Now you see me
by Adam Elgar
[ fiction - june 06 ]
(after Chaucer)
"It semed that the rokkes weren aweye..."
"I yow relesse, madame..."
Adam Elgar
Take it from me, I'm a bastard. I know about these things. Stand by for further details.
I'm also an illusionist, which may be the same thing as far as you're concerned. Let's agree that I'm an expert in deceit and trickery, with a zillion examples to demonstrate it. You remember the glass box suspended over the river? The forty-four days without food, outdoing Jesus? That was me. Or maybe not. Do you believe I was really in that box? If you do, you prove what the bloke said about suspension of disbelief. I was wherever you wanted me to be - which means I had you where I wanted you.
Ditto the pillar. Three days on top without having a pee. Piece of piss. Come on, think about it. Why would a hologram need to pee? And how did the real me come down to greet the press? Well, who said the pillar was solid? Work it out.
It used to be mirrors and smoke. Now it's digits and electrons, the magic of our age. And I have to confess that these days I'm often just the front man, not the real centre of the show. There's a technowizard behind me pulling the virtual strings. Which could be humiliating, but I take it in my stride. The pros outweigh the cons. We need each other. But never mind him, he's not the story.
The story is Dawn, the sweet, unhappy, flaky girl I was at school with - sometimes my girlfriend, always my friend, but never Mine with a Capital M. My tragic heroine. By the age of 18 she'd been stomach-pumped twice, and wore livid purple bracelets, but in spite of everything I made her laugh, and widened her eyes with wonder at my tricks. I may even have kept her alive. And meanwhile I waited for her to see sense, to realise that it could all be so much easier for her, that it was all terribly simple - if she could only accept that her true happiness lay with me.
But if I did keep Dawn alive, it wasn't for me. It was for Alistair - who was a class act, unlike us.
Dawn and I were all twanging vowels and chainstore fashion, but he was Mr Refinement, smooth to our rough, opera to our grunge, claret to our Hooch. He was Big Money, with a genius for making more. Every day he bought and sold half the GDP of Poland, but he treated Dawn like Princess Diana. Meeting him, and getting swept into a loftier way of life, seemed like the best thing that could have happened to her. And the nice part was that they didn't shut me out. My talents got me invited to their parties. I became jester to the court of Dawn and Alistair, an all-purpose entertainer, and night after night I wowed the crowds of beautiful people - and soon, very soon, I couldn't stand it any more.
Ironic really, when you think what I had going for me. I was almost starting to earn Al's kind of money, and I could make people believe whatever I wanted - but I couldn't get Dawn to love me. Not even a quick shag for old time's sake. She was too happy to need me, and besides she soon had other, higher things on her mind.
What does a man do when he has it all? Get bored and look for something new? Feel guilty and start to throw it away? Alistair did both. He got religion - Buddhism of all things. The Buddha told him to ditch his quest for material satisfactions. He was chasing an illusion - the whole world, the whole universe, is an illusion, a phantom web spun by the goddess Maya, who ensnares the soul and keeps it from true bliss.
Yeah, right... I got the point about a world founded on illusion, but what was there to complain about in that? After all, Maya had always been a dude to me. I'd made a decent living out of her even before I went hi-tech, so I objected to Alistair's slur on my patroness. But his conversion was interesting. Out of nowhere he had a conflict of interest, a big one - a conflict on a cosmic scale. It might work to my advantage.
First I had to start dying of love. Well, cancer - the next best thing.
I've never worked Houdini's way - dislocating limbs and all that. Crude. Too physical. But this was a drastic situation, so I broke my rule. You remember The Day of The Jackal, how the killer doses himself with cordite to get the pasty, old-man look? I did the same and added a shaved head - told Dawn it was chemo. I even cut out vitamin C and gave myself scurvy. That was no illusion. Christ! Bleeding gums, the lot. Don't try this at home, I'm telling you.
But I meant business, and Dawn was distracted, her mind on higher things, so she swallowed the lot, believed it all. Sat with me for hours telling me to be brave. Taught me to meditate, said it was saving her, and would save me too - though not in this world, presumably. I didn't need the next world. I told her that that if she loved me it would bring me back from the dead. I knew if I could just lure her into my bed once, I'd have her there for good. I said my illness was all her fault. What was the point of getting better if I couldn't have Dawn?
This was putting her under a hell of a strain, but it was for her own good. And feeling sorry for me, suffering for me, made her even more desirable, even more the one really essential thing in my life. Why couldn't she see it? After all, meditation wasn't doing her much good. She had to crack eventually, and when she did, I answered her prayer.
