08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  She met his eyes. How much of the man she imagined—well, yeah, dreamed—him to be was he really?

  He was waiting.

  She could try a small step—as if a small step off a cliff wouldn’t hurt as much as a big one. Well … Geronimo! “It’s … I guess it’s my mental difficulties.”

  “Don’t be afraid. Just tell me.”

  “I was having flashbacks of the hospital.”

  He crinkled his brow. “The hospital …”

  Had he forgotten? “Yeah, the hospital, you know, where they thought I was crazy and had me locked up and then sent those guys after me.”

  He cleared up and nodded. “Right. That hospital.”

  “It was like being in McCaffee’s and the hospital at the same time, stumbling around trying to figure out where I was and I couldn’t control it. I could see the hallways and the doctors and … and a really weird room.”

  He was about to take a bite from his toast but set it down.

  “It was dark, and there were lights and control panels like the inside of a spaceship, real sci-fi-looking. And then there was this big, empty room like a basement and two guys …” This was going to sound so weird! “And they were burning dead monkeys.”

  He raised an eyebrow and his face was one big Huh?

  “I know it sounds crazy. That’s because it is.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  Why? “Well, they had a black plastic bag full of dead monkeys and they were throwing them into a big furnace to burn them up.” And she didn’t want to go any further.

  He seemed to be envisioning it. “Well. Those were quite the circumstances.”

  “So I think … I think I need a breather—not from magic altogether, just from the weird stuff. I think it would be great—if I could, I mean—just to work here, just do whatever you need to have done and rest my brain, and then you could help me learn things that are, you know, from this planet, stuff I can get my hands on and work with and be … be here and not way out there.” Was he sold yet? “I’d work for free and you wouldn’t even have to train me.”

  He tried that on for a second, then gave his hands a little toss. “Well. Okay. So what do the Calhouns say? How soon do they want you back?”

  “As soon as I heal, I guess.”

  “And you need to rest your brain.”

  “I sure do.”

  “Well, we could just make you an apprentice. I want to finish cleaning out the barn so we can move stuff out of the shop. Then we can make room in there for a working stage and develop a stand-up show featuring you. If you can show up every day—what would you like, a four- or a five-day week?”

  She was trying to keep her emotions steady as she worked up an answer. “Umm … five, if we can work around my magic gigs.”

  “Got a few?”

  “Some birthday parties. I can show you my calendar.”

  “We’ll work around your gigs. Always. You need to be out there.”

  “Right, right.”

  “Five days a week, and working around your magic gigs, which includes McCaffee’s when you’re ready?”

  She was getting wide-eyed, nodding as her heart raced.

  “I’ll get you on the payroll as an employee. You’ll earn an hourly wage while we put a show together and see if we can make it fly—uh, when your brain’s ready. Sound good so far?”

  It sounded so good she was afraid it might not happen. “I want to work. I want to work and get my mind together, get my life together, get in charge of things …”

  “Instead of things being in charge of you.”

  Who was this guy? “Absolutely.”

  “I’m all for that. All right. Why don’t you help me clean up the dishes here and then we’ll go unearth some history.”

  The crates, trunks, and travel cases, all the imagined, designed, and painstakingly built props and illusions that brought thrill and sparkle to the Dane and Mandy stage for forty years, now rested in a great, squarish heap in the middle of the barn. To the farthest reaches of Dane’s knowledge, the stage lights blackened and the final curtain fell on Dane and Mandy when the last corner of the tarp was tucked in and the last knot in the rope was tied. He never imagined he would return, never thought he would look back, could not have dreamed that he would be standing before this monument with young Eloise. What an image: the finish and the start in the same moment gazing up at the span of time between them.

  “Wow,” she said.

  Yes. Wow. “Let’s see if we can get this rope undone.” He worked on one side, she worked on the other. The knots could be stubborn. He worked one loose. “How you doing?”

  “I think I got it,” came her voice.

