LITMIR.BIZ

      Meredith and I, along with Timmy and Tad and a group of shanghaied friends, stage an elaborate show in our living room every couple of years. We’re amateurs—not great, but getting good. We float tables and children around the house. We appear and we disappear, sometimes in balls of fire, sometimes in large boxes, sometimes right before the eyes of the audience. We dance. We sing. We eat razor blades. A few years ago, we balanced Timmy on the point of a sword, spun him around on it, and then watched the sword penetrate his slim little body. During one disastrous rehearsal, we nearly gave the kid a real-life appendectomy. In other mishaps, we have almost suffocated one of our female magicians, almost decapitated another, and almost burned the house down. Alas, show biz.

      As we prepare for each new show, our troupe of amateurs begins practicing about six months in advance, getting together every two weeks, putting in anywhere from three to seven hours of hard work at each session. There is a lot of tedium, a lot of frustration, and a lot of failure. (Again, much like writing stories.) Props stop functioning, threads break, secret doors don’t open, Timmy and Tad fall asleep backstage and need to be gently shaken and told it’s time to levitate.

      In general, the members of our cast have amiably tolerated the long hours and numbing repetition. Some of them, I’m quite sure, don’t really care much for magic, but they know I care, and so out of great generosity they’ve thrown themselves into a pursuit that others might find frivolous, childish, and more than a little bizarre. Real-life teachers dress up as showgirls. A nurse practitioner dresses up as a wealthy casino minx. For months on end, at considerable sacrifice, the members of our troupe gamely toil to master their miracles and to perform them with a measure of grace and elegance. It isn’t easy. Angles of vision need to be taken into account. Posture—keeping the shoulders level—can determine success or failure. Too much light, or too little light, can be the difference between applause and grim silence. Despite these stresses, and despite the enormous chunks of time stolen from their lives, the members of our cast have come to appreciate that which I find so beautiful in magic—those moments when a half-dozen colorful parasols appear out of nowhere in swift succession, or when a glass of Beaujolais vanishes beneath a silk cloth, or when the ace of diamonds appears at the tip of a switchblade.

      On show nights, as the living room fills up with ninety or so invited guests, our little troupe feels the jittery tension that any professional magician would feel. Backstage, we pace and mumble to ourselves. We rehearse moves in our heads. We feel dread fizzing up inside exhilaration. Although it’s only a living room magic show, we might as well be opening on Broadway or in Carnegie Hall or in a gilded theater on the Vegas strip.

      And so it begins. The music comes on and we make our way out into a make-believe world, into a dead-end desert casino, where some of us deal blackjack and never lose, and where some of us pull wads of cash from the air, and where a croupier shoots fire from his roulette wheel, and where love is won and lost, and where a cocktail waitress sings to a cowboy doing rope tricks, and where a bartender produces bottles of wine from his bare hands, and where silver balls float to the ceiling, and where Lady Luck sets off her fateful explosions on a long-ago New Year’s Eve out in the desert of West Texas. Briefly, at least, it all feels real. The magic is happening.

      Sixty-eight tricks later, it’s over. We blink and awaken from the dream.