by Steven James
I’m at the wheel of the van, and my friend Xavier Wray sits beside me. At fifty-two, he’s nineteen years older than I am, but he still has a closetful of tie-dyed clothes and still uses the word “groovy.”
He shaved his head last year because he didn’t think the ponytail went well with his receding hairline, and, as he said, he only had control over one of the two factors in the equation: “Start losing your hair and you look old; get rid of it all and you look timeless.”
I can tell he’s been watching me but trying not to be too obvious about it. Figuring he would say something soon enough, I wait him out, and just as I start thinking about the television exposé we’re working on, he breaks the silence: “It reminds you of that day, doesn’t it? The ocean? The shore over there?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“You want some advice, Jev?”
“Xavier, we’ve been through this before.”
“Sure, but do you want some advice now?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, here it is.” He brushes some lint from his faded season-one X-Files T-shirt imprinted with a picture of David Duchovny (looking quintessentially cool) and Gillian Anderson (looking urgently concerned), and the words “The truth is out there.”
“Stop trying to move on.”
I look at him quizzically. “That’s your advice?”
“Yup.”
“Stop trying to move on.”
“You got it.”
“That’s what’s going to help?”
“Yup.”
“Well”—I give my attention back to the road—“thanks, Xav. I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Thinking about what’s done, man, dwelling on it, trying to deal with it, I’m just saying, that creates a lot of emotional drag. Be where you are; let where you’ve been alone. Do that and the universe will lean in your direction.”
“That’s very Zen of you.”
“There’re always going to be holes in your heart in the shape of your wife, in the shape of your kids.”
“And you’re telling me, what? That I need to fill the holes with something else?”
“No. I’m telling you to stop staring into ’em and let ’em be there, a part of your story, a part that affects your future, sure, but not what defines it. Stop feeding your pain and it’ll dissipate. Okay, that’s it. That’s what I wanted to say. I’m done.”
“How long have you been waiting to tell me all that?”
“It just came to me. I’m in the zone.”
“Uh-huh.” I take a small breath. “Listen, I appreciate it, really, but let’s talk about something else.”
A long pause. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing really comes to mind.”
“Okay.” He sounds a little defeated. “Right.”
Xavier and I have been close friends ever since we met three years ago in Las Vegas, when my new show “Escape: The Jevin Banks Experience” opened. That was before moving to Atlantic City. Before everything happened and I gave up performing.
He’d worked backstage on the strip for nearly thirty years before coming to work pyrotechnics for me. He lives in an RV, loves to blow stuff up, doesn’t believe we landed on the moon, thinks Bush was responsible for 9/11, and still insists that Obama’s birth certificate was a fake: “Why do you think it took him so long to produce it? And who surrounded him every day? The Secret Service, Jevin. And they’re in charge of investigating counterfeit money. Right? Counterfeit documents? See? Just google it. It’ll make you a believer.”
Now I drive in silence and he quietly fiddles with the button camera I’ll be wearing. Moving from stage pyrotechnics to cinematography has been an easier transition for him than I thought it would be. He has an eye for it. So much of it is about angles and staging and lighting, just like in a stage production. And since I’ll be working incognito, he gets to use some of his favorite gadgets, like the button camera.
A Suburban passes us. A boy who looks about ten years old peers through the window at me as they go by. Even though my sons wouldn’t be nearly that old by now, I wonder what they would have looked like if they’d have reached that age. It seems to happen all the time these days when I see kids.
They’d be taller, stockier, possibly into football or soccer or playing piano, but that would’ve been Drew, I’m guessing, rather than Tony. Probably video games for both of them. I would’ve taught them to ride their bikes, they’d have navigated through most of their years of elementary school and—
Stop it, Jevin. This isn’t helping anything.
No, no it’s not.
Emotional drag.
If nothing else, Xavier was right about that much.
