The Confabulist

  “I can’t remember,” I said.

  “Nonsense. You can always remember. It might not be true, but you can always remember.”

  I tried to recall what I had done that day. “I listened to the radiator.”

  “Ah, yes. Did you know that a single bite of a radiator contains enough venom to kill a hundred men?”

  I did not. Wait, this wasn’t right. “I think you mean the inland taipan.”

  “Of course. Despite this, though, there are no recorded fatalities as a result of its bite. It’s very shy. Like you.”

  “I’m not shy, I’m cautious.”

  “You are cautious. Which is why you probably have taken note that your door has been opened.”

  I told myself that this was just a dream, but in an instant my mother was gone and I was awake. I lay still, keeping my breathing slow and deep, and listened. I heard nothing, and then, directly to my right, between my bed and the small desk, the floor creaked. Someone was in my room.

  “I know you’re awake.” A young woman’s voice, confident and angry, careened out of the darkness.

  She flicked on the light and I was blinded.

  “I only want to know why you did it.” The voice belonged to a young woman, maybe sixteen or seventeen. She was on the small side but clearly strong. She wore a black coat that went down to her feet, and had tied her thin black hair back with a ribbon. She wasn’t dressed like a typical assassin, I thought, and then reconsidered, accounting for the fact that I had no idea what an assassin wore, aside from what I’d read in detective novels, which I was beginning to suspect were not the most reliable sources of information.

  I gave her the only answer I could. “It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t mean for it to happen like that.”

  This seemed to surprise her. She didn’t say anything.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I picked the lock.” She smiled, proud of herself.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Alice. Alice Weiss.”

  “That’s an interesting name,” I said. Weiss. Could it be?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “This isn’t at all what I thought it would be like.”

  She pulled forward the shabby wooden chair and sat. She relaxed a little, but I could feel her tension and uncertainty. Her eyes wandered the room, settling back on me as I gathered enough courage to sit up in bed.

  “How did you think it would be?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Not like this. This is all so …”

  Neither of us spoke. The night became loud again.

  “What is it you want?” I asked.

  This wasn’t going to plan for her. I sympathized—nothing had gone according to plan for me either. She folded her hands in her lap. “I’d like to know what happened.”

  She was who I suspected she was. Alice Weiss. Harry Houdini’s daughter. I knew he and Bess didn’t have any children, so she must have a different mother. She had tracked me down because I had killed her father. She wanted answers. I wasn’t sure I could give her any.

  “I don’t know how to tell you what happened. It was an accident.”

  “I know. Everyone knows you didn’t mean it.” She said this like it was an insult.

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because you owe me answers. You made all this happen. You ruined everything. I want you to fix it.” Her head drooped and she sat still, as though checking her hands to see if they still held something important.

  I didn’t answer her. I couldn’t. There was no insight I could offer, having never known the man. I’d killed him, that’s all. If it weren’t for me, then maybe she could have come to know him.

  “It is a hard thing to grow up without a father,” I said. “I understand that your lack of a father is my fault. I had a father, though, and it’s possible you were better off. Sometimes an absent father is better.”

  Alice seemed to be thinking about this. I remembered how Clara used to look when deep in thought. I missed her. Being alone with your thoughts can make you forget that the world is full of people with thoughts of their own. I should not have left the way I had.

  “That’s what my mother told me,” she said. “That my father was a good man, but what he was great at was disappearing.”

  “That sounds about right to me,” I answered.

  “Maybe it is,” she said. “But he was never there to begin with. You can’t disappear if you never appeared.”

  “What is it you want, then?”

  She got up from the chair. “You could start by helping me find him,” she said. For a moment it seemed as though she was going to say something else. She took one last long look at me before walking out the door. It clicked shut behind her and left me alone again, listening to the sound of the dark.

  Alice’s words rattled around my room for months. What did she mean? We both knew where her father was. I was the one who had put him there.

