by Ivy Pochoda
While the rest of the Intersectioners furrowed their brows at the unfamiliar and all-too-real magic, I glanced over at Greta. What was she seeing in all of this? Not bizarre transformations that confused her friends. Not the red, oily tinsel that made the more religious members of the audience believe they were witnessing the devil’s work. What Greta saw was frustration in Toby’s magic. “Who cares,” she whispered to Jimmy, “if a banner becomes a cactus?”
“I dunno,” Jimmy replied. “It’s just a show.”
“Yeah, well, I thought it was going to be real,” Greta snapped. “You know, dangerous.”
Next Toby wheeled a bank of lockers onto the stage. He fiddled with the combination locks until they all opened at once. Inside each locker was a pet belonging to one of the audience members. Now the audience was engaged, certain that none of their family members would have lent a dog or cat to the traveling magician. Toby closed the lockers, and when he reopened them once more, the animals had vanished. Then a bark sounded from the back of the auditorium, and Billy Redtail McCallister’s dog—a rusty animal that traced its roots back to the coyote—appeared from behind a dusty curtain, followed by the other animals.
Greta snorted. Best Friend Number One rolled her eyes and asked Best Friend Number Two “what Greta’s deal is.”
Her deal was this: “I thought he was going to do it for real.”
“There is no real, stupid. It’s a magic show,” Best Friend Number Two advised.
But Greta wasn’t listening. “Imagine if you could vanish for good. Now, that would be something,” she said to Jimmy. “Hey!” Greta called loudly from the audience. “Why don’t you make it disappear for real?”
Toby shook his head and smiled. Greta’s friends squirmed as she opened her mouth again.
“I thought you were going to do something good. Like cut someone in half.”
Toby didn’t lose his cool. He just slid into his next illusion.
“You should cut someone in half,” Greta managed before Jimmy silenced her.
“You’d love that,” Best Friend Number One said.
“Only if it were real,” Greta said.
The show finished. The audience filed out of the theater more baffled than entertained. I hovered in the wings, still warmed by the inexplicable thrill of the performance. Finally Toby emerged.
I rushed over to him and clasped my hands around his wrists. “That was incredible. The mesas. The coins and the napkin. It’s like you made it up on the spot.”
Toby winked. He leaned toward me, but I shied away. The magician cleared his throat. “Sometimes the audience gets it, sometimes they don’t. I’d say tonight was fifty-fifty.” I let go of his arms. “But you know what, it doesn’t matter. By next year, they’ll have forgotten what they didn’t like. And I’ll be up there again with a completely different show.” Toby looped his arm around my shoulder.
I allowed my head to rest against his arm as I watched the crowd disperse, wondering if the magician had forgotten his last assistant as easily as this audience would forget him.
Outside, Greta and her friends were loitering around their cars, smoking, flirting, cursing.
“Hey,” Greta called, “I thought you said you were gonna do something cool.”
“I thought it was cool,” one of her friends said.
“Yeah, like with everyone’s pet. That was cool,” Jimmy offered.
“It wasn’t,” Greta said. “Nothing happened. Everything’s the same as it was before.”
“I don’t know, Greta,” Best Friend Number Two said. “Most of the show was, like, kinda too real.”
Greta shrugged and turned her back. “Good luck in Vegas,” she muttered.
We got in the car and drove out of Intersection. A few miles down the highway, we stopped for gas. I fiddled with the glove box, searching for a piece of fabric from Toby’s show that I could join to my quilt. Finding none, I wandered into the small convenience store and waited for him to pay. Just inside the door was a solitary slot machine. I reached into my bag and found the pouch filled with quarters. I wriggled one out and fed it to the slot. I pulled the handle. The wheels whirred. Music clattered out of the machine. I looked over at Toby as he tucked his receipt into his pocket. Then money began to fall. It slipped out of the machine, tumbling down onto my shoes: $325.
“Well,” the attendant said. “Well, well, well. She ain’t paid out in a while.”
I shook my head in astonishment.
