08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  “This article deals with his work on interdimensional displacement, ID, the whole idea that an object can be shifted from one dimension to another, moved an inch or a mile, and returned to its original dimension so that it seems to have been instantly transported from one place to another.”

  “Beam me up, Scotty?” said Arnie.

  “It would be that impressive if it really worked and a stage magician could get hold of it. Imagine the illusions—but they wouldn’t be illusions, would they? They’d be the real thing.”

  Dane couldn’t believe it yet, but a building tension was gnawing at his insides. “Her entrance on your show … she used to do that sort of thing at McCaffee’s, just appear out of nowhere.”

  “Okay,” said Arnie, “we’re doing sci-fi now, everybody keep that in mind. We’re not going to get carried away here.”

  “I’m afraid there’s more.” Preston leafed through the stack and found an article from Scientific American. “Timelines. How it could be possible for an object—maybe a person?—to occupy multiple timelines at once and thereby exist as a multiplicity.”

  “Multiplicity. Of course,” said Arnie. He was kidding.

  “Take comfort, I’m not that far ahead,” Preston assured them. “Here’s what I gathered from the article: Dane, here you are, sitting in this chair at … two thirty-five in the afternoon. On our timeline, in our time dimension, you’re the only Dane there is. The Dane who was sitting here five minutes ago doesn’t exist anymore. He was the two-thirty Dane. You’re the two thirty-five Dane.”

  “But he’s the same guy,” Arnie countered.

  “Except for the time; that’s the point of the article. You’ll never see both Danes—the Dane in the present and the Dane from the past—sitting in the chair at the same time unless you can place the two-thirty Dane on a separate timeline, then pull that timeline up to a point contemporaneous with the timeline of the two thirty-five Dane. Then you’d have two Danes existing at once in the same place because they would be in the same place at different times. It would be the same event happening twice at the same time.”

  Dane and Arnie stared at him blankly.

  “I don’t totally get it either,” he admitted. “The article uses the example of a railroad car passing through a railroad crossing.” He pointed out the illustration on the second page. “Here we are, the observers, sitting in our car waiting for the train to go by, and right in front of us, at this instant in our time, is the railroad car. Consider that an event, the railroad car passing directly in front of us. But two seconds ago it wasn’t in front of us, it was about a car length down the track to our left. Imagine that as another event that happened in the past. Now imagine if you could isolate that past event, that car at that place in that instant of time, move the event to a parallel track, analogous to a second timeline, and then shift that track forward so that both events are now occurring side by side at the crossing. You would have what would look like two identical but separate cars going through the crossing at the same time, but what you’re seeing are two different events on two different timelines. The same car twice at the same time.”

  Dane thought it over. “Two railroad cars? Out of one?”

  “Bizarre, isn’t it?”

  “Two Danes sitting in the same chair.”

  “Yes.”

  “What would that look like?”

  “I don’t know. You might see them both, you might not. Only Parmenter would know.”

  Another connection, a lightbulb coming on. “Carson!” Dane said. Preston and Arnie waited. “Carson, the dove. The four doves out of one. She did a routine with four doves but she only brought one… . I figured she secretly loaded the other three.”

  “Maybe she did,” said Arnie, not sounding very sure about it.

  “Or she”—Dane reviewed, piecing it together—“she generated three more Carsons in three other time dimensions and made them look like four at once in ours.”

  “Four events that could have been microseconds apart made to happen in the same place at the same time,” Preston suggested.

  Arnie sang the theme music from The Twilight Zone.

  “So!” Preston leaned forward in his chair, intense like a storyteller. “Imagine this with me. Here’s … Eloise … sitting in her chair and I’m telling her to levitate a pencil over which she, the girl in the chair, has no control. Somehow, through some connection with this Parmenter and whatever he’s come up with, she generates a second Eloise on a second timeline, unseen by us, who picks up the pencil, rotates it, and makes it fly around the room.”

  Dane ventured, “An Eloise who was there five minutes before?”

