Raj works with the production team to rig the Jaws of Life and stage Second Sight. He designs a new set of props for the Indian Needle Trick: bigger needles, so they read from the stage, and red cord instead of thread. The Mirage’s entertainment director asks Klara if she’ll let Raj saw her in half – ‘Easy-peasy; won’t hurt a bit’ – but she refuses. He thinks she’s afraid of the trick when the truth is that she could give him an hour-long tutorial on P. T. Selbit and his misogynistic inventions: Destroying a Girl, Stretching a Lady, Crushing a Woman, all of them perfectly timed to capitalize on postwar bloodthirst and women’s suffrage.
Klara won’t be a woman who is sawed in half or tied in chains – nor will she be rescued or liberated. She’ll save herself. She’ll be the saw.
But she knows they might lose the job if she pushes back more. She lets the costumer raise her hemline by five inches and lower her neckline by two, fit the chest with padded cups. During rehearsals, Raj stands proudly, but Klara is shrinking. The radiance she felt during the audition is becoming dimmer every day – it’s washed out by the five-hundred-watt spotlights, obscured by the fog of the smoke machines. She thought the Mirage wanted her as she was, but they want her cubed, larger than life. They want her Vegas. To them, she’s as much a novelty as the pink volcano outside the hotel: their very own girl magician.
Ruby’s cartilage is turning to bone, and her bones are fusing. Her body is seventy percent water, the same percentage of water on Earth. She has delicate canine fangs and one set of knobby molars. She can say go and no and come me, which means come with me, which turns Klara’s heart to goop. She shrieks with delight at the sight of the pink lizards that crawl through King’s Row and holds pebbles tight in her fists. When the show opens and they get their first big paycheck, Raj wants to sell the trailer and rent an apartment, look at preschools and pediatricians. But Klara is running out of time. If the woman on Hester Street was right, she’ll die in two months.
She doesn’t tell Raj. He’ll think she’s even crazier. Besides, she rarely sees him: between rehearsals, he stays at the theater. From a grid ninety feet above the stage, he rigs a system of customized lines and pulleys to steel pipe battens. He uses the stage’s traps and sloats to devise a disappearance for Klara after her Breakaway bow. He builds a new card table with the construction crew and helps them carry props from the shop to the stage. The stage manager loves him, but some of the techs are resentful. Once, on her way to pick Ruby up from day care, Klara passes two stagehands. They’re standing just inside the doors to the theater, watching Raj mark the stage with tape.
‘You used to be the one to set the marks,’ one says. ‘You aren’t careful, Gandhi’ll take your job.’
Klara walks to Vons, pushing Ruby in her red plastic stroller. She nicks eight cans of Gerber sweet potatoes from aisle four, which clink in her purse as she walks toward the exit. The sliding doors open, and she feels a rush of warm air. It’s evening in late November, but the sky is still denim blue. She sits down beneath a street lamp, opens one of the Gerber jars, and feeds Ruby with her index finger.
Two orbs of white light grow closer, larger, and a silver Oldsmobile rolls to a stop. Klara covers Ruby’s eyes and squints, but the car doesn’t keep moving: it pauses in front of her like she’s blocking the way out of the lot. In the driver’s seat, a man is staring at her. He has rumpled strawberry blond hair and pale gold eyes and a mouth hanging open. He looks exactly like Eddie O’Donoghue, the cop from San Francisco.
Klara scrambles to her feet and pulls Ruby onto one hip. In the process, she drops the jar of food, which cracks and spills orange mush, but she doesn’t stop – she walks and then she starts running back to the anonymous crowds of the Strip. She’s weaving through tourists, pushing the empty stroller crookedly with one hand and remembering the thrust of his tongue in her mouth, when she slams into the back of a heavyset woman with two long, brown braids.
Klara’s blood freezes. It’s the fortune teller. She grabs the woman’s shoulder.
