The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  Dead? Perhaps. But perhaps not completely.

  Raj strikes out with his contacts at the Southern California casinos, but the owner of the Lake Tahoe resort has a cousin whose wife’s brother manages the Golden Nugget. Raj goes to meet the man in his nicest outfit at a steakhouse on the Strip. When he returns, he’s jacked up, energy to burn and a wild look in his eyes like rapture.

  “Baby,” he says. “I got a phone number.”

  17.

  Klara has never performed anywhere like the Mirage’s proscenium theater. The battens stand thirty feet above the floor; there are two moving platforms, five stage lifts, twenty spotlights, and two thousand seats. The ascension rope has been set, and the Proteus cabinet waits on wheels backstage. Three Mirage executives sit in the front row.

  During Raj’s opening monologue, Klara stands in the wings, sweat shimmying down the sides of her sequined dress. For the first time, Ruby is in day care, a service on the seventeenth floor for the children of hotel employees. Klara’s stomach is clenched. She tries to focus, for Ruby’s sake. Shake out your hands. Swallow. Smile, goddammit. She steps, in gold heels, onstage.

  Light. Heat. She can’t tell the executives apart, with their untucked dress shirts and their faces in shadow. They fidget through the Proteus cabinet. One leaves during the Vanishing Birdcage, citing a conference call. The remaining two perk up during Second Sight, but Klara times the Breakaway incorrectly and must lift her knees to avoid hitting the stage too soon. When she opens her eyes, one of the men is looking at his pager. The other clears his throat.

  “That it?” he calls.

  A stagehand flicks the house lights on, and Raj walks out from the wings. He’s smiling his salesman smile, but anger comes off him like heat. For a fraction of a second, the enormity of this opportunity—the enormity of their failure—knocks the air out of Klara. In the RV refrigerator, there are three jars of Ruby’s food. She and Raj have been eating fast food, and she can feel it in her body, the combination of glut and lack. They have sixty-four dollars in a locked box in the glove compartment. If they don’t get another gig, what will they do?

  Klara thinks of Ilya, her mentor. He was the one who taught her that magic tricks are created for men: the pockets in suit jackets are perfectly sized to hold steel cups, and palming is easier with large hands. Then he taught her how to reinvent them. Klara uses compression-friendly foam balls, and she learned to work seamlessly with the drawer in a card table. But there was no way to get around the size of her palms, and when it came to sleight-of-hand magic, she could only rely on technique. “You’ve gotta get as good as the best men in magic,” Ilya told her, drilling her in one-handed cuts until her fingers throbbed with pain. “And then you’ve gotta get better.”

  Those sleight-of-hand tricks—they were her strength. They still are. But Klara and Raj have been trying to be Siegfried and Roy. In the process, Klara forgot the old, humble magic on which she was raised. She forgot herself.

  “No,” she says. “It isn’t.”

  She walks into the wings to retrieve Ilya’s black box, which she brought today for luck. She carries it across the stage and hops down into the audience, then turns the box into a table in front of the executives. Up close, the men don’t look alike at all. One is compact and hygienically bald, his blue eyes alert behind silver-rimmed glasses. He wears a red silk shirt. The other, in a black-and-white pinstriped shirt, is tall and pear shaped, his dark hair combed into a ponytail. Lavender glasses perch atop his nose, a delicate gold cross around his neck.

  Raj walks to the edge of the stage and sits behind Klara. His body is stiff, but he’s watching her. She pulls her favorite deck out of the table’s hidden compartment and spreads the cards on Ilya’s table.

  “Pick three,” she tells the bald man. “Turn them faceup.”

  He selects the ace of clubs, the queen of diamonds, and the seven of hearts. She puts them back in the deck. Then she claps.

  The ace flies out, fluttering midair before landing on a chair. She claps again: the queen sticks out of the center. When she claps a third time, the seven of hearts appears in her hand.

  “Ha!” says the man. “Very nice.”

  Klara doesn’t allow herself the compliment. She has work to do—Raise Rise, to be exact. She pulls a permanent marker out of the drawer and passes it to the man in the lavender glasses.

