Magic

by Audrey Niffenegger

  That night the thing inside me speaks for the first time.

  THE PIT BOSS in The Grosvenor casino doesn’t look like one.

  He’s a small, thin man with round silver-framed glasses perched on his nose. The eyes behind them are dark blue, almost black. He patrols his section of the floor slowly, stopping to chat to the regulars, to summon waitresses for the drunk tourists, his demeanour light and friendly and welcoming. But what he’s really doing is watching the tables, looking for the people winning too much, losing the small hands and winning the big ones, looking for silent movement of the lips, for tension and nervousness revealed by the untrustworthy bodies of men and women trying to cheat the house. He’s looking for people like me, people who aren’t playing the game straight. His gaze lands on me every few minutes, but I’m not worried.

  I’m exactly what he’s looking for, but there’s nothing he can do.

  I’m untouchable.

  “NICE INK,” SAYS a pretty mark in her late teens.

  I follow her gaze down to my forearm, and let out a short laugh. I consider correcting her, but decide against it. Instead I say thanks.

  She nods, but her eyes remain on my arm. I can see she’s counting, so I save her the time.

  “Forty-three,” I tell her, and she looks up. “All the spades, ten hearts, twelve diamonds and eight clubs. Forty-three.”

  “Nine missing,” she says.

  I tell her I know.

  “WHAT HAPPENED?” ASKS the policeman. He’s pale and he keeps twisting his hands in his lap.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t remember anything.”

  He doesn’t believe me. It’s written all over his face. But there’s no way he can prove me wrong. No one who came up out of the cellar is talking. Erin and Adam are catatonic, Chris is on life support somewhere in the hospital, and Johnny and Alice are dead.

  My word is gospel.

  NEVER TOUCH YOUR chips unless you’re making a bet.

  Halving and re-stacking, arranging into equal smaller piles, lifting a stack and letting it clatter through your fingers back onto the felt; all signs of nerves. Nerves aren’t your worst enemy, but they’re close. They make you do stupid things, they narrow your attention down to the cards and the dealer, reminding you that there is money at stake. You should never think about money when you’re gambling. The game is a game, nothing more, to be won or lost. The money is secondary.

  I watch the dealer’s hands. He slides cards from the shoe with well-practiced smoothness, with studied nonchalance. He is presenting indifference, relaxation, projecting openness and welcome, while he makes calculations in his head, while he reads the players at his table, assessing intoxication and mood and fatigue.

  He plays his role well. A worthy opponent.

  I GET BACK to my flat some time around midnight. There’s a bed and a desk and a chair that I never use. The wardrobe has my clothes in it, but they barely fill half the rail. It’s functional. I sleep here, and that’s all. There should really be a photo on the bedside table, so that I could stare at it every night as I fall asleep and remind myself why I do what I do. But there isn’t.

  THE DEALER FLIPS the ten of spades over in front of me, lays out the nine of hearts and the eight of diamonds to the other players at the table: a platinum blonde woman wrapped in dead animals and drunk on endless refills of champagne, and a frightened-looking man in a cheap suit and dirty shoes. Desperation rises from him in a cloud so thick it’s almost visible. The stack of chips in front of him is tiny, and he fingers them endlessly, as though trying to convince himself that they’re real, that they are all he has left, that somehow it has come down to this. The woman has six tall stacks in front of her, and pays no attention to them whatsoever. The money isn’t hers, and she doesn’t care if she loses it. As a result, she’s winning. The man is losing, his stacks disappearing slowly, inexorably. He wears the expression of a drowning animal.

  I SET MY stall up outside Liverpool Street station just before the rush hour starts. It’s simple, a folding table and a small printed sign:

  Three-Card-Monte

  Find the Queen

  £10 to play, WIN PAYS £50

  As always, within about ten minutes there’s a good crowd gathered. The world is a smaller place than ever before, with information available on everything at the press of a touchpad. So few secrets left. The crowd are looking for the scam, looking for the strings behind the puppets. None of them think they can actually win, but for the sake of a tenner, I know full well that eventually someone will try, just to see if they can work out how I do it. Their eyes scan the crowd, trying to identify my plants, watching my hands, trying to discern a Mexican drop or a bottom deal as I move the cards round and round and round.

  THE TEN OF clubs is flipped over in front of me. The blonde woman gets the king of hearts, the man the four of spades. He groans. He knows what’s coming, we all do, it’s inevitable. The dealer turns over his card. Seven of hearts.

  I split my tens, moving a second stack of chips onto the table. All of a sudden, I’ve got twelve thousand pounds riding on this hand. I feel a flutter of excitement and push it away. It’s not nerves, not exactly – I don’t care about losing the money I have, but I care about losing the pot I should be about to win. I care about losing the hand, of having good play punished, more than I care about the chips. The woman purrs appreciatively, either at the money the chips represent or the courage of my play, I don’t know which. She leans forward, two bags of liquid silicon threatening to spill from the narrow straps of the dress that are supposed to be holding them in place. She wants me to notice, wants me to look, wants me to approve of her, but I keep my eyes on the cards. The dealer slides a card from the shoe and flips it onto my first ten.

