Magic Mansion

by Jordan Castillo Price

  Three other magicians were currently in the studio. Ricardo assumed they were expendable too. They were all women—and women were usually relegated to the role of “assistant,” regardless of how talented they might be, or how much of the act was supported by their slender, glitter-rubbed shoulders. Stage magic was an old boys’ club, no two ways about it, and while male magicians (like the Professor) only seemed to grow more authoritative with age, in the eyes of the public, the female performers simply got old.

  Which made it bizarre that the women seated to either side of Ricardo were his mother’s age. To his right, Muriel Broom sat browsing last week’s tabloids in her bangles and fringe. In a time where mediums did their best to seem relevant and modern, with new age MP3 downloads and cable talk shows shot in sterile studios, Muriel decked herself out in yards of brocade and dozens of clattering pendants inscribed with mystical symbols. When she announced that she was a spiritualist, he believed her.

  And he wondered if she did trick table-rapping like the Victorians, or if she was more of a “I’ve got a message from your late grandmother” type of magician.

  Either way, Ricardo had no idea how her specialty would translate into a competition.

  Though Muriel’s spiritualism seemed like a more marketable selling point than Bev Austin’s act. Ricardo had initially taken Bev for a producer or a director. She wore a tea green pantsuit and a simple white blouse. Her gray hair was cut short, and a pair of pearl stud earrings and a wedding band were her only jewelry. Ricardo couldn’t quite tell if she was a lesbian, or just an older woman who’d never gone for the whole dresses and tresses thing. She hadn’t specified whether she had a husband or a wife, and it seemed tacky to ask.

  He did ask about her act, though. She’d said, “I’m the Math Wizard,” as if he must surely have heard of her. He plastered on his most polite smile, and she added, “I’ve performed at every public library in the four-county area.”

  And so, there he sat, Muriel Broom to one side and Bev Austin to the other. And there in front of the green screen, rounding out the bottom of the barrel, was a complete and utter newbie. Ricardo almost asked Muriel what the girl’s name was, but Muriel sat with her eyes closed, and the tabloid opened on her lap to a very fat-looking candid photo of Oprah. Either Muriel was communicating with the Other Side, or she’d also needed to get up at 4 a.m. to make it to the studio by seven. Ricardo leaned over to the Math Wizard, nodded to indicate the girl in front of the camera, and whispered, “What’s her name?”

  “Sue Wozniak.”

  “No…her stage name.”

  “She didn’t say. She works in the gift shop at Magicopolis. Maybe she doesn’t have one.”

  “But how could she…?”

  “Look at her,” Bev said. “She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know any better. She hasn’t had the type of life experience we’ve had.” She indicated Ricardo and Muriel with a tilt of her head.

  Ricardo gave his best gracious smile, and he supposed he should feel grateful that he was part of a “we” this early on in the process. Though the thought that the “we” included two older women with acts that looked none too promising was not exactly a comfort.

  Iain and his annoying retro glasses were guiding the magicians through their shots today. He was trying to capture something elusive about Sue Wozniak that involved “twirl and smile.” Between takes, poor Sue looked like she was succumbing to the spins. She smiled bravely, though, and did whatever was asked of her. She was pretty and blond, but not Hollywood-pretty or bombshell-blonde. She was the type of girl who’d break hearts in Topeka or Gary or Appleton…but not the type anyone would look twice at in L.A.

  “Swing your hair, smile. Great. Okay, Sue, we got it. Go take a seat.”

  Sue wove back to the seats, still smiling, and said, “Wow, that was intense! Do you think I looked okay?”

  “You looked great,” Bev reassured her automatically, while Ricardo said, “Totally cute.” She’d looked nervous, actually. But maybe that wouldn’t be too obvious once they floated in the graphics and effects.

  “Next up,” Iain said, “would be Bev…where’s the chalk?” He turned to an assistant who looked young enough to be in high school. “Did you get the chalk?”

