The Confabulist (18 page)

I should be going. There are all sorts of minor tasks I need to accomplish. I have a half-dozen books due back at the library. One of them is a new Houdini biography. I read these books on Houdini with great interest. A lot of them come remarkably close to the truth, but no one knows the story quite like me. I imagine that by now I might be the only one left alive who knows the truth, though it’s possible that there are details in some archive or government file that would lead a curious investigator to the correct conclusion. Either way, as far as I know I’ve read every single book ever published by Houdini or about Houdini, and no one’s got the whole story yet.

Aside from the obvious reason, I’ve stayed interested in Houdini because of his escapes. He became the world’s most famous man in an era when it was hard to be world famous, because he was able to get out of the most impossible setups. Nothing could trap him. But of course this isn’t true—all of his escapes were manufactured. He
never really escaped because he was never really confined. It only seemed like he was.

My interest in magic has been lifelong; as a boy I was fascinated by any trick, no matter how poorly executed. My father laughed at this. He thought I was a fool, easily manipulated, but he wasn’t seeing what I saw. Even with the worst of magicians I saw wonder. It didn’t matter that I knew how the trick was done, or how inexpert their methods were. That wasn’t the point. They made me believe there was more to the world than I was able to see. Or better, that it was possible for multiple worlds to exist at once.

An orderly in a white shirt and pants comes out the door and stops. He turns to look at me. He unnerves me. I can’t tell what he’s looking for. It’s possible he’s deciding whether to sit and maybe smoke a cigarette or eat his lunch on the empty half of my bench. He stares at me as though trying to figure out if I belong where I am. I’m afraid I can’t help him, as I no longer have any clear indication of my place in the world. My head begins to hum, like a mosquito has flown into my ear.

His uniform makes him look like an ice cream man—all he needs is the little paper hat. I’d probably buy a Fudgsicle from him if he asked, but he gives me an uncomfortable feeling. I find myself hoping he doesn’t come over and sit. Thankfully he seems to have completed his scrutiny of me and goes back through the doors to whatever tasks await him.

The hand is quicker than the eye. Now you see it, now you don’t. This is classic magician stage patter. It’s a lovely bit of misdirection, set up as a logical and provable statement. But the hand isn’t quicker than the eye at all. A magician knows this. And so does our own brain.

Most of us, when trying to catch a ball, will place our hand ahead of where the ball is when we saw it. Part of this is us reacting to where we think the ball’s trajectory will best intersect our hand, but we overshoot even more than that, because it takes time, about two hundred milliseconds, for the information about the ball’s whereabouts to travel from our eye to our brain and then to the muscles that control our hand. Our brain knows this. It knows that by the time it’s told the hand to move to the correct location, it’s dealing with out-of-date information. The ball has moved. The conditions have changed. The trick is afoot.

So the brain makes an unconscious logical assumption. If it didn’t, we’d be incapable of functioning within the world. That’s its job. But these unconscious rationales can also make us believe the impossible.

In 1918 Harry Houdini made an elephant disappear onstage at the New York Hippodrome in front of more than five thousand people. A box about eight feet wide and high and twelve feet long was wheeled onstage. An elephant named Jennie was then led out by a trainer. The box was up off the ground on wheels, with the long side facing the audience. Jennie and her trainer walked up a ramp into the box and the doors were closed. The stagehands rotated the box a quarter turn so that the entrance was facing the audience.

Houdini stared at the box and clapped his hands. A curtain was drawn back from a circular hole in the front of the box, and the back doors were opened, allowing the audience to see right through the box. Jennie was gone, Houdini said, “In an instant.”

But it wasn’t an instant. It only seemed like one. In reality it took Houdini over seven minutes to make an elephant disappear.

I made Alice’s father disappear by an entirely different method,
but it was the same effect. We both turned something enormous into thin air. That night she first found me, she was trying to find out what her father was like. She was trying to add substance to a ghost.

I know exactly what sort of man her father was. I’ve told her the barest details, I’ve told her facts, and I’ve told her mechanics. But I’ve never given her what she really wants to know. What he was like. Why he was absent.

I can’t imagine what that’s like, given the almost constant presence my own parents have in my consciousness, even now, years after they’ve died. I didn’t see my father ever again after I left home, so when I finally found out he was dead, it wasn’t a shock. His ghost had been haunting me for years before he died.

When I was about sixteen, we got in a fight. I don’t remember what it was about, but there was a moment when his arm was cocked, ready to backhand me across the face, but it never swung. I realized that I hadn’t flinched. I stood my ground, and then I understood that I could resist him. I might not win, but he would get as good as he gave. He seemed to come to the same conclusion.

“You’re not worth it,” he said as he dropped his hand and walked away.

My mother sat at the table, listening to the front door slam. She’d seen the entire exchange.

For the first time in my life I felt powerful. “What a fool,” I said.

My mother shook her head and got up. “You’re just like him,” she said, as though that wasn’t a bad thing.

I remember thinking that, no, I wasn’t. I was the opposite of him. And to this day, I still think that. But I can’t discount the fact that my mother loved him just as much as she loved me. And I can’t discount that his genes make up half my being. I just don’t feel like him.
But then again, I never really knew how it felt to be him—I only saw it from the outside.

