Luminarium (6 page)

“Better get going,” he heard himself say. He didn’t mean
she’d
better get going. But he himself didn’t move.

“I’m sorry, Fred. I didn’t mean—”

“No. I know.” He smiled. He was leagues beneath her, standing at the bottom of an ocean, rocks in his pockets, air all but gone. “Jill.”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember George ever using the word ‘avatara’?”

“Avatara?”

He nodded.

“You mean those … computer thingies?”

“Never mind. Stupid, just a …. Bye.”

He approximated a cheery wave and was in motion again, in his confusion still taking those tiny old-lady steps off toward the pharmacy aisle. Reaching it, he ducked in, and there was the old lady herself, that glistening hair puff bobbing like a buoy on a sunlit surface, that canvas bag of hers swinging into view as she turned toward the shelves:

MODERN BRIDE

Absurdly, he sensed a kind of mockery in the words. He was still staring at the bag when she slipped an item inside—an eyelash curler, he was pretty sure, sealed in paperboard and plastic. All at once, her face transformed, those horror-show eyes closing up from the bottoms into serene half-moons, that lipstick curving into an absent, kindly smile. She looked like she’d just shot up. Like she herself had just taken a spin in Mira Egghart’s chair. She’d expanded, absorbed those curlers—one less alienated thing in the world. She glanced his way and he pretended to peruse the toothbrushes. Without haste, she turned back the way she was going.

He followed, mimicking her motions, ambling and scanning, until he reached the personal grooming items, a mandala of files and clippers, brushes and barrettes. The eyelash curlers rocked on their metal rod. Just to the right of them, a column of tweezers rocked ever so slightly, too. For a moment he stood there, hypnotized by the frontmost blister pack, the tweezers like a silver wishbone rocking and glinting in the light. He grabbed it and stuffed it in the pocket of his jeans.

At first he thought maybe Pincurls had spotted him, but he couldn’t catch her eyes, and her expression seemed unchanged, still willfully carefree, as she made her way—a little more fluidly than he’d seen her move before—down another aisle and back toward the entrance. He followed, and, glancing up into a convex mirror near the ceiling, to his surprise and amusement, found his own expression now much the same as hers: the same faraway smile and crescent eyes. And more, he was expanding, billowing like a sail. The two of them were one again, two views of the same sun-dappled, arcadian vista. As one, gliding past Jill in a checkout line, the sight of her as painless as if he were on novocaine. As one, slipping through the automatic door to greet the city heat and light and bustle, all those people with places to go and things to do and good for them, more power to them. As one, having their arms clasped by a hefty, sweating, yet somehow balletically graceful man in a blue security jacket—at which point Pincurls looked at Fred, her expression having transformed once more, lipstick hooked like a scythe.

The birthday party was in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, at a big, white
colonial-style house with a circular driveway. Muggy enough outside to stagger the gnats, so Fred and his father were performing in the recreation room, an expansive sunken area with glass doors leading to the patio, a large backyard, and some woods beyond. Five- and six-year-olds, about twenty of them, sat on the carpet, their faces bugged with wonder, suspense, even fear, as Vartan, eyes ablaze, pretended to dump one trick pitcher of water after the next into the giant cone of newspaper Fred held as though with increasing distress at the burden’s steadily growing weight. Vartan paused after each pitcher, watching to see if Fred would collapse under the strain, while, on his knees, bent backward under the supposed weight, Fred groped behind his back, trying to reach his magic wand on the carpet. He motioned with his eyes back and forth between the wand and the birthday girl, who sat in a pink dress and plastic-gemmed tiara in the front row. The act was mostly in dumbshow, to the tune of deranged slide whistles, which at this point—the cassette tape long since baked by its eighties boombox—sounded closer to whalesong.

With the helpful urging of her mother, Fred finally made the girl understand that she should go pick up the wand. She approached tentatively, eyes like marbles, cheeks pulling a smile from the grip of her infolded lips. When she had it in hand, he whispered in her ear to wave it. Probably taking her cue from some videogame or other, she zestfully knocked his top hat off with it instead, then bonked him on the head with its heavy wooden star-tip. Thus renewing the ache that had begun yesterday, when the cop, busy signaling to his partner to go gently with the old lady, had let Fred’s head bang against the doorframe while shoving him into the back of the squad car.