  The rope went slack. He pulled it over to his side and let it fall. “Okay, come around and let’s ease this tarp off.”

  They gently, even reverently, drew the tarp over and down, letting it gather in crackling folds at their feet, and then he gave her time to take it all in: the ruggedly built travel cases with steel edges and corners, the plywood crates nicked and scraped from years of touring, the solid wood trunks with their metal latches and hinges.

  And stenciled on the side of every one of them were the words DANE AND MANDY, LAS VEGAS, NEVADA, USA.

  Her eyes rested on the words. He remained silent, pretending to look things over and tuck away the tarp as he watched.

  She lingered, her mouth open, then faintly smiling in amazement as she tilted, then wagged her head. “Her name was Mandy?”

  “That’s right.”

  She gazed at the name as if gazing into a face and then, reaching as a child reaches for her parent, she placed her hands flat upon either side of the name and framed it. “Whoa!”

  “Forty years.”

  “That is just so cool.” She studied the name as if reading it for the first time. “You know, I really like her.”

  He was thinking of Mandy and looking at Eloise as he said, “So did I.”

  She withdrew her hands and her eyes searched out every appearance of that name on every container, her eyes arcing over the stack as if she were in awe of a rainbow.

  This would be enough. He could feel his soul, his insides warning him to move on. “I guess we’d better …”

  She snapped out of it. “Oh, absolutely, yes. Didn’t mean to … It’s personal, I understand.”

  “No problem.” He had to do a little acting, had to push them onward. “Now what I want to do is re-create a stage such as you would find in a small to medium venue, something with more geography. I’d like to build it in the shop and use some of this stuff to create a setting, just give you some things to work around, handle, bump into, use if it fits your style. Going from close-up to stage means everything has to be bigger, wider. Here’s a Zigzag. You know what that is?”

  “The optical illusion. The lady stands in the box and then it looks like you remove the middle part of her.”

  “Right. I … I don’t see you doing this as part of your act, but working with some larger props might be a good exercise to help you think in bigger, wider concepts.”

  “I’d love the experience.”

  “Here’s a sub trunk—uh, substitution trunk.”

  “Metamorphosis!”

  “Okay, you’ve seen this one.”

  “The magician’s assistant gets tied inside a bag and locked inside the trunk. The magician raises a shroud around the trunk and then bammo! The magician trades places with her, just like that.”

  “It uses a lot of basic principles: timing, misdirection, creating an expectation, and then defying it—and just plain physical ability. We could try that out to hone the basics. It’s easy in principle, not so easy to perform convincingly. Once again …”

  “The magic is in the magician.”

  “You get an A.” Now he had to laugh. “And this one … this is our old levitation. It’s a dinosaur. There are so many better designs out there now—which I guess you’re aware of.”

  “I guess.”

 
“Mandy and I worked it into a gag routine and put a whole new life into it. That’s another lesson right there: even an old trick that everybody’s seen before can be fresh if you give it a little twist—which brings us to another little idea of mine. Considering how good you are with tennis balls and quarters, this might be just the thing.”

  Just the thing? This was more than “just the thing,” this was a God thing, a reunion, an awakening of an old happiness she remembered but hadn’t thought was hers. She muffled a squeal behind her hand, laughed through her tears, and gave Mr. Collins a hug.

  Four little pairs of dark eyes looked warily at her through the wire cage; four heads bobbed as the snowy white birds ruffled and sidestepped on their perch, checking her out. Newbies, she could tell. Everything was unfamiliar to them.

  “I remember you told me you raised doves,” said Mr. Collins. “Well, I just got these in and they’re going to need taming and training. I thought you might be interested.”

  She leaned close to the cage and the timid faces just inside the wire. She cooed at them, spoke gently, and they watched her, not afraid but not so sure either. They were four little angels, a visitation from that beloved dream—the return, in their own way, of her first loss.

