by Ivy Pochoda
“Swimming or floating at least.”
I looked at the deep pool of water surrounding me. Size and scale swelled and shrank; the sky turned back into water. The moon became a whale again. And then I felt the fish tank smallness, the eyedrop confinement of the massive animal. I closed my eyes and saw a wild expanse of ocean big enough to reduce the whale to a comprehensible proportion. I let go and imagined a body of water large enough to accommodate schools of ten thousand of the alabaster creatures. The water engulfed my mind, swamped my brain, crashed on the insides of my eyelids. The water in the tank took advantage of my moment of panic, flying up my nose, burning my eyes, and tearing into my throat. I grew faint and slipped off the raft.
“Mel,” Max cried, grabbing the back of my hair. “Mel!”
The top of the water slipped away. The white whale became black. Max’s words were drowned out by the curtain of water between me and the surface. My ears and throat opened, and the water crashed in. It broke through all the barriers of my body, rushing and roaring and pulling me down. I thrashed and kicked. And then I felt the silky tentacles, the graceful arms of my brother, around my waist.
Max drew me into the crook of his elbow, as I knew he would. I relaxed into his arms and let my head sink into his chest as we rose to the surface. Our heads broke through the water, and I snapped out of my reverie, choking and sputtering.
“How much of that stuff did you swallow?” Max asked, helping me up onto the platform.
“I don’t know. I just closed my eyes, and the water seemed to expand.” I scrambled away from the water’s edge.
“You just plunged off the raft and headed down. I think you’ve had enough water for one day. Do you mind sitting here while I take Sophie for a swim?”
Max dived from the platform, more like a dolphin than like a whale, and headed for the middle of the tank. He popped out of the water and beckoned to Sophie with his arms. I tried to trace their progress under the water, but they were lost in the unlit circles. Two minutes later, Sophie’s head crested the surface; then her whole body breached with Max sitting on her back. He waved at me before the pair plunged below the surface again.
After several trips around the tank, Max brought Sophie over to me. “It’s time to say good-bye,” he said as I reached for the whale. He hauled his dripping body out of the water.
“Bye, Sophie,” I whispered. She turned around and dived back into the depths of the pool—the moon eclipsed by the night.
In silence, we headed down the ladder. In the hallway, I slipped my clothes on over my wet bathing suit. Outside, the night had turned cold, and the sharp January air pinched my wet skin. The rain had stopped, and a few lonely flurries started their languid descent from the sky.
Max started the car and turned on the heater.
“Thank you,” I said, beaming at my brother. I was shaking all over—trembling with the memory of my plunge and the magnificence of the whale. And I was trembling with delight at discovering that the other girl in my brother’s life was a giant sea beast.
Eleven
The week after our trip to La Gaite theater was a week of rain. In Holland, a rare blue sky can immediately darken and be disrupted by bullet-sized hail; five weather systems can pass through in a single day, throwing the city from relative warmth into freezing rain. A twenty-minute walk can take you through a year’s worth of weather. Like my magician, the Dutch weather distracted with an honesty—a golden fan of sunlight leaking from behind a cloud—while it put the finishing touches on the storm waiting in the wings. Unlike the rain that flooded my childhood, drowning our house, the Dutch rainstorms passed by swiftly, eager to take their havoc elsewhere. The Dutch rain didn’t threaten, but performed, showing off its dexterity, its scope of pressures and wetnesses. It wasn’t dangerous and malicious like the rain that had made the river rise and the house fall down around my family. It was cheeky and wicked. It spoiled a blue sky without warning, fell on one side of the city but left the other dry, and it teased—hiding in an oppressive blanket of gray for an entire day without falling.
At night, Toby and I were carried off to sleep by the rain tapping on the roof—and in the mornings, we were summoned awake by fresh gusts of wind driving the rain against our small window. We had traded the permanent sunshine of Las Vegas for its opposite: an unceasing backdrop of gray. The rain washed away the thrill of Leo’s party and obscured the faded glory of La Gaite. The weather made exploring the city forbidding. So I remained in Piet’s house, letting one day slide into the next as I watched the old man dig through his boxes, holding up memorabilia from Theo’s triumphs for Toby.
