Magic Mansion (6 page)

“C’mon out, Miss Lee, and let’s see what the producers wanted to tell you.”

Camera one zoomed in on the cheap plastic dropcloth catching on her sandals as she struggled to get through her front door without showing them any more than she absolutely had to. She slipped out the door, then held her head high as she sized up Monty like an empress holding court. A five-foot-one empress in paint-splattered yoga pants. “Very well.”

Marlene was unsure if she’d ever heard someone use the words “very well” in conversation—but if anyone could get away with it, it was Jia.

“You’ve got a letter from Magic Mansion,” Monty said with excruciating perkiness. “Let’s see what it says.”

Cameras swarmed Jia as she took the letter, slipped her thumb underneath the seal, and opened the envelope. She scanned it once, and once again. Her expression shifted, something subtle. Joy, or panic? “I got in,” she whispered, then clasped the letter to her 7-Up T-shirt and repeated, “I got in.”

Marlene could have called cut, but it was only video, not film, and the afternoon had been humming right along. She sized up Jia and told her, “Good reaction. Can you give me one that’s a tad more excited? And then, Monty, you congratulate her. Wendy, come over here, make her messy hair more of a sexy-messy for me, a couple of strands in front, there you go. Okay. Jia, take it from the spot where you open the door and say it’s one-thirty, and this time, smile when you get the news. But don’t overdo it—make sure you still seem standoffish.”

Jia nodded and said, “No problem.”

Chapter 7

OPENING CREDITS

Show business contained far more preparation (and waiting) than actual performance. It seemed that way to Ricardo, anyway. He’d been awake since 4 a.m. to arrive at the studio by seven and shoot Magic Mansion’s intro. Each contestant would have their half-second in the spotlight at the beginning of every episode. They were to turn toward the camera and perform some sort of magical flourish. They’d been asked, in one of the half-million questions they’d been subjected to in the application process, whether they had a signature move. Those moves had been storyboarded, and focus-grouped, and finally pencilled in to a production schedule.

Ricardo was eager to show off his sliver rings. They lent themselves to all kinds of kick-ass poses.

He wondered what Professor Topaz had pinpointed as his own signature move—although, technically, Topaz didn’t have one. With the Professor, it was more of a word. “Behold.” The way he said it, as if he was alerting you to the moment when your perceptions about the world would be turned upside down and inside out, sent chills down Ricardo’s spine. Hell, even the memory of him saying it left Ricardo light-headed. Unfortunately, the Professor wasn’t taping his intro that morning, so Ricardo hadn’t seen him since the fateful encounter after the audition. Or maybe it wasn’t so unfortunate after all. Ricardo knew he was one of the lower-ranking magicians in the pack; he didn’t think he could afford to be known as the guy in the intro with the boner.

Three other magicians were currently in the studio. Ricardo assumed they were expendable too. They were all women—and women were usually relegated to the role of “assistant,” regardless of how talented they might be, or how much of the act was supported by their slender, glitter-rubbed shoulders. Stage magic was an old boys’ club, no two ways about it, and while male magicians (like the Professor) only seemed to grow more authoritative with age, in the eyes of the public, the female performers simply got old.

Which made it bizarre that the women seated to either side of Ricardo were his mother’s age. To his right, Muriel Broom sat browsing last week’s tabloids in her bangles and fringe. In a time where mediums did their best to seem relevant and modern, with new age MP3 downloads and cable talk shows shot in sterile studios, Muriel decked herself out in yards of brocade and dozens of clattering pendants inscribed with mystical symbols. When she announced that she was a spiritualist, he believed her.

And he wondered if she did trick table-rapping like the Victorians, or if she was more of a “I’ve got a message from your late grandmother” type of magician.

Either way, Ricardo had no idea how her specialty would translate into a competition.

Though Muriel’s spiritualism seemed like a more marketable selling point than Bev Austin’s act. Ricardo had initially taken Bev for a producer or a director. She wore a tea green pantsuit and a simple white blouse. Her gray hair was cut short, and a pair of pearl stud earrings and a wedding band were her only jewelry. Ricardo couldn’t quite tell if she was a lesbian, or just an older woman who’d never gone for the whole dresses and tresses thing. She hadn’t specified whether she had a husband or a wife, and it seemed tacky to ask.

