Here Is Real Magic Read online

  Andy held a map of the world spread open on a table, studying his options.

  “What’s left?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you’ve done everything. You’ve been everywhere. What’s the next terrifying leap?”

  “Going back,” Andy said. “Someday.”

  A breeze had come up at some point, warm and dry, and you could smell the desert blowing in from just beyond the edges of town. Andy got up and came back with a beer for each of us. “I’m going to Hong Kong next. Do you want to come?”

  “What’s in Hong Kong?”

  “I know an artist there. He’s an eccentric old man who did very well in business when he was young and now lives in a house by the sea. He paints and rows around the harbor in a little wooden boat. We met there when I first stayed in Hong Kong and he said I should come back anytime.”

  Andy and I sat in silence. I saw how it all could happen—how I could go to Hong Kong, and then south, maybe, through Indonesia and New Guinea and then on to South America. I’d read about the shamans of the Amazon—maybe I could persuade them to take me in for a month, or a year, and learn the secret language of the birds and the age-old intercessions between the magicians and the wider world. Or I could go west, through southeast Asia, on my way to Kathmandu and the mountain monasteries of Nepal, where I would rise early each morning to watch the sun climb over the Himalayas and then move on to China, by motorcycle, probably, and then up through Mongolia to Russia. Everywhere on the planet was just one decision away.

  “Will you stay in Hong Kong for a while?” I asked.

  Andy shrugged. “I want to look at all this footage I’ve been shooting on our trip. May be a documentary there.”

  “You’re going to show the whole world that moment when I ran away from the cobra, aren’t you?”

  “Probably,” he said. “You want to come?”

  I thought of Katharine. I thought of my job as a magician—I could probably make it back in time to book a good fall tour. I thought of friends and family and all the things you leave behind to travel the world like a vagabond. But—

  “Nate?” Andy said again. “What do you think? Want to come to Hong Kong?”

  “Yes.”

  HERE IS REAL MAGIC

  I still dream about India.

  I dream about the wide-open days in Varanasi by the river, and the morning on the banks of the Ganges in Rishikesh when the sun came over the mountains and everything turned to gold. I can close my eyes and see the snake charmer’s cobra drop from the basket and come straight for me, and it still raises the hair on the back of my neck. I remember the moment just before the old man performed his fire breathing illusion, when I said to myself I have been doing this a long time, I know how this shit works, but if he does what I think he is about to do then I don’t know anything at all. And then he did it. The fear, the hope, the allure, the confusion—it’s all there, intact, raw, close to the surface. I don’t think I’ve had a day since my return when I haven’t thought about my time on the other side of the world looking for magic. The stars over the desert, the child toddling down the alley in Shadipur Depot holding his baby brother tightly in his arms, the candles on the water in Haridwar drifting through the night like falling stars in a meteor shower—bright burning streaks of light you can still see after your eyes are closed. The world didn’t fit very well when I came back to Iowa. It still doesn’t.

  Andy stayed in Hong Kong for a while. From there, he went to the Philippines, then to Australia, then to New Zealand, and then he got hired on as the private chef on someone’s yacht and disappeared again. When he resurfaced and returned to the United States a year or so later, he lived on my couch in Iowa City for two months and sold the TV rights to his footage from our trip in India to a television network. The project took off immediately, then languished, then died, and a few clips now live on the Internet as a strange video snapshot of the moments in the trip when we had the camera rolling. I stay up sometimes and watch them, trying to get back to that world, but it’s strange seeing it on a screen, safely contained, sterile and remote. You can’t feel the heat, or the fear, or the hope.

  Since returning from India my advice to anyone and everyone who has asked about my time in that country has been simple: You should go. Go now. Do whatever you need to do to get there. Quit your job, sell your car, leave school, go. Maybe you’re like me—you grew up in the States and have done some traveling, and you feel that you have seen a thing or two. India will devour you. You will find kindness, cruelty, poverty, wealth, generosity, heat, noise, dust, and a sea of humanity that will shake your certainties and convictions until they fall out or die along the way. At the end you will stumble, besotted and reborn, from the airplane that brought you home and wonder how and when you can do it all again.

