The Confabulist (6 page)

“A
MAGICIAN IS AN ACTOR PLAYING A MAGICIAN
.” J
EAN-
Eugène Robert-Houdin, Houdini’s namesake, wrote this. I’ve read hundreds of books about magicians over the years. I feel like I know them better than some of the actual people I interact with, but this quote is my favourite by far. At first I thought he was merely talking about showmanship or stage presence, but it’s a bigger idea. Unless the magician has actual supernatural powers, unless what he does alters the workings of the known universe, then all we witness is a man pretending to be a magician. Everything is an illusion.

This is what has always captivated me about magic—the idea that we can create something that seems both real and impossible. That we could be two things at once without fully knowing which is material and which is a reflection.

I want to get up from the bench, march back into the hospital and into Dr. Korsakoff’s office. I want to demand that he do something.
He’s a doctor. Doctors are supposed to make you better, not tell you there’s nothing they can do and then invite you to have your picture taken with foliage. But as I’m about to stand, I’m once again distracted by the swishing of the automatic doors. The man who was there before, the one the door sensor didn’t recognize, has returned. This time the doors register his existence and swiftly part to allow his exit, and he walks with confidence and vigour into the world. What happened to him inside? He must have a good doctor.

The fight goes out of me. Of course if there were anything Dr. Korsakoff could do, he would offer it. I lean back into the bench and look out at the street. It’s a warm day. The sun is strong, not so much that I could cook an egg on the sidewalk, which I have never tried, but enough to make the world seem cheerful and welcoming. The cars that drive by are clean and colourful, their drivers likely the sort of people who willingly let people pull in front of them and merge lanes with grace and optimism.

If I’d known it would have led to this, I would never have gone to the doctor. I realize that wouldn’t have changed anything—I didn’t get sick because I went to the doctor, I only found out about it. Still, I wouldn’t have ended up on this bench, unsure of where to go or what to do.

It started innocuously. I was trying to unlock the door to my car, but the key wasn’t working. No matter how much I tried it wouldn’t fit the lock. I looked around the parking lot of the grocery store, wondering if it was possible there was another green Chevrolet nearby.

Then there was a woman standing behind me.

“Can I help you?”

“My key doesn’t seem to be working,” I said.

“That’s because this is my car.”

For some reason instead of protesting I stepped aside, and to my amazement she took a set of keys out of her purse and without resistance slid one into the lock and opened the door. She kept one eye on me as she slipped into the driver’s seat and started the car. I stood, shocked, and watched as she pulled out of the parking spot and drove away.

My ears hummed and then I knew the problem was indeed that this had not been my car. I remembered that my car was in fact the blue Honda four or five spots down.

The more I thought about it, the more concerned I became. I had never owned a green Chevrolet. I knew this. How, then, was I to square this knowledge with the fact that I had a clear memory of pulling into the lot of the grocery store and parking that green Chevy? How was it I could feel the vinyl of the seats, hear it squeak as I eased out of it, hear the thud of the heavy door slamming shut behind me?

There were other, similar incidents. Small things. I tried to dismiss them, but each time they came with a memory, a recollection that I knew to be false but which seemed real.

When I told my regular doctor about it, he looked at me as though I were lying. “You mean you’re remembering things that aren’t true?”

Eventually, after numerous assessments that led nowhere, I was referred to Dr. Korsakoff. He ran a battery of tests. His office called me in for the results. And now here I am.

Substance and illusion. Knowing which is which is difficult, maybe impossible. The audience in a magic act knows it’s a trick. They don’t believe the magician has magical powers. But they want to. They want the illusion to have substance, even if it’s a substance
that’s unknowable to them. The job of the magician is to nurture this desire, twist this desire, tease this desire. It must be made to seem impossible but also possible. There must be a moment when a logical outcome is made baffling and wondrous. If he fails to create this moment, then he is a failure as a magician.

One of my earliest memories is of being maybe five or six and going on a picnic with my parents. I remember my mother in the kitchen making sandwiches, and helping her pack a basket with sweets and bottles of soda. My father carried it as we hiked to a meadow a few miles from our house. A bee chased me for a while, buzzing in my ears as it careened by, and I hid behind my mother in an attempt to confuse it. She laughed at this while my father pretended that the bee was chasing him, dropping the picnic basket and waving his hands in the air, mimicking my childish hysterics.

We found a clearing and my father spread a blanket out on the ground while my mother unpacked our basket. The field smelled of dandelions, and above me there was one lone cloud that I tried to impose a familiar shape upon but it looked only like a cloud. I bit into my sandwich, the sharp tang of mustard on roast beef a puzzle in my mouth, and sat there warm and satisfied. I can still feel the cool breeze gliding across my forehead.

Years later, when I was about fourteen, I mentioned this day in passing to my father and he stared at me, his face blank, and said that we’d never been on any such excursion. As sure as I was that we had, I knew better than to argue with him. I asked my mother about it, and she couldn’t remember that day either. “There’s no meadow like that within walking distance of our house,” she said, and the more I thought about it, the less sense it made. We’d never been on any other sort of picnic like that before or since. But I remembered it as clearly
as I knew my own name. Over the coming weeks I spent my afternoons combing the surrounding land for a place that looked even remotely like the spot in my memory.

I still wonder if this memory is real or false, if it’s me or everyone else who’s wrong. Because that moment on the blanket is the happiest childhood memory I have. It has become the baseline from which I judge subsequent experiences. To this day the best thing I can imagine is sitting in the sun with your family, comfortably quiet and happy for the fleeting joy of being alive. Is this illusion or substance? What does it mean if this moment never happened?

