by Ivy Pochoda
“Probably not. But you never know. Fremont Street was a real men’s club.”
“Until you.”
“Until me.”
We left the red-light district and walked toward the Royal Palace and the Dam Square, where the carnival was running. “Magic is like growing up,” he said. “As you get older, you start playing with more significant objects, but you miss what you conjured with as a child. It’s silly to think of doing magic with blocks for the rest of my life. But sometimes I think it might have been better.”
“Except you wouldn’t have grown up.”
Toby was silent for a moment as we listened to the various amusements competing for our attention. “I was naïve when I first discovered that I could do magic. I thought my talent could win me friends.” He smiled. “I tried to use my skill to impress my classmates. I knew better than to head for the popular kids. Instead I latched on to those just on the outskirts of popularity.”
“Like me.”
“Probably like you. There was one girl, Madeline. I had a thing for her. She was pretty but awkward. The kind of girl who’s going to be popular eventually but doesn’t know it. Just looking at her, I knew that all the boys would be turning her way in a couple of years, when they got bored with the clones who are the focus of early teenage affection.” Toby draped an arm over my shoulder and looked at the sky as he talked. “Oddly, Madeline was interested in magic. I showed her only the little things—flowers and vases, silk scarves and card tricks. And she liked them. Every day she’d ask what surprise I had in store for her. Of course, most of my surprises were small gifts in disguise—candy, bracelets, stuff like that. So her interest was partly material.” Toby shook his head. “I never learned when to stop. I still haven’t. The kids in school were really getting on my case. They laughed at me and lumped me in with the math geeks and role-playing game misfits. I had a feeling that Madeline might soon see things their way. Instead of playing it cool, I upped the ante. We were lab partners in biology class, the only class I really enjoyed. At the back of the room, they had all these reptiles in formaldehyde. They must have been twenty or thirty years old. I found them intriguing, but they terrified Madeline. She was the kind of girl who got an excuse note from her parents on the days we were due to dissect something.”
“That sounds familiar.”
“Growing up with a father who was an anatomist, I was the opposite. I couldn’t wait to get inside a piglet or a frog to see how everything worked.”
“I can imagine that.”
“So Madeline and I were in the back of the lab, cataloging fossils. She couldn’t take her eyes off the formaldehyde animals. She said she felt them watching her. She said they were making her sick. So I—”
“You didn’t.”
Toby nodded. “Before I knew what I was doing, I’d transformed one of the small preserved turtles into a live animal. Madeline screamed. Everyone was staring at me with these expressions that were both condescending and terrified. She would not stop screaming. I tried to explain that it was only a trick. No one listened. The whole school rose to her defense, to protect her from a freak like me. As if I had done this to scare her. Within a month, she was on the arm of some baseball player, and I had lost my last friend.”
“But gained a turtle.”
“True. If I’d stuck to my blocks, things would be easier.”
I shook my head. “You’d be dating homecoming queens, and where would I be?”
“That day in the lab, I realized that all I’d ever have is magic. When I got home, I lay in bed, unable to stop my tricks. I conjured until I blocked out the jeering voices. I conjured a whole world to replace the one I was cut off from.” The flashing lights from the carnival danced across Toby’s face. “But then I began to see my magic differently. I mean, I transformed a nasty, preserved turtle into a live creature. What could my classmates do?”
“Nothing like that.”
“Nope. So even if it meant being the ultimate outsider—”
“A dangerous freak.”
Toby laughed. “Yes, almost that. Even if that’s what it took, I was going to keep exploring this world.”
“It’s a great place.”
“Better now,” Toby said, pulling me tighter.
“You never tell me stories,” I said, hoping for another.
“My stories are all the same.”
We had arrived at the foot of an enormous, gaudy Ferris wheel in the middle of the fair. We looked up at the wheel circling through the nighttime sky.
