The Magician's Assistant (16 page)

“He didn’t want you to know,” her mother said.

“But I do now. I know part of it.”

“You never should have seen them.”

Sabine closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “I did see them, there’s no use in going over that.” Even in her frustration, Sabine felt sorry for what she was doing to her parents.

Her mother pushed her plate away so as to put both hands flat out on the table. “Listen to me, Sabine. You had a long and very unusual relationship with a good man, but that’s over now. Parsifal’s death was a tragedy and we will all miss him, but you’re no girl anymore. There are no more years to waste. Don’t pursue dead men.” She slapped the table gently, as if to say, enough. “Don’t pursue dead men. I don’t think I have any advice clearer than that.”

Sabine didn’t think of the boy who Parsifal had been as dead. That boy was in Nebraska, waiting for her. He was there with his mother.

The house got bigger. Every day the staircase grew by ten steps. In another week it would be impossible to climb. Sabine didn’t go into most of the rooms anymore. When the firemen came on Tuesdays they ran the vacuum over old vacuum marks, picking up only the most subtle layer of dust and rabbit fur generated by life. What had possessed Phan to buy such a big house? Coming to Los Angeles alone, not knowing a soul, hadn’t he rattled around in there? Didn’t he find that loneliness was exacerbated by space?

Sabine tried to think about Parsifal’s life, but all she seemed able to remember was the nagging infection in his heplock. In her mind, he was always thin. He was already deep inside his spiral of aging. She wanted to think about him in Paris or in the backyard in summer or up onstage in the flattering light, but the thoughts were always crowded out by that last headache.

In the place where they did the MRI testing, Parsifal had barely opened his eyes. The machine was big enough to be a room itself, solid enough to have its own center of gravity. They must have built the hospital around it. Even broken into pieces, it could never have come through doors, down stairwells. Tiny beads of sweat began to surface on Parsifal’s ears. He stayed on his back, on his gurney, next to the sliding tray they would move him onto.

“It looks like a clothes dryer,” Parsifal said to her, and shuddered. “They’re going to put me in the dryer.” Parsifal was a magician, but magic wasn’t escape. Parsifal could make Sabine disappear down to the heel taps of her shoes, but he had no interest in restraining himself. He would not get into the disappearing closet, nor would he lie down in the saw box, even to see what Sabine had to do to make the blades miss her stomach. He was never once padlocked and chained. It was all he could do to see a film of Houdini hanging upside-down over Fifth Avenue in a straitjacket. Magic for Parsifal did not include being stuffed into a milk can filled with water or being buried in a coffin six feet underground. He could not speak of such illusions. Sabine never minded a tight squeeze. Despite her height she could tuck herself into whatever small corner Parsifal requested.

“I got locked in a refrigerator when I was a kid,” he told her once, when they were looking at some equipment that a retired magician was selling. The attic was hot and the ceiling low. Sabine had slipped in between two panels in a magic box that were so close she had to turn her face to the side. “I was playing and the door slammed shut.” He sat down for a minute on a stool. When Sabine asked him if he wanted a glass of water, he shook his head.

At the end of his life, Parsifal was trussed like a mental patient, stuffed, terrified, into a narrow tube so that the doctors might find the source of his crushing headache.

“You’re not wearing a watch. Do you have any metal on your body?” the black nurse said, his voice low but clear, nearly musical. “Do you have a pacemaker?”

“I really don’t want to go in there,” Parsifal said. His closed eyelids fluttered from the headache.

“Nobody wants to go in there,” the technician said. He was a Filipino who wore a gold cross on the outside of his blue cotton scrub suit. “Some people don’t mind and some people hate it, but nobody wants to go.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” the nurse said.

“Doesn’t hurt at all,” the technician said. “We’re going to lift you up, get you over onto the table. The pretty lady here is going to hold your head.” He looked at Sabine.

Sabine put one cool hand on either side of Parsifal’s head, and Parsifal cringed. No matter how gentle she was, she was causing him pain and it was something she did not think she could possibly stand. She concentrated on the shape of his ears inside her palms. Beautiful ears. At the count of three they lifted, brought him only a few inches into the air, moved him barely more than a foot. It was gentle, everything was easy, but there were tears pooling up in the corners of his eyes and they spilled into her cupped palms.

