The Involuntary Sojourner Page 3

  “Yes well he was my mentor! I saw him this year, at a magic convention in New York. Afterward, he said he had a surprise for me. And then he drove me to—Jeremy-san, can you imagine where?”

  Kazu paused.

  “Poughkeepsie.”

  Jeremy lifted empty hands and shrugged them apart in either puzzlement or indifference.

  “Oh. You don’t know who lives in Poughkeepsie, Jeremy-san? A very famous name in magic. A legend . . .”

  When it became clear that Jeremy had no intention of guessing, Kazu slowly revealed the name. He waited for a reaction.

  “. . . Do you know who he is?” he asked finally.

  “I’ve heard of him. I didn’t realize he was still alive.”

  Still alive? How disrespectful! Although there was no denying it: Feinmann was getting on. Kazu had been taken aback when the front door opened . . . The figure there, alarmingly frail, steadied itself on the doorframe. This was Harold Feinmann? After the introductions, they followed him inside. He seemed alert, at least, if milder and less acerbic than his reputation suggested; possibly Robert had vouched for Kazu in advance. He was actually wearing the fabled gloves! The gloves worn constantly to keep the fingertips moisturized for card work, to protect the hands—belonging to a retired postal worker, of all things—that had been called the greatest in magic. In a loud but gentle voice, Robert asked Feinmann if he could show Kazu his FBC. The Flexible Block Control was a move that, in its very absence from the published record (and even conjectured nonexistence), had achieved the status of myth. (Of course, nearly all of Feinmann’s work was unpublished. He was notorious for hoarding his methods, ever since a magician put one of Feinmann’s sleights into print under his own name. He seemed prepared to take his discoveries to the grave with him. Perhaps no name in magic had been built so purely on rumor and withheld information.) Feinmann slid off one glove, then the other. The hands, revealed: ordinary in size, narrow-fingered, complexly veined and spotted. They cradled a deck and did . . . nothing, apparently; until he raised them to expose for Kazu the serene clockwork shifting and realignment of cards . . . And then he painstakingly explained what his fingers were doing, as if Kazu had been designated the one meant to ensure that the move would not be lost forever.

  Kazu had practiced it for months, and had reached the point where—judging from the view in his practice mirror at least—the move might be nearly passable; but then his illness had struck, and he hadn’t practiced it or any other demanding sleights since . . .

  He rose up onto his knees and took a deck in his damp hands. He ordered the hands to stop shaking.

  “Feinmann’s Flexible Block Control: would you like to see it?” he asked; and without waiting for an answer, executed the move.

  “. . . How did it look, Jeremy-san?”

  “. . . Oh, my angle here wasn’t so good. I was a little below you, which wouldn’t normally—”

  “Did I flash?”

  “A little. But I can imagine, you know, how it should look . . .”

  “Yes, I’m sorry, I should have practiced more, it still needs work. I can’t perform it yet, but maybe I can demonstrate . . .”

  Jeremy, though, had already picked up his own cards and, cradling them gently, did . . . nothing.

  “Like that?”

  “Perfect, Jeremy-san! Perfect!” Kazu cried, voice bright with lavish enthusiasm to hide his desolation.

  “Really? It’s a beautiful move. It should be more well-known. Have you got a mirror?”

  “Ah. Yes, one moment please, I’ll bring—but one thing, Jeremy-san. Please don’t show this to anyone. I promised I wouldn’t—”

  “Oh, yeah, of course.”

  Kazu already regretted sharing the move. Why had he done it? How did he know Jeremy wouldn’t show the FBC to every young magician he met? Soon there would be a video tutorial on the internet and both Robert and Feinmann would know that Kazu had given away the secret . . .

  “The mirror?”

  “Right!” He hurried to his feet. “Sorry!”

  In the kitchen, Mariko stood at the sink, washing dishes. The cake was in the oven, baking in its square of light. He passed through the warm smell—a smell so rich and promising he momentarily forgot his guilt. Chocolate: today would be his first time in . . . Weeks? No; longer . . . The smell! It was like the promise of celebration. After everything he’d endured since his collapse. The celebration of a return to himself . . .