  “Two girls, two boys,” she said. Just like Mandy’s prizewinners.

  “They’ll need names,” said Mr. Collins.

  “Names …” Looking into those attentive little eyes, she didn’t care if Mandy Whitacre’s life was delusional, it was still hers. She reached into the memory, grabbed this one small corner of it, and hauled it into this room, where it could be real. She studied each dove and got to know its markings, the shape of its head, the curve of its beak, and then announced its name. “This little fella, his name is Bonkers. And this little girl, she’s Lily. And you—yeah, cutie, I’m talking to you!—you’re Maybelle, aren’t you? And that means you must be Carson. Glad to meet you.” She added only in her thoughts, again, then looked away to dab her eyes.

  She heard, then saw Mr. Collins sink into an old plastic patio chair, his hand over his mouth as if he’d seen the Red Sea part down the middle. He looked as if he would cry.

  “Mr. Collins?”

  He smiled away the emotion and wagged his head at a thought he didn’t share. “Call me Dane,” he said.

  chapter

  * * *

  28

  Eloise dubbed them the Gleesome Threesome—herself, Shirley, and Dane—a crew bent on a goal and getting a good old feeling getting there. Lifting, rolling, dragging, and hand-trucking tires, wheels, a ringer-washer, a couch, an old desk, and other rusted, mouse-chewed, bent, and seized-up junk out of the barn and carting it all to the dump was dusty, dirty, and difficult, but it was a pleasant kind of misery. Daddy always said hard work was good for the soul, and each evening, as Eloise zonked out on her bed, her soul felt better.

  Working alongside Dane—and being able to call him that—sure added a shiny side to it. Handing to, getting from, struggling, lifting, hauling, cracking jokes, and having laughs with that man were healing, as if a big, lost chunk of her life was finding its way back. Sitting on a stool beside him at his drafting table, studying his drawings of the stage he had in mind, and making out a materials list for the lumber store was a sweet flashback. She’d done the very same thing with Daddy when they built the aviary for her doves, the raised bed garden behind the house, the coop for the chickens. That day, not only did her soul feel better, she also went home feeling special, and that night she fell asleep with little movies of her second daddy playing through her head.

  Wednesday morning they moved the tiller, box scraper, tank sprayer, brush hog, and backhoe out of the shop and into the barn, which cleared floor space in the shop for a stage. By midmorning, the materials arrived. Eloise wore Dane’s nail apron and wielded his hammer, Dane did the cutting and layout, Shirley ran the power nailer and drill, and by quitting time on Thursday the Gleesome Threesome had completed a rough, unpainted stage, fourteen by fourteen, in portable sections bolted together. No lights, no curtain or backdrop, just a big frame and plywood box about three feet high with steps at either end.

  “That’ll do for the immediate future,” Dane said, snapping a picture. He’d snapped a lot of pictures during the process. Eloise was always smiling for the camera. “We’ll dress it up as we go along, but tomorrow we have to get you up there and start filling out a show.”

  The thought made her tingle. She climbed the steps and pranced onto the stage, imagining the shop as a theater, Dane, Shirley, and the Kubota tractor as her audience. She did a pirouette into a ta-da pose, arms outstretched.

  “How’s it feel?” Dane asked, looking up at her.

  She said, “Real good,” but that didn’t come near the feeling. She wasn’t just on this stage; she was also on this stage in this shop on this ranch with that man sitting down there in front of her, watching and caring about her. She added, “Like where I belong,” and that was more like it.

  Joy bubbled up and burst out in a squeal as she did another spin, flinging out her hand as if materializing something.

  A microphone flew from her hand across the stage. There was a gasp from the audience of at least five hundred—especially from the sound crew. The mike slowed, then stopped in midair. Eloise flashed a bedazzled look at the audience, stared at the mike as if she hadn’t a clue how it did that, and then, as if getting an idea, struck a dancing pose and drew it back toward herself with a beckoning wave of her hand. It floated toward her then, obeying her fluid gestures, halted just beyond her reach, tumbled end over end, then spun laterally like a bottle. Eloise was loving it and so was the audience.

