“Sure.”
“I think the magic trick works because people see only what they think is there rather than what’s actually there. This thumb tip trick works because the mind is a funny thing. It sees what it expects to see. It expects to see a real thumb, so that’s what it sees. The brain, as busy as it can be, is actually very lazy. And yes, it also works because people are, as you said, so easily distracted. But they’re not distracted by hand gestures. Most people who are watching a magic show aren’t really there watching the magic show. They are regretting something they did yesterday or worrying about something that might happen tomorrow, so they’re not really at the magic show to begin with, so how could they see the plastic thumb at all?”
I didn’t really understand what she was saying, but I nodded my head. I would have to think about this later. Replay her words in my head and puzzle it out.
“Don’t get me wrong. I believe in magic. But not the kind that requires gimmicks and tricks and sleights of hand. Do you know the kind of magic I’m talking about?”
“No. But it sounds cool,” I said. I wanted her to keep talking. I liked that we were having a real conversation. I felt important.
“Do you ever do any tricks with fire?”
“Well, you can do the thumb trick with a lit cigarette also, but I haven’t done it that way. You have to use fire to light the cigarette.”
“Well, imagine that there was a little flickering light and you had the power to make it turn into a giant flame, like a fireball.”
“That sounds really cool. How do you do it?”
“That’s the magic. You can turn this little tiny light into a huge fireball with only one thing—your mind.”
I didn’t know what she meant, but I liked the idea a lot. I liked magicians who could hypnotize people. Bend spoons with their mind. Levitate.
Ruth clapped her hands together.
“I like you, Jim. I like you a lot.”
“Thanks.” It felt good to hear her say that.
“I’m going to be in this town for only six weeks, but if you agree to come see me every day for the next six weeks, I will teach you some magic. The kind of magic that you can’t buy in a store and that will help you make anything you want actually appear. For real. No tricks. No plastic thumbs. No sleights of hand. How does that sound?”
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Because I know how to turn a flicker into a flame. Someone taught me and now I think it’s time that I teach you. I can see the special in you, and if you come here every day, without missing a single day, you’re going to see it too. I promise. It’s going to take a lot of work and you’re going to have to practice the tricks I teach you even more than you did your thumb trick. But I promise you, what I’m going to teach you will change your life.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. No one had ever called me special. And I knew if Ruth knew the truth about my family and who I was, she wouldn’t think I was special at all. I didn’t know if I believed she could teach me to make things appear out of nowhere, but I wanted to have more conversations with her like we had today. Being around her made me feel good inside. Happier. Almost like I was loved, which I knew was a weird thing to feel from a complete stranger. She looked like she could be anyone’s grandmother, except for her eyes. Her eyes promised mystery and secrets and adventure. There was no other adventure waiting for me this summer, and here was this woman offering to teach me something that could change my life. How weird. Whether she could or not, I didn’t know, but what I did know is that I had absolutely nothing to lose. I felt hope, something I hadn’t felt a lot of before.
“What do you say, Jim, are you ready to learn some real magic?”
And with that simple question the entire trajectory of my life and whatever fate had previously had in store for me shifted.
TWO
A Body at Rest
Since the start of civilization, the source of human intelligence and consciousness has been a mystery. In the seventeenth century B.C.E., the Egyptians believed that intelligence resided in the heart. Upon death, it was the heart that was revered and retained with the other internal organs. The brain had so little value to the ancient Egyptians that it was routinely removed with a hook through the nasal cavity before mummification, and then discarded. In the fourth century B.C.E., Aristotle believed that the brain functioned primarily as a cooling mechanism for the blood, and this was why humans (with their larger brains) were more rational than the “hot-blooded” beasts. It took five thousand years for this view of the brain’s insignificance to be reversed. The brain’s centrality to our identity began to be understood only because individuals who had sustained head trauma through accident or war injuries demonstrated impairment of thought or function. While much was learned about brain anatomy and function, our understanding remained very limited. In fact, through most of the twentieth century, it was believed that the brain was fixed, immutable, and static. Today we know that the brain has great plasticity and can change, adapt, and transform. It is molded by experience, repetition, and intention. It is only because of the extraordinary technological advances over the last few decades that we can see the brain’s ability to transform on a cellular, genetic, and even molecular level. Extraordinarily, as I learned, each of us has the ability to change the very circuitry of our brain.
My first experience of neuroplasticity happened with Ruth in the back room of that magic shop in a strip mall. I didn’t know this at age twelve, but during those six weeks she literally rewired my brain. She did what, at that time, many would have said was impossible.
• • •
I DIDN’T TELL anyone about my plans to go to the magic shop every day, but then again, no one really asked. Summer in Lancaster was like being in some hot, windswept, seemingly endless purgatory—there was always a restless feeling that I should be doing something, but there was nothing really to do. The apartment complex I lived in was surrounded by little more than packed earth and tumbleweeds. Occasionally this landscape was interspersed with an abandoned car or a derelict piece of machinery. A thing no longer wanted or needed—thrown away in a place no one would notice.
