Here Is Real Magic

by Nate Staniforth

  What is this loss and where does it come from? Though I was too young to recognize it at the time, my interest in magic has been bound to this question from the beginning. As a child I could see some weight in the world pressing down on the adults—parents, teachers, and even, already, some of my friends—and magic was a way to make it go away for a moment. One year at Easter during our annual hunt for plastic eggs I used my newfound sleight-of-hand skills to secretly hide the eggs again as I went around the living room with my younger brother and sister who were still busy trying to find them. At that age I knew the Easter Bunny wasn’t real—I knew my parents had hidden the eggs—and I thought that if I could secretly hide enough of them again my parents would find them and wonder where they had all come from. I wanted to give back some of the mystery and magic they were trying to give us. I thought they needed it more than I did.

  That finding wonder and amazement becomes harder as an adult is so universally acknowledged that it sounds obvious. But the more I consider the reason, the less certain I am of a simple explanation.

  The common answer goes something like this. As we get older, we learn more about how the world works, and because we have more information, the world becomes less amazing. But logically this doesn’t work, and even a child can see it isn’t really true. You may learn at school that lightning is a discharge of static electricity built up in the atmosphere and released suddenly into the ground. But this knowledge does nothing to diminish the awesome wonder of a thunderstorm in July that lights up the darkness with incandescent flashes of white spiderwebbing across the sky and splits the air with thunder that shakes the walls and sends the cat running for the basement. In the face of this undeniable power it is not the facts about lightning that strike you numb with dread or still with wonder, but rather the direct, immediate experience of those facts. You can explain lightning, but you cannot explain it away.

  Wonder is not the product of ignorance. It comes through knowledge rather than in spite of it. In those years of scouring the library shelves for anything even remotely connected to the work of magic and magicians I discovered a passage by Albert Einstein. By this point I had started a notebook of magic—my own magic book—and I copied the quote inside the front cover: “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all true science. Whoever does not know it, who can no longer pause to wonder or stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead.”

  But understanding this is one thing and feeling it is another. I had this quote taped to the inside of my touring case during my first year on the road and I’d read it for inspiration before going onstage. In the beginning it felt like a promise. Then it felt like an accusation. Then it felt like a verdict.

  Five years is a long time to be on the road. Even with the six-months-on, six-months-off schedule I had devised to ensure we had as much time together as possible, Katharine and I were tired of the constant time apart. The good shows were better than they had ever been—the pacing was tight and my dynamic range was increasing so I could be funnier in the light moments and more intense in the serious moments, and this gave each performance a depth and a tactility that clearly resonated with the audience. I was signing a lot of posters after each show, and taking a lot of pictures, and it was the only time I had ever really felt like a success. However, I was acting out of character in a way that made me realize something needed to change—skipping sound check, arriving at the airport later and later, almost missing my flights, even forgetting to buy airline tickets to the shows, like if I could just screw this up badly enough I could make it all go away and go home. I knew things were falling apart before they did, giving myself the curious perspective of a captain watching his ship sail toward an iceberg and not knowing how to stop the impending disaster, or whether he even wanted to.

  One day I landed at the airport—I think I was in Portland but I couldn’t tell you whether it was Maine or Oregon—and texted Katharine from the baggage claim as I waited for my luggage.

  Hey. Long day here. Couldn’t fall asleep last night and had to wake up at 4 this morning to make the flight. Waiting for my bags now and have no idea how I’m going to get through this one tonight. So tired. Bored. Angry. This is ridiculous. I miss you terribly and wish I could just come home. Be careful what you wish for, right? You might get it. Sorry I’m always so far away. What a fucking mess. Think I need a break from the road for a while. Do you want to run away with me?

  A response came back almost immediately.

  Hi Nate. Think you intended this for someone else.

  Oh shit. My text had not gone to Katharine. My text had gone to the student activities volunteer in charge of my show that night.

  How long could this last?

  Not long, certainly. Every time I got onstage felt as if it could be the last time, as if this once-grand adventure could all fall apart at any minute, and this gave the shows a desperate, hungry edge that drove them beyond what I was really capable of sustaining as a performer. The result was greatness—sometimes, when it worked—and catastrophe when it didn’t. There were no mediocre shows. It was all or nothing. And more and more, it was nothing.

  A few nights later in Virginia I got into an argument onstage. I have it on video, actually, and it gets worse every time I watch it. A group of, what—frat guys, athletes?—had been talking to one another throughout the first twenty minutes of the show. Usually I can bring everyone into the fold by the end of the first illusion but that night they kept talking and I lost my patience.

  “Hey,” I said. “I don’t know how to say ‘Shut the fuck up’ nicely, so I’m just going to say it meanly. Shut the fuck up.”

  This fell like the first blow in a fistfight. The whole room reeled back, sucker-punched. Everyone sat, silent, still, and waiting. On my good nights I would have listened to this silence carefully, gauging the impact of my words and adjusting my course accordingly, but this wasn’t one of my good nights. There may have been an appropriate way to handle this kind of situation, but I hadn’t found it. I kept going.