  She was dressed in her best, a silk blouse and gold cravat, black slacks, black vest with gold embroidery, hair done perfect and shining in the lights. Her audience was dressed in jeans, sweatpants, sweatshirts, snow boots, camouflage pants and shirts, beer logo T-shirts, and billed caps. It was the annual Community Christmas Show at the Wallace High School auditorium in Wallace, Idaho.

  The gig came up suddenly. A barbershop quartet had to bow out, leaving an open twenty-minute slot between the combined Kellogg and Wallace High School concert bands and the Christmas Carol Collection Community Choir. Someone telephoned Roger Calhoun, who telephoned Eloise, and Dane thought it was a great idea, a perfect way to test new material on a big stage.

  With a fluid, pulling gesture, she made the mike float past her and sang a note into it as it went by. It kept on singing the note as it circled behind and around her like a moon around a planet. When it came back around, she let it pass behind her hand, and as it did, it split into two microphones, exact duplicates. The first continued orbiting while Eloise sang a second note into the second mike, which set it in motion, and now two mikes were orbiting about her head singing a continuous chord in her voice. Mike One came around and passed behind her hand again. Presto, Mike Three! Eloise sang a third note, Mike Three carried it into orbit. A fourth mike joined the others and they sang a four-note chord that became the opening bars of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” a bow to the barbershop quartet that couldn’t make it. The folks got it right away. They laughed, she milked it.

  Dane and Eloise had six days to put a twenty-minute show together, six days of eye-to-eye, mind-to-mind brainstorming, discussing and arguing, trying this and then that to see how it looked, working out the dance moves, the props, the appearance of everything for a bigger crowd and bigger stage. They worked all day, talked and debriefed through lunch and dinner, kept at it until nine each night, when she drove home to sleep. It was intense, grueling, focused.

  She loved it. She never felt so alive.

  The microphones held the last chord of the song as they orbited faster, approaching blurring speed. Abruptly, Eloise put out her hand, caught Mike One as it came around, did a graceful spin, flung her hand outward …

  The mike became a dove that flew out over the audience in a wide arc.

  Eloise caught Mike Two, did a spin, flung out h
er hand …

  Another dove flashed into view and followed the first in a wide circle over the heads of the audience.

  Another catch, another fling, another dove. Three doves fluttered along the same trajectory like white-feathered boomerangs. Another spin, another fling …

  The fourth dove set out to fly the big circle just as the first was finishing.

  Ooooh! Ahhhh! Laughter. Astonishment. Applause.

  Dove One flew in close to Eloise, but she waved it on. It circled the room again, the others followed, and then they came home, one, two on Eloise’s right hand, one, two on her left. She brought her hands together in front of her, bowed with the birds to receive the applause, then straightened, threw her hands upward …

  The doves became a flurry of snowflakes sparkling in the lights, settling ever so slowly to the stage floor.

  Backstage, Dane gently put Carson the dove back in his cage. “Good work, little buddy!”

  Then he watched her work the crowd with wonder in her eyes, her childlike expression reaching the back row and saying, Wow! Did you see that? How did I do that?

  So alive. So free.

  On the left side of the auditorium, sitting on the very top row of the bleachers toward the back, a man in his thirties, wearing a crisp, new Cabela’s camouflage jacket and a billed cap, was honestly enjoying the show while he watched the screen of his laptop computer. In a small window in the corner of the screen was a video stream of Eloise’s performance, captured through the tiny camera mounted atop the screen and time-coded. On the main screen, locked into the same time code, columns of numbers rolled faster than the eye could follow, wave patterns rose and fell, blue shapes like time-lapse clouds formed and dissolved against the vertical and horizontal axes of a graph, and all in concert with every stunt and illusion produced by the girl onstage.