She whistles, and a small troupe of cats file onto the stage, rolling glass balls before them with their forepaws. While obedient to her commands, these cats are obviously enjoying themselves. Christine gestures to the audience—the cats grip the balls and leap down into the aisles with them. She gestures to the audience—the cats, without needing to see what she does, roll the balls up the aisles, leaving them in a row in the middle of each aisle. Swiftly the cats vanish through the curtained doors of the theater. Christine, who all this time has been making a quiet singing sound in her throat, opens her mouth and emits a soaring, pure tone—the glasses break and send plumes of fire into the air, plumes that rise and spin like pinwheels and then burst in clouds of coruscating pollen. The curtain has already fallen.
After a moment of silence, applause, the audience files out talking. The theater is empty. Christine is still standing in the middle of the stage, looking at the back of the curtain, eyes with pin-strut umbrella irises.
Her face goes wan blue and her body turns to vapor and condenses solid again with the distant beating of her heart. Her staring, golden eyes fix in space. She shuts them, and when she opens them again, she is on the street walking, as she does every night, down the streets of San Veneficio. She haunts the little plazas and open spaces and the crowded busy thoroughfares with the glowing white plaster of the tiny coffee shops, and the battered white wrought-iron chairs and tables, the white cotton shirts and pants on bronze and tan skin, glowing in the fading daylight and the waxing platinum beams of the streetlights. She passes through a city that rises around her like an architectural forest, hung with lazily flapping white muslin sheets that are film screens on which the people and the city are projected, rolling and swaying with the shifting of the sheets. They split to let her pass, one after another, and the thin cellophane tails of frayed cloth stroke her face as she goes by with a touch as light as a bubble, dewing her face with their faces and bodies. The brown-red and yellow-orange gold of the sunset and the lights of the streets and shops and the reflections, all mingle into an image of her face, her body moving forward, like the intangible wall of a bubble, an extension of her image cast in mingled light and color, and she occupies this image from moment to moment, stepping up to press herself into it, like putting on a mask, with the sensation of tiny electrical shocks criss-crossing her in waves, or the icy-hot sensation of a bubble bursting on the skin. Every moment it is renewed, every moment she steps forward to occupy it, and her ghost or her angel walks beside her and whispers to her, the gentle brush of her own lips on her own ear. Everything reacts to her, people, buildings, sky and ground, like reactants to an acid they come open and dissolve, and she completes them with her presence, arcing out from her in curved panes like wings or the tail of her shawl. Christine scans the crowds, and from their heavily flapping screens they watch her pass with flickering projected attention and a silent-movie indicator closing her in a circle. They look to see who she is looking for, as she searches one street to the next, finding no one. The same sinister, dreaming face, the same glinting gaze of shadowed eyes, the same impersonal, vatic presence, like a somnambulist, a sleep-talker, filled with secrets she urgently wants to discover. As always, he is never quite there, although everything invokes him. He would not approach her from the dusty projector beam, but out of the lightless expanse of the theater itself, where she is, although lost for a time in the endless kaleiding attractions of San Veneficio in desert sunset, the imaginary stars, the odor of partial phantoms. He would emerge from the source of all these things, and also from the darkness on which they are projected. He would emerge, but he hasn’t. Christine continues to patrol the streets at every sunset just as the exquisite portrait must always rise to occupy its frame, to meet or evade the viewer’s gaze.
The bargain was struck some time ago, in a dream. There were ten strange, real dreams. The first night, she dreamt she was a child again. She saw her mother, who has been dead for many years. Christine, barely taller than the ornate doorknob she turns with both hands, makes her way into her mother’s bedroom. The room is a silhouette against the sunset sky, which shines through two gaunt French windows; the walls are invisible. Her mother sits before the mirror on the opposite wall, her face lit by the reflected light of the sunset and two miniature lamps on the table before her.
