I spotted the young girl in the crowd, a few rows back. “You,” I said, pointing. “Do you want to see a trick?” Those directly in front of me turned, following my finger. The girl simply nodded, her mother pushing her forward to my folding table. In my hand was a purple marble, which I held out, enticing her forward.
“What is your name?” She must have been no more than six. Her chin barely reached the table. “Kiara,” she said, her eyes glued to the marble. “What a beautiful name. Do you like magic?” She was fully entranced, couldn’t take her eyes from the little moon in front of her. “She does, yes.” Her mother nodded vigorously. The crowd had backed away slightly, and had formed a semi circle around me, Kiara and her mother. A makeshift stage, right on Broadway. I shouted – “then let’s do some magic!” – and the crowd roared.
I had them, sitting on the edges of their seats, and the next thirty seconds or so were critical. They expected a show, and I would give them one. I reached forward, holding Kiara’s hand in my own, and placed the marble in her palm. “The marble’s yours,” I said. “You can keep it.” She grinned, flashing her gap-toothed smile. I folded her hand into a fist, and let go. “Show the crowd your marble!” Kiara turned, opening her fist. Empty. She looked back at me, and saw the marble sitting in front of me, on the table. She gasped.
“What the…?” I feigned surprise. This was where the acting came in. “How’d it get there?” Kiara reached for the marble, slamming her hand down on the table. Her eyes opened wide, and she turned back towards her mother, bewildered. She pulled away her hand. The marble was gone. “Here,” I said, holding out the small glass sphere. I tossed it to her, and she caught it clasped between both hands.
“There you go!” She was happy, and I was happy, but the crowd was tense. They expected trickery, and they were going to get it. “Keep it safely in your pocket,” I said. Kiara opened her hands to place the marble in the deep pockets of her navy striped dress. It wasn’t there. “That’s funny,” I said, “maybe you already put it away, and just forgot.” She understood me, and patted her sides, feeling for the marble. It was there, in her pocket. She shrieked. She was starting to grow afraid.
“Ok, ok.” I smiled at the crowd. “I’ve been unfair to all of you, especially you, Kiara.” I produced a second marble, an identical shade of purple, from my own pocket. “There are two marbles.” I titled my head towards the girl. “Why don’t I give you this one, too?” I squeezed my fist, as if crushing a grape, and this time Kiara screamed. She had felt it, the weight of a second marble falling into her pocket. She knew, then, what I was. But she would never tell.
The crowd broke out in applause when she pulled that second marble from her dress and held them both together. I winked at her, and then tucked a twenty into her mother’s hand, a small fraction of the money I’d raked in from that one trick. The perfect trick to end the day.
Would you believe me if I told you I was a magician? Not a magician like David Blaine, or Harry Houdini, but more akin to Harry Potter, or Merlin? No, you wouldn’t. I’m not surprised. I hardly believed it myself, that first time I experienced it. The feeling of just thinking something into being. There’s no support group for that moment. No chat room to seek out advice.
I’d been at it for days, had been working on a simple card trick in my bedroom in Queens. How to deal the second card in a deck, without anyone knowing. Sleight of hand. My hands were feeling very un-sleight, and I was ready to give up, when out of the blue I dealt an ace of spades, the second card in the deck. I was so excited, couldn’t believe my luck. I’d done it! I hadn’t even felt myself grab the second card, that’s how good the trick had been. I flipped over the top card of the deck, just to be sure. It was supposed to be a three of clubs, that miserable card, but it wasn’t. It was another ace of spaces. I froze. I was looking at two identical aces, laid out on the floor in front of me.
I flipped over a third card: ace of spades. A fourth, fifth and sixth card all came up the same. I threw the entire deck to the floor and felt my breath catch in my throat. The entire deck was aces. For a moment I just sat there, feeling my vision go fuzzy. Imagine seeing a penny crawl across the kitchen counter. Or a grocery list write itself. The movies glorify those moments, but laws of physics are called laws for a reason. I felt like vomiting, but somehow I stood up, grabbed my coat, and went for a walk.
It was mid-January, and the icy air shocked me back to reality. The cards hadn’t changed themselves. They couldn’t. My mind started racing. I was an overweight, pimply kid, living with his mother. I couldn’t do real magic. I had only eaten a turkey sandwich for lunch. My body was hungry, I’d been sitting on the floor for hours, staring at the same deck of cards, and my mind had played a trick. A cold wind blew up under my jacket and I turned to head home, muttering to myself. “Sack up, dude. Get a grip.”