“Shall we?” Toby’s face brightened as he led me toward the ticket taker. A brusque man with fingerless gloves ushered us into one of the compartments and dropped the safety bar. The flashing lights encircling our carriage began to dance as we left the ground. I looked down to see the carnival recede.
“This is better,” Toby said.
“What is better?”
“It feels safer up here.”
We rose toward the pinnacle of the ride. The wheel moved slowly, stopping to let on more passengers. When we reached the top, it shuddered and stood still.
As we fell, Toby began to talk. The words tumbled from his mouth. “It was so quick,” he said, raising his voice over the swirling carnival noise. “I heard the bullet. Then I have only a split second to transform it. It’s not difficult, but the timing must be perfect. My mind must be still.”
My thoughts flashed back to Eva standing in the audience, her presence perhaps clouding Toby’s concentration.
We passed the lowest point of the ride and began to ascend.
“I felt her behind me. How could I have been fooled by that costume? You designed it well, I guess. Conceals people. Isn’t that what is required to work in Vegas? Pretending to be someone else. A different someone to everyone. Well, it worked, and I chose her. And that was my mistake.”
“You should have chosen me,” I said.
Toby looked up as we began to rise. “No. I never mix love with magic.”
We reached the top of the ride. I braced myself for the stomach-lifting fall. “I could feel her behind me. I didn’t want to acknowledge her. A second mistake. I should have presented her to the audience, made a big deal. I guess I was arrogant. And angry. Her tension was distracting. I could feel her eyes boring into me.”
We passed the bottom of the ride once more and heard an exhilarated whoop from another passenger.
“She jumped in front of me.” He paused. “The reverberation was the worst part. It shocked my whole body. A wall had been thrown up in front of my magic. There were no pathways or tunnels through which I could undo what just happened.” Toby closed his eyes. “I could feel her life pouring out onto the table. Everything was spinning, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even be sick or shout.” He paused again. “It was a sick combination of mortality and failure. And then she was gone.”
We were at the top once more, looking over a maze of gables to where lighted bridges were reflected in the Amstel River. Far above the neon advertisements, the clattering trams, and the tacky department stores, Amsterdam still looked like a fairy-tale city.
Then the wheel pitched forward and began to accelerate. Toby stopped talking and grabbed my hand, allowing me to consider the scenery. The sky fell away as we plummeted downward. The windows of the department store and the wax museum directly in front of the wheel went out of focus. The palace on the west side of the square dissolved into an abstraction of brown and gray. The erratic lights and wind-up music of the carnival below swam past in quick flashes that reminded me of the fluorescent flares of deep-sea fish that Max had once shown me.
As the wheel spun, I could feel Toby relax and let his body slump against mine for the first time in days. I lost sight of the river. I leaned over the safety bar, trying to glimpse the water, but all I saw was a whirl of lights. And then we were back at the top of the ride. I looked down along Amsterdam’s main street and let my gaze turn east, searching for the river. But the primary north-south street had
changed. The tram tracks had vanished, and so had the shop windows. Instead of reaching the river, the street—now more like a road—disappeared into a horizon that was no longer bounded by the city. I thought I saw a brothel at one end and a saloon in the middle.
“Tonopah,” I whispered. I looked at Toby. Then I squinted, trying to bring the horizon closer and see what lay at the road’s end. And for a moment, I thought I glimpsed the blue ranch house. The wheel rose over the crest, the road seemed to lengthen, its horizon pulled back into the distance, and the house vanished. Then Amsterdam appeared as it should. “But I thought you weren’t going to do magic.”
“It only lasts for a moment.”
Nine
For some people, the best way to get to know a city is through its restaurants. Others prefer nightclubs, parks, or a day of shopping and sitting in cafés. For me, it has always been through exploring used-clothing stores. In the same way that Toby was able to learn so much about Jacqui Masterson and Evelyn Langhorn by watching them from his stage, I can learn about people and places by rifling through racks of old clothes. Their wearers’ stories—but not their names—rub off on my fingers. Sometimes I’m able to discover something about a neighborhood’s history and its residents. I find clothes that have been separated by death and divorce. I listen to stories of first loves and forgotten cocktail parties.