Christine’s mother is in her dressing gown, pale and long as a stalk of celery, cool and fresh and Junoesque, beautiful still, though she hadn’t long to live. Christine remembers standing by the generous curve of her thigh under her long red gown, looking up at her long-lashed face. Her mother was a stage magician and her room was filled with props—they had all been stage magicians, her family and a whole covey of other women as well. Christine was to be her successor—she would follow her mother’s ivory hands and imbibe the lesson in red tea from hibiscus petals—and she would replace them all in the future. Christine was the only child any of them had ever had, and they placed all their hopes in her.
Christine understands all these things right away, as one does in dreams, but the words her mother speaks to her are never fully intelligible. Something like this encounter in her mother’s bedroom takes place in dream after dream for many nights, and in each dream the words become a little clearer, the room a little darker, the hour outside the windows later and later. This is not a past moment revisited, this is a present moment—her mother is dead and has been making arrangements. A far better knowledge and a far better power than she or any of her colleagues or ancestors had ever had was somehow being offered to her for a service. Some part of that knowledge, an essential initial clue only, but more than she could ever have discovered on her own, and which would surely lead to a better magic.
Her mother had pulled out a developing pan filled with red, and the lights in the room flicked red, and she slid a paper in the pan and held out her hand to Christine. Christine felt her mother take her hand, and a sting as her mother pricked her finger and squeezed a drop of blood into the red, pressed her hand down into the red.
“Yes, it must hurt, I’m afraid,” her mother said, swirling the tray.
Slowly a picture appears on the paper. Christine’s mother pulled it out quickly and looked at it, then showed it to her. An irregular, dark figure peered out at her.
“He will teach you. The training must hurt, I’m afraid.”
And on another, later night, when the sky outside the windows was indigo and black, her mother, sitting in a tall golden bathtub with a turban binding up her heavy hair, said, “I will find him for you.”
Dimly, Christine saw her mother talking with someone, a dark and ominous figure at the end of the paved walk outside their house. She stood on one side of the fence, and he on the other. This was the figure in the picture, too dark to see. Her mother pulled something from her pocket—although she was too far away, watching from an upper-story window, to see what it was, Christine knows what it is: a picture of her. Reaching across the fence, the phantom places a bright red book in her hand.
The last night was the tenth; she stood at the fence, no longer a child but fully grown. Her mother is dead, Christine lives in the house with her father. It is dark, crickets are chirping, and this is odd because she doesn’t normally hear such incidental sounds in her dreams. She stands at the fence, where the light cast by the porch lamp grows weak—and suddenly he is there, as though sprung from the earth. She sees his appalling face, looks at his eyes, and at once knows entirely what she is being asked to do, and what she stands to gain. He warns her of the danger, and then asks. With a cold flash she agrees, bracing herself against any violent transformation to follow, but everything is the same. Still he is standing before her, on the other side of the fence. Speaking strange words, he instructs her to wait for his signal to act. For him and for this signal she searches in these nightly excursions.
When she fails again to find him, she always returns home. She walks between the trees and feels their cool, moist breath hazing the frictionless air of mornin
g, their boughs wave and fan her in passing like royal attendants. She glides over the steps to the porch and bobs noiselessly through the front door. In the left-front room, wide open beside her, her father used to sit in the center of the room, used to watch the sun rise, the window’s projected rectangle of light inching up his cotton shirt, illuminating his vacant, placid face. She would change her red dress for one of Quaker gray, and lightly step into the room, to stand behind his chair. He was schizophrenic. Forever in the same chair watching the same sun rise over the horizon, the identical rays playing over his same features and body with the same intensity, warming at the same rate. Time bends and resutures itself to loop this moment outside of time, for him. To her, he is not a person anymore. He became calm, indifferent, and open, like the trees and the grass, the ground beneath and the sky overhead, and like the sun also. He radiated ocean-deep calm. Christine liked to settle her weight on the chair’s arm and rest her head on her father’s chest, to be included in his vast, vacant calm. It wasn’t ocean-deep. It was shallow. Everything beyond a shallow depth vanished without trace or memory, and when she was like this, all but the moment and the attendant sensibility were occluded, endowing her with new vitality and incredible strength, refreshing her like a full night’s sleep. Presently, as the sun-window would pass to the wall behind him, she would raise her head and go upstairs to sleep.
