Sleight of Hand

by Peter S. Beagle

  I am actually dizzy and sweating, as though I were going to throw up. I say again, “I don’t know. I try to help, that is all.”

  “Uh-huh. Real commendable. I mean, pulling whole families out of the river and all, the mayor gives you medals for that stuff. Rescuing abused children, taking down mall shooters—that’s our job, you’re kind of making us look bad.” He slaps the steering wheel, trying to look sterner than his nature. “But beating up the bad guys, that’s a no-no. Doesn’t matter how bad they are, you get into some really deep shit doing that. They sue. And somebody like me has to go and arrest you…. not to mention explaining about sixteen million times to my boss, and his boss, why I didn’t do it already, you being right there on the scene and all. All the damn time.”

  My head is swimming so badly I have trouble making sense of his words. Something very bad is happening; whether to me or to Jane Doe I cannot tell. Could this hospital he is taking me to be her hospital? The policeman is speaking again, his face and voice serious, even anxious. He says, far away, “That vanishing act of yours, now that worries me. Because if you’re not crazy, then either you really are some kind of superhero, or I’m crazy. And I just don’t want to be crazy, you know?”

  In the midst of my faintness, I feel strangely sorry for him. I manage to reply, “Perhaps there is another choice…. another possibility….” Even if it is the right hospital, if the darkness does not come again, I will never reach Jane Doe’s silent room—not in handcuffs, which are surely coming, and with his hand tight on my shoulder. What must I do?

  “Another possibility?” His eyebrows shoot up again. “Well, now you’ve got me trying to figure what the hell that could be.”

  I do not answer him.

  He parks the patrol car in front of a squat gray-white building. I can see other cars coming and going: people on crutches, people being pushed in wheelchairs—an ambulance out front, another in the parking lot. He cuts the engine, turns to look straight at me. “Look, doesn’t matter whether I want to bust you on a filing cabinet full of assault charges or not. I got to do that. But what I’d way rather do is just talk to you, first, because that other possibility…. that other possibility is I’ve got reality wrong, flat wrong. All of it. And I don’t think I’m ready to know that, you understand?”

  It is Jane Doe’s hospital. I can feel her there. This close, the pull of the darkness is still erratic but convulsively stronger. I know she is reaching for me.

  With one hand I reach for the door handle, very slowly, holding his glance. With the other I start to unbuckle the seat belt.

  “Don’t—”

  I start to say, “I never had your choice.” But I don’t finish, any more than I get a chance to throw the door open and bolt into the hospital. Between one word and the next the darkness takes hold of me, neck and heels, and I am gone….

  once again in Jane Doe’s room, standing at the foot of her bed.

  And Felicia has seen me appear.

  Her silence is part of the silence of the room; her breath comes as roughly as her patients’ through the tubes in their throats; the speechless fear in her wide dark eyes renders me just as mute. All I can do for her is to move aside, leaving a clear path to the door. I croak her name as she stumbles through, but the only response is the soft click as she closes the door and locks it from outside. I think I hear her crying, but I could be wrong.

  There is a little bathroom, just to the right of the door, with a toilet and sink for visitors. I walk in and wash my face—still dirty and bruised from my convenience store battle—for the first time. Then I take a moment to study the mask that Jane Doe made for me. The woman in the mirror has black hair, like hers, but longer—almost to the shoulders—and fuller. The eyes looking back at me are dark gray. The skin around them is a smooth light-olive. It is blankly calm, this face, the features regular yet somehow uninteresting: easily ignored, passed over, missed in a crowd. And why not, since that so clearly suited Jane Doe’s purpose? Whatever terrified instinct first clothed me in flesh chose well.

  It is a good face. A useful face. I wonder if I will ever see it again.

