A Convergence Of Birds (18 page)

Make for yourself a world you can believe in.

It sounds simple, I know. But it’s not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one—the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations or continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don’t live an accident. Don’t call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I’m not a very smart man, but I’m not a dumb one, either. So listen: If you can manage what I’ve told you, as I was never able to, you will give your life meaning.

If the gondola’s rigid seat—the armchair lacquered in coffin-black and dully black-upholstered—is the softest, most luxurious, most relaxing seat imaginable,

it is because the aging magician cannot remember a rest so peaceful. You have a most lovely gondola, he turns to tell the gondolier, but his words come out as nonsense—or not nonsense, exactly, but song. Musical notes. The hungry gondolier remains silent, pushing on. The black water parts like thighs in anticipation of the gondola’s prow. It whispers to the aging magician: Shhhhhh. Shhhhhh. He leans forward, lies on his side, curls up his feet, puts his ear against the gondola’s floor. Shhhhh. Shhhhh. It’s like listening to a soon-to-be-mother’s belly, he thinks. Shhhhh. Shhhhh. Serene and peaceful. Safe. He will not get hurt now.

I’m sorry, the aging magician sings, ear to the gondola’s floor, but where are we?

Who paid the aging magician towards the end: nobody.

So he did parties for underprivileged children. It was the only way he could remain with the service that hired him out and the only way he could continue to practice his art. His powers of illusion had declined—he could remember only the two simplest of his card tricks, and was entirely unable to make things reappear after having them vanish. At best, he was a second-rate magician. Obvious. Sentimental. Hands too unsteady for any sleight. It was worse than embarrassing.

The children had to finish many of his tricks, when he forgot the ending, or his hands wouldn’t cooperate. Ta-da! a young girl would say, pulling the blue parakeet (his blue parakeet) from the thimble as he seated himself behind his cabinet of enchantment. And when he didn’t have the strength to pull the mile of rainbow ribbon from his mouth, a young boy came to his aid.

His shows became more like magic clinics than performances—This is how it works; This is how it works—and after each he would weep (always disappearing behind his enchanted cabinet so that the children wouldn’t see him), for he knew that

If a magician gives away all of his secrets,

he is no longer a real magician.

The new parties took the aging magician to poor neighborhoods, where for birthdays parents would draw lipstick circles around their eyes and call themselves clowns.

We’re so glad to have you, they would tell him as he unpacked. It’s truly generous.

The shows were much shorter (as the aging magician had fewer tricks at his disposal), and the illusions less impressive, but to his surprise the wonder multiplied: both the children’s and his. For the children, the excitement lay in not knowing how, or even if, the trick would be completed. Can he do it? Is it possible? For the aging magician, tricks became what he always wanted them to be for his children: objects of enchantment. After vanishing a rabbit and forgetting how to make it reappear, he would look at his hands, he would search them for gadgets and wonder, How did you do that? And when the parakeet flew the thimble, leaving only a single blue feather on the ground as proof that it had once existed, the aging magician asked, How? How? How? Tricks, all of them. I know. I performed them. But what were the tricks? And how can I know that I will be able to repeat them?

The aging magician wonders: Is the universe a pocket, or a rip?

It is late already, and he knows he should go home before he catches a cold. But the sky holds his gaze; the stars do. He thinks thoughts that are so complex they suggest simplicity, so simple they demand complexity: I am looking at stars that might or might not be there. Because: It takes time for light to travel. And: Everyone looks at the same stars. But: Everyone looks at them through different eyes. I wonder: Are the stars held in our eyes, or the other way around? Could the eyes of the living form a net, in which everything that exists is held? Which would mean, therefore, that: Everything that is not looked at is not held in the net, and so does not exist. He sees it:

Or: Perhaps the universe is the net, and human eyes are like marbles in a mesh bag. Those eyes not in the universe’s net belong to those never to be born.

