by Rucker Moses
My Uncle Crooked Eye saunters into the room in an unbuttoned pink shirt with a greasy tank top underneath. His belly looks like it’s made a nice home for pints of ice cream. He used to warm up the crowds for my pop with his Crooked Eye routine. He could move his wonky eyes in two different directions at the same time. He dubbed himself the “Ultimate Lookout.”
I’m waiting for a trick to appear in his hand, or for his eyes to spaz out in whatever direction for a quick laugh. But he remains composed. “Nina! Darling, it’s so good to see you.”
“Heyward, it’s good to see you, too,” she says.
My uncle pauses. “Heyward,” he repeats, like he’s tasting the sound of it. “Well, I’ll be, been years since anyone used my government name.”
“Hi, Uncle Crooked Eye!” I announce.
His eyes roll around like a couple of cue balls until his pupils find me. Then they hit a split in opposite directions.
“Young King!”
He holds out a hand for me to slap and pulls me in for a hug. He crouches down and gives me a good once-over that lasts so long it’s more of a twice-over.
“Well, well, looking more and more like him every day, Nephew,” he says, almost to himself. Then he seems to remember that my mom is right there, and he buttons up like he didn’t mean to mention Dad like that. “Except, you better looking, ’cause you look like your mama, too.”
Mom chuckles at the lame attempt. “Smooth, Heyward.”
She paces around the magic shop, eyeing the posters of old magic acts hung on the walls. There’s an empty space between posters for Magician Mulholland and Okito the Great. Ma stops and stares.
“Now, I’m no detective,” she says, “but how does dust settle on every inch of this place except for that perfectly rectangular bit on the wall right there?”
“Told you,” says Veronica.
“That was Preston’s poster, huh?” Ma asks Uncle Crooked.
I look to the empty spot on the wall and try to imagine my father’s face there, drawn in full color like all those retro magic posters. I’m kind of disappointed that they took the poster down. I was looking forward to seeing King Preston the Great, at least in pictures, with that double-dimpled smile we share. Mom kept all our pics of Dad boxed up in the basement, where no one could see them. I wonder, Doesn’t anyone want to remember him? Seems like even here in Brooklyn, in his old home in his hometown, folks want to pretend like he didn’t exist.
Uncle Crooked tries to explain: “Well, Nina, thing is, we figured, you know, with you being away so long, that don’t nobody want to be reminded of the past like that.”
“It was discussed,” says Veronica. “Whether to take it down or not. I thought you could handle it. I was overruled.”
Ma smiles at Uncle Crooked. “Heyward, that’s very considerate of you. But I’m okay. I can handle it. So can King. I mean, don’t get me wrong, this place is heavy with the past. But we wouldn’t have come back here if we weren’t ready to face up to it,” Mom continues. “My only question for you is—are you ready to let go?”
Uncle Crooked looks around the shop. He eyes every dusty trick, every old deck of cards with a look of love.
“Translation: he’s not ready,” says Veronica.
“How about you?” Mom asks her. “You up for helping turn this spot into the sweetest café in Echo City?”
“So ready, Auntie Nina. No offense, Uncle, but it’s time to put this place to bed. Like, way past bedtime.”
“Careful your father doesn’t hear you talk like that,” warns Uncle Crooked.
“Where is your brother? Is he around?” asks my mom, talking about my other uncle, Long Fingers, Veronica’s father.
Veronica and Crooked Eye exchange a look.
“He’s around,” says Veronica.
“Let’s just say he’s attached to the . . . magic of this place,” Crooked Eye explains carefully.
“Look, I get how much magic and this shop mean to you and your brother,” says my mom. “But seriously, when was the last time you had a customer?”
“I can answer that for ya,” Veronica says like she’s about to enjoy this. She pulls a big dusty book from behind the counter and thumbs through the pages, half of them falling out of the binding. “Our last sale was March twentieth.”
“Four months ago?” Mom asks.
“Actually . . . that was March twentieth of last year,” Veronica says, looking more closely at the book.
Crooked Eye shrugs. “Was a good March.”
“Heyward. It’s time,” says Ma.
Uncle Crooked sighs.
And I feel him. There’s so much history in this store, these cards, books, and tricks. So many memories of Pop. Now Ma wants to clean him out of his old home. Like, I get that it’s important to move on and all. But why does Mom have to be so good at it?
“Ma, can’t we try and make the magic store work?” I ask. “I mean, maybe it needs a cleanup and to get some, you know, buzz or something?”
“Bees don’t buzz that much,” says Veronica.
“Thanks, Young King,” Uncle Crooked says. “But your ma is right. In life, change is the one constant. Birth, death, life. Tide’s in, tide’s out. I appreciate what you’re doing for us, Nina. I know you didn’t have to come back here to save this place. But honestly, I can’t imagine losing our home. On behalf of the James family, you have our thanks.”
I touch the pocket watch that’s hanging from my neck beneath my shirt.
It’s a funny pocket watch that Pop left me. It’s brass and old-fashioned and it goes all the way up to 13.
I touch it when I want to remember him.
Sometimes, I want to remember him most when I’m afraid he’ll be forgotten forever.