“Not so bad,” the technician said. “Raise up your legs now.” He slipped a pillow under Parsifal’s knees. “Is that comfortable? Do you feel all right?”

“I’m sorry,” Parsifal whispered. Now the tears were running into his ears. “I just can’t go in there.”

“He’s claustrophobic,” Sabine said, stroking his arm. She was worried that she was going to faint.

The nurse and the technician looked at one another. They were a comedy team, each responsible for half a sentence. “The claustrophobia we’ve seen in here—,” the technician said.

“—one woman put out her arms and stopped the tray at the last minute—,” the nurse said, spreading his arms.

“—another one just scooted out the bottom and left,” the technician said. “Not a word to us.”

For a moment they were all quiet. They were all waiting for different things.

“This is a problem,” Sabine said finally.

The nurse looked through Parsifal’s file. He was clearly mulling things over. “I can give you a little Xanax, under the tongue. It’s bitter but it makes you feel better right away. That’s going to help you.” He stepped out of the room for no more than half a second and came back holding a tiny white cup, as if the pills were kept in a bucket just outside the door. At some point he had put on gloves, or maybe he had been wearing them all along. Then the nurse did something that surprised Sabine: He put his full open hand on the side of Parsifal’s face, a touch that seemed almost loving, and for a minute Sabine wondered if they knew one another. Parsifal opened his eyes as if kissed awake. “Open up,” the nurse said.

Parsifal parted his lips and the thin, covered fingers of the nurse dipped beneath his tongue. The technician turned without another word and went back into his booth where he sat behind a glass window. He busied himself at a control panel, not watching.

“I don’t like these machines,” the nurse said. “I’ve been in there myself lots of times. They test things out on us. But it isn’t bad.” He kept his hand on Parsifal’s face. He ran a thumb across Parsifal’s forehead in a way that did not seem to hurt him. “You just have to go. Just for a little while and then he’ll let you out. The pretty lady, is she your wife?”

“Yes,” Parsifal said.

“Your wife is going to stand right here at the bottom and she’s going to hold on to your foot.” He turned to Sabine. “Go hold his foot,” he said softly. And Sabine let go of Parsifal’s hand and walked to the end of the table and held both of his bare, sheet-covered feet. “All this is is magnets. There’s nothing in there that can hurt you.”

“I just don’t like being closed in,” Parsifal said.

“Nobody does,” the nurse said. “Nobody does. Is that pill gone?”

Parsifal nodded.

“Then you’re feeling a little better. I’m going to put some earplug? in because it gets noisy in there.” He slipped two small foam corks into Parsifal’s ears and then began putting padding around his head. “This is to hold you in place,” he said, his voice suddenly much louder. “You have to promise to stay still for this so you don’t have to do it again later on.” He put a strap under Parsifal’s chin and snapped the end above his head. “Now, this is the part that I don’t like. I’m going to put a trap over your head, just to keep everything in place. Close your eyes.” Even raised, his voice was sweet, hypnotic. Sabine knew he would have made a fine magician and she knew that even in his pain Parsifal was thinking the same thing. The nurse reached up and pulled a white steel cage over Parsifal’s head. Then Parsifal was Houdini, but he hadn’t practiced. “Now, I want you to stay real still, but if you need something, you say it, we can hear you, and you can hear us, and your wife, she’s right here holding your feet and if anything goes wrong she’ll just pull you out. Is that okay?”

Parsifal didn’t answer. He waved his hand.

“Okay,” the man said, and went behind the door.

The voice of the technician came over an unseen speaker. It filled the room. “I’m going to move the table now. This is going to be very slow.” When the tray moved into the tube, Sabine followed it. Parsifal wiggled his toes and she squeezed them back, and in this way they communicated.

“He’s doing all right in there?” the voice asked.

“He’s all right,” Sabine said. Squeeze.

There is a certain feeling when the spotlight is directly in your eyes. You know the house is full, the manager has told you, but everything in front of you is wrapped in a black sea, so you stop trying. To try and see is to strain your eyes against the light. It will give you a headache. When you look out, you are blind. The only person who knows this is the one standing next to you on the stage. He is all you can see. Together you speak and smile into the blackness. He is blind and he leads you. From this close you think he is wearing too much mascara.