I try to follow his advice and leave where I’ve been alone in order to get the universe to lean in my direction, but it’s not as simple as he makes it sound. I’ve never been able to just tell myself to be happy—or sad, or angry, or anything. Something significant has to happen for my emotions to pendulum that far in another direction. It would be so much easier if I could just tell myself what to feel and then feel it, but that’s not how things work for me. I only seem to learn the important stuff in life the hard way; I have to suffer before I change.
Setting the camera aside, Xavier finger-scrolls across the screen of my iPad to check my messages. “Looks like Charlene’s gonna be a little late, but I think you two should still make it to the center by five thirty.”
“It’s what, about two hours from Salem?”
“Maybe a little less, but about that, yeah.”
“Fionna send the files yet?”
He checks. “Not yet. Just another shot at a simile.”
Fionna McClury, who works logistics and “information gathering” for us, is a single, stay-at-home mom who homeschools her four kids and works as a cybersecurity consultant to pay the bills. Fortune 500 companies hire her to try hacking into their companies in order to test their firewalls. Nine out of ten times she’s successful.
Her kids help her sometimes for homework.
And sometimes she freelances.
For me.
She’s a real pro at teaching her kids everything except English. Her Achilles’ heel. Lately she’s been trying to teach metaphors and similes and keeps sending us some of her own to critique before using them with her kids.
A little apprehensively, I glance at Xavier. “What is it this time?”
“The plane was as fast as a metal tube flying through the air at six hundred miles an hour.”
“Um . . . it’s accurate.”
“I’ll tell her that.” He types. Hunt and peck. It takes awhile. “Hey, I forgot to mention, I need this weekend off. There’s a convention I’m going to.”
“Bigfoot or UFOs?”
“Very funny. It’s about tectonic weapons.”
“Tectonic weapons.”
“They’re for real, I’m telling you. There’s credible evidence that the Air Force has the U2, the HAARP antennae, microwave technology. Just blast another country’s fault lines with electromagnetic waves, take out their infrastructure without firing a shot. No boots on the ground. It’s the weapon of the future. Intense stuff.”
“Let me guess—Peru a few years ago? Haiti, Japan—test runs?”
“See, even you made the connection. Go to YouTube, search term tectonic weapons. It’ll blow your mind.”
“I’m sure it would, but why on earth would the US attack Haiti, Japan, or Peru?”
He taps his finger against the air as if to accentuate that my question was a way of agreeing with him. “Precisely, Jev. That is exactly the question we need to be asking.”
Aha. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“You can have the weekend off. And you should text her, tell her we need those files tonight.”
“Fionna.”
“Right.”
I guide the van along the highway and think about the TV
series we’re filming—another step in my transition from the stage to the screen.
For the last year, I’ve used my background as an illusionist to replicate the tricks and effects of dozens of fake psychics, televangelist con men, and fortune-telling scam artists.
I know all too well what it’s like to search desperately for answers, and I can’t imagine deceiving someone who’s in that situation just to make a buck.
My stage shows did well; money’s not the issue. I’m really not sure anymore what I want out of life, but I figure if I debunk hucksters who are taking advantage of vulnerable and hurting people, well, at least that’s something positive. Something small but worthwhile.
The exposés have become a staple for cable’s Entertainment Film Network, and while not paying nearly as much as my stage shows did, they’ve helped me keep my skills sharp.
Three episodes left under contract. Then I’m not sure what I’ll do. It feels a bit like I’m in a sea with nothing on the horizon to sail toward. And nowhere I really want to sail.
Two shows ago, Entertainment Film Network’s executive producer told me I needed to branch out in a new direction, merge my work with more of a bent toward investigative journalism—sort of an undercover illusionist. I’d studied journalism for a few years in college, so (at least to the producer) it seemed like a natural fit.
I don’t have the name or face recognition of a Copperfield, Blaine, or Angel, and in this case anonymity would be to my advantage.
So, here I am.
