08 Illusion (39 page)

… of a man he’d seen before. A man in his forties. Thin, graying hair, wire-rimmed, professorial glasses, a somewhat stern, focused expression.

He plucked the photograph from the table. “Who is he?”

Preston was intently reading his face. “So you
have
seen him before?”

“Who is he?”

Now Preston was the one shaken. “His name is Jerome Parmenter, former professor of physics at Stanford. I say ‘former’ because he seems to have disappeared.”

chapter

34

D
ane was trying to breathe. His hand was shaking.

“You need some water?”

Dane nodded. Arnie hurried to bring a glass.

Dane’s heart was racing. Anger, hope, relief, anxiety, all boiled inside him at once. “He was there at McCaffee’s …” He told Dane and Arnie the whole story of the man he’d seen in McCaffee’s, sitting in a corner with a computer while Mandy—Eloise—tried to levitate and came crashing to the floor.

Preston was as agitated as he ever got, which wasn’t very, but on him it was impressive. “Unbelievable! The odds! I was shooting in the dark, following a hunch! Unbelievable!” He grabbed at the photos on the table. “Let’s make some room here!”

They put away the photographs. Dane set aside his computer. The table was clear.

“The odds!” Preston was still recovering. “But I shouldn’t be surprised. Sooner or later the pieces had to fall together.” He reached again into his satchel and produced a small stack of lengthy articles in fine print from professional journals and scientific publications, some featuring the same photograph. “No, this is not from my pleasure reading list. My staff is always investigating new ideas and technologies that could be useful for new tricks and illusions—and psychic hoaxes, either one—and they sniffed out Parmenter. Here’s a man with cutting-edge interests: interdimensional crossovers, electromagnetic pulse, scalar waves, time travel. He’s a regular Tesla, or Einstein.

“This article deals with his work on interdimensional displacement, ID, the whole idea that an object can be shifted from one dimension to another, moved an inch or a mile, and returned to its original dimension so that it seems to have been instantly transported from one place to another.”

“Beam me up, Scotty?” said Arnie.

“It would be that impressive if it really worked and a stage magician could get hold of it. Imagine the illusions—but they wouldn’t be illusions, would they? They’d be the real thing.”

Dane couldn’t believe it yet, but a building tension was gnawing at his insides. “Her entrance on your show … she used to do that sort of thing at McCaffee’s, just appear out of nowhere.”

“Okay,” said Arnie, “we’re doing sci-fi now, everybody keep that in mind. We’re not going to get carried away here.”

“I’m afraid there’s more.” Preston leafed through the stack and found an article from
Scientific American
. “Timelines. How it could be possible for an object—maybe a person?—to occupy multiple timelines at once and thereby exist as a multiplicity.”

“Multiplicity. Of course,” said Arnie. He was kidding.

“Take comfort, I’m not that far ahead,” Preston assured them. “Here’s what I gathered from the article: Dane, here you are, sitting in this chair at … two thirty-five in the afternoon. On our timeline, in our time dimension, you’re the only Dane there is. The Dane who was sitting here five minutes ago doesn’t exist anymore. He was the two-
thirty
Dane. You’re the two
thirty-five
Dane.”

“But he’s the same guy,” Arnie countered.

“Except for the
time
; that’s the point of the article. You’ll never see both Danes—the Dane in the present and the Dane from the past—sitting in the chair at the same time
unless
you can place the two-thirty Dane on a separate timeline, then pull that timeline up to a point contemporaneous with the timeline of the two thirty-five Dane. Then you’d have two Danes existing at once in the same place because they would be in the same place at different times. It would be the same event happening twice at the same time.”

Dane and Arnie stared at him blankly.

