Klara has never performed anywhere like the Mirage’s proscenium theater. The battens stand thirty feet above the floor; there are two moving platforms, five stage lifts, twenty spotlights, and two thousand seats. The ascension rope has been set, and the Proteus cabinet waits on wheels backstage. Three Mirage executives sit in the front row.

During Raj’s opening monologue, Klara stands in the wings, sweat shimmying down the sides of her sequined dress. For the first time, Ruby is in day care, a service on the seventeenth floor for the children of hotel employees. Klara’s stomach is clenched. She tries to focus, for Ruby’s sake. Shake out your hands. Swallow. Smile, goddammit. She steps, in gold heels, onstage.

Light. Heat. She can’t tell the executives apart, with their untucked dress shirts and their faces in shadow. They fidget through the Proteus cabinet. One leaves during the Vanishing Birdcage, citing a conference call. The remaining two perk up during Second Sight, but Klara times the Breakaway incorrectly and must lift her knees to avoid hitting the stage too soon. When she opens her eyes, one of the men is looking at his pager. The other clears his throat.

‘That it?’ he calls.

A stagehand flicks the house lights on, and Raj walks out from the wings. He’s smiling his salesman smile, but anger comes off him like heat. For a fraction of a second, the enormity of this opportunity – the enormity of their failure – knocks the air out of Klara. In the RV refrigerator, there are three jars of Ruby’s food. She and Raj have been eating fast food, and she can feel it in her body, the combination of glut and lack. They have sixty-four dollars in a locked box in the glove compartment. If they don’t get another gig, what will they do?

Klara thinks of Ilya, her mentor. He was the one who taught her that magic tricks are created for men: the pockets in suit jackets are perfectly sized to hold steel cups, and palming is easier with large hands. Then he taught her how to reinvent them. Klara uses compression-friendly foam balls, and she learned to work seamlessly with the drawer in a card table. But there was no way to get around the size of her palms, and when it came to sleight-of-hand magic, she could only rely on technique. ‘You’ve gotta get as good as the best men in magic,’ Ilya told her, drilling her in one-handed cuts until her fingers throbbed with pain. ‘And then you’ve gotta get better.’

Those sleight-of-hand tricks – they were her strength. They still are. But Klara and Raj have been trying to be Siegfried and Roy. In the process, Klara forgot the old, humble magic on which she was raised. She forgot herself.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It isn’t.’

She walks into the wings to retrieve Ilya’s black box, which she brought today for luck. She carries it across the stage and hops down into the audience, then turns the box into a table in front of the executives. Up close, the men don’t look alike at all. One is compact and hygienically bald, his blue eyes alert behind silver-rimmed glasses. He wears a red silk shirt. The other, in a black-and-white pinstriped shirt, is tall and pear shaped, his dark hair combed into a ponytail. Lavender glasses perch atop his nose, a delicate gold cross around his neck.

Raj walks to the edge of the stage and sits behind Klara. His body is stiff, but he’s watching her. She pulls her favorite deck out of the table’s hidden compartment and spreads the cards on Ilya’s table.

‘Pick three,’ she tells the bald man. ‘Turn them faceup.’

He selects the ace of clubs, the queen of diamonds, and the seven of hearts. She puts them back in the deck. Then she claps.

The ace flies out, fluttering midair before landing on a chair. She claps again: the queen sticks out of the center. When she claps a third time, the seven of hearts appears in her hand.

‘Ha!’ says the man. ‘Very nice.’

Klara doesn’t allow herself the compliment. She has work to do – Raise Rise, to be exact. She pulls a permanent marker out of the drawer and passes it to the man in the lavender glasses.

‘Cut the cards,’ she says. ‘Any place you like.’ He does, revealing the three of spades. ‘Excellent. Would you sign this card for me?’

‘With the marker?’

‘With the marker. You’ll keep me honest. There may be another three of spades in this deck, but none that look like yours. We’ll put it back in the middle of the deck, like this. But here’s a funny thing. When I tap the card at the top of the deck’ – she turns it over – ‘there’s your three. Strange, isn’t it? Now, let’s put it where it belongs, in the center. But wait: if I tap the top card a second time, here’s the three again. It’s risen through the deck.’

Raise Rise is one of the most difficult tricks Klara knows, and she hasn’t practiced it in years. She shouldn’t be able to do it – but something is helping her. Something is pulling her back to the person she’s been all along.

‘Now, I’ll show you very carefully how I put it in the middle of the deck. I’ll even leave it sticking out this time so you can be sure I’m not lying – you see it? So do I. So why,’ she says, turning the top card over, ‘is it on top for the third time? And now – let’s see; I think I feel it moving – it’s strange, but I could swear it’s on the bottom. Would you remove the bottom card, please?’

He does. It’s his. He chuckles. ‘Well done. I wouldn’t have noticed the double lift if I hadn’t been looking for it.’

He still has one eye on his pager. Klara makes him her target. Her pinkie is cramping – it’s been a year since she worked on her outjogging – but she doesn’t have time to shake out her hands. She grabs a fistful of quarters when she puts the deck away and points at the metal coffee mug that sits at the bald man’s feet.