But this trip is nothing like debunking a roadside psychic. The Lawson Research Center, or LRC, headed by theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Dr. William Tanbyrn, has big dollars, big names, and a lot of credibility behind it.
It’s true that since Dr. Tanbyrn started getting deeper into the study of the roots of consciousness, he’d fallen out of favor with some of the mainstream scientific community, but most of those scientists were discounting his findings without analyzing or carefully investigating them. It seems that for a lot of people, just the fact that he’s now at the Lawson Research Center—a facility known for investigating the paranormal while also serving as a New Age conference center—is enough to undermine his credibility.
Needless to say, his most recent test results on mind-to-mind, nonlocal communication were controversial; the findings were widely disputed or simply disregarded, as were Dr. Dean Radin’s in the books The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds. However, Dr. Tanbyrn’s research had made it into three peer-reviewed journals and, supposedly, had been replicated by two researchers in Sweden, although as far as Fionna and Charlene had been able to tell, that study hadn’t appeared yet in any of the literature.
In essence, Dr. Tanbyrn and his team were claiming proof of unconscious psychic activity, or psi, saying they actually had hard data to back up the existence of some forms of telepathy. They claimed to have facts—scientific evidence, not just anecdotes of folks saying they could read other people’s thoughts.
I find that all pretty hard to swallow.
Whenever someone claims psychic activity—whether it’s a TV psychic, the gypsy at the fair doing cold readings, or a multimillion-dollar research center, my con-man radar goes up. As Xavier likes to say, “Wherever there’s someone out to make a buck, there’s someone about to lose his shirt.”
I have some ideas on how Dr. Tanbyrn and his team are faking the findings, but I need to be sure. Get it all on film. That’s what my three friends are going to help me do.
Charlene isn’t at the rest stop when we arrive.
While Xavier heads to the vending machines for some Gatorade and Cheetos, I look over my notes about the center where Charlene and I will covertly spend the next three days.
But after a few moments I hear a girl in the vehicle next to me crying and see the family with the ten-year-old boy that passed us earlier. The stressed-out-looking mom is urging her two kids out of the SUV.
“I don’t care if it’s a ten-hour drive.” She’s clearly exasperated. “Please, you have to get along with your sister.” Her kids look as weary as she does. The girl, who’s about seven or eight, wipes a tear from her eye.
Go on. It might help.
I slip out of the van, lean against the door, and pull out the 1895 Morgan Dollar I always carry with me. Rachel and I didn’t wear wedding rings, but since I was a numismatist, she insisted we exchange coins. This is the one she’d given me at our wedding seven years ago. It was by no means my most valuable coin, but being worth $125,000, it wasn’t one that I was about to use to buy a lottery ticket.
I accidentally-on-purpose let it drop. It rolls toward the boy.
After a glance at his mother for permission, he picks it up and hands it to me.
“Thanks.” But as I accept it, I vanish it from my hand. “Hey, where did that go?” I act shocked that it’s gone.
Both he and the girl search my hands, then the ground. I turn my pockets inside out to show them that they’re empty, and that’s when I palm the rest of the coins I’ll need. Then I pretend to notice something beside the boy’s arm. “Hang on. There it is.”
I reach over and pull half a dozen, more commonplace silver dollars one at a time from his left armpit, letting them drop to the parking lot.
“Did you see that, Mommy!” the girl exclaims. She’s definitely not crying now. Her brother searches both of his armpits for more coins. I gather up the ones that fell.
“Yes. I did.” Their mother is eyeing me a little suspiciously, as if I’m the psychopathic magician she’s heard about who lures kids away from their parents by doing coin tricks for them in rest stop parking lots.
Xavier is returning now, snacks in hand. He sees me entertaining the family and tries to hide a half-smile.
I do a couple more tricks—I’m in my element and it feels good—then I see Charlene pull into a parking spot a few cars away, and I tell the kids, “I didn’t realize it before, but I can tell you two are good at magic too.”
They look confused.
