The Magician's Assistant

by Ann Patchett

Suddenly to have the privilege of wearing your own skin, the headlong rush of love, the loss of the knifepoint of loneliness. That was the true life, the one you would admit to. Why even mention the past? It was not his past. He was a changeling, separated at birth from his own identity.

For twenty-two years Sabine had told her stories to one person, so that the action and the telling had become inseparable. What was left was half a life, the one where she lived it but had nothing later to give shape to the experience.

Where we are born is the worst kind of crapshoot. Sabine was not entitled to her birth in Israel, to the loving nest of Fairfax. This could have been her house. She could have picked up the bat, felt the coolness of the wood in her hands. And if she had, she would have cut off the past as well, clipped it like an article from the newspaper so that people might see that something was missing but no one would know what it was.

Most people can’t be magicians for the same reason they can’t be criminals. They have guilty souls. Deception doesn’t come naturally. They want to be caught.

Magic was less about surprise than it was about control. You lead them in one direction and then come up behind their backs. They watch you, at every turn they will be suspicious, but you give them decoys. People long to be amazed, even as they fight it. Once you amaze them, you own them.

It was the thing that Sabine believed in, more than passion, more than tradition. Find a man you love who is good to you.

Nothing comes in balance, Sabine. Your kids either vanish or they won’t go away. You pray that one daughter will get married and the other one will get divorced, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about either one of them.”

“I love it here. I come by myself now and people think I’m crazy. I come up here to think things out. When I can see everything like this it gives me perspective.” “So what’s the perspective?” “That everything is pretty much the same no matter where you are. That everyone has their problems, everyone has a couple of things that make them happy, and that if I went someplace else or knew other people it wouldn’t really change. Of course now I don’t want it to change, now I like where I am, but when I was younger, that used to give me real comfort.”

The things that went into keeping people together and tearing them apart remained largely unknown to the parties immediately involved.

I mean, if you know enough about biology to know where babies come from, then you should know that sooner or later they turn into teenagers, but somehow you just don’t ever think about it, then one day, bang, you’ve got these total strangers living with you, these children in adult bodies, and you don’t know who they are. It’s like they somehow ate up those children you had and you loved, and you keep loving these people because you know they’ve got your child locked up in there somewhere.”

Nothing comforted Sabine like long division. That was how she had passed time waiting for Phan and then Parsifal to come back from their tests. She figured the square root of the date while other people knit and read. Sabine blamed much of the world’s unhappiness on the advent of calculators.