The Miser's Dream

by John Gaspard

  And then there was me.

  “You,” I said through clenched teeth, trying to will the muscles in my face into a semblance of a smile. “I have you to thank for this, don’t I?”

  Quinton stepped into the room and clapped his hands excitedly. “Guilty as charged,” he said. “I was talking to the client last night and I happened to mention my show often goes over much better if the audience has already had a wee taste of magic earlier in the evening. When she agreed, I immediately thought of you. And here you are.”

  “Yes,” I said slowly. “Here I am.”

  “Eli that is such a cute costume.” I checked Megan’s face for any trace of irony or sarcasm, but came up empty. She sincerely thought I looked adorable. Knowing this, however, did nothing to help make me feel adorable.

  “You’re part of the act tonight?”

  She nodded and giggled. “We’ve been rehearsing all afternoon,” she said excitedly. “I’m not sure I can pull it off, but Quinton seems to think I’ll do fine.”

  “You’ll do fine,” he repeated, moving a stray hair from in front of her face. “You look perfect and you’ll be wonderful.”

  “You’re doing Harbin’s Zig Zag?” I asked, trying to sound as nonchalant as possible.

  “Mostly,” Quinton said. “I’ve also taken a tad from Paul Daniels’ presentation, but not so much I feel guilty about it. Tweaked it here and there and made it my own. You know how it is.”

  His tone was very buddy-buddy, like two old pro magicians just chewing the fat. However, I’d never felt less like a magician, let alone the member of an exclusive fraternity.

  “It’s really fun,” Megan said, clearly not sensing my mood. “It took some practice, but I think I finally got the hang of it.”

  “But now you’ll know how it’s done,” I said plaintively. “You never want to know how magic tricks are done.”

  She waved this thought away with her hand. “Oh, Eli, you know me,” she said, still smiling brightly. “I might know it now, but by tomorrow I will have completely forgotten how it works.”

  Despite my grim mood, I couldn’t help but smile. I knew that would likely be the case.

  Mercifully, it was time for me to mingle and amaze, so I excused myself and shuffled out of the room and into the hustle and bustle of the reception, which was already in full bloom.

  One of the first things you have to get over, as a working strolling magician, is the problem of how you approach people out of the blue and ask them if they want to see some magic. Magicians are, not surprisingly, often somewhat introverted, and so going up to strangers is not an easy skill to master. Plus, you’re butting into an existing social dynamic and immediately trying to turn it to be about you. You could be interrupting a regular conversation, a friendship-ending argument, or the beginnings of a marriage proposal.

  I think I’ve gotten pretty good at it over the years, but that night I discovered almost immediately that if you really want to quickly break the ice with a group of strangers, you need to dress up in a bunny costume. This is certainly true in magic, but I suspect it might have applications in other social situations as well.

  While in the costume, there was no need to introduce myself, apologize for interrupting or ask if anyone wanted to see some magic. When you see a six-foot rabbit coming at you holding an enormous black top hat with a magician sticking out of it, you pretty much know what the situation is. And if you don’t, you want your questions answered, pronto.

  The other thing which surprised me was how much fun I had doing it, and I don’t think the costume played any part in this. The hours I had spent, at Harry’s annoying suggestion, tearing my act apart and putting it back together had yielded some stunning results.

  During the dismantling process, I had realized that two separate card tricks I did as part of the walk-around act could be combined, with very minor changes, into one trick which produces two effects—a climax, followed by an even bigger and more surprising climax. This new combination got a much larger, longer and heartier response than when it had been two separate tricks and it tickled me to do it again and again for the different groups as I shuffled my way around the reception area.

  I had also made some scripting changes when I finally admitted to myself the reactions I was getting on two effects were not what I had intended. The audience was way ahead of me on my Card to Wallet routine and a prediction effect with a color-changing card wasn’t coming off as a prediction effect, but instead appeared to the audience as just quick sleight of hand. But with some minor and not-so-minor changes to the set-up for each trick, I immediately started to get the right reaction to each illusion.

  Not all the tweaks I made produced immediate or obvious results, but enough new and good things came out of the exercise that I promised myself to begin the dismantling process on my stage act as soon as possible. I even eliminated a really tough sleight of hand move from one trick, when I had realized I was only doing the move to impress other magicians. It might have been my imagination, but it felt like I got a better response to that trick than I had in the past, because my focus had shifted from being a slick “move monkey” to actually focusing on entertaining the audience.

  I was working out how I might tell Harry of these small successes without admitting he had been right when they announced the featured entertainment was beginning and my audience began to stream out of the reception and into the show room. And somehow my high spirits chose that moment to exit as well, for the next seventy-five minutes were a special form of torture.

  It was time for Quinton Moon’s show to begin.

  I missed the beginning of the stage show because I spent a frustrating ten minutes struggling to extricate myself from a bunny, and not the Hugh Hefner variety.

  By the time I reached the back of the theater, sweaty and sore, the show was in full bloom.