“Three hundred and twenty-five’s the max,” he continued. “That outta do you just fine.”
“For what?” Toby asked.
“For a Vegas wedding. That’s where you’re heading, ain’t it? Same machine paid for me and my wife.”
I married Tobias Warring in the Silver Bells All-Nite Wedding Chapel on the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. But you already know that. It was our way to end the pro cession of lonely roads and empty hotel rooms. For Toby, it was a way to conjure something permanent into his too-malleable world and perhaps, I wondered, to replace someone he’d made vanish. For me, maybe it was a way to fill the hole torn by my brother’s defection—but that was a story I had yet to tell my husband. That night we shared a bed in the Laughing Jackalope Motel at the bottom of the Strip. The room had a vibrating bed, a quarter for fifteen minutes. I used three dollars of change to rock us to sleep. And we slept wound around each other, shaking like giant rubber teardrops.
Two
When I go to sleep after too many drinks, the evening’s events replay themselves throughout my dreams in a narrowing spiral of convoluted and hyperbolic detail. And in the morning, when I enter an uncertain wakefulness, I am unable to distinguish between the mutations of the dream and real-time happenings. When the Las Vegas sun pushed through the fading and fraying trim of our curtains, I woke midgasp, head quivering three inches above the pillow, and realized that in the hysteria of yesterday, I had forgotten to panic.
My eyes focused on the brown-and-ocher decor of a motel past its expiration date. The furniture was scattered across the room, none of it flush to the walls, as if it were ready to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. And for an instant, I felt like I might follow. I let my gaze descend from the ceiling to the bed next to me, until it came to rest on the figure of the sleeping magician, his black hair spread out over his pillow like an ink stain. Toby slept with his fingers curled tightly around the edge of the sheet. I inched away from him, unsure of what we would say to one another if he woke up. He sighed, and his lips smoothed into a smile. His sleep-breath deepened as he fell further away from me into his dreams. Then my heart crawled into my throat—inspired by Toby’s too-calm sleep—forecasting the moment of panic that was just around the corner. I had married the magician. So I slipped out of bed and went to buy our wedding presents.
By ten, the temperature was already pushing ninety. The steam heat rippling off the road reached eye level and made crossing the street like going through a viscous-looking glass. Las Vegas isn’t a town well suited to ambling. It isn’t a town well suited to a pre-noon existence. At night, people are lured from the streets by a kaleidoscope of hypnotizing neon—and in the morning, the shops sleep as late as their customers. As I watched the ragtag remains of a bachelor party move toward me—a handful of men in disheveled sports jackets and ties struggling to walk in a straight line and negotiate the services of several hookers on the breakfast run—I came across what promised to be THE WORLD’S LARGEST GIFT SHOP: OVER 10,000 SOUVENIRS.”
Just outside the front door was a battered pay phone. I checked my watch. My parents would probably be home. I traced my fingers over the scratched receiver, remembering the river behind my childhood home. I used to count the days until it was cold enough for the water to freeze, allowing me to play on the river without having to swim. I remembered the sharp smell of the winter air, the sting of gusting snow, and the burn when my skin touched the ice. I remembered my parents supervising my uncoordinated skating sessions. I closed my eyes,
recalling the uneven surface of the ice that tossed me from my skates and the low moans from deep within the frozen river as it expanded and moved.
This was the season, the slow march of early fall into winter, when I longed for time to accelerate, for the temperature to drop, and the water to freeze. I suddenly yearned for the unmanicured lawn of my parents’ backyard. I wanted my parents to tell me how wild they’d let the grass grow this year and how often the river had flooded the past spring. I wanted to know if they ever used the sinking picnic table. And I wanted to tell them about Toby. I wanted to be told that if this didn’t work out, I could come home.
I pressed my finger onto the phone’s chrome surface and watched my fingerprint cloud the greasy metal. It would be early afternoon. Midautumn. The phone rang. I wondered about how quiet the house had become with me and my brother gone. The fall river would be the only sound. I wondered if my parents avoided our rooms, or if they’d changed them into studies, guest rooms, or let them be as they’d always promised. The phone kept ringing. I imagined it echoing through the house, out the screen door that led to the porch. I imagined it being absorbed by the water-damaged curtains in our living room.
