Rust and Bone

by Craig Davidson

  At the age of eighteen Herbert rode the bus to Toronto. He picked an agent’s name from the phonebook, walked to the Bay Street address, barged past the secretary into his office and ran off a series of rapid-fire illusions, culminating with a Fiery Orb. The agent, face sweat stung from the lingering heat, inked Herbert to a contract on the spot.

  “I’m sorry,” Jess said as her brother turned his hand in the soft light coming through the window. “Shouldn’t have said that.” She sipped her chrysanthemum drink. “Gets better the more you drink.”

  Herbert’s rise was, to use the industry parlance, meteoric. He embarked on a cross-Canada tour. “A latter-day Houdini,” the Toronto Star raved; “Destined to be the hottest name in magic!” heralded the Montreal Gazette. Europe came next, Herbert playing on the great Old World stages where Robert-Houdin once caught bullets between his teeth and made the floorboards seep blood. He rode a gathering groundswell into America, playing to packed houses at Radio City Music Hall, the Emerson Majestic Theater, and the Los Angeles Orpheum.

  He flew Jess and Sam in for his New York performance. Jess remembered sitting in a balcony box with her uncle, who looked uncomfortable amidst red velvet and shadowy silhouettes of wealthy men and women.

  But mostly she remembered Herbert.

  He seemed so small in the footlights’ austere glare, a stagehand startled by the curtain’s rise. But as he worked into his act, materializing playing cards by the dozens and flicking them with such force they ricocheted off lobby doors and balcony rails, Jess realized she was witnessing a man in his element. Sometimes he responded to the applause with an indulgent smile; other times by scorning his audience altogether. Herbert was forgiven his open disdain. The audience felt privileged to be witnessing a bright new star at the dawn of his career.

  There were television specials—Herbert Mallory’s Cabinet of Illusions!; Herbert Mallory: Upside Down in the Water Torture Cell!— and a string of well-publicized relationships, starlets, and supermodels and an adult film star. There were drunken fracases outside Hollywood nightclubs and the inevitable paparazzi scuffles. There were the grand gestures, such as the day Jess found a Mercedes convertible in her driveway. He developed the manner of a prince among commoners. He dispensed favors like gold and expected to be deferred to at any and every moment.

  His career ended live on national television, in front of an estimated seventeen million viewers, in a span of less than four minutes.

  “I’m not saying I wouldn’t try to find him,” Jess said. “It’s just, I won’t go alone. I’ve got my own problems.”

  Herbert nodded towards the pyramid of television screens. “I saw the news reports. Wasn’t right, what they did. Suspending you.”

  “I asked to be suspended.”

  “You did?”

  “I don’t belong there.”

  The stunt—or “personal challenge,” as Herbert called it—was a recreation of Houdini’s famous Buried Alive, in which the straitjacketed magician was sealed in a casket then lowered into a vault, which was then filled with sand. Escape was relatively simple: after wriggling out of the jacket, Herbert had only to slide open a panel in the casket’s base and dig through a foot of sand to a trapdoor.

  Jess was at home when it happened, watching on TV. It had all seemed so strange. The sand had been poured in but the vault was still open. Then a deep muted crack, the sound a bone makes fracturing deep underwater. The surface stirred a little; air from the ruptured casket vented in a series of sandy puffs. The cameras pulled back, as though ashamed of their intensity. As she sat in front of the television holding Ted’s hand, part of Jess hated Herbert for the manipulation.

  One of the producers came onstage, hollering, “Get him out of there—get him the hell out! ” Workmen rushed out with crowbars and screwdrivers, attacking the vault seams. The cameras zoomed in. An audience member clambered onto the stage, wedging his car key into a seam and prying with what little force he could muster. A technician tore at the vault with his bare hands.

  Three minutes and thirty-seven seconds passed before they were able to break the vault apart. The retaining wall gave way, washing a tide of sand into the front row. Jess saw Herbert’s arm turning over and over as his body tumbled down the grade of sand, his tuxedo jacket—he must’ve escaped his straitjacket before the casket fractured—rucked up to his elbow, gold cufflink glinting in the overheads. His body rolled until it hit the footlights.

