The Confabulist

  Now, recalling this moment that never happened, I want to make myself answer the phone. It doesn’t matter why Clara’s calling. Even if it is to scream at me, to berate me for all my failings and transgressions, it would be worth it to hear her voice. It doesn’t matter that it’s only my imagination.

  “The past is the past,” Alice says, and I remember where I am.

  I’m not sure how to answer her. Nothing is in the past for me. Because I remember it in the present, it’s in my head right now, though it’s always reconstructed. And reconstruction can’t be trusted. I can’t be trusted. None of us can.

  Houdini’s audience saw an elephant disappear. That’s what they remembered. They’d remember it moments after it happened, weeks after it happened, and years after it happened.

  But Jennie the elephant never went anywhere. She went up a ramp into a box. The box was rotated a quarter turn and a curtain was drawn back, revealing an open circle with bars on it. Through this circle they were able to see the inside of the box and the backdrop on the stage behind the box.

  Houdini was employing a trick that magicians had been using for a hundred years. It was a mirror. Jennie and her trainer walked into the box and stood behind an angled mirror that reflected the opposite half of the box and the background. They saw half an empty box and its reflection. That’s all.

  Because the audience saw Jennie go into the box, and they saw, or thought they saw, an empty box, what they reconstructed was a disappearing elephant. Something they knew to be impossible but nevertheless believed. It’s what they wanted.

  I know what I saw in Alice’s father, what sort of man he was. He was a fool. He was a womanizer. He thought he loved his mother—what he really loved was how she made him feel about himself. When she died, he grieved not for her but for himself, for the loss of that version of the man he deep down knew he wasn’t. He wanted people to think he was a brave man. At his core he was a coward. He betrayed the woman who loved him, and he betrayed himself. He was not fit to be a father. She might know all this already. But I have never told her. And before I am gone from myself, I need to tell her this, from my own mouth, in my own words. A confession.

  “Alice,” I say, “I have to tell you what really happened. It’s important.”

  “I don’t think it is.”

  If we have our three times, if there is the past, the present, and the future, then what purpose does the past serve? In the present we experience all sorts of situations, all of them requiring something of us. We need to react in a way that keeps us whole, keeps us from happily racing out into traffic. Without some sort of past, the present would paralyze us.

  But does the past change who we are? It may change how Alice feels about her life, but not necessarily for the better. I could tell everyone who saw the elephant disappear in front of them at the Hippodrome that it was just a mirror and some clever physics, but would that make their lives better? Would the reconstruction of their reconstruction be more truthful or of more value to them? Because at the end of the past and the present is the future. It never really comes but it’s there all the same, this supposed place we will someday get to. But the future is either our own death or the existence of magic.

  My mind is beginning to buzz again, and I’m in danger of becoming overwhelmed.

  “Martin?” she says, placing her hand on my arm. I flinch and she pulls it back.

  “I don’t know,” I say. My hands are shaking, and I’m speaking in a voice I haven’t used in a long time. I can’t figure out what I need to say. “I don’t know what it will do. But soon it will be gone. I can’t keep these memories safe, that’s what Dr. Korsakoff has told me. And this story, it’s your past. It’s all I have to offer you.”

  “Okay,” she says. “I understand. Go ahead.” There’s that face that is so reassuring.

  “I don’t know where to start.”

  She takes my hand. Her fingers are soft. “Start at the beginning.”

  I take a slow breath and let the buzzing in my ears subside. I will tell her everything as I know it to be, and will not leave anything out. She may not like what she learns, but I will have to accept that as it comes.

  “It is a constant struggle not to become the thing you hate most,” I begin.

  MARTIN STRAUSS

  1927

  THE ANSWER WAS INSIDE A NONDESCRIPT BUILDING NESTLED against the elevated train at the corner of Third Avenue and 48th Street in Manhattan. According to his book, this was where Houdini was hiding.

  It was a rundown building in a lower-class Irish neighbourhood, the sort of place where he could blend in with a minimal disguise. The people here would be too busy working to pay much attention to a man who kept to himself and wore his hat low.

  His leather book was in my inside pocket. I’d decoded each and every page into another book that I hadn’t brought with me. It was mostly a list of names, some that I recognized, like President Coolidge and Prime Minister King, and many that I didn’t. After each name was a medium’s name and a series of dates. None of it made much sense until the final few pages. After reading, I understood Houdini had amassed incriminating files on some of the world’s most powerful men, and he had faked his own death to stay a step ahead of them. The final line of the book was the address of this building.

  I stood on the front steps, reached out, and turned the doorknob. It was unlocked, which surprised me, but then again Houdini likely wasn’t much for locks. He knew better than anyone how little resistance they offered.

  I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, trying to make as little noise as possible. The only advantage I had was that Houdini didn’t know I was coming, or if he did, he didn’t know when. On the ground floor was a sitting room and a makeshift kitchen, unwashed dishes mounded in the sink. There was a cup of coffee on the counter, still warm. A copy of the previous day’s newspaper lay open at a small table.

