She stayed there for what seemed like a very long time. Eventually he released his hold on her and fixed her with a look that made her feel transparent. A feeling that she found totally pleasurable. She had no secrets…he knew her. He whispered in her ear, “How could I not love you? We are one and the same. You are part of me as I am part of you. I am also part of something bigger, which means you are part of it too which means it is part of you as well. In existence there is infinite bigness and infinite smallness; it goes all the way up and all the way down...for infinity. We’re all the same thing. To know what we are we must experience ourselves. This is what we are doing…this is what we’re all doing…we all seek to know ourselves.”
Exhausted, she flopped back onto the chair “There’s so much I want to ask…so much I need to know,” she said quietly.
The old man smiled. “When you have taught a child to add two and two the next lesson is not advanced equations...remembering is best done stage by stage...a gradual process.”
She let a silence hang in the air for a moment. “So what happens now?”
The doctors had assured her she wouldn’t dream, but they were so wrong. These were the first thoughts that occurred to the astronaut as she began her slow wake from hibernation.
- The End -
A GLIMPSE
Things hadn’t been the same since the operation. Not that they’d been bad, far from it, but, certainly, they were different.
The good news was that the tumour had been removed successfully. It had apparently been touch and go on the operating table, but she’d pulled through. He had suffered the agonies of the damned as he worried about her. By the time she had the operation she hardly noticed. She was actually suffering the agonies of the damned physically. The headaches nearly driving her insane with their intensity. ‘Knives cleaving at her brain’ was the way she’d described it. It had made him sick just to think about it.
Mercifully, that was now all behind her and them. He had his wife back. She was well, she was vibrant and she was delighted to be alive. And she was different. Not in a bad way, but certainly it made things difficult for him. At first he hadn’t cared so pleased was he that she was healthy. It had taken a while to notice but things had definitely changed.
Her withering sarcasm that he found so attractive had gone. She also didn’t seem to find his own creatively scathing criticisms of others amusing as she once had. She also laughed a lot more now. Not the occasional sly sniggers she affected prior to the operation, but big, wholesome belly laughs. Long gone also were her amusing tirades about her workmate’s shortcomings. He sincerely missed those. She used to have such an acerbic wit about her. She saw the humour in cruel teasing. It was one of the things that had attracted him to her. She had shared his bleak cynicism of the world and others. He wasn’t a bad or insensitive man, but he was a realist and so she used to be.
In the bedroom things had changed too. Their love making, whilst physically satisfying was now, so, well, what was the word? Wholesome. Yes, that was it, wholesome. Not a bad thing he supposed. They’d always been creative, and still were but now she seemed to relish every new permutation as a natural progression and not a daring adventure, which somehow took the frission of excitement away.
And then there were the silences. Now she would often be quiet when in the past she’d chattered continually. Car journeys were a case in point. They’d rarely played music as their banter would provide all the entertainment they required. Now, all too often, he’d turn the radio on to cover up the lack of conversation.
Of course they’d discussed it. Nothing was actually wrong per se but she agreed she felt different. The trouble was that he didn’t. And, she confessed, she felt that the change was accelerating. Not only that, she was enjoying the changes. She said she felt alive as if never before. She said she could see things differently. She said she needed to see where these changes were taking her. This worried him. The woman he loved was becoming a different person. He didn’t want to think of where this would lead. Surely he should love her no matter what? He wrestled with this dilemma. His wife had lost her cynicism. She’d developed a sense of humour that seemed to him to border on the childish. Her delightful scowls and dark biting tongue were a thing of the past. He missed them, and missed them badly.
She was genuinely distressed at the effect she was having on her husband. She seemed delighted at the changes within her and yet her love for her partner demanded she addressed his concerns. She was as curious as he to identify the cause of these changes.
Various professionals had relieved them of large sums of money whilst providing no answers. Undeterred, he continued to seek answers. She uncomplainingly went along with his research while developing a lust for life that he found almost unbearable in its enthusiasm. The nadir came at the hypnotist’s office.
She’d approached the session with such a boundless rapture he’d almost considered cancelling it. Prior to the operation, at even the suggestion of such an encounter, she would have heaped a withering diatribe on him for even suggesting it. God, he missed that. He loved that about her.
In a darkened room, the bearded Freudian swung his watch as his wife succumbed to the calming, suggestive voice.
“I want you to go back,” he whispered, “back to the moment of change.”
There was silence for a full minute. Suddenly his wife’s face lit up. “The operation,” she almost shouted.
“Tell us about it,” the hypnotist urged.
Though her eyes were closed he could see anticipation on his wife’s face.
“The anaesthetist asked me to count back from ten to one. I knew I’d never reach one but I thought it would be fun to try. I reached six and then suddenly I was just floating. Floating in space. I felt like Superman. I could fly. It was just wonderful.” She lapsed into silence with a calm smile on her face.
