by Ivy Pochoda
I took one of his hands in mine and massaged the deep crevices between his fingers. “They’re beautiful.”
“I didn’t want my classmates to see what I could do.” Toby laughed. “Then there was a year I barely used them at all. Right after I made my assistant disappear.”
I wrapped one of my hands over Toby’s to still its movement. I squeezed tight, bracing myself for his confession.
“It was an accident. A couple of years out of school, I shared a small circuit in the Four Corners area with a woeful magician, Jim Swenson. He called himself Swenson the Spectacular, but there was nothing remotely special about him. He could barely palm a dime.” Toby’s palm went cold inside my grip. “We had an assistant, Eva. Swenson wasn’t too happy when she and I got together. He was always jealous of my abilities, and his jealousy soon turned into mistrust.” Toby paused and exhaled. “I have never entirely understood how my magic works.” He looked at me, to see whether I was willing to follow him down a path paved with implausibility. He saw no resistance and continued. “When I was at school in California, I tried to mimic the style and methods of my classmates. But everything came too easily to me. I saw paths for conjuring where my peers saw blockades. When they needed to palm an object and substitute another, I could simply lose something into thin air and discover the necessary replacement in my hand.”
“How?” I asked.
“I’m not sure.” Toby closed his eyes. “The best explanation I can give is that, for me, the air contains hidden dimensions. It has pockets and caves. It’s like a maze waiting to be carved out of foam or sponge. I know this doesn’t make much sense. All I can say is that empty space is as big or as small as what you choose to fill it with. And many spaces prefer to exist out of plain sight.”
I nodded, although I didn’t quite understand.
“You see,” Toby said, returning to the middle of our suite, “there are endless patterns in the world that most people overlook. There are rhythms and pathways that are perfect for my magic. These unknown dimensions are what I find beautiful. They are untouched and unpolluted. They are mine. I consider them safe. By finding them, by paving and cultivating them, this is how I perform what you consider my tricks.” He took a deep breath. “Imagine the joy I felt the first time I carved my fingers through the air and discovered a place where I could transform one of my childhood blocks into a plant or an alcove where I could produce birds and rabbits to keep me company.” Now the magician smiled a smile that seemed to stretch back through time. Then he flopped back into the armchair. “Of course, I did my best to hide these methods from my classmates and later from Swenson. A year or so into our tour, Swenson started to suspect the extent of my abilities. He began whispering to Eva that I was dangerous. She ignored him.”
I let go of Toby’s hand and stood up and went to the minibar. I found a half bottle of white wine and poured two glasses. Toby took a sip and stared over the rim of the glass.
“It was supposed to be a simple trick: Here one minute, gone the next. I’d done it thousands of times before with statues, vases, flowers, even pets. I guess I never really thought about what would happen if I sent a person deep into the unseen labyrinth.” Toby spun his glass, transforming the wine from white to red. “Eva was a great assistant. She had this wild beauty that brought an element of danger and mystery even to Swenson’s magic.”
I sipped my wine, trying not to picture Toby’s beautiful girlfriend.
“I knew that Swenson and I were about to part ways. And I wanted to go out with a bang. That night was the first time that I didn’t hide my talent from him. The delight had been going out of my tricks. I hated masking the thrill I felt each time I uncovered a pathway or pocket of air along which I could move something. I was suffocating my art with artifice. You understand.”
“Yes,” I said. I sensed that hiding the true nature of his craft was like my plugging my ears to the textiles’ songs.
“I called the trick ‘Lady in the Lake.’ It was short illusion. It had to be. I constructed a large tank onstage filled with water. The tank was transparent on all sides. Eva was supposed to step off a platform and dive into it. Then she would disappear for a few moments. After a covering of lily pads appeared on the surface of the tank, she would burst through the water, carrying a flaming torch.” Toby took a sip of wine. “She never emerged.” He bit his lip. I watched as his teeth pressed deeper into his pale lips. Finally he continued. “I remember pushing my hands through the air. Then I knelt at the edge of the tank and combed the water. But I knew that it contained none of the compartments or pathways where I could search for her. I put my face into the water, but there was no point. The air, the water, the entire labyrinth had closed to me.”
