Authors: Thomas Tryon
Michael sat in the living room, waiting for his coffee and idly trying to balance a cup on a saucer in the most preposterous way. Wurlitzer entered the room, stepped briskly to the coffee table, and snatched away Michael’s expensive toys, one with each hand. “Really, young man,” he said in a pathetic voice, sounding to Michael for all the world like one of his vexed aunts. This was certainly a new way of perceiving the master, and he listened with a smile on his lips while Wurlitzer invoked Lena’s love for her china. Again, Michael was struck—he had seldom heard (or seen) his mentor consider Lena’s feelings. An unusually—how should he say it?—
approachable
mood, he concluded.
“I’m sorry,” Michael apologized. “I was daydreaming. Are you having coffee too?”
“
I
am,” Wurlitzer said. “Lena will bring it soon.” He took something off the mantelpiece before settling into the wing armchair he favored. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding up a pear-shaped earthenware pot, strangely marked, and open at both ends.
“No,” Michael answered, turning the thing around in his hand. “What is it?”
“It’s an aludel, an alchemist’s vessel used in sublimating metals.”
“Right,” Michael said, smirking. “Lead into gold—what dreamers.”
“We do wrong to judge earlier, benighted centuries by our own advanced standards,” Wurlitzer pronounced, making a clucking sound.
Michael shifted to a more receptive position, upright but relaxed. The master was getting ready to deliver a lesson, or at least a lecture.
“The alchemist,” Wurlitzer went on, “is generally derided, either for his ludicrous greed or his ludicrous science—”
“Or both,” Michael interjected.
“Or both,” the old man assented. “But what the best of them were trying to do was not to change base metals into valuable ones but to transmute their own personality, to discover the limits of the possible and then transcend them. They were trying real magic.”
“What is real magic?” Michael asked at once.
Something almost like a smile of indulgence for Michael’s impetuous youth crossed the old man’s face. “First of all,” he said, “it’s a matter of learning to see things differently, as you are doing in the pyramid and our little slide shows. Once you learn that, at certain times it’s possible to enter a world—a fantasy world, if you like—where you can do things ordinary people consider mysterious. To the magician, however, they are only clear and natural, because he brings his imagination to bear on the ordinary and makes his fantasy real. Ah, thank you, Lena,” he said, looking up as she brought in the coffeepot.
“Thanks, Mrs. Wurlitzer,” Michael echoed. Lena smiled at them both and withdrew. The whole family seemed to be in an expansive frame of mind.
In between sips, the old man continued talking. “It is ironic,” he mused, “but the magician can go so far along this path that he, like his audience, has difficulty distinguishing reality from illusion.” He leaned closer to Michael, and his tones took on more gravity. “How do we know that we are sitting here talking in the real world, and not some dream world, some fantasy? Pinch yourself. Go ahead, pinch.”
Michael pinched the back of his hand and looked at the magician.
“Yes, you smile, it is such a natural thing, you feel the irritation of the nerve ends, and by this means you convince yourself that you are alive, that you are here. But what if the next moment you awake as from a dream and discover that all of this was merely illusion? I will tell you a story. A man lives in London, city born and bred, yet all his life he has received intimations of a place he has never visited, a country place, with a river. It is purely imaginary, but he sees it clearly. The river has a particular bend with trees growing at the edge, weeping willows with drooping branches. The trees too seem familiar. At a later period he travels to India, and while walking through the countryside he arrives at a river. He walks some way along it; then he comes to that particular bend with the weeping willows, the scene he has imagined for so long. He seems to fall into a trance beside the river. A light touch awakens him, and he discovers himself to be, not an Englishman at all, but an Indian, and the person who has awakened him is his wife, telling him that an hour ago he had come to the river for water and fallen asleep beside it. Interesting, is it not?” He searched Michael’s reaction.
At first he was speechless; the story was so like his dream of Emily that he had the shattering feeling that Wurlitzer could read not just his thoughts but even his dreams. He forced his voice to sound normal. “Very interesting,” he said—an understatement.
Wurlitzer nodded archly. “You see the possibilities. Perhaps we are all merely dreaming and may awake at any moment to discover that we are not ourselves as we know ourselves to be, but other selves, leading other lives.” He laughed abruptly, harshly. “I offer these facile speculations by way of suggesting to you the power of the imagination, for that is where real magic resides. By allowing the imagination to work, one can work magic. You have surely experienced this already—the imagination of the magician working on the imagination of his audience?” he said, fixing Michael with his single eye.
