Next Toby wheeled a bank of lockers onto the stage. He fiddled with the combination locks until they all opened at once. Inside each locker was a pet belonging to one of the audience members. Now the audience was engaged, certain that none of their family members would have lent a dog or cat to the traveling magician. Toby closed the lockers, and when he reopened them once more, the animals had vanished. Then a bark sounded from the back of the auditorium, and Billy Redtail McCallister’s dog—a rusty animal that traced its roots back to the coyote—appeared from behind a dusty curtain, followed by the other animals.
Greta snorted. Best Friend Number One rolled her eyes and asked Best Friend Number Two “what Greta’s deal is.”
Her deal was this: “I thought he was going to do it for real.”
“There is no real, stupid. It’s a magic show,” Best Friend Number Two advised.
But Greta wasn’t listening. “Imagine if you could vanish for good. Now, that would be something,” she said to Jimmy. “Hey!” Greta called loudly from the audience. “Why don’t you make it disappear for real?”
Toby shook his head and smiled. Greta’s friends squirmed as she opened her mouth again.
“I thought you were going to do something good. Like cut someone in half.”
Toby didn’t lose his cool. He just slid into his next illusion.
“You should cut someone in half,” Greta managed before Jimmy silenced her.
“You’d love that,” Best Friend Number One said.
“Only if it were real,” Greta said.
The show finished. The audience filed out of the theater more baffled than entertained. I hovered in the wings, still warmed by the inexplicable thrill of the performance. Finally Toby emerged.
I rushed over to him and clasped my hands around his wrists. “That was incredible. The mesas. The coins and the napkin. It’s like you made it up on the spot.”
Toby winked. He leaned toward me, but I shied away. The magician cleared his throat. “Sometimes the audience gets it, sometimes they don’t. I’d say tonight was fifty-fifty.” I let go of his arms. “But you know what, it doesn’t matter. By next year, they’ll have forgotten what they didn’t like. And I’ll be up there again with a completely different show.” Toby looped his arm around my shoulder.
I allowed my head to rest against his arm as I watched the crowd disperse, wondering if the magician had forgotten his last assistant as easily as this audience would forget him.
Outside, Greta and her friends were loitering around their cars, smoking, flirting, cursing.
“Hey,” Greta called, “I thought you said you were gonna do something cool.”
“I thought it was cool,” one of her friends said.
“Yeah, like with everyone’s pet. That was cool,” Jimmy offered.
“It wasn’t,” Greta said. “Nothing happened. Everything’s the same as it was before.”
“I don’t know, Greta,” Best Friend Number Two said. “Most of the show was, like, kinda too real.”
Greta shrugged and turned her back. “Good luck in Vegas,” she muttered.
We got in the car and drove out of Intersection. A few miles down the highway, we stopped for gas. I fiddled with the glove box, searching for a piece of fabric from Toby’s show that I could join to my quilt. Finding none, I wandered into the small convenience store and waited for him to pay. Just inside the door was a solitary slot machine. I reached into my bag and found the pouch filled with quarters. I wriggled one out and fed it to the slot. I pulled the handle. The wheels whirred. Music clattered out of the machine. I looked over at Toby as he tucked his receipt into his pocket. Then money began to fall. It slipped out of the machine, tumbling down onto my shoes: $325.
“Well,” the attendant said. “Well, well, well. She ain’t paid out in a while.”
I shook my head in astonishment.
“Three hundred and twenty-five’s the max,” he continued. “That outta do you just fine.”
“For what?” Toby asked.
“For a Vegas wedding. That’s where you’re heading, ain’t it? Same machine paid for me and my wife.”
I married Tobias Warring in the Silver Bells All-Nite Wedding Chapel on the south end of the Las Vegas Strip. But you already know that. It was our way to end the pro cession of lonely roads and empty hotel rooms. For Toby, it was a way to conjure something permanent into his too-malleable world and perhaps, I wondered, to replace someone he’d made vanish. For me, maybe it was a way to fill the hole torn by my brother’s defection—but that was a story I had yet to tell my husband. That night we shared a bed in the Laughing Jackalope Motel at the bottom of the Strip. The room had a vibrating bed, a quarter for fifteen minutes. I used three dollars of change to rock us to sleep. And we slept wound around each other, shaking like giant rubber teardrops.
Two
When I go to sleep after too many drinks, the evening’s events replay themselves throughout my dreams in a narrowing spiral of convoluted and hyperbolic detail. And in the morning, when I enter an uncertain wakefulness, I am unable to distinguish between the mutations of the dream and real-time happenings. When the Las Vegas sun pushed through the fading and fraying trim of our curtains, I woke midgasp, head quivering three inches above the pillow, and realized that in the hysteria of yesterday, I had forgotten to panic.
My eyes focused on the brown-and-ocher decor of a motel past its expiration date. The furniture was scattered across the room, none of it flush to the walls, as if it were ready to pack up and leave at a moment’s notice. And for an instant, I felt like I might follow. I let my gaze descend from the ceiling to the bed next to me, until it came to rest on the figure of the sleeping magician, his black hair spread out over his pillow like an ink stain. Toby slept with
