The Magician's Tale

by William Bayer

  Suddenly feeling helpless, I try to wriggle free.

  "Don't!" she advises, pressing firmly on my shoulders. "To make this work you're going to have to keep very still.''

  "What're you going to do?"

  "Nothing too terrible." She smiles. "Actually, I think you're going to like it." Her eyes sparkle. "Timmy always did."

  She gazes at me, lightly brushes her hand against my cheek. "I'm going to kiss you," she says.

  She leans forward, presses her lips against mine, even as I twist my head away. She steps back, glances at me annoyed. I meet her eyes.

  "That's s not going to work, Ariane."

  "Isn't it?"

  I shake my head.

  "Fine!" she snaps. "Have it your own way then."

  She reaches forward, pulls a lever, there's a mechanical sound, then the disk starts to revolve. Moments later, turning, I feel a swelling in my head. Then, in panic, I understand I'm gazing at her upside down.

  "Turn it off!" I yell.

  "Hush! Timmy loved the wheel. You will too."

  "I'm getting dizzy."

  "You're right, it is turning too fast. Not to worry—I'll slow you down." She reaches forward, makes an adjustment. "There, that's better." I feel my rotation slow.

  Pinned to this wheel, turning sluggishly before her, I feel like a captive set pitilessly upon a spit.

  "You have to trust me now," she says, stepping back. "I never missed with him. I won't with you. At least I'll try not to," she adds with a smirk.

  It's then that I see the knife in her hand, its blade catching light from the fire. She turns it so it flashes in my eyes. The brilliance blinds me. Then I hear it whoosh past my face.

  My God! She threw it at me! She knows I know! She's going to kill me!

  I blink rapidly to regain my sight. Just then a second knife plunks into the wood inches beneath my arm. I feel the wind as it passes. Then I rotate another quarter-turn. She throws another knife. Then, when I'm upside down again, another.

  The cork scrapes my back as I freeze against it. I'm furious, terrified. I shut my eyes, order her to stop.

  She ignores me, and still the knives come, landing all around me, beside my neck, torso, outlining my legs, whistling as they pass, vibrating when they hit the wood. I open my eyes. Ariane, oblivious to my terror, is concentrating entirely on her throws. Turning before her, I am, I realize, no longer a person in her eyes, have become merely a target.

  "Go ahead, scream if you like," she says. "For some, they say, the screaming helps."

  Understanding that's what she wants from me, to hear me scream, I resolve I'd rather die than give her the pleasure.

  Whoosh! Plunk! Another knife lands, this time but an inch from my ear.

  "That one was really close," she says. "Sometimes, I'd throw them that close to him. So close that for an instant both our hearts would stop. Afterward, when I let him down, he'd be slick with sweat and his body would tremble for half an hour."

  She bites her lip and throws another. This one lands beside my hand.

  "One day," she says, "we were working on a new ending to the routine. Our concept was great—I'd fling the usual thirty or so blades as he revolved, then, the new finale, I'd throw a trick knife straight at his chest. It would penetrate to his heart, blood would gush and . . . blackout! The audience would go crazy, scream! We wanted so much to do it, but couldn't figure out how. So, just to see how it would look, I attached the front half of a broken knife right here."

  She approaches me, stabs her finger hard between my breasts.

  "It looked so cool. Then, I remember, I found a red candle, lit it, dripped thick red wax all up and down his chest." She traces the path of the wax upon my flesh. "Just like blood. To see how it would look."

  Another twist of the kaleidoscope, another shift in the pattern. She is, I realize, recounting Tim's Saint Sebastian fantasy, the one he expressed the day I photographed him nude.

  She steps back from me again, further back than before. "Just four more," she warns me. "To the four points of the compass, as we used to say."

  Whoosh! Plunk! Whoosh! Plunk! Two knives land quickly on either side of my chest. I can even feel the second graze my left breast as I turn.

  Whoosh! Plunk! The third lands just above my head, cutting through my hair.

  I think: The next will be the one. She'll go for my chest, my heart, the very place she stabbed me with her finger.

