Chapter 18: Showtime!

21 September 1974, The Showbox, Minneapolis

“I SEE YOU HAVE a salt shaker on your table, sir. May I borrow it?” The man in the front row handed the salt shaker up to Paris on stage. Paris removed the cap from the shaker. “I think salt is an amazing thing. They say we need salt to live, but where does it go?” Paris made a fist of his left hand and poured the contents of the salt shaker into it before setting the empty container on his table. “We put it into our bodies, but what happens to it then?” He held up both hands empty and then made two fists from which he poured the salt back and forth, each time showing that his hands were empty. He made a production of thinking he’d emptied his hand and then having more to pour into it. It was a good warmup for the second act and finally he approached the empty shaker at his table and began pouring salt into it. He filled the shaker to overflowing with salt that came from his apparently empty hand. Finally, he brushed the excess off the top of the shaker, recapped it, and handed it back to the man at the first table. The guy poured out a little and tasted it.

Serepte, Judith, and Lil were laughing at the side of the stage when Paul glanced toward them. He smiled, knowing they were enjoying the show even from this odd angle.

Paris brushed the salt remaining on his table into a pile and pulled a scarf from his pocket. He showed both sides of the scarf and then let it settle over the pile of salt. There wasn’t as much patter to the performance now as the lights narrowed over the table. As Paris held his hands above the scarf, it began to wiggle. Soon Alex, his rabbit, poked his nose out from under the scarf. The audience always had a special reaction to animals that Paris had learned to enjoy. He lifted the scarf off the rabbit.

“All from a pile of salt,” Paris said. “I used to do this trick with beans, but my mother insisted I would never amount to a hill of beans, so I switched to salt. Now Alex here needs a better stage to perform on. Something with a curtain. He probably wants a girlfriend watching him from the wings, too,” Paris wiggled his eyebrows and glanced over at Serepte. “Now what would turn this little table into a theater for a bunny? I know! Curtains!”

Paris gripped the scarf in his left fist with the tail trailing down. Forcing two fingers into the fist, he tugged and began drawing the scarf through his hand. The tail hanging down appeared from his fist, but when it emerged as a full scarf, another scarf was tied to it. Paris continued to pull scarves from his hand until they were piled on the table around Alex.

“What do you think, Alex? We have curtains but they need to be hung.” Paris held his hands above the table and the scarves began to move and dance. As the audience applauded, the scarves formed themselves into a little theater around the rabbit. Paris looked up from the miniature stage to see the audience reaction. His own was quickly muted. A mirror behind the bar reflected his image on stage. He had never noticed a mirror staring back at him before this moment. And not at one of him, but at a dozen. Each panel of the bar mirror reflected a new image of himself as if each had been focused directly on his line of sight. As he hurriedly moved to catch an escaping Alex, much to the audience’s delight, a dozen of himself moved at the same time—facing him moving with him, catching him off guard.

Paris felt the first tickling of a headache as the light from the mirrors hit his eyes.

The rabbit settled back on the table and Paris pulled the corner of one of the scarves. The others all collapsed in place. Showing both sides of the one scarf in his hand, Paris let it gently settle over the rabbit until it lay flat on the table. Paris lifted the scarf and showed it to the audience. A black image of a rabbit on the white scarf brought applause from the audience. Paris flipped the scarf around and showed a white image of a dove against a black scarf. He shook the scarf and out flew Sandra, his dove. The audience applauded and Paris looked up at them again.

A dozen doves flew in circles in front of him. They were hypnotic. For an instant, Paris could not distinguish his dove from the flying reflections in the bar mirror. A dozen plus one dove circled the room and swept in to grab a corner of the scarf lying on the table. All the scarves followed the dove like the tail of a great kite as Sandra swept around the room, her flight dizzyingly duplicated by the dozen reflections. He wondered if all the doves would land on his shoulders, or if the reflected magicians would recapture their own.

“Come on, Sandra,” he whispered, and felt the light touch of the dove on his shoulder as the other twelve lit comfortably on the shoulders of the other dozen magicians. In the reflection, Paris had seen the head of his dove poke up out of his breast pocket just before he shook the scarf as her cue. He would have to work on the timing of this act before he performed again. He took some satisfaction in the fact that all twelve other magicians facing him had made the same mistake.

They’re not real. It’s just a mirror. Why does it make my head hurt?

He had to break the hypnotic effect the mirror was having on him and the best way to do that would be to return to an audience interaction trick. He quickly flashed half a dozen oversized cards at the audience as Sandra disappeared from his shoulder and the scarves dropped to the floor. Seventy-two cards flashed in the mirrors in front of him. He showed an identical set of cards in his other hand, flipping them to show front and back. One deck had a red back and one a blue back.

He kept explaining why he was using such a simple deck and how the audience was only seeing an illusion, but his mind was elsewhere as his mouth worked on. His eye had strayed to the reflections once more and he was momentarily blinded by the light. Wayne must have turned something on by mistake. The lights seemed to come from the stage behind him and were reflected into his eyes. He didn’t dare to turn away to look, but willed Wayne to cut the offending lights. Nothing happened. He needed to get rid of those lights.

The audience seemed to be entranced as he selected a volunteer for the trick. But one person seemed not to be paying attention. He sat at the bar with his back to the stage, his shoulder hunched forward as he focused on his drink or something in front of him. Before all his senses had caught up with what he was seeing, Paris realized the man was watching the show—watching the twelve mirrored magicians performing in synchronization. The light Paris saw flashing behind him in the mirrors—it was the man’s eyes. They, too, were broken down and reflected, multiplied by the twelve panels, staring at him from behind the bar. Each of the two dozen eyes watched as if independent from the others.

