Saving Houdini

by Michael Redhill

  “The more the merrier!” said Blumenthal.

  Dash tried to keep a straight face. Clearly, they had planned this. To ramp up the excitement. No one knew who Jacobson was, and not a soul in the place had any suspicion of who the little man in sunglasses was in the seat beside him.

  “You are a doubter, are you?” said Blumenthal.

  “Powerfully,” said Jacobson.

  “Well, if you insist, I have no choice. Bring in your men.”

  Jacobson clapped his hands twice and the rear doors of the auditorium flew open. A file of men in dark blue uniforms entered. Gluckman had raised the lights a little so people could see: they were policemen. Dash shot a look at Blumenthal, and he saw on the man’s face that he had not been expecting Jacobson’s friends to be the law. He carried on gamely.

  “Well … Mr. Woolf, if you wouldn’t mind—”

  “Do you really think Harry Houdini would lend his name to your pitiful cause?” snarled Jacobson. “You two charlatans? Go ahead and do your trick now. See if we don’t find you out!”

  Houdini was asking him to sit. The policemen went everywhere, into the wings, to the front of the audience, down the stairs that led to the traps beneath the stage.

  Blumenthal gave Dash the ring, and he knew exactly where to put it. He looked up when he got to his spot. The fly space above appeared empty. The second ring wasn’t up there. “Wolfgang?” the magician called. The squirrel had appeared again at the edge of the stage. The audience laughed nervously. They weren’t sure what was going on.

  Jacobson finally took his seat as Wolfgang leapt into their midst, causing a minor uproar, and finally, jumped up onto a rope that crossed overhead. One end was secured to the railing of the second balcony, the other vanished into the flies. In the middle of the rope was the second metal ring.

  “If you wouldn’t mind,” said Blumenthal.

  The squirrel ran down the rope and went to work on it with his teeth. Bits of frayed fibre drifted down into the audience. When the last strand broke, Wolfgang jumped onto the disk as it looped down toward the stage. Dash leapt back—it looked like the squirrel and ring might crash into the backdrop, but just as it came to the level of the stage, it suddenly straightened, like the rope had gone solid, and then it clacked down into place.

  Blumenthal went over to it as the crowd broke into nervous applause. The magician nimbly untied the rope from the disk just as cables descended over the ring on the stage. He carried the ring to the cables and made a small show of attaching the cables to steel eyes distributed around the rim of the upper ring. The whole apparatus now rose and hovered about eight feet above the stage.

  “If you will,” said Blumenthal to Dash.

  Dash stepped into the ring on the stage floor. Blumenthal walked away from him, to the front of the stage, and leaned into the dark where his audience sat. He spoke to them quietly, confidentially—Dash couldn’t hear what he was saying. But he saw the hundreds of eyes gleaming in the dark beyond the magician, watching him intently, wanting to be amazed. Jacobson was sitting there with his arms crossed. But he was watching too.

  The cops at the back of the auditorium locked the doors.

  Walt, thought Dash.

  The lights dimmed.

  Blumenthal returned to his side. “Ready?” he whispered.

  “Not really.”

  “But we go on anyway.”

  “If this doesn’t work, we’re both going to be in trouble.”

  “Then it had better work,” said Blumenthal.

  There was the whir of pulleys and the upper ring lowered again. It passed over Dash’s head.

  The magician intoned: “The line that divides life from death”—the upper ring clanked against the lower—”is as thin as the bubble that will now encase this young man.”

  There was a pause, and then the upper ring began to ascend again. A shimmering film of soap came up with it.

  Dash lifted his eyes and saw sets of cables moving in different directions above him. Some all the way into the flies, some not as high. And … he was almost sure of it … there was a third ring as well.

  “Hello?” said Blumenthal, interrupting his study. He was looking at Dash through the soap bubble.

  “Sorry.”

  “As I was saying: only in magic can you disappear and … and then?”

  It was cold now; the air felt like it was tightening around him. The bubble began to waver before his eyes.

