Vanishing Acts
A few weeks after my mother died, I went to a magic show in the Mission. I appreciate this performer’s patter and bonhomie, his tight grin and tidy vest. Mostly, though, I like the way he vanishes eggs.
Years ago, I caught his act in a tiny gallery north of Market, where he spent the whole evening playing with eggs; juggling them, finding two in someone’s ear, cracking one open to reveal the dripping dollar he’d taken from a long-haired girl in the front row. Finally, he threw one, two, three eggs into the air, all of which vanished overhead.
In the Mission, however, he only did one egg trick. We were a small and random audience, sitting close together, close to the magician, on the fifteen chairs the city finally allowed him to fill. We wore masks, which I imagine was a problem for the guy, who likes to read your shaky smile before springing a gag on you.
“Because tonight is weird,” he told us, “I’m going to do something a magician should never do.”
“I’m going to show you how I disappear an egg,” he said.
He demonstrated the trick three times, talking us through his technique and toward the desired result. Fluttering his shiny red scarf in the air, wrapping it around a tender white egg, turning the little bundle around and around, then opening the scarf again to demonstrate the egg had vanished – to be rediscovered tucked inside his left sleeve, behind a book on a shelf and, finally, inside an open bottle of whiskey that sat on the floor next to his tall stool.
“Now you try it,” he said, and asked for a volunteer.
* * *
In the parlance, a magic trick requires both method and effect, the effect being what an audience subjectively perceives because of the method employed by a magician. A trick only works if its performer – through sleight of hand, distraction, misdirection, or other pretext – can disguise his technique, creating the illusion of impossibility we call “magic.”
Papyri dating to 2500 BC suggest that sorcerers were occasionally hired to entertain pharaohs, but magic as a performance art was first officially documented in 65 CE by Seneca the Younger. Seneca was fascinated by the “harmlessly deceptive” Acetabularii, ancient Roman masters of the cup and balls routine, a “trickery that pleased” him. In the centuries that followed, magicians refined their skills, categorizing and specializing in preferred techniques and developing ever more sophisticated methods to convince audiences of their ability to predict the future, levitate matter, produce and disappear objects, teleportate, transform, evaporate, reconstitute.
In the 1720’s, Isaac Fawkes advertised his “production” skills in a London newspaper, claiming he could,
take an empty bag, lay it on the Table and turn it several Times inside out, then command 100 Eggs out of it and Several showers of real Gold and silver, then the Bag beginning to swell several sorts of wild fowl run out of it upon the Table…"
In 1845, a former clockmaker name Eugene Robert-Houdin opened a magic theater in Paris where he dazzled audiences with a bevy of effects, including the purported “Second Sight” he applied to read the minds of audience members or divine the contents of sealed containers. The early 20th-century illusionist and stunt performer, Harry Houdini, perfected the art of escape. In the 1940’s, Edward Massey was renowned for his “finger amputation” trick. Uri Geller bent spoons, Ricky Jay threw cards, Penn Jillette shot nails into his never-injured hand, David Copperfield vanished the Statue of Liberty.
“You must practice,” Steve Martin cautions students of the magical arts, “you must practice, and never present a trick before it’s ready.” Even then, the trick will not succeed unless the audience is willing to believe it.
* * *
Before she lost her own mind, my mother used to read mine.
“You don’t want that,” she might say, if I reached for dessert at the buffet where we celebrated Mother’s Day when I was a child.
“Blue is your favorite color,” she divined, when we shopped for my school clothes.
“Is there something you’d like to tell me?” my mother asked when I came home from playing with secret friends she didn’t like, or swapped my one-piece for a bikini at Jody’s swim party.
What was it, I wondered, that my mother could see in my brain or my clothes, my eyes or my body that granted her access to my private life? What power did she have, what superior insight into my character or experience of my nature that let her predict mistakes I hadn’t yet made, shortcomings I didn’t know I possessed?
“Remember, Anne,” she would say, “I know you.”
