Page 31 of The Immortalists

“And we’re still here,” says Raj.

“And we’re still here.” Klara has hazy images of Raj in the apartment where she and Simon stayed during their first days in the city: Raj reading One Hundred Years of Solitude on the couch or making pancakes in the kitchen with blond, long-limbed Susie, who sold flowers near the ballpark. “What happened to Susie?”

“Ran off with a Christian Spiritualist. I haven’t seen her since seventy-nine. You came with your brother, didn’t you? How’s he?”

Klara has been fingering her martini glass, squeezing the narrow stem, but now she looks up. “He’s dead.”

Raj coughs on his drink. “Dead? Fuck, Klara. I’m sorry. What of?”

“AIDS,” says Klara, and she is grateful, at least, to have a reason for it, a name, which did not exist until three months after Simon’s death. “He was twenty.”

“Fucking shit.” Raj shakes his head again. “It’s a bastard, AIDS. Took one of my friends last year.”

“What do you do?” asks Klara. Anything to change the subject.

“I’m a mechanic. I do car repair, mostly, but I’ve done construction, too. My dad wanted me to be a surgeon. Fat chance of that, I always told him, but he sent me here anyway. He stayed in Dharavi—slum of Bombay—half a million people in a mile, shit in the river, but it’s home.”

“That must have been hard, coming here without your dad,” Klara says, looking at him. He has thick eyebrows, but his features are delicate—high cheekbones that taper into a slender jaw and pointed chin. “How old were you?”

“Ten. I moved in with my dad’s cousin Amit. He was the smartest person in our family—got a scholarship to college and moved to California for med school in the sixties on a student visa. My dad wanted me to be just like him. I was never good at science, I don’t like fixing people, but I do like fixing things, so my dad, he was half-right about me; though half isn’t enough, I suppose.” He has a nervous laugh, the trace of an accent, though Klara has to listen hard to hear it. “And you? How long’ve you been doing this?”

“Mm,” says Klara. “Six years?”

In the beginning, the grind was electrifying, but now it exhausts her: rigging and striking on her own, riding BART to Berkeley in her duster while hip-hop blasts from somebody’s boom box. Home at one in the morning or three if she’s coming from the East Bay, soaking in the tub as the Chinese bakery on the first floor whirs to life. Nights spent sewing the goddamn sequins back onto her dress with the junky machine she’s too poor to replace—there are sequins between the couch cushions, sequins on the stairs, sequins in the shower drain.

One year ago, she was badly injured during the Breakaway. A girl she hired through the Chronicle let go of the rope without checking the safety break, and it slipped three feet on the batten. Klara didn’t clear the floor. When she came to, she was on her hands and knees, her skull throbbing as if she’d taken a punch and her feet puffing up like dark balloons. She didn’t have insurance, and the hospital fees nearly cleaned out the money she inherited from Saul. She spent six weeks in a boot, raging. For the past year, she’s only worked with a nineteen-year-old boy from the circus, but he’s leaving in March to join Barnum.

“It makes you happy, I see,” says Raj. He’s grinning.

“Oh.” Klara smiles. “It did. It does. But I’m tired. It’s hard to do it alone. And it’s hard to get bookings. There are only so many venues that’ll hire me, and there’s only so many times they’ll do it—you perform in the same place for years, word gets around, the hype swells and then it dies and you’re still there, you know, hanging from a rope by your teeth.”

“I liked that part, the rope trick. What’s your secret?”

“There’s no secret.” Klara shrugs. “You just hold on.”

“Impressive.” Raj raises his eyebrows. “You get nervous?”

“Less than I used to, and only before. It’s the anticipation; I’m backstage and I feel . . . stage fright, I suppose, but it’s more than that, it’s excitement—the knowledge that I’m about to show people something they’ve never seen before. That I might change the way they see the world, if only for an hour.” She frowns. “I don’t feel nervous before the scarf tricks, or the cup and ball. That’s what I was raised on, but nobody likes it as much as the Breakaway.”

“Why don’t you change the act, then? Cut the small stuff, go big time?”

“It’d be complicated. I’d need equipment and a real, full-time assistant. I’d have to find a way to maneuver bigger props. Plus, my favorite acts, the ones I’ve only read about in books? Well, I’d have to figure them out. As a species, magicians are pretty tight-lipped.”

“Pretend, then: You can do anything. What do you do?”

“Anything? God.” Klara grins. “DeKolta’s Vanishing Birdcage, for one. He raised a cage in the air with a parrot inside it and then—boom!—it disappeared. I know it must have gone up his sleeve, but I’ve never been able to figure out how.”

“It must have been collapsible. The bars—were they jointed? Thicker at the middle than they were at the ends?”

“I don’t know,” says Klara, but now she’s flushing, talking fast. “Then there’s the Proteus cabinet. It’s a small closet, upright with tall legs on casters, so the audience knows you can’t come and go through a trapdoor. An assistant turns the cabinet around, opens the doors and closes them, and that’s when a knock comes from inside. The doors open, and there you are.”

“Mirrors,” says Raj. “Viewers don’t see the surface. They look through it, to whatever object’s being reflected.”

“Sure, I know that much. But it’s all angles; the geometry has to be perfect, and that’s the trick of it—the math.” She’s finished her drink, but for once, she doesn’t notice. “The act I’d really want to do, though, my all-time favorite, is called Second Sight. It was invented by a magician named Charles Morritt. Audience members gave him certain objects—a gold watch, say, or a cigarette case—and his assistant, who was blindfolded, identified them. Other magicians have done it since, with patter—you know, ‘Yes, here’s an interesting object, please hand it over,’ which was obviously some sort of code—but all Morritt said was ‘Yes, thank you,’ every time. He kept the secret till he died.”

“The blindfold was see-through.”

“His assistant was facing the wall.”