And then, one morning we both woke up agitated. I’d slept later than usual, the constant gray of the sky making it hard to distinguish the morning hours from the early afternoon.
When I opened my eyes, Toby was standing in the attic doorway, staring at the window. “Rain.”
I pushed my head into my pillow, struggling to regain the warmth of sleep.
“Why does it always have to rain? I feel like I haven’t seen daylight in weeks. And there’s nothing I can do about it.” He looked into his palms.
“So come back to bed.”
“That doesn’t help.”
“Maybe in your dreams it will be sunny.”
“You don’t want to hear about my dreams.” Toby moved to the window and watched the gray clouds blow across the gabled buildings opposite.
“Maybe our next stop is a snowy place. That would suit me perfectly.”
Toby turned from the window. “Of course it would, Mel Snow. But I don’t think there’s much call for a magician in Finland or the Arctic.”
“Magic doesn’t have to drive the train.”
Toby returned his gaze to the window. With a finger he traced the pathway of a droplet as it slid down the windowpane. “I guess not,” he said after a moment. Then he hit his hand against the glass, scattering the drops. “Want to see something green?”
“What are you going to do?”
“It doesn’t always have to be magic, does it?”
“Certainly not,” I said, letting Toby lift me out of bed.
We dressed and headed outside. Out on the street, Toby offered me a new angora scarf and an umbrella.
“You come prepared,” I said, wrapping up.
“Always.”
“Where are we going?”
He didn’t answer.
We walked to the end of Piet’s street and began to wind our way through his tangled neighborhood. Soon the elegant houses gave way to modern flats whose façades pretended a historic authenticity. We crossed a large canal and waited in front of Amsterdam’s largest parking garage for the tram. The wet air had condensed into a light rain—a noncommittal spray that brushed against our faces and settled on our hair. The inside of the tram was streaked with footprints, remnants of an early-morning rainstorm. The hinged carriages creaked and squealed over the wet rails as the rainy city smells came in through the doors. We headed east across the Amstel River, which was shrouded in a mist that rose up to meet the falling rain. At the next stop, Toby pulled me from the tram and into the rain, which had upped its tempo.
“Only a short walk,” he assured me.
“How do you know where you’re going?” I asked.
We crossed a sleepy canal that was being tickled and refreshed by the fat raindrops. We passed the hibernating zoo with its lingering scent of hay and wet fur. I kept my hand inside Toby’s, enjoying the warmth of his fingers. We crossed the street and stood in front of a black gate that joined two white buildings.
“The Hortus Bontanicus,” Toby announced.
“The botanical gardens?”
“Of course. Where else could we see something green?”
As soon as the turnstile clicked into place behind us, the sounds of the city evaporated—the rattle and squeal of the trams, the splash of car tires crashing through puddles, the whir of bicycles and the sharp ring of their bells. The gardens, which were no b
igger than a playing field, had been designed to obscure the city that ran along their edges. Small paths wound through stooped trees that hummed with life. Our feet crunched over the gravel, disrupting the glassy silence of the small park.
“This way,” Toby said, leading me to a row of three narrow greenhouses.
He parted a rubber curtain, and we stepped inside. The damp chill of the air gave way to a tropical warmth that hugged our faces and caught in our throats. The greens in the misty interior were as dark as the deepest forest, as pale as the oldest sea glass, as electrifying as the harshest chemical. I breathed deeply to fill my lungs. Then the trees began to shake and tremble as an explosion of butterflies burst from their leaves. We threaded our way along the narrow path at the edge of the small greenhouse, watching the butterflies as they sucked nectar, danced among the trees, slept on the undersides of branches. All the colors that had been drained from the Dutch city sprang to life. They vibrated and shook. By the time we emerged from the greenhouse, having let the butterflies deposit farewell kisses on our necks, Toby’s face had smoothed into a smile. I took his hand and led him into the next greenhouse.