Children, and adults as well, perform best when there is consistency and dependability. The brain craves them both. In my house there was neither. No set time to eat, no alarm to remind you to wake up for school, and no bedtime. If my mother’s depression lessened enough for her to leave the bed, a meal might be made. That is if there was food in the house. If not, I would go to sleep hungry or go visit a friend and hope he would ask me to stay for dinner. I thought I was lucky because, unlike most of my friends, I never had to be home at a particular time. I didn’t want to get home until late because I knew if I got home earlier there would often be a fight in progress or some other event that made me wish I were somewhere else, someone else. Sometimes the thing you want most is just someone to tell you, tell you anything. Because that means you’re important. And sometimes it’s not that you’re not important, it’s just you’re not seen because the pain of those around you makes you invisible. I pretended I was lucky because I didn’t have anyone to bother me—to tell me to do my homework, wake me up for school, or tell me what to wear. But I was only pretending. Teenagers crave freedom, but only if they’re standing on a base that is stable and secure.
• • •
RUTH HAD ASKED ME to come to the shop at 10 A.M., and I woke up early that first day feeling as if it were my birthday and Christmas morning both rolled into one. I had had a hard time going to sleep. I had no idea what she was going to teach me, and I didn’t really care. I just wanted to talk to her some more, and it felt good to have somewhere to go. I felt important.
• • •
I COULD SEE RUTH through the window of the magic shop that first day as I rode up on my orange Schwinn Sting-Ray with its white banana seat. I remember that bike so well because it
was the most valuable thing I had, and I had bought it with my own money. Money made from mowing lots of lawns in the heat of those long summer days. As I pulled up I saw that she wore a big blue headband that held her shoulder-length brown hair away from her face, and her glasses dangled on a chain at her neck. Her dress looked almost like the big smocks we had to put on over our clothes during art class at school. It was exactly the same color as the Lancaster sky in the morning—the lightest of blues with horizontal wisps of white. Every morning when I woke up, the first thing I did was look out my window. For some reason seeing that blue sky always made me feel hopeful.
Ruth gave me a big smile, and I smiled back, but I could feel my heart hammering in my chest. I knew it was partly from riding there so quickly and partly because I wasn’t sure what was going to happen. And I didn’t know why it was happening. It had sounded like a good idea the day before, and this morning it had seemed better than another day riding through endless fields of tumbleweeds on my Sting-Ray, going nowhere but always hoping to end up somewhere. Yet at that moment I wasn’t so sure.
What was I walking into? What if I wasn’t smart enough to learn whatever magic she was going to teach me? What if she found out the truth about my family? What if she was really some crazy lady who was going to kidnap me and take me out into the middle of the desert and do black magic with my dead body? I had seen a movie called Voodoo Woman a while back and suddenly I wondered if Ruth was a mad sorceress who was going to turn me into a monster she could control with her mind and then take over the world.
My arms went weak. I had the door halfway open, but suddenly it felt heavy. It resisted me. I looked at my bike lying on its side and at the nearly empty parking lot. What was I doing? Why had I agreed to this? I could get on my bike and ride away and never come back.
Ruth smiled and called out my name. “Jim, it’s so good to see you. For a minute I wasn’t sure you were going to come.” She nodded her head in a grandmotherly way and waved at me to come in. I felt warm inside. She didn’t seem like a mad sorceress bent on my destruction.
I pushed open the door the rest of the way. It now easily swung open.
“You were riding that bike down the street like you were being chased,” she said as I stepped inside. I often felt like I was being chased, but I did not know who was chasing me.
Suddenly my face flushed with shame. Maybe she saw my fear or my doubts. Maybe she had X-ray vision. I looked down at my old tennis shoes. There was a small hole at the top of my right shoe. I was embarrassed. I curled my toes so she wouldn’t see them.
“This is my son, Neil. He’s the magician.” If she had noticed the hole in my shoe, she was hiding it.
Neil didn’t look like a magician, really. He had big black glasses and the same shade of brown hair as his mother. He seemed normal enough. No magic hat, no cape, no mustache.
“So, I hear you like magic.” Neil’s voice was deep and slow. He had what looked like fifty decks of cards stacked on the glass countertop.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool.”
“Do you know any card tricks?” Neil started shuffling a deck in his hands. The cards seemed to fly from his right hand to his left hand, back and forth, back and forth, flying through space. I wanted to learn how to do that. He stopped and fanned the deck out in front of me.
“Pick a card.”
I looked at the cards. One card was sticking out slightly, so I figured that was the obvious choice and instead picked a card way off to the right.
“Now don’t show me what it is, but hold it in front of you and take a look.”
I glanced down, keeping the card close to my chest, just in case there were any mirrors behind me. It was the queen of spades.
“Now put it facedown anywhere in the deck, and now I want you to shuffle the cards. Mix them up any way you want. Here you go.”
Neil handed me the entire deck, and I tried to shuffle them—not like he had, but I managed to get my hands around the cards and did a pretty good job of shuffling them.