  I so wanted to hate it. And him. But the bastard charmed me—and the entire audience—at every turn.

  When Megan and I had seen Quinton’s chamber magic show at the St. Paul Hotel, I had been impressed at how intimate and personal he made the experience for a crowd of about fifty. Confronted with an audience that must have topped off at around four hundred, I assumed he wouldn’t be able to replicate the feeling of a personal relationship with every member of the audience, but somehow he pulled it off. I don’t know what he had done during the first ten minutes I missed, but by the time I got there he had won them over completely.

  When I came in he was just beginning his version of Houdini’s famous illusion where he walked through a brick wall. With the help of several audience members and some discreet stagehands, an impressive and solid-looking wall had been assembled on stage. Quinton recited his patter—which, of course, didn’t sound like patter but instead sounded completely fresh and improvised—as the wall was completed, talking about how Harry Houdini had done this same illusion and done it so effectively that many people had come to believe he actually could do things like walk through walls.

  The words “walking through walls” clicked in my head and I got a sudden image of the cops as they struggled to remove the bulky projection room door, behind which lay a very dead Tyler James. I hadn’t considered this before, but the circumstances of his death did have the distinct feeling of a magic trick, where someone discovered a way to walk through a brick wall without the necessity of something as mundane as a working door. In the case of the trick Quinton was in the midst of performing, I knew how he was pulling it off. But the trick in the projection booth was still a mystery.

  Quinton completed his walk through the brick wall to a thunderous and well-deserved ovation, and moved effortlessly into the next routine. But in his hands, nothing felt like a routine.

  The show was a conversation which appeared to move spontaneously and randomly from topic to topic, the way real conversations do.

  I knew most of the tricks he
performed, but he gave each one a distinctive twist and made them all seem fresh and new. He even pulled out some old standards from every magician’s birthday party repertoire and somehow made them seem completely dazzling and inventive.

  Unlike some magicians, Quinton didn’t make his focus fooling the crowd, creating puzzles and daring the audience to solve them. Instead—and I know how hokey this sounds, believe me—he created wonder and amazement on stage, not challenging the audience to figure out how the trick was done, but rather sharing in the moments of magic as he created them.

  That’s not to say everything went perfectly. He took some calculated risks and on two occasions I could see a routine was on the edge of failing. But he appeared to have an “out” for any situation, and from the audience’s perspective every routine was flawless.

  I was reminded of what my friend Nathan had whispered to me during Quinton’s lecture at our store: “If I were a magician, I’d want to be Quinton Moon,” he’d said, not taking his eyes off the presentation.

  “But you are a magician,” I had whispered back, also keeping an eye on the lecture.

  “I mean, if I were a really good magician,” Nathan had said and I knew exactly how he felt.

  For the final illusion in his show, Quinton brought out the Zig Zag, which is a classic box trick. Some magicians hate box tricks, some love them. Box tricks come in all shapes and sizes and generally the effect is pretty straightforward: something goes into a box and is changed into something else. It might be a showgirl becoming a tiger or a showgirl turning into the magician or someone disappearing into a series of smaller and smaller boxes.

  I never did box tricks much myself because they’re a pain to haul around and assemble. Early on I’d learned to go with the tricks that are easy to transport, particularly if you’re doing your own transporting. I know magicians who can do a ninety-minute stage show with only the contents of a bag that fits under the seat on an airplane and that’s what I aspired to be.

  I’ve spent my life listening to magicians argue over the pros and cons of box tricks, and as I watched Quinton set up the premise for his Zig Zag routine, I was reminded of something Johnny Thomson (AKA The Great Tomsoni) had said on the subject. It was during a visit to The Magic Castle when I was probably fifteen: “When you are doing a box trick, you have to talk the box away.”

  That sentence had stuck with me for years and it wasn’t until this very moment I really understood what he meant, because I was watching Quinton do exactly that. Even though the box was there on stage, big as life, the way Quinton presented the trick, the box was just one small element of the overall effect.

  In the trick, someone—in this case, Megan—steps into a tight, vertical closet-like box. You can see the assistant’s face through a hole at the top of the box, her hand through a hole in the center of the box, and her foot through a hole at the bottom.

  The magician then shoves two wide, steel blades through the box, trisecting it into cubes, in essence dividing the assistant into three parts: the head, the torso, and the legs. Of course, all this happens behind the door to the box, but the blades look real enough and they appear to go all the way through the box, yet the assistant smiles the entire time.

  Then it gets really weird.

  The magician pushes on the center box, shoving it away from the top and the bottom boxes. With this move, the center box is now no longer under the top box or over the bottom box. It’s next to those boxes but no longer part of them. And all the while the assistant smiles and waves her hand through the hole and wiggles her toes, even though the center section of her body has been pushed about two feet to the left.

