What the Mirror Took

At seventy-nine, Charlie still had the hands. At the Magic Manor in Hollywood he worked the close-up room three nights a week, dazzling tourists, dentists, and the occasional movie producer with cards, dice, coins, and the kind of dry one-liners that made people feel they were in the presence of a gentleman con man who had retired from sin out of good taste.

On this night the room was packed. Time for his finale.

With a fluid gesture, Charlie swept aside a blue curtain and revealed a transparent cylinder, six feet tall and barely wide enough to hold a person. It looked like a futuristic phone booth. The audience could see through it from every angle. A black rectangle outlined a glass door.

“Time spins and youth flees,” Charlie said to a young couple in the front row. “However, thanks to my Recycler illusion, we can reverse time and regain what is lost to the cruel ravages of the years.”

A few people chuckled. Charlie invited several volunteers up to inspect the cylinder. They tapped the half-inch glass, peered at the glass floor and glass ceiling, and confirmed there was no place for a human being to hide unless he had been folded by a professional laundry.

Charlie had them spread an Oriental carpet beneath the cylinder.

“My friends,” he said, “even if someone could breach the floor, access would be blocked by a carpet woven of the finest silk known to mankind. Well—at least the finest polyester.”

That got a titter.

Then Sarah walked onstage in a white gown.

“Please welcome my wife,” Charlie said, his voice softening, “the personification of beauty and wisdom.”

The audience smiled before they meant to. Charlie and Sarah had that effect on people. They looked like a couple who had been married long enough to become part miracle, part furniture.

Sarah entered the cylinder. Charlie closed the door.

“Are you comfortable in there, my darling?”

“It’s a bit crowded.”

“Someone else in there with you?”

Another ripple of laughter. Everyone could see she was alone.

Charlie lit a cigarette, blew smoke toward the glass, and the smoke seemed to melt through it, filling the tube with blue haze. He rotated the cylinder slowly. Sarah steadied herself inside with thin, gnarled hands pressed against the transparent wall.

When the smoke cleared, an old woman was gone.

In her place stood a beautiful young blonde.

The applause hit like weather.

Charlie rotated the cylinder again to show it was intact, opened the glass door, and the young woman stepped out to thunder. There seemed no possible way anyone could have entered or exited that tube. Maybe, some thought, the old woman had worn startlingly good makeup and stripped it off in the smoke. But no—her hands had remained pressed against the glass the entire time.

Charlie bowed. The curtain came down.

In the dressing room afterward, Sarah helped him remove his makeup while Patricia—the young woman who had emerged from the cylinder—leaned in the doorway, still glowing from the applause.

“You killed them tonight,” Patricia said.

“It did go rather well,” Charlie said.

“Pure magic,” Patricia said.

Sarah smiled as she packed away Charlie’s grease paint in his battered makeup case. Patricia and Sarah were the same size. They could wear the same loose white gown. They shared a similar coloring. There the resemblance ended. Sarah was at least fifty years older, and every year was visible.

That was why the act worked.

“Charlie,” said Patricia, “did you tell Sarah? We might get that Jay Leno booking.”

“That would be wonderful for you both,” Sarah said.

Charlie frowned. Why not the three of us?

Patricia cleared her throat. “I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“Tell us the good news,” said Sarah.

“Jim and I are going to have a baby.”

“Jim?” said Sarah. “The fellow from Bel Air with the flashy car?”

Patricia gave a modest little nod that didn’t quite hide a smug smile. “Nature took its course.”

Sarah hugged her. Charlie kissed her cheek. They were both delighted for her. Then Patricia delivered the bad news: the doctor had told her no exertion. She could not continue with the act.

Charlie said all the right things. They would work it out. They would find someone else. But in the privacy of his own skull, numbers began to lurch around like drunks.

Patricia had worked for next to nothing.

At home that night, Charlie and Sarah watched an old episode of The Honeymooners in their small apartment in the Valley. Afterward he slipped an arm around her.

“I hope Patricia is blessed with a healthy baby,” Sarah said. “Maybe I should make a potion for her.”

“I don’t think her doctors would appreciate toads’ feet soup.”