On either side of a path, thousands of cacti were stacked so high that they blocked the light from the windows. Some of them were minuscule, no bigger than my fingers, while others had towering tentacles with threatening spikes. It was as if Toby and I had stepped back in time, to the remarkable climate that had somehow drawn us together. The heat was the same: static and dry. The silence was the same: undisturbed by the quiet gaze of thousands of prickly plants.
I opened my mouth, letting the artificial heat fill my lungs. We didn’t speak as we examined the cacti’s confident poses and listened to their stagey silences. The plants were old. They had guarded their secrets for decades, not yielding to the scalding warmth or the scratchy soil. They seemed to be watching us with their needle-eyes, quietly confirming the match they had made in the desert months ago.
“Incredible,” Toby whispered as we stepped out into the chilly air. “So warm.”
We continued along a sand-colored path, ducking underneath the drooping branches of a weeping tree, and arrived in a small courtyard with an enormous glass atrium.
“I think we’re the only people here,” I said.
“I hope so,” Toby muttered.
I followed him up a set of stairs that led to a walkway forty feet above the greenhouse floor. We made our way through three climates—the familiar scorch of the desert, the wet burn of the tropics, and the searing humidity of the subtropics. Here the plants and trees came in shapes wilder than anything Toby’s hands might have conjured. All the patterns missing from the disorderly city appeared in the tripartite greenhouse—the veins spidering out over the rich green leaves, the perfect coils of bark winding around the exotic trees, the petals immaculately dispersed on the tiniest flowers.
I followed Toby out of the greenhouse toward an enormous glass structure as elegant as the palm trees arching toward its domed glass ceiling. We went up a wrought-iron staircase to a vertiginous semicircular walk through the tops of the palms. The trees grew thick and dense, often obscuring the path. I clung to the railing.
“The palms are so silent,” Toby whispered, parting two trees that had interlocked over the walkway. I gripped the railing and closed my eyes. He was right. Unlike the trees in American forests, which bustled with life—shedding their leaves, changing their colors, and giggling in the wind—the captured palms covered us in an umbrella of quiet. They seemed to absorb all sound into their flat leaves.
I pushed ahead and arrived at another helixlike staircase at the end of the walk. But before I began to descend, I felt the magician pull me back. I turned around. Toby was standing where I’d left him. I brushed the spot on my shoulder where I’d felt the cool touch of his hand. Then I rustled toward him through the curtain of fronds.
“Ssh.”
“What is it?”
We were standing in front of a palm with dark green elliptical leaves. “Look,” he said, pointing at the tree. He took one of the fronds between his fingers and began to rub it. A single note from a distant woodwind rose from the leaf. The magician took a deep breath. Then slowly, he began to rub the frond once more. The single woodwind note ran along the leaf to the trunk of the tree, then coiled up the bark toward the palm’s crown. As we listened to the palm’s music, to the hollow sound of a tropical jungle, the expression on his face was the same as when he had made the sand dance into his hands.
He hesitated before reaching back into the tree. I bent over the railing and stared into the maze of leaves and bark. I felt the tree sway as if a wind had leaked into the greenhouse. It swayed again. And then the fronds began to rub against each other like cricket wings. The music that rose from the tree sounded like the secret voice of the forest. It was the music of the soil. It was as complicated and as textured as the roots of ancient trees. The music flew to the top of the atrium, where it collided with the raindrops falling on the glass roof. Then it echoed along each panel of the glass before descending over the sloped edges of the dome like a waterfall.
Now Toby waved his arms again, calling down a crescendo from the trees. He fluttered his fingers along a small frond, summoning a harpsichord solo. He shook a massive palm, from which a drumroll and cymbal crash erupted. He reached out toward a distant tree, calling down a flight of oboes and bassoons. At his command, a palm tree with thin fronds exploded in a jubilant string arrangement, and a tree with narrow, tubular fronds sang with the strength of ten flutes. Toby kept his head thrown back, his arms stretched forward, and his fingers waving madly.