  By the spring my savings had run out and I was forced to find work. I got a job on a construction site using an alias. It was hard labour but I didn’t have to talk to anyone. I showed up, did my work, and went home.

  Every so often I’d open the small leather book I’d found in my pocket and leaf through it. It seemed to have come into my possession the night I punched Houdini. I knew I didn’t have it before then. The pages made no sense, a bunch of jumbled words with confused letters. I’d also begun to have the feeling that someone was observing me, following my every move. It was an odd feeling.

  I thought about Clara a lot. Constantly. For a while when I thought about her, it was in the present tense, still existent as part of my current reality. Soon, though, that began to fade. She became part of the past, a memory, and she ceased to live in my mind as anything other than a string of moments. But there was an ache there, a physical sorrow that increased the more she passed from substance into memory. For a while I could mitigate this by retreating to memory.

  There was one particular moment that I kept going back to. We were at the park, sitting on a bench, talking and watching people walk by. There were some birds milling about, hoping that we were the sort of people who brought birdseed for them, but we weren’t, and eventually they figured this out and left. Clara was wearing a white cardigan and a blue dress with flowers on it. The wind kept blowing her hair into her face, but was warm enough that she took off the cardigan and put it on the bench next to her. We talked in a roundabout way about nothing in particular: school, people we knew, things we liked and didn’t like. It was the sort of conversation people who haven’t known each other long but understand they will have many more conversations have, uncomplicated and almost lazy but also anticipatory. Eventually we got up and began to walk out of the park, and shortly Clara realized that she had left her cardigan on the bench. I jogged to get it, only a hundred yards back, and when I returned, hand outstretched with her prize, the look on her face was full of simple pleasure. My seemingly mundane gesture made her so happy. It was a strange math, how the size of an action corresponded to the outcome. At the time it didn’t seem particularly significant, but afterward this became the one moment out of all of them that I kept returning to.

  Whenever my mind went too far into this line of thinking, my mother would intrude into my consciousness.

  “You’re scared. You’re afraid there’s a darkness inside you that might escape. But the hiding you’re doing isn’t going to help, is it?”

  It wasn’t, but this was the price I had to pay for my actions. I had abandoned Clara, killed Houdini, disappeared without a trace. There must be some cost to this. “It’s like you said. Not everything is reversible.”

  “That’s true,” she said. “But almost everything is forgivable.”

  “How do you know if it is?”

  “You ask.”

  She was right. She was always right. But I couldn’t ask for Clara’s forgiveness, not now. Forgiveness is earned. What had I done to earn anything? And I couldn’t ask Houdini?
??s forgiveness either. Alice, though, that might be possible. She’d asked me to try to fix things. It seemed to me she needed a memory of her father that would help her better understand herself. If I could give that to her, that might at least start me on the way back to Clara and the life I’d left.

  What could I give to Clara? The only firsthand knowledge I had of Houdini was the feel of his gut as my fist sank into it. But I could find someone who knew more. That person, I realized, was Bess Houdini. If there was one person alive who understood Houdini, it was her.

  Bess Houdini wasn’t hard to find. Her house in Harlem was a well-known landmark, its address in the papers. In a matter of days I had quit my job, emptied my room, and made the trip to New York. I rented an equally spare and desolate room on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, paying cash and using a false name. It felt better to be doing something active, but the feeling that I was being watched didn’t abate.

  MARTIN STRAUSS

  Present Day

  AND NOW I’M ANGRY AGAIN. THIS BENCH, DR. KORSAKOFF, my own mind—it all boils up. I want to hit something or scream or pick up the trash can and throw it through the automatic doors, sending pebbles of glass skittering across the lobby. I haven’t been this mad in years. Not since my father died, at least. No one could make me as angry as he did.

  Do we ever really get over the things that our parents do to us? There was no grand cataclysm that marked my childhood, but the sum total of it left an echo that is still here. My mother was everything gentle. She made things better, she fixed what went wrong, and she remains what I conjure when I think of goodness.