She would rise upright in her bed the moment night began to fall. As the sun sets, it reflects into her room, multiplying its gleams on the cut-glass beads that fringe the ceiling lamp, and lighting constellations of hanging glass ornaments, spangling the wallpaper with fading pumpkin-orange diamonds, but she remains asleep until it has set, and twilight turns everything to blue. The setting sun dapples her face smoky orange through her windows, but she doesn’t wake up until twilight limns her face in pale fluorescent blue, like a patch of sky in the midst of high-piled cloud-white cushions and fog-white linen. Then her eyes snap open and she bolts upright like a jack-in-the-box.
She throws the sheets into the air and in a rustling flurry of flying cloth she rises to her feet, now in the center of a small hurricane of cloth, and in a moment the sheets settle again as silent and calm as a slow page turning, the words passed into forgetful darkness again. As they drop past her, she emerges fully dressed in gray, watching the bed fall into place as if she’d only just come in, hadn’t slept at all, was ready to undress and retire—the Magician. Outside it’s getting cold and dark, but she doesn’t turn the lights on right away. Instead she sits on the settee by her bed and looks around her, at the walls. In a moment, they light by themselves, the color of light under deep water, rolling in synchronous waves across the walls, timed to her slow heart beating. A few hours to kill before the show begins, her father has been dead for several years now, she has nothing to do and no one to look after, empty hours of waiting strung out behind her in endless reels of unspooling film of action taken and repeated and modified in infinite recordings.
Although she cultivates regular habits this next element is always introduced outside of any pattern. She opens the drawer of her nightstand and withdraws a doll, roughly eight or nine inches tall. It is a man, wrapped in a thick coat of black cloth. His face is pale, mutable, familiar, and indistinct like faces in old photographs. She looks at it from time to time and to her it looks like an old memory—air rustles in the trees playing cool air over her bare arms and legs as she hides savagely in the bushes, tracing her glances between a pack of kids on the far side of the park and on the picnic tables, and she tries to catch the particular smell of sandwiches warmed by the sun and exhaling the stored breath of a dozen different kitchens, or the smell of upholstery, lying very still in the back of her father’s car, hiding again, and watching in mute delight the faces of her friends passing by the windows again and again, rolling by with the sun glaring off their hair and faces as they squint and turn their heads searching, and all the while she’s inches away, inside the car. She waits for them to come back, suddenly desperately hoping they’ll come back and discover her this time. But the face that appears above her, framed in the window of the car, and dark with the shadow that falls over its features as it leans forward to peer into her eyes, is one she has never seen while awake.
Christine looks up into its eyes and says, “I understand.” She wakes up, her eyes already open, staring out the window at clouds in the night sky.
At the morgue there are steel tables and cold air, bodies covered with sleek white draperies, and Christine is there, too. Unerringly, she threads her way among the tables to the center and spins slowly in place, her wide skirts flaring across the floor. Then she moves from spot to spot, lifting sheets, exposing blue faces. Here, a young woman, her age, with black hair. Flick of her fingers in the air, the woman’s eyes open—the same color as hers. Roughly the same height and weight, the livid purple stripe across her throat: she had been throttled to death. Quickly, Christine draws the sheet over her again, bundling it underneath her with swift, businesslike motions, until she is completely wrapped. Then she draws a large brass hoop from beneath her skirts and, holding it in one hand, she waves the other, palm down, back and forth above the body, as if caressing it in the air. Her face hovers over her gliding hand, tight and intent, pushing out through her opaque eyes. The corpse rises a few inches off the table, still tightly wrapped in its sheet. Moving only her arm, the rest of her rigid as a statue, she passes the hoop along the body, right through, stopping just at the waist. Then she pulls the hoop slightly toward her, experimenting, and the body moves with it, remaining perfectly stable in the center of the hoop. She pulls it gently off the table, pulling it easily across the room with small tugs, as if coaxing it to drift across a pool. She pauses only to pluck a scalpel from a tray.
