Here Is Real Magic Page 10

  At a bookseller’s stand I found a notebook. I had been looking for one, thinking I would probably want to record some of the trip along the way, and this one was perfect. Inside it had fresh blank pages, but the leather-bound cover looked aged and worn, as though it had already been through a few good stories and somehow ended up here ready for another. It looked like a book about magic: old and mysterious, like something out of Indiana Jones. I bought it from the merchant along with a few books.

  Later that evening when we sat at the station waiting to board our train I opened the notebook and wrote a question at the top of the first page: Where do you find wonder? This was the central question for a magician, certainly, but I also thought it was an important question for anyone. Wonder is something that everyone cares about but no one discusses, and I probably wasn’t the only one in my generation to lie awake in bed one night, unable to sleep, trying to figure out when everything had gone so numb and how to get back. Where do you find wonder? is a good question, but it carries an unstated assumption. The real question is, Where do you find wonder after you have lost it? That’s what I wanted to learn on this trip—why you lose it, and how you get it back.

  I knew this: whatever it was, wonder had nothing to do with the Mickey Mouse, Hallmark-card, stars-and-sparkles associations it had back home. In America, and maybe in the West in general, “wonder” had largely been ceded to the realm of children’s entertainment and sentimentality. Adults—the thinking went—preferred diversion, edification, and distraction: football, gin, Netflix, GQ magazine, craft beer, politics, wood-fired pizza, Facebook, mystery novels, and horror films. Adults talk about essentially everything except wonder. This exclusion was so complete that it couldn’t be accidental. Why?

  I had one last thought before boarding the train. My original plan had been to seek out the magicians in India and let their work amaze me, but now this felt roundly inadequate and naive. In just over twenty-four hours here I had seen enough to recognize that while the magic in India might be good—and I hoped it was—the country itself was astonishing. That evening we had come in to the station over the massive Howrah Bridge, which sweeps you from street level high up through the air and suddenly you can see for miles, with all of Kolkata below you and the whole of India stretching out to the horizon. When we crossed, the sun was dropping lower and the cool blue of the sky was already turning yellow and orange. It had been a long time since I’d noticed a sky like that one.

  I looked up from my notebook after I’d scrawled down these ideas. An old man staggered slowly down the platform and then stopped and stood still, looking up to the high windows where the same evening sun cut through the gloom of the station. He stood there for a moment, tottering, alone in his destitution. Then, slowly, the weight of his frail, failing body overcame him and he sat down gingerly, then crumpled to the floor, resting his head on the concrete and keeping his face turned toward the light above. His eyes were still open but he didn’t move much. A train had come in and passengers stepped around and over him. A woman bent down to him and he growled something and she hurried away. He lay there fending off the occasional offer of aid and all the time looking up at the window. I don’t know if he ever got up again. India was beauty and suffering, side by side, over and over.

  THE TRAIN TO VARANASI

  That evening the train pulled away from Howrah station and I watched through the window as the fortress of red brick and bureaucracy disappeared behind us. I was not sorry to see it go. As we set off, the light from the setting sun flashed and flickered between the buildings, faster and faster, and Varanasi loomed somewhere ahead. Through the window, I could see backyards, back doors, and side streets before they fell away and all that remained of Kolkata was a pack of children racing along the tracks, waving to the departing train. One raised a stick above her head like a sword and ordered us off to battle. I returned the salute. Then they were gone.

  Andy sat down next to me.

  The bench across from us was empty, but farther down the car an Indian family occupied both sides of the aisle. The daughter sat on the floor, singing a high, playful rhyme in an unfamiliar language. The mom wore a bright yellow sari and unloaded food wrapped in aluminum foil from a paper grocery sack. It smelled delicious. Andy pulled his bag from under the seat and produced two bottles of beer. This was a minor miracle. We had been together all day, and I had no idea when or where he’d found them, or how he’d kept them cold, but I didn’t question my good fortune.

  An older couple sat on the other end of the car, watching us. Or, rather, they were watching Andy, who’d taken out his camera and was filming the countryside. Andy is something of a paradox. His clothes—duct-taped sandals, a ragged black T-shirt near the end of its useful life, and a tired pair of camping pants that zipped off at the knee—gave him the appearance of a vagabond, but his camera easily cost more than five thousand dollars and he changed the lens and framed his shot with the patient, deliberate care of a Zen master. This piqued their interest, and they sidled over for a better look.

  “Can you see anything out there?”

  The man spoke with a British accent and wore a gray wool jacket. The woman stood behind him, beaming, eyebrows raised, and I suddenly worried they were going to sell us something. They slid into the bench across from us.

  Andy stopped recording and raised his beer bottle in greeting. “Just the end of the sunset.”

  The couple—I guessed they were in their sixties—were from Birmingham and nearing the end of a six-week exploration of India by train. They had started in Mumbai and traveled south through Goa to Kerala before working their way up the east coast of India to Kolkata. The woman worked as a schoolteacher and the man had worked in sales for a number of years with a firm in London. We learned all this in about thirty seconds.