  Jack of diamonds. Twenty.

  He flips another.

  Ace of clubs.

  Blackjack.

  I SEE THE two men in the shiny black suits long before they think I do. But that’s OK. I want them to see.

  THE FIRST TO pluck up their courage is a man in his twenties in a sleek grey suit. He steps forward, places an expensive brown leather satchel between his feet, and takes a ten pound note out of his wallet. He places it on my table, and I nod without a word. I flip the cards over and show them to him; the queen of hearts, the four of spades, the nine of clubs. I flip them back face down, and begin to move them. Within three rotations of the cards I know there is no way he still knows which one is the queen. In a straight game, his odds of winning would now be one in three, pure luck with the odds in my favour. In a bent game, a usual three-card-monte game, his chances would now be essentially zero. If he somehow managed to identify the queen, there would still be no way I’d let him see it; I would double flip one of the black cards, or one of my plants would shout that they saw the police. Either way, the very worst case scenario would be my returning his tenner and announcing that the game was void.

  JOHNNY BLOWS THE candle out. At least, I think he does. Erin giggles as the cellar is plunged into darkness, but it’s not a giggle that sounds full of fun. It sounds nervous, it flutters as it emerges from her mouth.

  It’s the last thing I remember hearing before the screaming started.

  THE DEALER PAYS the blackjack out immediately, pushing chips across the table. Nine thousand pounds, fifteen with my chips. Six thousand still in play on twenty.

  The woman waves her hand. The man taps the felt so softly his fingers make no sound. The dealer flips over the queen of spades that we all knew was coming, and the man lets out a strangled sigh that sounds close to a sob before gathering up the last few of his chips and leaving the table.

  One card left. The woman and I pretend not to care, the dealer pretends the same, pretends he doesn’t want to turn a four and a ten and fuck us both over, wipe the smiles from our faces. The chips on the table are more than he earns in a year, and all three of us know it.

  He flips the card. Eight of diamonds. He draws another from the shoe and turns
it over. Nine of spades.

  Bust.

  THE THING INSIDE my head’s voice is light and playful. It tells me not to worry, that they won’t be able to prove anything. Then it tells me what it wants to do, and I lean over the side of the hospital bed and vomit onto the white linoleum floor.

  THE DEALER SLIDES me another six thousand in chips, and then more than thirty thousand to the woman, who smiles at me with open mischief, her dress riding high up her thighs, her breasts straining for release. “Drink?” she asks, her lips wet and glossy.

  “No thank you,” I say. Her smile falters, but only for a second.

  “Your loss,” she says, then slides her chips into a cup and disappears.

  I lift my chips with both hands, and make my way to the cashier. The pit boss watches me all the way, his eyes trained on my back, but there’s nothing he can do. I’m not wired, I’m not counting cards.

  I’m something else.

  I pass over my chips, and receive forty-nine thousand pounds in fifty pound notes. They offer me a cheque, but I decline. Cash is what I need.

  IT WAS ADAM’S idea. It really was. He’d seen something on TV and he wanted to try it. I don’t think he ever thought it would work. To this day, I’m still not sure whether it did. I felt something sharp dig into me when I sat down, and pulled the deck of cards out of the back pocket of my jeans. I carried one with me everywhere that summer. I’d discovered poker and I was always looking for a game. I put the cards down next to me before we got started.

  I still don’t know whether that’s why what happened happened to me. I’ll never know. The thing inside me doesn’t answer questions.

  I ACCELERATE, MY hands moving the cards into a blur, and I see the moment where the connection between his eyes and his brain fails, where the speed of the information input overwhelms his ability to process. I slow the cards, then line them up before him. The queen is to my left, his right. He considers for a second, a look of grudging admiration on his face at the quality of my performance, then points to the middle card. I slide the queen under the middle card, and flip it over. As far as he knows, I’ve turned over the middle card, the one he chose. But I haven’t. I’ve let the queen flip and slide over the top of the middle card. I lift it up and away, revealing the queen of hearts. For a moment he says nothing, then a little smile of triumph begins to emerge on his face. He’s beaten me, he thinks. In front of the watching crowd, he’s beaten me.

  “Well done,” I say, and pull a fifty pound note from the pocket of my jacket. I hand it to him, along with his tenner, and he looks slightly incredulously at the money. Then his usual demeanour returns, his master of the universe arrogance, and he tucks the notes into the inside pocket of his grey suit jacket.

  “Better luck next time mate,” he says, and tips me a wink. “You’re pretty good. Bit more practice, that’s all you need.”

  He struts away, and a silver-haired man clutching a black travel mug, his eyes wide and hungry with greed, immediately takes his place.

  I SLOW DOWN and let them come. They’re strolling through the crowd, not even trying to stay hidden. They look like bouncers, which is what they are. They’re wearing dark suits that don’t really fit them, high-necked black T-shirts, flat black shoes with rubber soles. They should be wearing earpieces, but they’ve taken them off in what seems to be their only concession to blending in.