  “Or a microsecond. Or a nanosecond. And on her own timeline so that she is writing her own unique history, free to act in her own way, make her own choices, carry out her own actions, but still remain in essence the original Eloise. Mind-boggling—and pure speculation, of course.”

  “So this second Eloise can fly?” Arnie asked.

  “If any of this really works, I’m guessing—guessing, mind you—that she can interpose herself between our time and space and hers anywhere she wants. If she could position her time and space four, six, however many feet above ours and penetrate our time and space from there, she would appear to us to be suspended in midair, flying, or at least the pencil she’s holding would appear so.”

  “So how does she levitate?” asked Arnie.

  Preston could only throw up his hands.

  Dane’s mind was racing along with his heart. “So Eloise Kramer is some kind of timeline duplicate, the Mandy Whitacre who existed forty years ago.”

  “But would she have any idea?” Preston mused.

  Arnie winced. “All right, time to call a halt here. Gentlemen, you took a wrong turn. Reality’s the other way.”

  “I was hoping I could speak with her after the show, but she’d left abruptly.”

  “And I can’t imagine why, with you being so nice to her.”

  Preston gave Arnie an impatient look. “Well, she didn’t exactly go crying to you.”

  “I wasn’t her manager anymore.”

  “And not her friend either.”

  Arnie took the blow but didn’t bend. “No. I wasn’t. She has that attorney to manage her now. She caught a flight back to Spokane, back to him and his big plans. Let him deal with her.” Then he told Preston, “And she was crying, by the way.”

  Oh, the feeling. Dane sighed, resting his forehead on his fingertips. “And I told her to leave, to get out of my life and never come back.”

  For a moment, words fled away. Arnie crossed his arms and looked out the window. Preston drew a deep breath and sighed it out long and slowly. Dane just remembered the last time he saw her; she was wearing that beautiful blue gown. She was wilting, dying against the doorpost, and he was walking away.

  At last Preston asked Dane, “Well, did she ever say anything to you, anything that would reflect on, uh …”

  “She said she was a little crazy, that she’d been in a mental ward … that she thought she was someone else.”

  Preston’s hands covered his nose and mouth as his eyes widened. “Who?”

  “She didn’t want to tell me, so we never talked about it.” Then he gathered strength and added, “But I did find out from a person connected with the hospital that when she was in the hospital she called herself Mandy.”

  Preston reeled a little at the news. “Oh, Dane. Ohhh, Dane. And this was before she met you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “She was calling herself Mandy before she even met you?”

  Dane could feel Arnie’s stern, cautionary look and just wagged his head. “It’s hard to be sure.”

  “You need to talk to her about this.” Then Preston thought again and his face fell. “But that wouldn’t be easy, would it?”

  “That’s why I never went there.”

  “What?” asked Arnie.

  Now Dane was feeling impatient. “You’re the one who though
t she was hustling me. What if I, the older guy, were to suggest to her, a cute, sexy twenty-year-old, that I married her forty years ago, so she’s my wife, or is about to be, or was?”

  Arnie wilted a little. “I see your point.”

  “Especially since we don’t really know what we’re talking about,” said Preston.

  “Ah!” said Arnie, “now there’s wisdom!”

  “But Parmenter knows,” said Dane.

  “If we can find him,” said Preston. “I tried to track him down. I wanted to be the first magician in line to be his friend and collaborator … and it didn’t happen. Last I heard from my sources, he’d left Stanford. He said he was pursuing a privately funded project and had relocated”—pause for effect—“to Las Vegas.”

  Another uncanny connection. Dane sank back in his chair.

  “Oh,” Arnie mused. “A privately funded project in Las Vegas! I’ve seen those, the guy shooting dice, downing some drinks, a couple of younger women along …” He snapped his fingers. “Hey, younger women!” Dane sent him a corrective glare. “Think I’ll get some more coffee. Where are those cookies?”

  “There is money there,” Preston countered, “and people who know how to make it and invest it to make more.”

