“What are you doing?” Simon asks—anything to keep his brother on the phone.
“I’m in medical school. I just got home from class.”
Simon pictures it: doors whooshing open and shut, young people walking with backpacks. The thought comforts him so deeply that he feels almost able to fall asleep. With his nerve pain and his twitching, he spends most nights awake.
“Simon?” Daniel asks, softening. “Is there anything I can do?”
“No,” Simon says, “there’s nothing.” He wonders if Daniel is relieved when he hangs up.
• • •
June 13th. Two of the men on Simon’s hall died in the night. His new roommate—a Hmong boy in glasses who keeps asking for his mother—can’t be older than seventeen.
“There was a woman,” Simon tells Robert, perched beside him as always. “She told me when I’d die.”
“A woman?” Robert scoots closer. “What woman, baby? A nurse?”
Simon is light-headed. They’ve been giving him morphine for the nerve pain. “No, not a nurse—a woman. She came to New York. When I was a kid.”
“Sy.” Klara looks up from her chair, where she is stirring a yogurt for him. “Please don’t.”
Robert keeps his eyes on Simon. “And she told you—what? What do you remember?”
What does he remember? A narrow door. A bronze number swinging on its hinge. He remembers the filthiness of the apartment, which surprised him; he had imagined a scene of tranquility, as might appear around the Buddha. He remembers a stack of playing cards from which the woman asked him to pick four. He remembers the cards he chose—four spades, all of them black—and the hideous shock of the date she gave him. He remembers stumbling down the fire escape, his palm clammy on the railing. He remembers that she never asked for money.
“I always knew it,” he says. “I always knew I’d die young. That’s why I did what I did.”
“Why you did what?” asks Robert.
Simon lifts a finger. “Why I left Ma. For one thing.”
He puts a second finger out but loses his train of thought. Talking feels like trying to reach the surface of an ocean. More and more, it’s like he’s drifting toward the bottom, like he knows what’s down there, though he can’t explain it to anyone on land.
“Hush,” says Robert, smoothing the hair off his forehead. “It doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters.”
“No. You don’t understand.” Simon dog-paddles; he gulps. It is urgent, that he say this. “Everything does.”
When Robert leaves to use the bathroom, Klara comes to Simon’s cot. The skin beneath her eyes is swollen.
She says, “Will I ever find someone I love as much as you?”
She scoots into bed beside him. He’s become so thin that they both fit easily in the hospital’s twin.
“Please,” says Simon: her words, when they stood on the roof as the sun rose, when they stood at the very beginning. “You’ll find someone you love much more.”
“No,” gasps Klara. “I won’t.” She lays her head on Simon’s pillow. When she turns to look at him, her hair falls over his collarbone. “What did she tell you?”
What does it matter, now? “Sunday,” Simon says.
“Oh, Sy.” There is a strangled cry, like something that would come from a chained dog. Klara puts a palm over her mouth when she realizes it’s hers. “I wish—I wish . . .”
“Don’t wish it. Look what she gave me.”
“This!” says Klara, looking at the lesions on his arms, his sharp ribs. Even his blond mane has thinned: after an aide helps him bathe, the drain is matted with curls.
“No,” says Simon, “this,” and he points at the window. “I would never have come to San Francisco if it weren’t for her. I wouldn’t have met Robert. I’d never have learned how to dance. I’d probably still be home, waiting for my life to begin.”
He’s angry with the disease. He rages at the disease. For so long, he hated the woman, too. How, he wondered, could she give such a terrible fortune to a child? But now he thinks of her differently, like a second mother or a god, she who showed him the door and said: Go.
Klara looks paralyzed. Simon remembers the expression he saw on her face after they moved to San Francisco, that eerie combination of irritation and indulgence, and he realizes why it disturbed him. She reminded him of the woman: counting down, watching him. Inside him a bud of love for his sister breaks open. He thinks of her on the rooftop—how she stood at the edge and spoke without looking at him. Give me one good reason why you shouldn’t start your life.