Sarah swatted his arm. “Charlie Fast, you horrible old man. You know perfectly well I would never use toads’ feet. Besides, I’m too old to catch toads. I can’t even catch a drunk snail.”

They laughed. They liked to kid each other.

Then Charlie told her what the clinic had said.

“As long as you keep taking your medicine, you’re going to be fine,” he said.

“Then there’s nothing to worry about.”

“No,” he said. “Nothing at all.”

They went to bed and slept badly.

Sarah’s heart medicine cost a hundred dollars a day. Their savings would cover about a month. Sarah had no citizenship, no green card, no Medicare. On the walls, framed clippings documented a lifetime of successful magic in second-tier theaters across North America. Charlie had started as a carnival barker. Sarah had been billed as The Witch of the Nile and danced in a sideshow so suggestively that decent men lost their religion.

In those days Charlie had cheated at dice and cards to supplement his income. Sarah had talked him out of gambling and into magic. He had talked her out of exotic dancing and whatever old-country occult nonsense she half believed and half performed for the rubes.

It had seemed like a fair trade.

By morning he was up making coffee in the dark little kitchen. Sarah heard him, as she always did, and came out in her robe.

He handed her the cup, then plucked two heart pills out of thin air.

She smiled and swallowed one. “I really only need one.”

“We’ve been through that with the doctor.”

She swallowed the second. “You still know how to make a good cup of coffee.”

“And I still know how to take care of you.”

He meant it. That was the problem.

That afternoon he got a call about a private poker game at the Century Plaza. Three hundred dollars to deal.

“You told them no,” Sarah said.

“Not exactly.”

“No.”

“I’d just be dealing.”

“It’s illegal.”

“It’s three hundred dollars.”

She fixed him with that old Egyptian stare that had once made him abandon a dice game in Reno and a brunette in Tucson. “I can take anything but living without you.”

He kissed her forehead and let it drop. For now.

When Charlie wasn’t performing, he hunted yard sales and garage sales for treasures people were too ignorant or distracted to price properly. First editions were his specialty. He could spot a valuable book at twenty feet if the light was decent and he wasn’t hungry.

That night at the Manor, without Patricia, he skipped the Recycler and did only close-up work. The audience was polite. The applause was thinner. In the dressing room afterward, the talent coordinator—a petty little man who had always wanted to be an entertainer and lacked even the dexterity for dishonesty—came in without knocking.

“Several guests complained you omitted the Recycler,” he said. “Management may have to consider a replacement.”

“Patricia is pregnant. I need a new assistant.”

“And when do you expect to pay for one?”

Charlie stared at him.

Patricia appeared in the doorway, radiant and indignant. “Not one of them is a tenth as good as Charlie.”

The coordinator inspected his bitten nails. “Congratulations on bringing another mouth into the world.”

“Give it a rest,” Patricia said.

He left.

Charlie removed a false eyebrow and said, “You really dealing private games?”

Patricia smiled. “You’re surprised I know that term? Card mechanic?”

He looked at her more carefully.

“I deal some parties,” she said. “After work. You interested?”

“I have to go home.”

“I hope Jim and I are as happy as you and Sarah someday,” she said, touching his arm.

At home, he found Sarah reading an old leather-bound volume on the occult, a relic from carnival days.

“I heard Patricia is dealing some games around town,” Sarah said.

“Probably trying to make a little money for the baby.”

“I think we should have lunch with her.”

“If you want.”

“I do.”

Over tea the next day, Sarah asked Patricia about the baby, about Jim, about money. Patricia answered lightly, but Charlie noticed something he should have noticed sooner: the girl was a better actress offstage than on it.

Then came the cascade.

The Leno booking fell through. The price of Sarah’s medicine went up. A flood at the Magic Manor closed the main stage for repairs, which cut their pay in half. One Friday night Charlie ran into Patricia outside the drugstore while picking up Sarah’s meds.

“I’m on my way to Bel Air,” she said. “Big game. Please don’t mention it to Sarah.”

“People do what they have to,” Charlie said.

The next day Patricia asked him to meet her for lunch on the West Side.

