Once, during the Golds’ annual trip to Lavellette, New Jersey, Saul woke the family at dawn. Gertie groaned, the last to rise, as Saul led them through the rented beach house, with its blue and yellow shutters, and down the path that led to the sea. Everyone was barefoot; there was no time for shoes, and when they reached the water, Klara saw why.
‘It looks like ketchup,’ Simon said, though it turned a watermelon fuchsia at the horizon.
‘No,’ said Saul, ‘like the Nile,’ and stared at the ocean with such perfect belief that Klara was apt to agree with him.
Years later, in school, Klara learned of a phenomenon called red tide: algae blooms multiply, making coastal waters toxic and discolored. This knowledge made her feel curiously empty. She no longer had reason to wonder about the red sea or marvel at its mystery. She recognized that something had been given to her, but something else – the magic of transformation – had been taken away.
When Klara plucks a coin from inside someone’s ear or turns a ball into a lemon, she hopes not to deceive but to impart a different kind of knowledge, an expanded sense of possibility. The point is not to negate reality but to peel back its scrim, revealing reality’s peculiarities and contradictions. The very best magic tricks, the kind Klara wants to perform, do not subtract from reality. They add.
In the eighth century BC, Homer wrote of Proteus, sea god and seal herder, who could assume any form. He could tell the future, but he’d change shape to avoid it, answering only if seized. Three thousand years later, inventor John Henry Pepper presented a new illusion at London’s Polytechnic Institution titled ‘Proteus, or We are Here but not Here.’ One century after that, in a construction dumpster at Fisherman’s Wharf, Klara and Raj scavenge for wood scraps. At this late hour, the site is abandoned – even the sea lions are asleep, only their noses above water – and they haul nine planks back in Raj’s truck. In the basement of the Sunset house he shares with four other men, Raj builds a cabinet three feet wide by six feet tall. Klara covers the interior with white and gold wallpaper, like John Henry Pepper’s. Raj hinges two glass mirrors to the inside of the cabinet, wallpapered, too, so that they look like the cabinet walls when lying flat. When opened toward the center of the cabinet with their edges touching, they hide a wedge of open space inside which Klara fits perfectly. Now, the mirrors reflect a side wall instead of the back.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she breathes.
The illusion is flawless. Klara has disappeared in plain sight. There, in the midst of reality, is another one nobody can see.
Raj’s past is anything but magical. His mother died of diphtheria when he was three; his father was a rag picker, wading through mountains of trash to find glass and metal and plastic to sell to scrap dealers. He brought the scraps of the scraps home to Raj, who turned them into tiny, delicate robots and lined them up on the floor of their one-room apartment.
‘He had tuberculosis,’ Raj says. ‘That’s why he sent me here. He knew he was dying, and he knew I had no one else. If he was going to get me out, it had to be soon.’
They’re lying on Klara’s bed, only an inch of space between their noses. ‘How did he do it?’
Raj pauses. ‘He paid somebody off. Someone who faked papers for me, saying I was Amit’s brother. It was the only way to get me in, and it took everything he had.’ There is a vulnerability in his face that she hasn’t seen before, or an anxiety. ‘I’m legal now, if that’s what you’re wondering.’
‘It wasn’t.’ Klara laces her hands with his and squeezes. ‘Did your dad ever make it here?’
Raj shakes his head. ‘He lived for another two years. But he didn’t tell me he was sick, so I didn’t get to see him before he died. I think he was afraid that if I visited, I wouldn’t leave him. I was his only kid.’
Klara pictures their fathers. In her mind, they’re friends, wherever they are: they play chess in ghostly public parks and debate theism in heaven’s smoky bars. She knows she’s not supposed to believe in the Christian heaven, but she does. The Jewish version – the Sheol, Land of Forgetfulness – is too hopeless.
‘What would they think of us?’ she asks. ‘A Jew and a Hindu?’
‘A barely Hindu.’ Raj pinches her nose. ‘And a barely Jew.’
Raj crafts his personal mythology anew. He is the son of the son of the legendary fakir who taught India’s greatest magic tricks to Howard Thurston: how to grow a mango tree from a seed in seconds, how to sit on spikes, how to throw a loose rope in the air and then climb it. This is what he’ll tell managers and booking agents, what he’ll print on the inside of their programs, and each time, he feels a satisfaction bit by guilt. He isn’t sure whether he feels more like the fakir’s imaginary grandson, taking back something that belongs to him, or like the hustler Howard Thurston, sneaking from East to West with a stolen trick in his pocket.
I don’t get it,’ Raj says. ‘The Immortalist.’
They sit on Klara’s couch. It’s April, four o’clock and drizzling, but heat rises from the bakery downstairs and they’ve propped a window open.
‘What’s not to get?’ Klara wears a loose T-shirt and a pair of Raj’s boxers; her bare feet rest on his thighs. ‘I’ll never die.’
‘Big talker.’ He squeezes her calf. ‘I get what it means. I just don’t get why you think that’s what you’re playing at.’
‘What am I playing at?’
‘Transformation.’ He props himself up on one elbow. ‘A scarf becomes a flower. A ball becomes a lemon. A Hungarian dancer’ – he wiggles his eyebrows; Klara’s told him about Gran – ‘becomes an American star.’