  There was a loud clatter above me, followed by the sound of muffled voices. My first instinct was to look for a place to hide, but then I remembered I’d come there for a reason and instead went to the staircase. The stairs were creaky and it took some effort to ascend them quietly. At the top was a door which was ajar. I peered in, apprehensive. All I could make out was a large stack of boxes and a wooden packing crate. I heard at least two distinct voices.

  “You’ve made this all far more difficult than it needed to be,” a voice said.

  I pushed the door open a few more inches. A tall man with his back to me had one of the boxes open and was riffling through it. He was crouched down in the middle of the room, pulling papers out of the box with one hand, a revolver in his other hand.

  I looked across the room and saw Houdini, thinner than when I had last seen him. He was tied to a chair and his shirt was torn.

  A smart man would have turned and crept back down the stairs and out of the building. Whatever was going on in that room meant that the people who had been looking for me were no longer interested now that they had Houdini.

  I was not a smart man. I looked around the room for something to use as a weapon and saw, on top of one of several stacks of boxes, an ancient-looking pistol with an ivory-inlaid handle. As I stepped into the room and picked up the gun Houdini saw me. He leaned forward in his chair and in a needlessly loud voice shouted at the kneeling man.

  “Tell Wilkie that for every file in this room I have a copy hidden elsewhere. Unless I am released you’ll never find where.”

  The man looked up at Houdini. “I already have my instructions.”

  Each step I took seemed like leaping a canyon. I knew I only had so much time to get to him before he saw me, but I dared not go too quickly for fear of making noise.

  “You won’t get away with this!” Houdini said.

  The man laughed. “Of course I will. It happens all the time.”

  I gripped the barrel of the gun and swung the stock down hard onto the back of the man’s head. He slumped forward and rolled onto his back, unconscious.
It was John G. Nemesis, his face marred by a fresh scar from when I’d smashed him with the beer mug.

  Houdini stood and shrugged off the ropes binding him like he was stepping out of a robe. He bent down, picked up a section of rope, and rushed toward Nemesis, rolling him over onto his stomach. In a few seconds he’d secured his hands behind his back with a series of knots so complicated I could barely make out how he tied them.

  “Allow me to introduce you to Mr. Findlay, though you may know him by a different name.”

  I was unable to say anything.

  Houdini was smaller than I remembered. “Forgive me, Mr. Strauss. I’m sure you’re nothing if not confused. All will be explained in a moment. In the meantime, let’s get our friend here more secure—people don’t stay unconscious in real life for as long as they do in films.”

  We each took a shoulder and dragged Nemesis to the chair, where Houdini trussed him up as quickly as he’d escaped his own bonds.

  “I’ll have Grigoriev deal with him later,” he said, standing back to admire his work. He turned to me. “I’m aware you and my Russian friend have met,” he said. “I’m aware of all that’s happened to you lately.”

  “Grigoriev’s dead,” I said.

  He stepped back, shaken. “Are you sure?”

  “I found him shot in his car three days ago.”

  Houdini went to the window and stared out. When he spoke, his voice was soft and desolate. “I underestimated them.”

  I took in the full scope of the room for the first time. There were more than fifteen boxes stacked against one wall next to a large fireplace. Next to that were six or so packing crates and as many or more travelling trunks with Houdini’s name stamped on them. In one corner was a wood cabinet about three and a half feet tall with a sloping hinged lid. A hole was cut in the middle of the lid and there was also one on each side. It looked to me like it had been designed to hold a person. There were a few other props beside it, including a milk can, and on the other side of the room was the chair that Nemesis was tied to and another empty chair.

  “You’re alive,” I said.

  “Obviously.”

  “But you made the world believe you were dead.”

  “Houdini is dead.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “I don’t understand any of this.” Houdini turned around. “No, you don’t.”

  I looked at the gun in my hand. It seemed needlessly ornate. “Is this thing loaded?”

  “Of course it is.”

  I pointed it at him. “Tell me everything. Start at the beginning.”

  Houdini walked across the room to the empty chair. He pulled it along the floor, away from Nemesis, and slumped into it. “All right. It began with a lie told to Harold Osbourne in Garnett, Kansas.”

  When he was finished Houdini rose from his chair and went to the fireplace. He bent down and held a match to a pyramid of wood and newspaper that was set up there, and in a few seconds had a fire going. He opened the nearest box and dropped its contents into the flames.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. I’d lowered the gun while Houdini was telling his story, but didn’t want to put it down with Findlay or Nemesis or whatever his name really was in the room, tied up or not.

  “It’s done,” he said. “I’ve lost. It’s time to disappear.”

  “You’re already dead, as far as anyone knows.”

  He watched the flames as though hypnotized. “It is entirely possible for two seemingly contradictory things to be at once true. Houdini is dead. But Houdini was just an invention. He was never real. Wilkie knows Ehrich Weiss is alive, it seems.”

  He picked up another box and shook its contents into the fire.

  “You have a daughter,” I said.

  My mouth was dry and the growing heat the fireplace was throwing into the room wasn’t helpful.