  “We have to find him,” said Dane. He felt ready to die trying.

  “And maybe we’ve picked up his trail again as of today. Or, you could say, as of September 17, 2010, at that intersection in Las Vegas. I’d say that’s your starting point. Dane, my friend, it’s time to ask questions.”

  Doris Branson, a lady in her fifties, managed the Orpheus Hotel Casino just off the Las Vegas Strip, was good to her friends, honest and shrewd in business, twice divorced, and—it seemed everyone knew it but she—prone to drinking.

  Among friends such as hers in a town such as this, it was hard to make a case against alcohol abuse, but she got a strong hint about it when she bent her car around a palm tree in someone’s front yard. She paid a one-thousand-dollar fine, agreed to perform forty hours of community service in lieu of jail, lost her privilege to drive for ninety days, and had to devote a great deal of time and money to getting insured again after her insurance company dropped her.

  Even so, her friends marveled and kept telling her how lucky she was. From the looks of the car and the blood on the dashboard, she should have been seriously injured, but she woke up in the hospital with no greater complaint than a hangover and no recollection of the accident. The doctors also reminded her—until she was tired of hearing it—how lucky she was. They kept her for one day of observation and then sent her home.

  Lucky? As of today she still had fourteen hours remaining on her community service commitment and twelve days to get her driver’s license reinstated if she completed a substance abuse class and could prove she had insurance. With luck like she’d had, she wasn’t about to place any bets, not even in her own casino.

  That’s where she was headed today, by elevator from the administration offices on the third floor to the casino on the main floor. It was routine, just verifying some numbers with the floor manager.

  She would never have that meeting.

  The Prospector’s Lounge at the Orpheus Hotel boasted twenty-five tables and ten booths and could seat a hundred, not a big venue for Las Vegas but impressive, even intimidating, to a girl raised on a ranch in Idaho who drove to Vegas in a tired VW. It was quite a leap from McCaffee’s, too, trimmed out in scrollwork and filigree, with a red carpet that was soft under the feet, red velvet curtains and brass fixtures, a totally clean, reach-everywhere sound system, a real stage with a powered curtain that disappeared into the ceiling, racks and racks of stage lights, a rear entrance direct from the dressing rooms—real dressing rooms!—and a three-person stage crew who knew everything there was to know about the place and were there to meet her every need.

  And all she was doing was auditioning.

  She gave it her best, as she always did, and maybe it was the total strangeness, the fantastical bigness, the mind-blowing color, light, and show-offishness of this city that provided the rush to get her through it. For sixty minutes she let the routines carry her along, let the pasts and futures and other places pitch and roll around her as she reached, moved, animated, levitated, and commanded her props, birds, and her own body from inside and outside herself, inside and outside of here and now. It was the same old madness that had dogged her for months but it got her work, and right now work was all there was.

  Her closing tableau with hoops, birds, bottles, and cards was as good as some of the fountains she saw around town—did anybody else in Nevada have water?—and right on cue, the big automatic curtain dropped and the stage became a box.

  She relaxed, deflated with relief, and stood quietly, letting her other worlds play out around her. Scenes from the ranch happened through: the shop with the tractor and the home-built stage passed over her; she could stand on the path outside the barn and look up the hill toward the house—the lights were on in the kitchen but she couldn’t see anyone; just a thought of the snowy meadow made it sweep past her like an ebbing ocean wave up to her knees. Hospital hallways—they always showed up for some reason—flashed across her vision in fast motion and then vanished, as they always did. An earlier version of herself, so solid and real they could have collided, danced around her doing stunts with the hula hoops, then broke into pieces and faded away. Suddenly, rudely, the casino just outside the lounge doors surrounded her, slot machines jingling, warbling, ding-a-linging. She braced herself, startled, as she, or part of her, or another one of her, raced past a row of elevators.