  Paramedics dragged him from the sand and administered mouth-to-mouth. For thirty seconds there was only the artificial rise and fall of his chest, a fragile bellows. One shoe on, the other yanked off. A hole in his sock. Shirt singed from the white-hot foots. He sat up abruptly, arms jerked out, fingers grasping at nothing. His eyes wide, grains of sand adhering to the lashes.

  “Are you all right?” the producer asked. “Herbert? Herbert?”

  “It’s eternity in there,” was all he said.

  The network cut to a rerun.

  Jess sat down. “As far as I’m concerned, our father deserted us. But if you want to track him down, I’ll tag along. I don’t want to speak to him, or even look at him. But I’ll go.”

  Herbert stared out at the world as he’d known it for nearly two years: vague and filtered, kept at bay by bricks and mortar and filthy window glass. “So you’re saying I have to go?”

  “Know what Sam calls this place? The Fortress of Solitude.” Jess raised the soda can to her lips, mildly surprised to find it empty. “I don’t know what happened in that casket. You never told me—I don’t know you’ve told anybody. I imagine it was horrible. And I know you’ve got money, enough to build this place and pay for that Jag and keep you in foreign soft drinks the rest of your life. But you need to get out.”

  Herbert gave her a look—a funny, diverted glance, turning away from her as you might from someone who is sick. “You know why I’ve never talked about it? Nobody’s ever really asked. My agent, my publicist, they were always telling me to get over it, forget it, it’s the past. Do you really want to know?”

  “Do you really want to tell me?”

  After a moment, he said, “It was dark. It was dark and I could hear the casket creaking. The sand was imported from Egypt. Powdered bones, mostly, animals who’d died in the desert; supposedly more airy, lighter. I felt the pressure building as they poured it in—my ears popped. I knew it was going to shatter. That was the worst part. It was dark and I knew it was going to shatter. I called out a few times— screamed, I guess. Four tons of sand. That’s like, two and a half elephants.” He shook his head wonderingly, as if the weight, stated in plain physical terms, shocked him. “It buckled. A shard of wood cut my cheek. That’s all I really remember. My life didn’t flash before my eyes. All I remember is darkness and pressure. This hard, featureless pressure.”

  For a long time neither of them spoke. Why would anyone squirrel himself away after something like that, Jess wondered. She’d never want to be cooped up again—sleep in an open field under the stars, no walls, no roof. No pressure.

  “A lot of luck in my life, up ’til then.” Herbert shrugged. “Streak was bound to end.”

  For the first time in many years Jess thought of walking home from school with him in the winter twilight, their flesh an oyster-gray color against the snow, Herbert animated beyond all reason, circling her like an excited dog until she’d wrestled him down and given him a snowy face wash, the two of them tumbling over the clean white ground like shirts in a dryer. She couldn’t connect the man sitting across from her to the boy she’d known years ago. There wasn’t even a vague outline, a silhouette.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow morning at nine,” she said. “You walk out the front door and I’ll drive wherever you want.”

  “Can’t you give me a few days?”

  “How serious are you about this? The article’s dated yesterday.”

  Herbert followed his sister to the front door. Hazy autumn sunshine streamed through a bank of saw-edged clouds; after t
he sepulcher that was her brother’s house, Jess had to squint. Opening the Jeep door, she cast a brief glance over her shoulder: Herbert stood in the hall, face broken into shadowed squares by the screen door’s mesh.

  THAT EVENING she sat on the porch with her husband, his hand holding hers under a blanket. Since being promoted off the factory floor his hands had softened, become more careful and defensive, as though, numbed from years on the line, feeling had returned to them.

  An early twilight hung suspended over the downtown skyline, patches of pewter burning between the high rises.

  “So, you’re sure it’s your dad in the photo?”

  “It’s him.”

  Ted’s father was an insurance agent, his mother a nurse. His family history was marked by the characteristic dullness resulting in well-adjusted offspring: no extramarital affairs or crushing debts or manic, right-brain-oriented parents. Having never known people like them, he could conceive of Jess’s father and brother only as vague abstractions, over-the-top comic book characters brought discordantly to life.

