stranger’s eyes.
“Shakespeare,” and the stranger glanced away from the park’s stage to gaze toward a young lifeguard overseeing her aquatic flock at the park’s adjacent public pool. “Man’s been dead for ages now. Nothing too hard about acting the parts, but it just doesn’t bring the coin. What is any of it about if not about the coin?”
Unlike when his father rambled on about college funds and investments, John heard passion when the stranger spoke of coin, stoking the man’s eyes like a puff of wind bellowed into the furnace.
“You don’t look like much of a banker.”
The stranger winced at this. “I would rather be manacled, locked into a led box and tossed into the deepest ocean abyss.”
“What?”
“Of course, you don’t understand,” the stranger grunted. “You see, the bard’s been dead all these years now. All that clapping on the grass isn’t going to bring him back.”
“What are you talking about?”
John thought the stranger must have been a little mad, but John hoped madness might tell the best stories.
“You smoke?” asked the stranger.
“Are you kidding me?”
On cue, the stranger searched at the air with a couple of fingers before suddenly slapping the back of his neck. Spellbound, John watched a burning cigarette appear from the back of the man’s throat, lit and smoldering as if the man’s intestines were composed of a withering fire.
“Do you smoke?”
John accepted his first with a cough. While the play’s audience sat on lawn chairs and smiled through soliloquies none understood, and while their children ran amok through the park to trap fireflies in glass jars, John Johnson met a man with more mysteries than his gaping imagination hoped to grasp.
The greatest magicians are those truest to their art, and so a master needs only an audience of one. While the park’s crowd stared upon the stage, John witnessed the manifestations of magic of which he never dreamed. He witnessed the magic of fire when the stranger, like a dragon, exhaled a long plume of flame as the final ash fell off his cigarette. He saw the magic of wind as the stranger’s shoes hovered a graceful minute between earth and sky. He saw the magic of earth as the stranger persuaded John to give up his house key for the benefit of a trick, vanishing it into midair with a quick hand clap, and then laughing as he pointed to where John needed to dig to find it. Though he soiled his shoes in the retrieval, John was transfixed as he withdrew the key from the shallow grave he had uncovered with his fingers. Those were tricks far more real than anything he had before seen from magicians who were dime-store conjurers in comparison to the elemental wizard the stranger proved to be.
“Careful, boy,” winked the stranger as John clutched his dirty key. “You’ve got the eyes to appreciate this sort of thing. Be half ashamed if I didn’t at least try telling you a little of the trouble.”
“Trouble?” John sounded hurt. “They’re wonderful tricks.”
“And don’t think for a second that they’re anything else.” The stranger craned his neck. “Tricks go both ways. They have more danger in them than you, and maybe even I, can really every know. I’ve heard my kind say that it’s the danger that makes the trick worth remembering.”
“I don’t think I’ll ever forget the ones you just showed me.”
The stranger raised an eyebrow. “Ah, but won’t you?” Here, that magician beamed a very wide smile, and the reflection of the new moonlight off of the stranger’s molars reminded John of how dark the park was turning.
“Follow me and see what I’m trying to tell you. No real good way to put it into words. There’s one element more before my show ends, one element more dangerous than all the rest.”
Perplexed, John followed that stranger to the chain-link fence that hemmed the boundaries of the public pool. It had become late, and no children splashed chlorine into one another’s eyes, no lifeguard remained to see that her swimmers did not stray too far into the deep end, or that they did not too rashly brave the high diving board. The stranger easily climbed that simple fence, and the wizard patiently waited for his audience of one to navigate above the links more slowly. Soon enough, water lapped in front of them, smooth and dark in the summer night, with only slight ripples created by the moon’s pull to show the water’s surface.
“Hold these a moment. Mind you, they’re solid and heavy.”
John had only peeked at the water’s edge for a second, and only a peek was enough time for the stranger to produce a set of heavy and gnarled chains. John swore he would have seen them. He wondered how he had not. They would have had to make a rattling as they had walked to the pool. They should not have been able to have hid in the stranger’s shirt.