  It took longer than expected to find his practice mirror. He knew it must be there somewhere, hidden among all the things relegated to the study when they cleaned up for Jeremy’s visit. He’d always kept his magic materials—the books, the periodicals, the monographs and lecture notes—within arm’s reach throughout the apartment, and although Mariko called it chaos everything was in fact stacked and separated according to a private system—he could locate an item instantly if he needed to. At first he’d tried to maintain the system when they started moving the piles, but Mariko had practically thrown whatever she found into the study—“I feel like I’ve finally gotten my apartment back!” she’d said exultantly when they finished—and now it was all a sad jumble, order destroyed, everything abandoned here in a ruin of collapsed walls, broken arches, and teetering columns . . .

  The mirror was buried under a heap of old magazines. Kazu hurried back with it, back through the kitchen’s warm birthday smell, to the living room, where Jeremy sat still cradling the deck in his hands. Kazu placed the mirror on the table before him, opened the side panels, and sat down to wait while Jeremy began performing for himself, disregarding Kazu completely. Should he repeat the importance of keeping the move a secret? Would repeating it even matter now?

  Something blurred past his shoulder. It arced and dove, a bluish something, arced again and, alighting on the bookshelf, quivered into a stable shape: a bird, alive and red-chested . . .

  “Ah! Mariko!” Kazu rose, stumbled toward it, stumbled away. “Mariko! A bird! A bird got—”

  Mariko rushed in, vanished, and reappeared with a broom.

  “Jeremy-san,” Kazu began, “I’m sorry—”

  It whirred by, struck the lamp, started a twirling fall and looped up toward the ceiling.

  “Kazu, out of the way!” Mariko cried, raising the broom. Kazu felt light-headed and sluggish, unable to move . . .

  “Wait, don’t hit it!” Jeremy shouted, leaping up, both hands extended, as if to cup the creature between them.

  “No, Jeremy-san, it’s okay, let—”

  Something—a wing tip? a current of air?—brushed his ear. Mariko barreled past, broom swinging.

  In English, in Japanese:

  “It’s okay, don’t—”

  “Hold on—”

  “Where is it?”

  “—it go?”

  “Do you see it?”

  “Wait, let’s—” Kazu held up his hands weakly as if to ward off attacks coming from all sides. “Please, let’s . . .” He half sat, half collapsed onto the tatami mat. “It’s gone,” he said, eyes closed, unsure if this was in fact true.

  “Must’ve flown back out the window,” Jeremy said.

  “Ahh,” Mariko laughed, elated. To Kazu she giggled: “Did he think he was going to catch it bare-handed? Funny kid . . . Tell him I wasn’t going to hit it. He’ll think I’m some sort of . . .” She carried the broom back into the kitchen. “How did he think he was going to catch it?” her voice went on. “Even magicians’ hands aren’t that fast.” He heard her laughing at her own joke.

  Kazu felt drained. His sickness—perhaps he wasn’t completely recovered after all . . . Finally he thought to get up and close the door to the balcony. “I’m sorry, Jeremy-san,” he said. “I should have kept this closed. We’re very high up here, eleventh floor, and—”

  “No, hey, no problem. A little excitement.”

&nbs
p; “Tell him,” Mariko repeated from the doorway, not laughing anymore. “I don’t want him to think I’d hurt a bird.”

  “Yes, yes, all right,” Kazu said irritably. “My wife wants you to know she was only trying to scare it away.”

  “Well I think it worked.” Grinning at her, Jeremy began flourishing an invisible broom. “Nice job!”

  She in turn mimed cupping something between her palms.

  Kazu heard them laughing together, each at the other. He had closed his eyes again. When he opened them, Jeremy had a piece of paper in his hand. He held it aloft.

  “A prediction,” he said solemnly; Kazu couldn’t tell if he was being serious or mocking the self-important tones of the typical mind-reader. “This one I’ve never shown to anyone. This is just for you.” He set the paper on the table.

