Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  He reached up while he was talking and took an egg out of her right ear. She didn’t feel it happen—just the quick brush of his long fingers, and there was the egg in his hand. She grabbed for her other ear, to see if there might be an egg in there too, but he was already taking a quarter out of that one. He seemed just as surprised as she was, saying, “My goodness, now you’ll be able to buy some toast to have with your egg. Extraordinary ears you have—my word, yes.” And all the time he was carrying on about the egg, he was finding all kinds of other things in her ears: seashells and more coins, a couple of marbles (which upset him—“You should never put marbles in your ears, young lady!”), a tangerine, and even a flower, although it looked pretty mooshed-up, which he said was from being in her ear all that time.

  She sat down beside him without knowing she was sitting down. “How do you do that?” she asked him. “Can I do that? Show me!”

  “With ears like those, everything is possible,” the old man answered. “Try it for yourself,” and he guided her hand to a beautiful cowrie shell tucked just behind her left ear. Then he said, “I wonder…. I just wonder….” And he ruffled her hair quickly and showed her a palm full of tiny silver stars. Not like the shining foil ones her preschool teacher gave out for good behavior, but glittering, sharp-pointed metal stars, as bright as anything in the sky.

  “It seems your hair is talented, too. That’s exceptional.”

  “More, please!” she begged him.

  The old man looked at her curiously. He was still smiling, but his eyes seemed sad now, which confused her.

  “I haven’t given you anything that wasn’t already yours,” he said. “Much as I would otherwise. But this is a gift. From me to you. Here.” He waved one hand over his open palm, and when it passed she saw a small silver figure of a horse.

  She looked at it. It was more beautiful, she thought, than anything she had ever seen.

  “I can keep it? Really?”

  “Oh yes,” he said. “I hope you will keep it always.”

  He put the exquisite figure in her cupped hands, and closed her fingers gently over it. She felt the curlicues of the mane, blowing in a frozen wind, against her fingertips.

  “Put it in your pocket, for safekeeping, and look at it tonight before you go to bed.” As she did what he told her, he said “Now I must ask where your parents are.”

  She said nothing, suddenly aware how much time had passed since she had left the picnic.

  “They will be looking everywhere for you,” the old man said. “In fact, I think I can hear them calling you now.” He cupped his hands to his mouth and called in a silly, quavering voice, “Elfrieda! Elfrieda! Where are you, Elfrieda?”

  This made her giggle so much that it took her a while to tell him, “That’s not my name.” He laughed too, but he went on calling, “Elfrieda! Elfrieda!” until the silly voice became so sad and worried that she stood up and said, “Maybe I ought to go back and tell them I’m all right.” The air was starting to grow a little chilly, and she was starting to be not quite sure that she knew the way back.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” the old man advised her. “If I were you, I’d stay right here, and when they come along you could say to them, ‘Why don’t you sit down and rest your weary bones?’ That’s what I’d do.”

  The idea of saying something like that to grownups set her off giggling again, and she could hardly wait for her family to come find her. She sat down by the old man and talked with him, in the ordinary way, about school and friends and uncles, and all the ways her cousin Matthew made her mad, and about going shopping on rhinoceroses. He told her that it was always hard to find parking space for a rhino, and that they really didn’t like shopping, but they would do it if they liked you. So after that they talked about how you get a rhinoceros to like you, until her father came for her on the motorcycle.

  ***

  “I lost it back in college.” She caressed the little object, holding it against her cheek. “I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find it anywhere.” She looked at him with a mix of wonder and suspicion. She fell silent then, frowning, touching her mouth. “Central Park…. there was a zoo in Central Park.”

  The magician nodded. “There still is.”

  “Lions. Did they have lions?” She gave him no time to answer the question. “I do remember the lions. I heard them roaring.” She spoke slowly, seeming to be addressing the silver horse more than him. “I wanted to see the lions.”

  “Yes,” the magician said. “You were on your way there when we met.”

  “I remember now,” she said. “How could I have forgotten?” She was speaking more rapidly as the memory took shape. “You were sitting with me on the bench, and then Daddy…. Daddy came on a motorcycle. I mean, no, the policeman was on the motorcycle, and Daddy was in the…. the sidecar thing. I remember. He was so furious with me that I was glad the policeman was there.”

  The magician chuckled softly. “He was angry until he saw that you were safe and unharmed. Then he was so thankful that he offered me money.”

  “Did he? I didn’t notice.” Her face felt suddenly hot with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, I didn’t know he wanted to give you money. You must have felt so insulted.”

  “Nonsense,” the magician said briskly. “He loved you, and he offered what he had. Both of us dealt in the same currency, after all.”

  She paused, looking around them. “This isn’t the right street either. I don’t see the motel.”

  He patted her shoulder lightly. “You will, I assure you.”

  “I’m not certain I want to.”

  “Really?” His voice seemed to surround her in the night. “And why would that be? You have a journey to continue.”

