She holds the mug in her right hand and splays her left, to show them it’s empty. When she snaps, a quarter appears between her left thumb and forefinger. She drops it into the mug, where it clinks. She pulls two coins from the bald man’s shirt collar, one from each of his ears, and two from the larger man’s shirt pocket.
‘Now, this is your mug, not mine. There’s no secret compartment, no storehouse of coins. So I bet you’re wondering how I’m doing this. I bet you already have your predictions.’ Klara gestures to the dark-haired man’s glasses. He hands them to her, and she tips them toward the coffee mug. One quarter slides over each lens. ‘It’s a natural response: we give life logic all the time. You see me producing coins over and over. Well, you assume, they must be in my left hand. And when I show you my left hand, when you realize that I can’t be holding them there, you change the logic. Now you’re thinking they’re all in my right hand. It would be useful, wouldn’t it? So close to the mug. You can’t see that I might’ – she passes the mug to her left hand – ‘be shifting’ – she reveals her right hand, empty – ‘methods.’
She coughs; two coins tumble out of her mouth. The dark-haired man puts his pager in his shirt pocket. Now she has his attention.
‘You’re a religious man,’ says Klara, eyeing the cross around his neck. ‘My father was, too. Sometimes I thought he was my opposite. His rules versus my rule-breaking. His reality versus my fantasies. But what I’ve realized – what I think he already knew – is that we believed in the same thing. You could call it a trapdoor, a hidden compartment, or you could call it God: a placeholder for what we don’t know. A space where the impossible becomes possible. When he said the kiddush or lit the candles on Shabbat, he was doing magic tricks.’
Raj coughs, to warn her. Where are you going? But she knows where she’s going. She’s known all along.
‘We know something about reality, my father and I. And I bet you know it, too. Is it that reality is too much? Too painful, too limited, too restrictive of joy or opportunity? No,’ she says. ‘I think it’s that reality is not enough.’
Klara sets the mug on the floor and retrieves a cup and ball from the drawer. She puts the empty cup facedown on the table and places the ball on top.
‘It’s not enough to explain what we don’t understand.’ She lifts the ball and holds it tight in her fist. ‘It’s not enough to account for the inconsistencies we see and hear and feel.’ When she opens her fist, the ball has vanished. ‘It’s not enough on which to pin our hopes, our dreams – our faith.’ She raises the steel cup to reveal the ball beneath it. ‘Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate’ – she puts the cup down – ‘reality’ – she makes a fist – ‘is.’
When she opens her first, the red ball isn’t there. What’s there is a full, perfect strawberry.
Silence stretches from the carpeted floor to the fifty-foot ceiling, from the back of the stage to the balcony. Then Raj begins to clap, and the bald man joins in. Only the man with the gold cross withholds applause. Instead, he says, ‘When can you start?’
Klara stares at the strawberry in her palm. It’s damp. She can smell it. There’s a roar in her ears like the waterfall she heard outside the Mirage – or was it a saw?
The bald man takes a leather-bound calendar from his pocket. ‘I’m thinking December, January – January? Put her right before Siegfried and Roy?’
The larger man has a voice like something moving underwater. ‘They’ll eat her alive.’
‘Right, but as an opener. We’ll give her a half hour, people are filtering in, they want something to look at; she’s a good-looking girl – you’re a good-looking girl – she gets their attention, asses in seats, and bam! Tigers, lions, explosions. Blast off.’
‘They’ll need new costumes,’ says the other man.
‘Oh, complete overhaul on the costumes. We’ll get you a production team, cut the birdcage, cut the cabinet, amp up the rope hang, amp up the mind-reading trick – bring an audience member onstage, that kind of thing; we’ll get you set up for it.’ Someone’s pager beeps. Both men check their pockets. ‘Listen, we’ll talk. You got four months before opening, you’re gonna be fine.’
Jesus fucking Christ,’ says Raj as soon as the elevator doors close. ‘A strawberry.’ He’s laughing, crumpled in the corner where two of the glass walls meet. ‘I’ll never know how you pulled that off, but it was perfect.’
‘I don’t know, either.’
Raj’s laughter stops, though his smile still hangs open.
‘I’m serious,’ Klara says. ‘I’d never seen that strawberry before. I have no idea where it came from.’
Her first thought is that the blackouts have come back: perhaps she drove to a market, bought a container, stuffed one in her pocket. But that doesn’t make sense. Raj is the only one who drives the rental car, and there’s no grocery store in walking distance from King’s Row.
‘What do you think you are?’ Raj asks. There’s something feral in his face, something wild, like a wolf guarding his kill. ‘A magician who believes in her own tricks?’
Months ago, she would have been wounded. This time, she isn’t. She’s noticed something.
The look in Raj’s eyes. She mistook it for anger. But that’s not what it is.
He’s afraid of her.
18.
Raj works with the production team to rig the Jaws of Life and stage Second Sight. He designs a new set of props for the Indian Needle Trick: bigger needles, so they read from the stage, and red cord instead of thread. The Mirage’s entertainment director asks Klara if she’ll let Raj saw her in half – ‘Easy-peasy; won’t hurt a bit’ – but she refuses. He thinks she’s afraid of the trick when the truth is that she could give him an hour-long tutorial on P. T. Selbit and his misogynistic inventions: Destroying a Girl, Stretching a Lady, Crushing a Woman, all of them perfectly timed to capitalize on postwar bloodthirst and women’s suffrage.
Klara won’t be a woman who is sawed in half or tied in chains – nor will she be rescued or liberated. She’ll save herself. She’ll be the saw.