Here Is Real Magic

by Nate Staniforth

  I soon realized that disappearing to the other side of the world to look for magic would be harder than I thought. For all of the traveling I had done in the United States while on tour, I had no experience with improvised wandering in a foreign country. The places I wanted to go weren’t on the main tourist routes, so much of the plan—if you could call my vague intention of making my way across India from east to west by train an actual plan—would be determined as I went. I had the phone numbers of a few local contacts and the email address of a good friend from college already traveling in Asia I could meet along the way, but compared to the bulletproof, clockwork precision of a tour schedule, this was going into uncharted territory.

  Running under all of this, too, was my worry that by leaving, I would ruin my career. I had worked my entire life to become a magician and had finally established a foothold in a notoriously tough profession. After five years of touring on the college circuit my career had a momentum that could be directed toward any number of projects. Why let that dissipate? Competition in the world of entertainment is fierce, and if I disappeared on a quixotic search for wonder and magic in India there was no guarantee that the work would be waiting for me when I came home.

  But mostly I thought about Katharine, and that was almost the end of my interest in India. I had a picture of her I brought with me on tour, an action shot of her jumping off the couch holding an electric guitar, mid-howl, and another of her standing knee-deep in a lake during a canoe trip, covered in mud, delighted. So much of our time together was remembered, or anticipated, but precious little just plainly lived. We’d just bought a house together and I wanted to go home and live in it. The prospect of going away from her—again, for who knows how long—was enough to make me want to scrap the whole plan. I’d go home and talk to her about India, I thought, but was sure that would be the end of it.

  Our conversation took three days.

  On the first day, we talked about the show in Milwaukee—the boredom, the anger, and the long frustration of life on the road. We spoke about money and retirement plans. We argued and made up and went for a long walk in the woods and talked about the difference between life as an amateur artist and life as a professional artist. We talked about creative compromise and how to truly serve one’s craft—is it better to keep money out of it even if it means working a day job to pay the bills, or is it better to accept the commercial compromises of professional work so you can spend all of your time working on your art? We argued each side of it and by the end decided it was a lost cause either way. We talked about Houdini and how he had been ready to quit and take a job with the Yale lock company when the famous producer Martin Beck saw him perform and turned him into a superstar. We spoke about how tough it must be to be a superstar.

  On the second day we talked about other professions I could take up instead. I loved history, I said, and my years of performing would translate well to a career in the classroom as a history teacher. This became a convenient way to avoid the conversation we should have been having and we spoke of my becoming a teacher as if it was already decided, how I could get a job at the high school up the road from our house and walk to school in the mornings and read in the evenings. If I wanted to keep up with magic I could volunteer at the hospital or give local shows a few times a year. But even as we spoke I knew this approach to magic was impossible. It had always been an all-or-nothing proposition for me. For almost twenty years I had bound myself to the aim and purpose of becoming a great magician, and I had done it so tightly that now I didn’t know how to undo it even if I wanted to. I didn’t know how to stop, but I didn’t know how to keep going, either. The thought of teaching, or any career that would take the place of touring as a professional magician, appealed only in the way you sometimes look down from a high place and love the idea of flying even if it would be the last thing you ever did.

  But fooling yourself is easy, and at the moment another job sounded pretty good. That night we built a big fire in the backyard and stayed up late and saw the stars and toasted my new career as a teacher, and we went to bed happy and a little drunk.

  “You really would be a magnificent teacher,” Katharine said as she was falling asleep. Katharine is one of those people who can use the word “magnificent” and make it mean something.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Do you think you could be happy in front of a classroom?” she asked. You could hear the hope in her voice. I was quiet for a long time.

  “I think maybe there’s more to life than being happy,” I finally said, and fell asleep some time later still trying to decide what I meant.

  On the third day Katharine had to work, so we didn’t get to talk until the evening, but during the day we both realized on our own that I would not become a teacher. When she came home we ate dinner in front of the TV and watched 30 Rock or How I Met Your Mother until the sun had gone down and Katharine suggested we go for a walk.

  In Iowa, the fall days are still hot but the nights are cold, and that night the sky was clouded over when we set off on our usual loop. It took us away from the town and along the edge of a park that stretched off on one side and vanished into blackness, punctuated several miles away by the lights from the houses on the other side. The night felt open and wild and larger than life, and as we walked we spoke about the future, and magic, and India.

  Katharine and I met in college, and from the beginning she was on board with my work as a magician. This is not to say she liked magic or understood why I thought it was so important—for a week or so after we started dating she thought I was really interested in Charles Dickens because I kept going on about David Copperfield—but she knew it mattered to me. After my escape from the river I wanted to do a buried alive stunt—another throwback to Houdini’s greatest hits—and when I told her my plan she looked at me directly and asked three questions.

  “Do you know how you’re going to do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you thought about what might go wrong?”

  “I have.”

  “Have you considered everything you haven’t thought about yet?”