“I don’t totally get it either,” he admitted. “The article uses the example of a railroad car passing through a railroad crossing.” He pointed out the illustration on the second page. “Here we are, the observers, sitting in our car waiting for the train to go by, and right in front of us, at this instant in our time, is the railroad car. Consider that an event, the railroad car passing directly in front of us. But two seconds ago it wasn’t in front of us, it was about a car length down the track to our left. Imagine that as another event that happened in the past. Now imagine if you could isolate that past event, that car at that place in that instant of time, move the event to a parallel track, analogous to a second timeline, and then shift that track forward so that both events are now occurring side by side at the crossing. You would have what would look like two identical but separate cars going through the crossing at the same time, but what you’re seeing are two different events on two different timelines. The same car twice at the same time.”

Dane thought it over. “Two railroad cars? Out of one?”

“Bizarre, isn’t it?”

“Two Danes sitting in the same chair.”

“Yes.”

“What would that look like?”

“I don’t know. You might see them both, you might not. Only Parmenter would know.”

Another connection, a lightbulb coming on. “Carson!” Dane said. Preston and Arnie waited. “Carson, the dove. The four doves out of one. She did a routine with four doves but she only brought one… . I figured she secretly loaded the other three.”

“Maybe she did,” said Arnie, not sounding very sure about it.

“Or she”—Dane reviewed, piecing it together—“she generated three more Carsons in three other time dimensions and made them look like four at once in ours.”

“Four events that could have been microseconds apart made to happen in the same place at the same time,” Preston suggested.

Arnie sang the theme music from
The Twilight Zone
.

“So!” Preston leaned forward in his chair, intense like a storyteller. “Imagine this with me. Here’s … Eloise … sitting in her chair and I’m telling her to levitate a pencil over which she, the girl in the chair, has no control. Somehow, through some connection with this Parmenter and whatever he’s come up with, she generates a second Eloise on a second timeline, unseen by us, who picks up the pencil, rotates it, and makes it fly around the room.”

Dane ventured, “An Eloise who was there five minutes before?”

“Or a microsecond. Or a
nanosecond
. And on her own timeline so that she is writing her own unique history, free to act in her own way, make her own choices, carry out her own actions, but still remain in essence the original Eloise. Mind-boggling—and pure speculation, of course.”

“So this second Eloise can fly?” Arnie asked.

“
If
any of this really works, I’m guessing—
guessing
, mind you—that she can interpose herself between our time and space and hers anywhere she wants. If she could position her time and space four, six, however many feet above ours and penetrate our time and space from there, she would appear to us to be suspended in midair, flying, or at least the pencil she’s holding would appear so.”

“So how does she levitate?” asked Arnie.

Preston could only throw up his hands.

Dane’s mind was racing along with his heart. “So Eloise Kramer is some kind of timeline duplicate, the Mandy Whitacre who existed forty years ago.”

“But would she have any idea?” Preston mused.

Arnie winced. “All right, time to call a halt here. Gentlemen, you took a wrong turn. Reality’s the
other
way.”

“I was hoping I could speak with her after the show, but she’d left abruptly.”

“And I can’t imagine why, with you being so nice to her.”

Preston gave Arnie an impatient look. “Well, she didn’t exactly go crying to
you
.”

“I wasn’t her manager anymore.”

“And not her friend either.”

Arnie took the blow but didn’t bend. “No. I wasn’t. She has that attorney to manage her now. She caught a flight back to Spokane, back to him and his big plans. Let him deal with her.” Then he told Preston, “And she
was
crying, by the way.”

Oh, the feeling
. Dane sighed, resting his forehead on his fingertips. “And I told her to leave, to get out of my life and never come back.”

For a moment, words fled away. Arnie crossed his arms and looked out the window. Preston drew a deep breath and sighed it out long and slowly. Dane just remembered the last time he saw her; she was wearing that beautiful blue gown. She was wilting, dying against the doorpost, and he was walking away.

At last Preston asked Dane, “Well, did she ever say anything to you, anything that would reflect on, uh …”

“She said she was a little crazy, that she’d been in a mental ward … that she thought she was someone else.”

Preston’s hands covered his nose and mouth as his eyes widened. “Who?”

“She didn’t want to tell me, so we never talked about it.” Then he gathered strength and added, “But I did find out from a person connected with the hospital that when she was in the hospital she called herself Mandy.”