He sold an eleventh edition Encyclopaedia Britannica that morning, found six old Mad magazines for almost nothing, then sold them before noon for a handsome profit. Southern California had put on one of its fraudulent perfect days, the kind that made poverty seem like a bookkeeping error.

Patricia was waiting in a restaurant near Brentwood.

“It’s my treat,” she said. “Order whatever you want.”

He ordered small. He always ordered small when somebody else was paying.

Then she said it. “I can get you ten grand for a couple of hours of your time.”

Charlie set down his fork. “Who do I have to kill?”

“No one. Jim’s been getting skinned alive in a private poker game. I told him if there was anyone in the world who could help him, it was you.”

“I don’t play cards for money.”

“Right. You’re just a consultant.”

Ten thousand dollars would cover months of Sarah’s medicine. It would buy time. Time was a currency more precious than cash when your wife’s heart was failing.

“When is the game?” he asked.

“Tonight.”

That night he lied to Sarah.

He told her he was going to the Manor to watch Tony Giorgio in the close-up room.

“I’ll come with you,” she said.

“It’s boys’ night out.”

“Old boys?”

“The oldest.”

She smiled and kept mending one of his socks. “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be young again for just one night?”

“We’re all right as we are,” he said.

Forty-five minutes later he was in Bel Air.

Jim’s estate had first editions in the den, antique watches on the man’s wrist, and the kind of shoes that cost more than Charlie’s first car. Patricia greeted him in a white blouse that smelled faintly of expensive perfume and clean cotton.

The three guests were what Charlie expected rich men to be and what rich men often were not: sharp, sober-looking, and predatory under their manners. Two Texans who had made fortunes in chips. An Englishman who looked half asleep.

By midnight Jim was down eight thousand dollars. Charlie corrected him.

“Ten thousand four hundred,” Charlie said.

Jim stared. “You don’t miss much.”

“You weren’t playing three men,” Charlie said. “You were playing one man wearing three bodies.”

He explained the signals: an ear tug, a card adjustment, a little piece of choreography among thieves. The best hand took the pot while the others softened the field. Patricia had dealt cleanly. Jim had been taken anyway.

Jim handed Charlie a ten-thousand-dollar check.

Then he said, “Help me get even.”

“No.”

“I’ll make it worth your while.”

“No.”

Charlie left with the check.

When he got home, Sarah was awake, staring at her crystal ball.

“You’ve been at a card game,” she said.

“I was serving drinks.”

“And cards were being played.”

He showed her the check. “I picked up ten thousand for us. No gambling.”

“The deal we made was magic only.”

“It was one time.”

“All right,” she said, and kissed him.

The next morning Patricia called. Jim wanted Charlie to look at some rare books.

At the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, Jim and Patricia were drinking Tequila Sunrises at breakfast as though this were a recognized adult behavior. After they ate, Jim got to the point.

“I want my money back from those bastards.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“The best thing you could do for Sarah,” Jim said, “is make sure her future is secure.”

They drove to Jim’s house. In the den, Charlie found himself in the presence of a small library of temptation. Jim told him to pick any two books he liked. Charlie chose leather-bound volumes worth several thousand dollars.

Then Jim made the real offer.

“Deal for me Sunday night,” he said, “and you can take fifty books.”

Fifty books. Charlie’s pulse actually changed.

That Sunday he took Sarah to the beach. They wandered the stalls along the sand, breathing salt air they could not afford to live near. He bought her a small gold ankh from a jewelry table.

“The symbol of life,” he said.

“My old country,” she said, smiling.

That evening he showed her the first editions from Jim’s house and lied again, saying he had stumbled into a bargain and might have another chance at a few more.

At Jim’s that night, Charlie spent an hour making himself into Mac, an anonymous red-haired bartender with a drooping mustache and the blank expression of a man whose most vivid thought was about ice cubes.

The players arrived. The game began.

Within minutes Jim dropped twenty thousand dollars. Then thirty.

Charlie dealt, watched, read the signals, and began mining the bottom of the deck with the sort of hands that, if preserved in formaldehyde, should have been studied by surgeons and criminals alike. Whenever the cheats signaled that Jim was vulnerable, Charlie adjusted fate by a card.

