harm’s way when there’s no need. Trying to ruin himself, in a roundabout way.”

“And that’s what you think I’m doing—erasing myself?”

“Maybe I do.” Sam stirred a finger through his tea. “Not ruining, but … well, shutting yourself off. Take a look, Jess—you’re half-crocked at noontime. When’s the last time you stepped outside?”

“You’re being overdramatic.”

Yet Sam wasn’t entirely off base. Jess didn’t feel herself being erased, but she did feel something growing around her, like a shell. Sometimes she thought of it this way exactly: a shell forming over her body, hard and calcified, enrobing her arms, her legs. As time went by it became more impenetrable, layer gathering upon layer the way nacre forms about a speck of grit to create a pearl. Soon everything developed a gauzy translucent aura, as though she were enclosed by panes of warped, cloudy glass. Lately things had become darker and more indistinct, the outside world—her old job and friends, Sam, her husband, the incident itself—developing a distant, hollowed-out quality, as though these were people and events she’d once dreamed, many years ago.

“What is it about you and Herbie,” Sam said. “Both of you hiding away from the world?”

Jess went to the cupboard and pulled down a bottle. That she refused to rise to his challenge, her utter lack of spirit, troubled Sam more than anything.

“Did you come for a reason,” she said, “or just to question my mental state?”

“That’s not fair, Jess. Not fair at all.”

Jess gazed out the kitchen window at the patches of lifeless brown grass crushed by the lawn furniture. It made her think of a little churchyard in some hamlet she’d passed through with her father. She remembered a tidy cemetery and her father guiding them between the gravestones. The knife-edged wind blowing across the flat endless prairie, the corroded flag holders and warmth of her father’s hand, tiny pink flowers bright amidst the browned grass.

“There was a reason I stopped by.”

“Uh-huh. And what’s that?”

“Your brother called. Wants to talk to you.”

“He’s got a phone.”

“You know Herbie.”

“I know Herbie.” As soon as she’d said it, Jess realized the lie. She hadn’t spoken to her brother in nearly two years. “What’s he want?”

Sam walked his cup to the sink and rinsed it out. He looked up and for a moment she caught something in his eyes. Then he hugged her the way Jess imagined a man trapped in a foxhole rocked by mortar fire might hug the man beside him: with a rough embarrassed ardency. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it—her wedding, maybe? He wiped his nose and walked to the door.

“Sam? Hey, Sam?”

She caught up with him in the front hall. “Come on. I’m sorry.”

“It’s a hard time.”

“That’s no excuse for me acting like a bear.”

“It’s alright.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Ah, quit it, will ya?”

Sam shuffled down the driveway and hoisted himself into the pickup. He looked comical behind the wheel: a tame black bear some enterprising soul had taught to drive.

“What did Herb want?”

“Didn’t say exactly,” Sam called through the open window. “Wanted you to stop by, but …”

Fakery #6: The Fraudulent Flatline. This tired ruse took root in India, where similar dime-store “miracles” are sufficient cause to bestow sainthood. The robed charlatan—for this fakery, the more aged and desiccate, the better—sits cross-legged on a busy street corner. Once a gallery of gullible rubes has assembled, someone is asked to check the charlatan’s pulse. It’s normal. Then, palms upturned and mouth closed, eyes staring like a lobotomy victim, his body trembles. Keen showmen emit white foam from the sides of their mouths, accomplished by secreting of a tab of bromoseltzer between lip and gum. The trickster’s pulse slows, slows … stops altogether! He has died before their very eyes! Yet, as if on cue, the rogue’s eyes open, and his heart beats fiercely once more. The deceit: by squeezing a small smooth stone in the crook of his armpit, applying pressure on the axillary artery to stem the blood flow, the man’s pulse “magically” disappears.

[3]

Herbert T. Mallory, Jr.’s house occupied a barren patch of scrubgrass on the banks of the Welland Canal. A towering Gothic monstrosity adorned with carving and scrollwork, parapet flanked by a pair of hideous granite gargoyles, it was truly more castle than house. The yard was fenced in by a crumbling brick wall topped with iron pikes and, at the front, a massive gate closing in the middle to form the letters HTM, the T splitting in half when the gates opened. The tangle of satellite dishes strung around the topmost parapet resembled toadstools sprouting from a tree stump. It seemed very much the kind of looming, creepy place children would delight in visiting on Halloween, but unfortunately Halloween was among the many holidays Herbert now refused to celebrate.

Jess parked her Jeep TJ on the rough shale outside the gates. Away to her left, the canal lift-locks rattled and groaned. How could Herbert bear that noise?

Thin rosy sunlight washed the stricken brown lawn and reflected off the cardinal-red paint job of Herbert’s Jaguar X80—though, to the best of Jess’s knowledge, her brother didn’t drive. A tentworm-infested elm, shrouded from trunk to highest branch in gray cobweb skin, shadowed the car. The mummified tree brought to mind images of a cocoon on the verge of birthing some enormous prehistoric bug. The infestation had progressed for years, Herbert not lifting a finger in opposition: the concept of a large imperious entity destroyed by a swarm of unrelenting smaller entities suited his socialist leanings.

Jess climbed the worn stone steps. Music through the screen door, a gloomy dirge.

“Who is it?” a voice answered her knock.

“Jess.”

After a formidable pause: “Door’s open.”

She walked down the tight hallway strung with photographs of her brother levitating with Doug Henning and bending spoons with Uri Geller, astraddle one of Siegfried and Roy’s white Bengals. Hung amidst the photos were posters advertising Herbert’s stunt spectaculars: The Water Torture Cell Escape, The Vanishing CN Tower, and the ill-fated Buried Alive. Music came from everywhere and nowhere at once; judging by the mournful caterwauling, Jess speculated the composer was prone to fits of deep depression.

The kitchen was a high-ceilinged room smelling of Cup-a-Soup and old newspapers. Greasy wallpaper and dull wooden molding transformed any light into gloom, and the tall narrow windows, smudged with lampblack, allowed little sunlight to filter through anyway. The air was dank and smoky, unnaturally so, as though a fog machine were pumping away in secret. A pyramid of television sets tuned to different stations climbed the right-hand wall.

“Good afternoon, sis.”

Herbert sat at a table strewn with piles of candy: jujubes and jellybeans, licorice whips, gummy bears. His slender frame was draped in a fur-trimmed robe; a tawny thatch of hair sprouted from the robe’s open throat, matching the unruly mop atop his head. A few ropes of hair were plastered wetly to his skull, as if, hearing Jess’s knock, he’d hurried to make himself presentable. Silver-rimmed glasses gave his face an antique aspect at odds with his age: thirty-three. He peered at Jess with the doleful expression of a man who’d recently quit drinking and, life robbed of whatever false pleasure it once held, now existed in a state of perpetual sorrow.

Jess sat. “Sam said you wanted to talk.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do.”

Herbert tented his fingers and pressed them to his lips. His fingers were long and tapered though quite gnarled, recalling the braided roots of a mangrove tree. He reached out and plucked a red jellybean from a pile, turning it over the way a gemologist might inspect a fire opal.

“And …?”

“I’m getting to it.”

Jess felt a familiar anger rising.

No creature on earth was more self-absorbed than a magician. Trust-fund beneficiaries, dowager princesses, prima donnas of every stripe—not in the same league. It was a lifelong predisposition, a certain stirring in the bosom of an infant boy as he witnessed his nose plucked from his face and wiggled between someone’s fingers. Boys who grew up to be magicians learned the power of mystery early on, became brokers in secret knowledge. The problem was, they tended to overindulge this power, which led, in Jess’s case, to an endless procession of scenes similar to this one in 1976:

“Pass the pepper, Dad.”

“What pepper, Jessica darling?”

“The pepper that was on the table a minute ago.”

“Well, it’s not there now, is it?”

“You palmed it.”

“Palmed it? My dear, palming’s a shameless trick practiced by street-corner hustlers.”

“Fine. You made it vanish.”

“Perhaps so. Say the magic word and I’ll make it reappear.”

“Please.”

“The butcher says please, darling. The garbage man says please.”

“Ugh. Floobidoo.”

Moments later she’d feel the pepper mill’s sudden weight in her pocket. The first time was amusing. The second time, less so. Times three through three thousand were abject misery. Which was why, as her brother milked the moment as her father had, Jess snapped, “Turn this horrible music off.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Another minute and I’ll slit my throat.”

Herbert hunted through the jumble of remote controls at his elbow, found the corresponding unit, pushed a button.

“Now,” Jess said, “what the hell is going on? ”

Herbert rooted through a sagging tower of newspapers—copies of the St. Catharines Standard, New York Post, Calgary Herald, a dozen more—coming up with a section of the Sault Ste. Marie Star. “Look.”

The local news headline read: Magician Dazzles Patients at Institution. A grainy black-and-white snapshot captured a tuxedo-clad man in mid-flourish, a loose horseshoe of housecoat-clad and wheelchair-bound spectators gathered round. She squinted at the photograph intensely, until the image dissolved into its composite black-and-gray dots.

“So?”

“So? It’s him! The magician—Dad!”

“I can see that.”

“Oh, I see. You don’t care, is that it?”

Why should she care? He’d forsaken them. It took two years to convince Herbert he hadn’t banished him to a horrible parallel universe, two years during which Herbert suffered nightmares of his doomed pater reeling and shrieking in a fathomless void. Jess had developed a pragmatic outlook: some fathers skipped out for cigarettes and never came home; her father stepped into a tea chest and vanished. Though carried off with more panache than the average abandonment it remained a crude and everyday act. “Same shit, different dad,” she’d told friends.

“You have no desire to contact him? None whatsoever?”

“He’s no part of my life. He left us.”

“The man had his reasons.”

“Don’t start on that again.”

“He did,” Herbert persisted. “He was driven into hiding by vengeful magicians upset about the book.”

