by Ivy Pochoda
Maybe Toby couldn’t see past the shredded peasant costume. Maybe he was eager to finish the trick and escape Eva’s gaze. He nodded in the direction of the voice.
That settled it. Greta approached the stage.
Toby did not seem to recognize her. Keeping his distance, he allowed the assistant to show Greta where to stand and how to spread her arms. Toby took his place several paces in front of her. He pulled a blindfold from his pocket and tied it over his eyes. Greta looked the audience over, a superior smile on her lips. The assistant climbed onto the facing table. The audience took a collective step back as she raised the gun and pointed it at the magician.
The sound in the pits wound down, and Toby’s updated vaudeville music seemed to be squeezed out of the speakers one note at a time. The assistant cocked the gun. The click echoed through the room. The moment before she fired, I heard the sound of crunching ice and turned to see Swenson behind me, draining his drink. Eva was next to him. With his mouth full of ice, Swenson smiled, showing me his nicotine-stained teeth. He raised his eyebrows and nodded toward Toby. Eva didn’t take her eyes off the stage.
I wanted to cry out. The showgirl pulled the trigger. Everyone leaned back as the bullet cut through the air. Toby stood still, his feet firmly planted on the table, his arms clasped behind his back, his mouth slightly open. Suddenly, a cascade of gold coins burst from the bullet’s wake and fell to the table. As the coins appeared, Toby lurched back slightly, then recovered himself. Greta rolled her eyes, but remained where she was. Toby removed the bullet from between his teeth. He tossed it to the audience so they could check for the mark.
When the coins had settled onto the table, Toby nodded to the assistant, and she raised the gun again. Swenson muttered something. Eva closed her eyes. “You should have said something,” she whispered. Before the assistant fired, Greta looked out over the audience, searching for someone who might take notice. All eyes were on the magician and his assistant.
Another explosion ripped through the blackjack tables as the showgirl fired for the second time. The audience recoiled again. Now a waterfall of petals emerged in the bullet’s wake, spinning lazily toward the table. Again, Toby staggered backwards before righting himself. Again Greta rolled her eyes. The audience exhaled. Swenson crunched another ice cube.
The assistant took aim again. The audience was barely ready. “I don’t know if I can take this,” one well-coiffed woman squealed. “I don’t know how he does it.”
Toby adjusted his feet on the table and clasped his hands.
Greta stole another glance at the audience.
“Daring,” the well-coiffed woman’s companion replied.
Greta was glaring at them. Then she caught my eye. She shook her head, summoning a composure I’d never seen before. She gave me her mocking smile before returning her attention to the trick.
The assistant cocked the gun. Greta held her head up high, her arms out. The assistant extended her arm. Toby steadied himself. And Greta, with quickness I’d never have expected, leapt in front of the magician.
This time, there was no transformation of lead to rain or snow or gambling chips. There was no miraculous waterfall of conjured objects to mask what was happening on the table. Greta extended her arms, as if reaching for the bullet, hoping to catch it like a football. It sailed into the space between her open arms, tearing through her dress and cracking her breastbone. An explosion of blood, the shape of a narcissus blossom, shot from her chest.
Toby whipped off his blindfold in time to see Greta tumble at his feet. As she fell, she turned in my direction. Smoke and the acrid stench of singed polyester filled the air. My scream kept rising from my throat as I watched the teenager’s blood pool around Toby’s shoes. The assistant dropped the gun. Someone stepped forward to catch her, trampling her fallen headdress as he approached.
I remained still while the audience rushed by. A few people tried to help the girl on the table while others slipped to the sidelines to watch the spectacle unfold.
My mouth was still open when Eva appeared in front of me.
“You didn’t try to stop him?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I didn’t know.”
“You did. You just didn’t believe me.”
And suddenly, I had the answer to Eva’s question about my loneliest moment. It was here, in this chaotic gambling pit, surrounded by hundreds of guests in cocktail clothes. I saw a string of dingy motel rooms, leading me back across the country. I saw myself at the counter of nondescript diners. The faces of the stampeding audience were cold. Then I felt Toby’s eyes.