  “We couldn’t find—”

  Iain swung around to face the magicians, and with his clipboard rigidly between them, said, “Bev, could you stand up for just a sec and pretend like you’re writing on a chalkboard?”

  Bev went still for a moment, and Ricardo felt a spike of panic from her. The performances at the public library had not likely prepared her for her time in this studio as much as she’d hoped. But like all of them, she was eager to please. She stood and did as she was told.

  She was a numbers-person, however—not a mime. It just looked like she was waving her arm around.

  “I need - the - chalk.” Iain snapped at the assistant. “Go find it. And if you can’t find that, saw off the end of one of those dowels and paint it white with correction fluid!” He sighed in disgust as the girl scurried away to do his bidding, then consulted his clipboard again. “Moving along, then. Ricardo. C’mon up in front of the green screen. God only knows how long it’ll take her to find the correction fluid.”

  Ricardo stepped in front of the green screen, found a mark on the floor, and stood on it. He could see his own reflection in the massive camera lens. His shirt was very white. Silk. Not only did it flow well, it set off his last five visits to the tanning bed beautifully. And if he appeared in the opening credits in white while everyone else wore black, maybe he’d be perceived as one of the “good guys.”

  One could only hope.

  “It would’ve been easier if you wore a jacket today,” Iain said.

  Ricardo steeled his face so it didn’t emote his dread. “The shirtsleeves look really good when you juggle the rings.”

  “Oh. The ring things. That’s your big move, isn’t it? Don’t worry about that—we’re gonna have you handle a few different props. You’ll be more versatile for the show if we don’t pigeonhole you as a juggler.”

  Ricardo was seized by the sudden urge to throw up. He smiled.

  An assistant wheeled a green-painted cart over. Thankfully, there were were linking rings on it, but also silks, paper flowers, a length of rope, and some oversized playing cards. “What you need to do is keep your eye on the camera, smile, and pull this stuff out from behind your back. In post, we’ll make it look like you’re grabbing it out of thin air. Do a few practice tosses.”

  If Ricardo had been forewarned, he would have practiced grabbing things from behind himself and tossing them with a flourish until he had the move down pat. All night, if necessary. But, like Bev and Sue before him, he desperately wanted to please—and so he stood in front of the green cart without complaint, reached behind his back, and mapped out the locations of the gear with his fingers.

  To Iain, those things were merely props. In fact, most people would perceive them as a group of inanimate objects. But while objects didn’t possess a consciousness in the same way living beings might, they were still made up of molecules and atoms, as people were. Everything, when you broke it down into small enough particles, was essentially the same. That was why a mylar bird, in the right hands, could actually fly…at least, that was the reasoning Ricardo used in explaining True magic to himself. He was just a magician, after all, not a quantum physicist.

  An assistant took readings with a light meter while a makeup artist powdered the shine off his forehead, but they felt distant to Ricardo, like window-shoppers on the other side of the plate glass. All his focus was on the props. Facing away from them, he tucked his hands behind his back and walked his fingers over the rings. Metal. Cool. Not his own rings, but similar enough that he felt as if he knew them. Not quite old friends, but maybe friends of friends. The silks—vibrant. He soaked up the vibe of them through his fingertips and tried to picture their colors. Blue. Red. Yellow. Ropes—clothes line, and not magician’s ropes, sc
arcely touched and fresh out of the package, with hints of plastic still clinging to the cotton. And then the cards. Playing cards were more difficult for him. Differentiating red from black was a snap. But the subatomic particles of the ink couldn’t tell a heart from a diamond, and so card tricks had never been Ricardo’s forte.

  He pulled a length of rope from behind his back and tossed it toward the camera, and it fell to the ground like a dead fish. And then he got an idea. If he made the linking rings look more interesting than anything else, that would be the shot they’d choose in editing. But the trick would be to not actually fumble any of the other props—because he couldn’t take the risk that they were going to paint him as a bumbler. They could try—but he wasn’t about to give them any ammunition.