  I walk back to Jane Doe’s bed. The strange near-nausea has not left me—if anything, it seems to rise and fall with Jane Doe’s breathing, which is labored now. She moves jerkily beneath the cover of her sheets, eyes still closed, her face sweaty and white. Some of the noises coming from the machines attached to her are strong and regular, but others chirp with staccato alarm: whether she is conscious or not, the machines say her body is in pain. And in the same way I know so many things now, I know why. The gift unleashed by the damage she suffered—the talent to give me life from nothingness, to sense danger, fear, cruelty from afar and send her own unlikely angel flying to help—has become too great for the form containing it.

  I sit down by her, taking her heavy, limp hand between my own, and the darkness touches me.

  There are too many.

  My lips feel too cold to move, so I do not even try to speak. All I can do is look.

  There are too many, and she cannot do enough.

  Images comes to me, falling through my mind like leaves.

  Red.

  Wet red.

  My feet in the red.

  She made me up to save her, but I was too late. So we saved others, she and I. We saved so many others.

  I look at the door. With every small sound I expect clamor and warning—gunshots, even, or barking dogs. I wonder whether Felicia will be back with the nice young policeman. I wish I could have explained to him.

  There is warmth in the darkness. I feel it in my head, I feel it on my skin. It is pain…. but something beyond pain, too.

  On the wall next to the telephone there is a white board with words written on it, and a capped marker. Writing is new to me—I have never had to do it before—so it does not go as quickly or as well as I would like, but I manage. In a child’s block letters I write down the name I found in the darkness, and three more words: WE THANK YOU.

  Then I go back to her bed.

  Voices in the hall now—Felicia, and another woman, and two or three men. I cannot tell whether the young policeman is one of them. No sound yet of Felicia’s key in the lock; are they afraid of a woman who comes and goes by magic arts?

  I think I would have liked to have a name of my own, but no matter. I lean forward and remove the cables, then the tubes. So many of them. Some of the machines go silent, but others howl.

  Fumbling at the lock…. now the sound of the key. It is so easy to close my hands around her throat, and I feel her breath between my fingers.

  VANISHING

  With any luck, this is as close as I’ll ever come to passing a kidney stone.

  The first seeds of “Vanishing” appeared in a story I wrote about ninety-seven times back in the very early ’60s and never managed to sell. Called “The Vanishing Germans,” it was an attempt at topical political satire that had all the subtlety of a Demolition Derby. One morning American Lieutenant Ethan Frome, guarding a checkpoint on the Berlin Wall, notices that all of West Germany has been replaced by a vast empty hole in the ground. His Russian counterpart, Captain Boris Godunov, confirms that the very same thing has happened to East Germany as well, leaving the Wall itself (and both of them) floating magically in space above an immeasurably deep chasm. The rest of the story contained no explanation for this event, but plenty of speculations; Kennedy and Khrushchev both made appearances; and every remaining country in the world wanted the H-Bomb, just in case. Ultimately peace broke out as a direct result of Germany’s disappearance, but I couldn’t leave well enough alone and slapped on a quasi-science-fictional O. Henry ending that made even less sense than all the words preceding it.

  The story was a mess. I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t sell, even back then, and after I buried the carbons in my filing cabinet I managed to forget they had ever existed.

  Forty years later Connor Cochran discovered “The Vanishing Germans” in my files and start
ed bugging me about it. The central visual of the story had seized him and would not let go; so he seized my metaphorical lapels and every now and then he’d shake them. Consider that image, he’d say. The floating Wall. What if you took it seriously?

  “Vanishing” went through at least eleven drafts and any number of dodged deadlines, and remains further out of my normal range and comfort zone than any other story in this collection, including “Dirae.” It’s a ghost story, yes, but it’s a lot of other things as well, and I suspect that I’ll be rediscovering and relearning it for a long time to come. In the end I’m happy with how it came out, but I’d be almost as happy never to spend another hour of my life studying photographs of Checkpoint Charlie, pouring over architectural diagrams of East German guard towers, or cross-comparing Berlin street maps from 1964 and 2009.

