The Magician's Lie

by Greer Macallister

  I couldn’t hold back a smile. “Soon.”

  He rolled over, stretched, kissed me gently on the lips, and settled himself back against the pillows. “So what’s your idea?”

  “A new illusion. One of the boys. Who’s the best?”

  “At what is the question.” He eyed me, half suspicious.

  “Not anything in particular. He doesn’t need to be a dancer or an acrobat. Well, an acrobat might be good. But not necessary. It’s a passive role, really.”

  “Go on.” Idly, he rubbed my shoulder.

  “He just needs to have presence, mainly. Oh. And act scared.”

  “Scared about what?”

  “About what I’m going to do to him.”

  “And what are you going to do to him, love?”

  “Cut him in half,” I said.

  “What?” Clyde’s hand dropped from my shoulder.

  “Well, someone cuts a girl in half, doesn’t he?”

  “A lot of someones do. Kellar, certainly. Atwood. Burlingame.”

  “And a dozen more. So I’ll cut someone in half. Why shouldn’t I?”

  He looked at me blankly. He didn’t have an answer.

  I kept going. “But not a girl. The girls can’t defend themselves. Cut a man in half, and see how he likes it.”

  “Arden, are you all right?”

  I bristled at the question. I’d expected him to embrace the idea, but he was clearly made uncomfortable by it, and I wasn’t sure why. He was usually head over heels for sensation. I said, “Of course I am.”

  “You almost died.”

  “Yes, I remember that,” I said with a touch of frost. “But I’m fine now.”

  “I don’t like this,” said Clyde. “It’s not you.”

  “It’s me. Truly.”

  “No. I know you.”

  He sounded more than confident. He sounded territorial. It rubbed me wrong. Accusingly, I said, “Do you?”

  “Arden, please, don’t be like this. I love you, and everything I want is your happiness.”

  “That’s not even my name,” I said.

  “Arden. Ada. Miss Bates. Whatever you’d like. It’s you and you’re mine.”

  “Yours? I can’t talk to you about this anymore. I need to go.”

  “No, no, don’t run, not from me, please,” he said and grabbed my arms, the worst thing he could do, and I ripped my body out of his grasp and stood.

  He started to rise from the bed, and I held my hand up, blocking him.

  “Don’t. Don’t.” I stepped into the dress I’d worn the night before, a forest green gown too fancy for the circumstance but the closest thing to hand.

  “Don’t go,” said Clyde. “You can’t very well wander the streets alone.”

  “Oh, can’t I?”

  “I mean—Ada, please—at least let me go.”

  “No, I’m leaving. I don’t care what you do. Please yourself,” I muttered, closing the top button of my dress on the way to the door, which I left hanging open behind me.

  ***

  I threw myself into revising the act. The excitement of the Halved Man was bubbling inside me. I stayed after Clyde with all my might—wheedling and cajoling, then insisting and demanding—until he agreed to find someone to make the new trick for me. The mechanics of it were relatively simple. The construction itself didn’t require a master, as an intricate cabinet illusion would. There were no hidden hooks or mounts. This only called for a competent carpenter with a bit of imagination, absolute discretion, and two weeks’ time.

  Hundreds of illusionists were cutting women in half, and despite the differences between men and women, they came apart just the same way under a blade. Or, rather, gave the impression of coming apart—of course no one was really getting severed. Men’s bodies could be reflected by mirrors or hidden under the false bottom of a trunk, just like women’s. There were as many different ways to stage the illusion as there were illusionists, but I chose one of the simplest, knowing the shock of seeing a man in a woman’s place at the end of the blade would be shock enough.

  The cabinet design I chose was a coffin-shaped box in which the body would appear parallel to the ground, on four narrow poles that raised the box to the level of my waist. The poles were wheeled so the cabinet could be freely moved about the stage. But the cabinet was actually two cabinets, the separation in the middle cleverly concealed with thin panels of veneer. The saw that seemed to sever the cabinet only slipped into the existing gap, cutting nothing at all. One of the twins would lie down in the top half of the cabinet, jackknifing his legs up and to the side, and Hugo would lie down in the bottom half, curled tightly and carefully so only his legs protruded through the cabinet’s holes. When the cabinet halves were pressed together, it looked like one man’s body, but it never was. Any viewer would assume Michael’s or Gabriel’s angelic curls connected to Hugo’s polished black boots, but they were entirely separate. The audience was off the track from the beginning.

  Even after I healed the cut Ray had made on my thigh, when Clyde and I made love, I always insisted on darkness. Whenever his hand roamed too close, I shifted and stirred to keep his fingers from touching me there. I knew my wish had worked and the cut had healed completely, leaving no sign, as my cuts always did. But I could still feel it there, burning against the tender skin, and I couldn’t stand the thought of my love’s fingers resting on that unholy spot.

  I was so careful in this respect I became careless elsewhere, and Clyde found among my things Ray’s straight razor, which he took for a gift I’d brought him. He loved the smooth unadorned bone of the handle and exclaimed over its perfection. He kept it on the sink and used it every single day he was with me. It made me sick to my stomach to see it in his hand, but there was no question of setting the record straight. I couldn’t even begin to explain. So I let him think it was something lovely when in fact it was something awful. For his sake. And every time I saw it, I tried to force myself to forget what that blade meant, what its sharp edge had done, but I always remembered. Always.