  On the flight into Hong Kong they served the most elaborate coach-class in-flight meal I have ever encountered before or since—complete with predinner cocktail, salad, predinner wine, dinner, dinner wine, dessert, and a postdinner cocktail. All of this made my entry into the city something of a blur. As we descended, I could see the skyscrapers glowing and flickering with neon-colored LED screens, lighting the clouds from below and turning the night to a Day-Glo haze of pink, yellow, and blue. It was like stepping inside the Internet. I left the plane and immediately fell into an arterial route of moving sidewalks and escalators that whisked me through customs, onto a train, into the city, off the train, onto another train, and then out into the night on a street far from the city center, which now glowed like a video game on the horizon across the water. Here the air was warm and smelled like the ocean, and we walked down the street to the home of the mysterious Uncle Ray.

  Since leaving Iowa I had met magicians, snake charmers, con men, holy men, mystics, gurus, street performers, street kids, rickshaw drivers, a poet laureate, and a film producer who traveled everywhere by oversized white Escalade, so ending the trip as the guest of an eccentric millionaire from Hong Kong didn’t strike me as particularly unusual. Uncle Ray greeted us at the door, pivoting on the heel of his cowboy boot as he led us down the hallway into his home. He was somewhere between sixty and eighty and looked like Bob Dylan or Captain Jack Sparrow. He welcomed us warmly and showed us to his table where a late dinner and tea service sat waiting.

  Uncle Ray had built his home by himself, brick by brick, as a hobby while he still worked in the city. He had laid the bricks about as well as you or I would lay them if given a board of mortar and a stack of bricks—which is to say, poorly—and so his house embodied the uncommon union of haphazard amateurism and unapologetic luxury. I never learned whether he had made his fortune in business or as an artist, but what he lacked in craftsmanship he made up for in vision, and his home was a masterpiece. He’d draped it casually along the rocks leading down from the road to the coast, stopping here for a swimming pool and there for a hot tub, uniting it all with a series of concrete steps poured and shaped by hand.

  On the first day I slept—thoroughly, unapologetically, completely. I had a basement room with a floor-to-ceiling window looking out on the ocean, and when I wasn’t sleeping I sat on the floor and stared out at the sea, thinking, remembering, trying to decide if any of this was real. I read. I wrote. I went down to the edge of the water and took Uncle Ray’s boat out into the harbor.

  That evening at dinner I agreed to give a performance for some business acquaintances of Uncle Ray at a private club in downtown Hong Kong, so on the second day I traveled into the city and up the elevator of a midrise tower to a well-appointed lounge with overstuffed furniture and large plate-glass windows looking out on the forest of skyscrapers. I wore my blue T-shirt and hiking pants and felt out of place in the roomful of suits. Twenty or thirty people had arrived for the performance and they clapped politely as I walked to the center of the room. Then silence.

  “Thank you. I’ve been backpacking across India, so please forgive my informal clothing.”

  Not
hing. No response.

  “My name is Nate Staniforth. I’m a magician, and I’d like to share a few pieces of magic with you.”

  It was as if they had been paid to sit as still as possible. No one moved. No one even made eye contact. I felt as though I was speaking to the skyline just beyond their rigid, lifeless bodies.

  I thought of the show at Marquette that precipitated this whole adventure, and the way I had felt onstage during the show—numb, mostly, and, if you had pressed me, disillusioned. Since then I had thought a great deal about wonder and bringing it home to my daily life. But as I looked out at the audience I considered that this was my daily life. I was a magician. At some point in India I had realized that I would always be a magician, and magicians do shows—full shows, not just tricks for people I meet during my travels. If I wanted to bring the ideas and experiences from India back with me, I had to find a way for them to live here, too.

