Entertainment magic, on the other hand, or secular magic, as it is also known, means the phenomenon of card tricks, sleights of hand, optical illusions, misdirection, and simulated vanishing acts performed publicly. Magic shows only really became a popular form of spectacle in the nineteenth century, when secular magicians started pulling bunnies out of top hats and doves from rumpled tuxedos, rather than evoking supernatural beings. The word magic to describe legerdemains, performative tricks, and attention management came into currency in 1811. Its effect is to make us tantalized by the romance that what we’re witnessing may be real. While it would seem that there should be a clear distinction between magic shows and real magic, the lines were always blurred, often intentionally, by magicians aiming to create a greater sense of mystique around their performances. The advent of stage magic paralleled the rise of spiritualism, and many magicians in the 1800s also performed as mediums.
In today’s age of David Blaine’s high-voltage stamina-stunts and Criss Angel’s mascara-streaked mindfreakery, David Copperfield may simply have been channeling archaic aspects of magic history by saying he’d discovered the fountain, but something about it did seem beyond his usual repertoire. The “real magic” premise made me think of Doug Henning, the world’s most famous magician before David Copperfield came on the scene, and the best-known illusionist after Houdini.
Fifty million viewers tuned in to NBC to watch Henning re-create Harry Houdini’s Water Torture Escape in 1975. “Mr. Henning is beyond compare as an illusionist,” raved the New York Times. “He believes in magic, and he makes us true believers, too.” Henning was still a megastar a decade later when he abandoned his showbiz career,1 which he characterized as “fake magic,” to devote himself fully to the Transcendental Meditation (TM) movement.
“I have always believed in real magic, that there is more to life than the senses can perceive,” Henning said at the time. He found what he was looking for by, as he explained, “studying the secrets of the yogis and the mechanics of unfoldment of creation with Maharishi. I realize now that even my wildest imaginings are but a fraction of what is really possible.”
His television specials always ended with him saying, “Anything the mind can conceive is possible. Nothing is impossible. All you have to do is look within, and you can realize your fondest dreams.” He certainly believed it. Through TM’s “real magic,” he spoke of attaining such an exalted state of consciousness he could perform actual miracles. “You can disappear at a high state of consciousness because your body just stops reflecting light,” he explained enigmatically. “When you reach your full potential, and you think, ‘I want to levitate,’ you can levitate.”
No longer interested in delighting crowds with tricks that appeared magical, he wanted everyone to experience infinity just as he had. And if, as he said, the human nervous system could be cultured so as to control the laws of nature, it could certainly allow a body to live forever.
Too young to have witnessed Henning’s time at the pinnacle of television magicdom firsthand, I’d first learned about Henning in high school, when he ran for Canadian office as a Natural Law Party candidate. News reports showed him yogic flying and joked about his making the national debt magically disappear. Laughed out of the political sphere, he threw himself into designing a meditation theme park in Niagara Falls called Veda Land. He and his partner in the project, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, drew up plans for a levitating building, a meditation university, and a Tower of Peace where world leaders could meet to settle disputes. A flying-carpet ride would carry up to 120 passengers onto a rose petal, plunge into its molecular and atomic structure, then finally come to rest in the flower’s “pure consciousness.” The plans were interrupted by Henning’s battle with cancer, which he chose to fight without medication or chemotherapy. He died at the age of fifty-two in 2000. Until the end of his life, however, he maintained that illusion magic simply uses known laws of science and physics, whereas real magic involves laws that haven’t yet been discovered.
No matter what happened, I felt sure I would be able to glean more about the intricacies of magic—real or otherwise—on the eleven Islands of Copperfield Bay.
* * *
1. He sold his stage illusions to fellow magicians, including David Copperfield.
14
The Sorcerer’s Lair
What is this fountain, would’st thou rightly know?
—Thirteenth-century Persian poem
Under the fountain of truth we drank the questions down.