  “Cut the cards,” she says. “Any place you like.” He does, revealing the three of spades. “Excellent. Would you sign this card for me?”

  “With the marker?”

  “With the marker. You’ll keep me honest. There may be another three of spades in this deck, but none that look like yours. We’ll put it back in the middle of the deck, like this. But here’s a funny thing. When I tap the card at the top of the deck”—she turns it over—“there’s your three. Strange, isn’t it? Now, let’s put it where it belongs, in the center. But wait: if I tap the top card a second time, here’s the three again. It’s risen through the deck.”

  Raise Rise is one of the most difficult tricks Klara knows, and she hasn’t practiced it in years. She shouldn’t be able to do it—but something is helping her. Something is pulling her back to the person she’s been all along.

  “Now, I’ll show you very carefully how I put it in the middle of the deck. I’ll even leave it sticking out this time so you can be sure I’m not lying—you see it? So do I. So why,” she says, turning the top card over, “is it on top for the third time? And now—let’s see; I think I feel it moving—it’s strange, but I could swear it’s on the bottom. Would you remove the bottom card, please?”

  He does. It’s his. He chuckles. “Well done. I wouldn’t have noticed the double lift if I hadn’t been looking for it.”

  He still has one eye on his pager. Klara makes him her target. Her pinkie is cramping—it’s been a year since she worked on her outjogging—but she doesn’t have time to shake out her hands. She grabs a fistful of quarters when she puts the deck away and points at the metal coffee mug that sits at the bald man’s feet.

  “Mind if I use that? Thank you; you’re very kind. I don’t know if you’ve noticed—I don’t know if you’ve looked—but this place is lousy with coins.”

  She holds the mug in her right hand and splays her left, to show them it’s empty. When she snaps, a quarter appears between her left thumb and forefinger. She drops it into the mug, where it clinks. She pulls two coins from the bald man’s shirt collar, one from each of his ears, and two from the larger man’s shirt pocket.

  “Now, this is your mug, not mine. There’s no secret compartment, no storehouse of coins. So I bet you’re wondering how I’m doing this. I bet you already have your predictions.” Klara gestures to the dark-haired man’s glasses. He hands them to her, and she tips them toward the coffee mug. One quarter slides over each lens. “It’s a natural response: we give life logic all the time. You see me producing coins over and over. Well, you assume, they must be in my left hand. And when I show you my left hand, when you realize that I can’t be holding them there, you change the logic. Now you’re thinking they’re all in my right hand. It would be useful, wouldn’t it? So close to the mug. You can’t see that I might”—she passes the mug to her left hand—“be shifting”—she reveals her right hand, empty—“methods.”

  She coughs; two coins tumble out of her mouth. The dark-haired man puts his pager in his shirt pocket. Now she has his attention.

  “You’re a religious man,” says Klara, eyeing the cross around his neck. “My father was, too. Sometimes I thought he was my opposite. His rules versus my rule-breaking. His reality versus my fantasies. But what I’ve realized—what I think he already knew—is that we believed in the same thing. You could call it a trapdoor, a hidden compartment, or you could call it God: a placeholder for what we don’t know. A space where the impossible becomes possible. When he said the kiddush or lit the candles on Shabbat, he was
doing magic tricks.”

  Raj coughs, to warn her. Where are you going? But she knows where she’s going. She’s known all along.

  “We know something about reality, my father and I. And I bet you know it, too. Is it that reality is too much? Too painful, too limited, too restrictive of joy or opportunity? No,” she says. “I think it’s that reality is not enough.”

  Klara sets the mug on the floor and retrieves a cup and ball from the drawer. She puts the empty cup facedown on the table and places the ball on top.

  “It’s not enough to explain what we don’t understand.” She lifts the ball and holds it tight in her fist. “It’s not enough to account for the inconsistencies we see and hear and feel.” When she opens her fist, the ball has vanished. “It’s not enough on which to pin our hopes, our dreams—our faith.” She raises the steel cup to reveal the ball beneath it. “Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate”—she puts the cup down—“reality”—she makes a fist—“is.”

  When she opens her first, the red ball isn’t there. What’s there is a full, perfect strawberry.