  My father was not a villain, though he did villainous things. He was cold, distant, and had no time for children. At his best, he was an actor playing a father. At his usual, he was a man who endured his children. At his worst, he resented us.

  He often appeared as though he wished he were elsewhere. He’d stare out the window, look at his watch, complain that we needed to go no matter where we were or where we had to be next. We were perpetually arriving early and leaving early, trying to keep up with his restless feeling that something was about to happen elsewhere. I imagine it exhausted my mother. I know it exhausted me.

  Until I started to become like him, at about the age of fourteen. I ceased being a mere hindrance to him and became an adversary. A young man has options in life an older man doesn’t. I would get out of our town, see the world, and do things he knew he would never do. My ambition diminished him, but I couldn’t see that. Every time he reacted to me with jealousy, I redoubled my efforts to become free of him.

  I should be going. There are all sorts of minor tasks I need to accomplish. I have a half-dozen books due back at the library. One of them is a new Houdini biography. I read these books on Houdini with great interest. A lot of them come remarkably close to the truth, but no one knows the story quite like me. I imagine that by now I might be the only one left alive who knows the truth, though it’s possible that there are details in some archive or government file that would lead a curious investigator to the correct conclusion. Either way, as far as I know I’ve read every single book ever published by Houdini or about Houdini, and no one’s got the whole story yet.

  Aside from the obvious reason, I’ve stayed interested in Houdini because of his escapes. He became the world’s most famous man in an era when it was hard to be world famous, because he was able to get out of the most impossible setups. Nothing could trap him. But of course this isn’t true—all of his escapes were manufactured. He never really escaped because he was never really confined. It only seemed like he was.

  My interest in magic has been lifelong; as a boy I was fascinated by any trick, no matter how poorly executed. My father laughed at this. He thought I was a fool, easily manipulated, but he wasn’t seeing what I saw. Even with the worst of magicians I saw wonder. It didn’t matter that I knew how the trick was done, or how inexpert their methods were. That wasn’t the point. They made me believe there was more to the world than I was able to see. Or better, that it was possible for multiple worlds to exist at once.

  An orderly in a white shirt and pants comes out the door and stops. He turns to look at me. He unnerves me. I can’t tell what he’s looking for. It’s possible he’s deciding whether to sit and maybe smoke a cigarette or eat his lunch on the empty half of my bench. He stares at me as though trying to figure out if I belong where I am. I’m afraid I can’t help him, as I no longer have any clear indication of my place in the world. My head begins to hum, like a mosquito has flown into my ear.

  His uniform makes him look like an ice cream man—all he needs is the little paper hat. I’d probably buy a Fudgsicle from him if he asked, but he gives me an uncomfortable feeling. I find myself hoping he doesn’t come over and sit. Thankfully he seems to have completed his scrutiny of me and goes back through the doors to whatever tasks await him.

  The hand is quicker than the eye. Now you see it, now you don’t. This is classic magician stage patter. It’s a lovely bit of misdirection, set up as a logical and provable statement. But the hand isn’t quicker than the eye at all. A magician knows this. And so does our own brain.

  Most of us, when trying to catch a ball, will place our hand ahead of where the ball is when we saw it. Part of this is us reacting to where we think the ball’s trajectory will best intersect our hand, but we overshoot even more than that, because it takes time, about two hundred milliseconds, for the information about the ball’s whereabouts to travel from our eye to our brain and then to the muscles that control our hand. Our brain knows this. It knows that by the time it’s told the hand to move to the correct location, it’s dealing with out-of-date information. The ball has moved. The conditions have changed. The trick is afoot.

  So the brain makes an unconscious logical assumption. If it didn’t, we’d be incapable of functioning within the world. That’s its job. But these unconscious rationales can also make us believe the impossible.