—Alden Penner, Clues
JUST AFTER noon on November 7, 2008, Raf Katigbak stood at an American Airlines gate in Miami, head craned toward a TV broadcast about an incipient hurricane swirling through the Caribbean. The National Weather Service warned that Paloma could hit the Florida coast within days. Flights to the Bahamas were still going ahead as scheduled, but they wouldn’t be returning until the tropical cyclone wreaked herself out.
“We’re going to be stranded down there,” said Raf, high-fiving me. “I’m never going home.” I hadn’t seen him in weeks. He’d let his beard grow out. The greasy black hair spilling from his panama hat reached his chin. He wore banged-up Ray-Bans, rattan shoes, a cream-colored linen suit with ripped silk lining, and a paisley opera scarf.
“You look conspicuous,” I told him.
“I’ve been getting a lot of funny looks. The only chink in my armor is the mismatched argyle socks.”
“Is this your idea of dressing for the occasion?” I laughed.
“Actually, this is what I wore last night. I was at a bar until three in the morning. I went home, packed, and then left for the airport an hour later. The US immigration agent was convinced I was a Colombian import-export businessman. He was like, ‘Do you have more than ten thousand dollars on you?’ and looked at me all serious to gauge my answer.”
“You do look like you have more than ten thousand dollars on you.”
“I feel like I have more than ten thousand dollars on me. Come on—I’m going to the Bahamas to stay at David Copperfield’s place!”
When we deplaned at Exuma International, two uniformed customs officials queried us about our Bahamian intentions. I explained that I’d come to write a story about the fountain of youth.
“I hope you tell the right story,” said one of them, stamping my passport.
“Me, too,” I replied.
* * *
Droplets of sapphire ocean spumed onto my face as we skimmed into the Out Islands. The waterway was a long liquid boulevard with private-island homes on either side. Sitting there in the back of the motorboat, I realized how impossible it would have been to sneak into Musha. “Pretty dreamy,” Raf sighed, pointing at an isolated patch of ivory sand covered in driftwood formations and skeletal palm trees.
Island after island flashed by, each lovelier than the last. We passed a gray stone castle on a scrub-covered atoll floating in the aquamarine water. A few minutes later, our captain, a buff, thirtysomething, country-club type, pointed out Johnny Depp’s island.
“I feel like I’m home,” said Raf, putting his feet up and flipping through a copy of Private Jet Lifestyle magazine.
About forty-five minutes later, we coasted up to the dock on Musha. The stairs led to a large building called the Landings, a tasteful wooden affair painted in pastel green, blue, and yellow. Above it, perched atop the island’s zenith, lay a dark mansion. As we prepared to disembark, the captain pointed out four or five sharks in the water, saying they lived under the quay.
“Are they pets?” I asked.
“Nah, they just live here.”
“But do they belong to Musha?”
“No, they’re wild sharks, but this is their home.”
“So sharks just choose to come live here under the front porch?” interjected Raf.
“That’s right,” answered a slightly impatient, blond, bland, managerial-type woman standing on the pier, dressed in a Musha Cay golf shirt. “But they’re not dangerous. You can
even go down there and swim with them while you’re here.”
“Do they bite?”
“Not really,” she said, smiling strainedly. “But don’t stick out your fingers around them. Don’t grab their tails, either. And don’t creep up on them from behind.”
As the various majordomos, butlers, and concierges introduced themselves and made sure we didn’t lift any of our suitcases, a pair of skinny legs in gray Crocs and peachy-pink surfer’s shorts strolled down the stairs. Copperfield’s crisply ironed shirt was as black as his bushy eyebrows. His face was partially concealed by a small-domed black cap. As he approached, his deep-set eyes brightened, becoming big and glossy.