Close enough. Fred snapped open the newspaper, now magically emptied, and stood with the birthday girl to take a triumphant bow, while Vartan seethed convincingly, stamping around, then picking up a cone of his own, only to have it burst and spill water down the front of his tux. Their act was all about filial conflict. The characters they played, father and son magicians, started out in a state of magnanimous cooperation, but soon became embroiled in an all-out war of one-upmanship. The tricks were all more or less standard variety, only progressively bigger. From the ever larger cones of newspaper, they proceeded to bigger and bigger interlocking metal rings; then to a series of increasingly capacious top-hats they popped open from collapsed discs, pulling out ever larger white-tuxedoed and top-hatted stuffed animals. Long ago, this top-hat number had built up to Vartan’s production of a large stuffed panda, and then to Fred’s whisking out a carbon copy of himself—white tuxedo and all. The moment never failed to stun—they’d always kept George well hidden until then. He and George had never switched off. They’d always done it this way, George popping out, Fred the one to pull him. George had loved being the magic itself; Fred had loved being the power that made it happen.

The best thing about that moment for them, better than the kids’ delirious shouting, better even than the parents’ astonishment, was their own dad’s reaction: Vartan had never failed to look dumbstruck by the sight of them. He’d never done it quite the same way, either: one day he’d step up and prod and pinch them, frisking for the illusion; another, he’d stand there, his eyes unseeing, like he was going to faint. His gestures had never been broad or overblown, and though he’d often achieved a comic effect, he’d never struggled to get there. Vartan was a professional actor—at that time, a struggling one, the magic shows a fallback as paying parts had become scarce. Young as they’d been, Fred and George had been fully cognizant of the fact that what was for them an opportunity to shine was for their father a goading reminder of his failure to shine any brighter; but in that moment when Vartan reacted however he did, they felt themselves and the laughing children to be audience enough for him, as good as any Broadway house.

Today’s substitute sequence—in which Fred conjured the panda, and Vartan found nothing to retaliate with but an espresso-sized top hat containing a white-tuxed gummy bear—evoked a different feeling. Vartan stared at that bit of clotted jelly in his fingers as if the last dregs of enchantment had been drained from the world.

For their grand finale, Fred and his father made the birthday girl disappear. After Fred made Vartan’s wallet vanish and Vartan did likewise to Fred’s shoes, Fred pulled the cloth off the table they’d been using, revealing it to be a giant box with a door in the side. He guided the excited princess inside, knelt, and slipped her a stuffed toucan he’d pulled from a hat a while back. She didn’t look afraid—in fact, her little face shone with so much unadulterated glee he wanted to crawl into the box and vanish along with her. But just in case, he whispered that the toucan’s name was Maurice, that he was a magician in training, and that he sometimes got scared of the dark. Fred then gave her a little flashlight to turn on in case Maurice got scared.

The girl clutched the bird, the flashlight, her eyes gemmy and hopeful, and suddenly, for the first time since yesterday, it was happening again. Fred was her. His mind bright and empty as a rising bubble in the sunlight. The world itself one big ball of magic. Everything good in it his.

He shut the door, feeling like he was locking up his own beating heart, and rose unsteadily to his feet. He was in no way a little birthday girl, he admonished himself. No, he was a hulking manchild in a white tuxedo, hewing the air with a spray-painted stick. As if this made the slightest bit more sense.

The box was mounted on ball bearings, and he began to spin it, running around it as he did, remembering what it was that had so saddened him as a thirteen-year-old that he’d felt he couldn’t go on doing these shows: a sudden conviction, inarticulable at the time, that childhood—even in its best, most lucky and ideal form—was a merciless hoax, endlessly renewed, adults fattening up children’s unsustainably giant egos so that later in life they could all suffer together, having those bloated bags repeatedly punctured and drained by one another and themselves. It was a view he pretty much held to this day, that this little birthday girl in the box and all her little friends would go on believing they were all princesses and Jedi Knights until their early to mid-thirties. At which point, out of a mixture of self-loathing, misplaced obligation, and poorly understood vicarious yearnings, they in turn would find themselves renewing the cycle, ballooning the selfhoods of the young. As he was doing now.

