The Misadventures of the Magician's Dog (9 page)

Standing there in his front yard, the sky black and full of stars above him, Peter tried to focus his mind. He started by thinking about how it had felt to do magic earlier that day. He tried to summon power to that spot in his head, the same electricity that had traveled through him that morning, but nothing came. Now that he knew
what to look for, he could feel that the electricity was present, that it was always present, but at the moment it was spread out around him, a soft mist that touched every inch of his skin, plus the rocks and the cactuses and the sidewalk and the house. If he wanted to do magic, he needed to pull that mist into himself.
Anger
, he thought. The Dog was right.

But how do you make yourself angry on demand? He thought of Celia, but he knew immediately that wouldn't work; he felt too guilty about the way she had avoided him all afternoon. The kids at his new school might tease him sometimes, but mostly they ignored him. How could he feel angry about that? What else did Peter have to be angry about?

Then he remembered his dream.

It returned to him in a flood: his father standing on the hill, his joyous wave slowing, turning increasingly despairing.
Good-bye
, he could see his father mouthing, although Peter was too far away to hear the words,
good-bye, kiddo, good-bye
.

In the dream, Peter had known that he would never see his father again, and that had made him incredibly sad. Now, though, he realized that another emotion had been under the sadness all along. It was unfocused and raw, but it was anger.

And with that anger came the buildup of electricity and the taste of power in Peter's mouth. He could do anything, anything at all, and no one in the world could stop him.
Fly
, he commanded the electricity, closing his eyes to focus on that spot on his head.
Fly
, he thought.

He felt his body rising, the ground no longer supporting
his feet. For a moment, he was a child being picked up by his mother. Then he opened his eyes and looked around. His feet were inches above the rocks, his head as high as the top of his bedroom window. Peter Lubinsky was flying.

“Do it like this,” The Dog said, arms and legs paddling through the air. “You're not Superman, you know. The magic made you weightless, but the actual motion has to come from you.”

Peter glared at him. It didn't help that he had envisioned gliding effortlessly through the sky, whereas in reality he found himself hovering helplessly a few inches off the ground.
I could turn you into mush
, he thought but didn't say.

The Dog must have seen the threat in his stare; either that, or years of dealing with a magician had taught him caution. “It's a little like swimming,” he continued, in a deflated tone.

Peter, who had never liked swimming, cautiously raised his hands above his head, then brought them down again in an approximation of a breaststroke. His body pushed upward in response, almost as if he really were in water, not air. He tried again, adding a kick this time. Up he zoomed; by the time he stopped moving, he was ten feet above his house. It was easier than swimming,
he thought, in the sense that small motions moved you farther. He looked down with wonder at his gray gravel roof, marked by veins of black tar. He was flying! Really flying! The anger that filled him in no way diminished his amazement that he was staring at his house from above.

“Now you're getting it,” said The Dog, flying up beside him. “Next try going forward and not just up. The key is to learn to control your speed and direction at the same time.”

Peter couldn't help himself: every time The Dog spoke, he wanted to smash him with the electricity that still tingled through him, sending that furry body whirling across time and space. It was such a strong impulse that it was all Peter could do to keep from acting on it. “I can figure this out by myself,” he grunted instead.

The Dog sighed and obediently moved away.

For the next twenty minutes, Peter practiced his kicks and strokes and dives. It was trickier than he had initially thought: if you pushed too hard in one direction (say, toward a cactus or a chimney), it was almost impossible to stop in midair or turn around. Flying wasn't like running on the ground, where you had some traction to work with. In the air there was no resistance, so Peter had to figure out how to make corrections in his flight path by changing the way he curved his body or moved his arms.

“There, is that good enough?” Peter demanded after maybe twenty minutes of tumbling into trees and slamming into the ground. His whole body felt sore, and they still were no more than a block from his house.

“It'll do,” grunted The Dog, who had been silently watching the whole time, only commenting when a car drove near or Peter got too close to a window.

“Well, let's get it over with, then,” said Peter. Irritation had taken the place of his earlier dread; what could some old man stupid enough to turn himself into a rock do to someone as powerful as Peter, anyway?

The Dog gave him the strangest look; if Peter had had to describe it, he would have said it was pitying, but that didn't make sense. Not at this moment, when for perhaps the first time in his life, Peter felt not the least bit pitiable. “Whatever you say,” said The Dog, taking off into the night sky, and then he was out of earshot, a streak of dirty fur racing through the stars.

From then on, no matter how fast Peter flew or how much he dawdled, that plumy tail always seemed to be exactly at the edge of his sight, no closer and no farther away than before. This suited Peter perfectly. Away from The Dog's annoying presence, Peter started to actually enjoy himself. It was like flying with his father in the Cessna, but better. Peter dove down to let his fingers skim the top of a palo verde; then swooped up, up, up, until he was shaking with cold and the air was so thin it was hard to breathe. What he liked best was the feeling of the wind wrapping itself around his body. If he moved his arms and legs correctly, he could travel amazingly fast, and the air responded by curling around him, almost as if it were racing him, or better yet, racing with him, his partner as he flew through the night.

In the blackness beneath him, swimming pools glinted like gems, and rooftops hid houses as though they were
secrets. It was hard not to feel superior to all those people huddled so helplessly below. Theirs was the world of interiors, of small rooms lit by even smaller lights. Peter's was the boundless world of the night sky. He owned it all: the stars, the wind, the desert below and the planets above. He could hold out his hand, he thought, and encompass the hopes and dreams of the whole universe.