He was friendly, if formal, and appeared pressed for time. As soon as we shook hands, he looked at his watch and suggested we tour the island before dinner. He started by showing us a game room in the visitors’ reception area. Houdini’s personal billiard table was the centerpiece. When I asked what phrase Houdini promised to tell his wife if he could communicate from the beyond,1 Copperfield answered immediately, “Rosabelle, believe.” He showed off some of his other collectibles, including a creaky fortune-teller machine, an early motion-picture device called a Mutoscope, and a hundred-year-old claw-digger amusement device.
Several members of his team were seated around a television monitor watching video footage they’d shot a day or two earlier. Copperfield explained that he’d brought down some Sports Illustrated models and Vogue cover girls to do a shoot for a calendar he was working on. One evening, they’d all played an indigenous game called the Musha 500. We watched them go at it.
The bikini- and stiletto-clad girls were standing on the beach clustered around two shallow trenches filled with water. Each “racetrack,” or aquatic corridor, was about four inches deep and four inches wide, and maybe ten feet long. Two girls each selected a goldfish from a central tank, then placed one fish in their respective trench. A whistle sounded. The models put straws in their mouths and started blowing bubbles into the water in order to make the fish swim forward. The freaked-out fish kept darting around, forward and backward, as the ultrathin models puffed furiously into their straws. One of them nearly got her goldfish to the end, but then it spotted the finish line, turned around, and zigzagged back down the concourse. “Merde!” she cried.
Copperfield told us how much fun the models had while they were here. As he spoke, the staff would laugh in unison, even if he wasn’t saying anything all that funny. Raf looked over at me and rolled his eyes. Copperfield then walked us out, explaining that we’d be able to check out the rest of the Landings later on, when we came back to eat dinner there together. Before the sun set, he wanted to show us the rest of the main island.
“Is the fountain on this island?” I asked, getting down to business.
“We can speak at length about the fountain tomorrow, after we go out and see the other islands,” he explained tersely, leading us along a paved road.
“Are there actually cars down here?” Raf asked.
“There could be, but we prefer golf carts.” Copperfield slid into a buggy’s driver’s seat, coolly indicating for me to sit next to him. Raf jumped into another cart driven by an assistant, and we all pulled out. “There used to be two limousines on Imagine Island,” said Copperfield, explaining how drug smugglers used these islands as landing pads decades ago. “They’d bring in female accompaniment to inhabit it. The movie Blow really happened at Norman’s Cay. A lot of cocaine went through Exuma.”
The island was larger than I’d anticipated, and greener. Oleanders and other lush flowers pulsated in the subtropical warmth. The sky had been overcast on our arrival, but slanting daggers of sunlight were now carving through the clouds, illuminating the Listerine waves below. The water, beautifully translucent, shimmered with almost unreal blue-green radiance. I asked Copperfield what color he thought it was.
“I don’t even try to describe the sea anymore,” he answered. “You end up using adjectives like cerulean. After all this time in the Caribbean, I let the photographs do the talking. Scratch that—it’s so many spectrums of blue, you can’t even photograph it. You have to see it.”
As we steered away from the ocean, he pointed out other Musha must-sees, such as a seventeenth-century head from Burma and a collection of royal thrones from Africa. “Here’s a Sri Lankan god I found on my travels,” he crowed, indicating a bejeweled, big-eared, mustachioed stone sculpture holding a conch in one hand, and what appeared to be a toilet plunger in the other.
“What’s his name?” I asked.
“Super Mario.”
Has sense of humor, I jotted into my notebook, and quickly flipped the page in case he was reading over my shoulder.
Our cart serpentined along a mazelike configuration of roads. I asked if it was possible to get lost on Musha. He stressed the importance of staying on the paths because there were holes all over the island. “If you fall in, you can go quite deep down. It’s dangerous. Some holes stretch all the way through the island’s core into the ocean.”
The warning sounded genuine—but it could also have been a possible clue to the fountain’s whereabouts. I started looking for any signs of life off the main path.