  “Think Herb will leave that house?”

  “Depends how important it is to him.” Jess touched her top lip to her nose, inhaling. “I think so. Unfinished business.”

  “And you?”

  “With Dad? We’re through.”

  Later, lying in bed, she watched Ted’s reflected image brush its teeth in the bathroom mirror. His body was that of a retired athlete gone slightly to seed. A newly acquired paunch overhung the waistband of his boxers, though he carried it well, as some men had the ability to. He brushed with swift, raking strokes, as though scouring a crusty pot. White foam ran down his fingers and wrist.

  It really is true, she thought to herself. Men are almost always more attractive when they think nobody’s watching.

  Fakery #22: The Bleeding Wall. Invented by Robert-Houdin, grandfather of modern magic, it is best performed in a public square. The magician draws a pistol, aims at a wall, and fires. Whitewash and plaster chips fly, and where the bullet strikes, blood drips down the masonry. The deceit: earlier that day, the magician drilled into the wall’s opposite side, filling it with a solution of ferric chloride. When the bullet—coated in a solution of sodium sulfo-cyanide—punctures the wall, a chemical reaction occurs, causing a thick crimson substance to spill from the hole. Interesting note: Houdin initially used his own blood, but, following a stretch of daily performances that left him wan and depleted, opted for this chemical substitute.

  [4]

  It was a fine, crisp morning. After last night’s rainfall the sun was blanketed by a layer of wrung-out clouds; they streamed down the sky, misty and tattered, a frozen waterfall. Jess unrolled the window to let cool, creosote-infused air rush in. It was the sort of day she wished she could freeze-frame and repeat indefinitely—she’d take this day the rest of her life.

  She pulled into Herbert’s driveway. Her brother sat on a trunk behind the screen door.

  “Coming?”

  “I’m debating.” Herbert’s voice was thin as a communion wafer.

  She glanced at her watch: 9:03. “Do I have to hogtie you and drag you out?”

  “For god’s sake—a minute, Jess, alright?”

  Her brother performed a series of rapid in- and exhalations, a powerlifter pumping himself up for a record-breaking clean-and-jerk. He pushed the screen door open with the toe of his loafer and made a timid half-step from darkness into daylight. He wore a six-button double-breasted wool gabardine suit, creases sharp as a soldier’s dress uniform. His face bore the squint-eyed, faintly horrified expression of an infant forced prematurely from the womb. He stepped down onto the driveway. To the best of Jess’s knowledge, it was the furthest he’d ventured in years.

  “Hard part’s over now.”

  “I’ve been out once or twice,” he said defensively.

  “Oh?”

  “Just last spring, in fact. A hobo took up residence in the gazebo.” He tilted his face to meet the sun. “I rousted him with a stick.”

  The next obstacle Jess faced was her brother’s luggage. She’d packed a small knapsack with a change of clothes. Herbert’s luggage consisted of a trunk, a footlocker, two suitcases, and a duffle bag of sufficient bulk to smuggle a pair of contortionists.

  “We’re going on an eight-hour car ride, not around the world in eighty days.”

  He looked wounded. “I need these.”

  “Quit being a prima donna. Why?”

  “How will he know I’ve been successful?”

  “What, did you pack awards and plaques? I’m sure he reads the paper.”

  Jess bartered him down to the duffel bag and a suitcase. She hefted the latter, so heavy it may have contained gold bullion, and dragged it to the Jeep.

  “I refuse to ride in that bog stomper,” Herbert said. “We’ll take my car.”

  Jess’s body soaked into the Jag’s tanned leather upholstery as water into a dry sponge. The sleek European dials and gauges were ringed by bands of polished teak. The odometer read 7.2 kilometers, which she suspected was the distance separating the dealership from Herbert’s hermitage.

  She caught the on-ramp at Lake Street and swung onto the QEW. They passed the Henley Regatta, where a solitary sculler plied the calm brown water, and the slopes of St. David’s Bench, where vineyard laborers plucked late-harvest Riesling off the vines. At the city limits they passed a flaking sign that read: Thank You for Visiting St. Catharines, home of Herbert T. Mallory, Jr., The World’s Greatest Magician!, with an illustration of a disembodied hand yanking a rabbit from a top hat.

