When my mother started to sleepwalk, my family joked that she had gotten it from me—some sort of bizarre reverse inheritance. I had always been told that I was the first Ahlberg to have an arousal disorder, though they hadn’t used that term when I was a child. They hadn’t even taken me to the doctor when it first happened. My mother had only mentioned it, almost in passing, to the pediatrician some months later when I had my annual physical. The physician had asked a few questions, and when he’d understood that only three or four times had I actually gotten out of bed in my sleep (and not once in the last month), he’d smiled and said there was nothing to worry about. It was not an uncommon occurrence among small children. Even the way I would seem to be awake—wide awake—and not recognize my father or mother. The physician had reassured my mother that I would outgrow it. And I did. The disorder may (or may not) have had something to do with starting kindergarten, the brain wanting to process all these new experiences and stimulations, or it may have been part of a growth spurt. Or maybe I was responding to stress in the house. But it didn’t matter. I would sleepwalk a couple more times over the next two years, but by the summer between first and second grade, I was sleeping through the night. When I saw my mother and father, I always knew exactly who they were.
“So, we have a box—an antique box I brought back from Egypt,” Lianna the Enchantress was saying to the dozen girls and boys at the party on Saturday afternoon. I was wearing my purple harem pants, a white dress shirt I had tied into a midriff, and a paisley vest I had found at a vintage clothing store in Burlington. My feet were bare, and I had painted my toenails a shade of lavender to match my pants. The costume was neither inappropriate nor revealing, but never before had I tied my shirt up to expose a part of my abdomen. As I worked, I was aware that some of the moms and dads were watching me as avidly as the children. But mostly I was aware of Gavin Rikert. The detective was leaning against the fireplace mantel of his sister and brother-in-law’s house, wearing blue jeans and a black turtleneck. I tried not to think about him, but it was difficult. His gaze was lionesque and he was standing perfectly still. I felt a bit like a gazelle.
“Did you bring it back on a flying carpet, Jasmine?” The question was shouted by a boy on his knees, a chubby kid in camo pants and a John Deere sweatshirt. In addition to interrupting my patter, he was leaning in a lot closer than I liked. But I guessed I had earned the Jasmine joke. I had spotted the boy right away as the child in the audience most likely to drive me crazy, and so I had brought out the Clatter Box earlier in the show than usual so I could involve him right away and win him over early on. Usually I wasn’t a fan of rewarding bad behavior, but the rules were different when I was performing: I did whatever it took to bring the skeptics and hecklers into the fold.
“As a matter of fact, I did,” I said. “What’s your name?”
“Foster.”
“Well, Foster, I need your help,” I told him, and with the speed of a lemur he bolted to his feet and was standing beside me. The box was about five inches square and decorated with neon-red camels against a banana-yellow desert on three sides and a cocoa-colored pyramid on the fourth. It was made of tin and had a gold tassel at the top. I gave him the box and asked him to hold it by the tassel with his right hand. Then, so he couldn’t use his free hand to examine the box, I gave him a silk to hold in his left.
“As you all can see—as you can see, Foster—the box is empty,” I said, opening the box’s front door, the side with the pyramid. The children and the parents all peered into the blackness. Meanwhile, I babbled about the mysteries of the pyramids and the way treasure hunters disappeared inside them. “The treasure chests were booby-trapped by the ancients to shoot daggers if someone ever opened them,” I added ominously.
I reached onto the card table beside me for a cobalt-blue scarf. I closed the pyramid door. Then I made a tube with my left hand and pressed the scarf into it with my right, reminding everyone how very different Egypt was from Vermont. I encouraged them to imagine how spooky it must be to wander through the dusky corridors and tombs inside a pyramid. When I opened my left hand, spreading my fingers into a starfish and exposing my palm, the scarf was long gone.
“But is it really gone?” I asked the kids, raising an eyebrow. “Does anything really disappear forever?” I glimpsed the detective against the fireplace and briefly our eyes connected.
“No!” the kids shrieked at once, aware that this was most certainly the correct answer, and I regained my focus.