  Jansen knew perfectly well that when Arl asked him to drive her to the clinic for her regular prenatal checkup, it meant that every single one of his daughter’s usual rides was unavailable. She had already told him that it wouldn’t be necessary for him to wait; that Elly, her mother, would be off work by the time the examination was done, and could bring her home. They drove down to Klamath Falls in silence, except for his stiffly-phrased questions about the health of the child she was carrying, and the state of her preparations for its arrival. Once he asked when she expected her husband back, but her reply was such a vague mumble that he missed the sense of it completely. Now and then he glanced sideways at her, but when she met his eyes with her own fierce, stubborn brown ones, he looked away.

  When they parked at the clinic, he said, “I’ll come in with you.”

  “You don’t have to,” Arl said. “I told you.”

  “Yeah, I know what you told me. But it’s my grandson in there”—he pointed at her heavily rounded belly—“and I’m entitled to know how he’s getting on. Let’s go.”

  Arl did not move. “Dad, I really don’t want you in there.”

  Jansen consciously kept his voice low and casual. “Tell you what, I don’t care.” He got out of the car, walked around to the passenger side, and opened the door. Arl sat where she was for a moment, giving him the I just dare you face he’d known since her childhood; but then she sighed abruptly and pushed herself to her feet, ignoring his offered hand, and plodded ahead of him to the clinic. Jansen followed closely, afraid that she might fall, the walkway being wet with recently melted snow. He would have taken her arm, but he knew better.

  This one would rather die than forgive me. Gracie almost has, Elly might—someday—but Arl? Not ever.

  In the clinic they sat one chair apart after she signed in. Jansen pretended to be browsing through Sports Illustrated until Arl disappeared with the OB/GYN nurse. He lowered the magazine to his lap then, and simply stared straight ahead at the gray world beyond the window. A sticky-faced child, running by, kicked his ankle and kept going, leaving its pursuing mother to apologize; a young couple sitting next to him argued in savagely-controlled whispers over the exact responsibility for a sexually-transmitted disease. Jansen froze it all out and asked himself for the hundredth useless time why he shouldn’t sell the shop—or just close it and leave, the way people were walking away from their own homes these days. Walk away and put some daylight between himself and trouble. Hanging around sure as hell wasn’t doing him any good, and alimony checks didn’t care whether you mailed them from Dallas or down the block. Neither did Elly and the girls, not so you’d notice. At least in Dallas he could be warm while he was lonely. He let his eyelids drift shut as he tried to imagine being somewhere else, being someone else, and failed miserably in the attempt. Eyes closed, all the screw-ups and disappointments just seemed to press in closer than ever.

  Shit, he thought. All of it, all of it. And then, At least the little rugrat quit zooming around. That’s something.

  The magazine slid from his relaxed fingers, but he didn’t hear it hit the floor, and when he opened his eyes to reach down and pick it up he saw that he wasn’t in the waiting room anymore.

  He wasn’t in Klamath Falls anymore, either. It was night, and he was on the Axel-Springer-Strasse. Instantly alert, he knew where he was, and never thought for a second that he was dreaming. Despite shock, beyond the uncertainties and anxieties of age, he knew that after more than forty-five years he was back at the Wall. The Wall that didn’t exist anymore.

  Kreuzberg district, West Berlin, between Checkpoint Charlie and the checkpoint at Heinrich-Heine-Strasse, just past where the Zimmerstrasse runs out and the barbed wire and barriers start zigzagging west….

  There it was, directly before him, just there, lit by streetlamps—not the graffiti-covered reinforced concrete of the Grenzmauer 75 that had been hammered to bits by the joyously triumphant “woodpeckers,” East and West, when Germany was reunited, and the pieces sold off for souvenirs, but the crude first version he had patrolled in 1963, a gross lump haphazardly thrown together from iron supports, tangles of barbed wire, and dirty gray cement building blocks the East German workers had pasted in place with slaps of mortar no one bothered to smooth. Jansen said softly, “No.” He put his fingers to his mouth, like a child, shaking his head hard enough that his neck hurt, hoping desperately to make the clinic waiting-room materialize around him; but the Wall stayed where it was, and so did he.