He reached down to Greta. Blood covered the front of his suit. A small fire seemed to be burning in his pale cheeks. His jaw was trembling. Our eyes didn’t leave one another until he turned away and gathered Greta in his arms. Pressing her limp body into his, he stepped off the table and carried her out of the casino. No one followed him.
I don’t know how far Toby went before he was intercepted by the police. At some point, I remember Sandra tapping me on the arm, telling me that he’d been taken to a precinct near Fremont. Somehow, she had managed to steer the remaining guests into the Hermitage Salon.
I spent the night on a bench outside the Las Vegas Police Department. I had my sewing basket and my quilt. As I watched the parade of witnesses—the showgirl assistant, the casino doctor, and Greta’s mother, who had been summoned from Intersection—I attached a scrap from the cocktail waitress outfit to the edge of my quilt. In the sharp, fluorescent glow from the police station, my quilt looked lifeless.
Folding it, I left the bench and crossed the dusty road to a phone booth. The dial tone surprised me as it cut through the Nevada night. I punched in my parents’ number, wanting to hear that I wasn’t alone. I imagined the phone ringing in their dark house, shaking them from their sleep. But no one picked up. Soon the answering machine clicked on. I opened my mouth, but my words dissolved in tears.
At 7 A.M. Toby emerged. “Death by misadventure,” was all he said as I took his hot, dry hand and wove my small fingers inside his. Greta’s mother confirmed Toby’s innocence when she explained that she had been expecting something like this ever since her daughter had run away. When she emerged from the station, she had Greta’s ball-chain necklaces twisted in her fingers like a rosary.
Toby and I sat in the minivan in front of the blue ranch house. It was two days after his accident, two days of ballistics tests and investigations into the legality of the bullet-catching illusion. I wanted to see the house and brush my fingers over a future that was slipping from reach. Toby waited in the car while I slipped inside the house and took a green-and-yellow-flowered dish towel for my quilt.
Back in the car, I turned on the ignition. A mile from the airport, I asked Toby, “Why didn’t you pick me?”
It was a moment before he replied. “There’s a place for you in my magic. But it’s not onstage.”
I unrolled the window. “You thought something might go wrong.”
“No.” Toby looked away from me, out the window. “The moment I met you, things fell into place. I’d been wandering in circles, one small town to the next, one uninterested audience after another. Not to mention the hours alone. And then, there you were in the Old Stand Saloon. I can’t tell you how many times I’d been in there.” He fiddled with the door locks, making them dance up and down. “Never saw a friendly face. I was almost ready to head home, or try out my luck in sideshows in Mexico. And then…” His voice trailed off. “And now—”
“And now, I can’t help.”
“When I was a teenager, I always got teased for being a magician. You can imagine I wasn’t the coolest kid in school. But no matter how bad it got, magic always made things better. Nothing seemed out of reach, and I could shape my world to suit myself. Who cared what anyone said?” Toby clenched his hands into fists. “There’ve been a few ups and downs in my career. But magic got me through. This is beyond my powers to fix. And it wasn’t even my fault. I will neve
r be a Las Vegas magician.” He shook his head as his eyes ran over the desert. “I wonder if I’ll ever be a magician at all.”
I placed my hand on his leg. “I could have prevented this,” I said.
Toby turned from the window.
“Eva told me something would go wrong. She said you’d be tempted to use an assistant. I didn’t know how soon it would happen.”
“It wasn’t the decision to use an assistant or a volunteer that was the problem. It was Greta.”
I looked out the window, wondering if Toby wasn’t really at fault.
We sat in silence for a moment.
“What should we do with the car?” I asked.
Toby didn’t reply.
“Your van?”
He shrugged.
“Toby.”
“Leave it,” he muttered.
“We can’t do that.”
“It’s just a car.”
“It’s more than that.”
I let the car idle. The engine rattled. The magician said nothing. He simply crossed his arms over his chest.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.” I took the keys out of the ignition. Then I put them back. “I hope someone comes along and enjoys it,” I said.