I wondered about this even before Dr. Korsakoff’s diagnosis, but now, obviously, it has taken on a new significance. If he’s right, if there really is nothing he can do about my condition, then maybe I should start to keep progress reports, like Charlie Gordon in
Flowers for Algernon
. It might prove useful to document whatever is going to happen to me. Perhaps if I write things down, I can create a story for myself that, through rereading, will become a sort of new reality as my ability to distinguish between illusion and substance worsens.

And Alice. If there’s any substance left of me, then I owe her the truth. I deprived her of a father. I can’t even now explain fully why I did it. It all seems a lifetime ago, and from where I’m sitting now, it’s easy to make excuses and justifications and hard to remember how it all felt at the time or exactly what happened. But I owe Alice something. An apology? It’s a little late for that. An explanation is something I’m not sure I have to offer. All I can give her is the truth as I know it, or as I can recall it. If I’ve learned anything in my life it’s that magicians aren’t the only ones hiding their identities from the world.

A woman with a small child passes me. The child, a girl with
curly brown hair tied into pigtails with red ribbons, looks unhappy. Her mother is holding her by the hand and pulling her along. The girl is lagging as best as she can, making it clear she doesn’t want to go inside. I can’t say I blame her one bit. I wouldn’t want to go either. I feel a strange kinship with this sprite in her blue dress and knee socks. The doors open and admit first the mother and then the girl, her childish attempt to avoid the inevitable defeated.

None of us wants to go. And I don’t mean inside the hospital, though that’s true. What I mean is no one wants to die, but we each know that sooner or later it’s going to happen to us. We tell ourselves that it’s a long way off, and turn to notions of religion or spirituality or science to make sense of it, and for some that does bring some existential comfort, but still most of us lag as much as we can, just like this girl. No one gets to stay. Yet we live and act as though it is otherwise.

The magician trades in this human struggle. Magic that is not real magic affects us because it mirrors our existence. We know that what we see isn’t as it seems, but we want it to be and want to understand it. We want to be fooled, and then want to know how we were fooled. We cannot prevent our minds from trying to figure out how the trick was done. I believe this is more than just intellectual curiosity. We strive for immortality in the face of its impossibility.

But magicians are clever. They understand that a magic trick is all about turning illusion into substance in such a way that we never fully comprehend what happened, or what we think happened. They know that a trick loses its power once we understand how it was done, and also that it loses its power once we no longer wish to understand how it was done.

There are four elements to this grand tug-of-war between substance
and illusion. There is effect, there is method, there is misdirection, and finally, when it’s all over, there is reconstruction. Magic is a dance between these four elements. The actor playing a magician seeks to choreograph a way through the trick with these component parts. If he does so, he will have achieved magic. If not, he is a failure.

Effect is the reason the trick exists. Without it there’s no point. It’s the rabbit coming out of the hat, the woman shown to be sawn in half, the ace of spades somehow inside your coat pocket. Often a good effect is kept secret until the moment of its reveal. You don’t actually know what the trick is until it’s finished. Other times the effect is announced at the start, and you’re watching for it, waiting for it, but then when it happens, you’re still amazed. Either way, the audience lives for the effect, we desire it more than anything, and if it pleases us we will believe, to a point, that the magician is not an actor but someone capable of altering the known laws of the universe.

Life is like this. Happiness is an extremely relative concept, but we will believe we are happy if the sum of daily effects is high enough. The more disappointments, bafflements, and failed outcomes we experience, the less likely we are to believe we are happy.

But of course it’s not easy to achieve an effect. If it were, magicians wouldn’t be extraordinary. Things we take for granted as everyday occurrences—like images on a television screen, telephones, electricity—would all have at one time been the most profound effects a magician could produce. The radio once worked people into a state of pandemonium, but over time we have become used to it. We don’t know how these devices function, outside of a rudimentary understanding of technological concepts—certainly less than 1 percent
of the population could actually explain how, say, a television works, let alone build one. We are, however, familiar with them. And so the things they do, however mystifying, no longer speak to us. We need to have the order of the universe tilted, and you can’t do this with things you’re used to.

Given that a magician isn’t actually tilting the universe, he must somehow achieve his effect using the tools available to mere mortals. How he does this is the method. The wires, the doubles, the mirrors, the trapdoors—magical methods vary from deceptively simple to diabolically clever. A good method is one where as little can go wrong as possible and where all aspects necessary to create the effect are fully within the magician’s control.

The problem with this is that the audience is on the lookout for the method. Because inherent in the wondrousness of the effect is the implication that if we could do it too, if the method were to become available, then we would also be magicians. We might shrug off the inexorable march of death.

So the audience must never be able to detect the method. If they do, the effect will be rendered meaningless. To keep this method secret, the magician employs misdirection. Misdirection can be as subtle as a tiny gesture, as obvious as an explosion, as expected as a curtain, or as coy as smoke. The audience is on the lookout for this, and the magician must be cunning about his use of misdirection. It is dishonest, and he knows it, but it is not malicious. It is in service of a greater truth.

The final element is the most complex. After the effect has been revealed, after the method has been executed and the misdirection has prevented its detection, the audience will attempt to reconstruct the trick. They will think back to what they saw and try to figure out
how it was done. If they succeed, even after the fact, then the effect is ruined and the whole act was for naught. The misdirection and method must not be detectable, even in hindsight. For this reason, the magician will insert elements into the trick that are there for the sole purpose of confounding the reconstruction of the trick.

The magician knows that what happened and what we will remember having happened can be two entirely different things. If he shows us A and C, we will believe we saw B. If he does his job, we will swear that we saw the impossible with our own eyes. When we close our eyes, we will see things as we believe they happened, not as they actually did. This is essential for the effect. It is what carries it forward, what propels us to seek the next effect, to keep our mortality in abeyance.

If Alice were here and I were to tell her this, she would shake her head and smile. “Martin,” she might say, “a magic trick is just a magic trick. Life is more complicated.”