“I might be,” Toby replied.
Greta tapped her nails on the counter. “Well, are you or not?”
Toby nodded.
“I saw your show.”
Toby didn’t reply.
“A couple of years ago. State fair.”
The magician’s jaw tightened.
“You made that woman disappear. Your assistant.”
“Not quite,” Toby muttered.
“So, then what?”
“Is our little punk girl bothering you?” a sandy-haired kid sitting farther down the counter asked.
“Shut up, Jimmy. I’m not a punk.” Greta narrowed her heavily lined eyes. “That’s my boyfriend,” she said under her breath.
“Yeah?” Jimmy said with a laugh, “So, what are you?”
“I’m a nihilist.”
“And what’s that?”
“It means I think there’s no point to anything, especially if you’re stuck in a dumb town like this.”
“Whatever, Sunshine,” Jimmy said.
“Don’t call me that.” Greta turned back to Toby. “I was wondering when you’d pass through.”
“Here I am.”
“And with a new assistant,” Greta said, looking at me.
I shook my head.
“No? So, you looking for one?”
“One what?” Toby asked.
“An assistant.”
“No. I stopped doing magic with people.”
“You think I’m going to work in this diner my whole life.”
“I don’t know what you are going to do,” Toby said. “But I’m hoping that, at least for now, you are going to take our order.”
“Yeah?” Greta fumbled for her pad. “I know what kind of magic you can do.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” the magician replied, then consulted the menu.
“You ever do Vegas?”
“Soon.”
“Like you’re ever going to Vegas,” Jimmy called.
“What do you know?” Greta snapped. Then she turned to Toby. “If you do Vegas, you’ll need an assistant.”
Toby shook his head.
“I’ll come.”
“Why don’t you start by coming tonight?” Toby asked.
“You gonna do anything dangerous?”
“I might.”
“Maybe. So maybe.”
When I joined the thin line of spectators trickling into the Intersection High auditorium, I wasn’t surprised to see Jimmy, Greta, and her two best friends already sitting in the second row, right down from the seat Toby had reserved for me. They looked around nervously, doing a poor job of smothering their excitement with teenage skepticism. There was an uncertain electricity running through the auditorium as people prepared to abandon their common sense.
Toby’s show smelled of sideshow and vaudeville. Crushed velvet capes shiny with wear, three-note music box crackle, and black top hats green with age formed the backdrop that allowed him to be distrusted and believed. He had all the lines from magicians past. “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight you are going to see things behave in a way you never thought possible,” he began, using the worn pomp and circumstance opener of any magic show. It was as if he was trying to conjure the image of a traditional magic show to distract the audience from his brand of magic—the kind that didn’t involve tricks.
His hands—which seemed so much smoother onstage than they had on the Tonopah table—cut through the air with disarming grace as he opened with a series of shadow projections that showed the road from Beatty to Tonopah with its parade of passing mesas. As he bent and curled his fingers, the mesas ran together until they exploded on the screen as a rushing river.
Once Toby had folded away the screen, he took off his top-coat and turned it inside out. As he reversed the sleeves, the coat vanished and was replaced by a canopy of black silk on which local Native American cave paintings appeared. Then he wrapped the black fabric around his shoulders, and it transformed into a red robe embroidered with Chinese dragons.
Toby reached into the pockets of the robe, pulling out handfuls of sand that I’d seen him collect outside the auditorium. He flung these into the air, transforming the sand into snow. Then he reached up, capturing some of the swirling snowflakes in his fingers. He cupped his hand and put his lips to his palm, blowing the snow in a perfect helix that spun from the stage into my lap. As the snow descended over me, Greta looked in my direction and rolled her eyes. “Lame,” I heard her whisper to her friends.
I don’t think the Intersectioners noticed or appreciated how Toby conjured with objects he’d collected from their town that day—street signs, coffee cups from the Route 66 diner, a wreath from the war memorial. They had been expecting rabbits and hats and enchanted bottles. They didn’t know what to think when Toby caused a seasonal shift onstage or when he made a bed of verdant flowers grow from the dry desert earth. They looked confused as he transformed one of the school’s banners into a cactus shaped like a famous Vegas casino. I’m certain the audience didn’t appreciate the greasy gingham napkin that produced a windfall of quarters. They simply slid to the edges of their seats, hoping that the traveling magician could offer them a low-impact release from the binding laws of crop cycles, ten-cent slot machines, droughts, and the rest of the everyday. They were hoping not for magic but for a church revival on the grandest scale—salvation instead of levitation.
I’d already had a foretaste of Toby’s singular mastery of magic, his impressive tricks. Now, with all the awkwardness I’d seen in the car banished, his hands carved the air, finding pockets of space visible to him alone. He pulled statues and busts and paintings from nowhere onto his stage. He made them change shape. He made the figures in the paintings move, the eyes on the busts wink. And while he conjured, when he looked at me, his lips curved into a subtle smile.
While the rest of the Intersectioners furrowed their brows at the unfamiliar and all-too-real magic, I glanced over at Greta. What was she seeing in all of this? Not bizarre transformations that confused her friends. Not the red, oily tinsel that made the more religious members of the audience believe they were witnessing the devil’s work. What Greta saw was frustration in Toby’s magic. “Who cares,” she whispered to Jimmy, “if a banner becomes a cactus?”
“I dunno,” Jimmy replied. “It’s just a show.”
“Yeah, well, I thought it was going to be real,” Greta snapped. “You
