Saving Houdini

by Michael Redhill

  “What about your Soap Bubble Vanish?”

  Blumenthal regarded the two of them with mild distaste. “My what?”

  “Oh, bully,” said Walter. “Hey, you don’t have a quarter, do you?”

  “The Soap Bubble Vanish,” continued Dash. “I heard it was a special trick you did. That you invented.”

  Walter flung his hand out. “Aw, cantcha see? This guy couldn’t get a rabbit out of a barn. He’s an amateur!”

  Blumenthal nodded sagely in the direction of Walter Gibson. “You want to know how to do a magic trick?”

  “He already taught me one,” Walt said dismissively. “He can make a whole quarter vanish right in front of your eyes!” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.”

  “I want to know,” said Dash. “That ring trick you were going to do—”

  “Before you were so rudely booed off the stage,” said Walt.

  “Ah, the ring,” said Blumenthal. “Let me see if I can find it.” He went back to his chair and rifled in his vest, then brought the ring over for inspection.

  Dash held it in his hand. Just a plain metal ring, tarnished from being handled, almost black. It was the circumference of a can of soup.

  “Now,” said Blumenthal, “how is a good magic trick done?” He took the ring back and held it out in the air between his thumb and forefinger. He moved a couple of steps away from them and gestured that they should remain still. “It is just a mixture of light, misdirection, tomfoolery, and mechanics.” He held the ring very still in the air, like he was balancing it on something. Then he let go of it and it stayed there, floating. “Oh, and technique,” said Blumenthal.

  “Howdja do that?” asked Walt.

  “With mirrors,” the magician answered. “Here, look.” He picked the ring out of the air and gestured them over to his mirror. There, he performed it again, and the ring hung in the air as well as in the reflection, just a foot away. He lit a candle. “Here now, get those lights,” he said to Dash.

  Dash turned out the lights and came back. Blumenthal held the candle behind the ring and it hung doubled in ghostly reflection.

  “This is how it’s done,” said Blumenthal. “The one in the mirror is the real one,” he said, and he shot his hand out toward the glass and snatched the reflected ring out of the mirror.

  Walter went white and ran out of the room.

  “You are the guy who invented the Soap Bubble Vanish.”

  “Sure, I am. And I invented horse-racing too.” He pshawed and went to flick the lights on again. “Your friend has a weak constitution?”

  “Please, Mr. Blumenthal. I came a long way to find you. The Soap Bubble Vanish is your trick. Maybe you … you just haven’t invented it yet.”

  “How would you know that? You a medium?”

  “A medium?”

  “A person that talks to ghosts.”

  “No. But, um, I do know some things.”

  “Like what?”

  Dash sighed. “Look. I was in a trick called the Soap Bubble Vanish, and it was a trick everyone said you invented. Something went wrong with it.”

  “It turned you into a terrible liar?”

  “No. It sent me back in time. Eighty-five years, to be exact.”

  The minimal warmth in Blumenthal’s eyes had faded. “Excellent. A comedian.” He threw a soiled towel into his suitcase.

  “Sir—”

  “Ah-ah-ahh!” said Blumenthal, his index finger raised in warning. “We are finished, thank you very much. Goodbye.” He stood and grabbed Wolfgang’s cage in his other hand. “Say hullo to Gluckman for me.”

  “Gluckman?”

  “Too late to play dumb. Herman Blumenthal wasn’t born yesterday, all right? So long, kid.”

  Dash protested, “Wait—”

  “SAYONARA!”

  Blumenthal grabbed the case with all his effects in it and left the room. Dash stood there a moment, despondent, then trudged back out into the hallway. Walt was waiting at the end of it, by the rear exit.

  “Thanks a lot,” Dash said to him.

  “That guy’s a warlock.”

  Dash put his head in his hands. “I need to get home, and ‘that guy’ is the person who’s supposed to do it! But I’m in Montreal tomorrow? Why?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Put on your thinking cap, Walt!”

