The Confabulist

by Steven Galloway

  And Alice. If there’s any substance left of me, then I owe her the truth. I deprived her of a father. I can’t even now explain fully why I did it. It all seems a lifetime ago, and from where I’m sitting now, it’s easy to make excuses and justifications and hard to remember how it all felt at the time or exactly what happened. But I owe Alice something. An apology? It’s a little late for that. An explanation is something I’m not sure I have to offer. All I can give her is the truth as I know it, or as I can recall it. If I’ve learned anything in my life it’s that magicians aren’t the only ones hiding their identities from the world.

  A woman with a small child passes me. The child, a girl with curly brown hair tied into pigtails with red ribbons, looks unhappy. Her mother is holding her by the hand and pulling her along. The girl is lagging as best as she can, making it clear she doesn’t want to go inside. I can’t say I blame her one bit. I wouldn’t want to go either. I feel a strange kinship with this sprite in her blue dress and knee socks. The doors open and admit first the mother and then the girl, her childish attempt to avoid the inevitable defeated.

  None of us wants to go. And I don’t mean inside the hospital, though that’s true. What I mean is no one wants to die, but we each know that sooner or later it’s going to happen to us. We tell ourselves that it’s a long way off, and turn to notions of religion or spirituality or science to make sense of it, and for some that does bring some existential comfort, but still most of us lag as much as we can, just like this girl. No one gets to stay. Yet we live and act as though it is otherwise.

  The magician trades in this human struggle. Magic that is not real magic affects us because it mirrors our existence. We know that what we see isn’t as it seems, but we want it to be and want to understand it. We want to be fooled, and then want to know how we were fooled. We cannot prevent our minds from trying to figure out how the trick was done. I believe this is more than just intellectual curiosity. We strive for immortality in the face of its impossibility.

  But magicians are clever. They understand that a magic trick is all about turning illusion into substance in such a way that we never fully comprehend what happened, or what we think happened. They know that a trick loses its power once we understand how it was done, and also that it loses its power once we no longer wish to understand how it was done.

  There are four elements to this grand tug-of-war between substance and illusion. There is effect, there is method, there is misdirection, and finally, when it’s all over, there is reconstruction. Magic is a dance between these four elements. The actor playing a magician seeks to choreograph a way through the trick with these component parts. If he does so, he will have achieved magic. If not, he is a failure.

  Effect is the reason the trick exists. Without it there’s no point. It’s the rabbit coming out of the hat, the woman shown to be sawn in half, the ace of spades somehow inside your coat pocket. Often a good effect is kept secret until the moment of its reveal. You don’t actually know what the trick is until it’s finished. Other times the effect is announced at the start, and you’re watching for it, waiting for it, but then when it happens, you’re still amazed. Either way, the audience lives for the effect, we desire it more than anything, and if it pleases us we will believe, to a point, that the magician is not an actor but someone capable of altering the known laws of the universe.

  Life is like this. Happiness is an extremely relative concept, but we will believe we are happy if the sum of daily effects is high enough. The more disappointments, bafflements, and failed outcomes we experience, the less likely we are to believe we are happy.

  But of course it’s not easy to achieve an effect. If it were, magicians wouldn’t be extraordinary. Things we take for granted as everyday occurrences—like images on a television screen, telephones, electricity—would all have at one time been the most profound effects a magician could produce. The radio once worked people into a state of pandemonium, but over time we have become used to it. We don’t know how these devices function, outside of a rudimentary understanding of technological concepts—certainly less than 1 percent of the population could actually explain how, say, a television works, let alone build one. We are, however, familiar with them. And so the things they do, however mystifying, no longer speak to us. We need to have the order of the universe tilted, and you can’t do this with things you’re used to.

  Given that a magician isn’t actually tilting the universe, he must somehow achieve his effect using the tools available to mere mortals. How he does this is the method. The wires, the doubles, the mirrors, the trapdoors—magical methods vary from deceptively simple to diabolically clever. A good method is one where as little can go wrong as possible and where all aspects necessary to create the effect are fully within the magician’s control.

  The problem with this is that the audience is on the lookout for the method. Because inherent in the wondrousness of the effect is the implication that if we could do it too, if the method were to become available, then we would also be magicians. We might shrug off the inexorable march of death.

  So the audience must never be able to detect the method. If they do, the effect will be rendered meaningless. To keep this method secret, the magician employs misdirection. Misdirection can be as subtle as a tiny gesture, as obvious as an explosion, as expected as a curtain, or as coy as smoke. The audience is on the lookout for this, and the magician must be cunning about his use of misdirection. It is dishonest, and he knows it, but it is not malicious. It is in service of a greater truth.

  The final element is the most complex. After the effect has been revealed, after the method has been executed and the misdirection has prevented its detection, the audience will attempt to reconstruct the trick. They will think back to what they saw and try to figure out how it was done. If they succeed, even after the fact, then the effect is ruined and the whole act was for naught. The misdirection and method must not be detectable, even in hindsight. For this reason, the magician will insert elements into the trick that are there for the sole purpose of confounding the reconstruction of the trick.

