Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  But for every step Sheila Olsen took, Anoush took one step back from her, remaining as unreachable—there, not there—as her father Abel had found her, so many years before. Strangely, for me, since I had never seen her as beautiful on the magazine covers—only hypnotically alive—now, as a middle-aged woman, she almost stopped my newly-manly heart. There was gray in her hair, a heaviness to her face and midsection, and in the way she moved…. but my heart wanted to stop, all the same.

  I was afraid that Sheila Olsen might snap, out of too much wishing, and make some kind of dive or grab for Anoush, but she did something else. She stopped moving forward, and just stood very still for a moment, and then she reached into her purse and brought out the lacy little key that she had taken from Rabbi Tuvim’s collection. She stared at it for a moment, and then she kissed it, very quickly, and she tossed it underhand toward Anoush. It spun so slowly, turning in the light like a butterfly, that I wouldn’t have been surprised if it never came down.

  Anoush caught it. Ghost or no ghost, ethereal or not, she picked Sheila Olsen’s key out of the air as daintily as though she were selecting exactly the right apple on a tree, the perfect note on a musical instrument. She looked back at Sheila Olsen, and she smiled a little—I know she smiled, I saw her—and she touched the key to her lips….

  ….and I don’t know what she did with it, or where she put it—maybe she ate it, for all I could ever tell. All I can say for certain is that Sheila Olsen’s eyes got very big, and she touched her own mouth again, and then she turned and hurried out of the synagogue, never looking back, I was going to follow her, but Rabbi Tuvim came up and put his hand gently on my shoulder. He said, “She has a plane to catch. You have a special party. Each to his own.”

  “You saw,” I said. “Did you see her?”

  “It is more important that you saw her,” the rabbi answered. “And that you made Sheila Olsen see her, you brought them together. That was the mitzvah—the rest is unimportant, a handful of candy.” He patted my shoulder. “You did well.”

  Anoush was gone, of course, when we looked for her. So was the rabbi’s key, though I actually got down on my knees to feel around where she had stood, half-afraid that it had simply fallen through her shade to the floor. But there was no sign of it; and the rabbi, watching, said quietly, “One lock opened. So many more.” We went back to the party then.

  Film took longer to develop in those days, unless you did it yourself. As I remember, it was more than a week before friends and family started bringing us shots taken at my Bar Mitzvah party. I hated almost all of them—somehow I always seemed to get caught with my mouth open and a goofy startled look on my face—but my mother cherished them all, and pored over them at the kitchen table for hours at a time. “There you are again, dancing with your cousin Marilyn, what was Sarah ever thinking, letting her wear that to a Bar Mitzvah?” “There you are in your grandpa’s tallis, looking so grownup, except I was so afraid your yarmulke was going to fall off.” “Oh, there’s that one I love, with you and your father, I told him not to wear that tie, and your friend what’s-his-name, he should lose some weight. And there’s Rabbi Tuvim, what’s that in his beard, dandruff?” Actually, it was cream cheese. The rabbi loved cream cheese.

  Then she turned over a photo she’d missed before, and said in a different tone, “Who’s that woman? Joseph, do you know that woman?”

  It was Anoush, off to one side beyond the dancers I’d been shoving my way through to reach Sheila Olsen. She had her arms folded across her breast, and she looked immensely alone as she watched the party; but she didn’t look lonely at all, or even wistful—just alone. As long as it’s been, I remember a certain mischievousness around her mouth and eyes, as though she had deliberately slipped into this photograph of my celebration, just as she had slipped comfortingly into her father’s work—yes, to wave to him, as Sheila Olsen had said mockingly then. To wave to her sister now…. and maybe, a little, to me.

  I practically snatched the picture out of my mother’s hand—making up some cockamamie story about an old friend of Rabbi Tuvim’s—and brought it to him immediately. We both looked at it in silence for a long while. Then the rabbi put it carefully into a sturdy envelope, and addressed it to Sheila Olsen in Grand Forks, North Dakota. I took it to the post office myself, and paid importantly, out of my allowance, to send it Airmail Special Delivery. The rabbi promised to tell me as soon as Sheila Olsen wrote back.