That damn book. The only renown Herbert T. Mallory, Sr., ever garnered came with the publication of Hexers, Charlatans, and Miracle Mongers: An Exposé. A compendium of “fakeries,” the book revealed the science and deception behind illusions practiced by inner-city con men, India’s famed god-men, and famous stage magicians. It was purchased by skeptics, hustlers, and the type of people who delighted in peeking through keyholes or leafing through strangers’ diaries.

“What are you talking about? What did anyone ever do? ”

“Well,” Herbert picked a fluffball off his robe, “what about the prank phone calls? And the time our house was egged?”

Jess tried to envision the ridiculous scene: a carful of magicians rumbling down the block decked in rhinestone vests and peacock feathers and bright satin turbans with cut-glass gems set in the centers, slewing around a hairpin curve, screeching curses and incantations while hurling eggs at their dilapidated bungalow.

“He abandoned us, Herbert. He’s a coward.”

“Believe what you want,” he said, chin set at a supercilious angle. “You don’t want anything to do with him, fine. I do.”

“Then hop in your car and drive.”

“You know I can’t.”

She shrugged and went to the fridge. Every rack and tray was stocked with cans of something called Sagiko Chrysanthemum Drink.

“Don’t have any beer?”

“It’s Korean. Very refreshing.”

Jess cracked one and took a sip. “Delightful.” She scraped her fingernail over a grimy windowpane, letting in a weak sickle of sunlight. “So, if you’re not leaving the house, how …?”

“Well, I thought maybe you’d track him down—”

“Oh, is that what you thought? Herbert’s little errand girl?”

“No, not like that—”

“I don’t care whether the man lives or dies—”

“Jesus, would you let me—”

“If you want to see him so bad, take off that ridiculous robe and leave this hermitage—”

“You’re one to talk!”

“At least I’ll set foot outside my door!”

Herbert pushed out of his chair and came at her. Jess flashed back to the days when he’d wrestle her to the ground, straddle her chest, and rap his fingers on her breastbone until she named ten chocolate bars— the dreaded rooster peck. Her only defense had been the fearsome purple nurple, which she administered with the sadistic glee of a gulag torturer. She wondered if this would end with them rolling about on the floor, pecking and pinching.

But he pulled up short, eyes filled with an uneasy mingling of shame and resentment. He turned his hand over in the weak sickle of light.

Jess looked at his fingers. Long and tapered, nails bitten to the quick. She’d seen those fingers do things no other fingers on earth could do, make cards and coins and tiny Egyptian swallows appear and disappear with the flickering swiftness of stop-motion photography. Yet taken out of their element and set to mundane tasks, those same fingers were inept and clumsy.

After his father’s disappearance, Herbert threw himself into magic. He carried a deck of cards everywhere, practicing tricks in the schoolyard, on the bus, in the bathtub. He bought a straitjacket from a medical supply company and learned how to dislocate his shoulders; Jess vividly recalled the meaty tok of his clavicle popping from its cup of bone. Soon he had cups and saucers, even the pot roast vanishing from the dinner table. Although Sam lauded Herbert’s abilities, as he felt was his role, it was with the disconcerting sense one gets watching history repeat itself.

At the age of eighteen Herbert rode the bus to Toronto. He picked an agent’s name from the phonebook, walked to the Bay Street address, barged past the secretary into his office and ran off a series of rapid-fire illusions, culminating with a Fiery Orb. The agent, face sweat stung from the lingering heat, inked Herbert to a contract on the spot.

“I’m sorry,” Jess said as her brother turned his hand in the soft light coming through the window. “Shouldn’t have said that.” She sipped her chrysanthemum drink. “Gets better the more you drink.”

Herbert’s rise was, to use the industry parlance, meteoric. He embarked on a cross-Canada tour. “A latter-day Houdini,” the Toronto Star raved; “Destined to be the hottest name in magic!” heralded the Montreal Gazette. Europe came next, Herbert playing on the great Old World stages where Robert-Houdin once caught bullets between his teeth and made the floorboards seep blood. He rode a gathering groundswell into America, playing to packed houses at Radio City Music Hall, the Emerson Majestic Theater, and the Los Angeles Orpheum.

He flew Jess and Sam in for his New York performance. Jess remembered sitting in a balcony box with her uncle, who looked uncomfortable amidst red velvet and shadowy silhouettes of wealthy men and women.

But mostly she remembered Herbert.

He seemed so small in the footlights’ austere glare, a stagehand startled by the curtain’s rise. But as he worked into his act, materializing playing cards by the dozens and flicking them with such force they ricocheted off lobby doors and balcony rails, Jess realized she was witnessing a man in his element. Sometimes he responded to the applause with an indulgent smile; other times by scorning his audience altogether. Herbert was forgiven his open disdain. The audience felt privileged to be witnessing a bright new star at the dawn of his career.

There were television specials—Herbert Mallory’s Cabinet of Illusions!; Herbert Mallory: Upside Down in the Water Torture Cell!— and a string of well-publicized relationships, starlets, and supermodels and an adult film star. There were drunken fracases outside Hollywood nightclubs and the inevitable paparazzi scuffles. There were the grand gestures, such as the day Jess found a Mercedes convertible in her driveway. He developed the manner of a prince among commoners. He dispensed favors like gold and expected to be deferred to at any and every moment.

His career ended live on national television, in front of an estimated seventeen million viewers, in a span of less than four minutes.

“I’m not saying I wouldn’t try to find him,” Jess said. “It’s just, I won’t go alone. I’ve got my own problems.”

Herbert nodded towards the pyramid of television screens. “I saw the news reports. Wasn’t right, what they did. Suspending you.”

“I asked to be suspended.”

“You did?”

“I don’t belong there.”

The stunt—or “personal challenge,” as Herbert called it—was a recreation of Houdini’s famous Buried Alive, in which the straitjacketed magician was sealed in a casket then lowered into a vault, which was then filled with sand. Escape was relatively simple: after wriggling out of the jacket, Herbert had only to slide open a panel in the casket’s base and dig through a foot of sand to a trapdoor.

Jess was at home when it happened, watching on TV. It had all seemed so strange. The sand had been poured in but the vault was still open. Then a deep muted crack, the sound a bone makes fracturing deep underwater. The surface stirred a little; air from the ruptured casket vented in a series of sandy puffs. The cameras pulled back, as though ashamed of their intensity. As she sat in front of the television holding Ted’s hand, part of Jess hated Herbert for the manipulation.

One of the producers came onstage, hollering, “Get him out of there—get him the hell out! ” Workmen rushed out with crowbars and screwdrivers, attacking the vault seams. The cameras zoomed in. An audience member clambered onto the stage, wedging his car key into a seam and prying with what little force he could muster. A technician tore at the vault with his bare hands.

Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds passed before they were able to break the vault apart. The retaining wall gave way, washing a tide of sand into the front row. Jess saw Herbert’s arm turning over and over as his body tumbled down the grade of sand, his tuxedo jacket—he must’ve escaped his straitjacket before the casket fractured—rucked up to his elbow, gold cufflink glinting in the overheads. His body rolled until it hit the footlights.

Paramedics dragged him from the sand and administered mouth-to-mouth. For thirty seconds there was only the artificial rise and fall of his chest, a fragile bellows. One shoe on, the other yanked off. A hole in his sock. Shirt singed from the white-hot foots. He sat up abruptly, arms jerked out, fingers grasping at nothing. His eyes wide, grains of sand adhering to the lashes.

“Are you all right?” the producer asked. “Herbert? Herbert?”

“It’s eternity in there,” was all he said.

The network cut to a rerun.

Jess sat down. “As far as I’m concerned, our father deserted us. But if you want to track him down, I’ll tag along. I don’t want to speak to him, or even look at him. But I’ll go.”

Herbert stared out at the world as he’d known it for nearly two years: vague and filtered, kept at bay by bricks and mortar and filthy window glass. “So you’re saying I have to go?”

“Know what Sam calls this place? The Fortress of Solitude.” Jess raised the soda can to her lips, mildly surprised to find it empty. “I don’t know what happened in that casket. You never told me—I don’t know you’ve told anybody. I imagine it was horrible. And I know you’ve got money, enough to build this place and pay for that Jag and keep you in foreign soft drinks the rest of your life. But you need to get out.”

Herbert gave her a look—a funny, diverted glance, turning away from her as you might from someone who is sick. “You know why I’ve never talked about it? Nobody’s ever really asked. My agent, my publicist, they were always telling me to get over it, forget it, it’s the past. Do you really want to know?”

“Do you really want to tell me?”

After a moment, he said, “It was dark. It was dark and I could hear the casket creaking. The sand was imported from Egypt. Powdered bones, mostly, animals who’d died in the desert; supposedly more airy, lighter. I felt the pressure building as they poured it in—my ears popped. I knew it was going to shatter. That was the worst part. It was dark and I knew it was going to shatter. I called out a few times— screamed, I guess. Four tons of sand. That’s like, two and a half elephants.” He shook his head wonderingly, as if the weight, stated in plain physical terms, shocked him. “It buckled. A shard of wood cut my cheek. That’s all I really remember. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. All I remember is darkness and pressure. This hard, featureless pressure.”

For a long time neither of them spoke. Why would anyone squirrel himself away after something like that, Jess wondered. She’d never want to be cooped up again—sleep in an open field under the stars, no walls, no roof. No pressure.

“A lot of luck in my life, up ’til then.” Herbert shrugged. “Streak was bound to end.”

For the first time in many years Jess thought of walking home from school with him in the winter twilight, their flesh an oyster-gray color against the snow, Herbert animated beyond all reason, circling her like an excited dog until she’d wrestled him down and given him a snowy face wash, the two of them tumbling over the clean white ground like shirts in a dryer. She couldn’t connect the man sitting across from her to the boy she’d known years ago. There wasn’t even a vague outline, a silhouette.

“I’ll be here tomorrow morning at nine,” she said. “You walk out the front door and I’ll drive wherever you want.”