  ***

  The night before the new act was to debut, there was a long, heavy thunderstorm. Clyde was next to me, and I was idly stroking his hair while we lay on the floor of the railcar together. The bed was far more comfortable, but sometimes we were too eager for it, and this had been one of those times. We’d drawn the shades against the lightning. I could hear the steady patter of rain on the roof, and it made the world inside seem small and dark and private. I reveled in the feeling.

  Clyde said, “I need to talk to you.”

  “So talk.”

  “Please. It’s serious.”

  I set my shoulders and turned toward him. I was ready for another fight. But he didn’t look angry, not exactly, and I tried not to rush to judgment.

  “I love you so much, you know that?”

  Soberly, I nodded. “I know that.”

  “And I think you love me.”

  “Yes,” I said, and my voice cracked, because for a moment, I realized he was a little unsure. That maybe I would say I didn’t love him. But I did love him, as much as I loved myself, probably more.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “If we love each other so much. Maybe we should do something about it.”

  “What?”

  “I want to be with you. I’ve been waiting for the perfect time, to have everything settled, and now I realize maybe that’s no way to live. Maybe we should jump at the chances that we have. You’re my Juliet, my Rosalind, my everything. My Arden. I want to be with you.”

  “But you are with me.”

  “Not in the way I want.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, so I asked. “Do you want me to come off the road?”

  “Not yet, no.”

  I was growing more confused, not less. “Then I don’t understand.
If you don’t want anything to change, what do you want?”

  “I want you to marry me.”

  The minute felt like an hour as I searched his face. He looked sincere. There was no trace of guile, no angle. And yet. I couldn’t help but think of the last time he’d proposed marriage to me, years and years ago, under circumstances that knocked me flat. He hadn’t meant it then, and he hadn’t looked any less sincere. He’d always been a good actor. The only difference was that now, unlike then, I knew it.

  I had the same feeling I had the first time he’d proposed: an overwhelming instinct to say yes, throw myself into his arms, mold my body to his. But this time, I didn’t give in.

  As soon as I got my breath back, I asked, “I see. How would that change anything?”

  He looked down. “It wouldn’t, really, I guess.”

  “Then why do you want to?”

  “Arden,” he said, a pleading note in his voice that I’d rarely, if ever, heard. “This is absolutely not very romantic. I had pictured it very differently.”

  I reached my hand out, cradling his beloved cheek in my palm. “You know I love you. Completely. And desperately.”

  “And I love you.”

  I said, “So you don’t need some certificate to tell you that. It wouldn’t make a bit of difference. We belong to each other already. Don’t we?”

  He said, “It makes a difference to me. It’s what I want, Arden. Please.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?” There was hope in his voice.

  I said, “I mean, okay, I’ll think about it.”

  He was silent for a minute. The next question he asked seemed unrelated. “Are you going to do that trick?”

  I didn’t tell him it was an illusion, not a trick, and I didn’t ask which one he meant. I told him bluntly, “Yes.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “My mind is made up.”

  “And marriage? Is your mind made up on that too?”

  I tried to be gentle. “No, darling. Please. That I need to think about.”

  “Of course you do,” he said, his voice rough. “You never do anything the way a normal girl would do it. Of course you have to do this your own way too. You’ll probably want to buy your own ring.”

  “I don’t,” I said. “I don’t even know if I want a ring.”

  “You know. You just won’t tell me.”

  “That’s not true. Please. I truly need time to think. You took me by surprise.”

  He still looked suspicious, but in the end, he said, “All right, then. A few days enough?”

  “Yes,” I answered and hoped it would be.

  ***

  We tried it first in Baltimore. It was somewhere we could put up posters, create mystery, pay people to whisper. We spread a rumor someone had been killed in a rehearsal. We spread a rumor it was as dangerous as the Bullet Catch, as fatal as Parisi’s Chainsaw Folly. We spread every rumor we could to guarantee a packed house for opening night, and we got exactly what we wished for.

  I’d never felt more powerful. I’d designed and performed dozens of illusions, but they were all some form of pageantry, turning the most prosaic items into flowers and ribbons and flames, embracing the lush impossible. I was the undisputed queen of creating opulence from nothingness. Nothing like this: savage and beautiful, with all the artifice of stagecraft stripped away. Nothing else had put me alone on a stage with the object of my actions, just the two of us, in which I could have complete victory. In a way, it was like Adelaide’s performance of Lady to Tiger, but instead of the physical form of a tiger, I took on the spirit of one. Instead of a delicate grace, I had a strong grace, a grace to be feared.

  Frankly, I liked being feared for a change.

  I had begun as a dancer, and a dancer’s allure was as a creature too light for the earth. My new allure was as a creature too dangerous for it. Jeannie outdid herself with a striking black gown, beaded and spangled all over, to suit me up like a modern witch, both graceful and grim. Unfortunately the gown turned out to be her swan song as my wardrobe mistress, as she was called home to Abilene to care for her mother, who’d taken ill. An unwelcome surprise, but I couldn’t begrudge her. I would miss her terribly, but the excitement of the Halved Man swept me along, carried me forward.