Is the universe a pocket, or a rip? Is the blackness a secret lining? A false backing?

He feels a shiver dance up his back and can hear a voice telling him it’s time to go home.

Hey, the boy says,

stopping the magician in an alleyway between Chinese restaurants. He grabs the aging magician’s skinny forearm, which is so skinny that the boy can feel his fingers through it, as if he were squeezing air. Give me your money.

I don’t have any, the aging magician says.

I don’t believe you.

But look, he says, showing the boy his wallet (out of which falls a blue feather), nothing.

The boy leads the aging magician behind a dumpster and makes him undress, one piece at a time. He searches each of the magic garments. Tell me where it is, he says.

I don’t have any.

You’re hiding it. I know you old people.

The magician takes off his black jacket (with the half-pulled-out stitches of an illegible name across the lapel), and his ruffled blue shirt with blue ruffles. There is only enough change for the bus. At the boy’s command, he takes off his ripped black slacks, revealing bony legs spotted with brown blotches.

Come on, old man, the boy says, give me your money.

I told you, I don’t have any. I—

Suddenly, the aging magician is aware of the boy’s tremendous youth and beauty. Long arms and fingers. Full lips. Moist. Those eyelashes, the aging magician imagines, could hold thimbles of water. His skin is perfectly smooth and taut. Everything the color of health. No, not health, exactly, but portraiture. Wasn’t there a famous painting of this boy in one of the far rooms of the museum? His left arm poised like a serving platter, his head tilted to one side, everything soaked in blue, wasn’t that the one? What did the plaque beneath it say? Portrait of a Petty Thief as a Young Man? No. Beautiful Boy Bathed in Blue? Notice those irises, so delicate, so wet and feminine. Those teeth, so precisely crooked, stained by a master. If he isn’t a painting in the museum, then he must be, himself, a museum—exhibiting his life’s work in his leather gallery, the curator of his own portable retrospective.

The aging magician is overcome—I want to be like that—and for the first time he feels that his fear of death is far more refined, more convincing and familiar, than his love of being.

Come on, the boy says, pounding his foot against the pavement, please, just give it to me. Why are you doing this? Just give it to me.

You are so beautiful, the aging magician wants to tell him. Do you have any idea how young and beautiful you are? No, you can’t, of course. One is only able to see the things that one doesn’t have, that one is not.

The boy searches the magic garments again, while the aging magician stands nearly naked in the cold, goose bumps coming forth from his arms like signs of the zodiac. It takes the boy several minutes to look through all of the secret pockets. He pulls out two clay pipes that the magician hasn’t been able to find, and thirteen silk handkerchiefs, and four hundred yards of multicolored cellophane ribbon, and eighteen thousand invisible birds, whose existence no one would have any reason to believe, or, for that matter, doubt. He even turns a cork ball into a soap bubble, without knowing how. Amazing, the aging magician says, his ribs supporting his chest like tent poles, like wands. And the boy, unable to subdue his boyishness, says, Tell me how! Tell me!

If the aging magician should begin to feel like the king’s food tester,

it’s because he senses that everyone is looking at him out of the corners of their eyes, waiting for him to die. Now? Now? He walks to the supermarket for his pumpkin seeds and pineapple soda, and everyone, he’s sure, is stealing glances to see if he’s still alive. Now? Now? On the way to the zoo, where he watches children watch the animals watch the children watch the animals, the gaze bouncing back and forth forever—one of the saddest, most uncrossable distances. (He wishes they could talk to each other!) As he waits so patiently outside the theater for a glimpse of his favorite coryphee, who never comes. In the Automat, eating pastries heavier than the sum of their ingredients. Even the doorman, he thinks, has been looking at him funny. They all want to know if he is still alive.