  “Listen. I woke up at three in the morning to get here. I care about this. I’m here because I want to be here. What the fuck are you doing here?”

  Silence. Absolute silence. I knew that my agent was going to get a call about this show. Maybe the campus newspaper was there. Maybe someone was filming this show and I’d be on YouTube by morning. I didn’t care.

  “If you want to talk to your friends, get the fuck out and go fucking talk to them somewhere else.”

  They looked at me, shocked but unmoving.

  “I’m not joking. You heard me. Get the fuck out.”

  The four guys stood and shuffled to the exit. They weren’t alone. Two girls in the back walked out. Another group of guys did the same. It wasn’t a mass defection—most of the audience was still there. It was a bad moment, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  The disaster came three nights later.

  THE BREAK

  That night I was scheduled to perform at Marquette University. I arrived in Milwaukee, checked in to the hotel, and drove to the theater early so I could have some time in the room before the show. By that point, the show was more of an argument than an exhibition, and if I didn’t bleed out some of that frustration ahead of time, things could get ugly. The janitor let me in the side door and turned on the houselights. For the moment I had the place to myself so I found a seat halfway back and stared up at the edge of the stage. How would it feel to watch my own show from here in the audience?

  Many people can relate to the disillusionment that comes from discovering the grinding day-to-day reality behind the alluring veneer of a job you’ve always wanted, but this loss carries a special meaning for magicians. A lawyer or a nurse may discover one day that the spark has gone and work that once felt challenging and rewarding has somehow turned to drudgery, but for the magician this is the very heart of the profession that is lost. No one becomes a magician for practical reasons. We get into magic
because we love that rush of astonishment and wonder, and when that goes, nothing remains.

  Four hours later I was one hour into a ninety-minute show and it was going spectacularly well. The campus auditorium was packed and I was building to the end of one of my best pieces. A young woman stood next to me onstage—she’d raised her hand to volunteer even before I finished asking for someone to help—and if the next minute or so went well her mind was going to explode.

  “Claire,” I said, “in just a moment I’m going to ask you to open your hands, but before we go on, let me be clear on one point.”

  The room was still and everyone was waiting. Claire was listening, motionless, except for her hands, which were stretched out in front of her body and clasped together and almost imperceptibly shaking. She was holding a clear Ziploc bag, sealed and crumpled into a ball inside her fist. She thought it was empty. It was not.

  “Before we started I asked you to close your hands around the bag to keep it safe. Do you remember?”

  She nodded.

  “Since the moment you closed your hands, I haven’t been anywhere near you, right? There is no way I could have introduced anything into your hands over the past few minutes?” Now, this wasn’t actually true, but it felt true to her and she would remember it that way.

  She nodded again.

  I turned to the audience. “I had Claire close her hands around the empty bag and I left her here onstage. Then I went down into the audience, borrowed a dollar bill, sealed it inside another Ziploc bag, and asked this gentleman on the other side of the room to hold it closed within his hands. Sir, have I come anywhere near you?” He shook his head. “That’s right. I have not.” Again, this wasn’t true either, but you’d be amazed at the details you can make people forget once you’ve learned to command their attention.

  “Sir, would you remind me of your name?”

  “David,” he said.

  “David, open your hands.”

  He opened his hands and uncrumpled the bag. It was empty. The audience drew one collective breath, but I held up my hand for them to wait.

  “Claire,” I said, and then paused to let them get ahead of me so they’d know where I was going. “Open your hands.”

  I had said those words before. I had said them a thousand times and I would say them a thousand more.

  Claire opened her hands and found the dollar sealed inside her Ziploc bag. Her face was bright and the audience was clapping, but I had a weight in the pit of my stomach and I couldn’t hear anything. I was staring out above their heads and having a hard time keeping my focus.

  “What?” I said.

  “That was incredible!” she shouted again.

  Something had gone bad. I was standing onstage in front of five hundred people and I had nothing to say. I looked out at the audience and stared up at the stage lights like a deer on the road about to be hit by a car. I couldn’t move.

  Claire looked at me, expectant. The audience was waiting. How long had I been standing there?

  “Claire—ladies and gentlemen—” I said, weakly, and she finally left the stage. The audience was still waiting.

  “I just—”

  But my mind was wandering.

  “I just wanted to say—”

  Doing magic used to feel like an adventure. Now I had done this so many times I didn’t even need to pay attention. I could just show up and the show would run all on its own. I had moved on, unplugged, disconnected. I was tired of being here. I didn’t care anymore. A magician has to believe in the magic or it isn’t magic. I was doing all of this for the wrong reasons.

  Even from the balcony they could tell something was wrong.

  Do you want to know the real secret to becoming a great magician? It’s very simple. You just have to care about it more than anyone else would ever consider possible. You give everything inside you to the work, night after night onstage and day after day in the studio or the workshop where you pour your life into the slow, patient job of taking tricks and turning them into magic. The real work happens alone, in front of a mirror practicing for hours on end or in front of a drawing board or a notebook, designing a bridge strong enough to span the great distance between deception on one side and magic on the other. And if you do it right, when you take the stage a show becomes an expression of the absolute highest that you have to offer. Do you want to be a great magician? Anyone can do it. All it takes is your life; your waking, breathing, hoping, hurting, day-in, day-out life.