A vision of himself, squatted down on his haunches like a frog, hopped across Michael's mind. “I think so,” he said.
The eye seemed to see the frog too, and its gaze relaxed as though in empathy. “Quite so,” the old man said. “And therefore you have felt the power of the magic will. Paracelsus defined magic as the working of spiritual power on the externals of nature. I quarrel only with the word spiritual, because, as you must know, magical power is often physical, a matter of energy and force fields and the like. Perhaps this is merely a semantic quibble; but that power, however it may manifest itself, is rooted in imagination, and it gives the true magician his mastery. His audience believes him, they have no choice; he forces them to believe, he bends them to his will.” He pointed to the needlepointed motto under the engraving of Napoleon and the Sphinx. “There is Paracelsus’s motto:
Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest:
‘Let him not belong to another who has the power to be his own.’ As you develop that power, you will find yourself capable of greater and greater feats.”
“Like the frog?” Michael whispered.
The master sighed. “You must study patience, my boy, along with all your other disciplines. It is most important. For now, focus on this: real magic—what ordinary people call miracles—is born out of the imagination, out of the mind; but the mind must be trained. Pulling rabbits out of a hat is nothing. But the rabbits of the mind—those are a different matter entirely. Nevertheless, I have hopes of your success. You are young, healthy, intelligent, energetic, independent. You have no immediate family”—he paused significantly—“and no serious love interest.” He paused again, staring at Michael blankly, with no question in his voice or his eye.
Though the effort left him incapable of speech, Michael held the old magician’s gaze. Now, certainly, he could not tell him of his early visit to Emily. Why did he feel so guilty?
“Moreover, you are ambitious,” the funereal voice was droning on, “and you have demonstrated a certain courage. This is necessary, for if you pursue your chosen path, you may glimpse things that will terrify you. If you haven’t already,” he added, arching one mocking, quizzical brow, the one over his glass eye. As Michael remained silent, thinking about the room with the black door, Wurlitzer returned to his discourse.
“We—we magicians, I mean—are explorers of terra incognita, like Columbus, obliged to a quest for what most frightens us. Should you draw back from it, from the possibility of whatever exists beyond the possible, you shall remain…ordinary, safe, untouched, like the people who pass you on the street, who will never be touched because they have no imagination. You will explore no unknown lands, but you will have peace of mind.”
“I don’t want peace of mind,” Michael heard himself saying.
“I know, my poor boy,” the master replied, his voice nearly free from irony. “That is why we are together. You have joined me in a conjuring act, a little hoaxing of the public’s desire to be amused. But you still wish, do you not, to join me in a greater undertaking?”
“You know I do,” Michael stated flatly.
“Good,” the old man said. He pressed his fingertips together and made of them a prop for his chin. “It will be like a trip, a voyage of exploration. And on the way, who knows? We may catch a frog or two.”
Sometimes Wurlitzer reminisced colorfully about other conjurors he had known from what he called the Golden Age of Magic: Horace Goldin, the Great Nicola, Cefalu from Italy, Levante from Australia, Sorcar of India, the ersatz Oriental Fu Manchu, and the Americans, Dante, Thurston, Blackstone. He had known them all, the great stage illusionists, sleight-of-handers, coin manipulators, mentalists, quick-changers, the crystal gazers, the mediums, the Chautauqua magicians.
“Did you know Houdini?” Michael asked one day.
“Certainly. A true daredevil. He started small, with cards, as so many do. But he had a great deal of imagination, along with incredible stamina. He even escaped from the stomach of a dead whale, believe it or not.”
Michael whistled, trying to imagine the logistics of
that
magical performance. “Escape artists interest me. Did you ever have anything like that in your act?”
“I’ve made a few escapes in my time,” the magician answered wryly.
“But you don’t want to do them anymore?” Michael pressed him.
“Not in this life,” came the reply, followed by an outburst of raspy cackles.
Michael ignored the master’s apparent conviction that he had made a fine joke. “How about the rope trick? Did you ever see that when you were in India?”
“No one has,” Wurlitzer snorted scornfully. “It is nonsense, a fairy tale like ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ The only thing to remember about the Indian Rope Trick is that at no time since the formation of the Himalayas has there ever been a single report from one reliable witness verifying its execution. Unreliable reports, of course, abound. So who is tricking whom? The one who does the trick, or the one who reports it? It is an absurd world, with many absurd people in it. But some find it difficult to tell the difference between a fakir and a faker, if you catch my meaning. You have heard the stories of Indians walking on coals, have you not? A bed of burning coals, a pair of naked feet, and you have a stunt. The tourists enjoy it vastly, tell their relatives in Keokuk how they saw this fellow walk on fire as if on ice. And how is it done?”