“You aren’t surprised that it’s Sunday,” Simon says. “You knew all along.”
“Your date,” Klara whispers. “You said it was young. I wanted you to have everything you’ve ever wanted.”
Simon squeezes Klara’s hand. Her palm is fleshy, a healthy pink. “But I do,” he says.
• • •
Sometimes, Klara leaves to let Simon and Robert be alone. When they’re too tired to do anything else, they watch videos, rented from the San Francisco Public Library, of the great male dancers: Nureyev, Baryshnikov, Nijinsky. One of the Shanti Project volunteers wheels the television in from the community room, and Robert lies with Simon in his cot.
Simon stares at him. How lucky I was to know you. He fears for Robert’s future.
“If he gets it,” Simon tells Klara, “he has to get into the trial. Promise me, Klara—promise me you’ll make sure.”
Word has spread throughout the corridor about an experimental medication that showed promise in Africa.
“Okay, Sy,” Klara whispers. “I promise. I’ll try.”
Why, in his years with Robert, has he had such trouble expressing love? As the days become longer, Simon says it over and over: I love you, I love you, that call and response, as essential to the body as food or breath. It is only when he hears Robert’s reply that his pulse slows, his eyes close, and he is able, at last, to sleep.
PART TWO
Proteus
1982–1991
Klara
10.
Klara can turn a black scarf into a single red rose and an ace into a queen. She can produce dimes from pennies and quarters from dimes and dollars from nothing but air. She can do the Hermann pass, the Thurston throw, the rising-card illusion, and the Back Palm. She is expert in the classic cup-and-ball routine, passed from the Canadian master Dai Vernon to Ilya Hlavacek and then to her: a dizzying, dazzling optical illusion in which an empty silver cup is filled with balls and dice and then, finally, one full, perfect lemon.
What she cannot do—what she will never stop trying to do—is bring her brother back.
• • •
When Klara arrives for a gig, her first task is to rig the space for the Jaws of Life. It isn’t easy to find nightclubs with high ceilings, so she also performs in dinner theaters and concert halls, and occasionally, as an independent contractor with a small circus in Berkeley. Still, she prefers clubs for their smokiness and dark moods, for the fact that she can work them alone, and because they are populated by adults, the people for whom she prefers to perform. Most adults claim not to believe in magic, but Klara knows better. Why else would anyone play at permanence—fall in love, have children, buy a house—in the face of all evidence there’s no such thing? The trick is not to convert them. The trick is to get them to admit it.
She brings her tools in a bulging duffel bag: drop line and ascension rope, wrench and clamps, swivel mouthpiece, sash cord. Ilya taught her that every rig is different, so Klara assesses the height of the ceiling, the width of the stage, the style and strength of the battens. There is no gap between failure and success—the timing is perfect or it is disastrous—and her pulse trills as she lashes the ascension rope to the batten from a ladder, as she wraps it thrice with sash cord and puts a safety break on the reverse rope. On st
age, she measures sixty-nine inches up from the floor: her own five feet six inches, plus seven for her feet when pointed, and a two-inch clearance to the ground.
She started performing the Breakaway two years ago. An assistant pulls the rope until Klara hovers at the ceiling with the bit in her mouth. But instead of floating back down, as she did in her early shows, she plunges when the rope is released. The audience always believes it’s an accident, and there are gasps, sometimes screams, until she jerks to a stop. By now, she’s almost used to the way her jaw jolts as it absorbs the weight of her body, to the whiplash snap of her neck and the sting in her eyes, nose, and ears. All she can see is the hot white of the lights until the rope is lowered inches more and her feet touch down. When she lifts her head and spits the bit into her palm, she sees the audience for the first time, their faces slack with wonder.
“I love you all,” she whispers, bowing—these words inspired by Howard Thurston, who repeated them before each show, standing behind the curtain as the overture swelled. “I love you all, I love you all, I love you all.”
11.