  “I think so. I won’t really know until I get a feel for the ground and the weight of the dirt. At some point I’ll just have to dig the hole and find out.”

  She looked at me again, weighing her answer, I think, and then said, “Okay. Let’s go buy some shovels. I’ll help you dig.”

  A friend’s parents owned a farm twenty miles out of town and they said I could use their sheep pasture if I promised not to die and also to fill the hole back in when I was done. That afternoon Katharine and I drove to the hardware store and bought two pairs of work gloves and two garden shovels. On the way to the farm we put the windows down in her car and roared the radio like any other college kids out for a drive, but we were on our way to dig a grave to see if I might be able to get out of it after being locked in handcuffs, sealed in a cloth sack, and buried alive. We spent the rest of the day digging, and as we dug she talked about the escape. She had a number of solid objections—the way the weight of the dirt would depend on the rainfall so we couldn’t predict how it would actually feel on the day of the performance; the way the audience would want to crowd around the hole to make sure I was really down there and how this might make it hard to hear if something was going wrong and I was calling for help; the way the dirt would crumble under my hands and feet like quicksand as I tried to claw my way to the surface, like swimming in molasses. But as she spoke, she dug, and by the end of the day we had our hole.

  “So—what do you think?” Katharine’s hair was up in a red handkerchief but a few pieces had escaped and were plastered on her forehead. Her jeans were covered in dirt. We were both soaked in sweat and had collapsed on the grass by the edge of the grave.

  “I don’t think I can do it,” I said.

  “Yeah, I came to the same conclusion,” she said. “But really, it’s not that you couldn’t do it. You’d probably be fine. You just couldn’t be sur
e. And,” she added, “it would be a really stupid way to die.”

  “Are you sore we spent all day digging out here?”

  She laughed. “Are you kidding? This was the greatest day in a long time. Who gets to hang out with sheep and dig in the dirt as a grown-up?”

  We turned off the main road and down a path that would take us home through the forest. I had been silent for a long time.

  “Hey,” Katharine said. “Are you really going to go to India?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can I tell you what I think?”

  “God, yes. Please.”

  “I think you should do it.”

  “Why?”

  She stopped walking. “You used to be so much fun. You’re so serious now.”

  “I’m still fun,” I said.

  “No you’re not. Why don’t you do magic at home anymore?”

  “Because I hate it now.”

  “Do you want to keep doing magic?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to do anything else?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Well, you should probably go away and figure out what you’re going to do, then.”

  She didn’t talk for a few minutes.

  “How long are you going to be gone?”

  PART TWO

  HOW TO DISAPPEAR

  Everyone had told me about the heat. They were right. The heat was extraordinary. I could feel it on the plane even before they opened the airplane door, overwhelming the air conditioning in the cabin as we taxied to the gate. Once I stepped outside the airport it was hard to think of anything else. Dust and thick black car exhaust choked the air, and everywhere the sounds of cars honking, brakes screeching, drivers shouting, and engines running hot overpowered any possibility of rational thought. For a moment I didn’t move, stunned and disoriented. In a distant part of my mind I wondered vaguely what I should do—find a ride, find a hotel, move from here to somewhere else. But high above, the late-afternoon sun shone relentlessly down on all of us, and mostly I just stood there and endured the heat.

  An hour later, I sat on the curb at the side of a road in Kolkata, trying to figure out what to do and worrying that I’d made a terrible mistake. The bright yellow 1930s-era taxi that had brought me there from the airport had just driven away. To my right, two children and a dog picked through a pile of garbage. I faced a row of two-story buildings, their tops bristling with snarls of electrical wiring and their brick façades in various states of decay. Behind them lay the entire subcontinent of India. I was hot, tired, stricken senseless with jet lag, and reeling from the realization that I had left everything—family, job, friends, the rest of the world—behind. My home in Iowa City, Iowa, was almost as far from this patch of sunbaked concrete as you could get. The shortest distance home passed through the center of the earth.

  Sudder Street was known as the backpackers’ district in Kolkata but I didn’t see any other backpackers. I had never seen squalor and destitution like this before. A young boy held a naked infant and sat on a blanket against one of the buildings. A man had been lying facedown on the sidewalk near the gutter since I arrived. He hadn’t moved. A woman in bright orange and red crouched at the edge of the street. I couldn’t tell what she was doing. A goat walked by. Something was burning.

  I am overprivileged. This poverty was worse than I had ever even begun to imagine. The majesty and the mystery of this adventure, so clear and urgent in the days leading up to departure, had gone. I wanted to go home.

  “You are American?”

  A man approached. I couldn’t tell if he was closer to fifty or seventy. He had short black hair and a gray beard and wore a faded red shirt with a blue cloth wrapped around his waist. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I didn’t know what to do. I nodded.

  “I am Ahmed.” He put his hand on his chest and repeated his name. “Ahmed.”

  “Hello, Ahmed.”

  He asked if I had a hotel. I did not.

  “Come with me. I will show you a good hotel.”

