by P. B. Kerr
Dybbuk always laughed when he heard kids at his school use that word, “grounded,” as if it meant something. Unlike them of course, he really was grounded. He could always have caught a bus to Vegas, but Dybbuk was much too lazy ever to do something like that. He hated buses. Was even a little frightened of them, and of the smelly, aggressive people who were often on them. Then there was the claustrophobia he felt on a bus. This is normal for any djinn, who hate all enclosed spaces except their own lamps.
So Dybbuk stayed home and hatched a plan that would get him to Vegas legitimately.
There were times when Dybbuk could play his mother like a guitar. He knew just how to pick her up, tune her a little, and then strum the strings to hear the tune he wanted. He knew exactly what to do to make her say the sort of thing she always said. So he walked around the house with a face like thunder, saying nothing very much and staring into space. Meanwhile, she baked him his favorite kind of curried cake, let him watch unsuitable DVDs, gave him his allowance, and she even gave him a new PlayStation game. But still he kept on with the face. And finally, she cracked. She snatched a bowl of cereal out of his fingers that he’d chosen to eat instead of her cake, and hurled it against the kitchen wall.
“Dybbuk,” she yelled. Only when she was really angry did she call him by his given name instead of calling him Buck, which was the name he preferred. “You’re trying my patience. I bake you a cake. I get you a game. And still you walk around looking like a long streak of misery. Isn’t there anything that would cheer you up?”
Now I’ve got her.
“Isn’t there anything I can do that’s going to put a smile on your gloomy face?”
He nodded. “Sure,” he said. “I want to go to Las Vegas.”
Jenny Sachertorte’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Vegas? What do you want to go there for? You’re too young to gamble and too old for the Chocolate Factory tour. Besides, no good djinn ever goes to Vegas without a good deal of caution. You know the place is run by the Ifrit.”
“Forget it,” he groaned like a bassoon, and rolled his eyes in his head.
“No, no, no,” she said. “If it might make you happy, we’ll go to Vegas. Just tell me why you want to go. Is it the lights?”
“I hate the lights,” said Dybbuk. “They look so dumb and tacky.”
“What then?”
“I want to see Adam Apollonius.”
Adam Apollonius was the most famous illusionist and magician in America. He was also the author of several self-promoting publicity stunts, such as his famous straitjacketed skydiving escape, and his blindfolded climb up the exterior of the Sears Tower in Chicago. Dybbuk had a poster of him on his bedroom wall.
“I don’t understand the fascination,” said his mother. “You know it’s all just an illusion. Any djinn can do that magic stuff for real. So what is it with this guy?”
“I dunno.” Dybbuk yawned. “I guess it’s just that he makes it look cooler than we do. Besides, I like the fact that it’s an illusion. Like you say, we can do it for real. I guess that makes it seem kind of ordinary. And he makes a show out of it, doesn’t keep it all a weird secret the way we do.”
“You know why we keep it a secret,” said Jenny Sachertorte. “It’s to protect ourselves.”
Dybbuk’s yawn grew larger. “Yeah, I know.” He shrugged. “Look, you asked what might make me happy. I told you. But it’s no big deal. Forget about it, okay?”
“No, we’ll go,” she agreed. “It might be fun at that.”
Dybbuk congratulated himself on the success of his plan.
I can hardly be in Las Vegas without my father knowing about it. He’s bound to seek me out. Surely. And it’s not like I want him to do anything. All I want to do is talk to the guy. To hang out with him for a few hours.
He smiled.
“There, that’s better,” said Dybbuk’s mother. “I just want what’s going to make you happy, honey.”