As we drove upward, toward the manor, he told me that he maintains a full-time staff of over thirty employees on the island, including a zookeeper. He pointed out some of his toucans. Toco toucans, he specified, “the Rolls-Royces of toucans.” I wanted to ask him about the sharks, but he embarked on a long story about the herd of African giraffes he’d purchased that would soon be wandering free all over the island. “They’ll eat off your plate,” he said, “over there in the Valley of the Giants. I’m building them a whole compound with bedrooms for when the weather’s bad.” He was also putting the finishing touches on something called the Secret Village, a hidden passageway that opens into a three-acre replica of Angkor Wat with “mind-reading monkeys who crawl all over you.”
As he spoke, a little bird scampered across the road. “Baby egret!” he exclaimed.
“Is a baby eagle called an egret?” I inquired, putting my pen down momentarily. “Or is it an egress? No, wait, an egress is an exit, a way out, an escape, right?”
“A baby eagle is an eaglet. We have a lot of crab-eating egrets down here.” Copperfield glanced over at my notepad and suggested I transcribe the following sentence: “‘As David Copperfield drove me to Highview, the highest point on Musha Cay, a crab-eating egret crossed my path.’”
Only when we walked into his mansion did it sink in that I was actually here, inside the magician’s abode. He showed off more exotic collectibles: cobra sculptures rising from the ground, maharaja chairs, carved prayer beds from Afghanistan (“their heads point toward Mecca”). The downstairs suite contained an African room with idols, masks, headdresses, and figurines used in tribal ceremonies. He took us into the dining room and showed us a canoe attached to the ceiling. It doubled as a chandelier. “Check this out,” he purred, pushing a button. The ship started slowly descending. “It levitates down from the ceiling on special occasions. That’s cool, right?”
“Yeah!” exclaimed Raf.
“What happens once it comes all the way down?” I asked.
“Anything you want,” he said, slightly miffed at my lack of imagination. “You can put dinner in it ahead of time, to impress your girlfriend, or place an engagement ring in it. Things like that.”
In the master bedroom, he pointed out the neatly made bed, saying, “That’s where I’m-not-allowed-to-name sleeps.” Then he flipped another switch and a huge TV floated out of the ground in a wicker Indian chest.
“Whoa! Where does it come from?” Raf asked.
“It’s magic.” Copperfield grinned.
The other rooms, vaguely reminiscent of Graceland, were filled with the strangeness of peering in on a superstar magician’s private domestic life. As I perused the rarities on display, I half expected to come across a genuinely magical item, like transparent wings or a cloak of levit
ation.
He wanted us to see the fitness center, so we jumped back on the golf carts. It turned out to be a basic corporate-hotel workout room. An antique carnival-strongman statue stood out front. On the wall inside, he pointed out a photograph of the strongman at the base of the Eiffel Tower, explaining that it dated back to the monument’s unveiling at the 1889 World’s Fair. The photo looked doctored. “It’s amazing what you can do with Photoshop these days,” I blurted out.
“That’s not Photoshop!” Copperfield protested, almost hurt.
“No, of course not,” I apologized. “Just a joke.”
For our next stop, he took us down to Coconut Beach, one of the islands’ main sand strips, neatly littered with Windsurfers, Yamaha WaveRunners, and the makings of Dave’s Drive-In movie theater. He described Musha as his most important project. He oversees all the details, he said, from buying the board games himself (“like Clues”) to designing the telephone users’ manual.
He parked the golf cart on a bed of white sand meticulously raked into swirls and geometric patterns. “If it’s not a hundred percent exactly how I want it to be, it’s a waste of my time,” he explained. The statement’s underdrift pulled me in. His perfectionism suggested not only a desire to have things done properly, but that he saw himself as being somehow above reality’s imperfections. It connected both to the boastfulness of that opening reel at his show (“greatest magician of all time”) and to the very desire to own a private island, to create paradise, to be apart from the rest of humanity, to have no attachments, to live in a blissful state of narcissistic fulfillment. To have things be exactly how you want them to be. To no longer suffer. To be perfect.
Book of Immortality Page 23
