He didn’t consult or warn Meg, but directed her to an all-night diner as she drove him back from the emergency room. Up until the moment the words “I’m done,” came from the Magician’s mouth, Meg harbored the hope that this trauma would allow him to finally see her, and that he’d invited her to the diner at 1:47 a.m. to confess his love.
Instead, he broke her heart and put her out of a job in the same breath. And he didn’t even have the decency to pay for her half of the meal.
Meg stared at the Magician. The Magician fidgeted with his gauze, and looked at the door and the neon and the cooling desert outside.
“I’m sure you’ll land on your feet, kid,” he said.
Meg blinked. She dug in her purse for tissues and money for the meal. When she looked up, the Magician was gone. Vanished into thin air.
Meg dropped coins and bills on the table without counting. Colt-wobbly legs carried her into the night. The air seared her lungs, and tears frosted her lashes. All up and down the strip, everything blurred into a river of light.
The Magician’s Assistant—she wasn’t even that anymore. Just Meg, and her parents had drilled into her young that that wasn’t worth anything at all. Who was she, if she wasn’t with the Magician? What could she possibly be?
Lacking evidence to the contrary, she chose to believe her parents. On stage with the Magician, she could pretend the glitter on her costume was a little bit of his glory rubbed off on her. Alone, she was nothing at all, and her ridiculous costume was just sequins, falling in her wake as she hailed a cab.
The car stopped at a location she must have given, though she didn’t remember saying anything at all. The space between her shoulder blades itched. She climbed out. Wind tugged at her hair and she took a moment to breathe in awe at the lights illuminating the vast sweep of concrete, a marvel of engineering, a wonder of the new world.
Meg left her purse on the backseat. She slipped off her shoes. The itch between her shoulder blades grew. Feathers ached to push themselves out from inside her skin.
Instead of landing on her feet, Meg landed at the bottom of Hoover Dam. A 727 foot drop that should have been impossible with all the security, except that just for a moment, Meg borrowed a little bit of magic—real magic—for her own. As she jumped, feathers burst from her skin and all the sequins in her costume blazed like stars. For just one instant before she fell, the Magician’s Assistant flew.
• • • •
The Stage Manager Brings White Roses
Rory remembered Meg, and it seemed he was the only one.
Before she hit the ground, before he left the diner and Meg sitting stunned in the booth behind him, the Magician had already forgotten her name. If he ever knew it at all. While Meg flew, capturing a moment of real magic without an audience or applause, the Magician was at a bar forgetting what he’d never remembered in the first place, and so Rory was the one who got the call. He sat on the floor, put his head in his hands, and sobbed.
Even though the Magician paid her a pittance, Meg brought Rory coffee and pastry at least once a week. He taught her how to knit. She taught him how to throw a fastball. She invited him to her tiny apartment, and introduced him to her guinea pigs, Laurel and Hardy. They watched old movies, both having a fondness for Vincent Price, William Powell, and Myrna Loy, and popcorn with too much salt. They laughed at stupid things, and cried at sad ones, and never let each other know of their mutual ache for the Magician.
Now that it was too late, Rory saw that of course he was like Meg, she was like him, and they were both fools. He brought a massive spray of white roses to her funeral. He laid them gently atop her cheap coffin, and his heart broke all over again. There were only five other people in the tiny chapel, and the Magician wasn’t one of them.
Rory hated him. Or, he meant to. Except when the Magician came to him three days later and told Rory he was putting together a new show and would Rory continue to stage manage him, Rory didn’t hesitate half as long as he should have before answering. His heart stuttered, his breath caught. The word no shaped itself on his lips, and the word yes emerged instead.
He betrayed Meg’s memory, and loathed himself for it, but he didn’t change his mind. The best Rory could do was press a single white rose in his handkerchief, and tuck it in a pocket over his heart, listening to it crackle as he followed the Magician to start again.
Every night, under the lights, the Magician smiled. His teeth dazzled with a rainbow of gel colors Rory directed his way. Every time the gun fired, Rory felt the kick of it reverberate inside him. His blood thundered. His stomach swooped. He ached with the Magician and felt his pain as he watched him fall.
