The Magician's Assistant

by Ann Patchett

To her they were just a television left on in another room.

“It’s more impressive to make a tall woman disappear,” Parsifal had told Sabine. “And it’s better to pull a really big rabbit out of a hat.” Sabine was five-foot-ten and Rabbit, a Flemish giant, weighed in at just under twenty pounds.

He slips off the edge of the pool and sinks into the water. It is not the water that is blue, nor is the blue a reflection of the sky. The pool itself is painted blue on the inside.

He was openly hostile to any magician who claimed to have powers above and beyond good acting and good carpentry. He couldn’t even speak of Uri Geller’s spoons.

stoplights that don’t give up and begin to flash yellow at ten P.M.

They lived in the magnificence of a well-watered desert where things that could not possibly exist, thrived.

They wanted to perform, they wanted people to see them, they wanted to steal each other’s tricks. The thought of the Castle depressed her.

But people loved it, the massive old house on the top of the hill, all the cupolas and leaded windows, the secret rooms and sliding walls. They made the place feel haunted by leaving it dusty and dim.

Sally nudged Bertie and pointed at the stuffed owl perched inside the bookcase. “Go up to the owl and say ‘Open Sesame.’ That’s how you get in.” Bertie looked shy. She didn’t want to speak to the dead owl. Sabine herself simply refused to do it. She would always wait and slip in behind someone else. “Go on,” Sally said. “It’s the only way.”

Back in the old days, before Parsifal decided the three-part box was an exercise in misogyny, she was sliding around inside a platform on her back, sticking up a leg, popping her seemingly disconnected head into the top box, waving her hand through a trapdoor. And when Parsifal finally reconstructed her, she could not appear sweaty or out of breath. She had to look surprised, grateful. By professional standards, Sabine was much too tall to be an assistant. The little women, like Bess Houdini, could squeeze themselves into anything, while Sabine had to be vigilant to keep herself thin and limber. Still, Parsifal said, better to have an assistant who looked like a stretched-out Audrey Hepburn, and there were plenty of tricks she didn’t figure into at all. Magicians all across the world managed quite well without assistants, but without magicians, the assistants were lost.

There is a certain feeling when the spotlight is directly in your eyes. You know the house is full, the manager has told you, but everything in front of you is wrapped in a black sea, so you stop trying. To try and see is to strain your eyes against the light. It will give you a headache. When you look out, you are blind. The only person who knows this is the one standing next to you on the stage. He is all you can see. Together you speak and smile into the blackness. He is blind and he leads you. From this close you think he is wearing too much mascara.

“You can’t always trust what you think, what you know,” he would tell Sabine. “But you can always trust your nature. You have to make the tricks your nature.”

They depended on Sabine to be safe, as she depended on them to be.

Sabine skimmed over the instructions, which were nearly impossible to follow. To do the cups and balls the way they described it would take eight arms, dim lighting, and an audience recently injected with Versed.

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.

A scout had seen them doing a weekend show in Las Vegas. They were opening for Liberace after his regular magician was swiped on the cheek by his own tiger during rehearsals. “If you’re going to work with animals, remember,” Parsifal had told her on the plane going out there. “People, rabbits, and birds. Little birds.”

If it weren’t for Carson, the only magician America would have access to would have been Doug Henning, his big-toothed grin floating through the occasional special.

There was a magician there they knew who called himself Oliver Twist, but when they went to him, Twist picked up his things and waited in the hall.

Levitation was invented by John Nevil Maskelyne in 1867. He manually placed his wife in the air. The trick then went to Harry Kellar, who sold it, along with the rest of his act, to Howard Thurston upon retirement. After Thurston, it went to Harry Blackstone. Sabine soothed herself with facts, gave her mind over to trivia. Too many people had the trick now. It wasn’t enough to just do it straight anymore. They had all seen a girl in the air.

Parsifal wrapped her in a blanket and tied it down. He ran a hand through the air across the top of her and beneath her, and then he took the board away so that her head stayed on one chair and her feet on the other and her poker-straight body rested in between. It was a good effect, but the audience hardly found it miraculous. In fact, this was the hardest part of the trick, because Sabine was rigid; she was balanced between two chairs weighted down to hold her steady.

You never told because people wanted so desperately to know. They wanted what you had and therefore what you had was all the power. Who would give that up? What possible benefit could there ever be in telling? A minute of gratitude and then the dull falling away, the boredom that always followed knowledge. For fifteen years the Fetters had wanted to know how Parsifal balanced Sabine on the top of a chair. Waiting for the answer hadn’t done them any harm.

would not drive in the snow, no matter how many times Dot offered her car. It would be like pitching an ice cube across a linoleum floor and then commanding it to stop.

He made me disappear in a locked trunk and brought me back as a rabbit. That was in a less enlightened time, but we did it all.”

Parsifal ordered his cards by the case. He threw them away after a few tricks, even if it was only in practice. He had to work with new cards. Once a card was broken in he didn’t know how to make it move anymore. But Sabine saved those decks. She practiced with cards until she tore them in half. She glued them together, painted them, and cut them into walls for office complexes. She gave the leftover packs to her mother, who sent them to Hillel House and the Jewish Home and, on one occasion, sent twenty decks to an orphanage in Israel.

Magic was always mocking in a way. It was the process of fooling people, making them think they saw something they couldn’t have seen. Every now and then fooling people made them fools.

“When you’re young and you want to have a baby because babies are so cute and everybody else has one, nobody ever takes you aside and explains to you what happens when they grow up. Maybe they all think it’s obvious. 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.”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” How said, careful in the ways teenage boys can be about not seeming to really want anything you might be able to give them.