Jim hit a hot streak so plausible it looked like luck.

By one in the morning he had won back everything and another hundred and twenty thousand besides.

When the guests finally left, Patricia flew out and kissed Charlie.

Jim brought him an armful of books. “These are for you.”

Charlie looked at the stack. It wasn’t close to fifty.

“I’d rather choose them myself.”

Jim smiled pleasantly. “Let’s call it even.”

Charlie thought he had misheard him.

“You’re way ahead,” Jim said. “Win-win.”

“I’m not leaving without the rest of those books.”

“Call the police.”

Charlie considered hitting him.

“Don’t,” Jim said. “I came third in the Hawaiian Triathlon last year. Take your books and vanish, old man.”

Charlie returned home carrying too few books and too much shame.

Sarah was awake. She had dragged an old steamer trunk into the front room and laid out her ancient carnival robe across the couch. The room smelled of musk and dust and old performance.

“You broke your promise,” she said.

“I’m doing it for your medicine.”

“I have potions for a weak heart.”

“This isn’t a game.”

“My magic works.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

She stared into the crystal ball. “They cheated you.”

“It shows on my face, not in that ball.”

She slipped on the old robe. It still fit.

“No more gambling?” she asked.

“If you put that thing away.”

“Very well.”

In bed, just before sleep, she said, “Patricia isn’t going to have a baby.”

He turned toward her. “You sure?”

“She only came to us to get you to deal.”

The next morning the Magic Manor called. The stage would reopen Wednesday. Same pay as before. No Recycler, no job.

At ten, Patricia appeared at their apartment with a few first editions under her arm and an apology on her lips.

Sarah closed the trunk and looked at her with icy calm.

“You’re not pregnant,” Sarah said.

Patricia blinked.

“You used Charlie. Your rich friend used him. He cheated my husband and he’ll cheat you next.”

“That what your crystal ball says?”

“There are kinds of magic you know nothing about,” Sarah said.

Charlie took Patricia by the arm and got her out the door before the scene could get uglier.

Back inside, he sat heavily in a chair. Sarah held the crystal ball in her lap like a cat.

That evening Patricia called again, contrite, tearful, useful. She would help with the act until they found a replacement. Sarah, after listening in silence, said they had no choice.

The three met the next day at the Manor to rehearse.

The Recycler, like all good illusions, was simple once you knew the secret. The cigarette smoke was nothing; Sarah wore a tiny canister in her shoe and could flood the tube with haze by pressing down. The real trick was the black rectangle outlining the door. Under cover of smoke, Sarah slid it around to the back while Charlie rotated the cylinder, making the audience believe the entrance remained in front. Then she opened the now-hidden rear door, stepped through a slit in the black curtain behind the apparatus, and Patricia climbed in. Charlie rotated the tube back. Patricia slid the black outline to its original position. The smoke cleared. Youth had replaced age.

A miracle of plywood, timing, and nerve.

When rehearsal ended, Patricia apologized again. Sarah opened wine. The three toasted their future.

The house was packed Wednesday night.

Charlie helped Sarah into the cylinder. He closed the door. He lit the cigarette. Smoke slid through glass like a lie made visible.

Inside the tube, Patricia waited in Sarah’s place, ready to emerge young and radiant to applause.

Charlie rotated the cylinder.

Patricia smiled to herself in the haze. Good old Charlie. He was her ticket. She had known it the first night she saw him handle a deck. She had worked cheap not for exposure but for access. Learn his moves, use him in private games, turn a faded conjurer into a machine for making money. Sarah, the old nuisance, would become a problem eventually, but problems had ways of disappearing in this town.

Then a voice spoke inside Patricia’s skull.

I know why you came back.

Patricia looked around wildly. There was no one in the tube.

Charlie trusted you. I never did.

“Who’s there?” Patricia whispered.

You meant to take him from me. His hands, his secrets, his soul.

Patricia’s breath quickened. “This is some kind of speaker—”

A cheap trick? No. Real magic.

A white flash exploded through her mind.