“A trick.”
“Not at all. They
do
walk on coals, but they don’t feel them. There is no trickery involved. It is done by faith. Not in one’s self, you see: in whatever the coal walker calls ‘God,’ though you and I would not. The faith that moves mountains and brings about other assorted miracles. A good fakir will tell you, ‘This will not hurt, believe me,’ and drop a hot coal into the palm of your hand, and it will not hurt or leave a blister. But as we know, fire burns, it must; that is its inherent property. Shall I illustrate this for you? Light the candle there.”
Michael took the matches, lighted one, and touched it to the candle.
“Draw it to you. Just so. Now, do exactly as I tell you. Do you trust me?”
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t.” His grating laugh ended in odd sucking sounds, somewhere between wheezes and giggles. “Remember,” he said after a few moments, “exactly as I tell you.” Michael waited, soberly regarding that single eye. Yes, he would feel some power, some triumph of the will, some transcendence of heat and energy and light. He was ready. “Turn your head, look directly at the flame. Look at it, see it for what it is, nothing more than carbon dioxide in combustion. Now—exactly as I tell you, remember—pass your hand through the flame, slowly, at a distance of perhaps an inch above it.”
Bending to gauge the measurement, Michael flatted his hand and moved it above the candle, thus suppressing the convection currents and causing the flame to elongate and draw upwards, where it came into contact with his skin. He cried out, snatched his hand back, and shook it with a resentful grimace.
“It burned!”
“Of course it did. Did anyone say it wouldn’t burn?”
“You said—”
“No, the fakir said it wouldn’t, not I.”
“But you said to trust you.”
“Did I? It is amazing how two eyewitness accounts of the same event can differ. In any case, you have learned something. Never trust anybody” He gave Michael a look of complete self-satisfaction.
The young man sucked the burn, feeling the blood rush to his face but trying to stifle his anger. The—he couldn’t think of a word—the
caddishness
of the whole thing enraged him. “You owe me one,” he boldly said. “When are you going to show me?”
“What should I show you?” Michael did a quick frog pantomime. “Ah, of course, the frog, your bete noire. I must admire your persistence. The matter is not very difficult, really.”
“Is it hypnotism?”
“I know little of hypnotism. Mesmer had certain facts to hand regarding magnetic energy, but they have proved mostly fallacious. Perhaps it had nothing to do with me, that little episode. Perhaps it had everything to do with you. You may have had a mystical experience.”
“Mysterious, maybe, but mystical, no.” Michael reminisced briefly about his hopping spasms and the cannonade of retching by the fountain. “No mystical experience.”
“Then what could it have been?” said the master, getting up and bending over him.
Their eyes met. Michael hooked his ankles around the legs of his chair and grasped the edge of the table with both hands. Wurlitzer stooped across him and picked up the matchbox. “I’m sorry, frog-boy,” he said sardonically. “No jolly springing about today. Remember: amphibians must be approached from the rear, not from the front.”
As the days and weeks passed, Michael’s absorption in his new life deepened. His mental and physical exertions, ever more intense, often left him muddled, fatigued, edgy. He was burning, he had no doubt, with a brighter flame, but there were times when he thought it might consume him. His powers, his skills were growing constantly; still, he felt fearful. This fear revolved around that terrifying glimpse Wurlitzer had cautioned him about—the monsters that might bestride his path. Michael had been dared to dare, and in this regard he was no coward; he could dare as well as the next, or better. He had been warned of the abyss; to look down was, the master had suggested, the end of the beginning, but it could be the beginning of the end as well. He had seen demonstrations of real magic, performed before his very eyes; and seeing was believing. As to his own capabilities he was far from sure. Sometimes power surged through him, his eyes burned, his capillaries tingled; sometimes all he felt was a great void. Sometimes he was able to make at least partial sense of what he was feeling and seeing, and sometimes none at all. Looking ahead was frustrating; there seemed nothing beyond but a thick wall whose solid mass he could never hope to penetrate. Lift the veil, the master had said; but Michael wondered how many veils he would have to lift before his progress gave him the capacity to affect anything or anyone other than himself. Meditation, complex mental exercises, boxes within boxes, horror lurking inside locked rooms: what could all that produce besides, at the very best, a headache?