While the aging magician has never believed in God, and isn’t about to now, he knows that God is the king for whom he must die: that his death will preserve some greater life. The poison, this time, is grief, and God has sent him to eat its tasty morsels before they reach the dark and starry platter. Or maybe what he fears is just the opposite: that nobody is looking; that his death, like his life, is without purpose; that there is neither greater good nor evil—only people living and dying because their bodies function and then do not; that the universe is a rip.

If aging magician should begin to wander bad neighborhoods like dime and junk stores,

it’s because he is looking for the boy who robbed him of nothing. He wants to find and protect him, hold him in time.

Beautiful, he whispers, wandering back alleyways with his shaking hands in his bottomless pockets. Where are you? He asks the man with the cloudy eye at the gas station. He asks the double-dutchers and brown-bag alcoholics. He asks the young girl who sits always on the same stoop, whose lollipop never dwindles.

Do you know of a boy around here? He is about this tall, and has very long arms and fingers. His eyelashes are also very long. He is a thief. But not a petty one. A real thief.

No, they tell him every time. Never seen anyone like that.

But you must. (He doesn’t believe them.)

No, mister, every time. I don’t know who you’re talking about.

He takes his hanky—his functional hanky—from his pocket, and draws on it. His arms are like this, he says.

And his eyelashes are like this. When you approach him, you think you’re walking through a haze, but it’s his eyelashes.

Never, they say.

He goes, whispering.

If the aging magician should forget where it is he’s going,

he tells his hungry gondolier: You lead the way.

Where was it that I meant to be? How did I get to this particular city? Why am I here? I remember telling you about my vacation, but I don’t remember ever deciding to take one, or packing any bags—no, I never packed a single bag—or boarding a plane, or saying goodbye to my true love (whom, after all these years, I have still yet to find), or any of the children for whom I have turned all of those marbles into blue parakeets and then made those parakeets vanish like the memories of dreams.

Why didn’t I notice the speed with which we have glided through this city? Would it have made the trip impossible? Why is it most impossible to notice the things that you will most regret not having noticed? Is that what noticing is? Is that what regret is?

I feel so heavy: like the moment before sleep, when all of the world is possibility and the only thing I want is rest. I remember as a child needing to fall asleep and not wanting to fall asleep. When I battled against sleep, whom was I battling?

Where are all of the people? I want to be with people and I am alone. Where are the opera houses and fish stands? Whores and glass blowers, eunuchs, moon-scrapers, tutus and heavy pastries? Where are the marble miles, the grime-stuffed flutes, the swans in the mire?

O, it’s true, my hungry gondolier, isn’t it? Those aren’t white sequins in the tooth fairy’s tiara.

It’s true: Only the blind can have sex without pain.

It’s true: We’re not blowing kisses to the minaret’s barred window; we’re going to burn down the palace.

It’s true: Adults cry less than children, and have more need to cry.

It’s true: When you care about me, you care about you caring about me. And when I care about you, I care about me caring about you.

It’s true: There’s gold at the end of the rainbow. That’s all there is! It’s true: I can no longer distinguish my pockets from my rips, my tricks from being tricked.

It’s true: I have been to this place before.

You propel us on, and without turning to face you I say: I don’t trust you.

You have understood me, because from over my shoulder I hear: It doesn’t matter.

If the aging magician felt, for a long moment, more alive than undead,

it was only because he saw the boy again, drinking a black cherry soda in front of the dime store, painting the straw blood-red with his breath. The aging magician followed him when he began to walk, vowing not to lose him this time, not to take him for granted.

He followed the beautiful young boy through a maze of side alleyways, past the fried coconut stands, over the crumbling bridge under which cardboard houses leaned and fell, around the decaying monuments and dry fountains, along the bank of the filthy river, which stank like dying animals. He kept a distance, not having the courage to make himself known, to say, You, most young and beautiful boy, do you remember me? Tell me that you do, even if it’s a lie. It’s a lie I’m now ready to believe. Let me know that I made some impression on you, that I changed your life in some small way, as you have mine. Touch me, lie to me. We could remind each other of who we are not.