  But something had happened. I had gone back on my end of the bargain. I used to give everything I had to give onstage, as if my whole life hung in the balance. Now it just felt like a job. Somehow all of this had gone wrong.

  The room snapped back into focus.

  “I need to go,” I announced. I was only two thirds of the way through the show.

  “I hope you had a good time watching all of this, but I need to go. Good night.”

  That night I sat in the dark in my hotel room and played John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme as I stared out the second-story window into the parking lot. I saw my rental car below, and across the pavement the hotel sign glowed: FREE WI-FI. HBO. END YOUR DAY THE SUPER 8 WAY.

  I wanted to disappear.

  I wanted to actually disappear. I didn’t want it to be a trick. I wanted to vanish.

  I tried to call Katharine and it went to voicemail. I left a message at my agency so they wouldn’t get blindsided by a call from the university the next morning asking why they got only two thirds of a magic show. Then I looked in the mirror.

  When I was young my parents gave me a 1922 silver dollar, and I have carried it with me for almost every show of my life. The coin is heavy and worn. When you balance it on your finger and flick the edge it rings like the sleigh bell in The Polar Express. It used to vanish and reappear whenever I performed magic, but now it just comes along in the coin pocket of whatever pants I’m wearing onstage.

  In 1922, magic was in its golden age, and Thurston, Dante, Blackstone, and Carter toured the world with their full-evening magic shows. Houdini was at the height of his powers. I wonder how he would be received today. Would Houdini’s magic have endured through the years if you could watch it over and over again on YouTube to pick apart his secrets?

  I turned on the light and stood in front of the mirror by the flimsy closet door. I held the coin in my left hand and closed my fingers. I opened my hand and it disappeared. I brought it back. I watched the coin vanish over and over, trying to remember how it had felt to make it vanish for the first time.

  When was the last time you were truly amazed? For me, it had been quite a while. Somewhere in the rush of show business I had forgotten that the tour is less important than the show, the show less important than the illusion, and the illusion less important than that quiet moment of wonder, which is the reason for doing all of this anyway. I wanted to find it again. I wanted that unfiltered, overpowering astonishment that blinds you, knocks you down, wakes you up, and reminds you that you are alive. I wanted a shiver of the unknown. I wanted to venture past the safety of my convictions and find the wilderness out there beyond the edges of my own world. I wanted to get lost. I wanted an adventure. I wanted a secret door or a buried treasure or something bigger than the world I had found.

  Also—frankly—I wanted a second chance. I had reached a point in my life when the clay was beginning to harden and I was unimpressed with my stake in adulthood. I had kept all the wrong parts of childhood and left behind too many of the good ones. I had wanted to become a great magician since I was a boy, but my younger self wouldn’t recognize me now: battle-hardened and opportunistic, always maneuvering for the next big break, aiming always at success instead of greatness. You justify it by telling yourself that you’re just paying the bills, that one day you’ll be ready to turn your attention once again to the craft, the work, the art, forgetting that every day takes you further and further from the artist and the person you want to be. But sometimes you remember. Sometimes dur
ing a show you catch a glimpse of whatever it was you were chasing, and that vision of everything you intended to be is enough to lay you low for the rest of the night.

  I wanted to stop. I wanted to take everything I’d become as a professional magician and burn it to the ground in one tremendous blaze. And then I wanted go away and dream it all up again the way it should have happened the first time.

  In the hours and hours I spent waiting in airports and sitting on airplanes, I read a lot—fiction, nonfiction, classics, trash, but mostly books about magic. On this particular leg of the tour I’d brought Lee Siegel’s Net of Magic: Wonders and Deceptions in India. It’s an academic text about the legendary street performers of India and the feats of magic that made them famous—snake charming, levitation, fire breathing. It chronicles their performances and the history of magic on the Indian subcontinent, but the best part is the glossy picture insert in the middle, full of haunting black-and-white images of these magicians at work—a cobra rising from a basket, a young man stabbing a skewer through his cheek, an old man sitting cross-legged in a marketplace, his eyes closed, serene, as if unaware that he is floating three feet off the ground.

  This did not look like magic in America. These magicians looked like bricklayers or farmers more than entertainers—like working men plying a trade rather than showmen trying to ingratiate themselves to an audience. They showed intensity, urgency, ferocity. I could not stop thinking about these pictures.

  And so on that miserable night, as I lay on the bed in my hotel room in Milwaukee, I started paging through the book, looking at the pictures and thinking of this tradition of magic so completely different from my own. I started dreaming of an adventure—a crazy, irresponsible break from the mechanized repetition of touring in America, a quest to the other side of the world to see these things for myself. I wanted to see these magicians with my own eyes. I wanted to feel the way that I used to feel when I watched a magic show and didn’t already know the secrets. I didn’t want more tricks—I had plenty of tricks. I wanted magic. Real magic.