“Can’t you give me a few days?”

“How serious are you about this? The article’s dated yesterday.”

Herbert followed his sister to the front door. Hazy autumn sunshine streamed through a bank of saw-edged clouds; after the sepulcher that was her brother’s house, Jess had to squint. Opening the Jeep door, she cast a brief glance over her shoulder: Herbert stood in the hall, face broken into shadowed squares by the screen door’s mesh.

THAT EVENING she sat on the porch with her husband, his hand holding hers under a blanket. Since being promoted off the factory floor his hands had softened, become more careful and defensive, as though, numbed from years on the line, feeling had returned to them.

An early twilight hung suspended over the downtown skyline, patches of pewter burning between the high rises.

“So, you’re sure it’s your dad in the photo?”

“It’s him.”

Ted’s father was an insurance agent, his mother a nurse. His family history was marked by the characteristic dullness resulting in well-adjusted offspring: no extramarital affairs or crushing debts or manic, right-brain-oriented parents. Having never known people like them, he could conceive of Jess’s father and brother only as vague abstractions, over-the-top comic book characters brought discordantly to life.

“Think Herb will leave that house?”

“Depends how important it is to him.” Jess touched her top lip to her nose, inhaling. “I think so. Unfinished business.”

“And you?”

“With Dad? We’re through.”

Later, lying in bed, she watched Ted’s reflected image brush its teeth in the bathroom mirror. His body was that of a retired athlete gone slightly to seed. A newly acquired paunch overhung the waistband of his boxers, though he carried it well, as some men had the ability to. He brushed with swift, raking strokes, as though scouring a crusty pot. White foam ran down his fingers and wrist.

It really is true, she thought to herself. Men are almost always more attractive when they think nobody’s watching.

Fakery #22: The Bleeding Wall. Invented by Robert-Houdin, grandfather of modern magic, it is best performed in a public square. The magician draws a pistol, aims at a wall, and fires. Whitewash and plaster chips fly, and where the bullet strikes, blood drips down the masonry. The deceit: earlier that day, the magician drilled into the wall’s opposite side, filling it with a solution of ferric chloride. When the bullet—coated in a solution of sodium sulfo-cyanide—punctures the wall, a chemical reaction occurs, causing a thick crimson substance to spill from the hole. Interesting note: Houdin initially used his own blood, but, following a stretch of daily performances that left him wan and depleted, opted for this chemical substitute.

[4]

It was a fine, crisp morning. After last night’s rainfall the sun was blanketed by a layer of wrung-out clouds; they streamed down the sky, misty and tattered, a frozen waterfall. Jess unrolled the window to let cool, creosote-infused air rush in. It was the sort of day she wished she could freeze-frame and repeat indefinitely—she’d take this day the rest of her life.

She pulled into Herbert’s driveway. Her brother sat on a trunk behind the screen door.

“Coming?”

“I’m debating.” Herbert’s voice was thin as a communion wafer.

She glanced at her watch: 9:03. “Do I have to hogtie you and drag you out?”

“For god’s sake—a minute, Jess, alright?”

Her brother performed a series of rapid in- and exhalations, a powerlifter pumping himself up for a record-breaking clean-and-jerk. He pushed the screen door open with the toe of his loafer and made a timid half-step from darkness into daylight. He wore a six-button double-breasted wool gabardine suit, creases sharp as a soldier’s dress uniform. His face bore the squint-eyed, faintly horrified expression of an infant forced prematurely from the womb. He stepped down onto the driveway. To the best of Jess’s knowledge, it was the furthest he’d ventured in years.

“Hard part’s over now.”

“I’ve been out once or twice,” he said defensively.

“Oh?”

“Just last spring, in fact. A hobo took up residence in the gazebo.” He tilted his face to meet the sun. “I rousted him with a stick.”

The next obstacle Jess faced was her brother’s luggage. She’d packed a small knapsack with a change of clothes. Herbert’s luggage consisted of a trunk, a footlocker, two suitcases, and a duffle bag of sufficient bulk to smuggle a pair of contortionists.

“We’re going on an eight-hour car ride, not around the world in eighty days.”

He looked wounded. “I need these.”

“Quit being a prima donna. Why?”

“How will he know I’ve been successful?”

“What, did you pack awards and plaques? I’m sure he reads the paper.”

Jess bartered him down to the duffel bag and a suitcase. She hefted the latter, so heavy it may have contained gold bullion, and dragged it to the Jeep.

“I refuse to ride in that bog stomper,” Herbert said. “We’ll take my car.”

Jess’s body soaked into the Jag’s tanned leather upholstery as water into a dry sponge. The sleek European dials and gauges were ringed by bands of polished teak. The odometer read 7.2 kilometers, which she suspected was the distance separating the dealership from Herbert’s hermitage.

She caught the on-ramp at Lake Street and swung onto the QEW. They passed the Henley Regatta, where a solitary sculler plied the calm brown water, and the slopes of St. David’s Bench, where vineyard laborers plucked late-harvest Riesling off the vines. At the city limits they passed a flaking sign that read: Thank You for Visiting St. Catharines, home of Herbert T. Mallory, Jr., The World’s Greatest Magician!, with an illustration of a disembodied hand yanking a rabbit from a top hat.

Herbert said, “Wish someone would burn that damn thing.”

He rummaged through his suitcase, retrieving the pipe Jess had seen jammed in his face during countless media appearances. It was a calabash of a style favored by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective.

“Why do you smoke that thing?”

“Because I am a sophisticate.” Herbert’s tone suggested Jess wouldn’t recognize sophistication if it crept up and nibbled her bottom.

“It’s a silly affected habit. Not at all you.”

“You have your vices,” Herbert said, “and I mine.”

On the north side of the Hamilton Skyway, Lake Ontario lay flat and emerald against the sun; on the south side, Stelco smokestacks rose in silvery pillars against the blue canvas of sky. Traffic was surprisingly light and they made good time. The Jag whispered along at 110 kph, Jess resting a couple of fingers on the wheel to keep it steady. After navigating through Toronto, Jess unrolled the window an inch or two, breathing the dung-scented air blowing in over the pastures. Herbert’s pipe smelled like a pan of scorched cherries jubilee.

She remembered driving this highway with her father and brother, traveling to a birthday party or bar mitzvah or cottage-country fair. The men sat in the front, her father lecturing Herbert on various tricks and illusions, pointing out the deceptions. She sat in the back. Every so often her dad would reach over the seat, squeeze her knee, and say, “Paying attention, dear?” At those times Jess wished her mother was still alive, or that she had a sister, any buffer between her and the men in the front seat. Her father made no allowance for the possibility she might not want to dedicate her life to magic; his mania was so all-consuming, and he’d found such a willing acolyte in his son, that he found it inconceivable she wouldn’t share his obsession. But even at her tender age, Jess knew a dead-end opportunity when she saw one: what role did women play in magic? Sequin-topped diversions. Eye candy. Her father used her no differently: Just stand off to the side and smile, dear. Let those darling dimples do all the work. Looking back, Jess realized her major life choices were influenced by a desire to surround herself with individuals and institutions the opposite of everything— whimsy, fickleness, fantasy—that magic, and her family, represented.

The highway wound along the eastern shore of Georgian Bay. Glimpsed through clusters of silver maple and Douglas fir stippling the shoreline, the water stretched like a dark curved mirror, interrupted only by a chain of dimensionless islands.

“So,” Jess said, “ever think about getting back into it?”

“What’s that?”

“Magic. The life.”

“Well, if you mean the sort of tricks I made a living off, no.” He opened a window and scattered pipe ashes to the breeze. “I’m interested in real magic.”

“Dad’s book should’ve convinced you there’s no such thing.”

“Not true. Dad believed in true magic. Why do you think he went to such lengths debunking the frauds?”

A sudden trapdoor feeling opened in Jess’s stomach. Here was something else her father had kept hidden away from her. She stared out the window, where a flock of migrating geese kept such perfect pace with the car as to appear frozen in place, pinned like moths to the backdrop of sky.

“There is real magic,” Herbert continued. “A Bedouin mystic sealed in a vault for two years emerges alive and in good health. A Navajo shaman changes into a timber wolf before a gathering of missionaries. A Hindu holy man climbs a rope into the clouds and vanishes. These things happened. Recorded fact. Transformation, telepathy, invisibility—it can be done.”

“Get out of here.”

“I’m serious. Tell me this: have you ever heard of Swami Vindii Lagahoo?”

“We play croquet together on Wednesdays.”

“Aren’t you clever. Lagahoo lived many years ago in Persia, where he was a spiritual counselor of sorts to the prince. Lagahoo was known as a great sorcerer—he lived for 127 years, according to the records of the day—and was credited with many miracles: producing sacred ash from his long sleeves, pulling cancerous tumors through the skin of sick men, levitation, transubstantiation. It’s written that once, at a palace gathering, he sliced open the gut of a suckling pig that had been roasting on a spit in full view of the guests—a dozen doves flew out of the slit! Astounding!”

Jess emitted a low sarcastic whistle.

“His most impressive feat, the one that I’ve been practicing, is making oneself invisible to the naked eye.”

“Come on, Herbert.”

“I’m serious. It’s no trick, just a purely mental skill. A basic matter of will. Lagahoo trained for years and was eventually able to maintain invisibility for hours at a stretch. The whole undertaking drove him crazier than a bedbug.”

“Did you ever consider he was crazy to begin with?”

Jess listened with mounting disbelief as Herbert described how, for the past six months, he’d passed each day in a room of his house, sitting in a cross-legged yoga position on the bare floorboards, teaching himself to become invisible.

“… first, you must block all outside distractions. The basic human sensations of sight, sound, smell, touch—block them out. One must feel nothing in order to experience everything. Focus the mind. Set aside all material thoughts. Concentrate. See nothing— no, see white. Perfect, unending whiteness. Center yourself upon it.”

