The Prestige

by Christopher Priest

She was talking about something that was of interest to her, not to me. I felt I should be polite to her, listen to what she was saying, but what she could never know was the resistance that lay deep inside me, the unconscious defence mechanism a kid builds up for himself when he has been rejected. To adapt to my new family I had had to throw off everything I knew of the old. How many times would I have to say that to her to convince her of it?

Women are intrigued by my hands, and a few say they love them.

‘Magicians protect their secrets not because the secrets are large and important, but because they are so small and trivial. The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done.’ There, in a nutshell, is the paradox of the stage magician.

The third stage is sometimes called the effect, or the prestige, and this is the product of magic. If a rabbit is pulled from a hat, the rabbit, which apparently did not exist before the trick was performed, can be said to be the prestige of that trick.

10th October 1877 I am in love! Her name is Drusilla MacAvoy. 15th October 1877 Too hasty by far! The MacAvoy woman was not for me. I am planning to kill myself, and if the remainder of these pages are blank anyone who comes across this diary will know I succeeded. 22nd December 1877 Now at last I have found the real woman in my life!

LOL

No magician gives away the secret of another.

‘You and this Alfred Borden are like two lovers who can’t get along together.

At the time I noticed his face first. It was gaunt, intelligent and handsome, with strong Slavic cheekbones. He wore a thin moustache, and his lanky hair was parted in the middle. His appearance was in general untended, that of a man who worked long hours and slept only when there was no alternative to exhaustion.

gaaaaaaaaay

‘I desperately need eight thousand dollars, Mr Angier.’

This is the weirdest tesla fanfic ever

I am a performer, a professional. I must give an appearance to what I do, give it a sheen and a glamour. I must project myself about the theatre in a flash, and at the moment of arrival I must appear to be a magician who has successfully performed the impossible.

What the audience sees is actually what has happened! But I cannot allow this ever to be known, for science has in this case replaced magic. I must, by careful art, make my miracle less miraculous.

I believe Borden is such a man as to make a fetish of his secrets and it was my misfortune to tangle with him.

The anonymity of failure is sudden.

She does not say as much but I sense she feels, as I am beginning to, that Borden and I might have made better collaborators than adversaries.

From this I hope he will learn that the enmity he fostered between us was futile and destructive, that while we sniped at each other we were squandering the talents in us both. We should have been friends. I will leave him this so that he may reflect on it for the remainder of his life.

I have cheated death many times. Death has therefore acquired a sense of unreality for me. It has come to be a commonplace event that by some paradox, it seems, I can always survive.