I didn’t think about what I would say if someone answered. I wasn’t sure how I’d explain my last three weeks. I was certain only that I’d tell them I’d be home as soon as it got cold. I would promise to stay through the winter. I would sleep in my old bedroom and be startled when the snow slid off the eaves. And I would bring Toby with me.
The phone rang several more times. I could no longer picture the late-summer tempo of my home—the slow creak of the porch swing, the tired rattle of the struggling refrigerator. The lazy trickle of the August river. My parents weren’t there. I hung up and entered the store.
What do you buy for the man who could, with the slightest movement of his hand, have almost anything? I wandered through multilevel displays of shot glasses, snow domes, and ashtrays. The souvenirs pledged a solidity they couldn’t provide. I discovered that the decorative ceramic bells airbrushed with pictures of the famous casinos had no clappers, the frosted champagne glasses lost their misty finish under the moisture of my fingers, and the ashtrays were made of tin that a cigar would melt. The shimmer and pageantry of the shop—its reduction of the Vegas experience into playing card coasters and poker chip chocolates—reminded me of the wedding chapel where I had pledged my future to a magician the evening before. Then the panic hit—a blow to the solar plexus that sent me tumbling into a rack of acrylic T-shirts. As I fell, I panicked hard about the small things bouncing around in the big picture. Was I going to live in a tract house on the outskirts of Vegas and turn orangey brown? Could I find a decent sunscreen in this sun-worshipping town? Was our marriage going to crumble like a miniature plaster casino or be stashed away and forgotten like the clapperless bells? Or would it hang on for years like the famous Las Vegas sign? Did the magician conjure me to his side? If so, how long would the trick work?
Usually textiles sing to me. Poly blends sound like synthesizers, while cottons are more like a big band orchestra. In the cluttered souvenir shop, all the materials—the plastics, rubber, plaster, and metals—were chanting and shouting, flooding my head with a frenzied orchestra. I gasped for air. To my surprise, I discovered that I was at the counter paying for a pair of frosted champagne glasses painted with the logo of the MGM Grand.
“Rough night?” the elderly cashier asked. She was wearing a straw sun hat and sunglasses, as if, even in the store’s artificially cooled interior, she was under threat from UV rays. “You looked a little unsteady back there.”
I turned my head and saw the scattered T-shirt rack.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve seen worse,” she assured me. “This town takes its toll. You’ve got to be prepared.” She touched her hat and began to wrap the glasses in tissue paper. “You’ll want to be careful before you do something serious. There’s a whole lot of trouble out there, just waiting to be had.”
Trying to avoid eye contact, trying to hide the panicked light that I knew was flashing in my eyes, I counted out my money. “There you go,” I said to the display of posters behind the cashier’s head.
“Well, I see you’ve already found yourself a little problem. Doesn’t take long.”
“I’m okay,” I replied, reaching for the bag.
The cashier wouldn’t relinquish her grip. “Now, listen to me. I know the way things work around here. You look like a smart girl, but I can tell this heat’s doing you no good. Once you cool off, you’ll find a way out of whatever it is that you’ve gotten into.” She let go of the bag so quickly, I almost let it drop onto the counter.
“Thanks,” I said, hiding my dislike of advice from strangers. “But I’ll never get used to the heat.”
“Don’t like the heat?” The cashier chuckled as I turned to leave. “Of all things.”
Outside the store, I unwrapped the glasses and held them up to the bright sky. Their smoked glass diffused and distorted the harsh sun. I put them away before my hands began to sweat and destroy their finish. Then I walked back to the motel over the steaming asphalt. The last tremors of my panic were still making my arms shake and stinging my fingers. I looked at my watch. I had been gone for nearly an hour. That would have given the magician enough time to pack his things and slip out into the surrounding sand. I closed my eyes and listened to the lazy traffic inching up the Strip and the slow tick of the climbing heat. What did my magician’s voice sound like? I remembered something of its static, but nothing of its lilt. I remembered his gnarled hands with their square depressions, but could not picture the arms that connected them to his elbows or shoulders.
