The Art of Disappearing by Ivy Pochoda (top non fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

mouths. The clatter and crack of bused dishes vanished; even the waiter froze, his gray cloth dangling off the corner of a table. So it seemed that the magician and I were alone, moving toward each other at an accelerated speed—me leaning over the table, Toby striding silently among the immobile diners.

A glance would judge Toby surprisingly good-looking and surprisingly young for a guy who sends drinks to strange women. Although I had never seen him before, there was something familiar as he approached. His dark hair, dark clothes, and pale skin gave him a shadowy appearance, and somehow I felt that he, or someone like him, had often been watching me—from the back of classrooms or on the school bus, across the aisle in a train or from a corner in a museum gallery.

An uneven mop of black hair dangled in Toby’s eyes and dusted his ears. His features were elegant and angular. His eyebrows arched sharply, while his high cheekbones sloped away gracefully. And from behind the ragged fringe of hair shone eyes the same gray blue as the summertime river behind my childhood home. As the magician drew nearer, I noticed a slight stoop to his shoulders and deep lines—rivers of frustration and worry—that flowed over his temples and streamed down from his eyes. His hands were prematurely knotted with years of forcing air, an untamable medium, to produce rabbits, doves, and sometimes to support full-grown humans. He splayed these hands, as elegant as tree roots, on the table, and began to speak, dispelling a little of the dusty silence of my desert days.

“I’m not a big fan of shrimp in cream. Maybe the wine will wash it down,” he said, leaning over the splintering table. “Mind if I join you?” He had a voice that produced its own static, a voice that, while announcing itself grandly, was interrupted by blips of self-doubt, as if both the voice and the magician had grown used to mistrusting the physical world. A sandy voice filtered through the worn megaphone of the big top.

I gestured across the table. “Please.” And we exchanged names: his—Toby Warring, mine—Mel Snow.

“So, you’re a magician,” I stated rather than asked. “Can I see something?” Then I blushed, embarrassed to have asked the obvious. My eyes lingered on his hands spread wide on the wooden table.

Toby’s gaze followed mine. “At eight, I could stretch an octave. My adoptive mother said she’d never seen anything like it.” He looked out the window. “She was a concert pianist. She looked like the innermost member in a set of Russian nesting dolls.”

“I’m hopeless with music,” I offered.

“Living with a pianist is no guarantee of talent.”

I nodded.

“When I was old enough, my mother put away my toys and brought me to the music studio. We had a converted porch stuffed with four baby grands. I was terrible. When I played, it sounded as if I were grasping onto tree branches to survive a fall from a great height. My mother said my hands engorged the keyboard and spat out music.” He laughed. “They never should have adopted me.”

“And you, your father…,” I began, then clamped a hand over my mouth. “I’m sorry. I’m behind on conversational etiquette.”

Toby smiled. “And I am happy to have someone to talk to. My father was an anatomist. He looked like an owl. And he was more interested in the dead than in the living. He had no idea what to do with me. After my brief music career ended, I returned to what remained of my toys. Basically a children’s edition of Gray’s Anatomy and my blocks.”

“That doesn’t sound like much,” I said, trying to catch the magician’s mercurial stare.

Toby narrowed his eyes. “Blocks are perfect for mastering the art of illusion.”

“Good for substitution?” I asked.

“My blocks taught me that I could do magic.”

I raised my eyebrows, waiting for him to explain.

He shook his head. “That would be revealing too much. And you have told me nothing.”

“My parents aren’t as remotely interesting as an anatomist and a concert pianist,” I said.

Toby folded his hands.

I shrugged. “My mother doesn’t work, and my father is a minor league baseball scout.” Then I mentioned the name of the suburban town on the banks of the Delaware River where I grew up, which turned out to be only a few miles upstream from Toby’s childhood home.

“Perhaps we passed each other at a game or a dance?” I suggested, even then trying to join Toby’s story to mine without letting him know that I had barely attended school functions myself.

“Magicians don’t go to football games or dances. I didn’t even finish high school.”

“You ran away to join the circus?”

“Something like that. I did a little magic show to earn money. Birthday parties and weddings. I guess my teenage anxiety came through in my tricks. My shadow projections wept blood. Rabbits I pulled out of hats were covered in fake gore. The flowers I found up my sleeves were dead.”

“I guess you didn’t get too many repeat bookings?”

“Even though I could make balloon sculptures of all the famous castles in Europe.” Toby laughed. “So I left home. I went to a magic-and-circus school in California. I didn’t last very long. My classmates started to suspect that I perform magic without illusion.” He turned his hands over, showing me two square depressions.

“Your blocks?”

Toby nodded. “They showed up in places I never intended. Places I never sent them.”

I smiled. “Now you are revealing too much again.”

The magician bit his lip. “I didn’t mean to. Like my magic, this confession is catching me a little off guard.”

“How is magic performed without illusion?”

“Naturally.”

I didn’t reply.

“You don’t believe me.”

“I don’t know.” I took a sip of my wine. “What else do you have up your sleeve?”

“Would you believe me if I told you I have no idea?” Toby shook out his cuffs, producing nothing.

“I might. Can you change water into wine?”

“That’s a miracle, not magic.” He passed his hand over my glass, turning the last