‘Mind if I use that? Thank you; you’re very kind. I don’t know if you’ve noticed – I don’t know if you’ve looked – but this place is lousy with coins.’

She holds the mug in her right hand and splays her left, to show them it’s empty. When she snaps, a quarter appears between her left thumb and forefinger. She drops it into the mug, where it clinks. She pulls two coins from the bald man’s shirt collar, one from each of his ears, and two from the larger man’s shirt pocket.

‘Now, this is your mug, not mine. There’s no secret compartment, no storehouse of coins. So I bet you’re wondering how I’m doing this. I bet you already have your predictions.’ Klara gestures to the dark-haired man’s glasses. He hands them to her, and she tips them toward the coffee mug. One quarter slides over each lens. ‘It’s a natural response: we give life logic all the time. You see me producing coins over and over. Well, you assume, they must be in my left hand. And when I show you my left hand, when you realize that I can’t be holding them there, you change the logic. Now you’re thinking they’re all in my right hand. It would be useful, wouldn’t it? So close to the mug. You can’t see that I might’ – she passes the mug to her left hand – ‘be shifting’ – she reveals her right hand, empty – ‘methods.’

She coughs; two coins tumble out of her mouth. The dark-haired man puts his pager in his shirt pocket. Now she has his attention.

‘You’re a religious man,’ says Klara, eyeing the cross around his neck. ‘My father was, too. Sometimes I thought he was my opposite. His rules versus my rule-breaking. His reality versus my fantasies. But what I’ve realized – what I think he already knew – is that we believed in the same thing. You could call it a trapdoor, a hidden compartment, or you could call it God: a placeholder for what we don’t know. A space where the impossible becomes possible. When he said the kiddush or lit the candles on Shabbat, he was doing magic tricks.’

Raj coughs, to warn her. Where are you going? But she knows where she’s going. She’s known all along.

‘We know something about reality, my father and I. And I bet you know it, too. Is it that reality is too much? Too painful, too limited, too restrictive of joy or opportunity? No,’ she says. ‘I think it’s that reality is not enough.’

Klara sets the mug on the floor and retrieves a cup and ball from the drawer. She puts the empty cup facedown on the table and places the ball on top.

‘It’s not enough to explain what we don’t understand.’ She lifts the ball and holds it tight in her fist. ‘It’s not enough to account for the inconsistencies we see and hear and feel.’ When she opens her fist, the ball has vanished. ‘It’s not enough on which to pin our hopes, our dreams – our faith.’ She raises the steel cup to reveal the ball beneath it. ‘Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate’ – she puts the cup down – ‘reality’ – she makes a fist – ‘is.’

When she opens her first, the red ball isn’t there. What’s there is a full, perfect strawberry.

Silence stretches from the carpeted floor to the fifty-foot ceiling, from the back of the stage to the balcony. Then Raj begins to clap, and the bald man joins in. Only the man with the gold cross withholds applause. Instead, he says, ‘When can you start?’

Klara stares at the strawberry in her palm. It’s damp. She can smell it. There’s a roar in her ears like the waterfall she heard outside the Mirage – or was it a saw?

The bald man takes a leather-bound calendar from his pocket. ‘I’m thinking December, January – January? Put her right before Siegfried and Roy?’

The larger man has a voice like something moving underwater. ‘They’ll eat her alive.’

‘Right, but as an opener. We’ll give her a half hour, people are filtering in, they want something to look at; she’s a good-looking girl – you’re a good-looking girl – she gets their attention, asses in seats, and bam! Tigers, lions, explosions. Blast off.’

‘They’ll need new costumes,’ says the other man.

‘Oh, complete overhaul on the costumes. We’ll get you a production team, cut the birdcage, cut the cabinet, amp up the rope hang, amp up the mind-reading trick – bring an audience member onstage, that kind of thing; we’ll get you set up for it.’ Someone’s pager beeps. Both men check their pockets. ‘Listen, we’ll talk. You got four months before opening, you’re gonna be fine.’

Jesus fucking Christ,’ says Raj as soon as the elevator doors close. ‘A strawberry.’ He’s laughing, crumpled in the corner where two of the glass walls meet. ‘I’ll never know how you pulled that off, but it was perfect.’

‘I don’t know, either.’

Raj’s laughter stops, though his smile still hangs open.

‘I’m serious,’ Klara says. ‘I’d never seen that strawberry before. I have no idea where it came from.’

Her first thought is that the blackouts have come back: perhaps she drove to a market, bought a container, stuffed one in her pocket. But that doesn’t make sense. Raj is the only one who drives the rental car, and there’s no grocery store in walking distance from King’s Row.

‘What do you think you are?’ Raj asks. There’s something feral in his face, something wild, like a wolf guarding his kill. ‘A magician who believes in her own tricks?’

Months ago, she would have been wounded. This time, she isn’t. She’s noticed something.

The look in Raj’s eyes. She mistook it for anger. But that’s not what it is.

He’s afraid of her.