“I won’t let go.” Angie adjusts her grip, straightens, and Meg follows her to the wings off the stage.
Angie keeps Meg grounded throughout the show. The extra effort turns her skull into an echo chamber, her bones grinding like tectonic plates shifting through the eons. When the bullet kisses the Magician’s flesh, Meg gasps. Once it’s done, and the Magician reappears in the back of the theater—a combination of misdirection and Angie’s resurrection magic—Meg finally releases her death grip on Angie’s hand. Love is a hard habit to shed; Meg applauds. Angie is the only one to hear the sound, and each clap sounds like the cracking of ancient tombstones.
The Magician makes his way back to the stage, smiling and waving the whole way. Circles of rouge dot the Magician’s cheeks. The lights spark off his teeth as Rory cycles through gel filters, making a rainbow of the Magician’s smile. He takes his bows, gathering the flowers and panties and hotel keys thrown his way. Meg’s features settle into something less than love, less than awe. She frowns, then all at once, her mouth forms a silent “o.”
“I remember why I came back,” she says.
“Come with me.” Angie slips out of the theater, not that anyone is looking for her to notice.
She keeps a room in the hotel attached to the theater, and there, Angie collapses onto her bed. Meg hovers near the ceiling, turning tight, distraught circles like a goldfish in a too-small bowl.
“I don’t know if it’s happened yet, or if it’s happening now.” Meg stops her restless spiraling and sits cross-legged, upside down. Her hair hangs toward Angie; if Meg were solid, it would tickle Angie’s nose.
“Can you show me?” Angie’s skull is as fragile as a shattered egg, but Meg came back for a reason, and Angie wants to know.
Meg stretches. Their fingers touch. The room shifts and if Angie had eaten anything besides the ghost of bacon and coffee in the diner inside Meg’s death, she’d be sick. Her body remains on the bed, but Angie’s self stretches taffy-thin, anchored in a hotel room at one end, hovering above a swirl of music and laughter and brightness at the other. She isn’t Angie; she isn’t fully Meg either. They are two in one, Angie and Meg, Meg-in-Angie.
And below them is the Magician.
He burns like a beacon. A sour vinegar taste haunts the back of Angie’s throat. Pickled cabbage and resentment, brine and regret. Angie can’t sort out which feelings are Meg’s and which are hers. She must have loved the Magician once upon a time. Didn’t she?
The room is full of strangers, but another familiar face catches Angie-Meg’s eye. Rory stands at the edge of a conversation where the Magician is the center. He sways, too much to drink, but also blown by the force of yearning, a tree with branches bent in the Magician’s wind.
Angie and Meg watch as Rory orbits closer, his need fever-bright. The Magician turns. He stops, puzzled at seeing something familiar anew. After so many years of being careful in the Magician’s presence, Rory’s desire is raw. Something has changed, or perhaps nothing has, and Rory is simply tired, hungry, willing to take a chance. And after so many years of looking right past his stage manager, the Magician finally sees something he needs—admiration, want, fuel for his fire. He sees love, and opens his mouth to swallow it whole.
A flick of the hand, a palmed coin, a card shot from a sleeve—the first and easiest trick the Magician ever learned and the one that’s served him best over the years. He turns on his thousand-watt smile, and Rory steps into that smile. Parallel orbits collide, and their kiss is a hammer blow, shattering Angie’s heart.
She gasps, coming up for air from the bottom of a pool. Meg floats facedown above the bed, a faint outline haloing her in the shape of wings. Tears drip endlessly from her eyes, but never fall.
Angie is angrier than she’s ever been.
It’s not the Magician’s infidelity. Like the Magician himself, she’s grown used to that. The Magician could kiss hundreds, flirt with thousands, fuck every person he meets, and Angie wouldn’t care. The kiss means nothing to the Magician, and to Rory it means the world. That, Angie can’t abide.
Rage widens cracks in Angie she hadn’t even known were there. She can see what will happen next, Rory fluttering to the ground in the Magician’s wake like a forgotten card. There’s already forgetting in the Magician’s eyes, his mind running ahead to the next show, the next trick, the thunder of applause.