  Silence stretches from the carpeted floor to the fifty-foot ceiling, from the back of the stage to the balcony. Then Raj begins to clap, and the bald man joins in. Only the man with the gold cross withholds applause. Instead, he says, “When can you start?”

  Klara stares at the strawberry in her palm. It’s damp. She can smell it. There’s a roar in her ears like the waterfall she heard outside the Mirage—or was it a saw?

  The bald man takes a leather-bound calendar from his pocket. “I’m thinking December, January—January? Put her right before Siegfried and Roy?”

  The larger man has a voice like something moving underwater. “They’ll eat her alive.”

  “Right, but as an opener. We’ll give her a half hour, people are filtering in, they want something to look at; she’s a good-looking girl—you’re a good-looking girl—she gets their attention, asses in seats, and bam! Tigers, lions, explosions. Blast off.”

  “They’ll need new costumes,” says the other man.

  “Oh, complete overhaul on the costumes. We’ll get you a production team, cut the birdcage, cut the cabinet, amp up the rope hang, amp up the mind-reading trick—bring an audience member onstage, that kind of thing; we’ll get you set up for it.” Someone’s pager beeps. Both men check their pockets. “Listen, we’ll talk. You got four months before opening, you’re gonna be fine.”

  • • •

  Jesus fucking Christ,” says Raj as soon as the elevator doors close. “A strawberry.” He’s laughing, crumpled in the corner where two of the glass walls meet. “I’ll never know how you pulled that off, but it was perfect.”

  “I don’t know, either.”

  Raj’s laughter stops, though his smile still hangs open.

  “I’m serious,” Klara says. “I’d never seen that strawberry before. I have no idea where it came from.”

  Her first thought is that the blackouts have come back: perhaps she drove to a market, bought a container, stuffed one in her pocket. But that doesn’t make sense. Raj is the only one who drives the rental car, and there’s no grocery store in walking distance from King’s Row.

  “What do you think you are?” Raj asks. There’s something feral in his face, something wild, like a wolf guarding his kill. “A magician who believes in her own tricks?”

  Months ago, she would have been wounded. This time, she isn’t. She’s noticed something.

  The look in Raj’s eyes. She mistook it for anger. But that’s not what it is.

  He’s afraid of her.

  18.

  Raj works with the production team to rig the Jaws of Life and stage Second Sight. He designs a new set of props for the Indian Needle Trick: bigger needles, so they read from the stage, and red cord instead of thread. The Mirage’s entertainment director asks Klara if she’ll let Raj saw her in half—“Easy-peasy; won’t hurt a bit”—but she refuses. He thinks she’s afraid of the trick when the truth is that she could give him an hour-long tutorial on P. T. Selbit and his misogynistic inventions: Destroying a Girl, Stretching a Lady, Crushing a Woman, all of them perfectly timed to capitalize on postwar bloodthirst and women’s suffrage.

  Klara won’t be a woman who is sawed in half or tied in chains—nor will she be rescued or liberated. She’ll save herself. She’ll be the saw.

  But she knows they might lose the job if she pushes back more. She lets the costumer raise her hemline by five inches and lower her neckline by two, fit the chest with padded cups. During rehearsals, Raj stands proudly, but Klara is shrinking. The radiance she felt during the audition is becoming dimmer every day—it’s washed out by the five-hundred-watt spotlights, obscured by the fog of the smoke machines. She thought the Mirage wanted her as she was, but they want her cubed, larger than life. They want her Vegas. To them, she’s as much a novelty as the pink volcano outside the hotel: their very own girl magician.

  • • •

  Ruby’s cartilage is turning to bone, and her bones are fusing. Her body is seventy percent water, the same percentage of water on Earth. She has delicate canine fangs and one set of knobby molars. She can say go and no and come me, which means come with me, which turns Klara’s heart to goop. She shrieks with delight at the sight of the pink lizards that crawl through King’s Row and holds pebbles tight in her fists. When the show opens and they get their first big paycheck, Raj wants to sell the trailer and rent an apartment, look at preschools and pediatricians. But Klara is running out of time. If the woman on Hester Street was right, she’ll die in two months.