* * *
Magicians rely heavily on “tells,” unconscious actions by audience members that betray their hidden feelings or intentions. “The things we think,” David Mamet’s character, Mike, proclaims in House of Games, “the things we want. We could do them or not do them. But we can’t hide them.” Poker masters, in particular, study opponents for giveaways; to the seasoned eye, miniscule changes in another player’s demeanor or actions can indicate a good or bad hand. As a general rule, “weak means strong” in poker; sudden shyness, a fumbling of cards or chips, nervous glances around the table or even a damp upper can lip can signal that a player is holding powerful cards. For experts who read the table, the obverse is also true. “Strong means weak;” splashing rather than politely passing one’s chips, glaring and staring, grousing and mouth-covering are indicators of an unimpressive holding.
Poker afficionados agree, though, that a player’s hands offer the most reliable tells, particularly if they’re shaking. This “trembling hand syndrome,” an undeniable sign of excitement, is hard for a player to control against and, as such, is a compelling harbinger of dominant cards.
* * *
“Never try to fool children,” Houdini once cautioned. “They expect nothing and therefore see everything.” My formidable mother didn’t fool me; her agile face was easy to read, and she was frank with her opinions and expectations.
Then she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. My mother’s tell wasn’t the classic trembling hand; it was, in fact, the opposite. It was a rigidity, an immobility, a frozenness of regard and stance. Her white smile morphed into a grimace. Her blazing eyes turned flat and fixed. Her bouncing foot sat immobile in its shoe. Her legs stopped bending and stretching. Her cunning fingers, her inventive and competent hands stopped cleaning and cooking and making and beckoning and shooing and touching and pulling and pushing. Eight years into her diagnosis, she sat sphinxlike in a wheelchair, inscrutable at last.
It was a guilty relief to visit my petrified mother, a horrifying pleasure to think I could spend time in her company without her active control, her perceived disapproval. To assuage my culpable ease, I often brought her things she’d formerly craved, candy and cookies, breads and pastries. She showed no visible interest in these favors. When pressed, though, when urged by my father or her caregivers, she would taste one or two.
“Do you like it, Eunice?” my father would ask.
But she did not respond.
Once, I brought a date nut cake that I baked with care, and to my mother’s former specifications. We cut a small slice and placed it before her chair on the table, but I couldn’t stay to watch her eat. As I turned to go, something pelted the back of my head.
“Eunice,” my father said. “Don’t throw food.”
* * *
In ancient times, magic was less a form of entertainment than a handmaiden to religious and civic exercise, an evolving and loosely understood tool akin to science, but associated with the occult, with both the dark and benevolent arts. The Egyptians, the Greeks and Romans, Persians and Mesopotamians utilized curses and potions, spells and talismans to appease and distract fickle gods, or to assert control over personal and professional fortunes.
Egyptians assumed that magic influenced every stage of human life, from conception through death, and even into the afterlife. The Mesopotamians practiced augury, deciding matters of state or determining their most intimate futures by interpreting the behavior of birds. The Greek and Roman worlds were populated by magicians; Hecate, the goddess of the moon and witchcraft, Circe the sorceress who helped Odysseus summon ghosts from Hades, Romulus and Remus whose fratricidal rivalry resulted in the founding of Rome.
Magic was practiced high and low, by one city-state against another, between rivals in business or suitors in love, to influence a chariot race or heal an ailing child. Curses were cast to “bind” or constrain targeted parts of a victim’s body. “I bind Cittos,” read one fourth-century Attican stone tablet, “my neighbor, the hemp-worker, the Craft of Cittos, his work, his soul, his mind, and the tongue of Cittos.” One besotted Egyptian suitor sought to bind Theodotis, daughter of Eus,
… so that Theodotis may no longer try anything with any other man but me alone, Ammonion, and may be subservient, obedient, eager, flying through the air seeking after Ammonion, son of Hermitaris, and bring her thigh close to his, her genitals close to his, in unending intercourse of all the time of her life.