He nodded to himself. “Yes, it’s possible. I’m living proof.” He added, “Totally self-taught!”

“If you’re doing this by yourself, how can you tell you’ve become invisible?”

Herbert sighed the way a teacher might when faced with a particularly dim-witted student. “I just know, Jess. I can feel it. A disconnection, I guess you’d call it.”

“All I can say is, if some guy walked into the station raving about aged swamis and invisibility, I’d ring up the men with butterfly nets.”

“Shut up.”

“Off to the loony bin he’d go. For his own good.”

“Think I’m nuts, do you? Pull in.” Herbert jabbed his finger at an approaching convenience store. “I’ll goddamn well show you.”

Jess eased off the highway into the lot of Gibson’s Groceteria, parking beneath a sign reading: Utility Turkey—59¢/lb. Herbert shrugged off his jacket and rolled his shirt sleeves to the elbow. “Shut the engine off and be quiet,” he said, unbuttoning the shirt to his navel. “This takes incredible concentration.”

Jess made a motion as though zippering her lips shut.

“All right.” Herbert rolled his neck and popped his knuckles. “Now, then. Watch.”

He closed his eyes. Soon his body was trembling, fingers twitching through a series of paroxysms as though tuning in stations on a finicky radio. His eyelids quivered like a man deep in REM sleep. His lips moved silently, a string of unintelligible syllables. Jess was reminded of a 911 call she’d answered a few years ago, some burnout who’d smuggled a narcotic toad back from Borneo; his girlfriend reported he’d been licking the poor creature’s backside all night. Jess found the guy sprawled on the kitchen floor in his boxers. The toad’s head poked from under the fridge, appraising its molester with bugged-out eyes. The guy’s body shook faintly, as though undergoing mild electroshock therapy. Herbert’s body was shaking much the same way.

This went on for five minutes. At no time did he disappear.

“Can you still see me?”

“Afraid so.”

“Damn!” His eyes snapped open. “Nothing? Didn’t my skin turn opaque?”

“Maybe a little smoky,” she lied.

“Hah—I told you!” Watching Herbert smile was like watching a match head burst into flame. “Just needs more practice.”

Jess pulled back onto the highway. The highway hooked sharply westward coming through Sudbury. They drove directly into the sun, which, sinking gently into the hills, threw long embers over the landscape. Here or there they passed a motel or trading post or bait shop, but otherwise the land unfolded in great sweeps of pine and maple and poplar. Herbert rummaged through his suitcase and slotted a CD into the player. “Edith Piaf,” he said. “The Little Sparrow. One of Dad’s favorites.” Jess listened to French lyrics sung in a gravelly contralto, trying hard not to hate Piaf just because her father liked her. It was nearly five o’clock by the time they hit Sault Ste. Marie.

THE SLEIGHTON MENTAL CARE FACILITY was situated on the city’s western outskirts, surrounded by a dense forest unclaimed by the logging corporations. The grounds were dotted with tall deciduous trees from which all but the most stubborn leaves had fallen. A wrought-iron fence, rusty bars tipped with ornate points, enclosed the buildings. Jess parked in the visitors’ lot.

“Cozy,” said Herbert.

Jess sat behind the wheel listening to the engine cool. She’d last seen her father as an eleven-year-old girl. Now she was a thirty-six-year-old woman with house and husband and twenty-five years of unshared history. She thought about that night at the Pythian lodge, how her father hadn’t held her gaze for even a moment; he’d simply stepped inside the tea chest, tipped his hat, and vanished. She wondered if it had been premeditated, or if he’d found himself on the other side of the curtain when the notion popped abruptly into his head: walk through the kitchen door out into the alley, turn the corner onto the street, keep walking. A snap decision. Two children, a mortgage, all responsibility—poof. Gone. Like magic.

“We’ve got to do this, Jess.”

“Says who? Nobody’s codified these things, written a guidebook.”

“Do I have to hogtie you, drag you in there?”

The facade of the hospital’s central building was pitted and water stained, chunks of mortar crumbling from the Catherine-wheel window frames. The receptionist’s unsmiling face was framed in a small porthole set in the middle of a pebbled-glass window. The only means of communication was through a perforated metal disk, same as at a theater box office.

“How may I help you?” the receptionist’s voice rattled.

Jess leaned close to the metal disk. “There was a magic show here a few days ago. We …”

“Ward Eight, fourth floor. Elevators down the hall to your right.”

The entrance to Ward Eight: a steel door painted with a faded rainbow; rabbits, chipmunks, and other forest creatures frolicked beneath the colorful arch. The window glass inlaid with chicken-wire.

An orderly sat behind the charge desk reading Archie’s Digest. The man filled out his white uniform to the last stitch, fabric straining under its hopeless burden. The skin of his face appeared to float upon his features, not quite secure, like the membrane forming on cold soup. His name tag read LEE.

“We’re here about the magician,” Jess told him.

Without looking up from the comic, he angled his wrist so Jess could see the digital readout on his watch. “Visiting hours end at five.”

“We aren’t here to visit any—”

“’Tis past five, m’dear.”

Jess reached for her badge, which she still carried. With her suspended it carried no weight, but the orderly didn’t know that. She flipped the top half over his comic and let it hang.

“What do you want with the magician, officer?”

“We have reason to suspect he was involved in a robbery,” Herbert said. “The man is a known hoodlum. We have eyewitness reports, and certain … corroborating evidences.”

“I don’t see how that could be,” said Lee.

“Look, we just want to ask some questions,” Jess said.

“Well, then, guess I’ll go rustle up your magic man.”

The orderly came around the desk and waddled into the ward, walking with the listing gait of a once-skinny man whose body has ballooned to ungovernable proportions. Herbert shot his sister a distressed look. Was their father a patient? Mercurial, recalcitrant, heedless of social responsibility—dear god, he fit the profile! Maybe they’d picked him up years ago, wandering the streets in filthy rags, destitute and mentally unglued. Perhaps he’d been here for decades and every few months the doctors reduced his medication so he could dress up and perform a show for his fellow looners. Herbert couldn’t handle the sight of his father in a ratty housecoat and fuzzy slippers, shambling about like a zombie.

“Do my eyes deceive me?”

They turned to see a man coming out of a glassed-in office behind the charge desk. Mocha-skinned and trim, sporting a pencil-thin mustache of a style cultivated by ’70s-era adult film performers, sleek body nearly lost within a billowing lab coat. “It is! ” he exclaimed, skidding to a stop beside Herbert. “Mr. Mallory, can I just say how honored I am—imagine, the great magician in our ward!”

Herbert inched behind his sister, ignoring the man’s proffered hand.

“Is there a problem?” The man spoke with a delicate Indian accent. “Have I upset you?”

“He’s fine.” Jess shook the man’s hand. “Just, after the accident …”

“Oh my, yes!” A shake of the head. “Terrible accident. Terrible, terrible. I watched on television.” He took a step back, embarrassed by his proximity. “Dr. Venky Iyer.”

“Jessica Heinz.”

“A thousand apologies, doctor.” Herbert bowed. “I mistook you for one of the inmates.”

“Ha!” Dr. Iyer cackled. “Cannot be too careful. Now, what brings you fine people here?”

“You hosted a magic show a few days ago …”

“Very nice, very nice,” Dr. Iyer said. “It certainly brightened everyone’s day.”

Jess glanced around, thinking the ward could use some brightening. The dayroom was covered in olive-green tile, strips of padded foam tacked to the walls at hip level. The light filtering through the leaded glass windows was muted by thick mesh screens.

“So,” Dr. Iyer arched his brows, “will Mr. Mallory be performing?”

He seemed to have mistaken Jess for Herbert’s agent. “I’m sorry, no.” She showed her badge. “We’re looking for information on the man who performed …”

“Here’s your magician.”

The orderly gripped a scrawny fellow by the elbow. The man had thick curly red hair and lips so thin they resembled soda crackers stacked one atop the other. A gourdlike head perched atop a spindled neck like an apple balanced on a breadstick. Standing beside him was a shockingly large woman of about sixty. With blotches of mascara smudging her face and a shock of frizzy black hair, she resembled a chimneysweep after a dogged day’s work.

“This is the magician …?” Jess managed.

“Who, Oogie?” Dr. Iyer chuckled. “Certainly not.”

“Well, he’s been practicing tricks all day,” said Lee. “I figured …”

Dr. Iyer shook his head. “The officer’s looking for the man Oogie’s been imitating lately.”

“I’ve been off the past week,” Lee said defensively.

“I’m the man you’re after,” the scrawny man piped up in a voice shrill as a piccolo. “I got magic like you never seen!”

“Cool your jets,” Lee warned.

Oogie grasped Jess’s hand and kissed it grandly. “Yes, milady, your eyes do not deceive you. It is I, Oogie Dellanthorpe.” His tone suggested the name passed over people’s lips with great frequency. “Or, as my legions of fans know me, the Mysterious Oogie.”

“Delusional, but quite harmless,” said Dr. Iyer. “A fascinating case.”

“I’ve been hiding out with my able-bodied assistant, Rhonda McMurphy.” Oogie nodded to his female companion. “The pressures of fame, you know. But don’t worry, I’ll soon be thrilling audiences again. I can leave anytime I want.”

“That’s not at all true,” Dr. Iyer whispered to Jess.

Oogie’s eyes fell upon Herbert. “Is it—could it be?”

Herbert performed a polite bow. “Guilty as charged.”

“Dr. Iyer, about the other magician …?”

“Of course, officer. I have his address on file.”

Dr. Iyer ushered Jess into his office and closed the door, leaving Herbert to fend off Oogie alone. The office was small and cluttered, shelves stacked with outdated medical texts. In the corner, a little heater popped and cracked as its parts grew warmer and expanded.

“An interesting man,” Dr. Iyer said, speaking of her father. “Comes in every year around Halloween. Mr. Dellanthorpe was so enthralled he’s taken on a whole new persona.”

