The Book of Immortality

by Adam Leith Gollner

  Copperfield had also written the first story in the collection. It told of a boy named Adam whose grandfather is dying. Trying to keep him alive, Adam tears up bits of paper and throws them in the air to create a snowlike effect. Alas, the following morning, Grandpa dies. Grieving, Adam heads to the beach, wishing he could bring his grandpa back to life. The story ends with a sheet of paper floating toward him on the breeze. He tears it up and hurls it into the sky; real snow wafts down.

  What a coincidence, I thought: a story about using magic to ward off mortality.

  * * *

  The show that night was sold-out. Arriving early and giddy with anticipation, my date and I picked up our tickets and spent a few minutes scoping out the rest of the audience. It consisted mainly of families, children out with their grandparents, as well as a few couples dressed up for a romantic night.

  The usher led us to a pair of plush blue velvet chairs set apart from the rest of the theater, a row in front of the first row, somewhere between the anonymity of the crowd and the glare of the stage. I immediately felt exposed. Whispers went up behind us, a hushed mixture of envy and curiosity, speculations about the type of people who’d procure such ostentatious seats.

  As we waited for the show to begin, a DVD loop projected lists of Copperfield’s accomplishments against the backdrop. “Most tickets sold around the world”; “Only living magician to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame”; “Largest sum of money ever amassed by a magician”; “Most Emmy Awards won by a magician”; “Magician of the Millennium.” The slide show was on repeat. It kept trumpeting his wealth, and how he’d sold more tickets on Broadway than Cats. The excessiveness of it all felt like an illusion, one I couldn’t help seeing as intended to make the other headlines about his private life disappear.

  The boasts were as revealing as they were routine. Writing about Prospero, W. H. Auden spoke of magic as a way to blot “the gross insult of being a mere one among many.” Copperfield’s idol Houdini also excelled at self-promoting. They both had East European–immigrant parents and came from a lower-class, shmatte background. Houdini billed himself as the Greatest Magician the World Has Ever Seen. But the boasting also led to his downfall—his claim that he could withstand any punch caused a young man to deal him a fatal blow.1

  Copperfield made his entrance on a motorcycle shrouded in smoke. Disembarking, he trotted right up to the lip of the stage. He came so close that I could make out the granularity of his makeup’s powder. His long, delicate fingers didn’t shake in the least, but he looked tired, baggy-eyed, like a wax figure of himself. His hair had an almost metallic quality. His black dress shirt was crisply pressed, and it billowed off his clothes-hanger shoulders, emphasizing a skeletal slenderness. He wore surprisingly scuffed-up, black leather Prada high-top shoes.

  The show opened with another on-screen montage, this time of his appearances on TV shows, from Seinfeld to Conan O’Brien to The Simpsons. Again: displaying importance. When the video ended, a few minutes later, the actual entertainment began. His demeanor became increasingly businesslike. His gift for speaking quickly and clearly herded the show along at a brisk clip. As he spoke, his eyes roved through the crowd, peering intently at everyone in the first few dozen rows, zeroing in on certain individuals. He recited memorized passages while spending long seconds eyeing audience members. When our turn came, I tried to look unquestioningly enchanted, but not overtly so.

  Alongside an icy assuredness, his ability to segregate his thoughts from the words he was speaking gave the performance a mechanical quality. Throughout his TV years, he’d been the opposite of ironic, so vanilla that his manager compared him to white paint on a white wall. Now, still G-rated, his delivery had taken on a sarcastic edge.

  As detached as he was, his tricks were fun to watch, complexly orchestrated and mainly inexplicable. Unfortunately, when he made an origami rose float, I was sad to see a string attached, easy to detect from our vantage point even against the intentionally distracting shimmery-silver background. After a few bits, he again played some video footage, this time of a large-scale Houdini-inspired illusion from the glory days. His TV tricks—like the one in which he chained himself to a flame-engulfed dinghy, plunged over the frothing edge of Niagara Falls, and somehow emerged dangling from the base of a helicopter—were significantly more impressive than the small-scale legerdemains he enacted before our eyes.