The woman turns. She’s only a teenager. Beneath the dancing lights of the Stage Door Casino, her face turns red, then blue.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ The girl’s pupils are dilated, and there’s a bullish thrust to her chin.
‘I’m sorry,’ Klara whispers, withdrawing. ‘I thought you were someone else.’
Ruby screams from her waist. Klara fumbles ahead, past Caesars Palace and the Hilton Suites, past Harrah’s and Carnaval Court. She never thought she’d be so glad to see the Mirage volcano’s stupid hot pink froth. Only when she enters the hotel does she realize she left Ruby’s stroller in front of the Stage Door, empty.
She doesn’t want to hear the knocks – she wants them to go back where they came from – but they’re only getting louder. Simon is angry with her; he thinks she’s forgetting him. An hour before their first dress rehearsal, Klara walks into the women’s bathroom at the Mirage and sets Ruby on the counter next to a vase of fake flowers. She takes out her watch. Meet comes quickly, as before. Thirteen minutes later, she hears a fifth knock: another M. In five minutes, there’s an E.
She thinks he’s starting the same word over when she realizes what he’s telling her. Meet me. After sixty-five minutes, she has another one.
Us.
Simon and Saul. Us. The bathroom seesaws. Klara puts her hands on the marble counter and drops her head to her chest. She’s not sure how long it’s been when she hears Ruby’s voice. The baby isn’t crying; she’s not even babbling. What she says is clear as day: ‘Ma. Ma. Ma-ma.’
Inside Klara, a long stalk keels and snaps. Always, it’s like this: the family that created her and the family she created, pulling her in opposite directions. Someone’s beating on the door.
‘Klara?’ Raj shouts, coming inside.
Instead of his usual outfit – a white T-shirt, smudged ashy, and an old pair of Carhartts – he wears his costume: a custom-made swallowtail coat and top hat, smooth and black as a penguin’s pelt. Ruby sits on the other side of the counter. She’s crawled into one of the Mirage’s gaping gold sinks and is playing with the automatic soap dispenser. There’s blue froth in her mouth, and she’s wailing.
‘What the fuck, Klara? What’s wrong with you?’ Raj takes Ruby in his arms and helps her spit, flushing out her mouth with his hands. He wets a paper towel and gently wipes her eyes and nose. Then he puts both hands against the counter and leans forward, resting his chin in the baby’s dark hair. It takes Klara a moment to realize he’s crying.
‘You were talking to Simon,’ he says. ‘Weren’t you?’
‘The knocks. I’ve been timing them. I wasn’t sure if they were real before, but I know it now: they are, they just spelled –’
Raj leans in as if to kiss her. But he pauses with his nose at her cheek before withdrawing.
‘Klara.’ When he looks at her, there’s something vivid in his face, something alive, something she thinks is love before she realizes it’s fury. ‘I can smell it on you.’
‘Smell what?’ asks Klara, buying time. She downed two mini bottles of Popov in the trailer; they were supposed to help her steady.
‘You must be some kind of masochist, to do this to us now. Or do you just think I’ll always be here to pick up the pieces?’
‘It was one drink.’ She hates the way her voice shakes. ‘You’re controlling.’
‘Is that what you tell yourself?’ Raj’s eyes widen. ‘Years ago. If I hadn’t found you. Where do you think you’d be?’
‘Better off.’ She’d be in San Francisco, doing gigs on her own. She’d be lonely, but in control.
‘You’d be a drunk,’ says Raj. ‘A failure.’
Ruby gazes at Klara from Raj’s arms. Blood rushes to Klara’s cheeks.
‘The only reason you’re still doing what you’re doing,’ Raj says, ‘is because I met you. And the only reason you were getting by before you met me was because you were ripping people off. You stole, Klara. Shamelessly. And you think all you were doing was giving people a good show?’
‘I was giving people a good show. I am,’ says Klara. ‘I’m trying to be a good mother. I want to be a success. But you don’t know what it’s like in my head. You don’t know what I’ve lost.’
