‘Less than I used to, and only before. It’s the anticipation; I’m backstage and I feel . . . stage fright, I suppose, but it’s more than that, it’s excitement – the knowledge that I’m about to show people something they’ve never seen before. That I might change the way they see the world, if only for an hour.’ She frowns. ‘I don’t feel nervous before the scarf tricks, or the cup and ball. That’s what I was raised on, but nobody likes it as much as the Breakaway.’
‘Why don’t you change the act, then? Cut the small stuff, go big time?’
‘It’d be complicated. I’d need equipment and a real, full-time assistant. I’d have to find a way to maneuver bigger props. Plus, my favorite acts, the ones I’ve only read about in books? Well, I’d have to figure them out. As a species, magicians are pretty tight-lipped.’
‘Pretend, then: You can do anything. What do you do?’
‘Anything? God.’ Klara grins. ‘DeKolta’s Vanishing Birdcage, for one. He raised a cage in the air with a parrot inside it and then – boom! – it disappeared. I know it must have gone up his sleeve, but I’ve never been able to figure out how.’
‘It must have been collapsible. The bars – were they jointed? Thicker at the middle than they were at the ends?’
‘I don’t know,’ says Klara, but now she’s flushing, talking fast. ‘Then there’s the Proteus cabinet. It’s a small closet, upright with tall legs on casters, so the audience knows you can’t come and go through a trapdoor. An assistant turns the cabinet around, opens the doors and closes them, and that’s when a knock comes from inside. The doors open, and there you are.’
‘Mirrors,’ says Raj. ‘Viewers don’t see the surface. They look through it, to whatever object’s being reflected.’
‘Sure, I know that much. But it’s all angles; the geometry has to be perfect, and that’s the trick of it – the math.’ She’s finished her drink, but for once, she doesn’t notice. ‘The act I’d really want to do, though, my all-time favorite, is called Second Sight. It was invented by a magician named Charles Morritt. Audience members gave him certain objects – a gold watch, say, or a cigarette case – and his assistant, who was blindfolded, identified them. Other magicians have done it since, with patter – you know, “Yes, here’s an interesting object, please hand it over,” which was obviously some sort of code – but all Morritt said was “Yes, thank you,” every time. He kept the secret till he died.’
‘The blindfold was see-through.’
‘His assistant was facing the wall.’
‘The audience members were plants.’
Klara shakes her head. ‘No way. The act would never have become so famous – people have tried to crack it for over a century.’
Raj laughs. ‘Dammit.’
‘I told you. I’ve thought about it for years.’
‘Then I suppose,’ says Raj, ‘we’ll just have to think harder.’
12.
Once, during the Golds’ annual trip to Lavellette, New Jersey, Saul woke the family at dawn. Gertie groaned, the last to rise, as Saul led them through the rented beach house, with its blue and yellow shutters, and down the path that led to the sea. Everyone was barefoot; there was no time for shoes, and when they reached the water, Klara saw why.
‘It looks like ketchup,’ Simon said, though it turned a watermelon fuchsia at the horizon.
‘No,’ said Saul, ‘like the Nile,’ and stared at the ocean with such perfect belief that Klara was apt to agree with him.
Years later, in school, Klara learned of a phenomenon called red tide: algae blooms multiply, making coastal waters toxic and discolored. This knowledge made her feel curiously empty. She no longer had reason to wonder about the red sea or marvel at its mystery. She recognized that something had been given to her, but something else – the magic of transformation – had been taken away.
When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone’s ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility. The point is not to negate reality but to peel back its scrim, revealing reality’s peculiarities and contradictions. The very best magic tricks, the kind Klara wants to perform, do not subtract from reality. They add.
In the eighth century BC, Homer wrote of Proteus, sea god and seal herder, who could assume any form. He could tell the future, but he’d change shape to avoid it, answering only if seized. Three thousand years later, inventor John Henry Pepper presented a new illusion at London’s Polytechnic Institution titled ‘Proteus, or We are Here but not Here.’ One century after that, in a construction dumpster at Fisherman’s Wharf, Klara and Raj scavenge for wood scraps. At this late hour, the site is abandoned – even the sea lions are asleep, only their noses above water – and they haul nine planks back in Raj’s truck. In the basement of the Sunset house he shares with four other men, Raj builds a cabinet three feet wide by six feet tall. Klara covers the interior with white and gold wallpaper, like John Henry Pepper’s. Raj hinges two glass mirrors to the inside of the cabinet, wallpapered, too, so that they look like the cabinet walls when lying flat. When opened toward the center of the cabinet with their edges touching, they hide a wedge of open space inside which Klara fits perfectly. Now, the mirrors reflect a side wall instead of the back.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she breathes.
The illusion is flawless. Klara has disappeared in plain sight. There, in the midst of reality, is another one nobody can see.
Raj’s past is anything but magical. His mother died of diphtheria when he was three; his father was a rag picker, wading through mountains of trash to find glass and metal and plastic to sell to scrap dealers. He brought the scraps of the scraps home to Raj, who turned them into tiny, delicate robots and lined them up on the floor of their one-room apartment.
‘He had tuberculosis,’ Raj says. ‘That’s why he sent me here. He knew he was dying, and he knew I had no one else. If he was going to get me out, it had to be soon.’
They’re lying on Klara’s bed, only an inch of space between their noses. ‘How did he do it?’
Raj pauses. ‘He paid somebody off. Someone who faked papers for me, saying I was Amit’s brother. It was the only way to get me in, and it took everything he had.’ There is a vulnerability in his face that she hasn’t seen before, or an anxiety. ‘I’m legal now, if that’s what you’re wondering.’
‘It wasn’t.’ Klara laces her hands with his and squeezes. ‘Did your dad ever make it here?’
Raj shakes his head. ‘He lived for another two years. But he didn’t tell me he was sick, so I didn’t get to see him before he died. I think he was afraid that if I visited, I wouldn’t leave him. I was his only kid.’
Klara pictures their fathers. In her mind, they’re friends, wherever they are: they play chess in ghostly public parks and debate theism in heaven’s smoky bars. She knows she’s not supposed to believe in the Christian heaven, but she does. The Jewish version – the Sheol, Land of Forgetfulness – is too hopeless.
‘What would they think of us?’ she asks. ‘A Jew and a Hindu?’