  It took longer than I expected: a good two weeks, probably more. After the first week, I was badgering the rabbi almost every day; sometimes twice, because they still had two postal deliveries back then. How he kept from strangling me, or anyway hanging up in my ear, I have no idea—perhaps he sympathized with my impatience because he was anxious himself. At all events, when Sheila Olsen’s letter did arrive, he called me immediately. He offered to read it to me over the phone, but I wanted to see it, so I ran over. Rabbi Tuvim gave me a glass of cocoa cream soda, insisted maddeningly on waiting until I could breathe and speak normally, and then showed me the letter.

  It was short, and there was no salutation; it simply began:

  “She sits on my bedside table, in a little silver frame. I say goodnight and good morning to her every day. I have tried several times to make copies for you, but they never come out. I’m sorry.

  Thank you for the key, Rabbi. And Joseph, Joseph—thank you.”

  I still have the letter. The rabbi gave it to me. It sits in its own wooden frame, and people ask me about it, because it’s smudged and grubby from many readings, and frayed along the folding, and it looks as though a three-year-old has been at it, which did happen, many years later. But I keep it close, because before that letter I had no understanding of beauty, and no idea of what love is, or what can be born out of love. And after it I knew enough at least to recognize these things when they came to me.

  OAKLAND DRAGON BLUES

  Once upon a time I tried to do a straight-up trade with Ursula K. LeGuin—my unicorns for the dragons from her Earthsea series—because Ursula’s dragons are just that good. Pretty much the definitive article, in fact, and there’s an end on’t.

  She declined to accept my offer, of course. Smart woman. I mean, I’m happy enough with my unicorns these days; but I’m convinced that dragons should have been put off-limits to fantasists after Earthsea.

  So you can imagine my surprise a couple of years ago when I found myself writing an entire as-yet-unpublished novel full of dragons, just because an idea came along that intrigued me too much to ignore. Then, as if stepping over the line once wasn’t risky enough, in a moment of rash confidence I agreed to tackle a story for a dragon-themed original anthology. I started by consciously resolving to go for something as different as possible from anything of Ursula’s. My chosen setting was the forests of rural northern California. My chosen time was right now. My invented gimmick: the notion that if dragons existed, then the illegal meth labs and marijuana farms that hide in those deep woods would certainly find them more useful than mere pit bulls or Dobermans…. but the story I wrote, about the animal-control officers who have to handle such things, refused to come into sharp focus. A week before my deadline I knew I couldn’t solve it in time and prepared to send my friendly, patient editor an apologetic admission of defeat.

  Then—as I’m always quoting Samuel Johnson’s “When a man knows that he is to be hanged within a week, it concentrates his mind wonderfully”—I remembered that when I was twenty-two, and taking my first failed crack at what eventually became The Last Unicorn, I’d included a particularly morose and colorful dragon in the opening chapter: a dragon that I had ruthlessly excised when I returned to work on the manuscript three years later.

  With that thought, this story was born.

  “I am happy to report,” Officer Levinsky said to Officer Guerra, pointing to the dragon sprawled across the Telegraph and 51st Street intersection, “that this one is all yours. I’ve been off shift for exactly seven minutes, waiting for your
ass to get here. Have a nice day.”

  Guerra stared, paling visibly under his brown skin. Traffic was backed up in all four directions: horns were honking as madly as car alarms, drivers were screaming hysterically—though none, he noticed, were getting out of their cars—and a five-man road crew, their drills, hoses, sawhorses and warning signs scattered by a single swing of the dragon’s tail, were adding their bellows to the din. The dragon paid no attention to any of it, but regarded the two policemen out of half-closed eyes, resting its head on its long-clawed front feet, and every now and then burping feeble, dingy flames. It didn’t look well.

  “How long’s it been here?” Guerra asked weakly.

  Levinsky consulted his watch again. “Thirty-one minutes. Just plopped out of the sky—damn miracle it didn’t crush somebody’s car, flatten a pedestrian. Been lying there ever since, just like that.”

  “Well, you called it in, right?” Guerra wondered what the police code for a dragon in the intersection would be.

  Levinsky looked at him as though he had suggested a fast game of one-on-one with an open manhole. “You are out of your mind—I always thought so. No, I didn’t call it in, and if you have the sense of a chinch bug, you won’t either. Just get rid of it, I’m out of here. Enjoy, Guerra.”