  Walt said, “Mine is already on, okay? Gosh, you’re bossy!” And he exited through the door to the back alley.

  That night, Dashiel Woolf felt he was truly alone in the universe. Nobody knew what was happening to him. The dark outside the curtainless window had distressed him the night before; now it overpowered him. He was lost in time and space.

  He laid one of his dimes in the light and watched it gleaming, as if it were something alive to keep him company, and then he picked it up and began scraping his name in the brand new lacquer. He finished the D and stopped, unable to listen to the disturbing sound of the dime scraping against the floor of an empty house.

  Finally, he fell asleep under his jacket on the wooden floor, his face in the little patch of moonlight coming through the window. His dreams were full of urgent voices. Bodies rushed one way and the other. He saw faces he knew and the faces of strangers. The world of his dreams was so chaotic that when he finally awoke, he was still exhausted. A gloomy orange light filled his room. At least the night was over.

  He stood in the window and looked out toward the woods, and the sun was coming over them, setting the tops of the trees aglow. The red and yellow leaves were fierce in the light.

  He was hungry again. Fear and hunger were things he’d only ever imagined until now. He knew that people in other parts of the world suffered from them. Every year in their house, they’d make a decision—the three of them together—what two charities they would send money to. His parents would write a cheque and Dash would forgo his allowance for two weeks and contribute. It was a good feeling to know the money he’d spend on hockey cards and comic books would, for those two weeks, be helping someone somewhere else in the world.

  But now he needed help himself.

  He put his jacket on and went downstairs. He stepped out into the crisp dawn air and took it deep into his lungs. Fresh air made you feel so alive, no matter how screwy the universe got on you.

  Some of the men on the street were already getting into their cars to go to work, or walking out to Broadview with their leather briefcases hanging from their hands. There was a boy standing in a doorway across the street, waving goodbye to his father. Just a normal morning for them—

  “Yasas, Papa!” the boy called. He was maybe six years old.

  “Yasoo, Louie!” said the man as he got into his car.

  Louie!

  Same house too!

  At ninety or so, Louie would wear his pants up to his rib cage, but today he was a little boy in his pyjamas waving goodbye to his papa.

  Dash wanted to wait for the car to pull out and then go up to the little boy and say to him, I’m Dashiel! I’m Dashy!

  Walt came at eleven, on his way home for lunch. He had another apple and one boiled egg with him, which Dash ate ravenously. He almost bit into the egg with its shell still on.

  Walt watched him uneasily. “I was thinking last night.”

  “Yeah?”

  “That Blumenthal guy. He doesn’t know how to do this trick you need him to do.”

  “I know that.”

  “So maybe that’s why you and me have to go to Montreal. To get Houdini’s help.”

  Dash pushed himself off the bedroom floor and started walking around making silent gestures with his hands. “O. M. G.,” he said.

  “Homegee?”

  “Never mind—I mean, you’re right. We really gotta go.”

  “Yeah, but how?”

  Dash stopped against the far wall, facing the closet. “Are there planes yet?”

  “Yeah, there are planes, Dash. If you’re a rich man. You got a hundred dollars or something in the bank?”


  “We have to be there tonight.”

  “We’ll take a train,” said Walt.

  “Oh, you have trains too!”

  Walt just stared at him. “There have always been trains, skipper.”

  “Okay. Good.” His mind clanked into motion. He felt the weight of a tennis ball in the upturned palm of his hand. He tossed it: nothing but net. Walt was getting used to his strange behaviour and hardly batted an eyelash.

  “I think I know what we have to do,” Dash said. “Do you ever have sleepovers?”

  “Do you mean, have they been invented yet?”

  “Can you leave your parents a note that you’re, like, studying for a test and you’re staying at a friend’s house overnight? Like, give the name of a real person or something, someone who’ll cover for you.”

  “I think, like, that might, like, work, Dash. Like.”

  “Okay.”