  “Ah, mentalism! I didn’t know you performed mental magic, Jeremy-san. Later, later I must show you something, I think you’ll like it. Do you know ‘The Inopportune Prediction’ by Philip Van Balkom? A very good friend, he—”

  “No. Kazu, this is what I want you to do.” He still had the solemn tone. Now it didn’t seem like a joke at all. Kazu found it annoying, but put on an earnest face and waited to be commanded.

  “Name a city,” Jeremy said, taking a pen and notepad from his pocket. “A city you’d like to visit.”

  Kazu knew all about the use of psychological influence and population stereotypes in mentalism; after all, he’d translated into Japanese a book by one of its foremost practitioners. (The author had even signed a copy for him.) The solution was to provide random information. Paris, Rome, possibly Honolulu: these would be the obvious choices. He tried to recall the capitals he’d been forced to memorize in his high school geography class. Oslo? No: too well-known. Djibouti. Was that even a city? Then he remembered an African capital he and his classmates had joked about because the word was, coincidentally, pronounced just like the Japanese word for “precocious.”

  “Maseru,” he said.

  Jeremy frowned but jotted it down.

  “Your favorite fruit?”

  Was pomegranate obscure enough?

  “Casaba,” he said.

  “A number from one to ten. Don’t think about it too much; give me the first number that comes into your head.”

  Kazu ignored this. Seven, of course, was the most frequent response. But Jeremy would realize that Kazu already knew that. One and ten were too extreme, five too snugly balanced in the middle. He considered three. But maybe this was exactly what magicians, avoiding the most common choices, gravitated toward . . . He settled on eight and changed his mind.

  “Nine.”

  Jeremy pretended to ponder the answers. He nodded to himself meaningfully. Kazu knew it was all nonsense, of course. Finally Jeremy put a finger to his lips, nodded once more and said:

  “What I’m getting here”—he tapped the notepad—“is that you’re at a crossroads in your life. You’ve recently started questioning whether the things you’ve placed value in are really of value. Does that make sense to you?” Kazu didn’t answer. “. . . You push yourself very hard. You do everything to the best of your ability and people respect you for it. This respect is important to you. At the same time you sometimes wonder if you deserve it.” Kazu wanted him to stop. He reminded himself that this was just stock cold reading, probably memorized straight from a book. “This could be wrong—it’s ambiguous, but it seems to suggest that . . . It’s not clear. Possibly that you’ve lost something important to you . . .”

  He put the pen and notepad away. “But none of this is a surprise to me. Before I came here today, I had a feeling about you, Kazu. I wrote it down.” He pointed at the prediction. “Take a look.”

  Kazu picked up the piece of paper. He unfolded it.

  Maseru

  Casaba

  9

  “Wait,” he mumbled in Japanese. “Wait a minute.” He set the paper down. When he picked it up again the words were still there.

  Maseru, Casaba, 9 . . . The department store’s magic counter appeared before him. And he suddenly remembered what he’d felt that first time, years before, when the lid was lifted and the ball was gone. It wasn’t wonder. It was horror, horror at how wrong this impossibility was, horror followed by some species of despair, followed by fury: he’d wanted to take the box and smash it into the glass counter. What he bought that day, and the next time, and the next, what kept him coming back, was the desire to demolish that feeling by learning all of the secrets the world had to offer. He had told the false story of his first magical experience so many times he’d fooled himself, misremembering what he’d really felt when he looked into the box. In his life, he had never experienced wonder at all. Unless wonder meant that loathsome queasy feeling when, for an instant, common sense ceases to operate and nothing is what it’s supposed to be . . .

  “Are you ready for some cake?” his wife called from the doorway.

  (In English: Kazu registered the language belatedly, with remote surprise.)

  He stared at the paper as if waiting for the letters scrawled there to reorder themselves into an explanation for a lifetime without wonder.

  (Jeremy and his wife, speaking to each other now, in English.)

  Maseru Casaba 9: A lifetime without wonder . . .

  “Okay, Kazu.”