Angie makes fists of her hands. She wanted better for Rory. She wanted him to be better. She wants to have been better herself. Smart enough to never have fallen for the Magician’s tricks, clever enough to see through the illusion and sleight of hand. Angie meets Meg’s eyes.
“We have to let the Magician die.”
• • • •
A Rabbit’s Funeral
“Shit, shit, shit.” Heat from the asphalt soaked through Angie’s jeans where she knelt in the Magician’s parking lot, the shoebox by her side.
Tears dripped from the point of Angie’s nose and onto the rabbit’s fur. She’d woken in the Magician’s rumpled sheets, wondering if she was the first to see them twice, even three mornings in a row, and she’d found the rabbit curled next to the defunct radiator, empty as though he’d never contained life at all. Nothing she could do, no amount of power she could summon, would unravel his death again.
“Are you okay?” A shadow fell over her, sharp-edged in the light, and Angie looked up, startled.
“Yes. No. Shit. No. Sorry.” She wiped frantically at her face, leaving it smeared and blotchy.
The sun behind the man turned him into a scrap of darkness. Angie wished she’d brought sunglasses.
“I’m fine.” She stood and lifted her chin.
“You don’t look fine.” The man’s gaze drifted to the box.
Exhaustion wanted Angie to drop back to her knees, but she turned it into a deliberate motion, scooping the box against her chest and holding it close.
“I know that rabbit,” the man said. “The Magician—”
“The Magician. The fucking Magician.” Angie couldn’t help it—a broken laugh escaped her. She held the box out. “Do you know his name? It’s not Gus.”
“No.” The man looked genuinely regretful, and it made Angie like him instantly, and study him more closely.
The air smudged dark around his shoulders, curling them inward. A shadow haunted him, like the one clinging to the Magician, with the same flavor, but unlike the Magician, this man felt its weight.
“I’m Rory.” The man frowned at the box. “I’m the stage manager, I was looking for the Magician.”
“He’s out. I don’t know when he’ll be back. He doesn’t even know yet.” She indicated the box again.
Guilt tugged at her briefly, recalling the Magician’s grief at the bar, but Angie doubted she’d see such a display again. The Magician had already moved on, his head too full of plans for his own death and return, overfull with confidence not in her abilities, but that he was too important to properly die.
She caught disappointment in the stage manager’s eyes. Angie recognized it; Rory was as big a fool as she was, maybe bigger still. Like a compass point finding North, Rory’s gaze went to the Magician’s window. He didn’t have to count or search, pinpointing it immediately. Love was written plain on his skin, letters inches high that the Magician was too stupid to read.
“Will you help me bury him?” Angie held up the box, drawing Rory’s attention back, his expression smoothed into one of weary pain.
“I’m—” Angie stopped. She’d been about the say the Magician’s girlfriend. But they’d only just met; they’d fucked a few times. She’d brought his rabbit back from the dead, and that was the most intimate thing they’d shared.
“Angie.” She coughed.
Her name felt awkward, a ball of cactus thorns she wanted to spit out. Now it was her turn to glance at the building, though she had no idea which window belonged to the Magician. Dread prickled along her spine.
“I have a car.” Rory gestured. “We could bur
y him in the desert.”
Angie followed Rory across the parking lot. She climbed into the passenger seat, and set the box containing the dead rabbit in her lap. The car smelled faintly of cigarettes—old smoke, like Rory had quit long ago. Angie found it oddly comforting.
“I’m a Resurrectionist.” Angie tested the word. The Magician had suggested it last night, bathed in the after-sex glow. She tried it on for size. “I bring things back from the dead.”
She expected Rory to slam on the brakes, swerve to the side of the road and demand she get out. He did neither. She kept talking.
“Simple things fall apart more easily—mice, sparrows, rabbits.” She tapped the box, finger-drumming a sound like rain. Telling Rory her secret felt necessary, an act of defiance. The Magician didn’t own her or her truths, not yet.
“Small things know the natural order of the world. Only humans are arrogant enough to believe they deserve a second chance at life.”