  In 1918 Harry Houdini made an elephant disappear onstage at the New York Hippodrome in front of more than five thousand people. A box about eight feet wide and high and twelve feet long was wheeled onstage. An elephant named Jennie was then led out by a trainer. The box was up off the ground on wheels, with the long side facing the audience. Jennie and her trainer walked up a ramp into the box and the doors were closed. The stagehands rotated the box a quarter turn so that the entrance was facing the audience.

  Houdini stared at the box and clapped his hands. A curtain was drawn back from a circular hole in the front of the box, and the back doors were opened, allowing the audience to see right through the box. Jennie was gone, Houdini said, “In an instant.”

  But it wasn’t an instant. It only seemed like one. In reality it took Houdini over seven minutes to make an elephant disappear.

  I made Alice’s father disappear by an entirely different method, but it was the same effect. We both turned something enormous into thin air. That night she first found me, she was trying to find out what her father was like. She was trying to add substance to a ghost.

  I know exactly what sort of man her father was. I’ve told her the barest details, I’ve told her facts, and I’ve told her mechanics. But I’ve never given her what she really wants to know. What he was like. Why he was absent.

  I can’t imagine what that’s like, given the almost constant presence my own parents have in my consciousness, even now, years after they’ve died. I didn’t see my father ever again after I left home, so when I finally found out he was dead, it wasn’t a shock. His ghost had been haunting me for years before he died.

  When I was about sixteen, we got in a fight. I don’t remember what it was about, but there was a moment when his arm was cocked, ready to backhand me across the face, but it never swung. I realized that I hadn’t flinched. I stood my ground, and then I understood that I could resist him. I might not win, but he would get as good as he gave. He seemed to come to the same conclusion.

  “You’re not worth it,??
? he said as he dropped his hand and walked away.

  My mother sat at the table, listening to the front door slam. She’d seen the entire exchange.

  For the first time in my life I felt powerful. “What a fool,” I said.

  My mother shook her head and got up. “You’re just like him,” she said, as though that wasn’t a bad thing.

  I remember thinking that, no, I wasn’t. I was the opposite of him. And to this day, I still think that. But I can’t discount the fact that my mother loved him just as much as she loved me. And I can’t discount that his genes make up half my being. I just don’t feel like him. But then again, I never really knew how it felt to be him—I only saw it from the outside.

  The urge to resist becoming my father has dominated my adult life. When in doubt I ask myself what he would have done and I do the opposite. It’s not even something I do consciously. He has infiltrated me to the core.

  Once, years ago, I asked Alice what her mother had told her about her father. “One moment he was there,” she said, “the kindest and gentlest man she’d ever met, and then he just disappeared. It was an illusion. He was someone else completely.”

  My rage is beginning to dissipate. Anger is a hard machine to maintain. It comes at the speed of light, and when it hits, it seems as though it will never leave you, but then it fades in a few exhales, and while it’s never completely gone it loses its power.

  I should have been more honest with Dr. Korsakoff. I have been having these false memories for a while, I know. What I don’t know is what to do about them.

  There are a few that keep coming, unbidden, and they seem so real. It’s frightening. There is one in particular. It’s early morning and I’m in bed. The room is cold, but I’ve kicked off the blankets. As I wake I feel the weight of someone else’s arm on my chest. I turn and look, see the arm is Clara’s. She’s asleep and there are lines in her face from the pillow. I can smell her, a mix of laundry soap and toothpaste. She’s not young anymore, but she’s still beautiful. I lie there, listening to her breathe, and I am overcome with the knowledge that one day either she or I will die; only one of us will be left, alone without the other. All the air is sucked out of the room and I feel like I’ve been shot into the vacuum of space though I haven’t moved from the bed. My sorrow is so enveloping that it’s physically painful. All I can think is that this can’t be right—the world could never be so cruel. Then Clara’s eyes open and she smiles at me, rubs my chest, and I feel myself warm like a child in front of a woodstove. I grow calm and content. Happy.