This Might Hurt(16)
I glanced at the rope on the newspaper stack and picked it up. I pulled it taut in front of him. “This would be sturdier.” He nodded, impressed.
Sir placed the platter on my head so I could get used to it. My mother fled upstairs to her bedroom. He watched her go, his lips curled in disgust. I set the platter down, wrapped the rope around my right wrist a few times, then let Sir tie both wrists together behind my back. He double knotted it, satisfied. At least I was standing on carpet. If the platter fell, there was a chance it wouldn’t break. I was only four feet two inches tall.
As if he could read my thoughts, Sir moved me to the tiled floor in the kitchen. He brought the platter, holding it solemnly before me, like a baby about to be baptized.
He steadied it on my head, watching me. “Nod when you’re ready,” he joked. “You all good, sweets?”
I steeled myself. “You can let go.”
He backed away and started the stopwatch. Ten minutes in, the lecture began. Sir circled me, a gunslinger ready for a duel. “What’s the only way you’re going to succeed?”
I wondered if the vibration of my voice would be enough to tip the platter, which, up to this point, I had kept steady. My neck was already beginning to ache.
“Through my willingness to endure.”
“Your future audience ain’t gonna hear you with a little church-mouse whisper like that. You’re not gonna sell out theaters or find your name on posters. You better find your voice, girl, and find it quick. It don’t take the world long to decide you’re unexceptional. You love magic?”
It was a ridiculous question, like asking a person if they loved breathing or swallowing. The feelings I’d grown for magic in the past fourteen months went beyond something as fragile as love. My mistake had been confiding that to Sir, who’d thought magic was dumb until he realized he could use it for his challenges.
“Of course.”
He nodded and squatted in front of me, voice low. “You keep your eye on the prize and you’re gonna be somebody someday. I can feel it.” His hand twitched as if to highlight the point. “The world’s never seen the likes of you, sweets.” He returned to full height, stretched his back, then settled into a kitchen chair.
“Sir?” Jack called from the stairs as soon as he’d gotten comfortable. “Can you come up here?”
“Whatever it is, ask your mother,” he said without moving.
“Her door’s locked.”
“Come down here, then.”
“I can’t.” She hesitated. “I was trying that jump-rope trick you taught me. I think I twisted my ankle.” When Sir didn’t say anything, she added, “It really hurts.”
He heaved himself out of the chair and grabbed the watch. “Fifteen to go.” He sauntered out of the kitchen, climbed the stairs, and began scolding my sister.
I resisted the urge to relax. The platter was steady. All I had to do was keep it exactly where it was for fifteen more minutes. I could do anything for that long, couldn’t I?
The task ahead of me was easy compared to Houdini’s work. For the Upside Down Trick, he locked his feet in stocks, then had himself lowered upside down into a tank filled with water. He stayed in there for two minutes until he escaped. He performed the trick hundreds of times.
In the Underwater Box Escape, he was handcuffed and put in leg-irons before climbing into a wooden crate. The crate was weighed down with two hundred pounds of lead, nailed and chained shut, then hoisted off the side of a barge into New York’s East River, like Alan said. It sank immediately. Fifty-seven seconds later, Houdini resurfaced, free of the restraints. When the crate was brought ashore, it was intact, shackles still inside.
These were the lengths I’d have to go to in order to make it as a performer. Sir was right: I had to be head and shoulders above everyone else. I pretended that I barely felt the rope chafing my wrists, the platter weighing down my skull.
Still, I considered shifting ten steps to my left so that I’d be in the living room and positioned over the couch to give the platter somewhere soft to land, just in case. Sir warned against just-in-case thinking all the time. Only losers thought that way, and in doing so, they predetermined their failure. But he’d never said I had to complete the sixty minutes standing in this exact spot.
I decided to stay where I was. No sense disturbing the peace.
Then: I felt it. Sometimes they built slowly, giving you time to press your tongue to the roof of your mouth or say “pickles.” Other times, like this one, they came out of nowhere.
I had to sneeze.
I hurried toward the carpet at the same time my nose and mouth erupted. All of a sudden my head was horribly light. In slow motion I watched the platter falling, falling, falling. With three quick flicks of the wrist, I freed my hands from the trick rope and caught the platter right before it crashed to the floor.
I stood there for a minute, doubled over and gasping. When my breathing returned to normal, I noticed how quiet the second floor had become.
Sir’s sermon had stopped.
A wave of something stronger than nausea rushed through me. I would’ve heard him coming down the stairs, wouldn’t I? I stopped breathing but could still feel my heartbeat in my hands. My knees went weak. I saw myself locked in the coat closet, a dog cage, a casket, in the pitch black, in white light, in seeping red. I was too frightened to cry or whine. I tightened my sweaty grip on the platter. I forced myself to peek at the staircase behind me.