Practitioners could go too far. At Teos on the Ionian coast, a man and his family were sentenced to death for making “harmful magic.” In the 4th Century BCE, the Greek woman Theoris was executed for selling “bewitching” drugs and spells. Antiphon, the gifted Athenian orator, wrote a speech for one aggrieved son whose stepmother directed a servant to add a love potion to his father’s wine. “My father,” the son proclaimed in court,
was seized with an illness which resulted in his death twenty days later. In atonement, the subordinate who carried out the deed has been punished as she deserved, although the crime in no sense originated from her: she was broken on the wheel and handed over to the executioner; and the woman from whom it did originate, who was guilty of the design, shall receive her reward also, if you and heaven so will.
For the ancients, a world without magic was virtually inconceivable. Its omnipresence and influence over daily life was “as much a matter of course,” the renowned Egyptologist James Henry Breasted noted, “as sleep or the preparation of food.”
* * *
Five years into her diagnosis, still willful and able to walk, my mother escaped her watchers for an unmonitored stroll in the garden where she promptly fell and splintered a brittle hip. Waking after surgery in her hospital room, she saw my father, my sister and me standing at the foot of her bed. She also saw things that weren’t at the foot of her bed; people and animals, charcuterie and cocktails, colors and swirlies that floated, unregulated, past her disoriented eyes.
“This happens,” my father, a doctor, explained as my mother reached and grabbed, laughed and fought with the invisible objects that hovered around her lunch tray.
“This won’t last,” my father assured us when my mother demanded we ask hotel staff to upgrade the linens on her hospital bed, or called for her long-dead father to retrieve the winter coat she remembered hanging on an IV pole.
A week later, my mother returned home from the hospital, and the phantoms she consorted with there remained behind. In many ways, though, so did my mother.
* * *
Production, the sudden presentation of a previously invisible object, is a common effect in magic and one of the earliest depicted in recorded history. When a party-circuit magician declares “abracadabra” before extracting a rabbit from his empty hat, he likely adulterates an ancient Aramaic phrase, “avra kehdabra,” “I create as I speak.”
Vanishment is an equally familiar trick, one in which a visible object abruptly evaporates. Conjurers often entertain by disappearing fluttering doves in false-sided boxes, audience members’ wallets under hidden jacket linings, or silk handkerchiefs inside their hands.
Production and vanishment are frequently performed in tandem, allowing magicians to present multiple, consecutive effects. The Acetabularii of ancient Rome used small vinegar jars to repeatedly disappear and reappear small round stones. Hieronymous Bosch painted a small and precious 15th-century canvas of two con artists, one of whom distracts a patrician victim with a magic performance while the second picks his pocket. Bosch produced at least five versions of “The Conjuror,” the most prized of which hangs northwest of Paris at the Musee Municipal in Saint-Germain-En-Laye. The museum displayed its treasure until 1978, when thieves palmed and kept it for two long months before the painting was recovered. Chastened by the swindle, the Musee Municipal closed its doors to the general public, now allotting just one day a year for ticketholders to view Bosch’s reappeared masterpiece.
* * *
My mother returned from the hospital incapable of walking on her jury-rigged leg. To avoid future mishap, she was strapped into a wheelchair each morning, imprisoned behind bed railings at night. Gradually, inexorably, her body shrunk inside its colorful clothing, her nose and chin, wrists and ankles, shoulders and thighs contracting to miniature replicas of their original selves. Her vividly mobile face lost its fantastic capacity to express glee and anger, mischief and exasperation, surrendering instead to a Parkinsonian mask. Her voice vanished, too, softening from its rich contralto to a sibilant murmur and, finally, a barely audible whisper full of hocus pocus words, of nonsense, of questions and observations that even she did not understand.
“Tell her ‘yes,’” my father would instruct, when I struggled to respond to comments my mother directed at me.
“Just say ‘you’re right,’” he advised. “It’s easier that way.”
One afternoon, I saw my mother outside in her wheelchair, behind deck railings that overlooked a small grove of gnarled oaks. Suddenly, she fell forward and I ran to help, only stopping short when I saw her remove a tissue from her sleeve and use it to wipe and re-wipe an imagined stain, some phantasmagoric swipe of dirt on the very bottom rung of the railings that penned her in.