Iblis had always expected his youngest son to show up in Las Vegas at some time or other. Indeed, for many years he had been counting on it, although perhaps not quite as soon as this. And it was just good luck for Iblis — which of course is bad luck for the rest of us — that Dybbuk and his mother should have shown up in the gambling capital of the world just a few hours after Iblis had been mauled by a pair of black djinn tigers. Mauled severely enough to necessitate abandoning his previous body and seeking out a new one. He had been going about this tedious process when he felt himself suddenly touched by his son’s presence — the minute Dybbuk got off the plane at McCarran International Airport and stepped onto the desert tarmac. This was also a bit of good luck for Iblis. In his physical human shape, he might never have felt the boy’s presence at all. A physical shape makes a djinn less sensitive to cosmic vibrations. But in his temporary existence as pure spirit it was much easier for him to detect his son’s arrival in Las Vegas — something Jenny Sachertorte could never have supposed.
Moving at the speed of light, Iblis flew through the dry Nevada air like an invisible missile locked onto its unwitting target. He found the boy and his mother at the baggage carousel, recognizing Jenny Sachertorte immediately in her scarlet, rhinestone pantsuit. The boy was tall, good-looking, and obviously charismatic. Just like his father, Iblis told himself conceitedly. And it took only a matter of a few brief seconds for him to occupy Dybbuk’s mind and discover the secrets of his young heart. With an ethereal, occult smile, Iblis realized that an ingenious plan he had been waiting for almost thirteen years to act upon was now ready to put into immediate effect.
As quickly as he had taken possession of Dybbuk’s body, Iblis was gone again, before Jenny Sachertorte — or, indeed, Dybbuk himself — was really aware that the spirit shape of the evil djinn had even been near them.
“What’s the matter?” she asked Dybbuk. “You looked blank for a moment.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. I asked you to grab that suitcase and it was like you hadn’t heard me.”
“I didn’t hear you. My ears. I’m still recovering from being in that plane. I hate planes almost as much as I hate buses.”
“It’ll pass. Take another claustrophobia pill.”
“I still don’t know why we took a plane at all, instead of traveling by whirlwind.”
“We’re here, aren’t we? Stop complaining. Besides, I don’t want us drawing attention to ourselves by using djinn power. You hear me, Buck? This town is full of Ifrit and if they sense us using djinn power we might find ourselves in trouble. Okay?”
“Okay, okay.”
They took a taxi to the Winter Palace Hotel and checked into a two-bedroom, rooftop suite with a spectacular view of Las Vegas. After dinner, they went to Adam Apollonius’s show, where they had the best seats in the house. Apollonius himself was a tall, thin man with a little goatee, an earring, and a lot of tattoos. Jenny Sachertorte thought he looked and sounded like an English soccer star.
The show was in two halves. In the first half, Apollonius made a variety of bears — polar bears and grizzly bears — appear and disappear from different parts of the auditorium. He also turned himself into a real silverback gorilla and then back again before having himself beheaded by a man wielding a giant ax who proceeded to walk around the stage carrying the magician’s still-talking head. (For those who disliked Adam Apollonius, this was usually the best bit in the show.)
Dr. Sachertorte tried not to look bored, but of course she was. By contrast, Dybbuk looked like he was entranced. In the intermission they got some drinks, and she asked if Dybbuk minded her not coming back for the second half.
“I don’t mind,” said Dybbuk.
In the second half, Apollonius made an elephant disappear from the stage, which, even to Dybbuk’s djinn eyes, looked pretty impressive. Then Apollonius said he wanted a volunteer from the audience to help him with his signature magic trick: the Magic Bullet Catch. He selected Dybbuk to come up onstage. And Dybbuk was, of course, delighted. He loved guns almost as much a
s he liked magic.
The Bullet Catch, in which a marked bullet is fired at the magician who catches it in his teeth, is the most dangerous trick in magic and has taken the lives of more than a dozen performers. Apollonius, who did nothing by halves, invited Dybbuk to fire a rifle at his head. Before Dybbuk could decide exactly how Apollonius was going to work the trick, the magician had ordered a loud drumroll from the orchestra, and invited his volunteer assistant to pull the trigger.
A split second later, the magician shouted at Dybbuk to stop. Too late. The gun fired and Adam Apollonius, who must have thought he had been shot, cried aloud and then rolled on the floor. The audience stood up as one. There were shouts and screams. Someone rushed onto the stage. Horrified, Dybbuk threw down the gun and ran forward to the apparently stricken magician.