Every night as the Magician allowed himself to be shot, Rory held his breath. He clenched his teeth. His muscles went tight with hope and dread wondering if this time the Magician might finally stay down so he could be free.
• • • •
The Resurrectionist and the Ghost
Angie is the first person to see Meg when she comes back from the dead. The Resurrectionist sits in the Magician’s dressing room, applying concealer over the exhausted bags under her eyes. No one will see her in the wings, but that’s precisely why she does it. The makeup is a little thing she can do for herself and no one else.
It’s getting harder to hold everything together, to want to hold it together—tell the bullet to stop, to cease to be once it’s inside the Magician’s skin, and tell the Magician’s blood to go. She sleeps eighteen hours a day, and it isn’t enough. Angie’s life has become an endless cycle—wake, eat, turn back death, applause that isn’t for her, sleep, repeat ad infinitum.
She smoothes the sponge around the corner of her left eye, and the ghost appears. Angie starts, and feels something like recognition.
“I’ve been waiting for you.” The words surprise Angie; she wonders what she means. A vague memory tugs at the back of her skull, of a night in a bar long ago, but before she can grab hold it fades away.
“Who are you?” the ghost asks.
“Who are you?” Angie counters.
“The Magician’s Assistant,” the ghost says.
“The Magician’s girlfriend.” The words leave a bitter, powdery, crushed aspirin taste on Angie’s tongue.
Angie laughs; it’s a brittle sound. How absurd, that they should define themselves solely in relation to the Magician. The ghost looks hurt until Angie speaks again.
“I’m Angie.”
“Meg.” The ghost gives her name reluctantly as if she isn’t entirely sure.
“So, you were the Magician’s Assistant,” Angie says.
Memory nags at her again, and all at once, the pieces click into place. When she and the Magician first met, he’d worn sorrow like a coat two sizes too large, but one he wasn’t even aware of wearing. Angie had sensed a hurt in him, and it had intrigued her, and now she knows—the hurt belonged to Meg all along.
There’s a certain flavor to it, tingeing the air. Even with the glass between them, Angie tastes it—like pancakes drowned in syrup, and coffee with too much cream.
Looking at Meg, Angie sees herself in the mirror. The Magician pulled a trick on both of them, sleight of hand. They should have been looking one direction, but he’d convinced them to look elsewhere as he vanished their names like a card up his sleeve, tucked them into a cabinet painted with stars so they emerged transformed—a dove, a bouquet of flowers, a Resurrectionist, a ghost. If Angie squints just right, there’s a blur framing Meg, a faint, smudgy glow sprouting from between her shoulder blades. It almost looks like wings, but when Angie blinks, it’s gone.
Well, shit, Angie thinks, but doesn’t say it aloud.
Behind Meg, sand blows. Or maybe it’s snow. The image flickers, like two stations coming in on the TV at the same time, back when that was still a thing.
“Can I come through?” Angie asks.
“Can you?” Meg’s eyes widen in surprise.
“I’m a Resurrectionist.” Angie’s mouth twists on the
words, but she can’t think of a better way to explain. “Death and I have an understanding.”
Angie reaches through the glass. The mirror wavers, and Meg’s fingers close on Angie’s hand.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Angie asks.
Meg shrugs, embarrassed. This is her death, but it isn’t under her control.
“Over there?” Angie points to the neon shining through the storm.
Meg shudders, but her expression remains perfectly blank. She looks to Angie like a person actively forgetting the worst moment in their world.
As they walk, Angie learns that for Meg, sometimes death looks like a desert with a lomo camera filter applied. Sometimes it’s sand and sometimes snow, but it’s always littered with bleached cow bones and skulls. It’s a place where you’re always walking toward the horizon, carrying your best party shoes, but you never arrive. Mostly, though, Meg’s death looks like a diner at 1:47 a.m., right before your boss—the man you love—tells you you’re out of a job and a future and good luck on the way down.