* * *
Ancient amulets were often inscribed with disappearing texts, spells or names that were repeatedly carved on the amulet’s surface, one letter less for each iteration, with the result that the original texts ultimately vanished at the bottom of the charm. Many believe these amulets supported the practice of deletio morbi; the conviction that, as the written words or names disappeared, so too did the illness, demon, calamity, or other unhappiness they represented.
More recent scholarship suggests that these vanishing stones could summon positive luck as well as banish misfortune, that they could be used to enrapture elusive love objects, cause the onset of desired menstrual bleeding, or placate disgruntled superiors.
For the ancients, disappearance and departure served both positive and negative purposes. Vanished words, lost expressions could symbolize revival as well as decline, represent hope as well as despair.
* * *
Deletio morbi offers no comfort when I cannot find my eyeglasses or coat. My keys and then my phone. Like a conjuror’s hat, my purse swallows pens and grocery lists, insurance cards and a just-renewed driver’s license. Sometimes I find missing objects in the very place I’ve looked for them before. Sometimes I find them in a linen closet or, once, alongside the lettuce in my refrigerator. Sometimes, I don’t find them at all.
Human brains shrink as they age, undermining our ability to encode and then retrieve memory. Stress, fatigue, and depression can exacerbate the process, as do widely prevalent genetic variations in our dopamine receptors. People of any age misplace belongings on a regular basis. The average individual loses at least nine items a day, and wastes a minimum of fifteen minutes looking for them. This calamity of lost objects and time can reach epidemic proportions in aging humans.
Scientists and laymen alike offer prolific advice for people seeking to circumvent the problem. Place your keys in the same spot each time you enter the house, they advise. Narrate aloud where you set down your phone. Retrace your steps, look once and look well, visualize misplaced items, beware the camouflage effect, know that lost objects are often found where you usually leave them.
“Don’t worry,” a friend once assured me when I fretted over a missing book, “it’s somewhere.”
Which satisfied me for a moment, until I realized that in addition to the book, now I had to find somewhere, too.
* * *
My father was a practical man who scorned magical thinking and related notions of divine intervention.
“Life,” he told me when I was young, “is a gift that ends in tragedy.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it ends,” he explained.
My mother’s life ended abruptly, after one unfinished dinner and a fitful night’s sleep. Because I was out of town, my father left a message on my phone.
“Your mother is in trouble,” he said, and then his steady, his solid voice broke. “Please call,” he asked.
By the time I did, though, my mother had died. And by the time I got home, she’d been disappeared by a funeral home hearse.
* * *
anishment is magic’s most dazzling effect, particularly when it involves vanishing people. Even without trickery, however, people disappear all the time. Jimmy Hoffa entered a Detroit restaurant in 1975 to have dinner with two mob bosses and was never seen again. Amelia Earhart boarded her famous Lockheed Electra in New Guinea on July 2, 1937, and disappeared, midflight, just north of the equator. In 1961, Michael Rockefeller evaporated near the Betsj River in New Guinea, where he’d gone to study the Asmat culture. Big band leader Glen Miller vanished during a December 1944 flight over the English Channel, and Greta Garbo “retired” from celebrity in 1941, remaining absent from the public eye until her death 49 years later.
My parents, themselves, were under no illusion about the certainty of loss. They were accustomed to parrying the calls, the announcements that this acquaintance or that golf partner or this harpy or that mensch had expired after a long or short illness, an accidental or deliberate exit. I sensed my parents’ resigned suspense, their growing fatigue with this gradual decimation, this excision of their generation’s acquired habits and taste, music and mores, assumptions and presumptions.
“I’m sorry,” a Florida cousin, one hundred years old, told my grieving father the day after my mother died. “I’m so sorry Eunice is gone.”
A week later, the Florida cousin died, too.
* * *
The funeral home director called me to select boxes for my mother.
“How many boxes do we need?” I wanted to know.
“Well,” he said in his hushy voice, “She’ll require a box before her cremation. And then, of course, she’ll require a box afterwards.”
“What do you recommend for the first one?” I asked.
