Two weeks later, on April 13, 1973, after two rehearsals a day for twelve days, I made my debut as Jorge Gaspard’s assistant at The Bellatrix Theatre in Sydney. That night I wore a long black dress that shimmered with rhinestone chips, like stars. My hair fanned over my shoulders, dusted with sparkles. I had applied my makeup severely—eyeliner, shadow, mascara, lipstick—so it would stand out even at the back of the theater. I had to get used to walking rapidly in high heels, and also to dealing cards while wearing long velvet gloves. At different times onstage I wore a silver headband, a black domino studded with moonstones, and during the one part of the act in which I took center stage, a black silk blindfold that Gaspard applied nimbly from behind my chair.
The last time I had walked onto a stage wearing a costume and makeup was in a college production of The Bacchae, in Greek, in a cast of classics majors. And once, when I was asked to read a paper I wrote on Seneca’s Letters to the members of a lecture course, I discovered that, while my voice never quavered, addressing one hundred people made my hands shake terribly. When Gaspard and I were rehearsing in the cavernous theater with just a few stagehands present, these memories kept going through my head, making what I was about to do seem overwhelming in comparison. Gaspard, however, was blissfully unconcerned about my lack of stage experience.
“One, when you get onstage, your mind will be on other things and you’ll be too busy to be afraid; two, though you will obviously be more appealing to look at, after you receive the once-over, the audience will be focused on me; three, like the rest of us, you’re probably more vain than you would like to think and you will relish the spotlight.”
Opening night I was still dubious. I knew I had my part of the act down, and I was comfortable in my costume, but as the minutes ticked away in my tiny dressing room, my stomach coiled into knots, my mouth dry, I had the powerful urge to bolt the theater, lose myself in the night, and wait tables after all, safely, anonymously, somewhere in the immensity of Australia.
Once onstage, however, though I hated to admit it, I found that Gaspard was right: after following him out of the wings (“Jorge Gaspard—Mentalist Supreme” was his introduction; “assisted by the lovely Mala” was mine), I had to concentrate on the opening routine. And the audience did focus on him exclusively. And, yes, by the time we reached intermission, I felt a tug for the stage even as I left it. Not once had I faltered. When the following week we performed in a fancy nightclub in Melbourne, with a far smaller stage and the audience nearly upon us, my stomach knotted up again. But soon enough, whatever the venue, instead of feeling trepidation, I began looking forward to our performances.
The act was straightforward, and Gaspard played it with few variations. He didn’t like surprises, which was no small paradox in a performance that required so much audience participation—by its very nature a series of improvisational unknowns. But, as he told me, you must only seem to be improvising while actually controlling everything: when you were truly forced to improvise, the performance was in trouble. These tenets of his seemed hopelessly abstract until I saw them in action—for he was a consummate performer—and that helped make my job simpler.
He began with a short tour-de-force routine. Opening and shuffling a sealed deck, I distributed two playing cards each to ten different members of the audience. Gaspard asked these people to exchange their pairs of cards, randomly, not once, but twice. He then stared hard at each audience member in turn, and closing his eyes, correctly identified the cards they were holding.
For the centerpiece of the performance, I descended into the audience again and picked out a succession of people. While Gaspard sat with his back to us, I stood beside these people and announced their names and places of origin through a portable microphone. Then I would read aloud the questions they wrote down for him to answer. These were the only things the audience could hear me saying. What they didn’t hear were the subtler messages encoded in my matter-of-fact recitations. It was these messages that provided Gaspard with the raw material which he would expand and refine in “reading” these people’s minds.
The code had been passed along to him by his wife, Heléne. She in turn had learned it as a young woman from a mind reader in Lisbon during the Second World War. This mind reader, a Venetian who had fled the fascists, told Heléne that the code could be traced back to the clairvoyants who came out of Alexandria in medieval times, hid from the Crusaders on Cyprus, and then roamed the Mediterranean as carnival performers.
Gaspard taught me the code in a single week of intensive sessions at the outdoor café of our hotel in Sydney. Because of my facility with languages, and the memory skills that sustained it, I picked up the code easily, impressing Gaspard, who said it had taken him over a month to instruct his previous assistant. After first playing detective, examining a given audience member, I read his or her question aloud to Gaspard, employing certain key words and numbers, each with its own set of variables, and stressing or syncopating others in order to communicate my observations: the style of the person’s clothing; whether he wore a wedding ring, cheap or expensive jewelry and cologne; his visible scars, tics, and mannerisms; whether he bit his fingernails down, had a smoker’s wheeze, or alcohol on his breath; and, most importantly, who his companion was, along with all the same details about the latter. I always sought out people who obviously had a companion. For, while the rest of the audience focused on the person I had chosen, I could glean much crucial information about the companion that would help Gaspard to make his revealing—hopefully startling—pronouncements from the stage. Sometimes he answered their questions directly; other times, he used them as stepping stones to what he had extrapolated from my observations—especially when he couldn’t answer the questions with confidence.