“Please continue,” the therapist prompted.
She took a very deep breath. “I travelled, faster and faster, past stars and galaxies. I travelled so fast they all became a blur. I just knew that I had to keep going. I wasn’t afraid; I was enthralled. I don’t know how I knew I had to keep going but something inside told me that I had somewhere to go. I knew that something was waiting for me at my destination. Something important.” She paused for a moment as if steeling herself, then pressed on.
“I suddenly came to a stop. Incredibly, there was a wall in front of me. I knew immediately what it was. I just had to get over it, to see what was inside. It was so annoying. No matter which direction I flew the wall was there. It seemed to stretch forever upwards and downwards.” She paused again.
“Why did you have to get over the wall?” The husband immediately felt ashamed at his outburst.
“To see what was on the other side. You see, I knew,” she said.
Ignoring the hypnotist’s dark stare, he pressed on, “What did you know? What was on the other side?”
His wife laughed. “Why, Heaven of course, you silly thing. It was so frustrating. No matter how far I flew in any direction there was no door, no way in. Then I noticed out of the corner of my eye, just below me, a bright point of light. I was sure that it wasn’t there before. I swooped down to it for a closer look. It was a small hole, no bigger than my little finger. A hole in Heaven.” Her breathing accelerated. “I realised at once I could look in. I pressed my eye over the hole and…I saw Heaven…I saw inside Heaven...I saw…” Her voice seemed to peter out as she relaxed back into her chair, her face serenely calm.
Agitated, her husband addressed her urgently, “What did you see? What did you see?”
She opened her eyes and fixed him with a look of such wonder he would never ever find the words to describe it.
“Everything,” she said.
- The End -
ABRACADABRA
He certainly hadn’t climbed to the top of the greasy pole of success via a route that could ever be described as traditional. Not that he cared. It was the cash that counted an
d now he had more than he could count. He used to take it from people without them knowing. Now he took it from them with his victim’s full knowledge he was conning them. The switch amused him. Though cynical beyond belief he appreciated irony. At least that was real.
With an extravagant flourish he covered the scantily clad, tightly bound girl with a satin cloth. The drums rolled, the lights dimmed, then, a moment later, a bright explosion of smoke shook the stage and the girl vanished. Incredibly, seconds later, the spotlight swooped to the back of the huge auditorium revealing the girl, miraculously unbound, running back down through the aisles of people, back to the stage to thunderous applause. ‘Jesus,’ he thought, ‘haven’t these people ever heard of twins?’ Their gullibility made him despise their weakness. There was the irony again. It was their weakness that had made him rich.
As he began to surreptitiously attach himself to the ultra fine cables would facilitate his ‘flying’ finale, he was vaguely aware that he was bored. God, was he bored. He desperately missed the excitement of the early days, when he’d begun on the journey of learning his craft. Unlike most magicians he hadn’t wasted his childhood endlessly practicing pathetic tricks or spending his allowance on cheap parlour illusions. This wasn’t what had interested him. He realised early in life that misdirection and manipulative skill could be used to his advantage. Not for him the junior magician’s circle or the appreciation of his classmates at a spectacular vanish. He embraced sleight of hand and deception. By the age of eleven he was already grifting in the school playground, effortlessly relieving people of lunch money. By thirteen he was unbeatable at poker. Whether it be a marked deck, card counting, crooked dealing or sometimes just his rigorously trained memory, he was able to totally control every encounter. In his hands, playing cards did his bidding. Endless practice paid off. Chance simply didn’t come into it. Only a fool would believe in luck.
While he was fleecing his classmates, safe in the knowledge that he could never lose, he also acquired the skills of watching for the bluff. The ‘shows’ and ‘tells’ that his friends exhibited in their amateurish attempts to deceive. It gave him valuable knowledge and experience of people and how they could be manipulated. At sixteen he could read people as easily as the daily paper.
His stack of cash began to turn from modest into something more substantial as he saw the rewards of his practice. He moved from cards to ‘dips’, ‘lifts’ and ‘brushes’. His ability to deprive friends and classmates of their cash by nudging against them or by a deft piece of misdirection became a daily occurrence. His prey would have enjoyed his skill, if he’d ever told them what he’d done. He never did. He then made the jump to strangers on the street and the money really began to roil in,
His hands, eyes and quick brain became his most valuable assets. He investigated thoroughly the experiences he had whilst observing the gullible and the victims of his skills. He then delved into the money pit that was clairvoyance, prediction and mentalism. There, with his well-honed observational skills and phenomenal memory, he made a name for himself amongst those who desperately wanted to believe in his gift. It was an easy sell. After all, he believed in them. They were making him rich.