  He was sitting, he realized, in the doorway of a building he did not want to think about; had, in fact, refused to think about for many years. The old ironwork of the entrance was hard and cold against his shoulders as he pushed away from it and struggled to his feet.

  Everything around him was familiar, his memory somehow fresher for so rarely having been examined. To his right the Wall angled sharply, blocking the road and continuing along the Kommandantenstrasse, while across from him he could see, just barely, the top of the eastern guard tower that looked down on the Death Strip, that deadly emptiness between the eastern inner fence and the Wall, where the VoPos and Russians would fire on anyone trying to make it across to West Berlin.

  Jansen turned from the Wall and took a few hesitant paces along the street. Most of it had actually belonged to East Germany—the Wall had been built several meters inside the formal demarcation line between East and West, so in some places any West Berliner who stepped too close was in danger of being arrested by East German guards; but elsewhere, in the West Berlin suburbs and beyond, there had been small family gardens growing literally in the shadow of the Wall, and even a little fishing going on. Jansen had always admired the Germans’ make-do adaptiveness.

  Here in the city’s urban heart, however, the buildings and shops and little businesses displayed a jumble of conditions, some still unrepaired nearly twenty years after the Allies had bombed and blasted their way into Berlin. Aside from the pooling glow of the streetlamps, Jansen could see no slightest sign of life. All the windows were dark, no smoke rose from any chimneys, and there was no one else in the street. The world was as hushed as though it had stopped between breaths. Beneath the unnaturally starless, cloudless black of the night sky there was not so much as a pigeon searching for crumbs, or a stray dog trotting freely.

  Jansen moved on in the silence, confused and wary.

  A few buildings past the Zimmerstrasse he couldn’t take it anymore. Feeling overwhelmed in the empty quiet, he knocked at the next door he came to, and waited, struggling to bring back what little German he had ever had. Sprechen Sie Englische? of course. He’d used that one a lot, and found enough Germans who did to get by. But there was also Wo bin ich?—“Where am I?” and Was ist los?—“What is happening?”—and Bitte, ich bin verloren—“Please, I’m lost.” They all seemed entirely appropriate to his situation.

  When no one responded, he knocked again, harder; then tried the next door, with the same result, and then the three doors after that, each one in turn. Nothing. Yet he had no sense of the city being abandoned, evacuated; even the front window of the little shop where he and Harding had taken turns buying sausages and cheese for lunch was sti
ll crowded with its mysterious, wondrous wares. He saw his dark reflection in the shop window, and recognized his daily grizzled self: lean-faced and thin-mouthed, with deep-set, distant eyes…. no change there, he thought: an old man caught, somehow, in this younger Jansen’s place.

  He might have graduated from knocking to shouting, except for what he discovered at the next intersection.

  Ernie Hamblin—one of the traffic section MPs quartered with Jansen in the Andrews Barracks—had gotten a big laugh out of Jansen getting turned around and lost, twice, in his first week on duty, all because the two streets that met here had four different names, one for each direction of the compass. Jansen looked to the right, up the Kochstrasse, and saw nothing unusual when compared with his memory. Straight ahead—as Axel-Springer-Strasse became the Lindenstrasse—looked wrong, but in the darkness he couldn’t quite make out why. To the left though, down the Oranienstrasse, there was nothing.

  Literally nothing. No street, no houses, no streetlamps…. only the same endless black as the sky, extending both outward and downward without the slightest hint of change. He walked as close to the road’s sharp edge as he dared, trying to make sense of what he wasn’t seeing, but could not. It wasn’t a cliff face or a pit: it was simply emptiness, darkness vast and implacable, an utter end to the world, as if God had shrugged, shaken His head and walked away in the middle of the Third Day. The ground that should have been there was gone. The city that should have been built on it was gone and worse than gone, carved away with absolute, unhuman precision. Looking out and away at that edge, where it floated rootless in the black sky, Jansen could see buildings that had been neatly sliced in half, as though by some cosmic guillotine, their truncated interiors looking pitifully like opened dollhouses.