  Levinsky’s patrol car was parked on the far side of the intersection. He skirted the dragon’s tail cautiously, got in the car, slapped on his siren—for pure emotional relief, Guerra thought—and was gone, leaving Guerra scratching his buzz-cut head, facing both a growing traffic jam and a creature out of fairy tales, whose red eyes, streaked with pale yellow, like the eyes of very old men, were watching him almost sleepily, totally uninterested in whatever he chose to do. But watching, all the same.

  The furious chaos of the horns being harder on Guerra’s normally placid nerves than the existence of dragons, he walked over to the beast and said, from a respectful distance, “Sir, you’re blocking traffic, and I’m going to have to ask you to move along. Otherwise you’re looking at a major citation here.”

  When the dragon did not respond, he said it again in Spanish; then drew a deep breath and started over in Russian, having taken a course that winter in order to cope with a new influx of immigrants. The dragon interrupted him with a brief hiccup of oily, sulphurous flame halfway through. In a rusty, raspy voice with a faint accent that was none of the ones Guerra knew, it said, “Don’t start.”

  Guerra rested his hand lightly on the butt of the pistol that he was immensely proud of never having fired during his eight years on the Oakland police force, except for his regular practice sessions and annual recertifications at the Davis Street Range. He said, “Sir, I am not trying to start anything with you—I’m having enough trouble just believing in you. But I’ve got to get you out of this intersection before somebody gets hurt. I mean, look at all those people, listen to those damn horns.” The racket was already giving him a headache behind his eyes. “You think you could maybe step over here to the curb, we’ll talk about it? That’d work out much better for both of us, don’t you think?”

  The dragon raised its head and favored him with a long, considering stare. “I don’t know. I like this place about as well as I like any place in this world, which is not at all. Why should I make things easier for you? Nobody ever cares about making anything easier for me, let me tell you.”

  Guerra’s greatest ambition in law enforcement was to become a hostage negotiator. He had been studying the technique on and off for most of his tenure on the force, both on site and through attending lectures and reading everything he could find on the subject. The lecturers and the books had a good deal to say concerning hostage-takers’ tendency to self-pity. He said patiently to the dragon, “Well, I’m really trying to do exactly that. Let’s get acquainted, huh? I’m Officer Guerra—Michael Guerra, but people mostly call me Mike-O, I don’t know why. What’s your name?” Always get on a first-name basis, as early as possible. It makes you two human beings together—you’ll be amazed at the difference it makes. Now if only one of those books had ever covered the fine points of negotiating with a burping mythological predator.

  “You couldn’t pronounce it,” the dragon replied. “And if you tried, you’d hurt yourself.” But it rose to its feet with what seemed to Guerra an intense and even painful effort, and with some trepidation he led it away from the intersection to the side street where he had parked his blue-and-white patrol car. The traffic started up again before they were all the way across, and if people went on honking and cursing, still there were many who leaned out of their windows to applaud him. One driver shouted jovially, “Put the cuffs on him!” while another yelled, “Illegal parking—get the boot!” The dragon half-lumbered, half-slithered beside Guerra as sedately as though it were on a leash; but every so often it cocked a red eye sideways at him, like a wicked bird, and Guerra shivered with what felt like ancestral memory. These guys used to hunt us like rabbits. I know they did.

  The phone at his waist made an irritable sound and rattled against his belt buckle. He nodded to the dragon, grunted “My boss, I better take this,” and heard Lieutenant Kunkel’s nasal drone demanding, “Guerra, you there? Guerra, what the fuck is going on up in Little Ethiopia?” Lieutenant Kunkel fully expected Eritrean rebels to stage shootouts in Oakland sometime within the week.

  “Big, nasty traffic jam, Lieutenant,” Guerra answered, consciously keeping his voice light and level, even with a dragon sniffing disdainfully at his patrol car. “All under control now, no problem.”

  “Yeah, well, we’ve been getting a bunch of calls about I don’t know what, some sort of crazy dragon, UFO, whatever. You know anything about this shit?”