  The old act had incorporated many things—fire and beauty and mystery and magic—but this was the first time we reached out into the seats to take our audience by the throats. This was the first time we made them afraid. And as strange as that was, as unexpected as it was, they found that they liked the feeling.

  I raised up the long bright knife and plunged it into the center of the coffin. The man cried out. Then I laid down the knife and picked up the saw, which I heaved back and forth with obvious effort, leaning my whole body into it to emphasize how heavy it was, how hard to move. The man howled as I sawed.

  The audience howled along with him.

  With a flourish, I spun half the man away, leaving the other half in place. Some nights, I left the head and shoulders behind, some nights, the legs and feet. The audience seemed to embrace both possibilities. No matter which half went where, they cried out in unison, disbelieving. They sucked in all their breath and let it all out like a single breathing person all together. The shock and the terror and the shared impossibility made a single fantastical creature of them. I made a creature of them.

  I spun the second half of the man off the stage after the first, clouds of smoke filled the stage, and I pointed with a terrible, straight finger toward the center of the front row. There a young man with a head of bright blond curls stood and opened his white shirtfront to expose a line of fresh red blood across the center of his waist. I clapped twice, hard, two sharp noises like gunshots. He wiped away the blood from his skin with the palm of his hand. He wiped again with his other hand until the blood on his stomach was gone, the flesh clean and unbroken underneath, turning so all could see. He was identical in every way to the man I’d cut in half, but whole again.

  Of course, earlier in the act, they’d already seen that the twins were part of the company. They knew there were two of them, identical blond things with cherubic faces and teenagers’ lanky frames. They saw one and started looking for the other. They felt smart, thinking they were too smart to be fooled.

  When the twin sprang up, as an unexpectedly whole person, the audience was suspicious. “Impostor!” they called. “It’s the other one!”

  And in the next moment, his brother sprang up at the back of the theater. Everyone looked back and forth between the two twins. The second one pulled aside his shirt to show a waist as unmarred as his brother’s. They both turned to one side and then the other, giving the audience a good look, from the cheap seats on down. Someone had been torn apart and made whole again, but it was impossible to tell who. They were both flawless.

  Then the audience shouted “Brava!” and “Amazing!”

  The twins took their perfectly synchronized bows, moving as one. Then I took mine.

  And the theater erupted in applause, long rippling waves of it, until the echoes threatened to deafen us all.

  The headline in the Sun read “Woman Magician’s Spectacle Divides Man, Dumbfounds Audience. Who Is This Amazing Arden?” There were other headlines, less flattering ones, but the Sun’s I clipped from its page and tucked away for safekeeping. I wasn’t given to keeping mementos, but this felt like a worthy occasion.

  It was an immense success, the Halved Man. It was like and yet unlike what everyone else was doing. It created a stir. There had already been press about my unfeminine business, but it multiplied a hundredfold. Some said I was possessed by the devil. Some said I should be stopped before I hurt someone. A preacher in Conestoga gave a sermon about the killing of a man by a woman being the sign that Armageddon was upon us, and he called for my destruction, so we had to have a police guard for a co
uple of weeks, but all that meant was more attention.

  The twins were ecstatic. Not content to simply take turns, they drew straws every evening to determine which of them would be the one in the box, and the excitement of this ritual brought the whole company together to lay bets and play favorites every night. They were all involved. Contessa, née Doreen, snuck down into the audience and watched, even though she had to be onstage for the next illusion. She couldn’t help herself. When the knife took its first plunge into the coffin, there was always a bloodcurdling cheer of joy, and I knew it was hers, because it happened in every town.

  The audience cheered and booed and whooped and cried, and when it was all over, they threw more flowers than they’d ever thrown before. It was amazing how their enthusiasm changed everything. The show seemed brighter, smarter, faster. All of us in it seemed more beautiful, more clever, more alive. The new energy affected every member of the company. I could see the difference clearly.

  In short, everyone was happy but Clyde.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  1904–1905

  The Ring in Danger

  He gave me a ring, of course. Maybe he thought that’s what I really wanted. It wasn’t. I wasn’t holding out for a bauble, some kind of material proof of his commitment. It shocked me that he thought that might be what I required. Then it shocked me again that I assumed I knew his reasons. It’s amazing how well you can know someone, how much you can love them, and still not really know what it is they’re thinking.

  The ring was lovely and simple. A gold band with a gemstone channel-set into it, very thoughtful, since it wouldn’t catch on my clothes while I was performing. It was a light blue stone, but when I looked at it carefully, it seemed to me to have a kernel of brown inside it, almost like my half-brown eye. If he’d searched to find something unique that reflected my own uniqueness, it was a touching and wonderful gesture. But I didn’t ask him about it. I couldn’t. If I asked about the ring, he would take it as an invitation to talk about the proposal, about whether or not I might accept. I wasn’t done thinking yet. I was afraid to talk at all to him until I knew what it was I was going to say.