“You’re doing just fine,” the technician’s voice said. “You are holding perfectly still. Just keep holding still.”

There was a drumming in the room, an industrial rhythm of hammers and gears, low thuds that at times seemed so frantic that it felt like something had gone wrong. The test took half an hour. Sabine watched the clock over the tube click along like an oven timer. She wanted to tell Parsifal something, to keep him occupied, but there was nothing to say. It was all she could do to speak. “Are you doing okay?” she called, and he bent his foot by way of acknowledgment.

“You’re halfway there,” the voice said. “You are so still. You’re perfect.” The sound of bedlam, jackhammers and lead pipes on lead walls. And then later, “Three more minutes. One more set of pictures and then you’re out of there.” That was when Sabine felt Parsifal’s toes flex and pull with happiness in her hands.

The nurse came into the room, his blue scrubs dazzling against his black skin. He pushed a switch to set Parsifal free. “Over, over, over,” the nurse said. “Never have to go in there again.” He slid the head cage up and flicked the chin strap loose. It came apart so much quicker than it went together. The padding was gone, the earplugs. Parsifal was free. “You’re feeling okay now. Aren’t you fine?”

“My head hurts so much,” Parsifal said, his eyes still watering. There were wet stains beside his head.

“They’ll know something soon. Come on and I’ll get you back to your room so you can rest.”

“Can I stay here, just for a minute? I don’t want to move yet.” Parsifal tried to smile at the man for his kindness. “I just need a minute to rest.”

“You want to stay on the machine? Wouldn’t you like it better if I moved you onto your gurney?”

“Not yet,” Parsifal said. “If that’s all right. Not just yet.”

“Sure,” the nurse said, patting his shoulder so lightly that they almost didn’t touch. “We’ll be right behind the window. We have a few minutes. You take your time.”

Sabine thanked him and the man left. All those people she met on the most important day of her life and never saw again. Sabine took Parsifal’s hand.

“I wish we were home,” he said.

“We will be. We’ll go home today. No matter what they tell us, we’ll leave.”

“Lean over,” he said. “Come close to me.”

Sabine bent forward. Her hair slipped from behind her ears and fell onto his forehead. His eyes were blue like the sky over Los Angeles in winter.

“Open your mouth,” he said.

And as soon as he said it she felt the cold weight on her tongue and tasted metal in her saliva. She opened her mouth and he reached up to her and took the silver dollar off her tongue.

“Look at that,” he said, and put it in her hand and squeezed her hand tight around the coin. “Rich girl,” he said.

Sabine waited three more days before calling Dot Fetters.

“Just checking to see how the wedding plans are coming,” Sabine said, but she could not make her voice sound like her voice. It shuddered and broke.

“Sabine?” Dot said.

Sabine put her forehead against the heel of her hand and nodded.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m good.”

“You’re coming out, aren’t you? That’s what you’re calling to tell me.”

“I was thinking...,” Sabine said, but didn’t finish.

“Bertie,” Dot Fetters called, “it’s Sabine, pick it up in the bedroom.”

In the distance, Sabine could hear a scramble. Dot Fetters was no fool; two would be more persuasive than one. In the moments it took Bertie to reach the phone, Sabine saw the rooms of the house on the other end of the line. She saw the living room where Dot Fetters sat in a reclining chair unreclined, pale tan walls and practical carpet with a braided rug over that. The kind of rug that Parsifal referred to as a big doormat. The light was dim and gold and the house was as small as Sabine’s was huge. The halls were hung with family photographs from generations back. The double bed that Bertie was now sitting on was covered in a white chenille spread. She didn’t stop to turn on the light on the bedside table before picking up the receiver.

There was a click and then a breathless excitement on the line. “Sabine! Are you coming?” she said in the dark.

“She’s thinking about it,” Dot Fetters told her daughter.

“You have to come now,” Bertie said. “We could use help with the wedding. You’ve got such good taste and I don’t know what I’m doing. I need help fixing up Haas’s house, too. There’s so much around here that needs to be done.”

“Don’t make her think we want her to come just to put her to work,” Mrs. Fetters said.