The urge to resist becoming my father has dominated my adult life. When in doubt I ask myself what he would have done and I do the opposite. It’s not even something I do consciously. He has infiltrated me to the core.

Once, years ago, I asked Alice what her mother had told her about her father. “One moment he was there,” she said, “the kindest and gentlest man she’d ever met, and then he just disappeared. It was an illusion. He was someone else completely.”

My rage is beginning to dissipate. Anger is a hard machine to maintain. It comes at the speed of light, and when it hits, it seems as though it will never leave you, but then it fades in a few exhales, and while it’s never completely gone it loses its power.

I should have been more honest with Dr. Korsakoff. I have been having these false memories for a while, I know. What I don’t know is what to do about them.

There are a few that keep coming, unbidden, and they seem so real. It’s frightening. There is one in particular. It’s early morning and I’m in bed. The room is cold, but I’ve kicked off the blankets. As I wake I feel the weight of someone else’s arm on my chest. I turn and look, see the arm is Clara’s. She’s asleep and there are lines in her face from the pillow. I can smell her, a mix of laundry soap and toothpaste. She’s not young anymore, but she’s still beautiful. I lie there, listening to her breathe, and I am overcome with the knowledge that one day either she or I will die; only one of us will be left, alone without the other. All the air is sucked out of the room and I feel like I’ve been shot into the vacuum of space though I haven’t moved from the bed. My sorrow is so enveloping that it’s physically
painful. All I can think is that this can’t be right—the world could never be so cruel. Then Clara’s eyes open and she smiles at me, rubs my chest, and I feel myself warm like a child in front of a woodstove. I grow calm and content. Happy.

I know this memory isn’t real; I know this didn’t happen. But I wish it did. If only this were how my life had turned out instead of the utter waste it has ended up being. If Dr. Korsakoff were a better doctor, if he could cure me, then maybe this false memory and the pain that comes with it would be taken away. He could even leave me with the memory if he could blunt the pain.

I don’t really want to go back inside and yell at Dr. Korsakoff anymore. That feeling is gone. The sun on this bench has had some sort of effect on me. It’s made me remember things that give me comfort. Real or not, they’re still my memories. I would like very much to recapture the feeling I had on that picnic with my parents. If I could go into the hospital and buy a roast beef sandwich, if I could stretch out on the ground and feel the breeze and look at the clouds as I ate, feel that serene unbridled elation I remember so well, open my eyes and be next to Clara, I’d trade that for any disappearing elephant.

HOUDINI

1918

“T
HE MOST IMPORTANT THING IS NOT TO PANIC
. N
O MATTER
what happens, you must keep your wits.”

Houdini paused to make sure that his point was understood. For the last year he’d been giving American soldiers and sailors lessons on underwater survival and general escape techniques. It was hard to tell how much they learned—it had taken him a lifetime to master skills he attempted to pass on to them over the course of an afternoon. Still, he liked to think that his efforts were saving lives.

“People drown in a sinking ship because they lose their sense of direction. If you become disoriented you’re done for. Watch the air bubbles. They’re your best clue to which way is up. Obviously, that’s the way you want to swim.”

The soldiers laughed nervously. There were about twenty of them, fresh faced and fidgeting in their crisp new uniforms.

“I did a bridge jump some years ago,” he began, trying to sound as
casual as possible. “I think it was in Detroit. The plan was for me to be manacled by the police, jump into the river, and escape. I’ve done dozens, if not hundreds, of such feats. The night before the jump was unusually cold, however, and in the morning we discovered the river had frozen over.”

Some of the soldiers nodded, as though they’d been there or done something similar.

“My wife wanted me to cancel. She said it was too dangerous, and she was probably right, but I knew that if I didn’t do it, they’d say I was a coward. So I had a hole chopped in the ice, which was about three inches thick, and in I jumped.

“The first part of the plan went okay. It was unbelievably cold, but I’d trained for the cold by submerging myself in baths of ice water. I got myself free of the handcuffs and leg irons easily enough, but I hadn’t counted on the speed of the current. The water was dark. I had been carried past the hole and couldn’t see where it was. As I ran out of air I made my way upward, where I discovered that between the ice and the surface of the water was a gap of about two inches that contained air. I was able to get myself a few breaths that way, but things were getting pretty grim.

“But I didn’t panic, boys. I stayed calm. My assistants had orders to leave me submerged for five minutes, and after that they should send a diver down on a rope to look for me so that my body could be returned to my wife. After eight minutes—I gave them hell for that extra three minutes, I can tell you that—they dropped a rope into the water. The diver was in a boat above getting ready to go into the water. He probably didn’t want to, cold as it was. I was still down there, breathing the air underneath the ice, looking for the hole to get out. And I saw that rope fall into the water, about twenty feet
away from me. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more welcome sight. I pulled myself up it just as the diver was coming down.

“So don’t panic. You never know what’s about to happen, and your job is to stay alive so that when an opportunity presents itself, you can take advantage of it.”

He had their full attention. They’d listen to him now, and with any luck they’d remember what he told them when they needed it. He thought about the advice he was giving them. It was good advice, he knew. Maybe he should take it.