  “Uh,” Guerra said. “Uh, no, Lieutenant, it’s just the time of day, you know? Rush hour, traffic gets tied up, people get a little crazy, they start seeing stuff. Mass hysteria, shared hallucinations, it’s real common. They got books about it.”

  Lieutenant Kunkel’s reaction to the concept of shared hallucinations was not at first audible. Then it became audible, but not comprehensible. Finally coherent, he drew on a vocabulary that impressed Guerra so powerfully for its range and expressiveness that at a certain point, phone gripped between his ear and his shoulder, he dug out his notebook and started writing down the choicest words and phrases he caught. If anything, Guerra was a great believer in self-improvement.

  The lieutenant finally hung up, and Guerra put the book back in his pocket and said to the dragon, “Okay. He’s cool. You just go on away now, go on home, back wherever you…. well, wherever, and we’ll say no more about it. And you have an extra-nice day, hear?”

  The dragon did not answer, but leaned against his car, considering him out of its strange red-and-yellow eyes. Huge as the creature was—Guerra had nothing but military vehicles for comparison—he thought it must be a very old dragon, for the scales on its body were a dull greenish-black, and its front claws were worn and blunt, no sharper than a turtle’s. The long low purple crest running along its back from ears to tail tip was torn in several places, and lay limp and prideless. The spikes at the end of its tail were all broken off short; and in spite of the occasional wheeze of fire, there was a rattle in the dragon’s breath, as though it were rusty inside. He supposed the great purple wings worked: it was hard to see them clearly, folded back along the body as they were, but they too looked…. ratty, for lack of a better word. Spontaneously, he blurted out, “You’ve had kind of a rough time, huh? I get that.”

  “Do you?” The dragon’s black lips twitched, and for a moment Guerra thought absurdly that it was going to cry. “Do you indeed, Mike-O? Do you get that my back’s killing me—that it aches all the time, right there, behind the hump, because of the beating it takes walking the black iron roads of this world? Do you get that the smell of your streets—even your streams, your rivers, your bay—is more than I can bear? That your people taste like clocks and coal oil, and your children are bitter as silver? The children used to be the best eating o
f all, better than antelope, better than wild geese, but now I just can’t bring myself to touch another one of them. Oh, it’s been dogs and cats and mangy little squirrels for months, years—and when you think how I used to dine off steamed knight, knight on the half shell, broiled in his own armor with all the natural juices, oh…. excuse me, excuse me, I’m sorry….”

  And, rather to Guerra’s horror, the dragon did begin to cry. He wept very softly, with his eyes closed and his head lowered, his emerald-green tears smelling faintly like gunpowder. Guerra said, “Hey. Hey, listen, don’t do that. Please. Don’t cry, okay?”

  The dragon sniffled, but it lifted its head again to regard him in some wonder. Surprisingly severe, it said, “You are a witness to the rarest sight in the world—a dragon in tears—and all you can say is don’t do that? I don’t get you people at all.” But it did stop crying; it even made a sound like rustling ashes, which Guerra thought might be a chuckle. It said, “Or did I embarrass you, Mike-O?”

  “Listen,” Guerra said again. “Listen, you’ve got to get out of here. There’s going to be rumors for days, but I’ll cover with the lieutenant, whoever, whatever I have to say. Just go, okay?” He hesitated for a moment, and then added, “Please?”

  The dragon licked forlornly at its own tears with its broad forked tongue. “I’m tired, Mike-O. You have no idea how tired I am. I have one task to complete in this desolate world of yours, and then I’m done with it forever. And since I’ll never, never find my way back to my own world again, what difference does anything make? Afterward…. afterward, you and your boss can shoot me, take me to prison, put me in a zoo…. what wretched difference? I just don’t care anymore.”

  “No,” Guerra said. “Look, I’ll tell you the truth, I do not want to be the guy who brings you in. For starters, it’ll mean more reports, more damn bookkeeping than I’ve ever seen in my life. I hate writing reports. And besides that…. yeah, I guess I’d be famous for a while—fifteen minutes, like they say. The cop who caught the dragon…. newspapers, big TV shows, fine and dandy, maybe I’d even meet some girls that way. But once it all died down, that’s all I’d ever be, the guy who had the thing on the street with the dragon. You think that’s a résumé for somebody wants to be a hostage negotiator? I don’t think so.”