For example, if a woman asked whether or not her husband really loved her, and I had already reported to Gaspard that she wore no wedding ring—the first thing I always looked for—and was twenty years old, in the company of an amused-looking young man, it was easy for Gaspard to reply, “He would—if you were married.” Equally easy were the questions meant to catch Gaspard out: a man asking if he would ever go bald when, as I detected, he was already wearing a toupee, or a woman inquiring how many children she was planning to have—when she was well past sixty. More difficult were the oblique questions: I’m thinking of the city in which my favorite composer was born, a woman wrote on her card. Can you identify it? Gaspard worked at deducing the questioner’s musical tastes from my description of her, insisting—while rubbing his forehead—that he required more information, until, snatching a couple of facts out of the air by way of my queries to the woman, he could nail down the city. As he told me that first night in Sydney, it worked out that for every twenty questioners, he successfully satisfied nineteen of them. “The twentieth,” he added drily, “is a good thing, anyway. It reassures the audience that you’re not tricking them.”
As for my own routine, it went like this. One week of every month, just before intermission, I took the spotlight for fifteen minutes. Soon enough, this became thirty minutes. Finally, the routine caught on so strongly that we doubled the number of our performances the week of the waning moon. Gaspard knew a good thing when he saw it. He first announced to the audience that I possessed a rare psychic skill, unlike any he had ever encountered. He offered no explanation beyond the vague—and darkly intoned—suggestion that my “telepathic powers were aligned to the movements of certain celestial bodies.” In fact, Gaspard knew nothing of my spider bite, nor did he have any idea that my “telepathic powers” had been amplified after a traumatic automobile accident. Once, when he probed rather insistently as to how and when I had become aware of my ability, I replied—improbably, and sharply—that I didn’t remember. He waited some time before asking again. To the audience he described in the simplest terms how I would demonstrate my skill.
“Mala will respond to six members of the audience—more than that would prove exhausting, considering the amount of psychic energy
she must expend.”
This was of course untrue, but Gaspard had told me it would add “spice”—one of his favorite expressions—to the routine.
“The six,” he continued after a pregnant pause, “will be drawn by lot, and one at a time will approach the stage, so as to be within twenty feet of Mala physically. Then she will relate the contents of a specific memory that is passing through that person’s mind at that instant. You may ask no questions of her.” He lowered his voice, and with a significant look scanned the audience from left to right. “Should you possess a memory that you do not wish to share, or that ought not to be shared publicly, do not allow it into your thoughts when you come before Mala. That said, understand that she will use her discretion before disclosing the contents of any memory.”
This provision was my idea, in case, as indeed would occasionally happen, someone purposely or otherwise called forth the memory of a graphic sex act or of some particularly gratuitous violence. Gaspard heartily approved of it, not because he wanted to spare my sensibilities, but because it added more spice. Still, some people summoned less sensational but incredibly painful personal memories, and I had more difficulty, in the time alloted me, in separating these out.
Once I concentrated on a person, his memories always came to me the same way: a helter-skelter rush of fragments that quickly ordered themselves, proceeding as a single set of moving images—as if a jumpy film projector were alternately run forward and backward at the highest speeds until it slowed down, fully focused. At first, on Kauai, memories like Wind’s and Val’s had just invaded my thoughts and remained as long as I fixed on them. Once I could control my intake of memories by entering other people’s minds, I felt responsible for what I was doing. Now that people were volunteering to open themselves up to me, and I was making money off my ability, I felt even more responsible—to myself, as well as to them. Being blindfolded helped in this respect, not only by enabling me to concentrate and creating the illusion of privacy onstage, but by ensuring that I never saw the people to whose memories I became privy. Young or old, ugly or pretty, they were all the same to me. Aside from their voices when they identified themselves, I had only the contents of their memories, for a few seconds, to differentiate them.
In Sydney, on the night of my debut performance, after Gaspard had drawn the silken blindfold over my eyes and knotted it, the six people who approached the stage proved to be typical of the groups I would face in subsequent performances.
First, a woman remembering a family picnic by a stream on which a blue rowboat was moored, tethered to a tree; it was the detail of the rowboat’s color that made her cry out.
Second, an old man remembering himself with his brother in sailor caps mugging before a store window near the turn of the century.
Next, a man’s recollection of someone (I saw only a pair of hands) quartering a melon on a flight of steps drenched in sunlight.
Then a teenage girl who remembered seeing a warehouse on fire from a passing train. (“How did you do that?” she shouted incredulously—to Gaspard’s delight—when I concluded my description.)
Fifth, a young man who remembered a pair of tigers pacing their cage at the zoo during a rainstorm.
And finally, an older woman with a murmuring voice who summoned the most chaotic memory: a door swinging open in a dark corridor, a lightbulb flickering on a cord from the ceiling and a bed in the corner over which a man was leaning—
At that point, I broke off, not sharing with the audience that there was a dead child laid out on the bed, and that the man was digging his nails into his palms, drawing blood.
Instead, I concluded by saying, “And he’s in great pain.”
Later, when word came backstage that this woman had asked to see me, Gaspard refused her request categorically, as he told me I must routinely do, without exceptions. “Because of crazies,” he explained, “and because we’re not psychologists. Not to mention that the sense of mystery you’re building onstage would be constantly undermined.”
