The Ambitious Card

by John Gaspard

  “One ahead? One ahead of what?” Pete asked, not taking his eyes off Grey, who was in the midst of giving a fellow a message from the man’s recently deceased father. The guy was nearly in tears, his head bobbing up and down along with everything Grey was saying.

  “Somehow he got a hold of the first question ahead of time,” I explained quietly. “Probably a switch of some kind—the Al Baker or the Moldavian—and so every time he appears to be opening an envelope to read the question he just answered, he’s actually reading the next question.”

  “One ahead,” Pete repeated.

  “Yeah, it’s used all the time in magic. In cards, coins. Hell, even Cups and Balls is a one-ahead. It’s all about having a piece of information the audience doesn’t know you have…You can work tons of variations on it and the audience is none the wiser.” I was going to explain further, but something Grey was saying snuck into my consciousness and grabbed my attention. In fact, for a brief moment, it sounded like he was talking about me.

  Here’s a little secret about how mentalism works—the audience plays the primary role in its success, much more than the performer. That’s because the human brain, in all its evolutionary glory, insists on filling in any gaps. If you give the brain A and then follow it up with C, it’s going to do its darnedest to connect the two with some form of B.

  Consequently, all the mentalist really has to do is toss out random words that your brain can grab onto and try to make sense of. If he says, “I’m getting a very powerful feeling about apples,” then the average brain immediately searches for any connection it can make to apples, and pretty soon you’re thinking, “Hey, I just had an apple last Thursday. This guy is pretty good.”

  The trouble is, even when you understand the principle, it’s difficult to keep your brain from getting caught up in it. Which is exactly what happened to my brain when it heard Grey say, “Who here had something taken from them by someone named Ed? Or someone that sounds like Ed, maybe Ted?”

  That immediately struck a nerve in my brain, because I did in fact have something taken from me by a guy named Fred, which my advanced brain immediately recognized as rhyming with Ed. Fred took my wife and he was the reason I was now living in a third-floor apartment above my uncle’s magic shop.

  Of course, on a purely intellectual level, I knew that wasn’t the case. Fred hadn’t actually taken anything from me. My now ex-wife, Deirdre, had left our marriage and married someone else. I might be angry about the manner in which she had done it, allowing the two relationships to overlap inconveniently, but nothing had been stolen. One husband had simply been exchanged for another. Not unlike taking one automobile and trading it for a new one. The only irregularity, of course, was that Deirdre had still been driving the first car while she test-drove the second.

  But who could blame them, really? They had worked closely for a number of years, she as a fast-rising Assistant District Attorney, he as a hotshot cop on his way to becoming a hotshot homicide detective. Deirdre really had far more in common with Fred than she did with me, a guy whose greatest skill, it appeared, was the ability to make a gallon of milk disappear into a rolled-up newspaper.

  All this flashed through my brain in a nanosecond and I mentally returned to the performance in time to hear Grey talking to a woman who had lost her virginity to a guy named Ned. Like I said, the brain will find the connection, regardless of how tenuous.

  Grey finished his short reading of the woman and the audience applauded, as they had done each time, regardless of his level of accuracy. He held up one hand to quiet them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I can feel my connection to the spirit world growing weaker, the braided strands to the other side unraveling by the moment. Could I impose upon my first helper to return to the stage to assist my journey back across that bridge?”

  Sharon, the over-dressed, matronly woman quickly made her way back to the stage, moving toward Grey, who was still seated stiffly in the high-backed chair. She placed two fingers on his wrist, moving them once and then again and then once more. She shook her head. “There’s no pulse,” she said, a note of dread in her voice.

  “No, not just yet,” Grey agreed. “I’m still on the precipice.” He closed his eyes and went through his deep breathing routine again.

  As he did, Sharon adjusted her grip on his wrist. After several moments, she started nodding, a little at first and then more confidently. “There it is,” she said. “I can feel the pulse. I can feel it.”

  Grey opened his eyes. “Yes. Yes,” he said, smiling like a Cheshire Cat. “I have returned. Thank you, Sharon.”

  He stood and ushered her off the stage, and then turned to the applauding crowd. “And thanks to all of you. I will leave you tonight with the words of a great man, The Amazing Dunninger, who so wisely said, ‘For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation will suffice.’ Good night.”

  He bowed deeply, took a step back, and then bowed again. The pipe organ music began blasting through the room as the audience stood, en masse, applauding wildly. Some had tears running down their faces, some were hugging each other, and the rest were clapping their hands vigorously as Grey took yet another overly-dramatic bow.

  “You’re up next,” a voice next to me yelled over the applause. The floor manager had appeared by my side, looking from me to the crowd. “Boy, that’s going to be one hell of a tough act to follow.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “That’s just what I needed to hear.”

  Chapter 4

  “Okay, we’re back,” the TV host said as the red light popped on above the main camera.

  I was onstage, seated at the large wooden table, trying to look casual and relaxed and feeling neither. My unease was heightened by the placement of Grey, who was seated at the other end of the table. This was an unexpected development and the only solace I could take in the situation was that it seemed to be just as unanticipated for Grey as well.