  “I can’t get enough money for two train tickets.”

  “I think I can,” replied Dash.

  10

  They checked the newspaper at a stand up on Danforth Avenue. There was a train to Montreal, today, at 1 p.m. There wasn’t much time.

  Dash insisted that Walter accompany him to the house on Arundel. There was no way he was going to knock on the door by himself and get chopped up into someone’s stew.

  On Arundel, Dash stopped about twelve houses up. “Hey, I just realized something.”

  “You’re insane?”

  “No. There are houses here.”

  “Of course there are.”

  “But in my time, right here is a parking lot. You won’t believe this, but in the future there are going to be so many cars that leaving them somewhere when you’re not driving them is going to be tricky.”

  “And they rip up houses so they can park them?”

  “They rip ’em up to build roads too. And bigger buildings.”

  “They better not tear my house down.”

  “I don’t think they have, Walt. At least not yet.”

  They walked up the other side of the street and stood across from number 64. The curtains were still drawn behind the streaky windows.

  “You missed the party they wanted to throw you yesterday, and now you want to ask them for money?”

  “Well, they seem to know me,” Dash said. His stomach was aching with both hunger and worry. Maybe if the people in this house didn’t come to the door wearing goalie masks and holding chainsaws, he could ask if there were any of those snacks left over.

  They both took a deep breath and crossed the road. The front yard was overgrown with huge, dead weeds. Spikes and puffballs. “You knock,” said Walt.

  “Just stand right there,” Dash said, indicating a spot on the porch one inch away from him.

  He knocked.

  Nothing.

  He looked at Walt for moral support, but Walt only shrugged. Dash counted to five and then knocked a little harder.

  He stepped back. He could hear someone inside coming down the stairs, then crossing the hall toward the door. The boards beneath him announced the approach of some substantial person. He felt frightened again. The window in the door shook and stirred the light.

  Then it went dark. There was a face there, filling the glass pane: a big, white, round face with a long, bushy moustache and two very small black eyes. The eyes blinked at him. Dash stood frozen for a second. Then he fumbled in his suit-jacket pocket for the envelope.

  “Hold on, hold on,” he said. He took out the card with the typed message on it and held it up to the window.

  The man unlocked the door and opened it. He’d been bending over to look out the window; now he straightened to his full height. He was a giant in a long grey sleeping shirt. It went almost all the way to his feet. Dash’s mother had something like it in pink.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Koyziti?”

  “Sorry?”

  “No,” said the man, and began to shut the door.

  “Wait!” said Dash, holding his palm out to keep the door open a crack. “Does anyone else live here? Please?”

  The man studied Dash’s black suit. His eyes narrowed. “Zosto shtey oblecheni kako schto?” At least that’s what it sounded like.

  “Please …” Dash said. “S’il vous plaît?”

  “Francuski?”

  “No, English.” There was an open door on a landing one flight up. Light was falling into the hallway there. “Does anyone up there speak English?”

  A young boy of about eight came and stood on the landing. “Papa?”

  “Pomonkney ova momchee,” said the man, and the boy came down the stairs slowly, taking Dash in with a worried look.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Hello,” said Dash. “Someone told me to come here.”

  “Who tells you?”

  “They gave me a card with this address on it.” He showed the card again. The father watched the two boys talking and eyed Walt out on the porch. Walt saluted. The man asked his son something.

  “Are you American?” asked the boy.

  “No. I’m from here … from Toronto. Who lives in this house?”

  “My father and me live in one of the rooms. There is two families same floor and another family in basement. A man live by himself back there—” He pointed down the hall that stretched beyond the stairs on the main floor. “This room, no one live.” Now he indicated the door to his left. “You want room?”

  “No. I thought someone here was expecting me. Do you know all the people in the house?”

  The boy spoke to his father. “My father say families are both Macedonia, like us, and the man who live alone is from Irishland.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “No,” said the boy. “He does work. Come home late at night.”