He did ask about her act, though. She’d said, “I’m the Math Wizard,” as if he must surely have heard of her. He plastered on his most polite smile, and she added, “I’ve performed at every public library in the four-county area.”

And so, there he sat, Muriel Broom to one side and Bev Austin to the other. And there in front of the green screen, rounding out the bottom of the barrel, was a complete and utter newbie. Ricardo almost asked Muriel what the girl’s name was, but Muriel sat with her eyes closed, and the tabloid opened on her lap to a very fat-looking candid photo of Oprah. Either Muriel was communicating with the Other Side, or she’d also needed to get up at 4 a.m. to make it to the studio by seven. Ricardo leaned over to the Math Wizard, nodded to indicate the girl in front of the camera, and whispered, “What’s her name?”

“Sue Wozniak.”

“No…her stage name.”

“She didn’t say. She works in the gift shop at Magicopolis. Maybe she doesn’t have one.”

“But how could she…?”

“Look at her,” Bev said. “She’s just a kid. She doesn’t know any better. She hasn’t had the type of life experience we’ve had.” She indicated Ricardo and Muriel with a tilt of her head.

Ricardo gave his best gracious smile, and he supposed he should feel grateful that he was part of a “we” this early on in the process. Though the thought that the “we” included two older women with acts that looked none too promising was not exactly a comfort.

Iain and his annoying retro glasses were guiding the magicians through their shots today. He was trying to capture something elusive about Sue Wozniak that involved “twirl and smile.” Between takes, poor Sue looked like she was succumbing to the spins. She smiled bravely, though, and did whatever was asked of her. She was pretty and blond, but not Hollywood-pretty or bombshell-blonde. She was the type of girl who’d break hearts in Topeka or Gary or Appleton…but not the type anyone would look twice at in L.A.
 

“Swing your hair, smile. Great. Okay, Sue, we got it. Go take a seat.”
 

Sue wove back to the seats, still smiling, and said, “Wow, that was intense! Do you think I looked okay?”

“You looked great,” Bev reassured her automatically, while Ricardo said, “Totally cute.” She’d looked nervous, actually. But maybe that wouldn’t be too obvious once they floated in the graphics and effects.

“Next up,” Iain said, “would be Bev…where’s the chalk?” He turned to an assistant who looked young enough to be in high school. “Did you get the chalk?”

“We couldn’t find—”

Iain swung around to face the magicians, and with his clipboard rigidly between them, said, “Bev, could you stand up for just a sec and pretend like you’re writing on a chalkboard?”

Bev went still for a moment, and Ricardo felt a spike of panic from her. The performances at the public library had not likely prepared her for her time in this studio as much as she’d hoped. But like all of them, she was eager to please. She stood and did as she was told.

She was a numbers-person, however—not a mime. It just looked like she was waving her arm around.

“I need - the - chalk.” Iain snapped at the assistant. “Go find it. And if you can’t find that, saw off the end of one of those dowels and paint it white with correction fluid!” He sighed in disgust as the girl scurried away to do his bidding, then consulted his clipboard again. “Moving along, then. Ricardo. C’mon up in front of the green screen. God only knows how long it’ll take her to find the correction fluid.”

Ricardo stepped in front of the green screen, found a mark on the floor, and stood on it. He could see his own reflection in the massive camera lens. His shirt was very white. Silk. Not only did it flow well, it set off his last five visits to the tanning bed beautifully. And if he appeared in the opening credits in white while everyone else wore black, maybe he’d be perceived as one of the “good guys.”

One could only hope.

“It would’ve been easier if you wore a jacket today,” Iain said.

Ricardo steeled his face so it didn’t emote his dread. “The shirtsleeves look really good when you juggle the rings.”

“Oh. The ring things. That’s your big move, isn’t it? Don’t worry about that—we’re gonna have you handle a few different props. You’ll be more versatile for the show if we don’t pigeonhole you as a juggler.”

Ricardo was seized by the sudden urge to throw up. He smiled.