The music of the palms and their hidden orchestra was majestic, but Toby had promised me. I took his wrists in my hands and pulled them downward, ending his concert.
“It doesn’t always have to be magic,” I said.
He didn’t reply.
“You said so this morning.”
“I thought you loved the magic.”
“I love you. It’s different.”
“But I’m a magician.”
“I don’t have to love you for being a magician,” I said, heading down the wrought-iron staircase, wondering for the first time where the magician ended and my husband began. I knew he didn’t know.
“I’m afraid there is little else to me.”
I took a deep breath. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
Toby took a few steps down the staircase, then stopped. “If you grow tired of the magic, you’ll grow tired of me.”
“Never.”
“I’ve pushed everything aside for my art. And why not? There’s a malleable world at my fingertips. I never have to settle for things the way they are.”
I turned and faced him. “But sometimes you should just accept them.”
“Why?”
I didn’t know.
“If I can make a dead plant bloom, why shouldn’t I? If I can make these trees sing, why should I stop myself? If I am the one person on earth who can do these things, is there any reason I shouldn’t? My art is like a trick box. I keep going deeper inside it, finding another box, leading to another dimension. The nature of my magic is its limitlessness. Why stop with one trick when there is another unfolding behind it? It’s like a kaleidoscope—one spectacular combination sliding into another. How can I look away?”
“I don’t know.”
Since our arrival in Amsterdam, Toby’s sleep had become erratic and almost reckless. In Las Vegas, the thrill of his next performance propelled him from bed with the rising sun, but sometimes he now slept from the moment he finished his dinner until past breakfast. On those nights, he would curl himself into a ball at the far edge of the bed with his hands tucked underneath the pillow. His sleep was impenetrable, resistant to any touch or caress, or even a lingering kiss in the shadowy hollow beneath his cheekbone. On other nights, however, Toby could not remain still. After we had gone to bed, something would jar him from his sleep. For the rest of the night, he would move ab
out the house. Sometimes he would come to rest on a sofa or landing, and then set off again on his nighttime ramble. In the morning, I might find him slumped over the dining room table or nestled against a newel post.
I woke up just past four in the morning. Toby had left our bed hours earlier. I shivered in the cold attic air before finding a sweater. Downstairs, I could hear the rustling of paper. In the living room, I found Piet kneeling next to three large boxes of playbills. He rarely slept, and had taken to cataloging and rearranging his memorabilia.
Toby was standing by the fireplace, one arm outstretched, his hand curled around the edge of the mantelpiece. His head was bowed and his cheek pressed against his shoulder.
“He’s sleeping?” I asked Piet.
He nodded.
Toby opened his eyes and looked from me to Piet. His expression was slightly angry, as if I had intruded upon something private.
“Where were we?” he asked Piet.
“Let me get you both some tea.”
When the magician left, I led Toby to the couch, where he put his head on the arm and allowed me to curl up next to him.
“I miss you,” I whispered.
“I’m sorry.”
I stroked his arm and closed my eyes, listening to a creaky bicycle pass outside. As we waited for Piet to bring the tea, I felt Toby’s body relax.
Scrapbooks filled with black-and-white photos of magic shows, many of them at La Gaite, were open on the coffee table. “Maybe Theo is right, and I do live in the wrong time for magic.” Toby put his head on my shoulder.
Piet shuffled into the room, carrying a tray of rattling cups and saucers and the pot of hot tea. “Let it sit for a moment. At this hour, I think it is best if the tea is strong.” He switched on a lamp at the edge of the couch, bathing our faces in soft light. “We can sit here until nearly eight without it becoming much lighter,” Piet said.
When the tea was ready, Piet filled our cups. “This house keeps me up at night as well,” he said. “I have every illusion I built for Theo stored here. I was a traditional craftsman until I met Theo. Something about our work together brought my illusions to life in ways I couldn’t imagine.” He picked up one of the scrapbooks and flipped the page. “I built La Gaite for him. In a way, the entire theater is one illusion. No two visits there are the same.”