Klara has never performed anywhere like the Mirage’s proscenium theater. The battens stand thirty feet above the floor; there are two moving platforms, five stage lifts, twenty spotlights, and two thousand seats. The ascension rope has been set, and the Proteus cabinet waits on wheels backstage. Three Mirage executives sit in the front row.
During Raj’s opening monologue, Klara stands in the wings, sweat shimmying down the sides of her sequined dress. For the first time, Ruby is in day care, a service on the seventeenth floor for the children of hotel employees. Klara’s stomach is clenched. She tries to focus, for Ruby’s sake. Shake out your hands. Swallow. Smile, goddammit. She steps, in gold heels, onstage.
Light. Heat. She can’t tell the executives apart, with their untucked dress shirts and their faces in shadow. They fidget through the Proteus cabinet. One leaves during the Vanishing Birdcage, citing a conference call. The remaining two perk up during Second Sight, but Klara times the Breakaway incorrectly and must lift her knees to avoid hitting the stage too soon. When she opens her eyes, one of the men is looking at his pager. The other clears his throat.
‘That it?’ he calls.
A stagehand flicks the house lights on, and Raj walks out from the wings. He’s smiling his salesman smile, but anger comes off him like heat. For a fraction of a second, the enormity of this opportunity – the enormity of their failure – knocks the air out of Klara. In the RV refrigerator, there are three jars of Ruby’s food. She and Raj have been eating fast food, and she can feel it in her body, the combination of glut and lack. They have sixty-four dollars in a locked box in the glove compartment. If they don’t get another gig, what will they do?
Klara thinks of Ilya, her mentor. He was the one who taught her that magic tricks are created for men: the pockets in suit jackets are perfectly sized to hold steel cups, and palming is easier with large hands. Then he taught her how to reinvent them. Klara uses compression-friendly foam balls, and she learned to work seamlessly with the drawer in a card table. But there was no way to get around the size of her palms, and when it came to sleight-of-hand magic, she could only rely on technique. ‘You’ve gotta get as good as the best men in magic,’ Ilya told her, drilling her in one-handed cuts until her fingers throbbed with pain. ‘And then you’ve gotta get better.’
Those sleight-of-hand tricks – they were her strength. They still are. But Klara and Raj have been trying to be Siegfried and Roy. In the process, Klara forgot the old, humble magic on which she was raised. She forgot herself.
‘No,’ she says. ‘It isn’t.’
She walks into the wings to retrieve Ilya’s black box, which she brought today for luck. She carries it across the stage and hops down into the audience, then turns the box into a table in front of the executives. Up close, the men don’t look alike at all. One is compact and hygienically bald, his blue eyes alert behind silver-rimmed glasses. He wears a red silk shirt. The other, in a black-and-white pinstriped shirt, is tall and pear shaped, his dark hair combed into a ponytail. Lavender glasses perch atop his nose, a delicate gold cross around his neck.
Raj walks to the edge of the stage and sits behind Klara. His body is stiff, but he’s watching her. She pulls her favorite deck out of the table’s hidden compartment and spreads the cards on Ilya’s table.
‘Pick three,’ she tells the bald man. ‘Turn them faceup.’
He selects the ace of clubs, the queen of diamonds, and the seven of hearts. She puts them back in the deck. Then she claps.
The ace flies out, fluttering midair before landing on a chair. She claps again: the queen sticks out of the center. When she claps a third time, the seven of hearts appears in her hand.
‘Ha!’ says the man. ‘Very nice.’
Klara doesn’t allow herself the compliment. She has work to do – Raise Rise, to be exact. She pulls a permanent marker out of the drawer and passes it to the man in the lavender glasses.
‘Cut the cards,’ she says. ‘Any place you like.’ He does, revealing the three of spades. ‘Excellent. Would you sign this card for me?’
‘With the marker?’
‘With the marker. You’ll keep me honest. There may be another three of spades in this deck, but none that look like yours. We’ll put it back in the middle of the deck, like this. But here’s a funny thing. When I tap the card at the top of the deck’ – she turns it over – ‘there’s your three. Strange, isn’t it? Now, let’s put it where it belongs, in the center. But wait: if I tap the top card a second time, here’s the three again. It’s risen through the deck.’
Raise Rise is one of the most difficult tricks Klara knows, and she hasn’t practiced it in years. She shouldn’t be able to do it – but something is helping her. Something is pulling her back to the person she’s been all along.
‘Now, I’ll show you very carefully how I put it in the middle of the deck. I’ll even leave it sticking out this time so you can be sure I’m not lying – you see it? So do I. So why,’ she says, turning the top card over, ‘is it on top for the third time? And now – let’s see; I think I feel it moving – it’s strange, but I could swear it’s on the bottom. Would you remove the bottom card, please?’
He does. It’s his. He chuckles. ‘Well done. I wouldn’t have noticed the double lift if I hadn’t been looking for it.’
He still has one eye on his pager. Klara makes him her target. Her pinkie is cramping – it’s been a year since she worked on her outjogging – but she doesn’t have time to shake out her hands. She grabs a fistful of quarters when she puts the deck away and points at the metal coffee mug that sits at the bald man’s feet.
‘Mind if I use that? Thank you; you’re very kind. I don’t know if you’ve noticed – I don’t know if you’ve looked – but this place is lousy with coins.’