The prayer went like this. Alistair's job wasn't agreeing with his Buddhism, which is no surprise. He was making big mistakes. Astronomical. Like when NASA lost a space probe, remember? Half the measurements were metric and the other half imperial. That kind of mistake. Other people's money was falling through his fingers like water - first as drizzle, then a monsoon, then Niagara Falls. Unlike a Buddhist, but like any mere mortal, he was panicking, patching holes with fictitious income and compounding his mistakes. He had to crash sooner or later, and as Dawn told me all this bit by bit, she worked herself up the way she used to in the worst times, back when we were close, when my gags and tricks were all that stood between her and…
Well, my moment came in the end. One day, sitting by my bed, wet-faced and wild, sobbing and shrieking so I could hardly understand what she was saying, she told me I could have her... if I "saved" Alistair.
Watching her carefully, I tried to work this out. She calmed down after a while, like she was facing the worst. Betraying her husband, yes, but only to save him from himself. I think Dawn saw a poetic martyrdom in that. She said, "At least you'll have done something worthwhile once in your life. What good's a magician if he can't do magic that helps people?"
How could I refuse?
It was time for my recovery programme. I pigged out on fruit and smoothies - my first in weeks - kicked my scurvy into touch, and set my shadowy partner, or colleague, or co-illusionist, to work. It was the perfect challenge for him. All he needed to get started was a password or two. You won't believe how easy that was. Even hard-nosed City traders - harder than Alistair had been until recently - are sometimes mind-bogglingly innocent. He used the same password for his main work account as he and Dawn did on their home PC. How dumb is that?
Unlikely? No way. Look at all the people who "confirm" their credit card numbers to strangers over the phone. Or who email their work passwords - which are often their own names - to a supposed system manager who's supposedly updating security.
Someone said, "There's one born every minute." That's an underestimate. In no time at all my partner was hacking his merry way through the company's network, delivering bounty to the funds that Alistair had screwed. And of course there was a commission - with an extra subtlety. Every genius knows that another equal genius will be able to follow his tracks and outdo him, and my technowizard didn't want that happening to him, so he left a trail, dark and twisting, but clear enough to anyone with the right determination and skill. And the trail led back to me. My PC, my internet account, my mother's maiden name - you name it. No one needed to know as long as I kept my mouth shut. That was the deal, and I agreed to it willingly.
As if by magic Alistair was in the clear. Then all I had to do was wait for the payoff.
I don't know the details of what happened next. I've pieced a few things together, but what I've worked out doesn't console me. First thing I knew was Dawn's voice on the intercom at four in the morning, loudly off her head, making no sense at all. I let her in straight away, but I was thinking about the noise she was making and my snotty neighbours, not how this was the endgame that I'd planned and suffered for. No triumph, no elation, not a quiver of desire - not even when she started taking off her clothes with the front door hardly closed behind her.
There's some gag, isn't there, about being careful what you wish for because you might get it. And there's nothing like being wise after the event.
I tried to get Dawn to calm down and keep her clothes on. This wasn't how I'd meant it - I was actually fighting her off! Her nose was running, her eyes were black smudges, and her voice was hoarse from shouting. All she'd say when I asked her what was going on - all innocence, as if I hadn't a clue - was, "I'm keeping my promise, you fucker!"
Well, you can forget arousal. Sex... jealousy... envy... they're all mighty forces, but this was something simpler and stronger. This was love. It was full on, total, and not for me. I thought I'd been devoted, but I knew nothing. Dawn was never really going to betray her husband. She'd told him the whole sleazy story... and left me filleted. Alistair was always going to have the last word, even if neither he nor I could have foreseen how. Maybe it was Buddhist enlightenment, maybe it was fate, or maybe just his upbringing. Whatever, he just did something I would never have been able to do. He must have staggered out blinking from the swirling dust of the last few weeks and said, "You made a promise, you've got to keep it."
You think I'm cynical, but you're the cynic. You'll say I had Al by the proverbials, so of course he had to play along, but I believe what Dawn said to me, sitting hunched on my floor, with me crouching beside her like a beaten puppy. "Alistair doesn't care about the money, or prison. He's ready for it, and so am I. I'll wait for him, however long it takes."
I looked at her, unable to take it all in, blinded by a new beauty in her, dizzy with this mad high-mindedness. A thousand years went by. "Dawn," I said eventually, sounding like I was dying of thirst, "we can't do this. Go home. Al needs you."
Took her an age to get the message, but at last she was gone...
More time has passed, and things are simpler now. I still live in hope, of course, but it's a bit more focused. No illusions. I just want to be left in peace. I've done my good deed, and so far no one has tracked me down, so it looks as if my techie has kept his promise. Which is all you can ask really, isn't it? Maybe I'm mad to tell you all this, but these days I've got other things on my mind.
And Dawn and Alistair have never been happier, as far as I know.
