The Self-Working Trick (and other stories), page 13
Another man pushed his way toward us, grumbling as he did. He was dressed in a suit, which made him stand out in the sea of uniforms.
“Martin, you’re just handing him a hostage, is that it?” the man said in a loud whisper. It was so loud that it may have been louder than his normal voice. “That seems like a bad, bad idea.”
I didn’t know who this guy was, but I was liking the way he thought.
“Look, Swanson, I’m doing everything I can to deescalate this matter. He called for a magician; so, unless you know of a deputy who can pull a rabbit out of a hat, I say the smartest thing we can do right now is give Pearson what he wants.”
The young officer in the van handed him a heavy flak vest, which the older officer quickly examined.
“Here,” he said, pushing it in my direction. “Put this on.”
I held the vest gingerly and then handed it back to him. “I can’t wear that.”
“What?”
“I can’t wear that,” I repeated.
“Good idea,” Martin said as he took the vest. “No sense getting him riled up by taking an offensive posture.”
I shook my head. “Actually, the vest will cover my pockets and inhibit my movements. If you want me to perform magic, it will have to be without the vest.”
“This is insane,” the man in the suit muttered.
“You got any better ideas?”
The two men faced each other down for several seconds. The man in the suit took a step back as he shook his head.
Sheriff Martin turned back to me. “Look, he seems like he’s really on edge.”
For a moment I wasn’t sure who he was talking about. The man in the suit? The man in the house? To be honest, it pretty well described my current state of mind as well.
“Do what you can to calm him down,” he continued. “Do a couple tricks. Entertain him. Then see if you can coax him outside.”
“If my tricks are bad enough, maybe that’ll force him out. I’ve been known to clear a room,” I joked. They stared back at me. “Got it. Do a couple tricks. Coax him outside.”
I began to walk toward the house.
“And whatever you do—”
I turned back. The Sheriff and his team were staring at me.
“Yes?”
“Whatever you do, just don’t make things worse.”
I couldn’t help but smile. If I have one mantra as a performer, that was probably it.
I was about halfway across the front lawn when my common sense caught up with me. Was this really the wisest course of action?
I looked at the house, which was a small rambler. It appeared identical to the houses on either side, paint color being the primary differentiator. The one in front of me appeared to be dark blue, with white trim. The shades were drawn and no lights were visible within, although the porch light was on. Unlike the houses on either side, the front door was painted red. I vaguely remembered this design touch indicated a welcoming environment.
I hoped that was going to be the case.
I stepped up to the door and looked for a bell. I couldn’t find one, so I knocked. My first attempt was so soft I could barely hear it myself. I tried again, this time putting some force behind three sharp raps. It still sounded like a very weak woodpecker who’d lost the will to live.
However, it seemed to have registered. Leon Pearson must have been watching from inside, because the front door opened just a crack. I could see he had the security chain on. I could also see he looked like a wreck. Through the crack in the door, I could only see one eye (bloodshot) and a bit of his face (unshaven). His voice was a croaky whisper.
“Are you the magician?”
I nodded. “Yes, Mr. Pearson. I’m Eli Marks. The magician.”
He stared back at me. “How do I know you’re really the magician?”
The question stumped me. I had certainly witnessed several situations where performers had proved to me that they absolutely weren’t magicians. But I was coming up short on an idea of how to prove I was. If I’d had a magic wand and a top hat with a rabbit in my hand, would that have persuaded him?
I stood there for several seconds and then an idea occurred to me. I fell back on the same words magicians have uttered since the dawn of … well, since the dawn of magicians.
“Um, think of a card.”
He stared back at me.
I continued, pretending he was the most helpful of audience volunteers. “Are you thinking of a card,” I said as I slowly—oh so slowly—reached into my coat pocket.
He studied me closely. I sensed he was poised to slam the door.
I pulled a boxed deck of cards out of the pocket.
“Have you thought of a card?”
He nodded, doing it so gradually it appeared to be happening in slow motion.
“And what card did you think of?”
He continued to stare at me. Finally, I detected a weak whisper.
“Three of spades.”
“Three of spades,” I repeated way-too cheerfully. I slid the deck of cards out of its cardboard box. “Well, if I weren’t a magician, could I make your card—the three of spades—reverse itself in this deck of cards? Like this?”
I made a vague magical gesture and then spread the cards so that he could see them. He looked down at the cards, then up at me to make sure I wasn’t doing something tricky. Then back at the spread of cards in my hands.
It appeared to be a completely normal deck of cards. All the cards were different, but one card was face down in the deck.
I reached into the spread and pulled the card out, delicately flipping it over so he could see the face of the card.
It was the three of spades.
Through the crack in the door, I could see his one eye go wide. He closed the door for several seconds and I could hear him futzing with the security chain. A moment later, he swung the door open—not all the way open, but wide enough for me to step through.
As he closed the door behind me, oddly only one thought occupied my mind: Although it had gained me access to the house, I had just burned off a nice ten-minute routine. I hefted my bag, hoping I’d brought enough stuff to get me through this.
