Behind the velvet curtain, Felix held his breath during the polite applause that followed. Anything more enthusiastic than golf claps had to be worked for. He couldn’t imagine a tougher room.
They’d opted to keep his real name (plus El Gato tied in to the use of a cat in the show), which he now suddenly regretted. A stage name to hide behind would be a relief.
There would be no friendly or familiar faces to focus on in the audience. He wasn’t even a member of the club, yet here he was, attempting to bypass the natural order of things and collect its highest honor.
This is insane.
What made us think we could get away with this?
One of Claire’s books said there were no such things as magicians, only actors playing the role of Magician. Jamie, his actor roommate, could probably do just as well or better right now if Claire had coached him, he realized glumly. Okay, so maybe that’s true—but Jamie’s not up here, I am.
Why squander a great opportunity just because it arrived early in the game? He would earn his bona fides later. See, everybody wins. Well, maybe not everybody. Not the magicians he would displace in the contest, the ones who had come up with their own routines and spent years—stop. You can’t think that way. You worked your ass off, too, no one can deny that.
Tonight was the beginning, a necessary launching pad, just so he could score the cash he needed to get his own place and honor his potential. Yes, honor his potential. That was the right attitude. I’ll make good on this, he vowed. I’ll be my own man after this. Forge my own path.
But first he had to win.
The judges would be using a scoring system for each aspect of the show:
Originality and skill
Level of difficulty
Stage presence
Audience reaction
If you displayed talent but no charisma, you were out of luck. If the audience adored you but your routine was derivative or simplistic, no dice. Claire believed her routine was foolproof but it was still up to Felix to be that fool.
He took a deep breath and walked onstage. You can do this. You’re El Gato. You always land on your feet.
The timer started.
Per Claire’s instructions, he plunged right in. No wasting precious seconds with “Good evening, ladies and gents” or “thank you for being here.”
“I have three curiosities for you tonight. They are not tricks. They are not illusions. They are real. And because you cannot accept the fact that they are real, you will try to pass them off as sleight of hand, or a trick of the light.”
The lights went out.
Someone shrieked in surprise, and then giggled. A tiny moment, yet vital to establishing a connection. A small hook to hang his hopes on: At least one person was on his side.
A moment later Felix was visible again, but only by the light of a flashlight, which he held under his chin. It was meant to give his face an eerie, fragmented glow, like a kid playing around a campfire.
Felix lifted a cardboard box and directed the flashlight beam through a small slit. The light went through it and emerged in two separate, distinct locations, visible on the wall stage right.
“Same source, different outcome. Electrons and photons. Some pass through, and others are reflected. One light, two images.”
Felix clicked off the flashlight, enshrouding the entire room in darkness once more.
Sound of a finger snapping.
Full house lights came back on and the curtain opened, revealing Felix’s stage: a small lab and chemistry classroom set, complete with smoking beakers, a chalkboard, a desk and a chair.
“Three curiosities. Why three? Three is a magic number. Three acts tell the perfect story. Beginning, middle, and end. The first act is transmutation.”
He fanned out a deck of blank cards, all of them bright white, front and back.
He took out a knife and cut his arm. The blood pack hidden in his sleeve punctured instantly.
The audience gasped and squealed in distress.
He squeezed a large drop of “blood” onto the blank deck of cards and fanned the deck, to show that the red suits—Hearts and Diamonds—had formed on half the cards in a dripping-wet red smear. All the symbols and faces seemed to vibrate, alive.
He wrapped his bleeding arm in a handkerchief, walked to the beakers, and lifted one out. “Blood to blood, dust to dust. Behold, the dust of my bones.”
He poured the dust on the deck of cards, closed them, and opened them to reveal that the black suits—Spades and Clubs—had now formed, spreading like the ink of a Rorschach test, changing from gray dust to black imagery, darker and darker.
Applause. He didn’t realize—or maybe he’d forgotten—how intoxicating applause could be.
“These are my cards, the devil’s picture book. Or, if you prefer, ‘Now I’m playing with a full deck.’”
Chuckles followed, half a beat behind. Felix moved so quickly the audience had trouble keeping up.
But it was really Claire moving quickly.
The fact that few people could keep up was one of the reasons he’d been so drawn to her. That and her loneliness. Maybe each ensured the existence of the other. He was glad he couldn’t see her out there, golden-haired and terrified, mouthing along with the routine.
“How do I know these are my cards? They came from my blood and from my bones. Alchemy died out two centuries ago, but we still look to it for our magic. Rabbits into mice, charcoal into gold. Blood and bones into cards. Breath into fire.”
He took a quick swig of a beaker labeled MAGIC SPIRITS, tossed a flash paper in the air, and blew. It ignited in a burst of light and flame.
Careful applause. They needed more. Flash paper wasn’t rare enough.