“What?” Toby asked.
“All I’m saying is I hope it makes someone else happy.”
Toby didn’t reply. He just shouldered his bag and walked toward the airport.
Eight
Amsterdam seemed to me to be tinted with the last paint coaxed from the corners of a once-vivid watercolor palette. The sky that peeked between the gabled buildings was not the blue promised by the famous Delft tiles, but a blue that had been stretched thin, made gray with too much water. With its muted colors—always more gray than blue and rust than red—reflected in the placid canals, the city had an illusory quality. Its narrowness, the hair’s-breadth houses and one-way streets, was exaggerated, thrown back by the dark canal water. The reflected city appeared as deep in its own canals as it was narrow on land.
Amsterdam was the perfect place for illusion. The long and interwoven streets, Palmgracht, Palmkade, Palmstraat, Palmdwaarstraat, beguiled with their similarity. And the shop, the restaurant, the small café where you wasted the afternoon, disappeared with a turn of the calendar page. Over time, I learned that Amsterdam was capable of this sort of trickery—the place that took you a half hour to find often turned out to have been only a few blocks from where you started.
For me, the city was an unlikely choice—a head-on collision with my water demon. But Amsterdam was a city that promised to shake off the desert, and just maybe, its canals would give me a glimpse of my brother’s watery shadow.
The train from the airport rattled into Amsterdam Central Station. The commuting crowds cleared to reveal a withered man in a heavy wool overcoat waiting for us near the first car. With light but slow steps, he approached.
“Piet Boerman,” he said, offering a dry hand, which Toby shook reluctantly. “Theo told you that I’d be waiting.” Piet blinked his watery blue eyes, then smiled so half moons rippled on his cheeks.
“Thank you,” I replied.
In those last days in Las Vegas, I had retrieved Theo van Eyck’s business card from Toby’s wallet and phoned the old magician. And although he’d sounded surprised, something told me that Theo had been expecting my call.
“I don’t live very far away,” Piet said as we headed away from the platform. “If you don’t mind, we can walk.”
Toby nodded and synchronized his long strides with Piet’s stiff gait.
Piet turned to me as we crossed the canal closest to the station. “Like Theo, I, too, was a magician of sorts.” Then he looked at Toby. “Tomorrow after you’ve rested, we will see Theo, a far more impressive magician than I. More impressive than nearly anyone, except you, I’ve heard.” Piet smiled, but Toby managed only a small nod.
Piet Boerman lived in a canal house that had been in his family for generations. Over the years, it had been turned into a museum of magic—smaller illusions stored on the top floors, and the devices for large-scale conjuring below. Now in his mid-eighties, he could no longer mount the steep stairs to the upper two floors. So he offered us the studio in his attic. Its only window looked out on the mismatched gables of the houses across the canal. Our room was too high up to see the street or the canal, so our view reduced Amsterdam to a uneven row of house tops, a disarray of step gables, bell gables, neck gables, and spout gables that looked like the peaks of Victorian circus tents. From our window, the city was cut off from its streets, canals, and human traffic. Our view showed everything and nothing—the endless run of amputated rooftops and the open sky with its magic lantern of weather.
In this attic, with its delightful combination of crisp air, rough sheets, and homespun blankets, I fell into a deep sleep, finally forgetting the face of the teenager who had sent us across the ocean. Soon, from somewhere inside my dreams, I heard Toby’s voice calling to me. I tossed and turned, trying to locate the magician. Then I woke. He was sleeping soundly next to me, his hands balled into fists and tucked under his pillow. His lips were pressed together. But I could still hear his voice whispering indistinctly in the cold air.
“Toby?”
The magician didn’t move.
“Toby?” I looked around the attic. The house creaked and resettled. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the magician’s voice. I plugged my ears. “Toby, stop.”
“What?” the magician muttered, and rolled over.