‘I don’t know what you’ve lost? Do you know – do you have any idea – what happened in my country?’ Raj wipes his eyes with the heel of his free hand. ‘Your dad had a business, a family. You still have a mom and a sister and a doctor big brother. My dad picked trash; my mom died so young I can’t remember her. Amit died in ’85 on a plane, minutes from Bombay, the first time he tried to go home. Your family had it good. They have it good.’
‘I know how difficult your life has been,’ Klara whispers. ‘I never meant to minimize that. But my brother died. My father died. They didn’t have it good.’
‘Why? ’Cause they didn’t live till ninety? Think about what they had while they were here. People like me, on the other hand – we hang on by our teeth, and if we’re really, really lucky, if we’re fucking exceptional, we get somewhere. But you can always be airlifted out.’ Raj shakes his head. ‘Jesus, Klara. Why do you think I don’t talk to you about my problems, real problems? It’s ’cause you can’t take it. You don’t have space in your head for anyone’s problems but yours.’
‘That’s an awful thing to say.’
‘But is it true?’
Klara can’t speak; her brain is tangled, wires crossed, the monitor shutting down. Raj checks Ruby’s diaper and reties the laces on her tiny shoes. He takes the diaper bag from Klara’s shoulder and walks to the bathroom door.
‘I swear to God, Klara, I thought you were getting better. Soon as the health insurance comes through, soon as we get a day off, I’m taking you to see somebody. You can’t lose it now,’ he says. ‘We’re too close.’
December 28th, 1990. If the woman is right, Klara has four days to live. If the woman is right, she’ll die on opening night.
There must be a loophole, a secret trapdoor. She’s a magician, goddammit. All she has to do is find the fucking trapdoor.
She takes a red ball to bed and plays with it under the covers. She’s figured out how to turn it into a strawberry. A French drop from the right hand to the left makes the ball disappear. Then she moves her left hand over her right. When she does a shuttle pass and opens her left fist again, there’s the cool, fragrant fruit. She eats each strawberry and tucks their green stems under the mattress. Then she slips out of the RV.
It’s black, black night, but it must be over ninety degrees. She can hear people moving around in their campers: showering and cooking, eating and arguing, yelps from the teenage couple in the Gulf Stream who are constantly having sex. Everywhere, there’s life: rattling in tin cans, trying to get out.
She walks to the pool. It’s shaped like a kidney bean and glows an acid, unearthly blue. There are no pool chairs – the manager claims they only get stolen – so Klara stands at the deep end. She takes off her tank and shorts, letting them fall in a clump. Her stomach is still soft and creped from Ruby. When she removes her underwear, her pubic hair seems to bloom.
She jumps.
The water surrounds her like a membrane. Klara’s feet look nearer than they are, and her arms seem to bend. The pool appears shallower than eight feet, though she knows this is an illusion. Refraction, it’s called: light bends when it enters a new medium. But the human brain is programmed to assume that light travels in straight lines. What she sees is different than what’s there.
She’s heard the same thing about stars: they appear to twinkle when light, viewed through earth’s atmosphere, becomes bent. The human eye processes the movement as absence. But the light is always there.
Klara breaks through the water. She gasps.
Perhaps the point is not to resist death. Perhaps the point is that there’s no such thing. If Simon and Saul are contacting Klara, then consciousness survives the death of the body. If consciousness survives the death of the body, then everything she’s been told about death isn’t true. And if everything she’s been told about death isn’t true, maybe death is not death at all.
She turns onto her back and floats. If the woman is right, if she could see Simon’s death in 1969, then there’s magic in the world: some strange, shimmering knowledge in the very heart of the unknowable. It doesn’t matter whether or when Klara dies; she can communicate with Ruby just as she does with Simon now. She can cross boundaries, like she always wanted to.
She can be the bridge.