“If a magician came up to you and granted you one wish, what would you wish for? Most people say money, wealth, fame, power, invisibility…I’d want time travel. Think about it. With time travel, there is no path not taken; there is no unexamined life. What people don’t understand is that time travel doesn’t go forward or backward. It goes sideways. You don’t move up and down along a continuum, because that would create a vacuum. No, you must move between worlds.
“Remember the flashlight?” He performed the light through cardboard again. “One light, two outcomes. One life, two paths. One person, two worlds.”
Lights out.
Flashlight on.
Lights on.
Felix suddenly appeared at the chalkboard.
He drew a line on the chalkboard, and then a second line branching out from the first and curving around so it eventually became parallel. “Look, it’s like a map of Los Angeles. San Vicente, I think.”
Laughter.
He labeled one line “You—A” and the second line “You—B” and drew circles to signify two people.
“With time travel, you wouldn’t move earlier in your own life, you’d swap places with a different version of yourself: the you that’s in a different world. The difference between the worlds isn’t huge. It’s not as though suddenly we all have lizard faces or have evolved into different species because some asshole stepped on a butterfly, apologies to Ray Bradbury.”
I was supposed to cut that line, Felix berated himself. Is my timing off now? Will I go past the ten-minute mark and be automatically disqualified? How much time did it add? And how much time am I adding by thinking about this? Oh, God. What’s the next line? Difference between worlds…right.
“No, the difference between our world and another, parallel world is as small as the difference between picking the Two of Hearts and picking the Two of Spades. You are still you. You’ve just made different choices, and different choices have different consequences.”
He moved to the front row with his deck of “bloody” cards in hand. The people there collectively recoiled and he smiled. “I won’t hurt you.”
No one budged.
“Here, take the deck.”
A woman shook her head, vehement.
“It’s okay, the
blood has almost dried.”
“Disgusting,” she said, to nervous titters all around.
“I don’t blame you for being uneasy. But if you please, pick a card.”
She gave in.
“This is not sleight of hand,” said Felix. “This is not misdirection. This is not an illusion. You have picked the card of your own free will. Think of this deck as a living thing—it came from me, after all—I breathed life into it. Each card has a role to play, and they are all entangled with one another. The deck is a closed, coherent system.”
He gave the woman the rest of the deck. “Hold out the deck to your neighbor and ask him to pick a card, then pass the deck along. Neighbor, once you’ve selected yours, do the same: Turn to the next person and ask him to pick a card.
“As it travels row by row, there will be fewer choices. If I pick the Two, you can’t pick the Two; I’ve affected your options. My picking the card precludes you picking the card. The more picked, the fewer possibilities remain.”
He returned to the chalkboard for some quick scratches:
52 cards = 52 worlds
51
50
49
48
Some audience members shifted impatiently in their seats.
“The first four rows hold fifty-two audience members, which is of course the number of cards in a deck. I’m going to predict with one hundred percent accuracy which card all fifty-two of you will choose.
“How am I able to do this? Because these are the only cards you could pick and still be in this world. If you were to pick differently, you would no longer be here; you would be part of a different world, in which you picked a different card, in that world’s version of this trick.
“Before you sat down tonight, I prepared my predictions. Each card has a perfect twin; each card in this deck is entangled with another card; they each do what the other does. Einstein hated entanglement. ‘Spooky action at a distance,’ he called it. Well, of course it’s spooky action at a distance,” Felix roared. “I’m a magician!”
And at the moment, he believed it, with his whole heart, which thundered in his chest as beads of sweat gathered on his forehead. More than that, he believed it would be true always, from that point on.
He wiped at his brow, suddenly out of breath. Took a moment to compose himself and clear his throat. “Under each chair I’ve taped a sealed envelope.”
“Oh, my God,” someone said.
“Yes, underneath each chair, taped to the bottom—don’t touch them yet—are envelopes. Inside each envelope is a card. A prediction of your choice.
“Don’t avert your eyes; that won’t stop me from making you participate. Pick a card and pass it on. Don’t think too hard.
“While you’re all passing the deck along, I’d like to prepare my finale, the third act, for which I’ll need the help of my feline assistant. He is going to time-travel.”
Felix disappeared behind the curtain and returned carrying a black cat with a white splotch on his forehead. The cat’s left paw was also white.
“Aww,” went the audience.
“This is my cat, Schrödinger.”
Felix kissed Schrödinger’s forehead, and set Schrödinger on the floor. Next he retrieved a large, white, velvet-lined box and held it aloft.
“This box represents Hilbert space. All the possibilities of the universe are inside it. Has everyone finished selecting their card?”
Felix removed a small manila envelope from his pocket.
“Schrödinger has a very important role. Inside this envelope is a prediction card, just like the ones under your chairs. He’s going to hold on to it for me.”
He placed the envelope in the cat’s mouth, set Schrödinger inside the box, and closed the lid.
“We’ll return to him in a moment. Remember what I said in the beginning? That I would predict precisely, with one hundred percent accuracy, which card each of you picked? Well, the cards you pick determine whether he lives or dies.”
