The Magician's Assistant

by Ann Patchett

Parsifal’s death had been easy. Having come to find there was no comfort in getting what she wanted, what she wanted now was something else entirely. She wanted him back. Sick or well. She wanted him back.

The night Phan died, Sabine had thought the tragedy was knowing that Parsifal would die, too, that there was only a limited amount of time. But now Sabine knew the tragedy was living, that there would be years and years to be alone.

She put no stock in dreams. To her they were just a television left on in another room.

Sabine wanted to be in her own home tonight. Phan’s home and then Parsifal’s home and now her home.

It felt a little bit like being drunk, the way her knees grew soft from the shock, the very edges of the grief that was coming for her.

She had stayed in love with him for twenty-two years—let him saw her in half, helped him make her disappear—even when she found out that he was in love with men. “You don’t always get everything you want,” Sabine told her parents.

as this one. “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.

She was the last stop for all of the accumulations and memorabilia, all the achievements and sentimentality of two lives, and one of those lives should not have come to her in the first place.

Closing her eyes, she imagined her parents’ deaths. She imagined her loneliness taking the shape of boxes and boxes of other people’s possessions, a terminal moraine that would keep all she had lost in front of her.

“I wanted that time.” She is crying now, inconsolable. Parsifal could still be sleeping in his own bed. This is all because of something she said, something she did. This is loneliness she has brought on herself.

For Sabine, life without family, without parents, was inconceivable, a hole of sorrow that made her love him even more.

Slowly the small stream of information dried up. The story had been told. It was over, leaving Sabine with only the vaguest details of sorrows best forgotten.

There was a certain perverse benefit to the situation anyway: Sabine was his family. Hers was the framed picture at his bedside. She was always his past, his oldest friend, mother, sister, and finally wife. History began in a time after they had met. She did not complain.

Her parents had assumed that there was a perfectly good, if perfectly horrible, reason for his lie, but she had not. She believed their answer was somewhere in the neighborhood of correct, if not the exact facts, then the general tenor. Someone in Nebraska had wronged Parsifal enough to leave him unable to speak of what had happened.

Sabine was grateful to her parents. Time after time she had asked them to understand things she didn’t have much of a hold on herself.

The years they had fought and wept and not spoken and made up were so far behind them now that the things that had been said were both forgiven and forgotten.

Sabine made them out of bits of Parsifal’s personality, characteristics of his face. She made their skin from the pale color of his skin. She put them together in her spare time, and when she had them all exactly right, she arranged them in the car and sent them speeding towards their death.

the entire state of Nebraska defied imagination. Who actually lived there? Every day that Parsifal lived in Los Angeles, he denied them, scraped them from the landscape again and again until they were hardly outlines.

Nebraska was white, a page as still as fallen snow. It was not crosshatched with roads, overrun with the hard lines of interstate systems. It was a state on which you could make lists, jot down phone numbers, draw pictures.

Those were long and quiet days for Sabine, every one sunnier and more relentlessly beautiful than the last.

Parsifal did not believe in magic. Everything was a trick and some tricks were better than others.

It was one thing to have spent your life in love with a man who could not return the favor, but it was another thing entirely to love a man you didn’t even know.

Some nights she was kind. What if you were born in Alliance, Nebraska, only to find that you looked your best in a white dinner jacket?

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.

And she believed him. Lies sprung up like leaks. They were too easy, too inviting.

She imagined there would be plenty of answers in the Fetters; probably just seeing them walk off the plane would make it clear that these were people you’d want to cover up.

They were all worn out from the sadness and the smell of the flowers. The beautiful day had hurt them.

Nights like this, the freeway was an amusement-park ride, a thrilling test of nerves and skill.

There was a reason he stayed away. Even if it wasn’t exactly evident, she trusted his judgment completely now. There was something wrong. Something that did not concern her or include her.

intimacy and that took time, and while she had seemingly limitless amounts of the latter, she had no stomach for the former.

People made her tired. The way they were easy with one another, the way they seemed so natural, only made her sad.

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.

“When we were apart something changed for me. I missed him so much I just decided it was better to take what I had. To accept things. I really believe he loved me, but there are a lot of different ways to love someone.”

In Los Angeles he was never afraid. So maybe that was why he didn’t tell her. Maybe it was better to keep it that far away, to never have to look at someone who was remembering when you have made such a concerted effort to forget.

She loved Los Angeles. Sabine would always choose to stay. She had lived through every tragedy and shame and they only served to draw her and her city closer together.

A magician’s assistant was flatly nothing without a magician. There would never be a night when the assistant took the stage alone. “Look how well she holds the hat,” they would say as she stood there, hat in hand, her face one bright smile.

Magicians all across the world managed quite well without assistants, but without magicians, the assistants were lost.

A wedding, Bertie’s wedding, might be reason enough to go to Nebraska. She closed her eyes and tried to picture the state. She told herself there were cows, it was cold, they grew corn. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make the words into landscapes. It was a country she couldn’t imagine. What could be more foreign than Nebraska?

She never thought about the trips, the dinners or days spent in museums. She only remembered his company now.

They held their children, kissed their lovers. She heard their voices all around her—It’s so good to see you . . . What will I do when you’re gone . . . I thought you would never get here . . . Good-bye. The good-byes wore her out. She’d had enough of them.

What would that be like, to have someone to blame death on, to stand across the courtroom from that person and point them out, say, You, you took everything I had. Little did they know that everything they had would be taken anyway.

It was the same sun, the same scalloped edges; on the back there was the same handwriting, which said, “Kitty, 1959.”

She was just beginning to see the edges of a hunger she didn’t know she had. When Parsifal died she lost the rest of his life, but now she had stumbled on eighteen years. Eighteen untouched years that she could have; early, forgotten volumes of her favorite work.

A childhood that could be mined month by month. Parsifal would not get older, but what about younger?

They sat together in a family silence, listening to the sounds they understood, heavy china cups against white saucers, forks against plates, ice ringing against the sides of glasses, and everywhere, everywhere, voices. No one could make out a whole sentence; but words, every one a free agent, fell against the sound of the cutlery and made a kind of music.

There are no more years to waste. Don’t pursue dead men.” She slapped the table gently, as if to say, enough. “Don’t pursue dead men. I don’t think I have any advice clearer than that.”

They had asked her very pointedly to forget about Nebraska. They had tried their best to be understanding and kind when she decided to go just the same. That would be the story they would always tell. How they begged her not to go, their only child, and how she left.

When her parents had told her not to leave Los Angeles, she had known they were right. Sabine’s best interest was always what they had in mind.

A place that was only for Jews was too new, the world would never permit it. All around them countries were full of anger; and much of it, or so it seemed with this child, was directed towards them.

Four countries were more than anyone should suffer in a lifetime. How could one street be so different from the next? If they didn’t feel the need to wander, why should she?