  “Where does he work?”

  “Bricks,” said the boy. “He make bricks.”

  Dash looked down at the card in his hand. There was no name, no instructions. No explanation at all. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Go home.”

  Dash stepped back out onto the porch. The father watched them carefully as he closed the door on them.

  “I guess you missed the party,” said Walt.

  “Something is wrong. Who gave me this?”

  “Well, if you’d gone when you were invited, maybe you’d know by now. Meantime it’s almost noon. If we’re not going to Montreal, I have to go back to school.”

  “No … wait,” said Dash. “I have another idea.”

  It was one of those plans hatched in desperation and destined to fail. Dash was going to convince Herman Blumenthal that the Soap Bubble Vanish was real, and that he and Walt knew how to get it invented. But it was going to take a real master to bring it into existence. Houdini.

  Once he explained that, how could Herman Blumenthal pass up the opportunity? To work with Harry Houdini? Blumenthal would buy them a couple of train tickets for sure. Maybe he’d even come with them! Once he saw the Gazette, he’d know Dash was telling the truth.

  But first, they had to find Blumenthal, and that entailed locating a hotel with a phone “register” (as Walter had called it) that would show the magician’s address. Addresses were in the register even if the people listed didn’t have phones. The concept of phonelessness bewildered Dash. How did people ever get in touch with each other? If someone you knew didn’t have a phone, did you have to walk over to their house to make plans? Did you have to write them a letter?

  Walt had told him that at the top of the woods and across the park there was a series of streets with small houses. It was a neighbourhood of working people’s houses, little red-and-yellow-brick dwellings with vegetable patches on the lawns. “Not a lot of money up there. You might stick out even worse than you did in my part of town. But there’s a hotel on a street called Carlton up there. It’s called the Queen’s Arms. They might have a register.”

  They decided on Dash’s outfit. He was going
to wear one of Walt’s shirts. His pants were fine. All of Walt’s shirts took cufflinks, so Dash just used his hockey-stick cufflinks. He wore his suit jacket with the cloth cap Walt had given him the night before. While Dash was trying to find Blumenthal, Walter was going to go home and collect a few more items of food and clothing and leave a note for his parents, before making his way down to Union Station. He was going to be in a world of trouble, but he’d made up his mind.

  They parted ways and Dash hoofed it up the steep hill leading to town. Then he headed into the warren of streets that led toward the main streets, one of which was supposed to be Carlton.

  The side streets finally gave onto a broad, paved expanse of road down which streetcars progressed in a swaying, uncertain fashion. Then, just down a jot, he saw Carlton and made his way there.

  The Queen’s Arms Hotel was on the south side. A heavy glass lantern hung over the porch. He went through the door into the foyer, a cramped space with a wooden desk sticking halfway into it. A man was reading a newspaper in a comfy chair, and the man behind the counter let Dash use his register. After a few moments of riffling the pages, Dash found H. Blumenthal.

  “Where’s Augusta Avenue?”

  “That’s in the market,” said the man over in the chair. Dash turned to see he’d removed the pipe he’d had clamped between his teeth. “You just take the Carlton tram over past Spadina. It’s the first left after that.”

  “Left past Spadina?”

  “That’s it. Be careful. Not a nice part of town.”

  “Pickpockets and werewolves,” said the counterman.

  “I’ll be careful,” said Dash, pushing the directory back across the desk. Spadina. How long a walk was that? He hurried out the door. It couldn’t be that far.

  Twenty minutes later, he was goggling at the sight of a dozen houses standing where Maple Leaf Gardens was supposed to be. He didn’t have time to think it over; he carried on. He was panting for breath and he wasn’t halfway there.

  It was already ten to noon. They had to make a train at 1 p.m. to get to Montreal in time for Houdini’s talk. It was getting cold again. He crossed Yonge Street, looking south for a moment. He could see the Pantages sign hanging over the street, a little white droplet stuck to the side of a building.