She checks the street outside with two craning twists of her head. Then she pulls the body out with her and right into the coach, a spectral white figure glowing faintly like a filament in the dark interior of the coach. Without a word, Christine taps the ceiling, and the carriage instantly jerks into motion, sweep ing silently down the street, with no driver.
She disembarks onto her front porch to a sussurrus of evening wind across her back. Easily she brings the body inside, dismissing the carriage around to the back of the house. Now she is working quickly, heading upstairs first, angling the corpse up the stairs behind her, grasping the top of the loop. She gets it into her bedroom and withdraws the hoop, letting the body settle onto her bed. Immediately she strips the sheet off and begins dressing it in her clothes, working hastily, but she is thorough, taking the time to collect its hair properly, trim the nails and buff them, the file rasping against the silence of the room. When she is done, the body looks like her. Now the hoop again, and downstairs to the back room. There she lays the body on a high table, flicking on a dangling, hooded lightbulb. Gently, she turns the face to one side, and taking the scalpel, she starts to cut the face, carving deep gashes in the bloodless, soft flesh, like cutting clay, it falls away in even straight edges, and all the while that face gazing up, smiling at her with the blissful, rapt look of a nursing child, up at her own face—still intent, forcing its way out through her eyes. She cuts the face until it is no longer recognizable, not anybody’s face. She checks the teeth, and pulls out the ones with fillings with a pair of pliers. Then she fetches her fountain pen. With a few deft strokes, she draws a silver-headed cane on the skin behind one of the ears—a sign, as instructed. When the ink dries, she is finished.
She takes the nail parings, the teeth, bits of hair and flesh and bundles them neatly into a cloth with the scalpel and the pliers. Then she drops the bundle into a wooden case she uses in her magic act, closes the lid, and taps it once with a black wooden wand. When she opens the box again, the bundle is gone. Satisfied, she carries the corpse into the front-left room and arranges it carefully on the floor.
It lies there now, staring straight up, absolutely still, its ruined face still placid, radiating ocean-deep calm.
The courtyard is lined with pillared Greek facades and broken paving stones scattered at the periphery over the dirt. There is a large oak tree in the center of the yard, its spoon-shaped leaves fluttering in the wind high in its boughs. In the shade of the tree and to one side is a rough wooden park table made of dry gray wood, bristling with splinters like a porcupine. She can make out the secretary sitting in the dim, yellow light of two old storm lanterns, glass chimneys cataracted with a layer of milky grime. At first, the secretary’s mousy-blonde hair, piled up on her head and just barely reflecting the light of the lanterns, is the only thing visible underneath the tree, but then the rest of her emerges as Christine draws nearer. Then, suddenly, she seems to snap into focus, carefully toting up accounts in a thick ledger, writing briskly in a neat flowing hand so fluid and graceful that simply watching her fingers flicking the pen back and forth is a pleasure. Christine has the impression that there are other people lurking about in the shadows, possibly a line standing in the shadows by the opposite wall. Ignoring them, she approaches the table, the wind rustling overhead like the hiss of silk cloth.
The secretary looks up at her and nods once, primly. She puts the pen back in her inkwell and closes the ledger, leaving it shut on the table. With a quick finger to her lips, she leads Christine out past the rear wall, pointing her down an alley to an open door with a dark frame in the center of the right-hand partition. Then, with the same darkly mysterious air of exaggerated scruple, she withdraws.
Within the doorway is a small room, not ten feet square. There is a single fluorescent high overhead, a pay phone on one wall marred with graffiti, and an extremely large confessional against the opposite wall, to her right. The door to the left-hand side is closed and latched, but the right-hand door is slightly ajar, not quite clearing the jamb. Christine steps inside, her small boots thudding muffled on the wooden floor, and draws the cabinet shut behind her, latching it with a small iron hook. She sits. The door in the partition falls slowly open away from her, silently. Within, she can just make out a few spangles of light from the outside, spattering the interior in the other compartment, where they fall on a fold of a white shirt, or a single white cheek—perhaps the gleam of a fixed eye.
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