Preston reeled a little at the news. “Oh, Dane. Ohhh, Dane. And this was before she met you?”

“That’s right.”

“She was calling herself Mandy before she even met you?”

Dane could feel Arnie’s stern, cautionary look and just wagged his head. “It’s hard to be sure.”

“You need to talk to her about this.” Then Preston thought again and his face fell. “But that wouldn’t be easy, would it?”

“That’s why I never went there.”

“What?” asked Arnie.

Now Dane was feeling impatient. “You’re the one who thought
she
was hustling
me
. What if I, the older guy, were to suggest to her, a cute, sexy twenty-year-old, that I married her forty years ago, so she’s my wife, or is about to be, or was?”

Arnie wilted a little. “I see your point.”

“Especially since we don’t
really
know what we’re talking about,” said Preston.

“Ah!” said Arnie, “now there’s wisdom!”

“But Parmenter knows,” said Dane.

“If we can find him,” said Preston. “I tried to track him down. I wanted to be the first magician in line to be his friend and collaborator … and it didn’t happen. Last I heard from my sources, he’d left Stanford. He said he was pursuing a privately funded project and had relocated”—pause for effect—“to Las Vegas.”

Another uncanny connection. Dane sank back in his chair.

“Oh,” Arnie mused. “A privately funded project in Las Vegas! I’ve seen those, the guy shooting dice, downing some drinks, a couple of younger women along …” He snapped his fingers. “Hey,
younger women
!” Dane sent him a corrective glare. “Think I’ll get some more coffee. Where are those cookies?”

“There
is
money there,” Preston countered, “and people who know how to make it and invest it to make more.”

“We have to find him,” said Dane. He felt ready to die trying.

“And maybe we’ve picked up his trail again as of today. Or, you could say, as of September 17, 2010, at that intersection in Las Vegas. I’d say that’s your starting point. Dane, my friend, it’s time to ask questions.”

Doris Branson, a lady in her fifties, managed the Orpheus Hotel Casino just off the Las Vegas Strip, was good to her friends, honest and shrewd in business, twice divorced, and—it seemed everyone knew it but she—prone to drinking.

Among friends such as hers in a town such as this, it was hard to make a case against alcohol abuse, but she got a strong hint about it when she bent her car around a palm tree in someone’s front yard. She paid a one-thousand-dollar fine, agreed to perform forty hours of community service in lieu of jail, lost her privilege to drive for ninety days, and had to devote a great deal of time and money to getting insured again after her insurance company dropped her.

Even so, her friends marveled and kept telling her how lucky she was. From the looks of the car and the blood on the dashboard, she should have been seriously injured, but she woke up in the hospital with no greater complaint than a hangover and no recollection of the accident. The doctors also reminded her—until she was tired of hearing it—how lucky she was. They kept her for one day of observation and then sent her home.

Lucky? As of today she still had fourteen hours remaining on her community service commitment and twelve days to get her driver’s license reinstated
if
she completed a substance abuse class and could prove she had insurance. With luck like she’d had, she wasn’t about to place any bets, not even in her own casino.

That’s where she was headed today, by elevator from the administration offices on the third floor to the casino on the main floor. It was routine, just verifying some numbers with the floor manager.

She would never have that meeting.

The Prospector’s Lounge at the Orpheus Hotel boasted twenty-five tables and ten booths and could seat a hundred, not a big venue for Las Vegas but impressive, even intimidating, to a girl raised on a ranch in Idaho who drove to Vegas in a tired VW. It was quite a leap from McCaffee’s, too, trimmed out in scrollwork and filigree, with a red carpet that was soft under the feet, red velvet curtains and brass fixtures, a totally clean, reach-everywhere sound system, a real stage with a powered curtain that disappeared into the ceiling, racks and racks of stage lights, a rear entrance direct from the dressing rooms—real dressing rooms!—and a three-person stage crew who knew everything there was to know about the place and were there to meet her every need.