  Over the next half an hour I threw myself at the audience again and again, urging, prodding, cajoling, provoking, trying to break through and shatter the heavy, stultified formality of this early evening cocktail reception. Magic, urgency, intensity, charm—I tried to light myself on fire, giving everything, as if this one performance would determine the future of my entire life. The audience sat, unmoving and expressionless at first, and then bemused, and then slowly, slowly I could feel them coming to life. One woman in her midfifties held a playing card in her hand, and when she opened it to find that her two of hearts had changed to an ace she stifled a shout, then a smile, and then she didn’t try to stifle it anymore. She stood in front of everyone, beaming, and the entire room changed. I stood on a chair in the middle of the room and gathered the audience around me, asking them to leave their seats and come closer. Again, reticence. Hesitation. I started doing magic for them—directly, in their hands, right in front of them. They moved in, gradually, straining for a better view. I did the rubber band trick, the coin vanish, the thread trick, and by the end they had pushed the furniture out of the way so they could all see. We stood there, tied around the chair like a knot, and I ended the show.

  “Good night,” I said. “Thank you.”

  Outside, the sun was setting and the entire city glowed brightly with neon light. Inside, everyone milled around drinking white wine and circling the hors d’oeuvres table. In the corner a group of men were studying an envelope I’d used during the show, holding it up to the light, examining the glue that held the edges together, looking for a clue. During the envelope trick in the show they had watched joyfully, amazed, but all of that had gone and they slowly peeled the envelope apart, looking for the secret.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked when they noticed me standing nearby. One of them began to explain his theories about the working of the illusion, and I listened for a few moments as he speculated. Magnets. A hidden mirror. Something attached to the back of my hand. Over his shoulder out the window I saw a jet lifting into the sky, heading east. The man watched my face for any clue or sign of agreement, but my attention was wavering. I thought of the candles on the Ganges. I thought of the train ride to Varanasi when the entire trip stretched out before me and the promise of something hidden and wonderful lay somewhere ahead, just out of reach.

  “Sir?” the man holding the envelope asked, and I realized he was waiting for a response.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “would you excuse me for just a moment? I’ll be right back.”

  I walked to the window. The colors of the city reflected off the water in the harbor—orange, blue, red, green—and the helicopters glowed with red running lights as they darted above the surface like fireflies, muddling the distinction between land and sea and sky. Hong Kong felt wild and unknowable, and for a moment I just stood there and looked at it.

  During the five weeks we traveled together, Andy and I had only one real disagreement. It happened an hour or so before flying from Mumbai to Hong Kong, when we stood on Juju beach as the sun dropped toward the horizon. Andy had wanted to film me saying something conclusive about the trip.

  “Just say something like ‘I came to India to search for magic and learned that real magic is all around you,’ ” he said.

  That was true, but I thought it was a terrible line and told him so.

  “Well, say anything. We just need to wrap it up and the sun’s going down. You just backpacked across an entire country. What did you learn?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  But here’s my answer to Andy’s question. I think you have to grow up twice. The first time happens automatically. Everyone passes from childhood to adulthood, and this transition is marked as much by the moment when the weight of the world overshadows the wonder of the world as it is by the passage of years. Usually you don’t get to choose when it happens. But if this triumph of weight over wonder marks the first passage into adulthood, the second is a rediscovery of that wonder despite sickness, evil, fear, sadness, suffering—despite everything. And this second passage doesn’t just happen on its own. It’s a choice, not an inevitability. It’s something you have to deliberately go out to find, and value, and protect. And you can’t just do it once and keep it forever. You have to keep looking.

  The next day I flew home.

  I don’t remember the flight. My only memory of that day is of Katharine waiting for me at the arrivals gate, sitting at first and then both of us running. We were so glad to see each other that she forgot where she parked the car. We spent forty-five minutes walking through the parking garage, checking level after level until we found the car and drove home.