  The show heated up when he picked two women from the crowd, including my date, to come onstage. He handed her a pair of large black rubber gloves—to protect her, he explained, from an African scorpion she’d be handling. She struggled to open the first glove, which was deliberately stuck.

  “Come on, you can’t get it on?” he joked.

  At the end of the routine, in which the real scorpion picked a card, any card, Copperfield pointed to his cheek and asked for an innocent kiss. The audience clapped as my date left the stage.

  “How was that?” I asked in a hushed voice, smiling in case he was watching.

  “That glove was rigged,” she whispered, back in her chair. “He manipulated my stage presence. I was robbed of my grace.”

  The show continued with a number of solid prestiges. Copperfield moved through them briskly, getting the show done. For his grand finale, he made thirteen audience members disappear. Each of them climbed aboard a wooden ark. One elderly lady took a little long to get into place and he started grumbling about getting paid overtime. Once she was settled in, he covered the boat in fabric. The sound of triumphant horns and strings unfurled from the PA. A moment later, Copperfield pointed into the distance. At the other end of the auditorium, the load of teleported people stood smiling and waving. Indisputably magical.

  The curtains fell. A short, impassive assistant named Robyn immediately swooped in and whisked my date and me backstage. We arrived at a set of thick metal doors. “Wait here,” Robyn told us. As she went inside, we caught a glimpse of the boat people signing paperwork.

  A few minutes later, we were ushered through the doors into a cramped vestibule. Copperfield stood waiting with a towel around his neck and a stack of Musha Cay postcards in his hand. I told him how great the show had been. He nodded graciously, considerately asked my date about herself, and then handed over some glossy postcards. They were the same ones Martha had given me. He started describing his resort, “the most magical vacation destination in the world,” in tones as well honed as in his onstage performance. While his charisma was undeniable, other qualities were also on display: wealthy salesman, embattled celebrity, master seducer. An agitation lurked behind his calm façade, a worldview strained through a colander of stress. But as he spoke, it seemed to me as though precious crystals were pouring from his mind. An entire vista unfolded before our eyes.

  I glanced down at the postcards. On Musha, it said, magic is ever present. Visitors encounter magic that they can experience nowhere else on earth. I wondered whether he considered the island just another part of the show. Did everything he involved himself in have to be magical?

  His monologue over, he leaned back against the wall, tilted his head downward, and stared up with a scrutiny calculated to decode my intentions. Wondering if he was hypnotizing me, reading my mind, shuffling through my innermost thoughts, I projected images of sandy tropical beaches onto my frontal cortex.

  “So are you on the staff at BestLife?” he asked, wiping the sweat from his brow.

  “No, just a freelancer.”

  “Have you written there before?”

  “No,” I admitted, realizing I needed to shuffle the deck. “But they really want feature stories about rejuvenation, so my editor loves this idea.”

  “There are lots of rejuvenating things down there.” He raised his voice, excited. “The whole point of creating Musha was to help people feel like children again.”

  I nodded empathetically, thoughts trailing off into what it might mean to want people to feel like children rather than adults. He said something about how somebody I�
�d never heard of who’d vacationed in Musha had been on the cover of BestLife recently. Copperfield genuinely liked the magazine. He took the stack of postcards back for a moment and pointed a manicured finger at an image. “Here, I want you to check out that pink sand,” he said, smiling benevolently at my companion. “Musha has pink-sand beaches the size of South Beach, in Miami. Sugar sand. That’s what I’m talking about. If you come down, you’ll see the sandbar where Pirates of the Caribbean was filmed. You can even watch it at my drive-in movie theater on Coconut Beach.”

  “It all sounds so wonderful,” I said, steeling myself. “All these details will make the perfect backdrop for a story about the fountain of youth.”

  “The fountain?” He frowned, serious. “How did you hear about the fountain?”