“It depends upon the material you prefer to use,” he answered. “The higher the quality, the more expensive the container. The more expensive the container, though, the more of it survives cremation.”
“I see,” I said.
“The parts of the container that survive cremation commingle with the ashes themselves,” the funeral director continued with a soft inhale. “And, respectfully, most people prefer just the ashes.”
“I see,” I said.
“And for the second box?” I asked.
“That’s a more complicated question,” he said, and then mailed me a box of brochures.
* * *
Boxes have featured in supernatural traditions for over four thousand years. Whether as numbered grids arranged in cubes, blocks inscribed with specific spells, or shapes embroidered onto ritual clothing, “magic squares” were credited with spectacular powers. The ancients and their descendants relied upon them to divine the future, cure radical illness, ensure longevity and, if portents so favored, achieve immortality.
Witches stored their curses in spell boxes, while Pandora’s box famously held all the world’s evil and misery. Shakespeare’s Bassanio divined the one coffer among many that contained Portia’s portrait, thereby winning her hand and enormous dowry. Faust followed the devil’s treacherous advice and fatefully tempted Gretchen with a precious box of jewels.
Boxes of all shapes and sizes have a long history in the magical arts, as well. Coffin-shaped containers hold the well-trained accomplices whom magicians pretend to saw in half. Little square boxes with hidden drawers hide rings and eyeglasses entertainers borrow from their gullible audiences. False-sided cases are made to appear and disappear decks of cards. Folding mirror cases produce bouquets of flowers and guinea pigs.
In magic as in life, a box can conceal or reveal, protect or betray, and the purpose of its contents may not be immediately apparent. As the king explained after giving Milo a magic container in The Phantom Tollbooth, “In this box are all the words I know,” useful and useless, helpful and harmful. The challenge, warned the king, the one thing Milo “must learn to do is use them well and in the right places.”
* * *
My sister and I waited in the driveway for the funeral director, who ferried my mother’s ashes in his long white van. Startled to see us standing outside, he quickly put down the sandwich in his right hand and, lacking further chance to gather himself, stepped out of the car. He was lumpy, rumpled, shiny-faced and with hair askew; no physical match, at all, for the unctuous voice I’d heard on the phone.
“Gross,” my sister quietly observed, “he’s gross,” and I thought she might cry.
The man handed my sister a plush green bag, which she gently cupped then passed along to me. The bag, he explained, contained a paper box, and inside the box were our mother’s remains, “triple-wrapped,” he assured us, as required by the State of California.
He waited for us to open the bag and, as we didn’t, urged, “don’t hesitate to call if you have further questions about disposal.”
Then, stepping back into the van, he drove away.
My sister looked at me holding my mother’s box.
“Isn’t she upside down like that?” she asked, and frowned.
“I don’t think there is an upside down anymore,” I answered. And, to our horror, we laughed.
* * *
A conjuror’s audience expects to be tricked; they are willing participants in the ruse the magician is primed to create. As card-master Jerry Andruss observed, “If I don’t fool you, I’m not doing my job as a magician.” But magicians fool so that audiences can feel entertained, not so they can feel foolish. If a conjuror achieves the latter effect, Andruss claimed, he isn’t “doing his job as a human being.”
Unlike magicians, swindlers fool the unwitting, and they do so for the purpose of causing harm. In the 1920’s, George Parker repeatedly “sold” the Brooklyn Bridge until the police, tired of removing toll booths his unsuspecting victims erected on the bridge, sent him to Sing Sing. Charles Ponzi perfected his pyramid scheme in the 1920’s and, decades later, Bernard Madoff used the same confidence game to swindle investors out of billions of their ill-placed dollars. Fraudsters gain victims’ confidence by claiming superior knowledge, identifying uniquely tender spots, offering empathy and support at the precisely appropriate moment. And, as Machiavelli recognized, “Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.”