I got up, pulled on a sweater, and tiptoed to the landing. The hallway of the floor beneath the attic was strewn with boxes bursting with playbills and leaflets. Out of the shadows, I could just make out the face of a Chinese conjurer printed on a cracked poster. I felt his eyes on me as I continued down the stairs. Now my magician’s voice was joined by dozens of other whispers calling to me from the boxes and muttering from the posters and playbills.
I began to hurry, taking the steep steps two at a time. The canal house shrank around me. Big devices with blades and saw teeth waited behind half-open doors. A gust of wind blew into the stairway. A handbill with the image of a magician dressed as a swami fluttered down from the floor above. He wore the same expression of dangerous superiority as the Chinese conjurer in the upstairs hallway. As I let the paper fall from my hand, the swami winked.
On the second-floor landing, a dark hallway stretched in front of me. The house heaved and breathed. At the end of the hall, a door blew open. The magicians’ whispers stopped. I squinted at the column of light that leaked into the hall, and saw a bit of fabric fluttering through the open door. As it rose and fell, Asian music filled my ears.
Even in the low light, I knew how this silk would feel as it slipped across my skin—like cold-melt mercury. I pulled the door open and, with a creak of hinges and floorboards, entered a chilly bathroom with a claw-foot tub. On the back of the door was an exquisite silk robe. I stared, hesitating to lift it from its hanger. Its music filled my ears. I grabbed the robe and swung it around my shoulders. The music swelled, drowning out the night noises of the old house.
The robe was the color of air—the silver of the clouds and the almost imperceptible blue of thinnest sky. The front of the coat was embroidered with two golden dragons, and on the back, an enormous phoenix burst from multicolored flames. I ran my hand along the wall, looking for a light switch. With a click, a weak bulb flickered to life, illuminating the robe’s rich colors. I approached a mirror and lifted my arms above my head. The dragons shifted. Then I spun around and watched as the phoenix flew high above the fire. The music escalated as the robe prepared to carry me away.
“You’ve found the phoenix.” Piet stood in the doorway behind me. Even in old age, he possessed a talent for surprise.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re finding it hard to sleep,” he said, placing a hand on my arm. “It’s not the jet lag.” He raised his white eyebrows. “It’s the secrets. It’s hard to sleep arou
nd secrets.”
“I thought I heard the robe calling me. From the hallway.”
“Did you?” Piet replied. Then he nodded. “Perhaps you did.”
I began to take the robe off. “I design fabric and textiles—and this silk, the music, its music, is unlike anything I’ve ever heard.”
“You hear music?” Piet asked.
I nodded and returned the robe to the hanger. Then the old magician placed his dry hand over mine. “No. It’s yours.” He tightened his grip. “I insist. This was from our end. From the moment when our magic stopped. If you hear music where I only see pain, you should keep it.”
“I couldn’t.”
“Please, a little souvenir to inspire you and Toby.”
I looked at the robe, suddenly unsure. “Thank you.” I draped the robe over my arm, exposing a label sewn inside the collar. “‘Made by Special Order by the People of the South,’” I read aloud. “For you?”
“Not for me. For Theo.” His words escaped from his lips, carried on uneven currents of breath. “His magic was the beginning and the end for us all.”
“But he no longer wants it?” I asked, running my hand across one of the phoenix’s wings.
“Theo?” Piet shook his head. “For him, the phoenix was a false friend. But that’s his story.”
The shadows in the hallway had shifted, smoothing themselves into benign shapes. “I sleep irregularly,” Piet said. “I can offer you some tea, provided we drink it the Dutch way—no milk and a little sugar.”
Still carrying the robe, I followed him to the kitchen.
I slept late the next day. When we finally left Piet’s house, the sun had vanished, leaving Amsterdam under the blanket of coal gray evening. At the end of his cobbled street, Piet stopped and leaned on his silver-headed walking stick. “Theo lives in our famous red-light district. He has been looking forward to your arrival.” He pulled up the collar of his overcoat. “We all are. It has been so long since someone joined us. Fifteen years is too long to spend in the company of the same faces. I think we fail to realize how old we’ve become.”