His nose wrinkled despite itself, quite an achievement given his last surgery, as she coaxed a shy, fat middle- aged woman in a (sigh) floral-decorated sweat suit from one of the first rows of the audience onto the stage.
The usual cabinet had been wheeled center stage by the blackclad ninja stagehands Majika used for assistants. They came and went like ebony fog, no posing, no muscle-flexing. In fact, there was something weirdly boneless about their silent, supple forms, like electric eels gone upright. Frogmen in wet suits, that’s what they evoked in their shiny Spandex jumpsuits covering head to toe to little finger. Disgusting.
This time the eternal magician’s prop was presented with the mirror in plain view on the outside front, even framed in ornate gilt wood, as if it were made to hang on a wall. The simpering cow from the audience, obviously a plant, was finessed into the cabinet by the door swinging open on a dead matte-black interior.
Once the dupe was inside, the shadowy ninjas sprang from somewhere to spin the cabinet sideways. Majika stood proudly edgeways behind it, her figure as sleek as a diver’s.
To the uneducated eye, the cabinet looked no more than two inches wide, like an ordinary mirror frame. Please! Marlon was getting a headache.
“How does she do that?” the reporter was whispering, nagging in his ear.
“Mirrors!” he snapped.
But he wasn’t sure. How irritating.
The frogmen spun the cabinet… once, twice, three times.
Its side profile was always as black and narrow as a dagger’s and Majika made sure to stand behind it fully visible, as if it were really that thin an edge.
He rapidly calculated angles, checked the wings and floor for hidden mirrors.
The audience gasped…
… for out of the narrow edge of the dark mirror the woman in the gaudy sweat suit stepped, blinking as if emerging from the dark.
“My goodness,” she murmured like the tourist born she was.
What a stooge! So annoying as to appear absolutely natural. He wondered what casting director Majika used.
The lithe magician gestured the woman to stand at her right side, then nodded to the dark men to spin the mirror again.
And this time the very same image of the sweat-suited woman stepped out from the other edge of the mirror. Majika moved between them, her own figure reflected to infinity in the bland mirrored face of the cabinet front.
The split images of the woman from the audience eyed each other, and then began addressing each another.
“You can’t be me.”
“You must be me.”
Twins. Simplest trick in the book. One backstage waiting to go on, the other planted in the audience. What a sucker ploy!
“How’d she do that?” the reporter prodded, her pencil waving in his face.
Watch the fresh peel, baby!
He leaned away from the unwanted contact. Twins, he was about to say, when Majika waved the two women together and they slowly converged until they melted into each other and only one stood there, looking like she needed to be pinched to wake up.
“How’d she do that?” the reporter persisted, insisted, as that ilk will.
“Mirrors,” he said shortly, rising so he could beat the rest of the audience to the exit doors. It was hard work. They were all standing, blocking the rows and the aisles, giving Majika a standing ovation for the final illusion of her act. He didn’t even glance stageward to catch the vaunted final fillip of the show: a white rabbit pulled from a black top hat that moments before had been flatter than a Frisbee. Even flatter than the edge of a spinning mirror.
“Chardonnay,” he greeted Majika when she finally returned from the multiple bows to her dressing room, which he had managed to enter as if he had appeared there by design. It stunk of opening night floral arrangements, but the show had been running for eight months.
“Merlin,” she answered. ”I mean, Marlon. Dare I ask how you got in here?”
“Started early, honey. Shut the door. We have things to discuss.”
She obeyed, just as she had used to when she’d needed the paycheck.
His confidence perked up. He was the maestro, she the upstart. “That mirror thing is a fairly effective trick,” he said, smiling. God, it hurt.
“Works for me.” She sat at her dressing table to swipe the glitter highlights from her face.
He wished she would wipe off that new expression of elegant self-satisfaction. Or had she always looked that way?
“Seriously,” he added, “I think you might have something there.”
“Really?” She spun toward him, bare-faced, looking as taut as a teenager.
He blinked like a tourist in the limelight. Something was wrong here. Unfair. Why should she be slim and unwrinkled, when she’d passed off his Babe-scale years ago?
“So how’s your kid?” He had searched for the given name and given up.
“He died.”
Silence always made him uncomfortable. He supposed firing her in the middle of that medical melodrama could have made it hard on… someone. He didn’t like to hear about people dying. He never knew what to say, so he said nothing.
She seemed to expect no less from him. “So, did you like the show?” she asked.
“What’s not to like?” Everything. “Glad you made such a great… comeback. You look terrific.” Spoken softly, like an invitation.
“Thanks. It’s good to see you again too.” She seemed pleased that he was here.
Oddly, that cheered him. He hadn’t realized he’d needed cheer until now. “Really?”
“Well, you are the maestro. I’m flattered that you bothered to see my show.”
“It’s that Mirror Image trick that’s the draw.”
“Illusion,” she corrected as swiftly as he had corrected the reporter.
She leaned an elbow on the dressing table, then her chin on her fist. Her image reflected to infinity behind her, thanks to the room’s traditional parallel aisle of dressing table mirrors. It was all done with mirrors, and he was never done with mirrors, for he saw himself, small and wee, in a tiny corner of the reflected room behind her. His trademark mane of hair, now a dramatic white, was mostly extensions now. He was the sum of all the parts of his former illusions.
His heart fluttered. This moment was important. He knew it. For her, for him. He couldn’t tell for which one it was more vital, just as one couldn’t tell the twins from the Mirror Image illusion apart, even when they merged at the end.
“It’s twins, isn’t it?” He spoke without wanting to, hungry, urgent, worried.
“No, not twins.”
“Not twins?”
She smiled, gently, as at a slow-witted child. “This is something totally new, my illusion.”
“Nothing’s new in magic. Nothing! It’s the same dodge and burn the photographers used do to enhance photographs, only it’s performed on the audience’s eyes instead of a negative.”
“Dodge and burn,” she repeated. “I like the way you put that.”
“Listen. I’m curious as hell, and I admit you’ve got me wondering. I really want to know how you do that.”
She was silent. Signature illusions were a magician’s bread-and-butter, big-time.
“A million dollars,” he said, unable to stop himself. “I’ll give you a million dollars if you show me the secret of that trick.”
His words had surprised her as much as they had him.
“A million dollars.” She savored them like bittersweet chocolate. “A million dollars would have saved Cody’s life.”
“Cody?”