  “And then?” Blumenthal repeated.

  “Come back,” said Dashiel Woolf.

  “Or not. Say so long, Dashiel.”

  Dash raised his hand in farewell. “So long,” he said.

  Herman Blumenthal had the pin in his hand now, a long hatpin, and the lights were getting brighter as he approached the bubble with its gleaming tip. Through the film, Dash could see Blumenthal’s nervousness. The audience straining toward him. Houdini leaned forward in his seat, and at last he took off his sunglasses. As he stretched his head forward, an awful, sick feeling spread in Dash’s chest and down to his stomach: it wasn’t Houdini. It was Dmitri, his driver.

  Houdini was still on the train to Detroit.

  Sol Jacobson’s mouth turned up slightly at the corners as bright ribbons of purple and green and yellow streaked across Dash’s vision. He saw the point of the hatpin coming through the bubble … and he heard Jacobson begin to laugh.

  The light was unbearable. A rushing noise swarmed him. Something snapped, and then …

  He was nowhere. A nowhere that was full of distant echoes and veins of darkness and …

  Applause?

  “But wait—!” came Herman Blumenthal’s voice from somewhere nearby.

  Dash’s heart sank. He was still in 1926!

  “—there’s something else!”

  Suddenly he wasn’t floating in space anymore. He was moving, shifting. He was rising. Or he was falling. He wasn’t sure anymore what was happening. There was a distinct clank and then a popping noise and just like that, he was standing on the stage in front of the audience. Gluckman’s audience.

  So he was going to be stuck here forever!

  The applause went on. The men in cloth caps stood, and the women in their sad dresses stood, and even the children were standing on the seats, and they were all applauding. Jacobson remained seated and Dash saw his lips part in disbelief. There was a flicker of movement to his right and he looked over: a line of men was ascending the steps to the stage. They were dressed identically: black overcoats and black hats, but they were all different ages. The one in front looked like a teenager, but the one behind was older. And the one behind him was the man who’d helped him get onto the streetcar when he first arrived, and the man behind him was the one who’d saved him from Constable Montrose. At the end, the man with the walrus moustache came up the stairs on a cane. They all wore black rings on their lapels: the ring Walt had given them as a gift, when they were just boys, eleven-year-old boys, having the adventure of their lives.

  They marched toward him one by one, vanishing just as they came to the edge of the ring in which he stood.

  His somehow future selves.

  Some of the policemen were now rushing back into the auditorium with perplexed looks on their faces. Three of them ran out of the wings, right past him, as if he weren’t there at all. Dmitri was applauding madly.

  The whole audience had taken to its feet, and Dash saw other shapes now, other bodies: a second phantasmal audience appearing overtop of the fading Pantages crowd. Behind their standing ovation were men and woman sitting in the seats, ghosts in ties taking pictures with their phones, ladies in loud print dresses, kids in T-shirts. And they were applauding as well. Slowly, they melted through the audience of 1926, their forms joining, both audiences applauding in raucous delight.

  Blumenthal swept his arm down again, bending at the waist and drinking in the adulation. But when he stood, his thin, bony shoulders began to thicken and a wave of white hair unfurled down the back of his head. His b
orrowed suit began to shine. He swept his top hat, blackly gleaming in the lights, toward Dash, and he was Bloom, Bloom the Beguiler, and Herman Blumenthal’s audience fluttered like candle flame guttering, and grew faint. So faint.

  And then they were gone.

  “Let’s hear it for my young assistant,” Bloom cried.

  Dash realized he could step out of the ring. He came forward onstage and the applause continued. He saw his parents in the third row, smiling grandly. The lights came up in the theatre and here he was, it was over, and the doors were opening at the back of the auditorium. Dash could feel the modern air coming down the aisles.

  27

  He clung to his parents as everyone filed out of the theatre. His mother had him tucked up tight beside her and his dad was talking to people who had gathered in a small knot alongside them.

  “Well, unfortunately, he came back,” he said, smiling down at Dash. “Not much to do about that!”