Dr. Iyer handed over a slip of paper with an address in Thessalon, a town two hours east. “I don’t even know the fellow’s name. He insists on using his stage name—the Inimitable Cartouche.”

By the time they exited the office, Oogie’s arm was draped chummily over Herbert’s shoulder. “You’re a fine fellow,” he said. “I like the cut of your jib.”

Jess pulled at her brother, making for the exit. “Well, thanks for everything.”

“No!” Oogie was reluctant to relinquish Herbert’s neck. “I’m … I’m putting on a magic show. Yes, it’s true: the Mysterious Oogie will perform tonight.”

“You’d really be helping us,” Dr. Iyer whispered. “Otherwise he’ll grouch all night.”

They agreed to stay. Lee guided Jess and Herbert to a sofa. Their presence prompted a great deal of curiosity; patients wandered out of their rooms, gravitating to the dayroom.

Oogie reappeared with a turquoise bedsheet pinned to the shoulders of his housecoat and a bristol-board top hat on his head at a breezy angle. Rhonda wore a sequined top and hoop skirt.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Oogie said. “Tonight I will dazzle you with illusions guaranteed to leave you questioning your sanity!”

“Ho ho ho, now, now, Mr. Dellanthorpe,” Dr. Iyer said in a singsong voice. “Let us choose our words a little …” he brought his index finger and thumb together, as though squeezing the juice from an invisible grape, “… more prudently, shall we?”

“Use what sense the good Lord gave you,” said Lee, “… or I’ll brain you.”

“We do not brain our patients, officer,” Dr. Iyer told Jess with a nervous smile. “We have a strict No Braining policy, in fact.”

Oogie shuffled a deck of playing cards. He strode over to a shrunken-apple doll of a woman, fanned the deck.

“Now, to remove any taint of duplicity—milady, have we ever met before?”

“I’m Marla,” the old woman croaked. “Your room’s next door to mine. You keep me up all night with grunts of self-gratification.”

“What I mean is, are we in cahoots?”

“I wouldn’t be in cahoots with you for all the silks in Siam.”

“Wonderful. Please select a card.”

Marla reached for a card. Oogie pulled the deck away and angled it differently. Marla reached again. Oogie snatched the cards away, stuffed half into his pocket and offered the remaining deck. Marla reached … Oogie pulled away. Rhonda performed a series of pirouettes.

“My formidable mental powers are useless!” Oogie was confused and dismayed. “This lady’s resistance is otherworldly. Tell me, aged crone, is there a metal plate in your skull?”

Marla had nodded off.

Herbert had been watching with mounting agitation. “Mind if I have a go?”

“Yes, give it a whirl,” Dr. Iyer said.

Oogie took a seat beside Jess, unruffled despite his failure. “I’m learning how to clog dance,” he told her. “Ordered special shoes from Scandinavia.”

Herbert fanned Oogie’s cards and knelt beside Marla, who snuffled into foggy wakefulness. Herbert asked her to take a card and show it to everyone but him. After Marla had done so, Herbert shuffled the remaining cards and directed Marla to slot her card back into the deck.

“When I tap the deck, your card rises to the top.” A light tap. “Remove the card, please.”

Marla’s face lit up. “The four of clubs—will you look at that!”

“Beginner’s luck,” Oogie huffed.

For the next half-hour Herbert ran through a series of card illusions: the Haunted Deck, Cutting the Ace, the Teleporting Card, the French Drop. Those who’d hung back earlier drew near. Everyone leaned forward, heads tilted slightly upward, bodies inclined towards Herbert like iron filings under a faint yet persistent magnetic pull. Following each trick the room burst with astonished laughter or low oooohs, followed by the disbelieving question: “How did he do that?” Jess watched her brother’s face change. Something peeled away from it, a layer so deeply ingrained she hadn’t noticed it until it was gone. The features relaxed, creases smoothing out, softening. She saw a trace of the boy she remembered.

“I must seclude myself in preparation for my final feat,” he said. “I ask the lights be dimmed. Everyone must remain completely silent. Any disturbance will ruin my concentration.”

“Herbert, are you sure—?”

“Hush, doubting sister.”

Herbert entered a room at the end of the ward. Following his departure the dayroom filled with excited whispers, like a cage full of birds. Lee tiptoed over to the dimmer knob and brought the light level down to a mellow dusk.

After a few minutes Herbert cried, “Behold!” and everyone craned to see the fabulous magician striding down the hallway …

… stark naked.

Herbert believed the only sure way to render oneself invisible required the removal of one’s clothes. Though he could still see his body—the pasty skin and thatch of curly black chest hair, the teacup-shaped birthmark on his hip—Herbert was utterly certain nobody else could.

“I am in your very midst,” he called out triumphantly, “and yet you cannot see me—ho ho ho! ”

A palpable surge of discomfort passed through the group. Most people looked away, shocked and deeply embarrassed. This only solidified Herbert’s conviction.

“Is this normal behavior?” Dr. Iyer asked Jess.

Herbert strutted through the group. He flipped a lock of Rhonda’s hair. “What’s that—the wind? No, madam, it was I!”

“Fellow’s equipped like a fox,” Marla said to no one in particular.

Herbert stopped in front of a black man wearing a porkpie hat. “Tell me, friend,” he asked. “As I stand before you, what do you see?”

“I see a damn fool! ”

“Herbert,” Jess said gently. “We can see you.”

“You’re lying.”

“Everybody please point at my brother.”

Twenty fingers did so.

“I see.” Herbert was more bemused than upset. “Well, isn’t that … odd.”

Herbert retreated down the hallway, pale body glowing in the thin nocturnal light. As he walked past the casement windows, burnt orange light of a harvest moon slanting through the glass, Jess noticed something odd: the moonlight did not touch upon the curvature of his arms and shoulders, did not touch his skin at all. It seemed to fall through him.

Fakery #77: The Possessed Apple. This ploy was first practiced in medieval days. An opportunistic rogue set an apple on the cobbles of the village square, claiming the ability to move it using only the precipitous powers of his mind. As he bore down with a look of fierce concentration, the apple would indeed begin to tumble over the stones. The ruse: the man cored an apple and placed a large beetle inside, then plugged both holes using potter’s glue and the remains of the core. The agitated insect tossed and turned within its mealy cell, causing the apple to move about. Humorous note: a few practitioners, touring this act through superstitious backwoods shanty-towns, were marked as warlocks and burnt at the stake.

[5]

IT WAS NEARLY eight o’clock when they left Sleighton. Dr. Iyer offered directions to the Regal Lodge—actually not a lodge at all, just five or six moss green cottages clustered on a rocky promontory jutting into Whitefish Bay. Their cottage had two cots and a stone fireplace. Stuffed largemouth bass hung on the walls, walleyed and glassy.

Jess sat on the porch beneath a tarpaper awning, looking out over the bay. The moon and stars stood on their exact reflections on the surface of the night-darkened water. A fish jumped in the center of the moon, the image rippling, glazing over, re-forming. She could barely make out the clapboard shacks standing amidst a cluster of pines across the channel.

Herbert joined her on the steps. They sat in silence for a while, listening to the constant lapping of waves against the dock pilings. The air was clean and raw and left the taste of winter at the back of their throats.

“What do you hope to accomplish by all this?”

“All what?”

“Don’t be dumb,” Jess said. “What do you want to ask? What do you want him to say?”

“I went back to the house, once. Before it sold and the furniture got carted away. Walking around, looking. This was at the time I still thought I’d, you know …”

“Banished Dad to an alternate dimension?”

“Right. He was everywhere in that house. He was in the bathroom cabinet, his razors and Burma Shave and that whatever it was, that pomade, to slick his hair. His clothes were lying around, smelling of him, that cologne. He was in the pictures on the walls and food in the fridge, the packet of flower seeds on the table. Hair stuck to a cake of soap. Everywhere.”

A bullet-shaped wedge of darkness cut through the moon’s reflection, the roar of an outboard motor swelling, dissipating.

“I made him a booklet, once. Cardboard and colored paper, tied together with yarn. I wrote down some of the tricks he’d taught me. Just this thing I’d made. It was childish; it was nothing. But I remember him saying he’d keep it close.” Herbert gazed into the sky, the seam where moonlight and darkness swam together. “It was still in his nightstand. There were a few old photos, some yellow slivers of toenail, the booklet. Why didn’t he take it with him, if it meant so much?”

They sat in silence. Jess stared out over the bay, starlight bending upon the water’s surface. A cold wind came across the water, slightly tainted by the sulfurous smell of the pulp mills. Three or four mallards congregated beneath the boathouse, bobbing bodies illuminated by an outdoor bulb; it took a moment before Jess recognized they were decoys.

“Why did you come?” Herbert asked. “You don’t want to see him.”

“That’s right.”

“So, just get out of town for a few days? Away from … all that?”

“I guess so.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Herbert, let’s not, huh?”

“You should talk about it to somebody. You talked to Ted, I’m sure.” He paused, focusing on the billowy white shapes left by his words. “Listen, when I told you about the casket—it helped. I didn’t think it would.”

She hadn’t talked about it—not to Ted, Sam, or the department psychologist. It was a wound too painful to dress, the edges raw and bleeding, and she kept thinking if she treated the pain as something untouchable and beyond her control it might heal itself eventually. But that hadn’t happened, and now everywhere, in the trees and the water and the sky, she felt a sadness weighing down on her. And though sometimes the pain receded, washed out on a tide of new possibilities and potential, it always returned, the more unbearable for that brief absence.

“Do you want to hear about it?”

Was it even a question?

“Only if you want.”

She told him this:

The call was a routine 412: Suspicious or overt behavior in a neighboring domicile. Usually a domestic dispute: shouting, accusations, broken crockery. Jess hated 412s, the women with swollen eyes refusing to press charges, the same depressing minuet played out week after week. The call came from Grapeview Estates, a wealthy development near Port Dalhousie. She pulled into a driveway on Sarah Court shortly after nine o’clock, the night of February 27.