A moment later, Apollonius jumped up again, grinning triumphantly, with a rifle bullet clearly visible between his teeth. He handed the bullet to Dybbuk, who verified that it was indeed the very same one marked by him earlier, and then bowed to the huge applause that shook the whole auditorium. Taking hold of Dybbuk’s hand, Apollonius invited the excited young djinn first to take a bow himself, and then to join him backstage.
Dybbuk was beside himself with pleasure and delight at meeting with his hero.
“For a minute back there, I thought I’d actually shot you,” confessed Dybbuk when they were alone in the magician’s dressing room.
“All part of the act, old boy,” said Apollonius. “The idea that there’s been some kind of accident gets the audience excited. They love the idea that I might have been killed.”
“Just like the great Houdini, huh?”
“You know about magic, kid?”
“Houdini was the greatest,” said Dybbuk. “But you’re pretty good.”
Apollonius tried to look modest, and failed. “What about you, kid? Do you do any magic yourself?”
“Sure.”
Infected with the bright lights of Las Vegas and the excitement of a lavish stage show, Dybbuk wanted to impress his glamorous host and, despite the warning his mother had given him about using djinn power, he decided to show Apollonius something the magician would probably think was just a bit of close-up magic instead of the real thing. Dybbuk extended his arm, pulled up his sleeve the way real magicians did on TV, and showed Apollonius his open palm and then the back of his hand. Dybbuk whispered his focus word. And when he showed Apollonius his palm again there was a chocolate bar in his hand.
“Pretty good,” said Apollonius.
“May I borrow your handkerchief, sir?” Dybbuk asked politely.
Apollonius tugged his handkerchief out of his breast pocket and, as requested, covered the chocolate bar in Dybbuk’s hand. Dybbuk whispered his focus word again and then lifted the handkerchief away to reveal the chocolate bar had disappeared. Apollonius started to applaud.
“How old are you, sonny?” he asked.
“Nearly thirteen, sir.”
“That’s the best close-up illusion I think I’ve ever seen,” said the man. “And believe me, I’ve seen the best. Show me another.”
“Let me see here,” mumbled Dybbuk, and thought for a moment. “How about a little levitation?”
He’d seen street magicians on TV levitating a few inches off the ground. It was a trick done with a couple of powerful magnets in the heels of their shoes; you just slipped one shoe off, let it stick to the other, and then lifted one foot in the air. Usually the magicians cheated a little with the TV camera so that you only saw one side of the magician’s body. But somehow it always looked impressive.
Maybe if he could make a very small whirlwind underneath his feet he could lift himself that way. He’d never really tried it before but, to his surprise, it worked. What was more, it looked a lot more convincing than anything ever seen on TV; Dybbuk rose all of twelve inches into the air, hovering there for several seconds before slowly coming down to earth again.
“Amazing,” said Apollonius. “I’ve never seen anyone do a levitation trick that’s as good as that. How do you do it?”
Dybbuk shrugged modestly. “Practice,” he said.
“Thirteen years old and you’re doing close-up tricks that take years to perfect. Years.” He shook his head in genuine awe. “What’s your best trick? The climax of your act.”
“The Indian Rope Trick.”
“Did you bring the rope?”
“It’s in the auditorium,” said Dybbuk. “I left it there, under my seat.” Even as he spoke he was putting a long length of thick rope under his seat, with djinn power.
“You came prepared, didn’t you?”
They went back onstage, in front of the now empty auditorium. Dybbuk got the rope and then laid it in a careful coil on the stage, like a sleeping python. Then, at the very moment when Apollonius was examining the rope, Dybbuk conjured a flute from the air.
“How’d you do that?” asked Apollonius.
“Practice.”
Dybbuk sat down and started to play and slowly the rope began to rise. Apollonius watched, apparently amazed as the rope straightened and rose up into the lights above the stage. “Is there some kind of wire in the rope, is that it?”
Dybbuk put down the flute and went up the rope like a monkey, and when he was near the top, he began to transubstantiate, which looked like smoke covering his disappearance.