  She lets me rotate a full turn, waits until I'm nearly upside down. Then . . . Whoosh!Plunk! The knife lands close up between my legs.

  She leaves me to rotate several times before the motor shuts off. When the wheel finally stops, I end up slightly off center, dripping, dizzy, outraged.

  "You did well." She compliments me as she loosens my bonds. "No sissy stuff, whimpers, screams. Timmy always behaved well too. Brave, manly, you know." She sniffs.

  Free at last, I shake my head to clear it, then find my shirt and put it on.

  "You're angry with me?" she asks.

  "Of course!"

  "But, Kay—I thought you'd like it, the thrill, I mean. I was never going to hurt you, wanted to give you something to remember, that's all."

  "You presumed too much," I tell her coldly.

  She stands back. "You don't like me, do you?"

  "Not much," I admit. "I'm finished here. I'm leaving."

  "Please! Don't go," she begs. She lurches toward me.

  I step back. She stumbles, falls.

  "What did I do wrong, Kay? Tell me?"

  "Why don't you tell me?"

  "What do you mean?"

  I stare down at her, hating her.

  "I'm waiting," I tell her. "But not for long."

  She gazes up at me. Suddenly I find her pathetic. I address her with contempt:

  "A few hard days at Atotonilco, maybe a half-baked confession to a priest. Lousy food, crawling around on stone floors, a few self-administered lashes of the disciplina—is that all it takes to purge your little soul of guilt?"

  She starts to weep.

  "Oh, please, Ariane—don't go sissy on me now."

  "God," she whines, "what do you want from me? What do you want?"

  "Spit it out!" I tell her.

  "What?" She gazes at me, eyes watery, mouth slack, her beauty now all drained away. "That I sent Timmy to see Crane alone? Yes, that was wrong. But it was his choice too. We took a gamble and we lost. I see that now."

  "What do you see?"

  "That I shouldn't have let him. He would have done whatever I wanted. I should have—"

  "What?"

  "—should have thought it through."

  "So why didn't you?"

  "I don't know," she cries, "I don't know. I just don't know."

  "Oh, I think you do, Ariane. I think you know very well."

  She continues to stare up at me, then crumbles.

  "I just wanted. . ." she moans. "I thought . . . if I could finally be, you know . . . just be alone." Her body shakes as she sobs helplessly on the floor. "Was that so bad?"

  Murder by omission. Gazing down with pity at her writhing form, I wonder what will become of her, whether she'll ever free herself of guilt. I shrug, pick up my camera, make my way through the apartment, descend the stone steps, cross the courtyard, open the heavy door that lets out to the street.

  Dawn has just broken. I've been up, I realize, the entire night. As I slip outside, a burro carrying firewood plods by, escorted by a small boy wearing a huge sombrero. I walk swiftly to my hotel, shower, change clothes, pack, order a taxi, make it to the terminal just in time to catch the first bus out.

  On the drive down to the plain, I ask myself if I was right to leave her like that, sobbing, so pathetic in her anguish. Is she evil? Probably, I think. Certainly she is mad and capable of evil acts. I know too there is nothing she can tell me that will further illuminate the mystery of the twins. I only hope that in the photographs I took, there will be one or two that will encapsulate their passion.
>
  Late-winter rains batter San Francisco. This cool gray city of love turns gray indeed. Water, funneled into the streets, rushes down the hills. There is flooding, a sinkhole opens on Seacliff, a mud slide shuts down Route 101, cutting off Marin County for a day.

  My own days now are constant, spent in the darkroom producing prints. Sometimes the work goes well, more often it turns difficult, in which case I walk down to the Marina, take an aikido class with Rita, then walk on to Maddy's for a consultation.

  Spring comes, flowers bloom, the city feels young again. An unexpected postcard arrives from Portland. The message, written in block letters, is spare, succinct:

  HI KAY! MOM DIED. I'M STAYING NOW WITH SIS. SEEING A SHRINK. MAYBE GOING BACK TO COLLEGE SOMEDAY. MISSING YOU AND RUSSIAN HILL. HOPE ALL GOES WELL. DRAKE

  I'm very happy to hear from him, to learn he's in care and safe.