“Well, hold them. They’re not snakes.”
The weight of the chains nearly scraped John’s knuckles against the concrete circling the pool as he accepted them. But John found satisfaction in discovering that he could will enough strength into his forearms to keep his arms outstretched and lifted. The stranger disrobed his shirt and his khaki trousers down to his boxers, revealing a skin canvas etched with tattooed filigree of dark and winding patterns that swirled in the moonlight. The wizard partook in an elaborate series of stretches and contortions, snaking his lithe limbs into shapes John had not thought possible. The contortions implied the man was made more of smoke than of flesh, a man who could either twist his elbows and knees into a box, or drift away like ashes in a breeze.
Eventually, the stranger ceased his inhuman warping, and he turned to regard his audience of one with a mischievous twinkle behind his eyes.
“Too bad I don’t have a big vase, or one of those giant milk jars. You have either one of those?”
Wide-eyed, John shook his head.
“A big steamer trunk? Even a coke bottle? You have a coke bottle?”
Again, John shook his head.
“Just as well,” the stranger sighed. “Suppose it would be foolish to bite off too much, being out of practice and all. Anyway, I should still have enough to make an impression. Wrap those chains around my hands. Don’t go showing me any mercy. I want you to tie those knots real tight.”
“I don’t know how.” John stammered.
The stranger’s smile passed, and he whispered his next words.
“Oh, tying the knots is the easy part, son. Not much magic needed to create a set of shackles. Common enough man excels in that trick. Go ahead, now, twist me up real strong with those heavy bonds.”
John found that his hands inherently knew a mystical kind of a weave. He found himself casually wrapping one link incredibly through another twisted loop. Somehow, he knew how best to wrap a section of link around the ankle and the knee. One knot felt as natural as another. Throughout, the stranger patiently stood, with his serpentine tattoos squirming in the moonlight, while John transformed that magician into a heavy beast of iron and flesh.
“And you say didn’t know you could tie such powerful knots?”
“Never had the need to do so before.”
“Are you a cynic?” The stranger appeared tense. “Are you one of those cynics who love to see children cry, to see mothers sob, to see artists starve? Are you one of those cynics who would turn a magician into a charlatan? I should have asked you that before I let you tie me up. You being a cynic might explain why you tie such strong knots.”
“No way,” John answered. “I’m no cynic.”
“Well, it wouldn’t matter to me one way or the other,” the iron chains hugged the man’s skin and seemed to merge with the underlining tattoos. “A real magician can escape any knot. Can certainly get out of any knot a cynic might tie. It would only be your loss if you turn out to be that kind of slime. That is a sad way to live, son.”
“But I’m no cynic. Believe me.”
The stranger held up his finger as if to tell John not to say another word. “Ah, but it’s not my role to believe. That’s the part you’re supposed to play.”
The stranger strolled a
long the pool’s edge, and John watched the man pass the buoys that separated the waters of the shallow and deep ends. The stranger appeared so casual despite the anxiety John felt rising in the back of his throat. Such confidence rankled John, and the stranger intensified that agitation by teasingly dipping a toe through the water’s surface. John wanted to run at the man and shove him into the water. He wanted to sprint at that magician and let the waters prove the stranger nothing more than a man by sucking down to the pool’s bottom, or prove him a warlock by expelling him to the surface. The stranger knew how far too push John’s patience, and before his audience mustered the courage to shove him into the water, the magician leaned casually past the edge and let the burden of his chains topple him into the waves.
John refrained from sprinting to the pool’s edge to peek into dark, rippling water. He had no faith in his knots, and he did not think he created a challenging trick. He thought this final trick of water was composed of too much hype, and he sadly supposed that much of the magnificence of the stranger’s previous, elemental tricks would wane. The stranger had spoken of something greater, and John’s
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