  She doesn’t tell Raj. He’ll think she’s even crazier. Besides, she rarely sees him: between rehearsals, he stays at the theater. From a grid ninety feet above the stage, he rigs a system of customized lines and pulleys to steel pipe battens. He uses the stage’s traps and sloats to devise a disappearance for Klara after her Breakaway bow. He builds a new card table with the construction crew and helps them carry props from the shop to the stage. The stage manager loves him, but some of the techs are resentful. Once, on her way to pick Ruby up from day care, Klara passes two stagehands. They’re standing just inside the doors to the theater, watching Raj mark the stage with tape.

  “You used to be the one to set the marks,” one says. “You aren’t careful, Gandhi’ll take your job.”

  • • •

  Klara walks to Vons, pushing Ruby in her red plastic stroller. She nicks eight cans of Gerber sweet potatoes from aisle four, which clink in her purse as she walks toward the exit. The sliding doors open, and she feels a rush of warm air. It’s evening in late November, but the sky is still denim blue. She sits down beneath a street lamp, opens one of the Gerber jars, and feeds Ruby with her index finger.

  Two orbs of white light grow closer, larger, and a silver Oldsmobile rolls to a stop. Klara covers Ruby’s eyes and squints, but the car doesn’t keep moving: it pauses in front of her like she’s blocking the way out of the lot. In the driver’s seat, a man is staring at her. He has rumpled strawberry blond hair and pale gold eyes and a mouth hanging open. He looks exactly like Eddie O’Donoghue, the cop from San Francisco.

  Klara scrambles to her feet and pulls Ruby onto one hip. In the process, she drops the jar of food, which cracks and spills orange mush, but she doesn’t stop—she walks and then she starts running back to the anonymous crowds of the Strip. She’s weaving through tourists, pushing the empty stroller crookedly with one hand and remembering the thrust of his tongue in her mouth, when she slams into the back of a heavyset woman with two long, brown braids.

  Klara’s blood freezes. It’s the fortune teller. She grabs the woman’s shoulder.

  The woman turns. She’s only a t
eenager. Beneath the dancing lights of the Stage Door Casino, her face turns red, then blue.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” The girl’s pupils are dilated, and there’s a bullish thrust to her chin.

  “I’m sorry,” Klara whispers, withdrawing. “I thought you were someone else.”

  Ruby screams from her waist. Klara fumbles ahead, past Caesars Palace and the Hilton Suites, past Harrah’s and Carnaval Court. She never thought she’d be so glad to see the Mirage volcano’s stupid hot pink froth. Only when she enters the hotel does she realize she left Ruby’s stroller in front of the Stage Door, empty.

  • • •

  She doesn’t want to hear the knocks—she wants them to go back where they came from—but they’re only getting louder. Simon is angry with her; he thinks she’s forgetting him. An hour before their first dress rehearsal, Klara walks into the women’s bathroom at the Mirage and sets Ruby on the counter next to a vase of fake flowers. She takes out her watch. Meet comes quickly, as before. Thirteen minutes later, she hears a fifth knock: another M. In five minutes, there’s an E.

  She thinks he’s starting the same word over when she realizes what he’s telling her. Meet me. After sixty-five minutes, she has another one.

  Us.

  Simon and Saul. Us. The bathroom seesaws. Klara puts her hands on the marble counter and drops her head to her chest. She’s not sure how long it’s been when she hears Ruby’s voice. The baby isn’t crying; she’s not even babbling. What she says is clear as day: “Ma. Ma. Ma-ma.”

  Inside Klara, a long stalk keels and snaps. Always, it’s like this: the family that created her and the family she created, pulling her in opposite directions. Someone’s beating on the door.

  “Klara?” Raj shouts, coming inside.

  Instead of his usual outfit—a white T-shirt, smudged ashy, and an old pair of Carhartts—he wears his costume: a custom-made swallowtail coat and top hat, smooth and black as a penguin’s pelt. Ruby sits on the other side of the counter. She’s crawled into one of the Mirage’s gaping gold sinks and is playing with the automatic soap dispenser. There’s blue froth in her mouth, and she’s wailing.