  I’m writing the last pages of this book in a hotel room in Omaha, seven years after returning from India. In forty-five minutes I’ll drive to the theater, and tonight three hundred people are coming to see the show. I just got off the phone with Katharine—home with our two young boys, who still don’t understand exactly what I do for a living. “Magic,” the two-year-old says, but we talk about the sky, the clouds, the rain, and the new shoots of green in his little garden in the back yard as magic, too, so I’m sure he has some confusion about what a magic show actually entails.

  The other day we had a rainstorm and he and I put on our raincoats and stomped around the puddles in the neighborhood. “A puddle repeats infinity and is full of light,” I read somewhere—Chesterton, I think—“nevertheless, if analyzed objectively, a puddle is a piece of dirty water spread very thin on mud.”

  We walked down the street, splashing in the pools of light, soaking our clothes and our shoes. He looked at me, his blue eyes burning brightly, as though we were committing some great and wonderful crime. Remember this if you can, I thought. All around us everything was wet, reflective, sparkling in the sun, a world set on fire for a moment.

  Here is knowledge. The rest is mystery. There is so much yet to be discovered.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book started with a declaration—To the Magicians, and I’ll get to them in a minute—but anyone who has made it this far knows this book could only truly be dedicated to one person. Dreams are heavy, and you never carry them alone, and Katharine has somehow managed to help me hold on to mine while simultaneously advancing her own career and holding our household together while I’m away on tour or holed up downstairs writing. In the eleven years we have been married she has been a supporter, collaborator, secret assistant, co-conspirator, companion, and best friend. Katharine, for all of that and for everything still to come, thank you.

  This book would not have been possible without the support of many people. I would like to thank my literary agent, Stephen Barr, for championing this book when it was nothing more than an eight-page, single-spaced manifesto, and for ushering it so skillfully through the publishing world. Stephen and I had a number of marathon-length conversations at various stages in the writing process and his ideas and suggestions have been invaluable.

  I would like to thank Lea Beresford, my editor, for her generous guidance at every step in this process. Working w
ith a first-time author who is simultaneously writing the manuscript and touring as a magician takes a special kind of patience, and over the past two years Lea has created an ideal environment for this book to grow. Thanks also to the team at Bloomsbury that has worked so hard to give this book a place in the world—specifically, Sara Kitchen, Lauren Hill, Laura Keefe, and Nicole Jarvis. Thank you to Patti Ratchford and Katya Mezhibovskaya for the incredible cover design, and to Emily DeHuff for her careful copyedit of the manuscript.

  I would like to thank my manager, Brian Schwartz, Rachel Miller, Arielle Rubin, and the whole crew at 7S, as well as my college booking agent Kate Magill and longtime collaborators Maher Jafari and Chuck Peters.

  Thanks to Andy Stoll, not only for years of friendship and collaboration but also for coming with me to India and submitting to the ordeal of becoming a book character.

  The magic world is a small, deeply loyal community and I’m honored to be a part of it. There are hundreds of world-class magicians around the globe whom I’ve never had the chance to meet but whom I think of as allies or brothers and sisters in arms in the struggle to create and perform good magic. Over the past twenty-five years your work has inspired, challenged, provoked, and flat-out astonished me. I love magic more than just about anything, and if you do too, thank you.

  I’ve had the opportunity to work with a number of magicians who have shaped my understanding of the craft for the better. Special thanks to friends and collaborators Brian Brushwood, Daniel Martin, Wayne Houchin, Gus Davis, CJ Johnson, Peter Boie, Norman Ng, Jonny Zavant, Chris Carter, Justin Flom, Justin Willman, James Galea, Blake Vogt, and Brent Braun.

  Additionally, the published works of Derren Brown, David Berglas, David Britland, Juan Tamariz, Darwin Ortiz, Teller, Barrie Richardson, Sam Sharpe, Tommy Wonder, Stephen Minch, Michael Ammar, Arturo Ascanio, Jamy Ian Swiss, Eric Mead, Paul Harris, Max Maven, Eugene Burger, Robert Neale, Jim Steinmeyer, Richard Kaufman, John Cassidy, and Anthony Owen have been essential to my own thinking about magic. Thank you.