  The magician knows that what happened and what we will remember having happened can be two entirely different things. If he shows us A and C, we will believe we saw B. If he does his job, we will swear that we saw the impossible with our own eyes. When we close our eyes, we will see things as we believe they happened, not as they actually did. This is essential for the effect. It is what carries it forward, what propels us to seek the next effect, to keep our mortality in abeyance.

  If Alice were here and I were to tell her this, she would shake her head and smile. “Martin,” she might say, “a magic trick is just a magic trick. Life is more complicated.”

  She’d be wrong, though. Effect, method, misdirection, reconstruction. For me, they explain everything.

  The little girl and her mother emerge from the hospital and stop beside me. The girl releases her mother’s hand while her mother searches through her purse. I smile at the child, but she doesn’t smile back. She stares at me, her face impenetrable, as though she’s not sure what she’s looking at. I’ve never been very good with children—there’s something about them that I can’t connect with. I wish this were not the case, because I like children, or at least I think I could if I’d spent more time around them and gotten over whatever this barrier is between us.

  I smile at the girl again and remove a coin from my pocket. I hold it out for her to see, let her eyes take in its shiny glint. I transfer the coin from my right hand to my left, toss it in the air, and we both watch it rise, stall, and tumble down to my waiting right hand. I nod and show her the coin. Then I pass it to the other hand and toss it in the air again, higher this time. The bright sunlight makes it sparkle as it once again tries to escape gravity, fails, and returns to my waiting right hand. I open my hand and we look at the coin even more closely. She’s captivated, I can tell. I move the coin to my left hand and toss the coin in the air a third time, but this time I don
’t catch it. The girl watches as it disappears into thin air; my hand, waiting to catch the coin, sits empty. She looks at me, surprised, and I raise a finger to my mouth and curl my lips into a shush. Her mother finds whatever she was looking for in her purse and takes hold of the child’s hand, pulling her away, unaware that anything has happened. As they depart the girl looks back at me and smiles. She has seen something unexpected and impossible.

  And that’s magic. She saw the coin vanish. Or at least she thinks she did. It was in my hand all along. Before each toss I visibly transferred the coin from my right hand to my left before throwing it, a casual and seemingly insignificant gesture that was, of course, not insignificant at all, because the final time the transfer never took place. My hand was empty when it mimicked its throw, and while she watched it my other hand dropped the coin into my lap and out of sight. But if you were to ask her, or most other people who witness this trick, they would swear they’d seen the coin tossed into the air.

  I’ve thought a lot about this over the years. How is it we can be so sure that we’ve seen, heard, or experienced what we think we have? In a magic trick, the things you don’t see or think you see have a culmination, because at the end of the trick there’s an effect. Misdirection tampers with reconstruction. But if life works the same way, and I believe it does, then a percentage of our lives is a fiction. There’s no way to know whether anything we have seen or experienced is real or imagined. The first two times the girl thought she saw me toss the coin in the air she was right.

  This gives me pause. If I’m going to be able to convey to Alice all that I know, and exactly what happened, then how important is it for me to differentiate between what I saw and what I think I saw? Is it even possible?

  I try to catch a glimpse of the girl and her mother, but they’re gone. I wonder if she will remember this moment years from now, if she will wonder if it really happened. I think back to the picnic, feel the sun on the back of my neck, taste the roast beef sandwich my mother made, hear the buzz of the bee. Or is that my tinnitus? How long have I been seeing things that weren’t there?

  MARTIN STRAUSS

  1926

  IT IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE NOT TO BECOME THE THING you hate most. When I left for Montreal to study at McGill, my father expressed the opinion that I’d be back soon enough, likely sooner rather than later. My mother thought she knew better.

  My mother was the only one who ever believed I would amount to anything. She had always seen something in me that no one else, including me, saw. Whenever I exceeded expectations, she would act as though a positive outcome was never in doubt. I often regret that I never asked her what she based this outlook on. It seemed risky, as though she might decide it was a foolish attitude if she were to think about it too much.

  “You will be back, Martin. To visit. I’ll miss you,” she said.

  They were both wrong. I never set foot in my hometown again.

  My studies proved far easier than I’d anticipated, though my problem had never been intelligence. I had a hard time caring about things. My father interpreted this as laziness, but it was more than that. Most tasks seemed so irrelevant and meaningless that it didn’t seem worth doing them at all. I was smart enough that I didn’t have to try at much but not smart enough to succeed at anything without effort.

  Montreal was a lonely town. You didn’t have to speak any French to survive, but it would have made life easier; my French was pretty terrible. I stayed in a rented room in a boardinghouse along with other students and the odd labourer.

  My only real friend was a student across the hall, Will Riley. He never seemed to go to class or study. He had money, and I assumed he had family behind him so how he did at McGill was mostly irrelevant. He always knew a good place to get a drink and liked to buy a round in exchange for company, so we ended up out together often enough for me to be drinking more than I should have. All my life this has been a weakness, but when I was younger I maybe didn’t try to keep it in check.