  He asked what I did for a living.

  This is a hard question for magicians. I feel a kinship with poets, painters, musicians, writers, and everyone else who holds an occupation that, when shared with strangers, is met with an incredulous and only sometimes unspoken “And you can make a living at that?” To answer is to be immediately misunderstood. When I’m on tour in America I tell the most outrageous lies to those who breach the outer defenses of dark sunglasses and headphones that I wear on airplanes. In these cases I am an architect. Cathedrals, exclusively. I am a cathedral architect. Or a teacher. Or a professor. Of quantum physics. I’m on my way to Boston to deliver a lecture on hydrostatic thermonuclear game theory at MIT.

  But here my guard was down. “I’m a magician,” I said to the man on the train, and immediately felt like an idiot. He raised his eyebrows.

  “You’re a what?”

  “I’m a magician. I do magic.”

  The woman’s eyes grew wide. She nodded and said, “Oh, that’s fun!”

  The man frowned. “And you can make a living at that?”

  I hated both of these people. “Yes, indeed.”

  The man was winding up for a monologue and not really listening. His capacity for ignoring wonders was itself a marvel; outside, the sun was setting—perfectly, gorgeously—but he continued speaking.

  “We went to Las Vegas several years ago and saw a magic show. What was his name?” His wife didn’t remember. “For his first joke—that’s what you call them, right? Jokes? Or tricks?”

  Another brief mid-story conference with his wife failed to resolve this uncertainty.

  “There was a table, a box, and a lady. And the joke was that he would disappear and then appear in the box. But the whole thing was so obvious.”

  The sun had set completely and the haunting, ethereal light from the window had been replaced with a flat and empty black that reflected the image of this small, ridiculous man who stole my sunset.

  He kept talking. “Anyway, the whole show was actually quite dull.” He hesitated and looked at me expectantly, wondering if he had convinced me that I should retire from my profession right there in the train car and take up another line of w
ork before we reached Varanasi. Earlier in the day I might have tried to change his mind, but now I was enjoying the hum of the train over the tracks and the taste of the beer and the knowledge that the dark, empty space just beyond this man’s reflection in the window was India, of all places, and that I was on a real adventure.

  “Have you been to Varanasi before?” Andy can be very polite.

  “Me? No. It’s supposed to be the holiest city in India. I’ve heard that people swim in the Ganges River every morning because they think it’s sacred. I’m not getting in that river, but I’ll take a look at it and watch them swim.”

  I stared straight ahead, stunned that the Western world’s cheap perception of magic that I had worked so hard to escape had followed me here to India and now sat across from me on the train. I was no longer listening. I was somewhere outside in this dark land, watching the train fly through the night.

  I got up to explore the train and as I walked past the family at the other end of the car the father raised his hand to catch my attention. A teacher, I thought, or maybe a professor. He was in his midforties and wore a cream linen shirt and gold-rimmed glasses.

  “Excuse me, please. You are a magician?” He must have heard me speaking to the man from Birmingham.

  I nodded. He shook my hand and motioned for me to sit.

  “What is the nature of the magic that you do?” He spoke with a hyper-articulate, lilting clarity.

  “Would you like to see something?” I asked him.

  One of my favorite illusions is a number-reading effect. First, you write a number on a piece of paper and crumple it in my hand without showing anyone. Then you ask the spectator to name a number between one and a hundred, and when they do, it ends up matching the number written at the beginning. It’s a simple piece of magic, but it’s very effective because the moment of astonishment happens in the minds of the spectators rather than in front of their eyes. It’s sleight of mind rather than sleight of hand, and this internal experience—maybe more than any purely visual moment of magic—feels truly impossible.

  The mom let out a surprised hoot. The man with the gold-rimmed glasses looked at the floor and slowly nodded.

  “Why do you do this?”

  “I love magic.”

  “And this is ‘magic’ to you?”

  “I would say that this is a way for me to see magic.”

  “That is very, very interesting. Now, I have to tell you that I know that what you are doing is a trick. I do not know how you are doing this trick, but I have watched magicians before and I always know ‘That is a trick.’ ”

  He said this so directly and with such total lack of hostility or smugness that I didn’t know how to respond. I had dealt with as many belligerent, drunken frat guys, cross-armed arch-skeptics, and unimpressible boyfriends as the next magician. But this man wasn’t heckling me.

  “May I tell you something?” He looked concerned.

  “Of course.”

  “You must know that there is a difference between tricks,” he said, pointing to my hands, “and the actions performed by the mental power.” He pointed to his head. “You are doing tricks but you say that you are a magician. You are pretending that your tricks are magic. But they are not magic. They are empty. They are nothing. Worthless.” Then, realizing that this total damnation of my entire career could be perceived as an insult, he added, “Don’t take my words as some abuse—”

  But I cut him off. “I don’t understand. All magicians do tricks.”

  “The actions performed by real mental power and real mental strength are different than tricks.”