Amsterdam was full of secondhand clothing vendors, from high-end consignment shops and hipster hangouts to local stores crammed with housecoats and junky jewelry. Old clothes speak to me. I could not wait to hear Amsterdam’s stories.
Toby and I wandered through the cobbled streets of Amsterdam’s Jordaan neighborhood, a district of family homes, art studios, and stores selling everything from antiques to junk. We paused in front of a shop window that contained a wild array of games. Hand-carved pieces, trapped in irresolvable challenges, faced off on strange boards. Toby squinted and leaned in close to the window. I saw two pieces from one of the games change position. The magician blinked, and a fresh card flipped over on a mysterious deck.
“I thought you didn’t do card tricks,” I said.
The magician smiled and squeezed my hand. Behind the window, two cruciform pieces danced in place.
I was about to urge Toby on, when a store across the street caught my eye. It was filled with clothes from the 1950s and early 1960s. The window display featured cat-eye glasses arranged on top of elegant hatboxes and suitcases. Airplane and train tickets were strung into streamers and hung like beaded curtains from the top of the window.
I left Toby staring at the games and stepped across the street. The store was split into two levels. The main floor was filled with garments in perfect condition—immaculate bouclé suits, fur-collared coats, and pink-sequined sheath dresses. I wandered around the top floor, trailing my hand across the racks. I paused, letting suits tell me of cruises on the Holland America Line, or whisper about the city’s post-war climate. There were photo-print dresses that mumbled something about jazz clubs and artist squats.
The downstairs was crammed with jumbled racks of funkier items. Here a poufy coral party dress gushed about a New Year’s party at the Hotel Europa, and a black velvet number worried that it had been mistaken for something that belonged in Amsterdam’s red-light district. I started browsing at the far end of the racks, fingering fraying crocheted dresses and pink swing coats with missing buttons. Soon my fingers latched on to a black velvet trapeze dress with a wide lace collar and long floppy lace cuffs. I pulled it out of the rack. I put my ear to the fabric and heard a familiar sixties pop tune. I closed my eyes and began to whistle along.
When I opened my eyes, a woman was standing in front of me. She was short, and her cropped hair was tipped with purple. Her features were small, almost elfin, and she wore a long deconstructed wool cardigan sweater and an enormous knit scarf. Beneath the scarf, a tattoo snaked up her neck. She stood with crossed arms, listening to me. I stopped whistling and felt myself blush. She laughed and extended a hand. She wore fingerless gloves, and her nails were painted green.
“Olivia,” she said.
I shook her hand. “Mel.”
Olivia took the dress from me. “I get it. It kind of makes you want to dance.” She spoke clear English, hardened with stiff Dutch consonants.
“I guess it does,” I said. “But not to my kind of music.”
“It’s got its own music?” Olivia held the dress away from her. The music grew faint in my ears.
“Well, sort of,” I said. “Or maybe not.”
“No,” she said, taking one of my hands in hers, “tell me.”
“It’s silly.”
“I’m sure it isn’t.” Olivia fixed me with her blue eyes. They were the color of the cornflowers that grew behind my parents’ house. Her gaze was earnest.
“Well,” I began, “sometimes fabrics sing to me, sometimes they speak. Not for long. Just for a couple of moments.”
“You’re kidding.” Olivia dropped my hand and turned around, taking in the jumbled racks and, I thought, trying to imagine their hundreds of songs and stories. “I work for a designer. He makes wild clothes, but none of them sing.” She grabbed a party dress with a velvet bodice and a long plaid skirt. “What’s this say?”
I leaned in close. “Instrumental Christmas music. Live.” Olivia held out a psychedelic bubble dress. “Sounds like surf guitar.”
“How do you do it?” She gathered a pile of dresses into her arms.