* * *
I was outraged by my mother’s long and terrible illness, her furious suffering and inexorable fadeout. I pitied her when she struggled for words, or cried in pain. But to our mutual shame, our unspoken truth, my mother and I were not friends. There had been unkindness, cruelties and misunderstanding, years of frostiness and shared disenchantments. In my secret self, in the deepest corner of my awareness, I knew I wouldn’t long for her when she left. I understood that my heart might ache, but it would not break. And this knowing, this decided calmness over my mother’s inevitable departure lulled me into a false and dangerous confidence game of my own making. One in which I believed I was in control. I could choose grief, I had power over loss. I dismissed the certain truth that “The first and worst of all frauds is to cheat / Oneself.”1
* * *
Humans excel at self deception; we not only tend to believe what we see, we also tend to believe what we want to see. Benign or not, tricks and cons succeed because they target our willingness to be persuaded, our self-satisfactions, our over-confidence in our perceptive capacities. As Ricky Jay observed, a scam artist’s perfect mark “is anybody who thinks that they can’t be cheated. Because they’re clearly suckers. Anybody can be cheated.”
Magicians fool audiences through practiced misdirection. They distract with meaningless chatter, diversionary glances, cheerful camaraderie, flapping coat sleeves and wriggling fingers, all of which induce a cognitive complacency, an inattentional blindness that persuades audiences to “unsee” that they are being tricked.
Many conjurors enjoy suckering audiences into believing they’re in on the dodge; that the artists, inadvertently or not, are showing complacent viewers how to achieve a magic effect. In reality, magicians will withhold an essential feature, one critical facet of legerdemain, thereby twice-fooling viewers, encouraging and then rapidly betraying their eager and ill-considered trust.
* * *
I recognized my self-deception eight hours after my mother died, when I came from the airport to my parents’ house and walked into their living room. “What trick is this?” I thought, seeing my old, my bent and exhausted father waiting there for me; this suddenly small and shrunken man sitting at a little round table. His blond hair finally, fully white, his blue eyes seeping tears, his green sweater torn, brown shoes untied, a bruised hand looped around a metal cane, a weeping cut on his chin from the shave he’d abandoned midway through.
I felt a sudden vertigo as the flimsy scaffold of my conceit teetered, a slip-sliding around the walls of my chest, a deep and chilling shame, a shock. I had suckered myself. Cheated myself. I’d been so distracted by my mother’s frantic suffering, her precipitous decline and raging collapse, that I hadn’t noticed my father vanishing right alongside her.
This bereaved and withered man, with his quirks and irregularities, his honor and devotion. This exhausted warrior, this deposed surgeon. A person, true, with outsized disregard for those who left food uneaten on their dinner plate, or neglected to extinguish the lights when exiting a room. Who could press too hard with his opinion, or repeat a story well beyond its utility. But a man of principle, as well, an enlightened thinker and dedicated learner, a gentleman, a truthful human, a shy and lonely soul. A courteous man, a gracious person who had loved me my whole life, had shown a young daughter his respect, had given and received apology, had advised me to “have a trade in life,” who warned me, “never depend on a man to take care of you.”
My extraordinary father, I saw at last, my flawed but perpetual hero would die one day, too.
And I had no control over that.
“The most hateful of all human griefs,” Herodotus claimed, “is to have knowledge of a truth, but no power over the event.” And, indeed, I was overwhelmed by the immediate heartache. Worse yet, I had walked myself into the con. I had no one else to blame for my hubris, my presumption in thinking I could somehow bend mortality’s emotional course to my will.
“Carpe diem,” my sloganeering father had urged us with his schoolboy Latin.
“Ad astra per aspera,” he pressed, “you never know what’s possible until you try.”
I seized too much, though, and aimed too high. I had fallen for the illusion that I was in charge, seen the truth I wanted, rather than the one that actually existed. Even the ancients, with their fierce commitment to conjury and the occult, recognized the obvious more readily than I: Mors ultima ratio. Death is the last word, “the most terrible of all things,” wrote Aristotle, “for it is the end.”
And the anguish that follows, for others, for oneself, cannot be “deceived,” or “beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations;” it will only, cautioned Seneca, “start up again and from its very respite gain force to savage us.” I had learned in an instant what the most ancient of tricksters had known forever. Death is the final effect, and grief cannot be vanished.