Angie let her gaze flick to the side, finding Rory’s eyes for a brief moment before he turned back to the road.
“How about here?” Rory parked and they got out.
Desert wind tugged at Angie’s hair. She held the box close, sand and scrub grass crunching under her feet. Rory kept a small, collapsible shovel in the trunk of his car for emergencies, a habit held over from when he lived in a climate with much more snow. He also kept a Sharpie in his glove box, and once they’d dug a hole, and laid the rabbit inside, Angie chose a flat, sun-warmed rock and uncapped the pen.
“What should we write, since we don’t know his name?”
“He was a good rabbit. His name was his own.”
Angie scribed the words. The moment felt like a pact, and when Angie stood, she took Rory’s hand. The sun dragged their shadows into long ribbons, and at the same moment, they turned to look behind them, as if they’d heard their names called. The city glowed in the gathering dusk. The Magician was waiting for them.
• • • •
How the Trick is Done
This is how it goes: Meg protests; she blushes translucent. She is dead, but she is afraid.
Angie points out how many people the Magician has hurt, how many more he will hurt still. Meg comes around to Angie’s point of view.
They tell Rory together, a united front. With Angie holding Meg’s hand, amplifying her form, Rory can see her. His eyes go wide, and his face becomes a glacier calving under its own weight. After his initial moment of shock, something like wonder takes over Rory’s face as he looks at Meg.
“You have wings.”
She blinks, spinning in place to try to see over her shoulder. The wonder on her face mirrors Rory’s, but the melancholy in her voice breaks Angie’s heart.
“I remember,” Meg says. “I think, once, I knew how to fly.”
“I should have…” Rory says, but he lets the rest of the sentence trail. Meg offers him a sad smile, telling him over and over again that her death is not his fault. Angie tells him that kissing the Magician was not a crime. Rory looks doubtful, but in the end, like Meg, he agrees. They need to let the Magician die.
Angie tells herself they are doing this for the dozens of lost souls, blown in like leaves from the strip, looking for magic, and instead finding the Magician. She tells herself it is not revenge. That he failed them more than they failed themselves. She thinks of late-night coffee, and early-morning champagne. All the opportunities she had to tell Rory that she knew he was in love with the Magician, to tell him to run. She savors her guilt, and pushes it down.
The one person they do not tell is the Magician’s Assistant, his current one. It is unfair, but she needs to be the one to fire the gun. Magic, true magic, requires a sacrifice, and none of them have anything left to give.
On the night the Magician dies, he asks for a volunteer from the audience. A hand rises, but the woman raising it feels a terrible chill, ghost fingers brushing her spine. She takes it as a premonition, and lets her hand fall. Rory trains the spotlight on the woman, on Meg behind her, and its brightness washes Meg away.
No other hands rise; the Magician’s Assistant accepts the gun with a smile, and Angie’s heart cracks for her. There is brightness in her eyes, curiosity. She believes. Not in the Magician specifically, but in the possibility of magic. She’s the Assistant for now, but her faith in the world tells her that she could be the Magician herself someday.
Rory shifts the spotlight to the stage. Bright white gleams off the Magician’s lapels, the Assistant’s costume sparks and shines. Angie watches the Magician preen.
There is a flourish, a musical cue. The Magician’s Assistant fires the gun. Angie holds her arms tight by her side. The bullet strikes home. A constellation of red scatters, raining like stars on the stunned front row. The Resurrectionist grits her teeth and trains her will to do nothing at all.
The Magician’s eyes widen. His mouth forms a silent “o.” He falls.
Dread blooms in the Magician’s Assistant’s stomach. The gun smokes in her hand.
Angie sweats in the wings. The Magician’s death tugs at her, demanding to be undone. It’s harder than she imagined not to knit the Magician back together. He is a hard habit to break, and she’s been turning back his death for so long.
She considers—is she the villain in this story? The Magician is callous, stupid maybe, and arrogant for sure. Angie is not a hapless victim. She made a choice; it just happened to be the wrong one. Rory and Meg, they are innocent. All they are guilty of is falling in love.