  People laughed.

  “How long was I gone for?” Dash asked him.

  “Oh gosh, it was so peaceful it felt like it went on forever!”

  People were jostling in. “Was it scary?” a young boy asked him. “Where did you go when you weren’t on the stage?”

  “Oh, I can’t tell you that,” he said. “It would ruin the trick.”

  “But I want to know,” the boy said.

  “Do tell!” came the voice of a woman behind them. “Tell us all! Did you go under the stage?”

  He looked around for the kid who’d given him the envelope, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  “Well, it’s very interesting,” said Dash. “I went back in time and tried to save Harry Houdini’s life.”

  There was appreciative laughter.

  “How did it go?” said someone else.

  “I failed,” said Dash.

  Home. He’d never think of the word, or the place, the same way again.

  He slouched in the back seat of the car as his father drove, staring up through the window at the now-clear nighttime sky, a sky fringed by the city’s light.

  His mother turned in the passenger seat. “Did you enjoy that?” she asked him.

  “Yes … thank you,” he said. “It was a wonderful … night.”

  The car trundled east, toward Greektown. They hadn’t called it that in 1926. It had been just Danforth Avenue. He had no idea when all the Greek people and the Greek food arrived. Tomorrow he was going to ask his dad to get him a Greek salad, one full of every colour under the sun, with feta cheese and olives, and he wanted a Coke with sugar in it and a box of Oreos.

  “Look how tired he is,” his mother said.

  As they walked up to the house, he reached for his father’s key. “I want to do it,” he said.

  He unlocked the door and swung it open. That smell. The fridge humming in the dark.

  He raced upstairs, saw the cabinet with the glass door right beside the bathroom, as it always had been, the towels folded in it. A picture of him at age seven, crouching inside a hockey net, hung on the wall in the hallway. Then there was the picture of all three of them, a professional portrait of them standing under a tree. He could still recall the feel of the itchy sweater he’d had to wear.

  His bedroom looked just as he’d left it earlier that evening. Schoolbooks tossed on the desk, the clothes he’d been wearing on the floor. Two rejected ties on the bed. Good thing he’d had that suit jacket.

  And there was his bed, under the window. His bookshelf. The hoop on the back of his closet door. It was his room in his house where he lived with his parents, Holly and David Woolf.

  His mum helped him off with his suit and hung it up for him. She noticed the bruise on his calf, and touched it lightly. The mark the rail bull’s truncheon had left on him. He told her someone had whacked him in stickball. It hurt when she touched it: the pain had come back with him.

  He brushed his teeth with real toothpaste. Everyone was exhausted. It was nice when the day ended and the house shut down, he thought. There was a peaceful togetherness in it.

  Dash snapped off his light and got under his covers. Then he got out and turned the light back on. He pulled the bed away from the wall and looked down into the crack. It was too dark to see the floor. He felt around with his fingertip, searching for a shape. The floor had probably been re-stained a dozen times in eighty-five years.

  “Everything okay?” asked his father from the hallway.

  “I dropped something.”

  “It’ll still be there in the morning, Captain Vanish.”

  “You’re right,” he said, but then he felt something against his fingernail. A straight indent, about a centimetre long. And a big curving line connecting the top of it to the bottom. A capital D.

  “Come on now, Dash.”

  He flopped back into the bed, holding his face still. “Sorry.”

  His father switched off the light and Dash got back under his covers.

  “Fun tonight, wasn’t it?”

  “It was,” said Dash. “Long night …”

  “Went by like a flash for me. Hey,” he said, coming in to pull Dash’s covers up. “When did you get your hair cut?”

  “Uh … last week. You didn’t notice?”

  “I must be on another planet these days.”

  Nothing like the one I’ve been on, Dash thought.

  He went out past his mum, who was leaning against his door frame, a silhouette. She came in to say good night too.

  “You know, sweetie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Singh wrote to me. She says Alex has written you six emails, but you never answered. Why don’t you reply?”