Toby stopped speaking and leaned back against the chair. “There was no explanation—no evidence, even—of what I’d done. At that moment, I couldn’t say whether I’d killed her or misplaced her.” The magician shook his head. “Helpless and terrified do not touch the surface of what I felt.” He took a deep breath. “I gave up magic for a year. But for me, there’s never been anything else. Slowly I started up again. But never using people. Since then, I’ve been hiding on whatever small stage I can find.” Suddenly Toby stood up. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you this.”
“Why not?”
“You think I’m dangerous or careless.”
I shook my head. “Did you look for her?”
“I tried every body of water I came across and every stretch of desert. I checked every restaurant and theater. Then one day I stopped.” Toby stared straight into my eyes. “Do you think that’s terrible?”
“I stopped looking for my brother long ago,” I said. “I moved to the one place he’d never appear.”
That night I accompanied Toby to his Vegas debut at the Castaway, a small pirate-themed casino on Vegas’s other strip, the unglamorous Fremont Street. The Castaway was once the most successful casino in town. Founded by a Texas rancher with a two-man body count, it was the epitome of hard-nosed, no-frills gambling and offered the highest limits of any casino in town—provided you staked it all on your first bet. By refusing to provide entertainment or amenities beyond the all-night grill in the basement, the Castaway had not budged from its diet of cards, smoke, and liquor for nearly fifty years. But a new manager, a cardsharp from Atlantic City, had come up with the idea that if the gamblers were shown a few card tricks—if they were teased with the impossible—they might get ideas about their own abilities and bet large. So the manager cleared the wobbly roulette tables and armless bandits from the small theater that, since the casino’s construction, had been used only as a roughing-up spot, and he placed an ad for a magician.
Toby chattered nervously as we walked, explaining how he would stick to working with conventional objects like balls and glasses. He knew that his audience was looking for tricks not magic, and he didn’t want to draw attention to his unconventional talents.
Toby performed his first show for an audience of twelve who had mistimed the start of the Fremont Street Experience—a laser show that played out hourly over the domed roof of the Fremont Street esplanade. On a shoddy stage in the Castaway’s neglected theater, Toby began his display of close-up magic. He opened by producing coins from the air and transforming ties into yards of silk handkerchiefs. His patter was mechanical, as he matched his magic to the tricks the audience was expecting, switching balls underneath cups and slipping cards into his sleeves.
Toby worked slowly, giving the audience his best attempt at a straight-up magic show. He wanted to tease them, pretending to show the strings that supposedly held his tricks together. He stepped off the stage and took a seat in the third row, allowing the audience to examine the slow movements of his hands. With his feet up on the seat in front of him, he produced a languid sequence of small-scale conjurings that made the audience gasp with delight each time they almost saw his method. Like the light falling off a July Fourth sparkler before the waver has completed his midair circl
es, Toby left a nearly discernible trail behind his tricks. But no matter how slowly he worked and how closely they looked, the audience could not decipher his methods. Unlike other magicians they’d seen, there was no explanation for the mundane magic that flowed from Toby’s hands.
That night after the show, we drove out to the point where the fringe casinos of neighboring towns recede into the desert. Toby was silent, his hands as still as the sand around us. We bought coffee from a roadside stand called Jim’s Big West Donut and drank in silence by the side of the road. The darkened sky had done nothing to cool off the day. I sat on the ground and tried to bury my fingers in the sand, looking for an oasis that had escaped the burn of the sun. And when I failed and allowed the hot grains to crawl beneath my fingers, I began to assign a pattern to the nocturnal sands. I traced one ripple as far as I could before I realized that I must have lost the original strand miles back. I didn’t notice that Toby was gone until I saw his footprints disappearing around the back of the doughnut shop into the outstretched blackness. Fitting my small feet into the prints of Toby’s larger ones, I followed the path until I caught sight of his angular figure in the distance.