Angie does not tell the bullet to stop, or the Magician’s blood to go. She lets it run and pool and drip over the edge of the stage and onto the floor. All Angie can hope is to turn her regret into a useful thing.
Rory lets out a broken sob. His will breaks, and he runs onto the stage, folding to his knees to cradle the Magician’s head in his lap. Meg hovers above them. She spreads her wings, and their translucence filters the spotlight, lending the Magician’s death a blue-green glow.
Angie walks onto the stage. In the corner of her vision, the lights are blinding. The theater holds a collective breath. She thinks of a lonely grave in the desert, and a rabbit without a name. She thinks of Meg, falling endlessly. She thinks of Rory, his lips bruised with regret. Angie kneels, and looks the Magician in the eye. She knows death intimately, his most of all, and she knows he can still hear her.
“Dying is easy,” she says. “Being dead is hard. Coming back is the hardest part of all. See if you can figure out how the trick is done, this time all on your own.”
She leans back. It isn’t much, but it assuages her guilt to think he might figure out the secret, the catch, the concealed hinge. He might learn true magic, bend it to his will, and figure out how to bring himself back to life one day.
The Magician blinks. The spotlight erases Angie and Rory’s features; they blaze at the edges, surrounded by halos of light. Between them, a blurred figure occludes the lights. It reminds the Magician of someone he used to know, only he can’t remember her name.
“Is this…” The Magician’s fingertips grope at the stage as if searching for a card to reveal. Those are his final words.
• • • •
Death and the Magician
Angie lets a month pass before she tracks down the Magician’s Assistant, his most recent one. They meet in an all-night diner, and Angie offers to pay.
The woman’s name is Becca, and she reminds Angie of a mouse. She starts easily, all shattered nerves. A dropped fork, bells jangling over the diner door—they all sound like gunshots to her, and her hands shake with guilt.
“It’s not your fault,” Angie says. “You did your job.”
Maybe one day Angie will admit the whole truth; maybe she’ll simply let it gnaw at her for the rest of her days, until she finds herself completely hollow inside.
“This is going to sound strange,” Angie says once they’ve finished their meals, “but how would you like your very own magic show?”
It isn’t enou
gh, certainly not after what Angie has done, but it makes her feel slightly better to think she is offering Becca the chance to live her dream. The pain is still there in Becca’s eyes, but Angie sees a spark of curiosity and something like hope.
“Tell me,” Becca says; by her voice, she is hungry to learn.
The act that replaces the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat looks like something old, as all the best tricks do, building on what came before and paying homage, while being something completely new. Every night, the Magician summons a ghost onto the stage. It must be an illusion, audiences say. Smoke and angled mirrors, just like Pepper back in the day. Only, the ghost knows answers to questions she couldn’t possibly know. She finds lost things, things their owner didn’t even know were gone. Sometimes she leaves the spotlight and flies over the audience, casting the shadow of wings, and creating a wind that ruffles their hair. Sometimes she reaches out and touches one of them, and in that instant, they know without a doubt that she is absolutely real.
The ghost looks familiar, and so does the Magician. The audience can’t place either woman, but something about them calls to mind spangly leotards and pasted-on smiles. They look like people who used to be slightly out of focus, standing just on the edge of the spotlight, out of range of the applause. Now they’ve moved center stage, and their smiles are real, and they positively glow.
Angie no longer watches from the wings as the show goes on. Meg is strong enough now that she no longer needs Angie to ground her, and Becca and Rory are just fine on their own. Perhaps one day, Angie will slip away from the theater altogether, though she isn’t sure where she’ll go.
For now though, she sits backstage in front of the mirror and looks the old magician in the eye.
As she does, she learns what death looks like for him, and thinks about what it will look like for her when her own time comes. Sometimes it looks like the darkest depths of a top hat, endlessly waiting for the arrival of a rescuing hand. Sometimes it looks like a party where everyone is a stranger, and no one ever looks your way. Every now and then, it looks like a diner at 1:47 a.m. and a heart waiting to be broken.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 14