  “Her name is Alice.”

  Houdini said nothing. He didn’t even acknowledge that I had said her name. I became angry. How could he just pretend something had never happened? That someone didn’t exist?

  “Why haven’t you ever been a father to her?”

  Houdini stared at me, his eyes dark.

  “I was never cut out to be anyone’s father.”

  “That’s not a choice you get to make.”

  “Everything is a choice.”

  He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out an envelope. He strode toward me with it extended. As he got close I recognized my father’s distinctive handwriting.

  “Where did you get that?”

  “You dropped it after you punched me. Take it.”

  I kept my hand at my side.

  “Take it.” He held the letter out, insistent. I took it from him, then crossed the room and threw it in the fire. I didn’t want to read it again.

  “You can deny it all you want,” Houdini said. “That won’t bring her back.”

  “I know that.”

  “The dead are gone. My mother’s not coming back. Grigoriev’s not coming back. Clara is not coming back.”

  I stepped back. He knew about Clara. How did this man know so much about my life? How did he seemingly know every terrible thing I’d ever done, everybody I loved? He had read the letter, obviously. He knew that it was from her, telling me she was sick, asking me to come and see her. And he knew that I had gone, had rushed to the hospital, but she was gone.

  “Clara isn’t dead.” I swallowed, hoping that this was true.

  “Isn’t she? I think you know better than that.” He said this with such condescension that I wanted to pull the pistol’s trigger and shoot him.

  “Bess isn’t dead either,” I said. “Except to you.”

  At the mention of Bess’s name Houdini wilted. I kept at him.

  “I went and saw her. She was returning love letters to the women who wrote them. She knows what kind of man you were.”

  Houdini remained silent.

  “Why did you drag me into this?”

  Houdini turned to look at me, his eyes watering from the smoke. “To buy me time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “To protect her. You were always a decoy.”

  I took the book out of my pocket. “And this?”

  “I slipped it into your pocket the night you punched me. They were supposed to take it from you weeks ago. It was supposed to be the last piece of the puzzle for them, the thing that would finally convince them they were done with Houdini. Do you really think I’d have put anything important in a keyword code? A child could crack one of those. But you got the better of our friend here.”

  Houdini returned to the fire. He fuelled it with another box and retrieved a jerry can from beside the fireplace, unscrewed the lid, and poured what appeared to be gasoline onto the fire. A ball of flame momentarily threatened to escape the limits of the fireplace but subsided.

  The man in the chair stirred. A moan escaped his lips, catching Houdini’s attention. He put down the canister.

  “You see this?” he said, gesturing to the fire. “It’s over. I’m burning everything.”

  When he got no response, only a glassy stare, Houdini sprinted across the room. “That’s how you want it to be, Findlay? You’ve spent a quarter of a century chasing me around, a lurking spectre.” He hit Findlay hard across the face with the back of his hand. Findlay’s eyes rolled back and a trickle of blood ran down his chin, but he stayed conscious.

  “I hand you and Wilkie a rube to uncover and you can’t even do that,” Houdini said.

  “Grigoriev stopped me from going to the Crandons,” I said.

  Houdini turned and glared at me. “He shouldn’t have done that.”

  Houdini returned to the fireplace and fed it more files. He picked up the gasoline again but didn’t put any on the fire. Sweat poured down his face and his shirt was blackened and stained, but he didn’t seem to notice the heat. He put the gasoline down and stepped away from the fireplace, moving toward the pile of remaining boxes.

  “I’m sorry,
Martin. I wish it didn’t have to be this way.”

  I believed him. It seems odd to me now that I did, but he seemed sincere. How much does that matter? I wondered. Does being genuinely sorry for something make a difference?

  Then I saw his right hand. He raised Findlay’s gun at me and pointed it at my chest.

  “What are you doing?”

  He swung his arm away from me and pulled the trigger. The gun recoiled and filled the room with thunder. Findlay’s chair fell backward and to the side. He aimed the gun back at me.

  “I’m sorry, Martin. I don’t want to do this. But you know everything. You’re my last link to the past. Neither Houdini nor Ehrich Weiss can die as long as you’re alive.”

  “Please don’t.”

  He shook his head and sobbed, but he didn’t lower the gun. I thought of Clara, and how I would never see her again. What would our life had been like if I had done something else in the next moment, anything else? Would we have married, raised kids, grown old? She would have come to depend on me to have answers, as someone who knew how to feel about what was happening. My children would have deserved a father who was capable of properly loving them. Standing there with a gun pointed at me by the most famous man no one knew was alive, I wished that I could have been that person. But I knew I wasn’t. Punching Houdini hadn’t ruined anything for me that I wasn’t going to ruin on my own.

  What happened next is a blur. It felt like we stood there for hours with him working up the nerve to pull the trigger and me trying to think of some way out. Then there was an explosion and the can of gasoline spewed forth an arcing column of fire. I still held the gun I’d used to knock Findlay out, and without thinking I raised it and shot Houdini in the heart.