Meet my new room. Same as my old room.
I mean, literally the same room I grew up in.
Same mirror on the closet door as when I was eight.
There’s something scary about mirrors. The way they make the world into more worlds.
My father disappeared into a mirror.
I know, that sounds weird. But it’s true. I watched it happen and so did everyone else.
I knew in that moment that magic was real. Really real.
But then we moved out of Echo City and Mom started pretending that magic’s not real. At school, they’d say that magic is not real. One time I got mad and told a teacher that I know magic is real, because my pop did magic and vanished through a mirror. Next thing I knew, Mom had to come meet the principal after school. I had to sit down with Gary, a counselor with curly hair and a beard, to “talk about my feelings.” All we did was play chess, and I learned to pretend that Pops disappeared just like regular pops disappear.
Now that we’re back in Brooklyn, I can stop pretending. I can be around my pop’s folks, people like my uncles and V, who won’t make me pretend and won’t treat me like I’m crazy.
We’re done moving in our boxes and stuff from the rental car, and Mom has lain down. I’m crazy restless and things are quiet—too quiet. I can almost hear the Mercury calling to me. I think about that figure in the Prince Albert coat in the dark, and I want to go back so bad it’s like an ache in my neck. But there’s no cool way to do it. No way to get out without Ma phoning missing persons for the second time in her life. No way to explore the city on my own.
So instead, I explore the house. Because if magic is hiding anywhere in this world, it’s in a dusty old brownstone like this one, that’s had a family of magicians living in it for decades.
In the kitchen, I find the wall where we used to mark how much I’d grown each year. I compare myself now to how short I was when I was eight. I’ve grown by about one full head—two if you count the twists in my hair. I was always on the tall side for my class, but not like Pop—he’s the tallest of his brothers by far. When I first started growing
out my twists, I liked how it made me taller, more like Pop.
The James Family Brownstone is basically how we left it. Most of the furniture is the same, but older. The one difference is that every spare space is stacked with books. Old books, new books, books with covers stripped off, books with crumbling bindings, or with titles so faded you can barely read them. Stacks and stacks of them load the hallways, windowsills, and half the upstairs bathtub. I’m searching the house looking for magic, and instead my neck hurts from holding my head sideways trying to read all the titles of these books on and about magic, like Black Herman’s Secrets of Magic, Mystery and Legerdemain, and The Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy. The bookcase in the living room is also loaded with books, but here they’re all ordered neatly, covering the entire back wall, floor to ceiling, with a rolling ladder like in a legit library. I scan the bindings—Picatrix, Testament of Solomon—and recognize one title in particular, The Four Elements of Magic, by Anonymous.
I remember Pops used to read that book so much, Mom would make comments like, “The Four Elements of Magic? Much as you read that book, more like The Fourth Member of Our Family.” I wish I had asked Pops about the elements. Maybe I was just too young, or before he disappeared I wasn’t as curious about magic.
Cracks run down the faded leather spine like the lines on my palm. I try to pull the book from the shelf but feel this strange tension, like a pair of fingers is holding the book from the other side. I pull against the resistance, and the book slides halfway off the shelf as a hinge somewhere inside the wall seems to move. I hear a crank and grinding of gears and at first I think I’ve broken something.
Then the entire bookcase rattles in its grooves and slowly turns inward, revealing an opening.
Wow, I think, and I wonder, Was this always here?
Did Pops use this passage, and I never knew?
I step into a small foyer that’s the shape of a hexagon. There’s the entrance to my back, the other side of the bookcase that closes behind me. There’s a hallway in front of me. And on the four walls to my right and my left, there’s nothing but pictures and clippings of Pop.
It’s like a shrine. Three of the walls are dedicated to his best tricks. There’s Hooker’s Vanishing Deck on one wall, the trick where he could make cards disappear and reappear, and that no one could ever figure out. There’s the Skull of Balsamo—that creepy, hovering human skull with a brass jaw that could see into the past and speak to the dead. Then there’s William Tell’s Pistol, the act with the old-style handgun that shot a bullet Pop could catch like a fastball. The fourth wall is all clippings about his strange disappearance, and photos of the Mirror.
Looking at these walls, I realize how much Pop is missed. He’s not just missed by that old, forgotten magic store out front—he’s like the glue that held this place together. And I finally get to look at pictures of him. I scan every feature in every frame, looking for faces that I make and poses that I hit, too.
The doorway that leads to the hallway has an inscription hung over top:
THE FOUR ELEMENTS OPEN THE WAY.
I shrug. Guess I figured out that one on my own.
I walk through and there’s some lived-in rooms. There’s a sofa with a kitchen at the back.
Through another doorway, I find the jackpot.
Well, not the jackpot. But a jackpot. Not real magic exactly, but a real magician’s workshop.
The walls are lined with shelves overflowing with screws, light bulbs, springs, bolts, crystals, bones, cigar boxes, magician’s wax, bent cards, and old newspapers. Projects are everywhere. Half-finished or half-abandoned, depending on your point of view. Half-completed sketches. Over a half dozen moldy coffee cups. Neon lights in odd shapes cast a strange color across the room.
