The Immortalists(49)

Raj coughs, to warn her. Where are you going? But she knows where she’s going. She’s known all along.

‘We know something about reality, my father and I. And I bet you know it, too. Is it that reality is too much? Too painful, too limited, too restrictive of joy or opportunity? No,’ she says. ‘I think it’s that reality is not enough.’

Klara sets the mug on the floor and retrieves a cup and ball from the drawer. She puts the empty cup facedown on the table and places the ball on top.

‘It’s not enough to explain what we don’t understand.’ She lifts the ball and holds it tight in her fist. ‘It’s not enough to account for the inconsistencies we see and hear and feel.’ When she opens her fist, the ball has vanished. ‘It’s not enough on which to pin our hopes, our dreams – our faith.’ She raises the steel cup to reveal the ball beneath it. ‘Some magicians say that magic shatters your worldview. But I think magic holds the world together. It’s dark matter; it’s the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate’ – she puts the cup down – ‘reality’ – she makes a fist – ‘is.’

When she opens her first, the red ball isn’t there. What’s there is a full, perfect strawberry.

Silence stretches from the carpeted floor to the fifty-foot ceiling, from the back of the stage to the balcony. Then Raj begins to clap, and the bald man joins in. Only the man with the gold cross withholds applause. Instead, he says, ‘When can you start?’

Klara stares at the strawberry in her palm. It’s damp. She can smell it. There’s a roar in her ears like the waterfall she heard outside the Mirage – or was it a saw?

The bald man takes a leather-bound calendar from his pocket. ‘I’m thinking December, January – January? Put her right before Siegfried and Roy?’

The larger man has a voice like something moving underwater. ‘They’ll eat her alive.’

‘Right, but as an opener. We’ll give her a half hour, people are filtering in, they want something to look at; she’s a good-looking girl – you’re a good-looking girl – she gets their attention, asses in seats, and bam! Tigers, lions, explosions. Blast off.’

‘They’ll need new costumes,’ says the other man.

‘Oh, complete overhaul on the costumes. We’ll get you a production team, cut the birdcage, cut the cabinet, amp up the rope hang, amp up the mind-reading trick – bring an audience member onstage, that kind of thing; we’ll get you set up for it.’ Someone’s pager beeps. Both men check their pockets. ‘Listen, we’ll talk. You got four months before opening, you’re gonna be fine.’

Jesus fucking Christ,’ says Raj as soon as the elevator doors close. ‘A strawberry.’ He’s laughing, crumpled in the corner where two of the glass walls meet. ‘I’ll never know how you pulled that off, but it was perfect.’

‘I don’t know, either.’

Raj’s laughter stops, though his smile still hangs open.

‘I’m serious,’ Klara says. ‘I’d never seen that strawberry before. I have no idea where it came from.’

Her first thought is that the blackouts have come back: perhaps she drove to a market, bought a container, stuffed one in her pocket. But that doesn’t make sense. Raj is the only one who drives the rental car, and there’s no grocery store in walking distance from King’s Row.

‘What do you think you are?’ Raj asks. There’s something feral in his face, something wild, like a wolf guarding his kill. ‘A magician who believes in her own tricks?’

Months ago, she would have been wounded. This time, she isn’t. She’s noticed something.

The look in Raj’s eyes. She mistook it for anger. But that’s not what it is.

He’s afraid of her.





18.


Raj works with the production team to rig the Jaws of Life and stage Second Sight. He designs a new set of props for the Indian Needle Trick: bigger needles, so they read from the stage, and red cord instead of thread. The Mirage’s entertainment director asks Klara if she’ll let Raj saw her in half – ‘Easy-peasy; won’t hurt a bit’ – but she refuses. He thinks she’s afraid of the trick when the truth is that she could give him an hour-long tutorial on P. T. Selbit and his misogynistic inventions: Destroying a Girl, Stretching a Lady, Crushing a Woman, all of them perfectly timed to capitalize on postwar bloodthirst and women’s suffrage.

Klara won’t be a woman who is sawed in half or tied in chains – nor will she be rescued or liberated. She’ll save herself. She’ll be the saw.

But she knows they might lose the job if she pushes back more. She lets the costumer raise her hemline by five inches and lower her neckline by two, fit the chest with padded cups. During rehearsals, Raj stands proudly, but Klara is shrinking. The radiance she felt during the audition is becoming dimmer every day – it’s washed out by the five-hundred-watt spotlights, obscured by the fog of the smoke machines. She thought the Mirage wanted her as she was, but they want her cubed, larger than life. They want her Vegas. To them, she’s as much a novelty as the pink volcano outside the hotel: their very own girl magician.

Ruby’s cartilage is turning to bone, and her bones are fusing. Her body is seventy percent water, the same percentage of water on Earth. She has delicate canine fangs and one set of knobby molars. She can say go and no and come me, which means come with me, which turns Klara’s heart to goop. She shrieks with delight at the sight of the pink lizards that crawl through King’s Row and holds pebbles tight in her fists. When the show opens and they get their first big paycheck, Raj wants to sell the trailer and rent an apartment, look at preschools and pediatricians. But Klara is running out of time. If the woman on Hester Street was right, she’ll die in two months.