Whatever this turned out to be.
The impression I’d gotten from outside was correct: There were no lights on in the house. However, the spotlights the Sheriff’s department had aimed on the exterior did a remarkably good job of providing plenty of illumination within.
The lights also added an eerie quality to the space, forcing long shadows on the wall, like a stark blue sunset was exploding just outside the front windows.
Leon waved me toward the living room, which was getting the most benefit from the spotlights outside. Furniture consisted of a worn couch, a side table, an easy chair, and a coffee table. The room was a little messy, but the key item or items I was looking for—a gun or guns—were not immediately visible.
I turned to my left and could see a small dining room beyond. The dinner table looked to hold the remains of a single meal, with the three other chairs set in an orderly fashion around the table. What looked like a large family photo was hanging on the far wall, but the long shadows from the spotlights made it hard to see any detail.
Here in the living room, a big TV sat on a stand positioned in one corner. The Golden Girls was playing silently. Betty White must have just said something stupid, because Bea Arthur was giving her a death-beam stare. Although the volume was off, somehow I felt like could still hear the echo of canned laughter.
Once I had a sense of my environment, I turned to survey my host. He was somewhere in his forties and about three inches shorter than me; a bald spot on the top of his head was clearly in the process of spreading to the rest of his scalp. He wasn’t shaking, exactly, but he was sort of vibrating. He was clearly nervous. He was wearing an out-of-style suitcoat, which hung on him poorly; he’d either lost weight or had never really grown into his father’s suit.
He wasn’t holding a gun, but the coat was bulky enough to hide a weapon and a couple good-sized cats as well. In fact, it might have been my imagination, but it looked like the left side of the coat was drooping down further than the right. Was there a bulky object in that left pocket? I really couldn’t be sure one way or the other, so I decided the best course of action was to proceed as if there was.
The coffee table was cluttered with several empty beer bottles and two mostly empty bags of chips. Leon cleared them away quickly, disappearing from the room for a moment. Seconds later he was back; the trash was gone, and he’d grabbed a straight back chair from the dining room. He set it in front of the coffee table and gestured that the couch was mine.
“So, you’d like a magic show,” I said as I settled in, really trying to sound upbeat and cheerful. I was probably overdoing it.
“I was supposed to have a magician before,” he said quietly. He wasn’t making eye contact. “When I was ten. For my birthday. It didn’t happen. Like a lot of things didn’t happen.”
He was staring at the coffee table. We sat without speaking for several seconds. I was running some possible responses through my head, but before I could settle on one, he spoke again.
“It didn’t happen,” he repeated. “And, you know, I still want that magician. So, I called and booked a magician.” He looked up at me. His eyes were really watery; he wasn’t crying but was right on the edge of tears. “I’m sorta having a bad week.”
I nodded. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I’m not sure he actually heard me, but he kept talking. “I lost my job, my wife left me, she took the kids, I don’t have any money, I have nothing but debts. And I’m just having a bad week.”
I am not proud of it, but my first thought was, well, looks like I’m not getting paid for this one. But I quickly shoved that selfish notion aside.
“Perhaps a little magic can brighten things up,” I said, again turning the cheerful knob up higher than probably necessary. “Do you like card tricks?”
He stared back at me vacantly.
“I don’t know. Is that what most people like?”
I’d been reaching for a deck of cards, but his query stopped me cold. I had to admit, no one had ever posed that question to me. I had a lot of card tricks in my repertoire, but I’d never really stopped to consider this existential question: Was that what most people liked? Or was it simply what I liked doing?
“Well, I’ve got card tricks, coin tricks, tricks with rope, with rubber bands, a cups and balls routine,” I rattled off quickly, pushing that larger question out of my mind for the time being. Instead, I tried to think about the sort of tricks he might have seen at the ten-year-old birthday party that never happened. I’m sure balloons had been on the program, maybe a coloring book illusion, probably some form of hippity-hop rabbits. And sponge balls. Lots of sponge balls.
I had none of those. Just cards, coins, rope, rubber bands and cups and balls. And a couple paperbacks for a book test, if it came down to that. Which I hoped it wouldn’t.
“Cards are okay,” he finally said.
“Well, since you seem to like the Three of Spades, let’s do a little something with that card.” I quickly sorted through the deck in my hand and found the card. I handed it to Leon while I reached for the black sharpie in my pocket. He clutched the card but watched my hand very closely. He seemed relieved to see it was just a magic marker as I pulled it from my pocket.
“Leon, go ahead and sign your name across the face of the card, just so we can make sure I’m not doing anything tricky.” I uncapped the pen and handed it to him.
He slowly and deliberately signed his name on the card, taking far longer to write four letters than I might have expected. Once he appeared satisfied with the result, he tentatively handed back the card.
I blew on it, to make sure the ink was dry, and then launched into my routine. Under normal conditions, I do this modified Ambitious Card routine pretty quickly, getting some laughs with how swiftly the card jumps to the top of the deck, along with all the variations I’d added. However, I got the immediate sense that doing anything quickly would increase Leon’s anxiety. It seemed pretty clear that my primary goal, if I had one, was to make Leon less and not more anxious.