On an unusually cold night in February, 1988, Klara stands onstage at the Committee, a Cabaret theater on Broadway that is typically populated by a comedy troupe of the same name. This Monday, they’ve rented it to Klara, who paid more to perform there than she’ll ever make back. She’s put a business card on every table—The Immortalist, the cards read—but the audience is sparse, guys who filtered over from the Condor and the Lusty Lady or are headed there afterward. Klara is witty in the cup-and-ball act, but nobody’s interested in anything but the Breakaway, and even that has lost its novelty. “Enough magic, sweetheart,” someone shouts. “Lemme see your tits!” When her act is over and a burlesque troupe begins to set up, Klara puts on the long, black duster she wears on performance nights and walks to the bar. She lifts a leather wallet from the heckler’s pocket on her way to the ladies’ room and slips it back, empty of cash, on her return.
“Hey.”
Her stomach drops. She spins, expecting to see a freckled face and whiskey-colored eyes, a uniform and a badge, but instead she’s faced with a tall man in a T-shirt, loose jeans, and work boots, a man who puts up his hands in surrender.
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says, but now Klara is staring at his light brown skin and shiny, shoulder-length black hair, both of which she’s sure she’s seen before.
“You’re familiar.”
“I’m Raj.”
“Raj.” And the light bulb. “Raj! My God—Teddy’s roommate. Baksheesh Khalsa’s, I mean,” she adds, remembering Baksheesh Khalsa’s long hair and steel bracelet.
Raj laughs. “I never liked that kid. What kind of white guy up and starts wearing a turban?”
“The kind who hangs in the Haight, I guess.”
“They’re all gone now. They work in Silicon Valley, or they’re lawyers. With very short hair.”
Klara laughs. She likes Raj’s quickness and his eyes, which search her. People are filtering out of the theater; when the front door opens, she sees black night, speckled with stars and the neon marquees of the strip clubs. Ordinarily, after gigs, she rides the 30 Stockton to the Chinatown apartment where she lives alone.
“What are you doing right now?” she asks.
“Doing?” Raj’s mouth is thin lipped but expressive, with a sly curl. “Right now, I’m doing nothing. I have no plans at all.”
• • •
Ten years have passed. Can you believe it? Ten years! And you’re one of the first people I met in San Francisco.”
They sit in Vesuvio’s, an Italian café across the alley from City Lights. Klara likes it because it was once frequented by Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg, though it’s now occupied by a rowdy group of Australian tourists.
“And we’re still here,” says Raj.
“And we’re still here.” Klara has hazy images of Raj in the apartment where she and Simon stayed during their first days in the city: Raj reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on the couch or making pancakes in the kitchen with blond, long-limbed Susie, who sold flowers near the ballpark. “What happened to Susie?”
“Ran off with a Christian Spiritualist. I haven’t seen her since seventy-nine. You came with your brother, didn’t you? How’s he?”
Klara has been fingering her martini glass, squeezing the narrow stem, but now she looks up. “He’s dead.”
Raj coughs on his drink. “Dead? Fuck, Klara. I’m sorry. What of?”
“AIDS,” says Klara, and she is grateful, at least, to have a reason for it, a name, which did not exist until three months after Simon’s death. “He was twenty.”
“Fucking shit.” Raj shakes his head again. “It’s a bastard, AIDS. Took one of my friends last year.”
“What do you do?” asks Klara. Anything to change the subject.
“I’m a mechanic. I do car repair, mostly, but I’ve done construction, too. My dad wanted me to be a surgeon. Fat chance of that, I always told him, but he sent me here anyway. He stayed in Dharavi—slum of Bombay—half a million people in a mile, shit in the river, but it’s home.”
“That must have been hard, coming here without your dad,” Klara says, looking at him. He has thick eyebrows, but his features are delicate—high cheekbones that taper into a slender jaw and pointed chin. “How old were you?”
“Ten. I moved in with my dad’s cousin Amit. He was the smartest person in our family—got a scholarship to college and moved to California for med school in the sixties on a student visa. My dad wanted me to be just like him. I was never good at science, I don’t like fixing people, but I do like fixing things, so my dad, he was half-right about me; though half isn’t enough, I suppose.” He has a nervous laugh, the trace of an accent, though Klara has to listen hard to hear it. “And you? How long’ve you been doing this?”