And my Uncle Long Fingers sits right in the center of it all, working on something that’s covered beneath a giant tarp.
I stay quiet and watch him work, though I can’t make out what’s under there. Uncle Long still hasn’t noticed me, he’s so into his project, fingers bent around a screwdriver like spider legs. The focus he pours into the end of his working fingertips is a physical force. Probably has its own gravitational field.
Uncle Long Fingers has let himself go. He sports a matted ’fro like a shrub that needs a gardener. His bushy salt-and-pepper beard is speckled with crumbs. His body is soft and sunken as a beanbag chair. But his mind—you can see the intelligence, wild in his eyes like an electric storm.
I inch closer, trying to get a look at what he’s working with, what he’s screwing or unscrewing or fixing or taking apart.
Something familiar catches my eye. A pocket watch dangles from a hook that’s attached to a plaque. I look closer and realize it’s just like the watch my dad left me—it goes all the way up to 13. There’s a bunch of random letters scrawled on the wall above the plaque:
Ybbx Sbejneq naq Onpxjneq, Vg’f Nyy gur Fnzr
“What’s up, Nephew?” His gruff voice startles me nearly out of my skin.
“H—hi, Uncle,” I say, and wave a hand.
But waving at him is pointless. He still hasn’t looked up at me.
“You lost?” he asks.
“No,” I say firmly. My eyes fall back to the scrawl of letters that looks like total gibberish—or, I should say, the code. “Look Forward and Backward, It’s All the Same,” I recite.
He strokes the crumbs from his beard and runs his fingers over the hodgepodge of letters like he’s impressed. “You can decode those letters that fast?” he asks.
I reach for the chain around my neck and show him the watch.
“My dad taught it to me. He left me one just like the one you got here.”
Long Fingers takes both watches in his hands and examines them together. “Well, I’ll be. That’s Preston’s old watch, all right,” he says with a whisper. Then he glances at me and recovers his gruff expression. “Never knew he gave this to you.”
“He used to write me notes in that code to see how long it would take me to figure it out. He told me how time is just a construct of the mind. The ability to slow down and speed up time is the magician’s greatest asset. A trained magician can see the smallest blink of an eye. The key is thirteen,” I say, and point to the number 13 on the watch.
“Oh yeah?” He smirks. “So you got it all figured it out?”
“It’s a simple code. You take a letter, and substitute it with another letter that’s thirteen letters forward or thirteen letters back. You get the same letter whether you go forward or backward.”
I grab a piece of paper and a pencil from his messy desk and write it out.
“So take the letter A, right? In the code, the letter A is repped by the letter N, because an N is thirteen ahead of A,” I say, scribbling down letters and numbers. “Or you can count thirteen back and start with Z. It’s all the same. A is always N. It doesn’t matter, because, Look forward and backward . . .”
“It’s all the same.” Long Fingers finishes the phrase. “Not bad, kid. Time is the key. Look forward and backward in time.”
He reaches to the plaque and removes a wood-grain slat, revealing two circular sets of letters surrounding the clockface. Clearly, he made this plaque just to mount his or my dad’s Watch of 13. The alphabet runs in two concentric circles around the numbers on the clockface, showing how the code works. The first set starts with an A over the 1 on the clock, the second set starts with an N over the 1.
“Wow, this thing has been around my neck for four years and I never knew that trick. My dad always made me do the math.”
“I suspect that was part of your daddy’s point. We came up with that little code back in the day, passing notes to each other. But you knew that phrase already. You didn’t decode it that fast, did you?” he asks, genuinely curious.
I shrug with a wink. “Magician’s secret.”
But of course he’s rig
ht.
“Okay, Nephew, color me impressed. You know the code, you figured out the bookcase and made it to my little lab here. So what brings you snooping around this old house?”
“Magic.”
“Magic? Haven’t you heard? We gettin’ rid of that stuff so we can serve coffee and biscuits,” he says with a bitter growl.
“I don’t mean that magic. Not those tricks out there. Anyone with a few bucks can buy those. I mean real magic.”
“What makes you think there’s any such thing as real magic?”
“’Cause I seen it,” I say. I give him a cold look so he knows what I mean.
“Ah. Yeah, well, I think you seen enough of that stuff to last a lifetime.”
“No. I want to see more.”
“Maybe you don’t know what it is you want.”
“Of course I don’t know. How could I know? My ma doesn’t want me talking or thinking about magic. She just wants me to be a normal boy. But I don’t think there’s any such thing as that, and if there was, normal boys don’t see their fathers vanish into mirrors.”
He shrugs. “Maybe not.”
“I have questions, Uncle.”
“Well, you can ask them, but just so we clear, that don’t mean I got to answer them.”
“Fine.”
I want to ask about the Mercury and the figure in the Prince Albert coat—but I’ve made lists of questions, all for a moment like this, and a random one awkwardly jumps out at me. “If magic is real, why don’t we magic the dishes clean every night?”
He laughs. “That’s the best you got?”
“How come we don’t magic the house out of foreclosure?”
He pauses and gives me a serious look. “Clearly, it doesn’t work like that, ’cause you here with your mama, isn’t that right, Nephew?”
“How come we don’t magic Pop back?”