The caller was a man in his mid-fifties cradling a white terrier in his arms. He pointed to a half-constructed house across the street. Saw people moving around before dark. Arsonists. Lit a fire. Liable to burn the damn block down.

The house hovered at the lot’s back edge in a pool of darkness. Snow-covered roof beams poked at the sky like broken ribs, icicles descending from every unfinished angle. Jess walked beneath the funnel of light cast by a gooseneck streetlamp as new snow fell, flakes alighting on her hair and face. Arson was a summer crime, best when the air was hot and tinder dry; this was likely vagrants seeking shelter.

The flashlight cast a bleached glow on the untreated wood. Electrical cables snaked through holes in the ceiling and wound around exposed beams. The floor was dusted in fresh snow, untracked by footprints.

Officer Heinz, she called. Police.

She shone a flashlight down the basement stairwell: smashed cinderblocks, flattened fast food cartons, gray cement glittering with frost. The ashy, electric scent of a doused fire. Jess’s footsteps echoed hollowly as she descended. The radio crackled at her hip, a medley of codes and numbers. She told herself it was a vagrant, some washed-out husk posing no threat. But she’d heard stories of encounters beneath train trestles or shadowy freeway overpasses, men with little hope or sanity lashing out viciously. Her right hand tightened on the butt of a .38 service revolver.

A shape ran past the flashlight’s beam. Lit by the stark white cone, the eyes were glassy and feral, the hand clutching something small and silvery.

Jess raised her pistol, the motion almost casual. Her understanding that it was a child came a split second too late to stop her muscles flexing under a presumption of danger.

Muzzle-flash lit the boy’s face. He twisted away, as though ashamed. The force of impact threw his body back, feet leaving the ground, flying, falling. He hit the ground and skidded.

The flashlight fell from her hands, lighting the left side of the boy’s body. He wore a puffy white parka, blue jeans, a Timex wristwatch. His right hand was mittened; the left clutched a silver Zippo. The gunshot had jolted one of his boots off. There was a hole in the heel of his sock. Jess saw all this. His face was white, green eyes dilated, left eyelid fluttering. His mouth was open and there was some blood there, thin and shiny. He drew short, hiccupping breaths. His cheeks were smooth and hairless and freckled, his hair parted to the left. There was a small hole in his parka, frosted black around its edges. The hole was placed somewhere between shoulder and heart. Tiny flecks of blood all over his clean white parka and in the swimming light they looked to move across his chest like aphids.

Another boy stood in the corner. The concrete at his feet scorched black. A pile of sticks, a half-burnt mitten, a soda bottle melted down to a charred lump of plastic. Two boys playing with fire in an abandoned house. The city was growing so quickly, green spaces paved into parking lots—where could boys go to do the sorts of things boys did? Two boys playing with matches, piss-scared they’d be caught. One of them had tried to run.

“Go,” she said to the other kid who was already moving up the stairs. “Get help. Get … help.”

She knelt beside the wounded boy, pressing her hands to his chest. Redness pushed between her fingers, warming them. How old was he? Maybe twelve, maybe younger. She called it in. Shots fired. Civilian down. The boy coughed up blood. His fingers were long and shapely; girlish. She pulled him onto her lap and tilted his head, scooping blood from his mouth with her fingers. His nose was slightly upturned—the word devilish flitted through her mind. A smear of ash on his chin. His eyes wide open, glazed, looking up into the darkness. Calm, hugely round eyes.

“Please,” she said, “please.”

In that moment, she saw the boy’s funeral. A small group gathered on a grassy hill, bright winter sunlight washing the snow-topped tombstones. She saw the coffin, small and narrow and polished to a high gloss. She saw a blown-up photo leaning on an easel, a picture of the boy as she’d never known, the boy’s face wide open and smiling. She saw the boy’s father sobbing in the sloppy and frightening way some men have, loud and gasping for air.

“Why did you run?” she whispered. “It wasn’t so bad. A little fire. It’s okay. Not so bad.”

Ambulance, fire, police: standard 911 protocol. Paramedics pulled the boy from her, injected rapid-coagulant into his neck, carried him away. Someone wrapped a blanket around Jess’s shoulders. She was led to a cruiser and taken home.

Green luna moths pulsed on the cottage’s screen door, bathed briefly in porchlight before drifting into the darkness. Nothing had changed physically—the moon still reflected its quivering image on the bay, water still lapped the pilings—and yet things were unconditionally altered.

“It was an accident,” said Herbert. “A terrible accident. But the boy pulled through. He’s okay—I read a story about it.”

“His name is David Hickey. Eleven years old. The bullet passed within four centimeters of his heart.” She held her index finger and thumb an approximate distance apart. “Fractions, you know? Four … centimeters. Increments.”

She wouldn’t tell Herbert—or anyone—about the trip to the hospital the next day. How she’d stood outside the ICU, peering through the observatory room window at the boy reclined in a hospital bed. His parents sat beside the bed watching the arrhythmic spike of the EKG monitor. She’d wanted to go to them, to apologize and hold the boy’s hand … but she was paralyzed with fear: fear of what had happened, and what could have happened. For the first time she could recall, she prayed to God, prayed for the boy to pull through. She prayed for the boy, but also—selfishly, she realized afterwards—for herself. She prayed for the boy’s health so she might go on living as she had, the fine job and caring husband and quotidian happiness she’d enjoyed. Her future depended on the boy, so she prayed for him, and for herself.

“I don’t think I’ll ever escape,” she said. “I mean, sometimes it goes away, that feeling, but it comes back. So I’m always wondering, is it possible—escape?”

Herbert didn’t reply. Jess felt a blankness rise inside her, flowing through her veins, nasty and slippery like heavy black oil in a drip pan. She stepped off the porch, walking down the gentle slope falling away from the cottage, towards the shore.

“Jess? Hey, Jess?”

She did not run; there was no urgency. She heeled off her shoes on the thin band of soil along the shoreline and went into the bay. The icy water sent a rolling tide of gooseflesh up her body. Cones of mist rose off the water’s surface and she felt the mushy bottom between her toes. The water’s flat surface was a pane of deeply tinted glass as she passed through it slowly, the chill gone now, water warm, the temperature of blood. She let herself go, not diving but merely sinking. Her mouth filled with the taste of stirred silt and algae; the weight of water forced the air from her lungs. Disconnected images fled through her mind: an improbable barn roof, the gap between each slat exactly four centimeters, sunlight pouring through in neat even bars; a World War II battlefield, mud and blood and shit, she’s charging a machinegun nest in a clean-pressed OPP uniform, screaming and laughing at once; a field on a long-ago summer day, the dry earth and smell of hay, tumbling over and over in the tall grass, holding onto someone whose face she cannot make out. Fractions, brinks, increments, hair breadths, verges, moments: she saw all this. Undercurrents buffeted her, pulling her deeper. Strands of hair swept in soft arcs across her face. Her feet lost touch with the bottom and she floated out into the uncertain gravity of the bay.

Hands encircled her waist. Her head broke the surface and she saw the hot white stars aligned in orbit. Her brother’s arms were hooked tightly beneath her armpits, feet kicking between her legs. Herbert paddled into the shallows and rolled over on his side.

“Jesus,” he gasped, “are you crazy?”

“I don’t know.” Shivering, she struggled to frame an appropriate response. “I can’t see my way clear of it anymore. Like, the things you thought possible aren’t truly possible anymore, and they’ll never be again. I’m sorry, but, you know, sorry’s not enough. It’s just … not … enough.”

Herbert peeled his shirt over his head and heaved it onto the grass. His chest was wan and sunken, an arrowhead of dark hair pointing at his chin. Plumes of steam rose off his shoulders and braided from the crown of his skull.

“I don’t think escape is something we can hope for,” he said. “People have it worse than us; we can’t flatter ourselves otherwise. You go on. Put your head down and bull through.” He showed her his palms. “What else can you do? Find something that fills that empty space inside you. For me, it’s magic. There’s something peaceful about it. Calm and steadying. It gives me control. I think that’s what it’s about: not escaping, just regaining control.”

Regain control. It sounded so simple, a matter of mechanical application: turn wheel in the direction of the skid, pump brakes steadily. Go about your business. Jess wasn’t sure she could. Her character wasn’t weak or resigned, but controlling the terms of her imprisonment possessed no appeal.

“Let’s get into some dry clothes,” she said. “You’ll catch pneumonia. What were you thinking, trying to swim in this cold?”

“Seemed like the thing to do at the time.”

THAT NIGHT JESS CALLED HOME. Ted picked up on the sixth ring.

“It’s me.”

“It’s you.” His voice logy, as though his mouth were packed with syrup-soaked wool. “Find your man?”

“No. Tomorrow.”

While they’d dated, Ted hadn’t known how to dance. Jess loved dancing, the club atmosphere, the way a knowing partner would hold her. Though athletic and comfortable in his own skin, Ted was no dancer. One night she’d made an offhand remark; I’ll have to find me a boy who likes to dance, the kind of comment a woman might make in the early stages when the threat of other options carried weight.

Unbeknownst to her, Ted started taking lessons. He met with a widowed instructor, Cora, every Tuesday and Thursday. They feather-stepped and reverse-turned across her wide living room, practicing the Paseo con Golpe and El Ocho. On New Year’s Eve he’d taken her to the Blue Mermaid, where, at the stroke of midnight, he displayed his skills during a slow waltz. He was still horrible, two left feet, but that’d made no difference.

“I miss you,” he said. “I miss your smell.”

“My smell?”

“You’ve got a great smell. It’s still here, in the sheets, but—not the same.”

“Will it be enough to tide you over?”

“I guess it’ll have to. Can’t hug and kiss the sheets.”

“You could…”

“But that would be … weird.”

“A little.”