“Shuffle them again.”
I did it again and was a little better this time. The cards stacked a little more crisply and orderly.
“Now a third time.”
This time I remembered to push my knuckles into the cards to make them bow, and when they came together they were like two gears that spun together.
“Very good.” I handed the deck back to him. He started turning the cards over one by one, faceup. Every once in a while he would hold up a card and say, “This is not your card.” Finally he turned over the queen of spades.
“This is the one. This is your card.” He waved the card around with a flourish and set it faceup in front of me on the counter.
“That’s cool,” I said with a smile, wondering how he knew it was my card. I picked it up and turned it over. I checked all four sides of the card to see if it was bent at all. Nothing.
“Do you know who this is? Who the queen of spades represents?”
I tried to remember the name of a queen I had heard about in history class. I could only remember one. “Queen Elizabeth?”
Neil smiled at me. “Now if this were an English deck of cards you would be correct. But this happens to be a French deck of cards, and in the French deck, each queen represents a different woman in history or mythology. The queen of hearts and the queen of diamonds in a French deck represent Judith and Rachel, both powerful women from the Bible. The queen of clubs is known as Argine, who isn’t anyone I’ve ever heard of, but her name is an anagram of Regina, which is Latin for ‘queen.’ The queen of spades, your card, is the Greek goddess Athena. She is the goddess of wisdom and the companion of all heroes. If you go on a heroic quest, you definitely want Athena on your side.”
“So how did you know that was my card?”
“Now you know a magician never reveals his tricks, but given that you are here to learn, I guess I can let you in on the secret.” Neil turned the card over. “This deck happens to be a marked deck. It looks like a regular Bicycle deck, but if you look closely at what looks like a flower here at the bottom, you can see that there are eight petals around the center. Each petal represents a card from two to nine, and the center of the flower represents the ten. Over to the side, these four swirls represent the suits.” He pointed to another design to the side of the flower. “When magicians mark decks, we shade in either a petal or the center and a petal to represent the jack, queen, and king. If nothing’s shaded it’s an ace. And then we mark up here to show the suit. So if you look at your card, you can see the code. The center is shaded plus the number three petal, so that is a queen. And over here you can see that the spade is shaded.”
I studied the card. The shading was subtle, and if I didn’t know what I was looking for I never would have noticed.
“It takes some study, but once you’ve memorized it, you can read them quickly.”
I looked at all the other decks spread out on the counter. “Are all of these decks marked?”
“No. These are all different types of trick decks. Stripper decks. Svengali decks. Gaffed decks. Forcing decks. I even have a brainwave deck. I make them all. Cards are my specialty.”
I had heard of gaffed decks, with trick cards like the thirteen of diamonds or a dead king of spades or a joker who is holding the exact card someone in the audience picks, but that was it. All the other names sounded so mysterious. Stripper decks and brainwave decks? I had no idea what these could be, but I didn’t want to admit my ignorance to Neil.
“You know in World War II there were special decks of cards that were made and sent to prisoners of war in Germany? Each card could be peeled apart and hidden inside was a section of a map that, if you pieced it all together, showed a secret escape route for the prisoners. Now that was an amazing magic trick.”
Neil put the queen of spades back in the marked deck and handed it to me. “You can have thi
s. It’s a gift.”
I took the deck from him. No one ever just gave me things for free. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks a lot.” I vowed to myself to memorize every marked card.
“So, my mother tells me she’s going to teach you some really cool magic.”
I smiled, not sure what to say.
“Her magic is way beyond anything we have out here.” He waved his hand around the store. “With her magic you can learn to get anything you want. It’s kind of like a genie in a bottle, but she’s going to introduce you to the genie in your head. Just be careful what you wish for.”
“Three wishes?” I asked.
“As many wishes as you want. It’s going to take a lot of practice, though. It’s much harder than learning card tricks, but it might not look like much. I had to practice for a really long time. Just remember to pay close attention to everything she says. There aren’t any shortcuts. You have to follow every step exactly as she tells you.”
I nodded at Neil and put the marked deck of cards in my pocket.
“She’s going to take you in the back now. We have a small office back there. Remember, do whatever she tells you.” He looked over and smiled at her.
Ruth patted her son on the forearm and then looked at me. “C’mon, Jim. Let’s get started.”
She walked toward a door in the back wall of the store and I followed, having no idea what I was really doing.
• • •
THE BACK OFFICE was dim and smelled a bit musty. There were no windows and only an old brown desk and two metal chairs. The carpet was brown shag, matted down in the middle of the room and sticking up like short brown grass around the walls. There were no magic tricks in here. No wands or plastic cups or cards or hats.
“Sit down, Jim.”
Ruth sat in one of the metal chairs and I sat down in the other one. We were face-to-face and our knees were almost touching. My right leg was jittering up and down, which it did every time I was nervous. My back was to the door but I knew where it was in case I needed to run. I mentally calculated how long it might take me to get out of there and get to my bike.
Into the Magic Shop Page 3