Back in my room I was calm. The deck was normal again. Only one ace of spades. Mom was at the hospital, and wouldn’t be home for hours. I was alone, just how I liked it. I grabbed some chips from the kitchen and started watching anime. The morning had been weird. That was for sure. I left the cards on the floor and pushed them from my mind.
It wasn’t until later that night, lying in bed, that I accepted the theory I had been suppressing all afternoon: I had done something to the deck. “Let this be an ace,” I had thought, and then the next card up had been an ace. No amount of hunger could cause the sensation of holding two identical cards in my hands and knowing I was seeing the impossible. I had opened the deck that morning, had counted the cards, felt their laminated edges. They were as real as I was, and one of them had changed on my command. Was that possible? I jumped from my bed and grabbed the cards off the floor. For a minute I hesitated, because I knew once I tried this, once I tried to do actual I-think-I’m-a-wizard magic, I couldn’t go back, couldn’t convince myself I was sane. I thought of the most unlikely card to be at the top of the deck. “Nine of diamonds.” Then I picked the card, and sure enough, it was a nine of diamonds. I turned the deck over, searching for something other than a nine, but there were none. I flipped over the deck, unwilling to see my magic transpire before my eyes. “I want a regular deck.” This time I spoke out loud, the words coming out high-pitched and broken. I flipped it back over, and found 52 individual cards staring back at me.
Let me say what you’re all thinking: children speak to decks of cards. They speak to stuffed animals. They even speak to themselves, their alter egos. Not twenty year old men, living at home and slinging cappuccinos at a Starbucks in Elmhurst. They know better, understand that inanimate objects don’t respond to commands, don’t have the capacity to change themselves. Well, this particular deck did. What can I tell you? I could do magic.
You might expect that the following day in my apartment was madness. That I was summoning objects, changing forks into spoons, just causing all kinds of mayhem. But it didn’t happen that way. The reality is, faced with endless opportunity, it took me a while to get creative. That second day, I spent about sixteen hours straight changing the cards in a deck. Twos to queens. Hearts to diamonds. I can promise you, it didn’t get boring. It didn’t even cross my mind that my powers would work on anything else.
What had crossed my mind were dollar signs. I knew what these kind of tricks, done right, could earn me in places like Union Square and Central Park. The whole reason I had decided to get into magic in the first place was to hustle a few dollars from tourists, and I could see the potential a true conjurer had from a mile away. I was going to be rich.
Weeks passed, in which all I did was practice my new skills. My mom, when she was around, bore the brunt of these tests. “Pick a card, Mom,” I’d say, knowing that whatever card she picked it would be a queen of hearts. “Do you remember your card?” She’d nod. “Ok, then stick it back in the deck.” I would shuffle around playfully, as though stumped. “Oh! Here it is, the queen of hearts. Is this your card?” It took over a dozen times to impress her. My mom didn’t mess with magic.
From there I decided to step things up. I’d guess her card before she could stick it back in the deck. Or I’d have her pick three cards in a row and I’d guess them all. But eventually I got sloppy, and guessed a card I had no real business knowing. “How’d you – “ Mom had frozen, her mind racing as she thought through what I’d done. She believed in spirits – I’d heard her talking to Dad on more than one occasion – and so I think, on some level, she’d seen the magic in what I’d done. She stopped letting me practice on her from that day on.
I ventured to the streets not long after, expecting to make quick money, but it wasn’t that easy. The truth is that the public is reluctant to give away their hard-earned cash to a little punk kid like me with a deck of cards. You have to earn your stage. So I spent a couple weeks, really, going around Manhattan showing off my wares. Guessing a card here and there. Making trinkets disappear and reappear in strange places.
I didn’t exactly cut the figure of a world class street magician. Those guys are typically slim, smooth operators. Maybe a little sketchy, just enough to seem like the type to sit in a dark basement somewhere, practicing games for a living. But me? I was big, over six feet tall, and pushing 300 pounds. I was a clumsy texter, for Christ’s sake! My pudgy fingers jerked the cards around like a wise guy counting his money. But I made it work, because I had magic on my side.