  “So you’re telling me that there are things that look like magic that aren’t actually a trick, but rather the result of …”

  “Yes. Of mental power.” He looked at me as if this should settle everything.

  “You’ll forgive me for finding this hard to believe.”

  He straightened. “I have experienced these things myself. And I will tell you a recent example.”

  I couldn’t believe that I was having this conversation.

  The man continued. “I was traveling to Agra with my sister. Another woman who we did not know was sitting on a bench across from us and she kept staring at my sister for ten or fifteen minutes. Suddenly my sister started feeling thirst, so she drank from a bottle of water and then fainted. She lost consciousness. I was very worried, so I questioned the woman—because I thought that she had done something to my sister—and the woman chanted some words and my sister regained consciousness. But she is still under the effect of that power. Two months have gone by and she is still feeling very weak. So that is just a simple incident that I have come across.”

  “And you attribute that woman’s power to …”

  “Superior mental strength. Yes.”

  He told this story without the least effort toward drama or suspense and succeeded in making the casting of a malicious spell sound like a trip to the grocery store. I was torn between the assumption that this man was insane and the evidence—namely, his polite, well-dressed, respectable-looking family and his careful, deliberate way of speaking—that he was not.

  “Let me say it this way,” he continued. “If you ask a five-year-old boy ‘What is two times two?’ he may be able to answer ‘Four.’ You may ask a ten-year-old boy ‘What is twenty times thirteen?’ and he could give you the correct answer of 260. As unlikely as it sounds, you may even be able to find a person who can answer you if you ask ‘What is 555 multiplied by 465?’ It might look impossible. You might call that a trick because you don’t know how to calculate such a large figure. But is it a trick? No. That is not a trick. That is superior mental strength.”

  I pointed out that the ability to solve math problems is hardly the same as casting a hex on someone’s sister.

  “Why? Why is it different?” He spoke without anger or even reprimand. “You might assume that it is different because it is beyond your mental power, but multiplication seems impossible for a child who has only learned addition and subtraction.”

  He put one hand to his chest. “I am a student of science. I have done my education in physics. I am a computer hardware specialist and I have a degree in computer science as well. I tell you this so you know the scientific world in which I live. I have come across such experiences that make me believe that there are things in this world that don’t have any answer. It is difficult to accept because they are so strange in nature; they are so unacceptable at first sight; they are so effective in making you a believer. I know that the woman used her power on my sister. I have seen it.”

  I looked at him with what must have been an insulting combination of awe and incredulity.

  “All of the knowledge that we have accumulated is only a tiny portion of the total available knowledge. Here is knowledge,” he said, holding his hands close together and indicating the space between. Then he spread his arms wide. “The rest is mystery. There is so much yet to be discovered.”

  I wanted to believe this man’s story about the spell, but a few nonmagical explanations came immediately to mind—heat stroke, dehydration—the sister was thirsty, after all. But more disarming than the story was the quiet, unaffected certainty of the man as he told it. Oh, you want directions to the mall? Sure, it’s just two miles down the road on your left. You want to hear about magic? One time a woman cast an evil spell on my sister, and she’s still suffering the consequences. No big deal.

  Andy had disentangled himself from the Birmingham couple and had somehow produced two sandwiches, two bags of potato chips, and two more bottles of beer that sat waiting when I rejoined him on our bench. I told him about my conversation, and Andy could tell that the two encounters—first with the British man who thought magic was too frivolous and then with the Indian man who thought it was too serious—had unseated my sense of purpose.

  “Nate, I’ve spent a lot of time in India. It can be very difficult to tell what is real and what is fake, and I want you to just consider the possi
bility that maybe this isn’t the most important distinction. You met a man who actually believes that someone cast a spell on his sister. The fact that a well-educated, articulate adult believes in spells seems far more interesting than the question of whether or not spells actually exist.”

  This wasn’t helping. I stood, but Andy offered one final thought.

  “Whether or not his story is actually true is beside the point. Isn’t it possible that belief in spells makes them real? Isn’t that the entire basis for hypnotism? People think it works, therefore it works.”

  I needed to get some air.

  The individual cars were divided by narrow, awning-covered platforms that shifted with the train as it bent along the track. As I crossed between the cars, I found a door leading to the outside. I expected it to be locked, but when I grabbed the handle the door slid to the side and opened to the rushing expanse of blackness outside the train.

  My initial vertigo passed and I stared out at the darkest night I had ever seen. The light from the train illuminated the ground just beyond the tracks but faded quickly into a deep, empty void. Overhead the stars felt very close. I thought of the meteor shower in the cornfield. Now I was in India, on the other side of the world. The air was warm. I sat, legs dangling over the edge, and watched. I replayed the conversation with the Indian man over and over in my mind, hearing his story and feeling his conviction and faltering in my certainty that he, rather than I, was missing something. Here the idea of power and magic and otherworldly forces did not seem far away at all. The border between reality and fantasy felt very thin, as if the train could accidentally cross over at any minute and arrive not in Varanasi or even India but rather in Neverland or at the North Pole.