Toby stopped speaking and leaned back against the chair. “There was no explanation—no evidence, even—of what I’d done. At that moment, I couldn’t say whether I’d killed her or misplaced her.” The magician shook his head. “Helpless and terrified do not touch the surface of what I felt.” He took a deep breath. “I gave up magic for a year. But for me, there’s never been anything else. Slowly I started up again. But never using people. Since then, I’ve been hiding on whatever small stage I can find.” Suddenly Toby stood up. “Maybe I shouldn’t have told you this.”
“Why not?”
“You think I’m dangerous or careless.”
I shook my head. “Did you look for her?”
“I tried every body of water I came across and every stretch of desert. I checked every restaurant and theater. Then one day I stopped.” Toby stared straight into my eyes. “Do you think that’s terrible?”
“I stopped looking for my brother long ago,” I said. “I moved to the one place he’d never appear.”
That night I accompanied Toby to his Vegas debut at the Castaway, a small pirate-themed casino on Vegas’s other strip, the unglamorous Fremont Street. The Castaway was once the most successful casino in town. Founded by a Texas rancher with a two-man body count, it was the epitome of hard-nosed, no-frills gambling and offered the highest limits of any casino in town—provided you staked it all on your first bet. By refusing to provide entertainment or amenities beyond the all-night grill in the basement, the Castaway had not budged from its diet of cards, smoke, and liquor for nearly fifty years. But a new manager, a cardsharp from Atlantic City, had come up with the idea that if the gamblers were shown a few card tricks—if they were teased with the impossible—they might get ideas about their own abilities and bet large. So the manager cleared the wobbly roulette tables and armless bandits from the small theater that, since the casino’s construction, had been used only as a roughing-up spot, and he placed an ad for a magician.
Toby chattered nervously as we walked, explaining how he would stick to working with conventional objects like balls and glasses. He knew that his audience was looking for tricks not magic, and he didn’t want to draw attention to his unconventional talents.
Toby performed his first show for an audience of twelve who had mistimed the start of the Fremont Street Experience—a laser show that played out hourly over the domed roof of the Fremont Street esplanade. On a shoddy stage in the Castaway’s neglected theater, Toby began his display of close-up magic. He opened by producing coins from the air and transforming ties into yards of silk handkerchiefs. His patter was mechanical, as he matched his magic to the tricks the audience was expecting, switching balls underneath cups and slipping cards into his sleeves.
Toby worked slowly, giving the audience his best attempt at a straight-up magic show. He wanted to tease them, pretending to show the strings that supposedly held his tricks together. He stepped off the stage and took a seat in the third row, allowing the audience to examine the slow movements of his hands. With his feet up on the seat in front of him, he produced a languid sequence of small-scale conjurings that made the audience gasp with delight each time they almost saw his method. Like the light falling off a July Fourth sparkler before the waver has completed his midair circles, Toby left a nearly discernible trail behind his tricks. But no matter how slowly he worked and how closely they looked, the audience could not decipher his methods. Unlike other magicians they’d seen, there was no explanation for the mundane magic that flowed from Toby’s hands.
That night after the show, we drove out to the point where the fringe casinos of neighboring towns recede into the desert. Toby was silent, his hands as still as the sand around us. We bought coffee from a roadside stand called Jim’s Big West Donut and drank in silence by the side of the road. The darkened sky had done nothing to cool off the day. I sat on the ground and tried to bury my fingers in the sand, looking for an oasis that had escaped the burn of the sun. And when I failed and allowed the hot grains to crawl beneath my fingers, I began to assign a pattern to the nocturnal sands. I traced one ripple as far as I could before I realized that I must have lost the original strand miles back. I didn’t notice that Toby was gone until I saw his footprints disappearing around the back of the doughnut shop into the outstretched blackness. Fitting my small feet into the prints of Toby’s larger ones, I followed the path until I caught sight of his angular figure in the distance.
The magician stood a hundred yards out in the desert, a black stencil against the inky sky. He was back in his training ground, in