I buried the card in the deck and then gave it a tap. I looked at Leon. “So, your Three of Spades is somewhere in the middle of the deck, right?”
Leon nodded as he stared at the deck.
“But you’re a fan of the Three of Spades and it’s a fan of you, so just like that, your card has jumped to the top of the deck.”
I snapped my fingers to indicate this action and Leon actually jumped at the sound. I proudly flipped the card over.
It was the Six of Diamonds.
“Oops, looks like I did something wrong, sorry,” I began as I prepared to correct this apparent mistake. “Let’s find your card again.”
I flipped the deck over and scanned through the cards for the Three of Spades. Leon watched me closely, his eyes locked on the spread of cards.
“That’s weird,” I said, sticking closely to my usual patter. “It’s nowhere in the deck. I seem to have lost your card.”
Usually, this point in the trick gets a bit of reaction from the audience; an ‘ooh’ or an ‘aah’ as they realize their card has disappeared entirely from the deck.
Leon, as the situation had already made clear, was not my typical audience.
“You lost the card?” he said, sounding frantic. “You don’t know where it is?”
I put out a hand to reassure him. “Don’t worry. I know where it is.”
“But you said you lost it and it isn’t there. You screwed up.”
I quickly reached into my pocket and pulled out the Three of Spades. “It’s okay, Leon. It’s right here. Right where I put it. It’s just part of the act.”
“Part of the act,” he repeated, but I didn’t get the sense he was fully understanding the situation.
“It’s a common trope with magicians,” I explained. “We call it Magician in Trouble. You pretend to make a mistake. But you really didn’t. It’s just part of the show.”
“So, the magician’s really not in trouble?”
I shook my head, trying to sound as sympathetic as I could. “Standard procedure. I always know where the card is.”
“Why is that?
“Because I put it there.”
He thought about this for a minute and while he did, I couldn’t help flash back to the many conversations—okay, arguments—I’d had with my uncle Harry on the topic of Magician in Trouble.
“Excuse my French,” Harry would say. “But in my opinion, Magician in Trouble is just a jerk move on the part of the performer. You’ve gone to all the trouble to win their sympathy and affection. You make an apparent mistake. The audience feels bad for you. And then you pull the rug out from under them and basically say, ‘Ha! I tricked you. I was in charge all along.’” Harry shook his head. “A jerk move,” he grumbled.
But I always disagreed with Harry on this point. “Harry, I don’t think anyone in the audience ever really believes I’m in trouble. They know it’s part of the act.”
“What they know and how they feel are two entirely different matters,” he’d mutter as he’d walk away, effectively ending the debate. For the moment, at least.
“Magician in trouble,” Leon repeated slowly. He looked up at me. He was backlit by the lights from outside, but I could see the look of desperation in his eyes. “So, maybe I’m not really in trouble?”
No, Leon, I thought. You are definitely in trouble. But I figured that wasn’t the answer he needed to hear.
“Sure, maybe you’re not in trouble either,” I said.
“Maybe I’m not,” he repeated softly.
I made the executive decision that I’d successfully completed that trick. It was time to move away from Magician in Trouble to something that might have a more positive feel to it. I felt the deck of cards in my hand. As a performer, I’m not big on metaphors, but a thought occurred to me.
“It’s really all how you look at it,” I began, ad-libbing some new patter for a trick I’d been doing since I was a teenager. I’d learned it from my uncle Harry, who had learned it from the guy who had first devised it. I had done it hundreds of times and felt I was probably in a good position to improvise on it a bit.
“Cards are like life,” I continued. I split the deck in two, flipping one half over in my hands. “Sometimes things get mixed up. Jumbled.”
I quickly shuffled the two halves, combining the face up half with the face down half. I completed the shuffle, cut the deck, and then spread the cards for Leon.
“As you can see, the cards are pretty evenly mixed, some face up, some face down. A mess.”
“A mess,” Leon repeated softly. He ran his finger across the cards and then pulled his hand away, perhaps concerned he had crossed some imaginary line.
I smiled to reassure him, then squared the cards. I quickly cut to some random spots in the deck and flipped it over, reinforcing the idea that all the cards were indeed mixed, face up and face down.
“But you know what, Leon?” I said as I gave the cards another cut and another shuffle. “Even when things are completely jumbled up in our lives, you know who has the power to put things right?”
He stared back at me blankly. Once it became clear he wasn’t going to answer, I continued as if that had been my plan all along.
“We do,” I said. “We can put things back in the right order.”
I began to snap my fingers and then thought better of it; the last time I’d done that, it had spooked my audience-of-one more than I liked. So, instead, I waved my hand over the tabled deck.
“And just like that, order is restored.”
I spread the deck across the tabletop. All the cards were now facing the same direction. They were all face up.
Except for one card.
I gestured for Leon to flip it over. He reached across and tentatively nudged the card from the spread and turned it.
It was the Three of Spades.