  He pulled a card from behind his back and flipped it toward the camera. Of course, he put a slight spin on it for fear of being obvious about favoring the rings—no magician would toss a card without putting a spin on it—but as it left his hand, he implored it to show its back face to the lens. It obliged, of course. Paper was easy like that.

  Once the props all lay on the floor in front of him, Iain said, “Enough rehearsal. Let’s get the shot.”

  Ricardo managed to keep from scoffing. There was a word for a magician who practiced a move once: unemployed. But he’d touched each of the objects, and they seemed game enough to go along with his plan.

  An assistant gathered them and set them back on the cart—in a completely different arrangement than they’d been before. No matter, though. He knew them now. Not old friends, no. But pleasant enough acquaintances—like Muriel Broom and Bev Austin and Sue Wozniak.

  Iain said, “Okay, you ready to roll?”

  Ricardo stood tall, checking in with each object behind his back. A silk? Ready. A card? Ready. A ring? Oh yes, he could be very good friends indeed with these rings.

  “Ready.”

  “Don’t worry about the audio, that won’t be used. Start off looking down at the floor, then look up, right into the camera, and pull something off the cart and toss it.”

  The directions were simple enough. Tap. Jazz. Gymnastics. Moves in the Field. Ricardo had been priming himself since he learned to walk, and a take-snap-look-toss combo was child’s play. Head snap. He flung the rope. Head snap. He flung a silk. And another silk, and another, and then while the third silk floated, he sent a query to the ring: are you ready?

  Ready.

  Take-snap-look, but this was not a silk or a card or a rope. This was a ring, and he put a special backspin on it. It leapt up, sparkling in the studio lights, and twirled on his fingertip before he gave it another pop, and it spun away and clattered to the floor with the other props. It was perfect.

  Ricardo looked to Iain, smiling for real now, not just camera-smiling. “Don’t you have one more card there?” Iain didn’t seem particularly wowed. “Pitch that over your shoulder and we’ll move on to Bev—it looks like her ‘chalk’ is dry.”

  Though Ricardo was deflated about his spectacular ring twirl going completely unnoticed, he didn’t allow his smile to falter. A card. Fine. Whatever. He grabbed it from the green-painted cart and flicked it over his shoulder with hardly a thought. The card, thrilled it wasn’t getting left behind after all, did a jubilant swan dive, rising and falling in a spiral that seemed to hover in front of the camera on its way down.

  It settled on the pile of silks face-up. The ace of hearts.

  “Weird,” Iain said. “That almost looked like we did it on the computer.”

  Great. Leave it to the take he hadn’t been trying to do well to come out the best. “Card tricks really aren’t my specialty,” Ricardo said. “Did you see the ring? The light was hitting it just right.”

  Iain ignored him, turned to the cameraman and said, “You got that card, right?”

  “Pretty cool.”

  Ricardo said, “I think the ring will read better on tape.”

  “We’ll see what the graphics department ends up doing with it,” Iain said. “Have a seat.”

  While Ricardo well and truly thought that if he wanted to pick his battles, a decision about what he would do in the opening credits might very well be a crucial skirmish to win, he sensed that any amount of dissension with The Big Important Producer’s wishes would only make Iain more likely to use the footage of the card-flick, not less.

  Maybe the editors would pick the ring after all. It really had been a very cool twirl. Ricardo gathered his pride and turned back toward his seat—though when he took another look at it the props on the floor, he had to admit, the ace of hearts was looking pretty damn pleased with itself.

  Chapter 8

  THE ARRIVAL

  On warm days when nights turned cool, mist would often gather in Hollywood’s canyons and valleys. Tonight, though, it received the help of three strategically placed fog machines. John’s driver sighed as he rolled through the mist for an exterior shot. A dozen town cars crept up the drive—which was undoubtedly shot in such a way that the tattered trampoline across the street didn’t show, nor the house with the pair of recliners on the front stoop, indoor furniture with stuffing hanging out of the cushions where they’d been picked at by birds. The mansion itself likely belonged to a “flash in the pan” who’d needed to sell off the land around it, then sell off the mansion itself once his or her heyday came to a close. And maybe the same thing had happened to whomever purchased it from them. And no doubt there were plenty of slapdash repairs inside done by set designers with the intension of those fixes holding only as long as the shooting schedule.