  He felt too ashamed of himself to answer her.

  “Will you please write to him? He obviously misses you and it’s unkind not to reply. Don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is.”

  She leaned down to kiss him, blocking the light with her warmth. “You will learn that there are many ways to have a friendship, Dashiel. If distance alone kills it, it wasn’t a friendship in the first place. He’s your friend. You should honour that.”

  “I will. I’ll write to him.”

  “Good. Oh, I found something in your suit pocket.” She took an envelope out of her bathrobe pocket. “Who is this from?”

  “That … OH!” he said.

  “What?”

  TOMORROW. The card said tomorrow. Not 1926. Today’s tomorrow. His heart suddenly flailed around in his chest. Walt.

  “Dash?”

  “It’s an invitation,” he said in an unnaturally high voice. “An invitation. From a friend. He’s inviting me to a party after school tomorrow!”

  “Well, that’s wonderful! You should go.”

  “Can I?”

  “I’m thrilled that you want to. Of course. Good night, sweetheart. I love you.”

  28

  Dreamlessness. He’d earned it. He had travelled down so deep into darkness and nothingness that when he opened his eyes, he wondered if he’d slept at all. But when he woke up, it was morning, and he was in the world he came from, the only one he really knew.

  He got up and got dressed. Jeans, T-shirt, ankle socks. He took his phone and his keys. He felt in the pockets of his good suit. There were still some coins in there, including a quarter dated 1924. His mum had left the small, white envelope on his dresser.

  Walking around in his bedroom, it was almost exactly like yesterday morning, which was either twenty-four hours or six days ago. But it felt now that the roof of his house was missing and he was walking around on a stage in front of an invisible audience. Maybe the audience was only himself. Or maybe it was everyone and everything, always.

  Dash poured himself a huge bowl of Count Chocula and drowned it in milk. His parents leaned against the kitchen counter, drinking their coffees, watching him.

  “Did you go for a twelve-mile jog in the middle of the night?” his dad asked.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “That’s a lo
t of cereal.”

  “Look at him,” said his mother. “He’s like four pieces of linguini stuck to a carrot. Let him eat.”

  “Yeah, let him eat,” said Dash, slopping milk into the bowl.

  “At least don’t put so much into your mouth at once,” said his dad.

  His mother held her hand out for his bowl. “Hey, Dash got invited to a party! After school today.”

  “Frantabulous,” said his father. “Need a lift?”

  “It’s okay,” said Dash. “It’s in the neighbourhood.”

  “Then back for dinner by six,” his mum said. “You have hockey. Or is your friend’s mum doing dinner? I suppose you could skip your—” She spun a look to his dad. “We could see a movie.”

  “I don’t think it’s dinner,” said Dash.

  “Oh. Well, then, be home by six, sweetie.”

  After his breakfast, his dad gave him his lunchbox and Dash slipped it into his knapsack. He snuck a safety pin off his mother’s dresser. They both kissed him out the door.

  He walked to the bus stop. Victor Avenue. On November 1, 2011. Too unreal. Too real.

  Mr. Leonidis was picking leaves off his lawn one by one. “Heh, Dashy!” he called, waving.

  “Hi, Mr. Leonidis,” he said, waving back.

  “Good boy, eh?”

  He got onto his school bus and went to school, and it was a Tuesday like any other Tuesday, especially in the way he couldn’t wait for it to be over. But today, the reason was very different.

  French, gym, recess, lunch, math, home economics, English. As the day went by, occasionally he felt that he was a part of it. Most of the time, he didn’t.

  Somehow, three o’clock finally rolled around. Then he was free and there was electricity in his veins. He used the safety pin to attach the black ring to the front of his jacket. Arundel Avenue was only a five-minute walk, and he’d been invited for four o’clock, but he couldn’t wait. He had to go right away.

  It was the same house, but it seemed so much more alive now. The front yard was a patch of fading green, and rose bushes under the window still held a few of their leaves. The steps were painted blue and all the curtains were open.