  Hilly calls, tells me she's tired of "jilling off," that she's now "out there" seriously searching for a lover. Giggling, she adds that to her immense surprise, at The Duchess at least, her newfound fame has cut no ice at all.

  On Sundays Dad and I have gotten into the habit of taking long slow hikes at dusk. We vary our route, sometimes walking from Fort Mason through Crissy Field to Fort Point, other times exploring the shimmering upper forests of the Presidio, or striding along Baker Beach looking at old gun emplacements, then continuing on to Point Lobos, Lands End and the ruins of the Sutro Baths.

  Today, striding the footpath between the Great Highway and the dunes, we marvel at the way the sun melts into the Pacific.

  Dad mentions that Hale came by City Stone Ground on Friday and, for the first time in years, didn't ask about the leather hood. He looked hunched and haggard, Dad says, bought a couple of baguettes, made small talk, suddenly leaned forward, whispered, "You and your daughter betrayed me," then scuttled off.

  We shake our heads over that, then walk on, keeping stride, relishing the moment when the sun slips away leaving only a glow behind.

  "It's night now. Your time, darlin'," he says.

  I look at him. There's still something unspoken, a question that's been nagging me for months. Now that it's dark I dare to pose it:

  "When did Wainy see Mom play the piano?" I ask.

  Dad's surprised. "He told you he did?"

  "He spoke of the beauty of her fingers as they caressed the keys, told me I have her eyes."

  "As you do, darlin'. As you do."

  "You were close friends, then?"

  He looks away. "Not me and him so much."

  "Him and Mom?"

  "Yeah. Sort of."

  When he turns back, I see tears in his eyes. He must think the dark conceals them; otherwise he would not have faced me. He has forgotten how well I see at night.

  "I must pity the man now he's such a wreck," Dad says. "Back then he was handsome. Hard to believe, I know."

  What can I say? Is it any of my business, these intimate corners of my parents' lives—whom they loved, betrayed, the dangerous adulterous games they played? I don't like to think of Mom having an affair with Wainy, handsome or not, or with any other man, or Dad with another woman. But I can deal with it. I believe I've even come to love them the more for their weaknesses. Tim was flawed too, as are we all. For me now it's only the flaws that are worth photographing, not the smooth concealing masks. And so I turn back to the ocean, now just barely rimmed by the rapidly failing light.

  Brave, wonderful Sasha comes to me at night, helps me to see "colors." On days when he's off, we draw the blinds and make love for hours. Then we go out to walk. San Francisco is a city of unexpected, suddenly revealed views. We climb and descend, always trying new routes, always delighting in the exquisite light as it hits a building or paints our shadows upon a wall.

  Now, on nights when I'm alone, I never think about the Judge. Also on these warm spring nights I rarely look through my telescope. Rather I sit and gaze out with naked eyes, taking in a panoramic view. The city is whole for me now; I can see my future in it. I will wander its streets, take pictures of its people, and, though never seeing its colors, will feel them and by feeling come to know their beauty.

  Tonight, again inspecting my final photographs of the twins, the ones I took in Ariane's bedroom down in San Miguel, I view them as the key images in my book.

  Exposures, I now understand, is many things at once: murder story; horror story; story of good and evil; the story of a street hustler, his life and death; of Tim and Ariane Lovsey, the Zamantha Illusion by which they were formed and the world of illusion in which they lived. In the end it is also a story of light and shadow, black and white, and all the tones between: desire, love, fear, courage, greed and pain—the tale of my quest.