  But even in the context of the neighborhood in which it sat, and even with the likelihood of its unfortunate history, the mansion, with its manicured lawn and dazzlingly lit exterior, did indeed look magical as John approached. A director on the lawn signaled, and the town cars filed past the cameras more quickly, then swung out the U-shaped drive, only to begin their approach yet again. Once the cameras had filmed them from dozens of angles, they coasted to a halt, and John’s window rolled down.

  The scent of dry ice crept into the car. Marlene poked her head in and said, “Good to see you, Professor. Right now we’re getting shots of everyone stepping out of their car. Then we’ll put you over by the juniper while you wait. Just remember, the only time we want you to look directly into the camera from here on out is when you record your video journal. Other than that, pretend it’s not ever there.”

  John glanced over her shoulder. Pretending the cameras weren’t even there was nowhere near as easy as it sounded. It seemed like everywhere he looked, there was a camera.

  “Once you get over there with the other contestants, talk to whoever you want—your reactions are being taped—but make sure you greet Fabian Swan. Play it up a little, since you both run in the same circles. You two are our mentor-types, so make sure you act like the mansion is no big deal and nothing fazes you.” She glanced at John’s immaculate new suit and spotless white gloves, and added, “Not that it probably does.”

  As the window whirred back up, Marlene retreated into the fog to debrief the next car, saying into her cell, “No flash paper, no open flames—no exceptions. I don’t care who’s asking. We do not have the liability coverage for it.” John allowed himself a small smile beneath the camouflage of the mist. Unfazed? Hardly. But he could almost hear Casey now: You’ve got the world’s best poker face, babe. Make sure you work it to your advantage.

  John was accustomed to performing live, not recorded, so the scrutiny of the three cameras when he exited the town car was definitely unsettling. Still, it wasn’t as if they would catch him smoothing his hair or picking lint off his sleeve. He was a professional, therefore, he did not fidget.

  One of the cameras did a sweep around his face from a low angle. He could imagine how he might look in the shot, framed by fog and the night sky, and just as Marlene had warned him, he steeled himself from looking anywhere near the camera. Within the space of a few heartbeats, it almost seemed natural to just ignore the
scurrying of the crew around him. Maybe he could actually get used to it, if only for a few weeks. He was a performer, after all. He was accustomed to being scrutinized.

  The mist parted as he strode across the dewy lawn toward the juniper where a group of men and women in tuxes and sequins awaited. Magicians and their assistants…but one of the women was holding a child-sized ventriloquist’s dummy, and another wore a saucy top hat on her blazing red hair. He then realized that when he’d initially pegged them as assistants, it was really his age showing. That, and his life experience, because Rose Topaz could never have aspired to do her own act.

  Though magic was a male-dominated profession, the Magic Mansion contestants wouldn’t all be male. This was prime time TV—and it looked like the ratio was half and half. The group he approached was not magicians with their assistants. Just magicians. And that was a relief.

  It made John feel less alone.

  But only slightly so. When he saw Fabian Swan in his dusky purple tuxedo, a sense of relief flooded him so profoundly, he suspected he wouldn’t have needed Marlene’s instruction to greet his contemporary warmly, though they’d never been formally introduced.

  Fabian was a black man of sixty or so, with iron gray in his hair and mustache. He was medium height, though he projected an air of authority that made him seem taller. And while he wasn’t known for boisterous displays of good cheer any more than John was, when he saw John approaching him through the crowd of tittering magicians young enough to be their children, his gaze softened into what, on him, passed for a smile.