  During the break, as the host chatted casually with me while I settled into my place on stage, he suddenly turned to the floor manager and said, “Hey, why don’t we get Grey back out here as well? Might be fun to have the two of them on camera together. Is he still here? Can we do that?”

  This was followed by several energetic and hushed conversations by crew members speaking frantically into their headsets. A few moments later, Grey stepped back into the room, just pulling on a black wool coat. The host saw him from the stage and pointed him out to the crowd. “Hey folks,” he boomed to the audience, “how many of you would like Grey to stick around for this next segment?”

  Even if Grey had tried to decline, he would have been drowned out by the thunderous ovation the audience gave to this seemingly spontaneous suggestion. Moments later, he was re-wired with a microphone and seated at the other end of the table from me, where he still sat stiffly, refusing to look me in the eye.

  “We just had a great paranormal experience with psychic, mentalist, and spiritualist Grey,” the host continued, speaking directly into the camera. Without any prompting from the floor manager, the audience began applauding wildly. Grey smiled wanly and tilted his head a fraction of an inch, acknowledging their adoration.

  “And joining us now,” he continued, glancing down at his ubiquitous index cards, “is debunker and magician, Eli Marks.”

  He waited a beat too long, anticipating an interruption by applause, which clearly wasn’t coming. The floor manager, standing just off-camera, frantically gave the audience the applause signal. Their response was at best lackluster, clapping with the same enthusiasm that a group of kids might display when being forced to welcome the man who was about to kill Santa Claus.

  The host glanced at the index card again and then looked up at me. “So, Eli, you saw all of Grey’s performance tonight, right?”

  “Yes, I did,” I said.

  “As a debunker of paranormal events, did it set off all of your internal alarms? All the bells and whistles?” He chuckled
good-naturedly.

  “Well, to begin with, I prefer the term skeptic rather than debunker,” I began, but he quickly cut me off.

  “Debunker, skeptic, either way you don’t believe that what Grey did here tonight was supernatural in any way, do you?”

  I looked from the host, to the crowd, to Grey, who was ignoring my very existence.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said suddenly, turning back to the host as I decided to just jump in and do it. “Grey is very good at what he does. Really. He has excellent crowd control, solid routines, and is obviously skillful. I have no issue with that. What gets me…what sticks in my craw, as my uncle would say…is that he presents the tricks that he’s performing as if they were real.”

  “You’re saying they’re not real?” the host asked provocatively.

  “Not one second of it. Look,” I said, leaning forward and gesturing toward Grey across the table from me. “Grey has a great mentalism act. Really. He could make a handsome living in a Las Vegas showroom for years to come with that act. Not at one of the bigger hotels on The Strip,” I added, “but he could still aspire to a job downtown.” My joke, such as it was, got nothing from the audience.

  “So then, if it’s all bogus, can you tell us how he does it?” the Host asked provocatively. “Let us in on all the little secrets?”

  I sat back in my chair with a sigh. “Well, you see, that’s going to be a problem. Essentially what Grey did tonight was a magic show, and we magicians are not known for our willingness to let our secrets out.”

  “A professional magician never reveals his methods?” the host offered.

  “Something like that,” I agreed.

  “Well, don’t take this the wrong way, Eli,” the host said, getting ready to go in for the kill. “But you appear to want it both ways. You say it’s all fake and not real, but at the same time you won’t explain how it’s done. That’s doesn’t seem quite fair, does it?” He winked at the audience and got a smattering of applause in response. They still hated me, but now for a new reason. That was progress of a sort, I guess.

  “Maybe I can meet you halfway,” I said. “What parts do you want to know about?”

  He glanced down at his notes. “Let’s start at the top. How did he stop his heartbeat?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry, folks, that’s a magic trick. I can duplicate it for you, if you like, but I won’t tell you how it’s done.”

  “Okay, then,” he continued, scanning through his notes. “How did he identify people in the audience…he knew their names, what they were wearing, objects they were holding…and he did it all while blindfolded. Can you explain how he did that?”

  “Well, for starters, just because you have a blindfold on doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re blind. But, as for his method, I suspect he and his lovely assistant—”

  “Nova,” the host added, gesturing to the woman in question, who was seated just off-stage.

  “Yes, the lovely Nova. I suspect that the two of them used a fairly simple verbal code to communicate the information. In fact, if you were paying close attention…or even if you weren’t, for that matter…I think you might have recognized they were having a wee bit of trouble with it tonight.” I looked over at Grey, who was glaring at Nova. She looked away and Grey huffed quietly and folded his arms in disgust.

  “All right, fair enough,” the host said, looking down and flipping to a new card in his stack. “What about his second-sight ability…reading the words from books and magazines held by audience members? There clearly wasn’t any code going on there.”

  I nodded in agreement. “No, I think a more sophisticated technology was used for that.” I picked up the wireless handheld microphone that Nova had left on the table. “Remember earlier when Nova got too close to one of the speakers in the audience with this microphone? How there was that loud, annoying feedback?”