He let himself dwell on that idea for a while as he flew, following The Dog's tail. It was a satisfyingly powerful thought.

And then something strange happened. Peter was flying along, thinking how much better he was than everyone else, when out of nowhere, he heard Izzy's voice asking him for a glass of water. Logically, Peter knew this couldn't be real. Still, her voice was so clear that when Peter heard it, he turned his head to answer and was surprised to find only empty sky.
Izzy isn't here
, he reminded himself, and then tried to return his mind to the subject of his own superiority. But it was a little like waking up from a dream that makes perfect sense one moment and none at all the next. You can't just shut your eyes and go back into a vision that daylight has revealed to be ridiculous. How could he be superior to Izzy? That couldn't be right. . . . And then one thing after another stopped being right: first his sense of being better than everyone; then his anger at The Dog; then his own fearlessness, which now struck him as laughable.

Below him, the houses had grown fewer and fewer as they flew deeper into the desert. At the same time, the darkness had grown larger, seeping like spilled ink into every corner of the earth and sky. Above him, the
crescent moon seemed to smile mockingly. It was all so empty, Peter thought. How could he have failed to notice that before? How could he not have realized how lonely flying was, up here so far above the rest of the world?

With a kind of relief, he saw that in front of him, The Dog had finally slowed down and was in effect treading water in midair.

The Dog raised his nose as Peter came near, as if he were sniffing him.

“Hey,” said Peter when he got close enough that The Dog could hear him.

The Dog laughed his snorty laugh. “Feeling better, are you?”

“I don't know about better. . . . More like myself, anyway.”

“How long did it last?”

Peter didn't need to ask what
it
was. “Until a few minutes ago.”

“Longer this time, huh?”

Peter just shrugged in answer. What could he say? The strangest part, the thing that he was too embarrassed to tell The Dog, was that he could still feel that person, the angry one who was both him and not him, inside his mind, pushing to get out. Peter shivered at the thought.

“So that's the magician's house,” said The Dog, pointing downward with his nose.

They had reached the outer rim of lights. This was the spot where human habitation ended; beyond was the endless dark of the empty desert, interrupted only by jutting fists of even blacker rock. The houses out here were
all expensive, and most were enormous complexes centered on two or three or four acres of land. From where Peter hovered, he could see the curved tiles of some roofs, the flat silver surfaces of others.

And then there was the magician's house.

It was less house than palace. As Peter and The Dog dropped down to the path that led to the entrance, Peter could feel all his earlier fear returning. What sort of power would it take to build a house like this? The front door alone was easily three times Peter's height and made entirely of copper. On either side of the door stood massive pillars, and next to the pillars were matching spiral staircases that led to a gigantic balcony above. There were windows everywhere, as tall as the door, but nothing was visible behind them: they were windows that were meant to be looked out of, not into.

“So what do you think of my old home?” asked The Dog, his lip curling in an expression Peter couldn't read.

“Umm . . . it's big,” said Peter.

“Wait until you see it on the inside,” said The Dog. “It's bigger in there than out here. I mean, he didn't want to be ostentatious or anything.”

“Oh.”

“He liked to sit on the balcony,” The Dog continued. “You'll find that one of the biggest problems magicians face is boredom. Once you can do or have anything you want, nothing is all that interesting. So my magician made it so he could hear and see whatever he wanted, and then he spent his evenings eavesdropping on the neighbors. He'd look around until he found something interesting and tune in as if it were his own personal
television program. If the show got boring, he could always force one of the ‘characters' to say or do something they hadn't intended. Make them quit their jobs or fight with their families. Anything to keep it dramatic. Lots of divorces in this neighborhood after we moved in.”

“He messed up people's lives?”

“Oh, yes. Many times. He thought it was funny.”

Peter looked again at the house: with all those dark windows, it reminded him of a dragon who was pretending to sleep but who was really watching you. “Wouldn't I be better off trying to become more powerful on my own?” he asked. “So I could bring my dad back myself?”

“Maybe,” said The Dog. “But to become more powerful, you'll have to get angrier. By the time you're powerful enough, you may be too angry to want him back anymore.”

Peter shivered. “What makes you think the magician will help me?”

“I don't know if he'll help you,” said The Dog. “I never know what he's going to do. One day last spring he woke up in a good mood, and we played fetch for hours. Another day he came home in a fury—I don't know why—and took away my name.”

“What do you mean, he took away your name?”

“There's not much you can take away from a dog; we're pretty simple creatures. But names—they're important to us. So that's what he took. Now I don't even remember what it used to be, and it doesn't work when I try to give myself a new one.”

“Why do you want to turn him back, then?” asked Peter. “Isn't it better that he's a rock?”

“It's complicated,” said The Dog.

“But you must hate him,” Peter said.

The Dog was silent for a long moment. Then, almost inaudibly, he said, “No, I don't hate him.”

“Why not?”

“Because I knew him before.”

“Before? Oh . . . before.” Before he became a magician, Peter realized. Before he built this monstrous house; before he destroyed marriages out of boredom; before he stole The Dog's name. “He was nice before?”

The Dog was quiet for a minute, his gaze still on the massive front door. “He was terrific,” he finally said, then stood up and padded on silent paws toward the house. Peter followed, his feet crunching on the rocky path. He half hoped they wouldn't be able to get in, but the door swung open the moment The Dog touched it with his nose. Without a backward glance, The Dog slipped inside, disappearing immediately into darkness.