  “I read the newspaper reports.” Martha probably hadn’t told him anything about my angle.

  “There won’t be much of that.” He smiled tightly, his fluttering fingers tracing arabesques of misdirection in the air. “You’ll be immersed in the sense of wonder: there’ll be amphibious catamarans, Jet Skis, and Balinese daybeds. We’re just not ready to show the fountain of youth yet.”

  “Is it real?”

  “Yes, it’s real, but we’re not sure how real,” he said, fingers stiffening. “We know it affects plants and insects, but we don’t know if it’s for humans. It’s too early to discuss at this point. There won’t be any of that.”

  “My editor needs there to be some of that.” I was showing my cards. “They commissioned a story about Musha’s antiaging qualities, including the fountain of youth.” It wasn’t me—it was BestLife.

  “Musha is a place for people who have the wherewithal to go anywhere on earth,” Copperfield continued, a hint of fluster creaking through. “It’s about making billionaires feel like they’re kids again. That’s a story, isn’t it?”

  “It is.” I nodded, with determination now. “But, like I said, this story needs the fountain. I don’t need you to explain how it works. I just need to see it, to experience it in some way so that I can use it in the story.”

  Copperfield straightened up brusquely. “Were you promised the fountain of youth?”

  “No,” I answered, apprehending that Martha might get in trouble for this.

  “So nobody promised you the fountain?” he reiterated, calming down, sensing a simple bureaucratic solution to the impasse.

  “Nobody promised me anything. But there’s a story behind the fountain of youth that hasn’t been told yet, and BestLife is interested in publishing it.”

  He paused, balancing the odds. He looked at my date, and looked back at me. “Okay,” he granted finally. “I might be able to give you a taste.”

  “That’s all my editor wants,” I exhaled gratefully.

  “We’ll continue this over the phone.” He handed me a card. His number ended in five 5s, like a Hollywood pizza-delivery line. “I’m going to need to speak to you quite a bit before I agree to this.”

  “That’s perfect!” I smiled.

  Perplexed by my enthusiasm, he shook my hand, said good-bye, and faded into the inky recesses of the theater.

  * * *

  Following the Montreal performance, Copperfield and I spoke a number of times. If he called and I was out, my call display showed that he would keep calling, often every ten or fifteen minutes, until he got through. The first time he tried to reach me, I returned home from a short meeting to find three messages from him on my answering machine. When I called him back, he had some bad news for me. He’d been thinking about it and had decided I wouldn’t be able to see the fountain.

  That didn’t mean I shouldn’t visit, though. “I want to be very clear with you about what you’ll see if you come down and what you won’t see,” he said. “I’m not in the bait-and-switch business. I’m in the billionaire business. I make billionaires happy. Is that a story we can do?”

  “There are numerous possible stories—”

  “The richest man in the world has been here four times. I’m not gonna name any names. . . . Okay, the Google guys got married here.”

  He repeatedly mentioned how he couldn’t reveal who’d stayed on Musha in the past, even though his publicity materials referred to them, by name, frequently: “In the guest roster are the names of entertainment luminaries such as Oprah Winfrey and Robin Williams. . . . Musha’s most recent guests include one of the world’s wealthiest men, an internationally known computer software magnate.” As mysterious as Copperfield tried to make it sound, there was no way I could even pretend I’d be focusing the story on Bill Gates’s visit.

  “The ‘billionaire playground’ angle is different than a feature about your fountain of youth, which is what I pitched,” I said. “We’re exploring the metaphor of rejuvenation, and the fact that there’s a real fountain of youth on Musha. I can weave details about the billionaires into the story as long as we agree I’m there to write about the fountain.”

  “Musha is about being children again,” he corrected me. “I’m redoing my childhood. My parents used to smuggle me into drive-ins. I’m haunting one of the islands. It’s a metaphor about reliving and regaining things that we’ve lost.”