  Herbert said, “Wish someone would burn that damn thing.”

  He rummaged through his suitcase, retrieving the pipe Jess had seen jammed in his face during countless media appearances. It was a calabash of a style favored by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective.

  “Why do you smoke that thing?”

  “Because I am a sophisticate.” Herbert’s tone suggested Jess wouldn’t recognize sophistication if it crept up and nibbled her bottom.

  “It’s a silly affected habit. Not at all you.”

  “You have your vices,” Herbert said, “and I mine.”

  On the north side of the Hamilton Skyway, Lake Ontario lay flat and emerald against the sun; on the south side, Stelco smokestacks rose in silvery pillars against the blue canvas of sky. Traffic was surprisingly light and they made good time. The Jag whispered along at 110 kph, Jess resting a couple of fingers on the wheel to keep it steady. After navigating through Toronto, Jess unrolled the window an inch or two, breathing the dung-scented air blowing in over the pastures. Herbert’s pipe smelled like a pan of scorched cherries jubilee.

  She remembered driving this highway with her father and brother, traveling to a birthday party or bar mitzvah or cottage-country fair. The men sat in the front, her father lecturing Herbert on various tricks and illusions, pointing out the deceptions. She sat in the back. Every so often her dad would reach over the seat, squeeze her knee, and say, “Paying attention, dear?” At those times Jess wished her mother was still alive, or that she had a sister, any buffer between her and the men in the front seat. Her father made no allowance for the possibility she might not want to dedicate her life to magic; his mania was so all-consuming, and he’d found such a willing acolyte in his son, that he found it inconceivable she wouldn’t share his obsession. But even at her tender age, Jess knew a dead-end opportunity when she saw one: what role did women play in magic? Sequin-topped diversions. Eye candy. Her father used her no differently: Just stand off to the side and smile, dear. Let those darling dimples do all the work. Looking back, Jess realized her major life choices were influenced by a desire to surround herself with individuals and institutions the opposite of everything— whimsy, fickleness, fantasy—that magic, and her family, represented.

  The highway wound along the eastern shore of Georgian Bay. Glimpsed through clusters of silver maple and Douglas fir stippling the shoreline, the water stretched like a dark
curved mirror, interrupted only by a chain of dimensionless islands.

  “So,” Jess said, “ever think about getting back into it?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Magic. The life.”

  “Well, if you mean the sort of tricks I made a living off, no.” He opened a window and scattered pipe ashes to the breeze. “I’m interested in real magic.”

  “Dad’s book should’ve convinced you there’s no such thing.”

  “Not true. Dad believed in true magic. Why do you think he went to such lengths debunking the frauds?”

  A sudden trapdoor feeling opened in Jess’s stomach. Here was something else her father had kept hidden away from her. She stared out the window, where a flock of migrating geese kept such perfect pace with the car as to appear frozen in place, pinned like moths to the backdrop of sky.

  “There is real magic,” Herbert continued. “A Bedouin mystic sealed in a vault for two years emerges alive and in good health. A Navajo shaman changes into a timber wolf before a gathering of missionaries. A Hindu holy man climbs a rope into the clouds and vanishes. These things happened. Recorded fact. Transformation, telepathy, invisibility—it can be done.”

  “Get out of here.”

  “I’m serious. Tell me this: have you ever heard of Swami Vindii Lagahoo?”

  “We play croquet together on Wednesdays.”

  “Aren’t you clever. Lagahoo lived many years ago in Persia, where he was a spiritual counselor of sorts to the prince. Lagahoo was known as a great sorcerer—he lived for 127 years, according to the records of the day—and was credited with many miracles: producing sacred ash from his long sleeves, pulling cancerous tumors through the skin of sick men, levitation, transubstantiation. It’s written that once, at a palace gathering, he sliced open the gut of a suckling pig that had been roasting on a spit in full view of the guests—a dozen doves flew out of the slit! Astounding!”