  Doris Branson rode the elevator alone, mildly bored by the quiet until the door slid open and the pleasant sound of money and more money being raked in sang in her ears. It was like walking into a factory with hundreds of machines running except that the machines didn’t produce anything, they just transferred it. It was a business doing pleasure with these people.

  Oops! She nearly collided with a pretty girl in a blue costume and holding a hula hoop. Great. A cabaret girl who hadn’t learned the rules: no costumed performers on the casino floor. She ought to know that!

  “Miss! You don’t belong out here!”

  The girl looked astounded that Doris would even address her, which only raised Doris’s temper another notch. “Don’t look at me like that!”

  Where was Vahidi? She grabbed her cell phone from her pocket …

  Well, now she felt silly and couldn’t remember the number. The phone was blurry and the floor was moving—

  The phone dropped to the floor as Doris uttered a truncated scream, lurched and twisted with arms flailing, then toppled to the floor, an arm and a leg broken and blood trickling from her nose and mouth.

  A lady vacationer screamed. Security personnel came running. Before she passed out, Doris dizzily searched for the girl in blue. “Not onna casino floor …”

  But the girl was gone.

  Did that lady really see me? Was I really there?

  The girl in blue sank to one knee, her hand on the floor, and worked to keep her balance until there was only the stage and it wasn’t moving. She thought she heard a distant scream from the fading casino floor—somebody must have hit a jackpot—but after that, the only sound was her own windedness.

  It was alarmingly quiet on the other side of the curtain. There was no applause at all, just a muffled conversation between two voices. With a mere whisper of a thought she reduced her twelve doves down to the original four—Carson, Maybelle, Lily, and Bonkers—received their cage from a stage guy, and tucked them safely away. She set the hula hoops aside, left the bottles, silks, and cards in a heap, and peeked through the curtain.

  The place was empty except for Seamus and the hotel’s entertainment director, Mr. Vahidi, sitting at a center table just a few rows back from the stage.

  “Don’t come into the lounge area, miss,” said Vahidi. “You’re underage.”

  “She knows,” said Seamus. He had his planner open on
the table in front of him.

  Were they working a deal? She sat at the edge of the stage, trying to see their faces. The stage lights blinded her.

  They were muttering, talking about dates, weeks available, dollar amounts. She heard Vahidi say “one-fifty,” then Seamus said “three hundred,” then Vahidi asked, “What’s she gonna wear?”

  She looked at her blue pants outfit with gold embroidery. It was her newest and best, reminiscent of a certain blue gown. “This.”

  Vahidi looked her over and told Seamus, “For three hundred you should get her into something striking.”

  Seamus began explaining her choices in costume, how she didn’t normally present herself “that way.”

  “Hey, this is Vegas,” said Vahidi. “She’s competing with some big shows out there, and she’s got what it takes. You kidding me?”

  “We’ll discuss it,” said Seamus.

  Come on, Seamus, do what you do best: look out for me.

  The stage lights shut down and the house lights came up a little. Now she had a better view of Vahidi, a man who must have been raised on cheeseburgers and Crisco, with a face like a road map and a very expensive watch. Besides the wrinkles and folds on his face he had two scars he must have gotten from a street disagreement in his youth.

  “So how’s she bill herself?” Vahidi asked.

  “Eloise Kramer,” said Seamus. “Or the Amazing Eloise—”

  “Mandy,” she said.

  Seamus paused. Vahidi waited.

  “What?” said Seamus. “I thought we were—”

  “Mandy Whitacre.”

  Seamus leaned toward Vahidi, “We can let you know.”

  “It’s Mandy,” she said. “M-A-N-D-Y.”

  Seamus gave her a corrective glare, which she bounced right back at him. He said to Vahidi, “Eloise Kramer is her legal name; Mandy Whitacre is a stage name. She’d like to use the stage name.” He threw her an inquiry with his eyes, Okay? and she threw him back an answer, Guess it’ll do for now.

  Vahidi shrugged and wrote it down. “Does she do escapes?”

  “Sure she does,” said Seamus.

  Escapes? “Sure I do,” she said.