“Go on, reach into your jacket pockets.” With the sight angle of the mother and the attention of the kids focused on my right hand, the two left-handed drops I did a few moments ago while I was finishing the second-to-last trick hadn’t been easy, but after twenty-five years of doing this, I’d managed to pull it off.
The kids reach into their pockets and are each astonished to find a silver dollar.
“I told you. It’s magic.”
“That was really good,” the woman tells me, finally sounding a little more at ease, then nudges her kids toward me. “Go on, give the nice man back his money. And thank him for the magic show.”
Though visibly disappointed that they can’t keep the coins, the children obediently offer them to me.
“Oh, those were in your pockets, not mine. I couldn’t take those.” I wink at their mother. “I hope you have a great trip.”
At last, with a word of thanks, she allows the kids to accept the silver dollars, then corrals them toward the restrooms.
Charlene is getting out of the car, and Xavier, who has a mouthful of Cheetos, waves to her but speaks to me in between crunches. “You just can’t stand it, can you?”
“Stand what?”
“Seeing kids cry when you know you can make ’em laugh.”
“What can I say. It’s my only redeeming quality.”
“You’re pretty good at blackjack.”
“True.”
Charlene rounds the van. “Hello, gentlemen.”
We greet her and she watches me pocket my remaining coins. Xavier, who’s deep into his bag of Cheetos now, licks some cheese powder from his fingers.
Charlene sighs good-naturedly. “I see you’re both up to your usual tricks.”
“Old habits.” I put the last coin away.
“How many silver dollars have you given away to kids over the years?”
“A couple, I suppose.”
“Uh-huh.”
She smiles and it looks n
ice. Brown-haired and congenial, Charlene Antioch has a girl-next-door innocence about her, but also a slyly sexy side that she keeps hidden except when onstage in my show—that is, when I still did stage work. I don’t know how many times in the last six years I’ve made her vanish, sliced her into pieces, or let her chain me up and seal me in a water tank. But I haven’t done an escape in over a year. The thought of Rachel and the boys in the van, trapped, drowning, has just been too much for me. I can’t even stand being in small, cramped places anymore.
An escape artist who’s claustrophobic.
So now he makes films exposing fake psychics.
Pathetic.
Today Charlene, who’s thirty-two but looks twenty-five and is a chameleon when it comes to outfits, has her hair in a ruffled, earthy hairdo that might’ve actually looked more natural on Xavier than on her. Birkenstocks, a button-up shirt, and tan Gramicci climbing pants round out her neo-progressive nature-lover outfit. Undoubtably, she chose it because of the center we’re heading to. I, on the other hand, wasn’t so particular—black jeans, a faded T-shirt from one of the half-marathons I ran last year, a three-season leather jacket. Also black.
“How was your drive?” I ask her.
“Good.”
Xavier crumples up the empty Cheetos bag, aims for a trash can ten feet away. Tosses. Misses. Goes to retrieve it, but rather than drop it in, he backs up for another ten-foot shot.
I glance at my watch. “We should probably get going. They’re expecting us by five thirty and it’s still almost an hour to the Three Sisters.” The famous mountain range wasn’t far at all from the Lawson Research Center and, coincidentally, was near the town where I grew up.
On his fourth try, Xavier finally hits his shot, and the three of us remove the cameras, the heart rate monitor, and the radio frequency (RF) jammer from the van. Even though Charlene and I have used them all before, Xavier insists on re-re-re-explaining how they work, how to keep them concealed, how Charlene would use the jammer and heart rate monitor tomorrow when she was in the chamber.
“Right.” She takes the nearly invisible monitor that’ll record her heart rate and, in a gesture of modesty, turns to the side before unbuttoning her shirt to press it against her chest, just above her heart. Xavier confirms that it’s recording her heart rate, prints out the results on the small portable printer we’re going to take with us. Then, monitor removed and shirt rebuttoned, Charlene climbs into the rental car.