He shook the vision from his eyes and felt as if his brain had struck the inside of his skull. Pain lanced up from the base of his neck and nearly blinded him. He fought to focus on the cards. The audience had seen the card she selected from the deck was the jack of diamonds. She placed it in the rack facing away from the audience. Everything was in place. The audience laughed as Paris showed the audience that the pack contained only jacks of diamonds. They were certain the assistant would be tricked into believing he had guessed the right card. But Paris had a different trick in mind.

“Now would you please tell the audience what card you have chosen?”

“The two of spades,” she answered. Paris acted put upon and quickly ran through the cards remaining in his hand.

“Seriously? I’m supposed to be the only one who makes jokes in this show. Please tell me the card you really selected.” She looked at the card again.

“The two of spades.”

“You’ll have to prove that.” Paris had an uneasy feeling. The trick was taking too long. He could feel a disaster brewing. “Would you please show the audience the card you chose?” She showed the card to the audience. They shouted in unison, “Two of spades!” At least someone is having fun. “Unless something very strange has happened, we have gone awry on this trick. You see, the audience saw you put a jack of diamonds up here in the rack.” He turned the card around and showed that it was a two of spades.

“It’s all an illusion,” Paris explained to the woman. “You were close enough to see exactly what you drew, but the audience was blinded. I showed a hand in which every card was a two of spades, but they all thought they saw a jack of diamonds. Now, let’s unblind everyone and you will all see what was really in my hand.”

He flicked his wrist and spread the cards to the audience to show how they had been fooled. The five cards in his hand were multiplied to sixty in the mirrors—sixty jacks of diamonds. He had opened the cards the wrong direction. He needed to pull the trick back together quickly.

“Not all my spells are working correctly tonight. There is an alien force in the theater,” he intoned in as spooky a voice as he could muster. “We have the two of spades with a red back in your hand. We have the two of spades with the blue back on the rack. I would like you to place one on top of the cards in my hand and one on the bottom. By sandwiching the jacks of diamonds, the twos of spades will spread through the deck.” He waved a hand over the cards and spread them wide. Now all seven of the cards were jacks of diamonds and eighty-four of their garish faces smiled back from the mirror. It was a shaky conclusion, but it worked. He escorted his assistant back to the edge of the stage where she received her applause and returned to her seat. The audience roared with appreciation. He would have to rehearse this variation for future reference. At least it saved the trick.

Paris began to hum as he returned to his position behind the table. He didn’t know why, but it was comforting to him as something important seemed to niggle at the edges of his aching brain. The card trick had nearly panicked him. Perhaps it would not have been so bad if he had not seen the instantaneous reflection of his own reaction in the mirrors. They mocked him at the time he needed his concentration the most.

He could feel the headache growing as he began cleaning up his workspace. He rolled a piece of paper into a tube and looked at the audience through it. Then he began picking up the scarves from the floor and stuffing them into the tube one after another. They did not emerge from the other end. He started picking up other things from the table—his silver egg, a marble, a golf ball, a tennis ball. Each item was stuffed into the end of the paper tube as Paris sang a wordless melody and danced around the table. Nothing emerged from the tube. Paris pulled a bowl of fruit near him and pushed objects of ever-increasing size into the impossibly small opening of the paper tube where they disappeared. Plum, apple, orange, grapefruit. He reached into the bowl and his rabbit came into his hand. The audience watched breathlessly as he gently fed the bunny into the tube where it disappeared.

Paris continued his chanting sing-song dance around the stage. Wayne had come through to help him. The followspot was directly in his eyes so he could no longer see the mirrors that had distracted him. Still, the room spun as he teetered on the brink of memory. Something important was being whispered in his ear. Paris raised a hand and circled it above his head. From the circle flew Sandra, his dove. He held out the hand and she landed on it. Then, like the rabbit before her, the dove disappeared into the tiny tube as if sucked into a vacuum cleaner. Paris held the tube to his eye and looked through it as the audience erupted in applause.

The isolation of looking through the tube focused Paris on one of the mirrored panes. A new light rose from it. His knees felt weak and his heart beat too fast. He wanted to end the act and sit down, but the monster magicians in the mirrors mocked him with their spells. As Paris crumpled the tube of paper in his hands and made it disappear, he was caught again by the multiple images behind the bar. Each was different. A boy, a child, a man, mocking his performance. A tear squeezed out of his left eye and hung tenuously just at the corner. As he waved his hands and continued to sing to himself, the reflections in the mirrors moved in a pattern, circling around each other and around the light that held the center of the reflection. The images were familiar but unsettling to Paris. It was kaleidoscopic. The mirror images rotating independently of Paris, moving in and out toward a vortex at the center of which was the light that never wavered. He was losing control again. The mirror was taking over.

His head was throbbing now. The tear at the corner of his eye grew and broke loose from the tenuous bond that held it, dripping down his cheek to mingle with the sweat gathered there. Paris needed a finale for the act and reached for the cloth covering his table. An instant stab of pain crushed his thoughts as he saw a pattern emerging on the cloth. It was a flat off-white, a color that many people call ivory. Paris snatched the veil from the table.

Serepte! It suddenly dawned on him that he must not come in contact with Serepte. She would try to heal him and nothing could heal this pain of memory that was bursting on him. He flipped the cloth out in front of him until it was flat and then let go. It hung suspended in the air as he walked around it, looking for all the world like it draped an invisible table.

He fought to hold himself together long enough to finish the act, but his one path of escape was blocked. Serepte stood in the wings flanked by Judith and Lil. He could not move toward her. He could not inflict his pain on her. The first night he met her, she had lifted the headache when she touched his forehead. Taking his pain had hurt her. He would not give her his pain.