The magician stood a hundred yards out in the desert, a black stencil against the inky sky. He was back in his training ground, in the empty expanses where he’d tried to tame and understand a magic that was not based on illusion or trickery—the conjurings with their surprise endings. Toby lifted his head as I approached. “Those cups and balls might be good enough for a small theater, but you deserve better.”
His arms fluttered through the sky, rippling the solid darkness like a flip book. Then Toby grabbed the sand from around his feet, cast it into the air, and watched it rain down again. As they fell, the grains took the shape of wings extending from the magician’s body. The wings fluttered once before dissolving into the desert floor. Toby fanned his fingers wide against the sky and then snapped them shut. The sand rose up to meet him.
I was trembling. I knew he had a knack for producing saltshakers and seafood, but this was different. The whole desert seemed to be at my magician’s command. I wanted to draw closer, but did not want to disturb the dancing sand. Castles rose to my husband’s fingers. Then the sand took the form of enormous flowers. He made rivers flow and snowflakes fall. When his hands dropped to his sides and remained motionless, I ran toward Toby and wrapped my arms around him.
“That was astonishing,” I whispered, not wanting to disturb the magic in the desert air.
Toby’s hand slipped over my fingers, lingering for a second on my wedding band. When we returned to our suite, the turquoise stone had been replaced by one that captured the colors of the desert’s setting sun.
Three
I was born at home during a dramatic rise in temperature that transformed a blinding snowstorm into a flood. It was a freak occurrence, resulting in three days of heavy rain that ravaged our state. I know now that my brother, Max, was more pleased with the rapidly rising river than with his new sister. But it took me years to accept that he loved water more than he loved me.
Max was a water baby. Soon after he was born, my father decided that the best way to protect him from the river behind our house was to teach him to swim. On his first half birthday, my father took Max to the local pool. Holding him by the ankles, Achilles-like, my father eased my brother into the water. Max kicked free, dipped his face, and casually came up for air. My father applauded and promptly enrolled him in infant swim classes.
By the time he was three, Max was spending his evenings submerged in his bathwater, training himself to hold his breath for over a minute. By the time he was four, it was clear that Max preferred water to land. When no one was looking, he jumped into pools, fountains, even the ocean. At first my parents encouraged his swimming—driving him to pint-sized swim meets, timing while he held his breath underwater in the tub, taking him to the university to watch the Olympic trials. But when I was born, everything changed.
There had been no time to get to the hospital as the temperature began to rise, the barometer to fall, and the snow that had been predicted to last until the morning of my birthday gave way to torrential rain. So, with her Jiffy Pop belly about to burst, my mother rolled from the couch to the floor, and the water and I picked our moment to arrive. When I entered the world thirty hours ahead of schedule on our imitation oriental rug, my father swung me into the air, rescuing me from the floor that was already sagging under the weight of the creeping water.
My parents hadn’t considered that a house by a river might not be watertight. Ours was always ready to leak. Squirrels, termites, and carpenter ants had spent years snacking on the roof and the sills. Over time, the foundation had sunk into the river-dampened soil. If my parents had ventured into our shallow basement, they would have discovered an Alice in Wonderland–style Caucus-race among the chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, and mice who circled a permanent puddle on the floor.
While we were growing up, my brother would often whisper to me about the way the water had worked its way in from the corners of the house, surged around the moldings, and sneaked in behind the carpet runners on the day I was born. He told me how it had slipped over doorjambs and seeped into the cracks of our imperfectly sealed floors. It had advanced slowly, he said, carefully lapping the cream-colored tassels on the edge of the rug. Then, like an orderly phalanx, it had begun its attack on the orange-and-blue carpet. Wave after wave of water had marched forward, sinking deep into the synthetic fibers, and finding no resistance, it had stayed for the night. And despite the fact that even now, if I close my eyes and roll myself into a ball, I can remember the damp welcome that greeted me before I was whisked from the rug and held above the rising water, I was never seduced by Max’s stories.