And the face I remembered was that of the performer—the one coated with a sheen of stage light and fairy dust. It was a completely incomplete picture, one from which the subject could easily disentangle himself and vanish before I snared him in my net of details. Perhaps what had attracted me to Toby the day before had been an illusion. Or perhaps my first impression would last forever. I paused at the door of the room and realized I did not know what to listen for, what rhythm of breathing or dreaming should be coming from behind the wall. And just before I turned the handle, I wondered if the magician was waiting, hoping for the girl he’d banished from his stage years ago to step through that door.
Inside the poorly air-conditioned room, Toby was sitting up in bed. As I closed the door, I thought I saw a glimmer of panic wash off his face. His shoulders relaxed. “You’re back,” he said.
I leaned against the door, twisting my fingers through the plastic bag, and watched as the magician continued to smile. His genuine pleasure seemed at odds with the artifice of his craft. With sleep creased on his face and his hair wild, the magician looked handsomer than I’d remembered. It caught me off guard how striking Toby was, how naturally his face lit up without stage lights or magic.
To my surprise, his thin body was muscular and smooth. I closed my eyes, trying to recall what it had felt like to hold him the night before. My mind went back to all my empty mornings in remote motel rooms, and I wished that I had stayed in bed. I looked again at the magician, and despite what he had told me, and despite the loneliness I’d seen hugging his shoulders, I wondered if I wasn’t part of his game.
“I thought you’d left. I didn’t even hear you get up.”
“I tried not to wake you.”
“I told you, I’m uneasy with people. And when I wake up, you’re gone.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought I’d sent you away.”
“But my stuff is still here,” I said, looking toward my suitcase.
“I guess that’s right.” Toby didn’t seem convinced.
“You don’t know me very well if you think I’d go anywhere and leave that behind.”
“I hardly know you at all.” With one elegant hand, he patted the bed next to him.
I wondered if it was an invitation to join him, and I hesitated. Before I stepped forwa
rd, Toby withdrew his hand from the pillow and gathered the sheet around him.
I turned my back and busied myself with my suitcase, glancing in the mirror as he got out of bed. It seemed strange that we had slept curled around each other, and now it was difficult to make eye contact and to form full sentences. The magician slipped into the bathroom. Soon I heard the clatter of water hitting the plastic shower cabin.
I began to dig through my suitcase for something better to wear. I had on yesterday’s clothes. They smelled of smoke from the Treasure Island, where we’d had our first drink as a couple. When I’d decided on a yellow sundress with bright red flowers, Toby emerged from the bathroom wrapped in a towel.
“Shower?” he asked.
I nodded. On my way to the bathroom, our bodies touched. “Sorry,” I said, trying to slip past him.
“Oh, sorry,” Toby echoed, moving to the bed.
I stood under the shower, letting the water run cold, then hot, then cold, as I prepared again for the heat of the day. I examined the ends of my hair, wondering how much lighter it would become under the Vegas sun. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d spent the night in a hotel room—or in any room—with a man. I couldn’t even clearly recall my last date. It was probably some bungled affair toward the end of art school. As I began to shave my legs, I wondered whether Toby and I had actually dispensed with the awkwardness of the dating process—negotiating each other’s likes and dislikes, the fear of revealing our true opinions.
I turned off the water and let myself drip dry. Then I stepped out of the shower and listened for sounds from the next room. I wrapped a towel around my head and leaned into the mirror. I parted my lips, hoping to think of something to say to the magician that would make him stand by our decision of the night before.
I put on my dress, pulled back my hair, and opened the bathroom door. Toby was sitting in one of the chairs with his legs crossed and one hand on the telephone. He was wearing all black again, a T-shirt instead of his Western shirt. He’d flung open the curtains, and the sun brought out the strange blue highlights in his skin.