  SPECIAL AUTHOR'S EDITION SUPPLEMENT

  "THE MAGICIAN'S TALE": Q&A WITH WILLIAM BAYER

  Q. What made you decide to write this novel in a first-person female voice?

  A. It was a tough decision. Could I, a guy in his late fifties at the time write in the voice of a colorblind woman in her early thirties? I wasn't sure I could bring it off, but then I read a wonderful novel, Smila's Sense Of Snow by Peter Hoeg in which he wrote in the voice of a feisty female, and that gave me heart. I decided to try a hundred pages, and if the voice felt false, then to rewrite in third-person omniscient narrator form. A funny thing happened: I found I could sit down at my computer and get my head into Kay Farrow without any trouble. It just seemed to work. My step-daughter believes I was getting in touch with my feminine side. I showed her what I'd written, and showed it also to my three half-sisters (all in their thirties) and they all encouraged me to go on. So I took heart from that and went on to write the entire book in Kay's voice. I was very pleased that when my agent put it up for auction, all the interested bidders were female editors. In the end it went to a female editor at Putnam, the deal approved by the company's female CEO. I must say, I felt pretty good about that and am very glad I took the shot.

  Q. San Francisco seems almost like a character in the book. Was that your intention?

  A. Definitely! My wife and I had just moved to San Francisco when I started work on The Magician's Tale, so I was still in the process of discovering the city. I'd always wanted to live in S.F., and so it seemed natural to set the novel there. Whenever I took a break from writing, I'd go out, walk the streets, pick up on something, then integrate it into the book. We lived in an apartment on the top Russian Hill, as does Kay. In fact, I gave her an apartment that we'd considered but decided was too small for us. Also, one of the first things I did when we moved to San Francisco was to buy a good telescope. Kay has one, of course, and uses it quite a lot, often to peer at the windows of her ex-lover's Telegraph Hill apartment. It's a great instrument to have if you live on one of the hills in San Francisco and like to peer around. I used to notice lots of telescopes set up in windows when I strolled my neighborhood at night.

  Q. You have a lot of gay material. How did you research that?

  A. I'm not gay, but know many people who are, and the gay scene in San Francisco is pretty hard to avoid. I did make a real effort to check out the male hustler scene on Polk Gulch. Even though I'm pretty much a day-person, I went down there several times late at night, dressed in black like Kay and, like her, with a camera around my neck. It didn't take me long to pick up on what was going on.

  Q. Why the pen-name David Hunt?

  A. I often get this question. It was a purely commercial decision, which I'll attempt to explain. The way the publishing business works, bookstores, especially the big chains such as Barnes & Noble, base their orders on computer tracking of an author's previous sales. I'd had two New York Times best-sellers in the 1980s, but the sales on my two books before The Magician's Tale had flattened out. So it was Putnam's idea that I use a pen-name, thus forcing the bookstore chain buyers to actually read the book and base their order on its merits, rather than on my previous sales. I'd once flirted with the notion of writing a series under the name David Dagger Hunt, bu
t Putnam felt that was too long (if the name is short, it can appear in larger letters on the jacket) so we mutually agreed to go with just plain old benign David Hunt. I didn't like having to do this, but wasn't given much of a choice. If I wanted there to be piles of books in the stores, I had to use a new name. When Crossroad Press decided to put out an e-edition, I requested that they put my real name on the jacket. An author's name, after all, is his currency, and thankfully an e-edition doesn't depend on the procedures employed by bookstore chains.

  Q. How did you come up with the notion of making Kay colorblind?

  A. I've always liked the idea of giving a character a weakness which she/he turns into a strength. Since I knew I wanted Kay to be a photographer, and since I personally love black-and-white photography, I came up with the notion that she be totally colorblind. At first I was a little worried because I knew that most people who have so-called colorblindness (green-red confusion) are male, the defective gene coming from the X-chromosome of which males have only one. But I did some research and discovered an extremely rare malady called achromatopsia that results in total colorblindness and is not gender specific. I looked into it, and decided to make Kay a high-functioning achromat. One of the things readers seem to like about her is the way she uses colorblindness in her work. It also makes her a night-person and gives the novel a noirish quality. You'll find that none of her descriptions employ colors. Everything she sees is described in shades of black, white and grey.

  Q. How was the book received?

  A. Generally very well, except by a nasty reviewer on the San Francisco Chronicle who's never liked anything I've written. The New York Times review was terrific, as were the prepublication reviews. Readers seem to love this book more than any of my others. I still get requests to write more books starring Kay, but I decided not to continue with her as I'm not fond of working again and again with a single character.