“Where are you?” called Apollonius. “Where did you go?”
Dybbuk let the rope drop back down to the stage and while Apollonius was busy examining that, he transported the smoke carrying all of his atoms to the back of the auditorium, where he reassembled himself and then called out to the famous magician.
“Here I am.”
Dybbuk walked back to the stage, where Apollonius was still shaking his head.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. In all my years of magic. I mean, you make the Indian Rope Trick look like the real thing.”
Dybbuk grinned. He was enjoying himself.
“You’ve got it all, kid,” said Apollonius. “You’re young, good-looking, you’ve got more talent than I’ve ever seen. How would you like your own TV show?”
“I don’t think so,” said Dybbuk, conscious now that, perhaps, he had gone a little too far.
Apollonius laughed. “What do you mean, you don’t think so? You’re a natural. A star. And I can make it happen. Believe me, in a few weeks you could be the most famous face in America. I can make you more famous than fame itself.”
Dybbuk was still shaking his head. His mother was going to kill him.
Apollonius thought Dybbuk was still being modest. “No kidding. I’m serious. You’re what magic has been crying out for. A magician who’s as big as any pop star. Maybe bigger. We’re going to make a fortune. And the girls are going to love you, Buck. The girls are going to worship you, my boy.”
That got Dybbuk’s attention. “Girls?”
“Sure, girls. Lots of girls. You like girls?”
“Oh sure, but …” The “but” was on account of the fact that Dybbuk was a little shy of girls. With girls it was so easy to get things wrong. There had been a girl named Lisa of whom he’d been very fond. She’d made a wish and because Dybbuk had dearly wanted her wish to come true for her, he’d made it happen. He wished he hadn’t. But he had. Lisa had wished that Teddy Grosvenor, who was a boy at their school in Palm Springs, “would just disappear.” And Dybbuk had learned the hard truth of what Mr. Rakshasas was always saying: “A wish is a dish that’s a lot like a fish — once it’s been eaten it’s harder to throw back.”
“Girls,” said Apollonius. “You’d better get used to the idea of hundreds of them screaming outside your hotel and camped in front of the gates of your Hollywood home. Sending you their pictures and locks of their hair. Greeting your arrival at airports all over the country. Fainting with excitement when you autograph their hands. Crying because you said hello to them.”
“Hundreds?”
“Thousands.”
&nb
sp; Dybbuk nodded. All thoughts of meeting his father were now gone from his mind. He knew who he wanted to meet. He wanted to meet girls. Thousands of them.
Halfway across America, Nimrod called Jenny Sachertorte on a cell phone from inside his whirlwind.
“Nimrod,” she said. “I was just going to bed. What’s happening? Has Marion Morrison shown up yet?”
“Yes, yes, dear lady, everything’s fine on that score,” said Nimrod. “How’s Dybbuk?”
“Oh, he’s fine, I think.”
“John and I are on our way to Palm Springs to see him on a mission of mercy,” said Nimrod.
“Well, we’re not there. We’re in Las Vegas. At the Winter Palace. For a weekend break. Dybbuk wanted to see a show. I think it’s really cheered him up.” Her tone hardened a little. “Is he in trouble again? What kind of mission of mercy?”
“Light my lamp, no. Nothing like that. Perhaps I’d better tell you when I see you both.” He looked at his watch. “Shall we say at breakfast? Tomorrow morning? In your hotel?”
A few hours’ flying time brought them within sight of Las Vegas. In the Nevada night it looked like some huge and exotic species of electric jellyfish floating in a jet-black sea. Nimrod landed them in the huge parking lot of the Marriott Winter Palace — a luxury hotel that was the image of the famous royal palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. They checked in and went straight to bed, tired and a little windswept after their long flight.
In the morning, they went down to breakfast in the Pompeii Room and found Dybbuk and Jenny Sachertorte sitting quietly and staring down at their cereal. It was plain from their faces that they had argued about something.
“Hey, Buck,” John said brightly, and tapped him on the shoulder with his fist playfully. “How are you doing, buddy?”