  I leave the crowds of the West End behind and head towards the river. Here the streets get narrower and darker, the buildings crowding in above the cobbles, and the air is quiet and still. I continue to stroll. Two figures lurch out of the shadows at me, but I let them pass by. The man leers drunkenly at me as he drags a semi-conscious girl towards the taxis and buses of Trafalgar Square.

  Near the end of the street there’s an opening in the wall. It’s a pitch black rectangle, that I know leads into an alley with a dead end. I can almost feel the excitement of the two men behind me, feel them hoping against hope that I make the turn.

  WE DID IT in Johnny’s cellar.

  His mum and dad both worked so his house was empty during the week, and it was where we spent most of our time anyway. There were six of us, the same six that had been hanging out all summer; me, Johnny, Adam, Chris, Alice and Erin. Chris and Alice started fucking that summer, and didn’t think the rest of us knew about it. But Erin had read Alice’s diary when she was in the shower one evening, and told the rest of us. We’d taken to dropping lines from her breathless, feverish descriptions of their couplings into normal conversation, and watching the colour rise in her face. She never confronted us about it, so we kept doing it. As a result, there was tension in the air the morning we made our way down into the basement. I still wonder sometimes whether that was partly to blame for what happened.

  We followed Johnny downstairs, and looked at the arrangements he had made. The rug in the middle of the basement had been rolled back against the wall, and a pentagram had been drawn on the concrete floor in red chalk. Candles stood at each point of the shape, and a small bowl sat on the floor to one side.

  “Spooky,” laughed Erin, but the laughter didn’t quite reach her eyes.

  She looked nervous as we sat in a circle around the chalk outline, forcing small talk, trying not to appear scared. I was scared. I can remember that much. I was scared from the second I saw the pentagram. It was cold in the basement, and the shape seemed unpleasant, almost threatening. I knew I was projecting, that there was nothing scary about the chalk lines themselves, that I was thinking about the things I had seen them used for in films and TV programmes, none of which were real.

  Johnny passed a box of matches around the circle, and we each lit one of the candles. There was now a greasiness to the air, a thickness that I didn’t believe had been there before the yellow flames flickered into light. Then Adam picked up the bowl, put it in his lap, and unwrapped a razor blade.

  “Let’s do this,” he said, grinning.

  WHEN THE POLICE eventually turn up and move me on, I’ve managed to lose just over four thousand pounds, and the crowd waiting for their turn has swollen to almost a hundred.

  THE DEALER GIVES me a curt nod as I sit down. I’ve had him before, but I don’t think he remembers me. Hundreds of faces pass before him every night, most of them creating no impression. The drunks, the screamers, the ones who throw punches and spit threats, they’re the ones who get remembered. I’m none of those.

  The pit boss glances in my direction. He keeps the recognition from his eyes with practiced restraint, but he looks for just a millisecond too long, and I know I’m on his radar. I shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be back in the same place so soon after I was last here. But I’m desperate. The yearning, the need to atone is wider and deeper than it’s been in years, and it’s Christmas and most places are closed. Even the most debauched, degenerate places like to close for a day or two over the holiday. It makes them feel a little more respectable, a little more dignified, rather than the open, running sewers they really are, whirlpools of filth and one-way lust that suck in the hopeless and the helpless.

  THE THING INSIDE me tells me I did well. I thank it through gritted teeth, and wait for the police to let me leave the hospital.

  I TAKE THE dealer for four thousand quid in about forty minutes. I’m not counting the cards, not really. I could be, could tell anyone who wanted to know that the true count through the decks was positive nine, but that’s not why I win. I can’t explain why I win. The thing inside me might be able to, but I don’t let it out. I never let it out, not voluntarily. I bet and double and split and I win and win and win and it waits and waits and waits.

  That’s the deal. The deal I never agreed to.

  I WAKE UP and the flat is cold. I paid the man who owns it a year’s rent to leave me alone, and he’s held up his end of the bargain admirably. I pay the bills even though I rarely use the gas or the electricity. I shower in the morning, and I turn on the lights at night for about ten minutes when I get home, but that’s all. I eat
breakfast in a café around the corner, and that’s normally the only meal I sit down for each day. I grab something in the evening if there’s time, or I get a waitress to bring me a sandwich if I’m working one of the shiny casinos on Park Lane.

  They’ll bring you anything they want, especially alcohol. Nothing tips the odds in the house’s favour quicker than getting the players drunk. It doesn’t matter how many free beers or gin and tonics they give you, as long as in the end you lose your chips. It’s a mutually beneficial system; the player feels like they got something out of the house while they played, and the house gets your money. Seems fair, although it obviously isn’t.

  Most people are just too stupid to see it.

  AN HOUR AND ten minutes at Fenchurch Street and last night’s money is all gone. Sixteen thousand pounds given away in just over two hours.

  It’s not enough though. It’s never enough.

  I STROLL INTO the alleyway, and I feel their excitement spike. The possibility of violence is close now, and they know it. As I walk down the alleyway, my heels drumming on the stone beneath them, I feel the air shift and the light change as they follow me through the opening. I keep walking, my eyes fixed on the damp, dripping wall in front of me, and then the thing inside me speaks, its voice soft and lazy, the voice of something that has just woken up.