  “Yes, but you issued a press release about the fountain of youth, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, but it’s not ready to be seen yet,” he snapped, then immediately switched to a more patient tone. “The fountain-of-youth thing will reveal itself in the next few years, but not now.”

  “But isn’t there a way to speak about it now? We are speaking about it now. And the way you speak about it suggests that it’s very meaningful to you.”

  “It has a mystical quality, but it’s real. If you want to think it’s snake oil, fine.”

  “I don’t need to bathe in it. I don’t need an explanation of it or any full reveal. I can respect the mysteries of the fountain’s ways, but I do need to write about it. I just need enough of a thread in order to bring the rejuvenation aspect to life.”

  “I really don’t want to show it. If I turn water into wine, I’ll get hammered. As soon as you give people something tangible, they’ll rip it apart. It’ll be dissected. I’ll be crucified.”

  Had he just made a Christ analogy? I tried to assuage him, going on about how BestLife readers would relate to the story of the fountain.

  “I want people to not think I’m . . . crazy,” he replied. “But you’re right: maybe we can talk about the fountain. On Musha. Yes. Would that be enough for your story?”

  I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want to give in too easily. He told me to think about it and call him back.

  I mulled it over and saw only one way forward. To not see it—but talk about it—would still be better than not going. I’d just have to sneak out at night and find it. When we spoke next, a few days later, I nevertheless pressed him to show me the fountain.

  “You won’t see my wrinkled hand go into a stream and come out young,” he said firmly. “This is not a trick. But if you want to talk about the meaning of the fountain—that, we can do.”

  “A discussion of the fountain of youth, on Musha.”

  “You’ll have a very passionate subject. I speak about the fountain with great verbal aplomb.”

  He suggested I speak to my editor about it. I told him that I was pretty sure it would fly. Stories invariably end up different from how they’re conceived, I explained, reiterating my point about the numerous possible approaches to covering Musha. I was essentially agreeing to give him the story he wanted—“David’s Magical Island for Supremely Rich People”—as a way of getting the story I wanted.

  Sensing an opportunity to introduce my book into the conversation, I mentioned my intention to write more than one story about Musha. Even though he wasn’t ready to show me the fountain for BestLife, would he be willing to show me the fountain before any other reporters once he was ready to unveil it?

  He said he’d consider it.

  “There’s one last thing,” he added. “It’s important t
o bring someone. To be there alone is going to suck. All the experiences on Musha are shared experiences. You should bring that girl you came to the show with, or someone else if you want, it doesn’t matter. Do you think she’ll be available?”

  * * *

  I decided not to invite her after coming across a leaked document, “Show Participation,” containing instructions for his road team on bringing girls backstage. It revealed how Copperfield’s onstage gestures indicated to his team which women he was interested in. Backstage, his assistants had to recite memorized lines, including a mention of Musha Cay: “Hi! How are you? Did you enjoy the show this evening? Good! . . . My name is (name). . . . I work for David. . . . We just wanted to thank you for your participation in the show, and David will be here in a few minutes to also thank you personally. Every time we see somebody in the audience or onstage with a look or personality that is special, we like to get more information so we can possibly contact you in the future . . . and so we can invite you and your family back to the show whenever you are in the city. Did you know that David has recently bought some islands in the Bahamas? Well they are BEAUTIFUL and we are doing a lot of project [sic] for these islands: ads, tv, radio and many other promotions. So we’d like to keep in touch with you in case there is a job in the future we think you would be interested in.”

  One section outlined methods of handling models, including important prospects David might want to speak to privately. When “pulling” the guests, assistants were advised to be smooth and discreet, especially with a “special.” There were guidelines on extracting personal information from these female “prospects”: “While they are filling out the form, you should try to chat with them and ask them the following questions: Where are you from? What hotel are you staying in? Who did you come to the show with? Husband? Boyfriend? Friend? Whenever it feels comfortable, you should take a Polaroid photo of them.” If a boyfriend or husband started causing problems, assistants were instructed to do their best to calm things down by referring to the “What to Say” sheet for help.