After a beat: “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I just wanted to …”

“Hear my beautiful voice. Don’t blame you: ladies call at all hours to hear my silky-smooth baritone, baby. So … what are you wearing?”

Jess laughed softly. “Ted, your dirty mind.”

“Oh, my god,” Herbert moaned. “Find a phone booth, why don’t you?”

Fakery #44: Rod into Serpent. One of magic’s oldest tricks, it plays on a snake’s nature and instinct. First, chill the snake in an icebox for several hours to render it sluggish. Then, grasping the head between thumb and index finger, apply steady, equal pressure. This stuns the serpent, who believes an enormous beast is attacking. Unable to defend itself, it goes into shock, body rigid as a twig. Finally, set the stunned snake on the floor. Within a few minutes, it will slither away, unharmed.

[6]

The morning sky was dour, the trees to the west a dirty tone of silver. A cover of fog clung to the bay, moving low and fat across the water.

Jess navigated down the gravel track leading to the main road. Fog hung suspended between skeletal oak and maple. Rounding a blind curve, Jess glimpsed the looming shape and slammed her foot on the brake. The car’s back end fishtailed over the shale.

“Holy moley,” Herbert said in a small, childlike voice.

The bull moose was easily ten feet tall. The front half of its body blocked the road, hindquarters mired in the spillway. Seen in profile, its head was a long dark wedge elegantly downswept, a smooth invert bow connecting its lips to the wet fur of its dewlap, which fanned in finlike ridges. The antlers were mostly shed of their itchy summer hide, though molting tatters hung from the odd point; rising from either side of the skull, tips stained by pine sap, they resembled the wings of an albino butterfly.

“Honk the horn.” Herbert recalled stories of cars colliding with such beasts, frames buckling and metal shearing while the animal walked away, stunned but unhurt. “Scare it.”

“It’s okay,” Jess said. “There’s room on your side.”

She eased the car forward, angling around the moose’s projecting bulk. The animal’s massive head swiveled, dark eyes focused on the vehicle. The front wheel slipped on the steep grade of the spillway. Branches raked the fender and windows.

“God, Jess. We’ll tip over.”

Jess’s heart fluttered—it felt wonderful. “We’re okay.”

She inched the front bumper ahead, tapping the gas. The moose’s head dipped, nose pressed to the driver-side window. Jess’s face was separated from the moose’s by a thin pane of glass. Beads of moisture ringed its sockets, a thickly sloped nose and teeth the hue of old bone, a corona of horseflies buzzing around its head. She felt a kinship with the animal—an illusive kinship, the kind that sometimes occurs when strangers lock eyes passing in cars headed opposite directions. The creature expelled plumes of steam through nostrils the size of teacups. Flecks of mucus sprayed the window. Its tongue, black and a foot long, licked a diagonal slash across the misted glass, as though it wished to learn of this strange shiny creature by its taste.

Jess edged the car back onto the road. They stared out the rear window as the moose flicked the huge leathery funnels of its ears at the maddening flies.

“That,” Herbert said softly, “is its own kind of magic.”

They arrived in Thessalon shortly after noon. The main drag conformed to an archaic model, with stores long since wiped from the metropolitan topography—Woolco, Stedman’s, Saan—hanging on thanks to stubborn small-town consumers. The streets and trees and shops were bleached out, town suffocating beneath a blanket of low, dark clouds.

Their father’s house stood at the end of a block shaded by the knitted branches of maple and walnut trees. The squat one-story was utterly nondescript and bordered on sterile; Jess had known bums to decorate their cardboard hovels with more flair. She thought of the exotic locales her father could’ve disappeared to: the white sand beaches of Pago Pago, the African veldt, the caldera of a dormant volcano. But no, he’d abandoned them for this shoebox less than five hundred kilometers away.

They climbed the cracked brick steps and Herbert rang the bell. Jess peeked through the slitted drapes: an ancient stereo with dual cassette player and turntable, a swayback sofa, a stack of newspapers propping up an overflowing ashtray. Dust motes hung in the air, turning over and over.

“He’s not home,” a woman’s voice called out through the shutters of the house next door.

“Do you know where he is?”

“Try the bowling alley.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure!” The shutters snapped shut.

PARKWAY BOWL-A-DROME was a corrugated-tin building in the shape of an airplane hangar jutting from the back end of the Leonard Hotel, the two structures fused into one grisly unit. Farmland stretched for miles behind the alley.

Stepping through the front doors, Jess was assaulted by an odor peculiar to bowling alleys: an amalgam of cigarette smoke, grease, shoe deodorizer, whatever they used to polish the lanes. Herbert gazed up and down the bustling hardwood floors, the mica-flecked balls spat from return chutes and gaudy red-and-white shoes stacked in cubbyholes, the insectile hum of the ball-buffing machine, thinking his father wouldn’t set foot in this place on a dare.

The man behind the counter tried to guess Jess’s shoe size. “Size eight wide.”

“We’re not here to bowl, but yeah.” Jess unfolded the sheet of newsprint with their father’s photo. “Looking for this guy. Know him?”

“Who’s asking?”

Jess showed her badge. The counterman smiled wisely, as though unsurprised to see their father’s misdeeds had finally caught up to him. “Lane eighteen, officer.”

The man pushed a small white button in the center of the teardrop ball return and rubbed his hands together over the dryer. On the inclined scorer’s table sat a rosin stick, a talc pouch, a deck of Players, and a Styrofoam cup of coffee. The man sunk three fingers into a jet black ball, took two strides, launched the ball in a tight spiral; it flirted with the gutter before curving to strike the one pin. He marked it off on his score sheet, pulled a cigarette from the deck, lipped it, and said, “So. You found me.”

Herbert and Jess sat at the horseshoe of molded fiberglass seats ringing the lane. Their father wore tan pants and a beige sweater. His dark hair had thinned and grayed; a widow’s peak gave his face an elongated equine aspect. Though age and wear had blunted the sharpness of his features, his emerald eyes still shone.

“So,” Herbert said after a minute, “you’re bowling now.”

“Bowling’s wonderful. It makes the heart merry.” He looked his children up and down. His fingers rose to his face, tracing his lips and cheek as though searching for correspondences. “It was that newspaper article, wasn’t it? I told that damn reporter no pictures.”

Jess couldn’t believe his lack of emotion. Part of her—a very large part, it seemed—hoped he’d cower like a Nazi war criminal brought to justice. But there was no shame, no contrition. It was as though he’d stumbled across a couple of old, not especially close acquaintances, and was struggling to make polite conversation.

“Don’t you have anything to say? Don’t you feel the least bit guilty?”

“Jess, please …”

“I’m too old to feel guilt, and besides, it’s a wasteful emotion. If that’s why you searched me out, you may as well leave. Excuse me a moment.”

He bowled a strike, then turned to his son and palmed the scorekeeper’s pencil up his sleeve. “Still got it, don’t I?”

Herbert dug a coin out of his pocket and sent it skipping along his knuckles, then palmed it with deft precision. He opened his mouth to show the coin glinting on his tongue.

“I saw you slip it into your mouth,” his father said. “Good, but not quite perfect.”

Herbert didn’t say anything. It didn’t matter his father was wrong, as Herbert had slipped the coin into his mouth earlier, anticipating the opportunity; nor did it matter he was infinitely more skilled, his movements clean where his father’s were clubbish; the fame and women and wealth—none of it mattered. At that moment he was a child again, the boy forever trying to please but always falling critically short, shamed and confused before his father.

“Why’d you do it?” Jess cast her eyes in a conspicuous arc: scuffed lanes, a glass case full of cobwebbed trophies, everything overhung in a haze of bluish smoke. “Was this worth it? For all this … splendor? ”

“You always had a smart tongue, Jessica. I knew Sam would take you, we talked about it obliquely, and that was a better fit.” A strain of subdued pride underlay this pragmatism. Jess got a sense he considered himself somehow herculean, holding on as long as he had. “Your mother wanted children. Never a goal of mine. I sent money when I could—didn’t Sam tell you?”

“You abandoned us.”

“Didn’t throw you to the wolves, darling.”

Jess realized that, over the years, her father had been crafting his most brilliant illusion: he’d tricked himself into believing what he’d done was justified. She’d always considered him a confused man who’d made a bad choice—and perhaps, half a lifetime ago, that had been the case. But the man she now faced was completely devoid of remorse. This wasn’t an act or a smokescreen; this was self-delusion distilled to its purest essence.

“It was the other magicians, wasn’t it?” Herbert said. “Fallout from the book.”

“I shouldn’t have written that thing. People trusted me with their secrets and I sold them out. Foolish, but I had something to prove.”

“Was it magic, then? A search for real magic?”

Jess caught the note of desperation in Herbert’s voice. For him, it all hinged on justification: the idea of their father leaving to pursue a higher goal was something he could live with.

“Real magic? No such thing. Please don’t tell me any of that foolishness we talked about when you were a child lingered on. It was all … bunk. I was entertaining you; they were pleasant fictions, fairy tales.” He squeezed the talc pouch anxiously. “I never told you the tooth fairy didn’t exist, but I never felt badly for it. I just supposed the truth would dawn on you sooner or later.”

“The truth. Right. Of course.”

Herbert’s body was trembling. Had he actually believed this would end with hugs and kisses and promises of Sunday dinners? Twenty-five years dismissed and everything reverting to the way it once was, father and son driving to some dustbowl town in the summer twilight, talking of magic?

“He’s everything you lacked the courage and ability to be,” Jess said. “You see that, don’t you?”

Her father’s gaze narrowed, then skipped across the surface of the lanes. “Anyone can become successful if their passion becomes an obsession. Set yourself to a single life task, how can you help but become a success?”

“But isn’t that what you did, abandoning us to pursue—this? ” Jess heard the desperation creeping into her voice. “Jesus, was it really so awful?”

“I was miserable.”