Inside the diner, laminated menus decorate each booth. The wind ticks sand against the glass as Meg and Angie slide onto cracked red faux-leather banquettes. In the corner, a silent jukebox glows.
“I don’t mean to be indelicate, but you’ve been dead for a while. Why come back now?”
The air is scented with fry grease and coffee on the edge of burnt, old cooking smells trapped like ghosts.
“I don’t know,” Meg says. “I think something important is about to happen. Or it already happened. I can’t tell.”
She shreds her napkin into little squares, letting them fall like desert snow. Her nails are ragged, the skin around them chewed. This time when Angie squints, Meg goes translucent, and Angie sees her falling without end.
• • • •
The Rabbit Returns
The first time Angie saw the Magician, he had gauze wrapped around his left index finger, spotted with dried blood. She’d just lost her job, or rather it had lost her. Donna, who sat in the next cubicle over, caught Angie uncurling the browned leaves of a plant, bringing them back from the brink of death to full glossy health. Angie’s boss called Angie into her office at noon, and by 1 p.m. Angie was installed at a bar, getting slowly drunk.
The constant movement of the Magician’s hands was what caught Angie’s eye. She watched as he tried the same cheap card trick, only slightly clumsy with his injured hand, on almost every patron in the bar. No matter which card his mark chose, when the Magician asked, “Is this your card?” he revealed the Tarot card showing the Lovers, and smirked at the implications of flesh entwined. She watched until it worked, and someone left on the Magician’s arm. Angie found herself simultaneously annoyed and amused, and the following night, she returned to the same bar, curious whether the Magician would as well.
The Magician did return, but there were no card tricks this time. She spotted him alone in a corner, his head resting on his folded arms. Angie slipped into his booth, holding her breath. If this was a performance, it was a good one. The Magician looked up, and Angie couldn’t help the way her breath left in a huff. His face was stark with a grief, thick enough for her to touch.
“He’s dead,” the Magician said. “The little bastard bit me. He was my best friend, and now he’s gone.”
The Magician blinked at Angie as if she’d appeared out of thin air. Angie said nothing, and the Magician seemed to take it as encouragement to go on. He held up his gauze-wrapped finger, and poured out his pain.
“Maybe I left his cage open after he bit me because I was mad. Maybe I was distracted because I’d just fired my assistant and I forgot to latch it tight. Whatever happened, he got all the way outside, across the parking lot. I found him on the side of the road, flat as a swatted bug.”
Tears glittered on the Magician’s cheeks. They had to be real. If he’d been putting on a show, he would have made a point of letting Angie see him wipe them away.
“I put his body in a shoebox in my freezer. I’m going to bury him in the desert.” The Magician laughed, an uneven sound. “Have you ever been to a rabbit funeral?”
The faint sheen at his cuffs spoke of wear. Despite the show he’d put on the night before—cheap card tricks to tumble marks into his bed—she saw a man down on his luck, wearing thin, a man whose deepest connection was with the rabbit who’d bit him then run away.
The Magician looked lost, baffled by grief—like a little boy just learning the world could hurt him. There was something pure in his sorrow, something Angie hadn’t seen in Vegas in a long time. It looked like truth, and Angie wanted to gather it into her hands, a silk scarf endlessly pulled from a sleeve.
A shadow haloed the Magician. A death that wasn’t the rabbit’s clinging to his skin; he didn’t even seem aware it was there. Angie caught her breath, deciding before she’d fully asked herself the question. That bigger death wasn’t one she could touch, but the rabbit—that was a small thing she could heal.
“Do you want to see a magic trick?” she asked. “A real one?”
The Magician’s eyes went wide, touched with something like wonder. Maybe it was his grief making him see clear, but for just a moment, he seemed to truly see her. He nodded, and held out his hand.
The Magician led Angie to his shitty apartment. As they climbed the stairs, her nerves sang—a cage, full of doves waiting to be released, a star-spangled box with a beautiful woman vanishing inside. Her skin tingled. She considered that she was about to make the biggest mistake of her life, and decided to make it anyway.