The wealthier he became the more curious he was at the seemingly endless ways that people could be deceived. He mastered the intricate technicalities of ‘vanishes’, ‘palming’ and the ‘skim’. How to make a roomful of people see what he wanted them to see. How to influence their thinking simply by the power of his own mind and personality. He moved effortlessly to hypnotism. He was able to mesmerise the most vulnerable subjects in seconds. His ability to identify those subjects was refined to a fine art as his quest continued.
By eighteen he was not merely an enviably talented magician, he was an increasingly affluent and professional con man. He saw no difference between the two. As his success continued, his arrogance grew until the day he made a spectacularly disastrous share trade. Wiped out overnight, he was forced to complement his grifting by performing table magic at novelty restaurants. It was a crushing blow. He took his revenge on his stockbroker by lifting his wallet six times in as many weeks, together with his car and house keys on two additional occasions. The havoc he caused in the man’s life gave him at least some recompense.
As he performed a particularly innovative vanish at a table one night (the tips were better if he made an effort) his smooth technique and darkly cynical patter came to the notice of one of the diners at another table. As he was about to move on, the man blocked his path and pressed a business card into his hand. “Hey, Kid,” he smiled. “Call me.” He turned to return to his seat. As the conjurer studied his card the diner looked back at him and winked, “Abracadabra huh?” Momentarily non-plussed the magician looked up, “Yeah, sure, Abracadabra.”
As he sat in the agent’s office two days later his mood was in high spirits. Five confiscated billfolds tended to have that effect. It had been a good morning and it was still only eleven o’clock. “OK,” the agent demanded, “Show me what ya got.” Twenty minutes later the man was astounded by the competence of the performance he’d witnessed. It was one of the best he’d ever seen. The brief show was combination of flawless close up magic, mentalism and a vicious patter seemingly engineered to humiliate him. A real crowd pleaser; people loved to see others embarrassed. His level of skill was extraordinary. Yep, the kid had it. He signed him on the spot. As the ink was drying on the contract he fixed the young man with a gimlet eye. “Study your craft. Really study it. We’ll make a killing.” Together with the share tip it was the only advice he ever took. He was glad he did.
He rose rapidly through the ranks. His unique act stunning and appalling audiences in equal measure. In the mentalsim part of his show, his exposure of his suspects knew no bounds. He revealed details that should not just have been shut away, but buried in coffins six feet deep in the ground then covered in concrete. His hypnosis show was so extreme that minors were banned from attending. His conjuring amazed people with its audacity and innovation. In these moments the audience forgot his cruelty and gawped in fascination. Once he started to perform they were caught like rabbits in his headlights. Cannon fodder.
Naturally, lawsuits followed, the publicity droving his booking fees ever skywards. There was even a high profile suicide. The money cascaded in. Business was good. He was loathed and adored in equal measure. He delved into his craft ever deeper in the knowledge that the greater his skill the greater the rewards. His only pleasure came from his ever more brutal manipulation of his audiences; simultaneously striking them speechless with wonder at his illusions whilst ritually verbally abusing those he selected from the adoring crowds.
‘Who the fuck are ‘The League?’ was the first thought that had come to mind when he picked up the envelope in his post box. The paper was of a quality that told him this wasn’t junk mail. Additionally, his name and address had been written in a flourishing hand. On the top left hand corner of the lush manila stationary, ‘The League’ was monogrammed in an impressive embossed typeface. Curious, he opened it and read.
‘You are summoned to appear before the League to account for your behaviour. Call this number to make an appointment. Do not delay.’
It was unsigned. Save for a telephone number beneath the message, the missive contained no further information. He read the message a second time, briefly bemused. His attention wavered and then, annoyed at the intrusion, he tore it up. An identical letter arrived the following day. And the next. And the next.
On the fifth day, as he was tearing up yet another entreaty, his doorbell sounded.
The man who stood in his doorway was immaculately dressed. An exquisitely cut suit complimented by a perfect yet incongruous Lily in the buttonhole of his lapel. Apparently in his late sixties replete with a shining bald scalp, the man was staring at him with what appeared to be curiosity. “Yes?” the magician snapped irritably. The man looked down at the Lily and appeared to study it carefully. “I always wear one of these. It’s a
n ancient symbol of innocence and purity.”
“And that’s of relevance to me how?” The conjurer exhibited his well-known short fuse.
“The craft that we practice needs be to gentle, lest we are tempted take advantage of the innocent, those souls who give themselves over to our skills in their belief of our power. The purity the Lily represents symbolises this wondrous web of magic we weave and its true origins. Thus I wear this flower to constantly remind me of these two truths.”
The magician scoffed, “Who the fuck uses words like ‘lest’ and ‘thus’? Jesus, man. Just fuck off why don’t you?” He made to shut the door. At that moment a picture fell off the wall behind him with a loud crash, startling him. In the moment he hesitated, the man entered. Momentarily confused, he was about to speak when the stranger beat him to it. “Actually, I thought I’d come in.”
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