  The bitterness rose so fast in her throat that it almost made her throw up. “If you know my name, if you know about my family, if you know things I’d forgotten about, then you already know why. Alan’s dead, and Talley—my Mouse, oh God, my little Mouse—and so am I, do you understand? I’m dead too, and I’m just driving around and around until I rot.” She started to double over, coughing and gagging on the rage. “I wish I were dead with them, that’s what I wish!” She would have been desperately happy to vomit, but all she could make come out were words.

  Strong old hands were steadying her shoulders, and she was able, in a little time, to raise her head and look into the magician’s face, where she saw neither anger nor pity. She said very quietly, “No, I’ll tell you what I really wish. I wish I had died in that crash, and that Alan and Talley were still alive. I’d make that deal like a shot, you think I wouldn’t?”

  The magician said gently, “It was not your fault.”

  “Yes it was. It’s my fault that they were in my car. I asked Alan to take it in for an oil change, and Mouse…. Talley wanted to go with him. She loved it, being just herself and Daddy—oh, she used to order him around so, pretending she was me.” For a moment she came near losing control again, but the magician held on, and so did she. “If I hadn’t asked him to do that for me, if I hadn’t been so selfish and lazy and sure I had more important things to do, then it would have been me that died in that crash, and they’d have lived. They would have lived.” She reached up and gripped the magician’s wrists, as hard as she could, holding his eyes even more intently. “You see?”

  The magician nodded without answering, and they stood linked together in shadow for that moment. Then he took his hands from her shoulders and said, “So, then, you have offered to trade your life for the lives of your husband and daughter. Do you still hold to that bargain?”

  She stared at him. She said, “That stupid riddle. You really meant that. What are you? Are you Death?”

  “Not at all. But there are things I can do, with your consent.”

  “My consent.” She stood back, straightening to her full height. “Alan and Talley…. nobody needed their consent—or mine, either. I meant every word.”

  “Think,” the magician said urgently. “I need
you to know what you have asked, and the extent of what you think you mean.” He raised his left hand, palm up, tapping on it with his right forefinger. “Be very careful, little girl in the park. There are lions.”

  “I know what I wished.” She could feel the sidewalk coiling under her feet.

  “Then know this. I can neither take life nor can I restore it, but I can grant your wish, exactly as it was made. You have only to say—and to be utterly certain in your soul that it is your true desire.” He chuckled suddenly, startlingly; to her ear it sounded almost like a growl. “My, I cannot recall the last time I used that word, soul.”

  She bit her lip and wrapped her arms around herself, though the night continued warm. “What can you promise me?”

  “A different reality—the exact one you prayed for just now. Do you understand me?”

  “No,” she said; and then, very slowly, “You mean, like running a movie backward? Back to…. back to before?”

  The old man shook his head. “No. Reality never runs backward; each thing is, and will be, as it always was. Choice is an uncommon commodity, and treasured by those few who actually have it. But there is magic, and magic can shuffle some possibilities like playing cards, done right. Such craft as I control will grant your wish, precisely as you spoke it. Take the horse I have returned to you back to the place where the accident happened. The exact place. Hold it in your hand, or carry it on your person, and take a single step. One single step. If your commitment is firm, if your choice is truly and finally made, then things as they always were will still be as they always were—only now, the way they always were will be forever different. Your husband and your daughter will live, because they never drove that day, and they never died. You did. Do you understand now?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “Oh, yes, yes, I do understand. Please, do it, I accept, it’s the only wish I have. Please, yes.”

  The magician took her hands between his own. “You are certain? You know what it will mean?”

  “I can’t live without them,” she answered simply. “I told you. But…. how—”

  “Death, for all His other sterling qualities, is not terribly bright. Efficient and punctual, but not bright.” The magician gave her the slightest of bows. “And I am very good with tricks. You might even say exceptional.”

  “Can’t you just send me there, right this minute—transport me, or e-mail me or something, never mind the stupid driving. Couldn’t you do that? I mean, if you can do—you know—this?”

  He shook his head. “Even the simplest of tricks must be prepared…. and this one is not simple. Drive, and I will meet you at the appointed time and place.”

  “Well, then.” She put her hands on his arms, looking up at him as though at the sun through green leaves. “Since there are no words in the world for me to thank you with, I’m just going to go on back home. My family’s waiting.”

  Yet she delayed, and so did he, as though both of them were foreigners fumbling through a language never truly comprehended: a language of memory and intimacy. The magician said, “You don’t know why I am doing this.” It was not a question.

  “No. I don’t.” Her hesitant smile was a storm of anxious doubt. “Old times’ sake?”

  The magician shook his head. “It doesn’t really matter. Go now.”

  The motel sign was as bright as the moon across the street, and she could see her car in the half-empty parking lot. She turned and walked away, without looking back, started the Buick and drove out of the lot. There was nothing else to collect. Let them wonder in the morning at her unruffled bed, and the dry towels never taken down from the bathroom rack.

  The magician was plain in her rear-view mirror, looking after her, but she did not wave, or turn her head.