Raj has big plans: new costumes, new business cards, bigger venues. He’s teaching himself the East Indian Needle Trick, in which a magician swallows loose needles and thread and pulls apart his cheeks for audience inspection before regurgitating them perfectly strung. He’s even booked them a run at Teatro ZinZanni, a dinner theater owned by one of his clients at the repair shop.
Klara can’t remember exactly when they decided to go into business together, or when they started to think of it as business. Then again, she can’t remember a lot of things. But she loves Raj: the jolt of his energy, his genius in animating objects. She loves the straight dark hair he is always pushing out of his eyes, and she loves his name, Rajanikant Chapal. He builds a mechanical canary for the Vanishing Birdcage – hollow plaster to which he glues real feathers – and uses a rod to manipulate its head and wings. She loves that the bird comes alive in his hands.
Klara’s greatest trick is not the Jaws of Life, but the force of will it takes to ignore her audience’s pagers and stonewashed jeans. In performing, she rewinds the clock to a time when people marveled at illusion and spiritualists talked to the dead, when they believed the dead had something to say. William and Ira Davenport – brothers from Rochester, New York, who conjured ghosts while roped to plank seats inside a large wooden cabinet – are the most well-known Victorian mediums, but they were inspired by sisters. In 1848, seven years before the Davenports’ first performance, Kate and Margaret Fox heard rapping sounds in the bedroom of their Hydesville farmhouse. Soon the Fox home was called the spook house, and the girls began a national tour. In Rochester, their first stop, physicians who examined the sisters claimed they were causing the noises by clicking bones in their knees. But a larger team of investigators could find no earthly reason for the raps, nor for the communication system – a code based on counting – that the sisters used to translate them.
In May, Klara bursts into the bathroom while Raj is showering. ‘Time!’
Raj cracks the foggy shower door. ‘What?’
‘Second Sight. Morritt’s trick – it’s time, time is how you do it,’ and she’s laughing, it’s so obvious, so simple.
‘The mind-reading trick?’ Raj shakes his head like a dog. Water splatters the walls. ‘How?’
‘Synchronized counting,’ says Klara, thinking as she speaks. ‘He knew the audience was listening for a secret code, a code based on words. How could he get around it? By creating a code based on silence – the amount of silence between his words.’
‘And the silence corresponds to what – letters? Do you have any idea how long it would take to make whole words?’
‘No, it couldn’t be letters. But maybe they had a list, a list of common objects – you know, wallets and purses and, I don’t know, hats – and if Morritt said “thank you” after twelve seconds, his assistant knew it was a hat. And for the type of hat, they could have had another list – materials, let’s say – one second for leather, two for wool, three for knits . . . We could do it, Raj. I know we could.’
He’s looking at her like she’s crazy, and she is, of course, but that’s never stopped her. Even years later, when they’ve done the act hundreds of times – even when Klara is pregnant with Ruby, even after Ruby is born – Klara never feels closer to Raj than she does during Second Sight. Together, they balance on the edge of failure, Raj holding an object and Klara straining, straining to hear his cue before racing through their numbered lists. A Reebok sneaker. A pack of Lifesavers. The sharp intake of breath from the audience when she gets it right. No wonder it takes a drink or three to calm her down after the show, hours before she’s dull enough to sleep.
Two days before their opening at Teatro ZinZanni, Raj returns to Klara’s apartment after his shift at the repair shop. They’ll have to work through the night on the Vanishing Birdcage.
‘You get the wire?’ he calls, throwing his coat on a chair.
‘I’m not sure.’ Klara swallows. Yesterday, she was supposed to get a pack of thick brass wire from the art supply store on Market, which Raj will use to finish the birdcage. ‘I think I forgot.’
Raj comes toward her. ‘What do you mean, you forgot? Either you went to the store or you didn’t.’
She hasn’t told Raj about the blackouts. She’s gone months without one, but yesterday, Raj worked an extra shift and she had no distraction from the thoughts that swarm her when she’s alone: her father’s absence, her mother’s disappointment. She thought of how badly she wished Simon could see her now, not on the little blue-lit stage on Fillmore but at a real dinner theater, with real props and a real partner. So she left her apartment for a bar on Kearny and drank until the thoughts stopped.
‘Well, I did forget,’ says Klara, bristling, because this is what Raj does – he never lets anything go. ‘But the wire isn’t here, so I must not have gotten it. I’ll go tomorrow.’
She walks into the bedroom and pretends to adjust the string lights around the window. Raj follows her. He grabs her arm.
‘Don’t lie to me, Klara. If you didn’t do it, say so. We have a show to run. And sometimes, it feels like I care about it more than you.’
Raj designed their business cards – The Immortalist, they read, with Raj Chapal – and Klara’s new costumes. He got a tuxedo jacket from a suiting outlet and paid a seamstress to tailor it to Klara’s body. For the Jaws of Life, he ordered a gold sequined dress from an ice-skating catalog. Klara resisted – she thinks it’s cheesy, that it doesn’t look like vaudeville – but Raj says it’ll sparkle under the lights.
‘I care about this more than anything,’ she hisses. ‘And I wouldn’t lie to you. That’s insulting.’
‘Okay.’ Raj squints. ‘Tomorrow.’