  Now that I was here I wasn’t sure how I intended to simply show up and find a place to stay, but following a strange man through this burned-out neighborhood was not how I imagined the afternoon playing out. I shook my head.

  “Come with me. I will show you a good hotel. Safe.” He pointed down the street.

  Ahmed looked stern and serious and made no effort to curry favor or trust, which I took as an immeasurably good sign. I did need a place to stay and I couldn’t have been the first American to stumble stunned and disoriented out of a cab into the backpackers’ district of Kolkata. I stood up and shouldered my bag.

  Ahmed walked down the road and I followed. The streets were paved but covered in dust that billowed into the air as cars and rickshaws passed, catching the light from the setting sun and making it feel like a scene from a well-lit movie about the end of the world. A group of men sat on plastic stools at a tea stand and watched me pass.

  Ahmed stopped in front of a one-story brick building with a small metal door and a sign that said GUESTHOUSE. He turned to me.

  “This is a good hotel.”

  It did not look like a good hotel. It looked like the back door to a butcher shop. I wanted Ahmed to go away. I wanted to open my bag and dig out the guidebook and find the name of an overpriced, unapologetically luxurious hotel and go there and take a shower and sleep like the dead. I did not feel like a good person. I wanted to use the two credit cards and three hundred dollars in cash I had in my back pocket to escape this place and go back to my home where children and dogs did not eat from the same pile of garbage. I was tired and ashamed of my revulsion.

  I reached into my pocket for some money, intending to tip Ahmed so he would go away. Then, for some reason that I don’t entirely understand—maybe the look on Ahmed’s face or the uneasy feeling I was getting from this “hotel”—I hesitated.

  Ahmed looked down at my handful of change. I had gotten the coins in the airport and was holding them in my open hand. I noticed that the Indian five-rupee coin was about the same size as a U.S. quarter. Without even really thinking about it, I put the rest of the coins back into my pocket.

  Ahmed looked up at me, and then back down at the coin. My fingers did their dance. The coin vanished.

  Ahmed lost it.

  Everyone should learn and perform one great magic trick. In the reactions of the audience you see a side of humanity almost completely hidden during the rest of day-to-day life, and the world would be a better place if everyone could witness this at least once. From the students on the playground at recess to this man named Ahmed who worked in a terrible neighborhood in Kolkata, the response to great magic is the same: a mouth stunned open, widening eyes, fear, doubt, and then openly, nakedly, joy. Pure joy. This transformation is far, far more amazing than the trick, which is just a tool designed to create this moment. A moment of pure astonishment makes you forget to be cool. It makes you forget to be composed or distinguished. It makes you forget to—consciously—be anything. The faces that are revealed when our masks of self-awareness and propriety are blasted away are, simply, beautiful. Magicians get to see people at their best. I wish everyone could have this experience.

  Ahmed was beside himself. He laughed. He put his arm on my shoulder. He kept laughing. His wife was just down the street—could I show the coin going away to her? Also, his brother was not very far off—could he see it, too? In that one moment everything changed and I was no longer just a tourist.

  When magic is bad it is worse than almost anything. When it is good it becomes a way to see a side of humanity that is the same in all of us, a way to find, in astonishment, the common ground that bridges political, economic, geographic, cultural, and religious differences, a window through which we can see that despite everything, we are not as different as we imagine.

  I checked in to the hotel. The room was small but surprisingly clean for the state of the building. I had been awake for almost two days. At hom
e in Iowa the sun was just rising.

  I had strange dreams that night—of Katharine and home, of life on the road in America, and the common nightmare among magicians of wandering into a room in your house and discovering a theater filled with people waiting for your show to begin. I slept badly and woke early, staring at the unfamiliar curtain across the window as the reality of the situation slowly resolved itself into clarity.

  I was in India.

  Outside, the whine of a two-stroke engine broke the early-morning silence as a rickshaw driver began his day. This woke a dog, who began barking, and over the next twenty minutes the whole city came to life. The gray light from the window illuminated the room—my bag in the sink, up off the floor to keep it away from the cockroaches.

  There was a knock at the door. Andy was here.

  I first met Andy in college. He was the student body president and gave pie-making lessons at a local cooking store. This combination, along with his massive Friday night dinner parties, made him something of a local celebrity. If you didn’t know him personally, you had heard of him.

  Andy had helped start an underground nonprofit organization called the James Gang. No one really knew who they were or what they did, but every few weeks something great would take place in town—a concert, a festival, the grand opening of a new art gallery space—and at the bottom of the poster or invitation you would see “A James Gang Endeavor” and know that Andy and his mysterious posse of poets and artists had struck again. They had apparently convinced a number of local bankers and business owners that the best way to foster an environment of creativity and culture in a college town out in the middle of the cornfields was to give money to the James Gang to fund these projects. It worked. We had more poetry readings, art shows, independent film screenings, concerts, and music festivals per capita than anywhere for a thousand miles in any direction. And Andy was at the center of it all.