“I’m not sure. I design textiles, so it comes in handy sometimes. Sometimes, it’s distracting.”
Olivia held up each of the dresses to my ear. Jazz, bluegrass, Dutch folk music, some kind of Bavarian beer hall chant, I told her. Then she pressed her ear into the fabric, straining to hear what I heard.
“I can’t,” she said, hanging up the dresses one by one. “They all sound like the seashore.” Olivia began sifting through the racks until she found the black velvet dress I’d been whistling along with. “You need this.”
“I do?”
“I’m having a party. Well, not me. My boss, Leo, is. His parties are the best. This one has a burlesque carnival theme.” Olivia led me to a clearing between two racks and spread the dress on the floor. “I’m thinking you could cut out the bodice and lace it with red ribbon,” she explained. “Then you could fashion the bottom into pantaloons.” She pinched the bottom of the dress together. “Very cool.”
“What about the collar?” I asked.
“You’ve got to leave it. It will look Victorian. A good contrast.”
I nodded.
“And shoes. We need to find you some shoes.” She jumped up and handed me the dress. “Try it on. I’ll be right back.”
I ducked behind a curtain at the back of the store and slipped into the dress.
While I was changing, Olivia thrust a pair of red boots with silk laces under the curtain. “I’m sure they’re your size.”
I stepped out into the room. Olivia knelt down and began to pin the dress into pantaloons. “It’s not perfect, but you’ll get the idea.”
Suddenly, I heard a low whistle coming from the stairs.
Toby had stopped mid-descent and was staring down at me. He wore a top hat he must have taken from one of the shelves on the upper floor. “Two days in Amsterdam, and you’re turning into…Well, I don’t know what you’re turning into. I like it.” The magician continued down the stairs.
“Olivia, this is my husband, Toby.”
Olivia sprang from the floor to shake Toby’s hand. “It looks like he’s already started on his costume.”
“Costume?”
“We’re going to a party.”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight?” Toby and I asked in unison.
“So, you better get started on your alterations,” Olivia said. Then she dug into a pocket, pulled out a small laminated invitation, and handed it to Toby.
“‘A Burlesque Carnival,’” he read.
“The top hat is perfec
t. You see?”
“Not much of a costume, in my case.”
Olivia looked at me.
“He’s a magician.”
Olivia grabbed Toby’s wrists. “You have to come. A magician at a carnival. It’s perfect.”
It had been dark for hours when Toby and I headed out, wearing overcoats over our costumes. I’d taken the top hat Toby had found in the clothing store, and he wore the phoenix robe and a faded turban from Piet’s collection.
“You’re definitely on the carnival side rather than the burlesque,” I told Toby as I pinned the turban into place. He didn’t mind.
The invitation directed us to the side door of a church in the north of the city. A flight of stone stairs led down to the catacombs. As we approached, I could feel the steamy pulse of the party. We slipped into a crowd of revelers in floating velvet garments, fishnet stockings worn as sleeves, oversized tailcoats draped over peasant skirts.
This was the kind of slow-burn party where no one shouted introductions or stopped to wonder what you did or where you came from. The crowd swayed to low-key trance music. A series of stone corridors lit with torches were filled with twirling dancers without partners who raised their arms to the arched ceiling. I’d driven past parties like this before in the Nevada desert—tribes of millennial hippies circling a bonfire as they worshipped the desert or the sky. But I’d always kept on going.
Toby and I were swept into a throng of dancers who led us deeper into the catacombs until we found a square room ringed with a colonnade of arches. This was the official dance floor. Olivia appeared in front of me. She was wearing cropped tuxedo pants held up by suspenders over a white tank top. I looked down and admired her red fishnet stockings and impressive black patent leather heels laced with straps that came halfway up her calves. She’d powdered her face white, applied electric-blue eye shadow, and painted her lips ruby red. Without a word, she took my hand and pulled me deeper into the dance floor.