  By my final year I had my studies down to a routine. I’d go to class, do whatever was required to pass, and work odd jobs to supplement my income. At nights I’d go drinking with Will.

  I’m not sure exactly what happened, but whatever anxiety I’d experienced growing up about who I was or what I would become seemed to lessen to the point that people probably couldn’t tell it was there.

  Perhaps this was the reason Clara took an interest in me. I never really understood why she wanted me, much as I never understood my mother’s confidence.

  It’s inexplicable what causes a person to love someone. It is a feeling so irrational that it allows you to believe that the person you love has qualities they don’t actually possess. And when someone loves you back, it’s nearly impossible not to feel you must never let them see what you are really like, because you know deep inside that you are not worthy of their love.

  But Clara chose me. She made an effort to be near me, and she made it clear that all I had to do was meet her halfway. I finally worked up enough nerve to ask her out, and she said yes. We saw each other a couple of times a week after that, and though I was always waiting for the moment when she’d decide that she’d had enough of me, she seemed content, even happy.

  One of our favourite things to do was visit the vaudeville theatres. We’d seen Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, Howard Thurston, Charles Carter, and a dozen others. We disagreed about the singers, but we both loved the magicians.

  After seeing Howard Thurston, I was inspired to learn a couple of card tricks. The one I liked most was called the Memory Master. When I felt I had it down, I showed it to Clara.

  I took a deck of cards and fanned it out on the table between us, faceup. “Ordinary cards,” I said. I then broke the deck into two piles and combined them. As I was doing this I took note of the top card, the ace of spades, and the bottom card, the three of diamonds. I shuffled the cards a couple of times but maintained the two cards’ respective positions at the top and bottom of the deck.

  “Pick a card,” I said, fanning them out in my hands, facedown.

  Clara smiled at me. “Shuffle them again.”

  I feigned indignation. “Don’t you trust me?”

  She laughed. “Of course I do.”

  I shuffled them again—the way the trick worked, I could shuffle them as many times as I wanted so long as the ace stayed on top and the three on the bottom.

  “Okay, pick a card and don’t show it to me or tell me what it is.”

  She reached out and took a card, looked at it, and smiled. What a smile. I felt as if I’d fooled the world into believing I was capable of greatness.

  “Put it facedown on the table.” I broke the deck in half at the middle and placed her card in the break. I had swing cut the cards, which means that when you cut the deck you move the top half from one hand to another, so that the top card becomes the card in the middle, and the bottom card ends up next to it. I knew that whatever card Clara had chosen was now in the middle of the deck between the ace of spades and the three of diamonds.

  I then broke the deck slightly above the middle and riffle-shuffled the cards. This might add a card or two between the ace and the three, but it wouldn’t change the general ordering of the three key cards.

  “Now for the hard part.” I fanned the cards out on the table face up. “I will memorize the order of the entire deck of cards.”

  Clara laughed as I made a show of holding my thumbs to my temples and squinting. After a few seconds I said, “Got it.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely. I’m going to turn around and close my eyes. I want you to move the card you selected to a different spot in the deck.”

  I turned away and waited for her. Between the ace of spades and the three of diamonds were two cards, the five of hearts and the ten of clubs. Whichever one of those two was missing would be the card she’d chosen.

  “You can turn around,” she said.

  I turned around and looked down the entire length
of the deck. I stopped when I got to the ace. Next to it was the five of hearts, then the ten of clubs, then the three of diamonds. None of the cards had moved. Something had gone wrong.

  Clara watched me and seemed to understand that the trick had failed. I frowned and looked at the cards again, then up at her. “I think I screwed it up.”

  She leaned over the table and kissed me. I forgot about the stupid card trick. She tasted like lilacs.

  “Who cares,” she said. “I don’t like you for your magic tricks.”

  The beer hall was poorly lit. Will was sitting at a small table in the back and was a couple of beers ahead of me. He grinned at me as I sat, and pushed a mug across the table.

  “You look like a kid who’s just seen his first naked lady,” he said.

  I hadn’t been aware there was any look on my face. “Shut it.”

  He pretended to flinch. “This is how you treat me after what I’ve got for us?”

  I drank a good third of the glass, set it down, and wiped my mouth on my sleeve. “What exactly is it you’ve got for us?”

  He reached into his coat pocket and handed me four small pieces of paper. They were tickets to Harry Houdini’s show the following night at the Princess Theatre.

  “How did you get these?” I’d tried all week to get tickets.

  He shrugged. “They fell off a truck.”

  Houdini fascinated Clara. He’d performed earlier that day at McGill, but the place was so packed we couldn’t get in. I’d never seen such a crowd before—there were people up on ladders in the student union building. Clara and I had hung around for a while before giving up, and she’d been disappointed about it.

  I stayed out drinking with Will for two or three more hours, celebrating our good fortune. It was too late to go to Clara’s and tell her the good news unless I wanted to have a run-in with her father. Eventually I stumbled out into the street. It was a crisp October evening, but I had enough beer in me not to feel the cold.