  Kazu looked up. Jeremy had begun pulling things—the notepad, the pen—from his pocket. “I’ve kept you stewing long enough,” he said, eager to show he wasn’t the sort of magician who’d fool a brother in the fraternity and then gloat, sitting on the method, the way some would. “I guess you want me to tell you how it’s done.”

  Kazu knew he was required to say yes, to beg this boy to tear away the mystery and grant him one more secret for his notebook.

  Mariko came in carrying the silver tray reserved for special occasions. It gleamed, newly polished.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said in English. “Here you are.” She set the tray down. And Kazu was so grateful for the reprieve he could even forgive finding only one slice of cake there.

  Liability

  Doug hit the kid while he was driving home from his weekly chess game with Otto the liquor store clerk. He had lost the game in a humiliating reversal, after feeling sure he had Otto whipped using an obscure line of the Taimonov system found in an old Chess Life. Otto gloated, as usual. He went backwards for Doug, replacing pieces on the board, untangling positions, all the way to the point of the fateful blunder.

  “Here’s where your game went south,” Otto said mournfully, his fingertip on a bishop’s slotted head. “Right here.”

  The kid sped into the intersection on a mountain bike, straight through a red light, torso tilted down aerodynamically. The bike ended up half under his car and the kid ended up down the street. A guy and his dog came over and watched the kid twitch for a little while. Doug joined them.

  “You got your phone?” the dog owner said. “’Cause I don’t. Otherwise I’d call.”

  Doug took his phone out of his pocket.

  “You want me to make the call for you? Can you handle this?”

  “I’m fine,” Doug said, handing the guy his phone.

  There was no blood. The kid twitched. He looked maybe fourteen. The dog owner called 911 and gave their location and Doug’s license plate number.

  “She says don’t touch him,” the dog owner told him.

  “I’m not going to touch him,” Doug said.

  The dog quit sniffing the kid and looked up at its master with a let’s get moving kind of expression.

  “She said five minutes if you can believe her,” the dog owner said, returning his phone. “Don’t touch him. Just leave him be.”

  “Right.”

  The kid wasn’t moving anymore.

  “Which, hell, we don’t need her to tell us, right? What are we gonna
do? Don’t touch them. That’s the first rule. Leave it to the professionals. ’Cause you could do more damage that way. Shifting things that are you know . . .”

  “Right.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “He wasn’t wearing a helmet.”

  “Jasper, sit.”

  An ambulance came, spraying the intersection with the sound and colors of panic. But the men who got out worked in an efficient way that calmed everything down. They worked very fast but without any apparent sense of urgency, reminding Doug of the pit-stop crews in professional auto racing. By the time the police arrived the paramedics had the kid strapped onto a stretcher and were putting him in the back of the ambulance. As they sealed him in and screamed away, all he could think was: Thank God for those guys! They were like a hazardous waste disposal unit. Or a bomb defusing squad. They were like a special cleanup team that removed impossible things from the intersections of the world.

  ***

  The police separated them: one talked to Doug and one talked to the dog owner.

  Doug kept trying to listen to what the dog owner was saying. He could hear him make a whistling sound as he gestured with one hand.

  The cop who was questioning Doug took his driver’s license to the patrol car. After a minute he brought it back.

  The other cop squatted and said something to the dog Jasper.

  A car had stopped in the intersection. Inside, a little girl and a man with glasses watched the five of them. They weren’t gaping, the way you imagine bystanders at an accident. They looked shrewd and knowing, like a pair of insurance investigators already on the scene. The cop who was talking to Jasper stood up and waved the car along.

  “If asked, would you agree to a breath alcohol reading?”

  Doug thought about this carefully. His answer to this question seemed crucial, even though he hadn’t been drinking.

  “Yes,” he said finally.

  Where was Jasper’s owner? Where was Jasper? They were nowhere to be seen. Their cop was measuring the skid marks behind Doug’s car with a tape measure. Doug’s cop went to the patrol car again and came back with a black object in his hand. At first Doug thought it was a Breathalyzer kit, but it turned out to be an Instamatic camera, which he used to take a picture of the front of the car.