The Immortalists(42)
By October, it’s been months since Klara and Raj performed. Klara couldn’t do the Jaws of Life while pregnant; now, nights awake with Ruby have turned her brain to fog, and she can’t count properly during the mind-reading act. They haven’t been able to recoup the costs of their materials. Their meager savings have gone to diapers and toys, clothes that Ruby outgrows by the hour. Raj walks from the Tenderloin to North Beach, pitching nightclubs and theaters, but most of them turn him away. The manager at Teatro ZinZanni can only give them four dates that fall.
‘We need to leave,’ Raj says, at dinner. ‘Take this show on the road. San Francisco’s burned out. The people here, they’re robots, they’re computers. Death to ’em, man.’ He boxes with an invisible computer.
‘Wait,’ says Klara, raising a finger. ‘Did you hear that?’
She’s pointed out Simon’s knocks to Raj before, but he always claims not to hear them. This time, he can’t have missed it. The knock was loud as a gunshot; even the baby yelped. She is five months old, with Raj’s silky black hair and Klara’s Cheshire cat grin.
Raj puts his fork down. ‘There’s nothing there.’
It pleases Klara, that Ruby can hear the knocks. She bounces the baby, kisses her pointy new teeth.
‘Ruby,’ she sings. ‘Ruby knows.’
‘Focus, Klara. I’m talking about moving. Making money. Breathing new life into this thing.’ Raj claps in front of her face. ‘The city’s over, baby. It’s dead. We’ve gotta hit it. Find gold somewhere else.’
‘Maybe we expanded too quickly,’ says Klara as Ruby begins to cry; the clapping has scared her. ‘Maybe we need to slow down.’
‘Slow down? That’s the last thing we need to do.’ Raj begins to pace. ‘We’ve gotta move. We’ve gotta keep moving. You stay too long in one place, you’ll burn out anywhere. That’s the secret, Klara. We can’t stop moving.’
His face is lit up like a jack-o’-lantern. Raj has big ideas, just like Klara does; it’s one of the things she loves about him. She thinks of Ilya’s black box. It’s meant to be on the road, Ilya said. Maybe she is, too.
‘Where would we go?’ she asks.
‘Vegas,’ says Raj.
Klara laughs. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘Why?’
‘It’s gaudy,’ she says, counting off on her fingers. ‘It’s over-the-top and overdone. It’s cheap, but it’s ridiculously expensive. And there are never any female headliners.’
Vegas reminds her of the first and only magic convention she attended: a glitzy event in Atlantic City at which the line for the men’s bathroom was longer than the women’s.
‘Most of all,’ she adds, ‘it’s fake. There’s nothing real about Vegas.’
Raj raises his eyebrows. ‘You’re a magician.’
‘Damn straight. I’m a magician who’ll perform anywhere but Vegas.’
‘Anywhere but Vegas. It could be our new show title.’
‘Cute.’ Ruby whimpers, and Klara maneuvers awkwardly out of her T-shirt. She used to walk naked through the apartment, but now she’s embarrassed by her body’s utility. ‘I’d rather live like nomads.’
‘Okay,’ says Raj. ‘We’ll live like nomads, then. Stay a few months in each town. See the world.’
Ruby unlatches, distracted. Klara pulls her shirt down, and Raj scoops Ruby up by the armpits. ‘San Francisco’s full of memories, Ruby-bean,’ he says. ‘You stick around here, you’re messing with ghosts.’
Does Klara imagine that he glances at her? His eyes are pencil points. But perhaps she’s wrong; when she looks again, he’s returned to the baby, blowing raspberries on her soft brown skin.
Klara stands to clear the dishes. ‘Where would we stay?’
‘I know a guy,’ Raj says.
That night, Raj and Ruby fall asleep easily, but Klara can’t. She climbs out of bed and walks past Ruby’s cradle to the closet, where she keeps Ilya’s black box. Inside it are her cards and steel rings, her balls and silk scarves. She doesn’t use them very often anymore, the flashier acts having overtaken her sleight-of-hand tricks, but now she brings two scarves to the round table in the kitchen. Raj’s old chili pepper lights are tacked around the window; to avoid his notice, she leaves them off. Before she sits down, she reaches for the bottle of vodka in the back of the freezer and pours herself a drink.
She used to work late like this. As a teenager, she’d wait until she heard Simon’s steady breathing and Varya’s muffled dream sounds, until Daniel began to snore, and then she collected her tools from underneath the bed and snuck out to the living room. She relished the unusual quiet and the feeling that the entire apartment was hers. She kept the lights off then, too, setting up on the floor beside the living room window so as to see by the street lamps on Clinton. For months, these sessions were her secret. But one night in winter, she padded into the living room to find that her father had beaten her to it.
For seconds, he did not notice her. He sat in his favorite armchair – tufted, upholstered in pea-colored velvet – and he was reading a book. There was a new fire in the hearth, the logs whole and glowing.
Klara nearly turned around, but stopped herself. If he could sit here at one in the morning, why couldn’t she? She stepped out of the darkness of the hallway and over the threshold to the living room, where Saul noticed her at last.