He stopped and opened the door, gazing, along with the children in the audience, at the empty false compartment. The little girl was gone, the oneness vanished with her, like the air subsequent to a punch in the gut. He hadn’t wanted it in the first place; no matter, he could barely stand the loss of it. He almost forgot to take his bows (this was his moment of triumph, after all), almost just stood there pawing at the ruffled front of his tux shirt as Vartan pantomimed to the audience his worry that his brash young assistant had gone too far,
too far
, this time. Then Fred was spinning the box again, the white/green/pink of the walls/yard/shouting little faces flying through the space opposite him where a ten-year-old, white-tuxedoed George should have been, grinning and spinning from the other side. Again, Fred stopped to open the door. Still no girl, the room ticking and juddering around the empty box. In their childhood shows, he and George had exchanged twin embarrassed, nail-biting faces at this point, which had always gotten laughs; but now, what with the turning room and thickening air, Fred’s distress must have seemed too real. The audience fell silent, and even the girl’s mother, a woman with a bump of a nose and wavy locks who for no especially good reason reminded him of Mel, stopped smiling and clutched her upper arms.

Vartan stepped up to Fred, pointing at him, then at himself, then at the box. Vartan’s mustache and the stubble around it was almost as white as his thinning hair, which in turn was almost as white as his tux and cape and shiny plastic shoes. Maybe it was the sunlight, but Vartan’s skin, too, looked paler than Fred had remembered it, so that his eyes, brown and deep-set in their ashen moats, seemed to be the only spots of color on him, which made them look all the more haunted and luminous as they checked Fred’s own. Fred could see the question there, not the question of whether he would join forces with Vartan to combine their magical skills, but the other one, and Fred nodded, signaling both yes to the invitation and yes he was all right. They ran, they spun the box, the room whirling behind Vartan, his hair tousled in the wind. He was still giving Fred that sad, interrogative look, the same one he’d given him upon picking him up from the police station the night before.

They waved their wands, touched them together, and broke away just before the fuse Vartan had surreptitiously lit reached its destination at the top of the box. There came a flash of light, a smell of sulfur—Vartan insisted on using flash powder, even indoors—and the door dropped open. From the shouts of little voices, Fred surmised that they’d successfully rematerialized the girl, though he was having difficulty verifying it with his eyes—he hadn’t moved quickly enough, hadn’t looked away from the flash in time, and it had taken away large patches at the center of his vision. He edged toward the front of the box, blinking. He could vaguely make out Vartan’s stooping form grabbing hold of a diminutive, pink-sleeved forearm, to the children’s continued cheers. But aside from that shred of pink and a sparkle of tiara, he couldn’t see the little girl herself, which made it almost feel like they’d failed to bring her back. Glimpsing the penumbral whiteness of Vartan bending at the waist, Fred too took his bow. Strange shapes and geometrical patterns appeared in the cloud-shaped afterimage of the flash—weaves of tiny radiating circles and stars—clapping children dimly visible beyond.

Vartan and Fred
ate their slices of chocolate cake from little paper plates, acknowledged the gratitude of the bump-nosed mother, took their check from the husband—who, from his chrome-framed glasses and look of slight apology for his own wealth, Fred took, rightly or wrongly, to be a dot-com success story—then, in the boggy heat, loaded up the magic van and climbed in. Looking flushed, not even bothering to pull out of the driveway, Vartan fired up a bowl. He kept his head angled toward Fred as he smoked but otherwise showed little caution. It was late afternoon, and the suburban street was peaceful. A Mercedes SUV slowed as it passed; Fred doubted the driver could see what Vartan was up to, but in this neighborhood the mere sight of a dented old Astro van might merit a cell phone call to the police.