She would never learn why her father left. The only power he held was the magician’s power of secret knowledge, and to relinquish that was to yield whatever slim command he still held over them. She wanted to tell him it didn’t matter, he could take his pathetic secrets to the grave … but she did care, and for a moment saw herself as a young girl in that dirty wash of alley light, squinting into the darkness, wondering what did we do wrong?

“You don’t believe in magic?” Herbert said. “Come outside, then. I’ll show you.”

“Herbert, don’t do this. Please.”

“Stop talking nonsense. I won’t watch you make a bloody fool of yourself.”

Herbert’s hand clutched his father’s sweater. “Damn it, I’ll show you. It’s not nonsense!”

“Take your hands off me. You’re making a scene.”

Jess took Herbert’s wrist, trying to pry his fingers loose. Her father beat at his son’s arm as he shook the sleeve. Although Jess never shared Herbert’s vision of a joyful resolution, she had not imagined a tug of war in a Bowl-a-drome.

“Goddamn you, let go! ”

“It’s real! I can show you—real! ”

“Knock it off down there!” the counterman hollered.

“Let ’em go at it,” a bowler with a limp walrus mustache called back. “About time someone gave it to the old bastard.”

Herbert gave a final furious tug, tearing the sweater, tumbling onto the floor with a swath of angora clutched in his fist. Herbert, Sr., fell back, bony backside impacting a fiberglass bowling chair with a thump. His son stood carefully. Softly but with utter conviction, he said, “I know what’s real. Whether you believe or not makes no difference anymore.”

Herbert walked out of the alley. Their father sprawled in the chair, heaving. His torn sweater sleeve hung between his legs, nearly brushing the floor. The collar was stretched out of shape, baring a pale clavicle.

“I wasn’t … lying,” he panted. “They were just … fantasies.”

Seeing him like that, a tall frail man with a torn sweater, the harsh light of the scorer’s table showing just how deeply his eyes had retreated into their sockets, Jess realized this was a man who’d never really stepped out of that tea chest he’d entered many years ago. Exited physically, yes, tripped the hidden latch and vanished; but the way that body sagged, the defeated slouch of those shoulders, was the same posture she’d seen in men handcuffed in the backseat of her squad car. An imprisoned look.

THE SKY WAS A DARK BOWL quaking and crashing with thunder. Jess scanned the parking lot, then dashed to the car. Rain pelted down in stinging wires. She peered through the window, but he wasn’t inside. She called his name and wind snatched the word from her mouth.

Squinting into the driving rain, she saw him standing along the fenceline bordering the fields, fenceposts dark with creosote and the rusty stitchwork of barbed wire. Shirtless, trousers plastered to his legs, hair stuck to his skull. Eyes closed, he swayed slightly.

Jess stood in the lot, one foot mired in a pothole rapidly filling with rainwater. A vein of lightning split the sky, bathing the fields in rippling white light. Rain poured down her cheeks. Herbert swayed side to side. His face was serene. He looked so young, a boy. Jess laughed at the craziness of it all, the beautiful absurdity. “You’re nuts!” she shouted, laughing harder. She saw a figure standing in silhouette behind the alley’s smoked glass. Herbert swayed, his ears tuned to an unheard harmony, the rhyme of the wind and rain and sky. His hands held out, palms flat to the earth, as though seeking an elusive balance. Lightning creased the sky, whitening his body.

Her breath caught.

For the rest of her life, she will always wonder—did it happen? Perhaps it was a trick of the light, a fleeting disorientation. Later she will think her mind played a trick: she wanted so badly for it to happen that she willed her eyes into momentary belief. She will never speak of it, yet one night many years later will wake from a dream of that faraway afternoon, the wind and rain and the sense of something in the air, a quivering pressure in her eardrums, an odd taste beneath her tongue—not magic; she will never quite bring herself to so blunt an admission. Something feathery and alive that all those years later seems so unreal and yet the vision persists undimmed by time, a vision as bracing as it was during those fleeting heartbeats when it happened, and she will sit bolt upright as a cool night breeze plays through the open window and starlight curves upon the brass buttons of her police uniform hanging in the bedroom closet, and, in a voice so low and tremulous her husband does not stir, she will whisper, “He disappeared.”

The skin of Herbert’s chest and arms and head turned opaque as a nearly colorless essence, smoke or mist or fog, rose off his body. For a moment Jess could see the basic structure of his skeleton, the bones of his arms and ribcage, skull gilt with flashing light, then only the arteries and veins pumping blood. When these vanished all that remained were the disembodied trousers standing on their own and the open field beyond. Jess would never forget that Rolex free-floating in the charged air, the dime-sized flash of brilliance as lightning reflected off its face.

Herbert’s body suddenly coalesced, the disparate atoms flooding back and uniting. He toppled into the mud. Jess ran to him.

“Did you see it?” His eyes were alive and on fire. “Did you see?”

“I don’t know what I saw.”

She helped him up, amazed at just how light he felt. A strange smell clung to him, a mixture of singed earth and ozone. She threw his arm over her shoulder and carried him across the lot. By the time she settled him into the front seat, he was fast asleep.

She cast a glance at the bowling alley window. The silhouetted figure was gone.

Recognize that what they peddle as truth is in fact fiction. Look beyond the stagecraft, deception, and sleight-of-hand, and you will always find the truth, which is simply this: there is no truth. It is all a lie. Elaborate and brilliantly concealed, but a lie nonetheless. Never trust your eyes. Be forever skeptical. Learn to spot the tricks I have outlined and together we shall expose these “magicians” for what they truly are: frauds, shysters, and villains!

[7]

Herbert slept the entire drive home. At one point he started shivering violently and Jess wrapped him in sweaters and ran the heater until his teeth stopped chattering. The rain let up, leaving in its wake a pristine clarity.

They pulled into Herbert’s driveway shortly after nine o’clock. Warm southern air was infused with the plankton smell of the canal. Jess woke Herbert, helped him wrangle his luggage onto the porch. He glanced at the stricken tree on his lawn.

“I really should do something about that poor thing, shouldn’t I?”

“Burn it. End its misery.”

“Maybe I will. Plant another in its place. Water and trim it. Take good care of it.”

He reached into his pants pocket and withdrew a small booklet: soggy green construction paper tied up with fraying blue yarn, clumsy scissoring, words written in a spiky hand. For a moment it seemed as if he would crumple it, but he smoothed it out and returned it to his pocket.

“I don’t think he’s a bad person. I think he just … lost control. It could happen to anybody, don’t you think? He’s not a bad man.”

Jess envied his childlike ability to forgive. Perhaps he would never grow up, be forever a man-child lost in a world of mirrors and

brightly colored smoke. This didn’t anger her, where before it had. He came forward, an awkward lunge, hugging her. Jess felt his stiff contours, bone and hard angles, a boy’s body not yet fleshed into adulthood. She remembered a night when they were young, Herbert waking from a nightmare and crawling under the covers of her bed, his body all elbows and kneecaps. He really hadn’t changed over the years: still bony and gangling and clinging to beliefs others had long ago surrendered.

My brother, she thought. Crown prince of Never-Never Land.

“Well.”

“Well. Sam cooks dinner for me and Ted on Sundays. You should come.”

“But, Jess … Sam’s a terrible cook.”

“Come anyways. Come anytime.”

Jess walked to her Jeep. As she pulled out, she saw Herbert standing beside the gossamer-enshrouded elm, laying his hands on the trunk, stroking the black flaking bark.

SHE DROVE THROUGH STREETS wet from a brief night rain, neighborhoods silent in the dark, the clean lawns, the houses low-slung and split-level and modern. Radio tuned to the local station, Chrissie Hynde singing about a picture of you. Moving into the country: the night coolness of low peninsula fields, vineyards and cherry groves, solitary lights of farmhouses and irrigation ditches filled with moonlit water. She thought of the summer she’d picked fruit with a group of itinerant Caribbean workers. They were paid by the basket, and a small Jamaican man with skin so dark it hurt her eyes had shown her how to twist strawberries off the vine so as not to damage the fruit. The Jamaicans shared two old ten-speeds and after the day’s picking would bike to the nearest convenience store with a roll of quarters, calling their wives from payphones, talking of the money they’d made and how they’d spend it.

It was almost midnight by the time she pulled into her driveway. Sam’s truck was parked at the curb. The living room light burned. She saw figures in silhouette through the drapes: one on the couch, another in a chair.

She sat on the stoop. The sterile scent of late autumn, haloes of misty yellow light making a nimbus around each streetlight. To the west, a few miles distant, a thin column of smoke rose into the sky. It came from her brother’s part of town; she wondered if he’d lit that poor tree on fire. She hoped he had, and willed an errant ember to settle on the roof of his house and burn it to the ground, too. There was an inclination in her family to hide away from the world, crawl into dark places and vanish. If they weren’t flushed from hiding and forced into daylight, there was a possibility they’d disappear forever.

Leaves skated across the street, pushed by a swirling wind. She stared into the sky, each star a bright pinprick, each realizing a precise clarity. The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

Jess thought of the uniform hanging in the hall closet. Tomorrow she would take it off its hook and make a decision: burn it or put it on. Either way was a beginning. She was ready for a beginning.

Booming laughter from inside. One silhouette threw its head back, the other slapped its knee. Ted and Sam, and, across town, Herbert razing his front yard.

The men in her life.

Jess scuffed her boots on the welcome mat and stepped inside.

Know this: there is such a thing as magic. It exists. My intent is not to teach you the art of true magic, but rather to awaken you to its presence in the world and in our lives. Magic is in the water and air and sky; it is all around us, in objects of beauty and ugliness alike. Perhaps this all sounds quite mad; perhaps you think me a fool. All I can say is, I know what is real. My convictions are unshakable. My only hope is that, even if you never accomplish real magic or see it with your own eyes, you still believe in it, or at the very least its possibility.

I am convinced the world is a much brighter place for those who believe.

—Excerpted from The Apprentice’s Guide to Modern Magic, by Herbert T. Mallory, Jr.