Max watched my arrival from between the peeling rungs of the banister on the second-floor landing, waiting for a moment when he might be left alone. He got his chance when the doctor arrived and transferred me and my mother to a bedroom upstairs. Max dashed out to the garden, tilted his head toward the sky, and let the icy rain slip across his face. He skipped across the cold, swampy lawn down to the river that had overflowed its banks. But as he dipped a toe into the rushing water, my father arrived, grabbed him by the collar, and swept him back to the house.
My mother spent the next three days in bed, listening to the rain that hadn’t taken a break since I was born. The light drizzle that tickled the roof and windows in the early evening became a full-strength assault, drumming the house on all sides with a heavy metal beat. My parents didn’t hear the slate tiles stripped from the roof by the wind shatter on the driveway, leaving our house defenseless. It was Max who discovered the new leak—a playful drip that came in through the roof, descended into a crack in the attic floor, and charmed its way through the plaster of the third-floor ceiling, until it was able to fall, one droplet at a time, onto the hall carpeting. He stuck his head out into the hallway just in time to catch the slow descent of the first drop.
That was where my father found him. At first he watched Max in silence, unwilling to break the spell on the openmouthed boy. But then a drop of water that had trembled for several minutes in the cracked ceiling made its swift descent. Max shut his eyes as the drop hit the back of his tongue. He closed his mouth and swallowed, savoring the taste of rain and wood and plaster. My father moved forward to speak to him, but the water had taken advantage of his delay to launch its invasion. It started pouring through the ceiling. Five leaks sprouted in the hallway, three more in Max’s room, four in my parents’ bedroom, and one in the guest room where my mother was nursing me.
From that day on, my mother blamed Max for inviting the water into our house. She blamed him for leaky bathtubs, burst radiators, broken pipes, and most of all for the occasional surging of the river. Each winter, she would count down the days until it would be cold enough for the river to freeze and the rain to turn to snow. Snow was her elixir. And more important, snow made things match. It smoothed rough edges and ha
rsh contours. It erased the garish paint jobs on new cars and undermined families who had trimmed their houses in a Caribbean palette. It masked badly pruned hedges and covered lawn ornaments. Snow, according to my mother, brought tranquillity and beauty to a mismatched world. As she saw it, a good snowstorm would be better than a baptism.
When I was seven and Max was eleven, the remnants of a tropical storm moving up the coast raged against the house for three days. My mother insisted Max stay indoors. He stomped his foot with the agitation the storm was whipping up inside him. Our mother shrugged her shoulders and turned back to the stove, where she was fixing steak and fries.
But that night, even the prospect of all-you-can-eat fries and cake for dessert couldn’t calm the frustration that was consuming my brother. As my mother cooked, Max rattled his fist against the window, trying, it seemed to my mother, to add to the force of the furious storm. Thunder cracked in the distance. Max beat his fist against the window again, causing more droplets to slip onto the sill, and then he marched up the stairs.
He did not come down at dinnertime. His plate of food cooled. My mother wavered between distress at her son’s unhappiness and a desire to show him the dangers of the storm. After dinner, I helped her load the plates into the dishwasher. She called to Max, “If you’re going to wash your face before bed, do it quickly.” Unsupervised, Max often plugged the bathroom sink, filled it with water, and practiced holding his breath.
“One day, he’ll forget what he’s doing and simply pass out under there,” I heard my mother whisper in my father’s ear. So my father volunteered to be a lifeguard during his son’s bathroom aquatics. But Max complained that our father’s presence prevented him from reaching the underwater peace he sought. And late at night, when my parents were asleep, he would return, fill the sink, and dunk his head.