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

his head as his eyes ran over the desert. “I wonder if I’ll ever be a magician at all.”

I placed my hand on his leg. “I could have prevented this,” I said.

Toby turned from the window.

“Eva told me something would go wrong. She said you’d be tempted to use an assistant. I didn’t know how soon it would happen.”

“It wasn’t the decision to use an assistant or a volunteer that was the problem. It was Greta.”

I looked out the window, wondering if Toby wasn’t really at fault.

We sat in silence for a moment.

“What should we do with the car?” I asked.

Toby didn’t reply.

“Your van?”

He shrugged.

“Toby.”

“Leave it,” he muttered.

“We can’t do that.”

“It’s just a car.”

“It’s more than that.”

I let the car idle. The engine rattled. The magician said nothing. He simply crossed his arms over his chest.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s go.” I took the keys out of the ignition. Then I put them back. “I hope someone comes along and enjoys it,” I said.

“What?” Toby asked.

“All I’m saying is I hope it makes someone else happy.”

Toby didn’t reply. He just shouldered his bag and walked toward the airport.

Eight

Amsterdam seemed to me to be tinted with the last paint coaxed from the corners of a once-vivid watercolor palette. The sky that peeked between the gabled buildings was not the blue promised by the famous Delft tiles, but a blue that had been stretched thin, made gray with too much water. With its muted colors—always more gray than blue and rust than red—reflected in the placid canals, the city had an illusory quality. Its narrowness, the hair’s-breadth houses and one-way streets, was exaggerated, thrown back by the dark canal water. The reflected city appeared as deep in its own canals as it was narrow on land.

Amsterdam was the perfect place for illusion. The long and interwoven streets, Palmgracht, Palmkade, Palmstraat, Palmdwaarstraat, beguiled with their similarity. And the shop, the restaurant, the small café where you wasted the afternoon, disappeared with a turn of the calendar page. Over time, I learned that Amsterdam was capable of this sort of trickery—the place that took you a half hour to find often turned out to have been only a few blocks from where you started.

For me, the city was an unlikely choice—a head-on collision with my water demon. But Amsterdam was a city that promised to shake off the desert, and just maybe, its canals would give me a glimpse of my brother’s watery shadow.

The train from the airport rattled into Amsterdam Central Station. The commuting crowds cleared to reveal a withered man in a heavy wool overcoat waiting for us near the first car. With light but slow steps, he approached.

“Piet Boerman,” he said, offering a dry hand, which Toby shook reluctantly. “Theo told you that I’d be waiting.” Piet blinked his watery blue eyes, then smiled so half moons rippled on his cheeks.

“Thank you,” I replied.

In those last days in Las Vegas, I had retrieved Theo van Eyck’s business card from Toby’s wallet and phoned the old magician. And although he’d sounded surprised, something told me that Theo had been expecting my call.

“I don’t live very far away,” Piet said as we headed away from the platform. “If you don’t mind, we can walk.”

Toby nodded and synchronized his long strides with Piet’s stiff gait.

Piet turned to me as we crossed the canal closest to the station. “Like Theo, I, too, was a magician of sorts.” Then he looked at Toby. “Tomorrow after you’ve rested, we will see Theo, a far more impressive magician than I. More impressive than nearly anyone, except you, I’ve heard.” Piet smiled, but Toby managed only a small nod.

Piet Boerman lived in a canal house that had been in his family for generations. Over the years, it had been turned into a museum of magic—smaller illusions stored on the top floors, and the devices for large-scale conjuring below. Now in his mid-eighties, he could no longer mount the steep stairs to the upper two floors. So he offered us the studio in his attic. Its only window looked out on the mismatched gables of the houses across the canal. Our room was too high up to see the street or the canal, so our view reduced Amsterdam to a uneven row of house tops, a disarray of step gables, bell gables, neck gables, and spout gables that looked like the peaks of Victorian circus tents. From our window, the city was cut off from its streets, canals, and human traffic. Our view showed everything and nothing—the endless run of amputated rooftops and the open sky with its magic lantern of weather.

In this attic, with its delightful combination of crisp air, rough sheets, and homespun blankets, I fell into a deep sleep, finally forgetting the face of the teenager who had sent us across the ocean. Soon, from somewhere inside my dreams, I heard Toby’s voice calling to me. I tossed and turned, trying to locate the magician. Then I woke. He was sleeping soundly next to me, his hands balled into fists and tucked under his pillow. His lips were pressed together. But I could still hear his voice whispering indistinctly in the cold air.

“Toby?”

The magician didn’t move.

“Toby?” I looked around the attic. The house creaked and resettled. I shook my head, trying to dislodge the magician’s voice. I plugged my ears. “Toby, stop.”

“What?” the magician muttered, and rolled over.

I got up, pulled on a sweater, and tiptoed to the landing. The hallway of the floor beneath the attic was strewn with boxes bursting with playbills and leaflets. Out of the shadows, I could just make out the face of a Chinese conjurer printed on a cracked poster. I felt his eyes on me as I continued down the stairs. Now my magician’s voice was joined by dozens of other whispers calling to me from the boxes and muttering from the posters and playbills.

I began to hurry, taking the steep steps