  Quinton talked the box away beautifully. In his version of the trick, it wasn’t really about the box at all. It was about all of us and our lives today and how we were living them, with Megan standing in as the surrogate for the audience. He talked about the pressures of life, the need to be all things to all people, and how many of us effortlessly move from one role to another throughout the day, in essence splitting ourselves into various pieces to meet the needs of the people we care about.

  This patter was made all the more engaging with Quinton’s where-the-heck-is-he-from accent and the intimate way in which he spoke to the audience. For her part, Megan didn’t have much to do, but she looked lovely with her smiling face peering through the small hole.

  I had a sudden pang looking at her onstage in this magician’s act. I understood I had never offered to put her in my act because she so adamantly didn’t want to know how any of the illusions were accomplished. And, in my defense, she had never asked to be in the act. Then why would her appearing in Quinton’s act hurt so much and feel like, well, a betrayal? If he had been a lesser magician would I be feeling the same conflicted feelings?

  Quinton got to the portion of the routine where he pushes the center box away from the top and the bottom boxes. I knew Megan was doing the lion’s share of the work, but to the audience it looked like Quinton was making a Herculean effort while Megan simply stood in the box and smiled.

  Quinton stepped away, revealing that a third of Megan was two feet to her left, her hand still waving in the center box, while she smiled and wiggled her toes in the other two boxes. In most acts, this would produce applause, polite or otherwise, but Quinton did such a masterful job of talking the box away, the audience leapt to their feet as one, with some people going so far as to cheer and whistle.

  The audience was still giving this standing ovation when I left the showroom. For all I know, they were still clapping by the time I got to the parking ramp.

  The parking ramps in downtown St. Paul exist at two ends of a spectrum. A handful are state-of-the-art complexes that are shiny and new and bright and colorful. The rest, however, are drab, low-ceiling, cramped affairs, many of which appear—impossibly—to have been designed and built before automobiles had been invented or even imagined.

  The addition of automated payment machines and subsequent elimination of booth attendants has increased the creepiness level by a factor of ten and I was feeling quite alone as I stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for my floor. The door began to slide closed and then suddenly jerked open, as someone must have hit the UP button on the wall outside.

  That someone stepped into the elevator and I gasped. It was an involuntary and, in retrospect, completely appropriate reaction.

  “I thought that might be you. Small world, isn’t it?”

  Sherry Lisbon reached past me to press her floor number. I stepped back to give her a wide berth, but she still seemed to be standing closer to me than entirely necessary. She was wearing a long, thick fur coat which looked anything but faux and she was made-up and coifed to the hilt. She turned to me and gave me a steady look, challenging me for a response.

  “Yes, it is,” I finally stammered. “Very small world.”

  “Were you working tonight?”

  “Yes, yes I was. A corporate gig,” I added, to fill the silence.

  “So where’s your bunny?” she asked, giving the elevator a cursory once-over.

  “I was doing strolling close-up magic,” I explained. “I left the bunny at home.”

  This was, of course, a flat-out lie, as I haven’t worked with a rabbit in years. In fact, I had banned all animals from my act after the tragic intersection between a fugitive dove and a badly placed ceiling fan. It was for a children’s birthday party and it was a performance for which I ultimately earned nothing but wisdom.

  The elevator, which felt like it was running at a painful half speed, finally dinged, signaling the arrival at my floor. I moved forward in anticipation of my imminent release, willing the elevator with my mind to stop and the doors to open.

  “Anyway,” I said, beginning the end of our conversation, “it was fun running into you...”

  The doors opened and just as I lurched toward my release, she placed what I ass
ume could only have been an icy hand on my shoulder.

  “Mr. Marks, do you mind walking me to my car?” she said quietly. “I find this parking ramp unsettling.”

  My immediate thought was that I was currently standing next to the most unsettling thing in a six-block radius, but chivalry won out and I reluctantly pressed the Close Door button.

  “Sure,” I said flatly. We rode in silence for what seemed like a long time, even though the light on the elevator panel indicated we were only traveling up one floor.

  Upon arriving on her level, she marched ahead of me, her heels click-clicking on the concrete as we made our way through the murky ramp. It was colder here than in the elevator, the frigid air blowing in through honeycombed openings which covered the exterior wall and provided a limited view of downtown St. Paul.

  “A paid gig, was it?” she asked over her shoulder, turning her head only the slightest degree back toward me.

  “Yes,” I said. “An insurance company, I believe. It might have been underwriters.”

  “Ah, well. I suppose they deserve entertainment as much as anyone.”

  “Yes, I suppose they do.”

  I don’t really know cars, but I could tell immediately which one was likely to be hers. There were plenty of different makes and models parked where we were headed, but the one that caught my eye was low to the ground and sleek. It was a deep, rich red and it looked powerful and a little dangerous. She hit the button on her key fob and the car winked at us, silently congratulating me on being so astute.

  “Let me ask you this,” Sherry Lisbon said as she reached the driver’s door. She turned and looked up at me. “This show you did tonight.”

  “Yes.”

  “Once you accept the job, is that it?”