  I was saying this to the host, but I could see audience members nodding along with me as I spoke. “Well, that’s because you don’t want to get a live microphone too near a speaker—whether it’s a great big speaker on a stand in front of the stage,” I said, waving the microphone toward one of the distant speakers, “or a little tiny speaker hidden somewhere else.”

  With that, I waved the microphone past the left side of Grey’s head, which produced a loud, shrill electronic shriek from somewhere near his left ear. He leapt up, holding his ear and moving quickly away from the table.

  “Damn it,” he said, rubbing his ear furiously. Then he must have realized that not only was he still in front of a live audience, he was also on live television. Ever the professional, he regained his composure just as quickly as he had exploded. He bowed slightly to the audience, ran a hand through his hair and glared quietly at the host as he returned to his chair.

  “I didn’t come on this program to be insulted,” he said, sitting heavily in his seat. “I have a gift that I have proven again and again, countless times. I don’t need the blessing of this, this…performing monkey.” Grey spit out the last words like a curse. He flinched slightly as I moved the microphone toward him again, and then I set it midway between us on the table as a gesture of truce. The host was still flipping through the cards.

  “Perhaps, Mr. Marks, you could explain how he predicted each of the questions in the sealed envelopes? And, even more impressive than that, there were all the facts he seemed to know about the audience members. People he’d never met before, according to him.”

  “Impressive? Perhaps,” I began. “But not really all that difficult.”

  “What about when he revealed that someone in this room had a relative who died on the toilet? You don’t just pull that out of thin air, do you? And he even knew how the fellow died…a heart attack, if I remember correctly.” He nodded in agreement with several nearby audience members.

  “To begin with, dying while on the toilet may be a unique event, but it’s not as rare as you might think. How many people do we have in this room?” I asked, doing a quick scan of the crowd. “About 200 people?”

  “Give or take,” the host agreed.

  “Well, in a group of 200 people, I would guess you have maybe a one-in-three chance of finding at least one person who knows of someone who died while on the toilet. For an act like Grey’s…for any mentalist…that’s a chance worth taking, because it’s a big payoff for very little risk.

  “And, as for cause of death, there weren’t really all that many options,” I continued. “When death comes on a toilet, it’s traditionally in the form of a heart attack or stroke, not a fall from a great height or a gunshot wound. Unless you’re John Travolta in Pulp Fiction.” This actually produced a ripple of laughter from the crowd. It didn’t turn the tide, but finally I was feeling a little less hate coming from the group.

  “Okay,” the host acknowledged. “But what about divining the questions on the cards in sealed envelopes? I think of myself as a pretty smart guy, and to me that seems to defy explanation.”

  “Let me see here,” I said. “How can I explain the technique without giving too much away?” I sat quietly for a moment, not trying to build drama—although that was the unintended effect—but to actually figure out a way to explain what Grey had done without screwing up about a hundred other magic tricks that use the same method.

  “There’s a technique in magic called One Ahead,” I finally said, talking first to the host and then turning and addressing the crowd. “And it’s as simple as it sounds…The magician is one ahead. That one might be a piece of information, a name, a question, or even a physical object, like a coin or a ball. The magician has it and the audience doesn’t know it, so he’s One Ahead.”

  I gestured toward Grey, who was still steadfastly refusing to look in my direction. “In the case of Grey’s envelope trick, somehow he got the first question ahead of time…lots of different ways to do that, although I think I know the method he used tonight…and by being in possession of the first question, all he had to do was to pretend to read that q
uestion when he was actually opening the second question.”

  I was getting an equal amount of head nodding and blank stares from the audience. The host was going to say something, but even he seemed a bit baffled. I reached into my coat pocket and took out the deck of cards I always carry.

  “Let me demonstrate the same thing, but with a deck of playing cards,” I said as I spread the cards, face down, in a mess all over the table. “I’ll need some help with this,” I added, gesturing toward the host and then, in a burst of inspiration, toward Nova as well. As the audience applauded, the host bounded back up to the stage, while Nova moved at a much less enthusiastic pace.

  “Let me see if I can remember the pattern for this routine,” I said as much to myself as to the crowd. It took a few seconds for me to mentally sort through my card trick files, and then I remembered the routine. “Okay, I think I’ve got it.”

  I spread the cards around on the tabletop some more, to mix them even further. The host was standing over me and Nova had just crossed the stage. Grey, seated across the table from me, looked like an unhappy statue.

  “Every time I try to write the word psychic,” I said, rolling into the routine. “I somehow always end up writing the word physics. Now, except for sharing most of the same letters in common, the two words may seem unrelated. But they’re actually a lot closer than you might think. You see, in quantum physics, it’s understood that the very act of observing an action invariably changes the outcome. And, it turns out, the same is true in some psychic situations.”

  I moved the pile of cards around on the table, flattening it out, exposing nearly all the card backs. “Now, all of us are, to one degree or another, psychic. However, just like in physics, sometimes the very act of observing our psychic work will change the outcome. So for this effect, each one of you is going to use your psychic powers, but we’re not going to look at the results until the end. Because looking at them might actually change that outcome.”