Two hundred twenty-nine performances and twenty months later, on the night of December 15, 1974, in The Stardust Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, twelve people approached me before a full house. (This was the limit I myself had set over time, for it turned out that the psychic energy I had to expend was exhausting.) I was restless and distracted that night. Not because of the performance, the mechanics of which had long since become second nature to me. Or even because, as I was well aware, the next day, just a few hours off, would have been Loren’s nineteenth birthday. No, my anxieties stemmed from the fact that I had never before been in Las Vegas or any other part of Nevada, and Nevada was Cassiel’s home state.
In the previous year I had been up and down the east and west coasts of the United States, along the Pacific rim, and through half a dozen South American capitals with Gaspard, but I had not been in the desert since I drove west after Loren’s disappearance—and on that trip I had never strayed farther north than Tucson. All day at the hotel my thoughts had been full of Cassiel. Accustomed now to diving easily into others’ memories, I found it was my own that had been weighing on me from the moment our plane touched down that morning.
Memories from the Repose: that first time Cassiel kissed me, his arm still in a sling, as we stood on deck crossing the South China Sea.
And memories from Manila: the first time we had made love with the small fan blowing onto our bed; and the envelope containing my bracelet on which Cassiel had drawn the navigational symbol for a celestial fix.
And then there were the disturbing memories of Cassiel’s which I had visited at the Hôtel Alnilam. As I took a taxi to The Stardust, gazing at the stark mountains beyond the lights of Las Vegas, I felt sure those memories had occurred near this city. Closing my eyes, I could see the woman in the red dress running—could smell gasoline fumes before the red car burst into flames. An hour later, as I applied my makeup before the humming, incandescent bulbs of my dressing room mirror, those fumes were still with me, leaving me light-headed when I took the stage a half hour later.
Gaspard was playing as a headliner, so he was in a good mood that night. But just before we went on, he grew alarmed to see that I was—uncharacteristically—pacing and wringing my hands. When I rebuffed his inquiries, he grew even more alarmed. I had put on a new black dress, with twice as many rhinestone chips as its predecessors, and new heels to match, and I had dusted more sparkles than ever into my hair, which I was wearing very long again. On this particular engagement, a warm-up for a European tour that summer, I wore a black domino onstage until I was blindfolded just before the intermission; only in the second part of the act would my face be fully visible.
Walking into the lights, I realized suddenly just how tired I was. Sleepless the previous night, I had tried all afternoon to nap, without success. The Stardust, like every other casino in town, was air-conditioned well below 70°. But I was boiling. The new dress, custom-made for me in Hong Kong of the lightest silk, seemed heavy as canvas. Beneath my domino I felt sweat beading around my eyes. Only by working rotely did I make it through Gaspard’s first routine without throwing him off.
During my own routine, I needed all my energy to concentrate. The layout of the main lounge at The Stardust didn’t help: huge, with a domed ceiling, it was called the Star Room, and its low, curved stage, flanked by enormous palms, was backdropped by a gold curtain with silver stars. Two bright spotlights, one on Gaspard, one on me, crisscrossed the stage, following our movements, and a machine in the wings wafted clouds of mist past us, to produce an atmosphere in keeping with our psychic activities. The stage had two runways into the audience, where semicircular tables ran to the back of the room. The closest tables were twenty feet from center stage. The star motif of the room was repeated everywhere: lamps, ashtrays, the waitresses’ star-speckled leotards, not to mention the constellations reproduced on the ceiling and the enormous white marble star embedded in the black floor.
The place was packed. Men in black or
white dinner jackets, women in pastel gowns. Diamonds and sapphires flashed in the blackness when the houselights dimmed—dazzling as a night sky.
After his introduction, while he was affixing my blindfold, Gaspard whispered urgently in my ear. “Is everything all right?”
I nodded slowly, but my head was whirling.
The twelve audience volunteers lined up on the right-hand runway. The first two proceeded routinely. The third was a man who identified himself, in a low brooding voice, as “Lieutenant Gregory Castro.” I had heard that sort of voice dozens of times and knew right away that he was not a cop, or an active-duty military man, but a Vietnam vet. Braced for his combat memories, I was about to fix on Lieutenant Castro when a sequence of images far more explosive to me burst into my thoughts. Someone in the first two rows stood up and pushed his chair back so abruptly—at a moment when the rest of the audience was absolutely still—giving off such powerful emanations, that my concentration immediately shifted to him. To my astonishment and exhilaration this was the memory I saw passing through his head:
He was descending a flight of stairs, into a cramped foyer with a frayed Persian carpet. There was a coatrack on which a green woolen coat hung beside a smaller blue one. Two suitcases sat by the open front door. Down a short slate walk, on a quiet street, a car was idling at the curb with its headlights burning. His cigarette ember glowing, the man behind the wheel was blowing smoke out the window. Overhead the tree branches were lined with snow. The person who descended the stairs took the blue coat off the rack and paused before entering a room off the foyer.
My heart was racing wildly, for I knew that stairway and the carpet and the green coat—they all could have been lifted from my own memory. Which was what I thought for an instant: your own memory has intruded and this has nothing to do with the person who left his seat.