“His name was Gus.” The Magician set a shoebox on his makeshift coffee table.
The rabbit lay on his side. Despite the Magician’s description, he wasn’t particularly flat. He might have been sleeping, if not for the cold. It seeped into Angie’s fingers as she held her hands above the corpse. The Magician watched her, all curiosity and intensity, and Angie blushed. A rabbit was different than a houseplant—what if she failed? And what if she succeeded?
The rabbit twitched. His pulse jumped in her veins, a panicked scrabbling. Angie placed her hands directly on the rabbit’s soft, cold fur. She meant to make a hushing sound, soothing the rabbit’s fear, but the Magician’s mouth covered hers. Salt laced his tongue; was she crying, or was he? She lifted her hands from the rabbit and pressed them against the Magician’s back instead to still their shaking. Death clung to them, tacky and oddly sweet. She resisted the urge to wipe her palms against the Magician’s shirt, pulling him closer.
She’d never brought back anything larger than a sparrow. Now she could feel the rabbit’s life in her—hungry, wild, wanting to run in every direction at once. The other, larger death continued to nibble at her edges—feathers itching beneath her skin, wind blowing over lonely ground.
The rabbit’s pink nose twitched; his red-tinged eyes blew galaxy-wide. He ran a circle around the Magician’s apartment, and the Magician laughed, a joyous, bellowing sound. He lifted Angie by the shoulders, twirling her around.
“Do you know what this means?” His voice crashed off the cracked and water-stained apartment walls.
He scooped her up, carried her to rumpled sheets still smelling of last night’s sex. Angie’s teeth chattered; the rabbit was still freezing, and the Magician was warm. She dug her fingers into his back, and leaned into him.
The sex was some of the strangest Angie had ever had. The Magician touched her over and over again, amazed, as if searching for something beneath her skin. For her part, Angie kept getting distracted. She snapped in and out of her body, pulled to the corner of the room where the rabbit rubbed his paws obsessively across his face. She giggled inappropriately, her limbs twitching beyond her control. She developed an insatiable craving for carrots. The Magician, lost in his own wild galaxy of stars, never seemed to notice at all.
In the morning, she found the Magician at his cramped kitchen table. The sense she’d forgotten something nagged at the back of her mind—something sad, something with
feathers—but the more she reached after it, the further it withdrew. She watched the Magician scribble on a napkin, coffee cooling beside him, burnt toast with one bite taken out of it sitting on a plate. He looked up at Angie with a wicked grin.
“How would you like to be part of a magic show?”
• • • •
The Assistant Returns
The bell over the door chimes, and Meg flinches, her shoulders rising like a shield. She and Angie both look to the entrance, but there’s no one there.
“We should go.” Angie might be about to make the second biggest mistake of her life, but she decides to do it anyway. “Would you like to see a magic show?”
“I did magic once.” Meg’s voice is dreamy. “I think, but…” She frowns, then shakes her head, a sharp motion knocking the dreaming out of her voice and eyes. “I don’t remember.”
Hunger flickers in Meg’s eyes now, tiny silver fish darting through a deep pool of hurt. Will seeing the Magician help, or add one more scar? Angie holds out her hand. Meg’s touch is insubstantial, but she takes it.
Here’s the secret to what Angie does: dying is easy. Being dead is hard. And coming back hurts like hell. But it’s easier if you’re not alone, and Angie doesn’t let go of Meg the entire time. She’s come a long way since the rabbit, but it’s an act of will, consciously holding space for Meg’s hand, bringing her—not back to life, but back as a ghost. The act leaves Angie’s vision bursting with grey and black stars. She has to steady herself against the dressing room table as she and Meg emerge.
“I’ve been looking all over for you.” The Magician puts his head around the doorway, impatient, distracted. “We’re about to start the show.”
He barely looks at Angie; he doesn’t see Meg at all. In Angie’s peripheral vision, Meg’s expression falls. She’s braced, but nothing can truly prepare her for the Magician failing to see her one last time.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 13