The next thing Patricia knew, she was on the floor behind the stage curtain, staring up at the ceiling. Her back hurt. Her hands felt wrong.

She looked at them and began to scream.

The hands were old.

Knotted veins. Parchment skin. Age spots.

Sarah stood over her in Patricia’s young body.

“The wine yesterday,” Sarah said gently. “I put a little something in it. A potion. We traded places.”

“You can’t steal somebody’s body!”

“You tried to steal my husband.”

“Give it back!”

“In a moment Charlie will have Jim’s.”

Patricia stared in horror. Sarah murmured a phrase in a language older than English, and Patricia’s borrowed old body went limp.

Sarah stepped back into the cylinder.

The smoke cleared.

The audience roared as the young woman stepped out.

After the curtain call, Charlie and “Patricia” went to the dressing room. He was buzzing with relief. The act had worked. They still had a job. They still had a shot.

“There’s some wine left,” said Patricia—Sarah in Patricia’s body. “Shall we finish it?”

Charlie took a glass.

On impulse she kissed him.

He recoiled. “Don’t do that.”

“Wouldn’t you like a younger model?” she asked, teasing.

“The only woman I want is my wife.”

She smiled. Even in another woman’s face, the smile was Sarah’s.

A moment later an old woman staggered into the dressing room.

Charlie turned, alarmed. Of course he thought it was Sarah. It was Patricia inside Sarah’s frail body, half mad with terror.

“She stole my body!” Patricia shrieked.

Sarah lifted a hand and Patricia collapsed into sleep.

Then Sarah prepared the rest.

She altered the wine. She hid the unconscious bodies. She waited.

When the knock came, she smiled.

Jim entered.

“Did the old man agree to work with us again?” he asked.

“He’ll be easy to handle,” Sarah said in Patricia’s voice. She offered him the glass. “Taste this. Tell me what you think.”

Jim drank, frowned, and dropped.

A short while later Charlie and Sarah drove to Bel Air.

Charlie was in Jim’s body.

Sarah remained in Patricia’s.

At a red light Charlie touched his face, his chest, his hair, as if checking a costume. Then he turned to Sarah, and desire—old desire, young desire, ridiculous desire—shot through him like an electrical fault.

“Pull over,” he said.

She laughed. “Patience.”

At the Magic Manor, half an hour later, Jim and Patricia woke in old bodies in the dressing room.

Jim lurched to the mirror and stared at Charlie Fast’s wrinkled face. Patricia stared at Sarah’s ravaged features and began to sob.

Then Patricia saw the note.

“If you sip the wine from within the cylinder,” she read, “you will return to your own body.”

Desperation makes believers quickly.

The stage was empty. The theater dark. The transparent cylinder stood under a work light like an accusation.

Jim climbed in. Patricia squeezed in beside him. There was barely enough wine left for each of them to take a sip.

They drank.

Nothing happened.

“Maybe shut the door,” Jim said.

Patricia slid it shut.

Still nothing.

Then smoke began to seep through the floor.

“There must be a release,” Jim shouted, pounding at the glass.

“The black outline!” Patricia cried. “Slide it!”

Jim shoved at the black rectangle. It did not move.

“It’s painted on!” he shouted.

“Yes,” Patricia said, coughing. “But how can that be?”

Because the mechanism had broken a year earlier. Because Sarah had painted the outline on the glass rather than pay for repairs. Because stage magic had failed, and real magic had stepped in to fill the gap.

They died clawing at the transparent prison.

In Bel Air, Charlie and Sarah let themselves into Jim’s mansion and ran laughing to the bedroom like two fugitives in a romantic comedy written by the devil.

Later, lying on silk sheets after making love with a kind of gratitude usually reserved for shipwreck survivors, Charlie turned to her.

“I have a confession,” he said. “I never believed you could do real magic.”

“I have one too,” she said.

“What?”

“The black outline on the Recycler hasn’t slid in a year. Too expensive to fix. I just painted it on.”

Charlie stared.

She smiled and nestled against him.

“That’ll teach you to mess around,” she said, “with an honest-to-goodness Witch of the Nile.”