“Mm,” says Klara. “Six years?”
In the beginning, the grind was electrifying, but now it exhausts her: rigging and striking on her own, riding BART to Berkeley in her duster while hip-hop blasts from somebody’s boom box. Home at one in the morning or three if she’s coming from the East Bay, soaking in the tub as the Chinese bakery on the first floor whirs to life. Nights spent sewing the goddamn sequins back onto her dress with the junky machine she’s too poor to replace—there are sequins between the couch cushions, sequins on the stairs, sequins in the shower drain.
One year ago, she was badly injured during the Breakaway. A girl she hired through the Chronicle let go of the rope without checking the safety break, and it slipped three feet on the batten. Klara didn’t clear the floor. When she came to, she was on her hands and knees, her skull throbbing as if she’d taken a punch and her feet puffing up like dark balloons. She didn’t have insurance, and the hospital fees nearly cleaned out the money she inherited from Saul. She spent six weeks in a boot, raging. For the past year, she’s only worked with a nineteen-year-old boy from the circus, but he’s leaving in March to join Barnum.
“It makes you happy, I see,” says Raj. He’s grinning.
“Oh.” Klara smiles. “It did. It does. But I’m tired. It’s hard to do it alone. And it’s hard to get bookings. There are only so many venues that’ll hire me, and there’s only so many times they’ll do it—you perform in the same place for years, word gets around, the hype swells and then it dies and you’re still there, you know, hanging from a rope by your teeth.”
“I liked that part, the rope trick. What’s your secret?”
“There’s no secret.” Klara shrugs. “You just hold on.”
“Impressive.” Raj raises his eyebrows. “You get nervous?”
“Less than I used to, and only before. It’s the anticipation; I’m backstage and I feel . . . stage fright, I suppose, but it’s more than that, it’s excitement—the knowledge that I’m about to show people something they’ve never seen before. That I might cha
nge the way they see the world, if only for an hour.” She frowns. “I don’t feel nervous before the scarf tricks, or the cup and ball. That’s what I was raised on, but nobody likes it as much as the Breakaway.”
“Why don’t you change the act, then? Cut the small stuff, go big time?”
“It’d be complicated. I’d need equipment and a real, full-time assistant. I’d have to find a way to maneuver bigger props. Plus, my favorite acts, the ones I’ve only read about in books? Well, I’d have to figure them out. As a species, magicians are pretty tight-lipped.”
“Pretend, then: You can do anything. What do you do?”
“Anything? God.” Klara grins. “DeKolta’s Vanishing Birdcage, for one. He raised a cage in the air with a parrot inside it and then—boom!—it disappeared. I know it must have gone up his sleeve, but I’ve never been able to figure out how.”
“It must have been collapsible. The bars—were they jointed? Thicker at the middle than they were at the ends?”
“I don’t know,” says Klara, but now she’s flushing, talking fast. “Then there’s the Proteus cabinet. It’s a small closet, upright with tall legs on casters, so the audience knows you can’t come and go through a trapdoor. An assistant turns the cabinet around, opens the doors and closes them, and that’s when a knock comes from inside. The doors open, and there you are.”
“Mirrors,” says Raj. “Viewers don’t see the surface. They look through it, to whatever object’s being reflected.”
“Sure, I know that much. But it’s all angles; the geometry has to be perfect, and that’s the trick of it—the math.” She’s finished her drink, but for once, she doesn’t notice. “The act I’d really want to do, though, my all-time favorite, is called Second Sight. It was invented by a magician named Charles Morritt. Audience members gave him certain objects—a gold watch, say, or a cigarette case—and his assistant, who was blindfolded, identified them. Other magicians have done it since, with patter—you know, ‘Yes, here’s an interesting object, please hand it over,’ which was obviously some sort of code—but all Morritt said was ‘Yes, thank you,’ every time. He kept the secret till he died.”