An assistant wheeled a green-painted cart over. Thankfully, there were were linking rings on it, but also silks, paper flowers, a length of rope, and some oversized playing cards. “What you need to do is keep your eye on the camera, smile, and pull this stuff out from behind your back. In post, we’ll make it look like you’re grabbing it out of thin air. Do a few practice tosses.”

If Ricardo had been forewarned, he would have practiced grabbing things from behind himself and tossing them with a flourish until he had the move down pat. All night, if necessary. But, like Bev and Sue before him, he desperately wanted to please—and so he stood in front of the green cart without complaint, reached behind his back, and mapped out the locations of the gear with his fingers.
 

To Iain, those things were merely props. In fact, most people would perceive them as a group of inanimate objects. But while objects didn’t possess a consciousness in the same way living beings might, they were still made up of molecules and atoms, as people were. Everything, when you broke it down into small enough particles, was essentially the same. That was why a mylar bird, in the right hands, could actually fly…at least, that was the reasoning Ricardo used in explaining True magic to himself. He was just a magician, after all, not a quantum physicist.
 

An assistant took readings with a light meter while a makeup artist powdered the shine off his forehead, but they felt distant to Ricardo, like window-shoppers on the other side of the plate glass. All his focus was on the props. Facing away from them, he tucked his hands behind his back and walked his fingers over the rings. Metal. Cool. Not his own rings, but similar enough that he felt as if he knew them. Not quite old friends, but maybe friends of friends. The silks—vibrant. He soaked up the vibe of them through his fingertips and tried to picture their colors. Blue. Red. Yellow. Ropes—clothes line, and not magician’s ropes, scarcely touched and fresh out of the package, with hints of plastic still clinging to the cotton. And then the cards. Playing cards were more difficult for him. Differentiating red from black was a snap. But the subatomic particles of the ink couldn’t tell a heart from a diamond, and so card tricks had never been Ricardo’s forte.

He pulled a length of rope from behind his back and tossed it toward the camera, and it fell to the ground like a dead fish. And then he got an idea. If he made the linking rings look more interesting than anything else, that would be the shot they’d choose in editing. But the trick would be to not actually fumble any of the other props—because he couldn’t take the risk that they were going to paint him as a bumbler. They could try—but he wasn’t about to give them any ammunition.

He pulled a card from behind his back and flipped it toward the camera. Of course, he put a slight spin on it for fear of being obvious about favoring the rings—no magician would toss a card without putting a spin on it—but as it left his hand, he implored it to show its back face to the lens. It obliged, of course. Paper was easy like that.

Once the props all lay on the floor in front of him, Iain said, “Enough rehearsal. Let’s get the shot.”

Ricardo managed to keep from scoffing. There was a word for a magician who practiced a move
once
: unemployed. But he’d touched each of the objects, and they seemed game enough to go along with his plan.
 

An assistant gathered them and set them back on the cart—in a completely different arrangement than they’d been before. No matter, though. He knew them now. Not old friends, no. But pleasant enough acquaintances—like Muriel Broom and Bev Austin and Sue Wozniak.
 

Iain said, “Okay, you ready to roll?”

Ricardo stood tall, checking in with each object behind his back. A silk? Ready. A card? Ready. A ring? Oh yes, he could be very good friends indeed with these rings.

“Ready.”

“Don’t worry about the audio, that won’t be used. Start off looking down at the floor, then look up, right into the camera, and pull something off the cart and toss it.”

The directions were simple enough. Tap. Jazz. Gymnastics. Moves in the Field. Ricardo had been priming himself since he learned to walk, and a take-snap-look-toss combo was child’s play. Head snap. He flung the rope. Head snap. He flung a silk. And another silk, and another, and then while the third silk floated, he sent a query to the ring: are you ready?

Ready
.

Take-snap-look, but this was not a silk or a card or a rope. This was a ring, and he put a special backspin on it. It leapt up, sparkling in the studio lights, and twirled on his fingertip before he gave it another pop, and it spun away and clattered to the floor with the other props. It was perfect.

Ricardo looked to Iain, smiling for real now, not just camera-smiling. “Don’t you have one more card there?” Iain didn’t seem particularly wowed. “Pitch that over your shoulder and we’ll move on to Bev—it looks like her ‘chalk’ is dry.”