  Free of detours, the road back seemed notably shorter than the way she had come, though she took it distinctly more slowly. The reason, to her mind, was that before she had been so completely without plans, without thought, without any destination, without any baggage but grief. Now, feeling almost pregnant with joy, swollen with eager visions—they will live, they will, my Mouse will be a living person, not anyone’s memory—she felt a self that she had never considered or acknowledged conducting the old car, as surely as her foot on the accelerator and her hands on the wheel. A full day passed, more, and somehow she did not grow tired, which she decided must be something the magician had done, so she did not question it. Instead she sang nursery songs as she drove, and the sea chanteys and Gilbert and Sullivan that Alan had always loved. No, not loved. Loves! Loves now, loves now and will go on loving, because I’m on my way. Alan, Talley, I’m on my way.

  For the last few hundred miles she abandoned the interstate and drove the coast road home, retracing the path she and Alan had taken at the beginning of their honeymoon. The ocean was constant on her right, the massed redwoods and hemlocks on her left, and the night air smelled both of salt and pinesap. There were deer in the brush, and scurrying foxes, and even a porcupine, shuffling and clicking across the road. Once she saw a mountain lion, or thought she had: a long-tailed shadow in a shadow, watching her shadow race past. Darlings, on my way!

  It was near dawn when she reached the first suburbs of the city where she had gone to college, married, and settled without any control—or the desire for control—over very much of it. The city lay still as jewels before her, except when the infrequent police siren or fire-engine clamor set dogs barking in every quarter. She parked the Buick in her driveway, startled for a moment at her house’s air of abandonment and desolation. What did you expect, disappearing the way you did, and no way to contact you? She did not try the door, but stood there for a little, listening absurdly for any sound of Alan or Talley moving in the house. Then she walked away as calmly as she had from the magician.

  Six blocks, six blocks. She found the intersection where the crash had occurred. Standing on the corner angle of the sidewalk, she could see the exact smudge on the asphalt where her life had ended, and this shadowy leftover had begun. Across the way the light grew beyond the little community park, a glow as transparent as seawater. She drank it in, savoring the slow-rising smells of warming stone and suburban commuter breakfasts. Never again…. never again, she thought. Up and down the street, cars were backing out of garages, and she found herself watching them with a strange new greed, thinking, Alan and Mouse will see them come home again, see the geese settle in on the fake lake for the night. Not me, never again.

  The street was thickening with traffic, early as it was. She watched a bus go by, and then the same school van that always went first to the farthest developments, before circling back to pick up Talley and others who lived closer to school. He’s not here yet, she thought, fingering the silver horse in her pocket. I could take today. One day—one day only, just to taste it all, to go to all the places we were together, to carry that with me when I step across that pitiful splotch—tomorrow? My darlings will have all the other days, all their lives…. couldn’t I have just the one? I’d be right back here at dawn, all packed to leave—surely they wouldn’t mind, if they knew? Just the one.

  Behind her, the magician said, “As much as you have grieved for them, so they will mourn you. You say your life ended here; they will say the same, for a time.”

  Without turning, she said, “You can’t talk me out of this.”

  A dry chuckle. “Oh, I’ve suspected that from the beginning.”

  She did turn then, and saw him standing next to her: unchanged, but for a curious dusk, bordering on tenderness, in the old, old eyes. His face was neither pitying nor unkind, nor triumphant in its foreknowledge, but urgently attentive in the way of a blind person. “There she was, that child in Central Park, stumping along, so fierce, so determined, going off all alone to find the lions. There was I, half-asleep in the sun on my park bench….”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Please. Before I go, tell me who you are.”

  “You know who I am.”

  “I don’t!”


  “You did. You will.”

  She did not answer him. In silence, they both turned their heads to follow a young black man walking on the other side of the street. He was carrying an infant—a boy, she thought—high in his arms, his round dark face brilliant with pride, as though no one had ever had a baby before. The man and child were laughing together: the baby’s laughter a shrill gurgle, the father’s almost a song. Another bus hid them for a moment, and when it passed they had turned a corner and disappeared.

  The magician said, “Yet despite your certainty you were thinking, unless I am mistaken, of delaying your bargain’s fulfillment.”

  “One day,” she said softly. “Only to say goodbye. To remind myself of them and everything we had, before giving it all up. Would that…. would it be possible? Or would it break the…. the spell? The charm?”

  The magician regarded her without replying immediately, and she found that she was holding her breath.

  “It’s neither of those. It’s just a trick, and not one that can wait long on your convenience.” His expression was inflexible.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well. It would have been nice, but there—can’t have everything. Thank you, and goodbye again.”

  She waited until the sparse morning traffic was completely clear. Then deliberately, and without hesitation, she stepped forward into the street. She was about to move further when she heard the magician’s voice behind her. “Sunset. That is the best I can do.”

  She wheeled, her face a child’s face, alight with holiday. “Thank you! I’ll be back in time, I promise! Oh, thank you!”

  Before she could turn again the magician continued, in a different voice, “I have one request.” His face was unchanged, but the voice was that of a much younger man, almost a boy. “I have no right to ask, no claim on you—but I would feel privileged to spend these hours in your company.” He might have been a shy Victorian, awkwardly inviting a girl to tea.

  She stared back at him, her face for once as unreadable as his. It was a long moment before she finally nodded and beckoned to him, saying, “Come on, then—there’s so little time. Come on!”