Chaos from the audience. Shouts, some angry Shhs, then silence.
“Yes, you heard me. A quantum system is nothing until it’s measured. It doesn’t exist. Looking at it and making an observation about its qualities brings those qualities into being and destroys the system. When multiple possibilities are brought to a single outcome, we experience quantum collapse. Everyone done? Everyone have a card? Let’s all reach under our chairs and remove our envelopes. Don’t be shy.”
“Holy shit, he got mine right,” someone yelled. Arm movements, cacophony, as more and more people reached under their chairs, held up their cards, and ripped open their envelopes. Shrieks and laughter overlapped, along with more announcements of successful predictions.
Felix was pleased. “Yes, I know it’s surprising…Especially because half the cards were dipped in poison.”
Sounds of people screaming and throwing their cards made Felix want to grin maniacally, but he held back.
“And half of them were not. Because the cards are entangled, we can predict with certainty that if the card you chose has poison on it, so does its twin, in the envelope. Only trace amounts, not nearly enough to hurt you.”
Someone in the second-to-last row stood up. He was the final person to participate in the trick.
“I’ve got the Ace of Spades,” he called. “But there’s no envelope under my chair.”
“That’s true. I’m glad you pointed that out. You’re absolutely correct. Schrödinger has your card.”
“No way!”
“But was it a poisoned card, or no?” Felix asked.
“No! No!” shouted the audience in a desperate chant.
“Are you sure?”
“No!” they yelled again.
“A poisoned card can’t hurt you, but for a cat…well, it could be deadly.”
“Yes!” / “No!”
“Shall we see?”
Felix lifted the box.
The cat was dead. The envelope remained in his mouth. Poison from the card had seeped through the thin paper and killed him.
Nobody made a sound for a long, long time.
Then a woman cried, “Bring him back. Make him come back.”
“Impossible. But it’s okay. Don’t you see? In the other worlds, Schrödinger’s alive. In the other worlds, the poisoned card was not chosen. Think how happy your other self is. She’s clapping. Can’t you hear her clapping?”
“Make him come back.”
“Bring the cat back to life!”
“Very well. Perhaps Schrödinger can time-travel back to us by switching with another world’s version of himself.”
The clock was running out. The warning light in the overhead booth flashed, signaling the nine-minute, thirty-second mark. If he went beyond ten minutes, everything would be for naught. He’d be disqualified even if the judges liked him the best.
If.
Lights out.
Lights on.
The switch had occurred. The “dead” cat (a taxidermy of Schrödinger’s late sibling) was gone. He and the live Schrödinger had swapped places.
Schrödinger got up, stretched, hopped out of his box, and walked to the front of the stage near the lights, where he proceeded to bow three times.
A cat, the most notoriously difficult animal to train or manage, had been killed and brought back to life. And then the cat had bowed.
Unbeknownst to the audience or the judges, one of the footlights on the floor of the stage had an extra element inside, next to the bulb: Schrödinger’s favorite toy. He wasn’t bowing; he was leaning over to try to grab the treat with his mouth through the glass.
The room exploded with cheers.
It didn’t matter that the next competitor swallowed fire, or that the one after that balanced five plates above his head. The contest was over, and everyone inside the theater knew it.
* * *
The Mexican Inquisition, as he came to think of it, turned out to be easier than Felix expected. He’d overprepared. The j
udges certainly wanted to chat with him at the post-ceremony cocktail party, but their questions were rooted in awe rather than distrust.
Watching him onstage, they’d reverted to wide-eyed little boys just as Claire predicted they would, and the young man several decades their junior with the shaved head and smooth brown skin was their strange new god. After all, Magician of the Year Felix Vicario was the total package: a jock magician with a science habit and a sense of humor. It gave the art a much-needed update. They’d known for years that magic was no longer the purview of old men, and here was the proof! Now they could compete with those arrogant cardists in the court of public opinion. Just like Penn & Teller, Derren Brown, and Michael Carbonaro before him, he was changing the face of magic.
While Felix had rehearsed the act that won them over, he’d also rehearsed having the kind of personality that would’ve created the Schrödinger’s Cat routine in the first place. Felix the science jock had supposedly audited physics classes whenever possible, none of which he received grades or credits for (and thus wouldn’t appear on his transcripts if anyone looked into it), but such was his love for the topic. This was in actuality the type of thing twenty-something Claire would’ve done, though he wasn’t sure if she had. Despite all the time they’d spent together, and how much she’d infiltrated his psyche, he still knew very little about her. The thought was surprisingly depressing. All of the free drinks and congratulations paled in comparison with what he wanted to do with Claire, whom he now associated with the greatest night of his life. She’d warned him beforehand she couldn’t stay and celebrate or indicate in any way that the victory was shared.
If he could have, Felix would have bent her backward in a full-body dip and delivered a showstopping kiss for all to see. He pushed that image aside and focused on entertaining the judges with his made-up personal history.
Club Deception Page 24