The key was to draw a crowd, to generate disbelief, and then to reign in one or two skeptics with deep pockets. “Bullshit,” they’d say from somewhere in the back. “Let me place my own card, and shuffle the deck.” I’d feign exasperation, all the while thinking how unfortunate this guy from Des Moines was to have picked the one true magician in all of New York City to prove his point. We’d haggle, and eventually there would be some sum of money on the line, maybe fifty or a hundred bucks. I would find his card, no problem, and he would lose his mind, start to call me all sorts of names, but the crowd always had my back. “Relax, man,” some kid on a skateboard would say, “he’s been doing this all day. He’s insane, bro.” I would usually flash a guilty smile at that point, tuck the money into my back pocket, and start to pack up my things. It didn’t seem like a good idea to push my luck too far with guys like these. Next thing, he’d make me guess his middle name, which was Edward, or his date of birth, which was March 9th. I might even be tempted to do it, and then we’d have a real problem.
After a few months or so I’d built a pretty steady business. I was out on the streets from noon until about six, and I could make anywhere between twenty and a hundred bucks an hour depending on how magic-obsessed my crowd was. On a convention weekend, when strange, fantasy-loving teens roamed Times Square practically looking for ways to be separated from their cash, I could clear one fifty an hour. Those days I’d swap out my playing cards for a Pokémon deck, or Yu-Gi-Oh, and sure enough, pulling a Mewtwo out of the deck got these kids fired up. I couldn’t lose.
Fast-forward back to Kiara. That evening, as I folded up my table and slid my cash box into my backpack, I noticed a man lingering at the back of the dispersing crowd. Tall and thin, he wore an old duster jacket and a dark baseball cap that covered most of his face. He looked like he was out catching vampires and had accidentally stumbled into a Yankees game.
Any other time in my life, under different circumstances, I don’t bat an eye at this new visitor. But, like I’ve been saying, I was a magician. I was performing magic that I hadn’t believed in six months ago. So seeing this guy, who looked like Van Helsing, or Blade, really freaked me out. He was clearly hanging around, waiting for the chance to get me alone.
Sure enough, as I started walking down 42nd to the subway, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “Have a minute, kid?” I turned and briefly locked eyes with his cold, red stare. “I gotta get home, really,” I said, pulling my backpack around towards my front. Maybe this guy was just a junkie trying to score my box of cash. “What do you need?”
What he said stopped me in my tracks. “I want to know what other real magic you can do.” Real magic? Uh oh. I’d met my fair share of nut jobs doing tricks in Time Square, but not one of them had genuinely referred to my trade as real magic. “What?” I figured ignorance might work, but instead the guy just grabbed my shoulder, hard, stopping me in my tracks.
“Check your pocket,” he said. I hesitated. Check my pocket? This couldn’t end well, but I did, feeling the shiny marble. I pulled it out and showed him. “My marble.” The marble vanished before my eyes. “Check your pocket,” he said again. I checked. The marble was there. I was looking at a second magician.
“Ok,” I said, my heart pounding, “I get it. What do you want?”
“Why don’t we find somewhere more private to speak?” The man grinned, flashing a row of white, crooked teeth, and gestured down 42nd, towards the water.
The guy wasn’t kidding about someplace private, and twenty minutes of silence later we were standing on Pier 81, in the shadow of a pink sunset. I just stood there, twice this guy’s weight but terrified. Mom was going to read about me in tomorrow’s Post, a fat, blubbery mess washed up somewhere on the banks of the Hudson. I had been avoiding the man’s direct stare, had been focusing on his beat up sneakers instead, but finally I looked at him.
“You’ve got a gift, kid.” His words were blunt, matter of fact. “There aren’t too many of us that do.” I wanted to run, to be anywhere other than that pier, but something about the man kept me rooted to the spot. He commanded attention. I started to stammer, trying to think of a decent response, but he stopped me with a click of his tongue. “There are powerful forces out there,” he said, “things you can’t even imagine. And we need your help.” I hesitated. This guy was nuts. I was nuts for getting involved in any of this. I needed to go back, to apologize to Kiara. I was a fraud.
The man sensed my distress. “It won’t be easy, you know. Those tricks you can do? That’s only the beginning.” His eyes flicked downwards, to his waist, and mine followed. In his hand was a small ball of fire. I’d had enough. I backed away, hugging my backpack into my chest and keeping my eyes on the man. This was gonna get me killed. I turned to run, to escape the nightmare, when the man said something that made me stop.
“What?” I turned, straining to hear his distant voice over the steady beat of the Hudson. “What did you say?”
“Your father would have wanted it, Tony,” he whispered. “He would have wanted you to pick up where he left off.”