Besides all this manual work, besides the innovating sessions, the solo practices, the rehearsals, besides learning as much as he could about Wurlitzer’s equipment and stage repertoire, there was the matter of Michael’s training, his magician’s education. This took a variety of forms, not one of which failed to surprise him.
Meditation, for example. He was required to sit for at least an hour every day in a strange, pyramidlike structure located in an otherwise empty basement room and there to concentrate the whole power of his mind on…nothing. According to the master, nothingness—the pregnant void, nonthinking, nondesiring, non-being, consciousness turned inward and so purged, so purified that it no longer distinguished itself—was a mental state devoutly to be wished. Only after he had gained control over his conscious mind could the magician empty it of all images and replace them with the one he required. There was a vast potential in nothingness.
The power of concentration, of self-generated intensity, was one that Michael possessed in a superior degree. Though these exercises left him drained, mentally and physically, he made some interesting and peculiar discoveries while sitting in the pyramid: the attraction of the abyss, for example; and the mind's continuous effort of subversion against itself; and the sounds of his blood, pumping around inside him. He learned there some things he decided would be better kept from Emily, and so a week passed before he called her from the coffee shop across the street.
“Michael,” she said, when she heard his hesitant hello. “At last. Are you okay?”
“Sure,” he replied. “Just getting settled. There’s a lot to do here, and I don’t have a phone, so it’s hard to call.”
“Don’t the Wurlitzers have a phone?”
“Yes, but my room is really separate from their apartment, so I don’t feel comfortable inviting myself in just to use the phone.”
“I see,” Emily said. Michael detected a note of resignation in her voice. She’d got the message—I can’t call you, you can’t call me. “And how is your room?”
“It’s fine. It’s great, in fact, very comfortable.”
“I miss you,” she said flatly. “Can’t you get away, even for a few minutes? I could come down there.”
“I miss you too,” Michael replied at once, and as he said it he realized how true it was, how lonely he was already and what a relief it would be to return to being a normal young man again, if for even just a while, to sit down somewhere with Emily, just to talk to her, to see her laugh, to laugh himself. The master was fascinating but seldom amusing. Magic was entertaining for the audience, they gasped and laughed helplessly, laughter with a little nervousness mixed in, but for the magician it wasn’t funny. It was work, serious work. He knew that now; it was what he hadn’t known before. “But it’s impossible,” he concluded. He heard Emily’s sigh of exasperation explode against his ear. “I just can’t yet. Not yet,” he added weakly.
“I don’t understand, Michael,” she said.
“I know you don’t,” he replied. “You can’t. I don't myself. But just be patient, Em, okay? Just bear with me awhile until I figure out what I’m doing here.”
“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay. I can do that.” “I've got to go now,” he said. “I’ll call you again soon.” “All right,” she said. “I’ll be here. Goodbye, Michael.” She hung up.
Michael stood holding the buzzing receiver for several moments, looking out through the coffee-shop window at the building across the street where the master was waiting for him, moving slowly, ponderously among the bits of scenery and machinery backstage, waiting for his student, his unusual, talented, promising student, to whom he would reveal, in time, even his darkest secrets. At this thought, Michael hung up the receiver hurriedly and rushed out into the street.
One day about a week later, Michael was invited for the first time to lunch at the Wurlitzers’. Gratefully abandoning his plan to grab a sandwich and a milkshake across the street, Michael followed the master into the living room. There the old man left him and plodded down the hall to the kitchen; murmurs of conversation barely reached Michael’s ears. He glanced around, taking in various items in the cluttered scheme of the room, dwelling briefly on two framed decorations on a wall. One was a monochrome of the Gerard painting, Napoleon Confronting the Sphinx. The second, hung below it, was a carefully stitched coat of arms, comprising symbols he thought unlikely for such an emblem, and, below, a motto: ALTERIUS NON ST QUI SUUS ESSE POTEST.
He sat in a chair and took up a book lying nearby, a selection of essays by Montaigne. The air was stuffy. The room itself was silent, except for the ticking of the clock on the mantelpiece. He thumbed the pages of the book, mostly looking at the titles of the different pieces—“Concerning Solitude”; “Concerning Cannibals”; “That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die”—and then he shut his eyes, his hands and arms relaxed. He was trying to envision that “nothingness” that Wurlitzer had described, that vivid, pregnant state of unbeing. He saw pictures printed on the retina of his eye, images, shapes. The face of the Sphinx presented itself. Then the coat of arms with its curious symbols. And the motto. His Latin could hardly be said to exist; something about the “power of oneself,” perhaps? Then among the identifiable shapes he was aware of one that swam insistently before him, seeking precedence. He made an effort to evoke it more clearly. Roundish, bright, not precisely a light, but more like the reflection of light, an image he was retaining from normal vision. He tried to concentrate more, to trap its fuller shape or design. It came nearer, then floated away. He attempted to associate the object with others, with his own senses. He had the distinct feeling of thirst, that his mouth was dry and he wanted to drink.
He opened his eyes, looked around, laid the book aside, and got up. He had the feeling he was playing the childhood game of Hotter-Colder, where someone tries to discover an object chosen by the group but unknown to him. He moved from the chair to the table, then to the piano, eventually to the curio cabinet beyond it. He stared at this imposingly handsome piece of furniture; then, scarcely aware of his actions, he turned the key and opened the glass door, his eye roving from object to object on the shelves. Then he saw it: he took it out and held it in his hand. It was suntouched, somehow, and warm, a small silver christening cup with a monogram, much like the one his aunts (one of whom was his godmother) had kept on the mantelpiece over the big living-room fireplace. That cup always reminded him of his parents, perhaps because it was one of the very few visible proofs—outside of his living, growing self—that he had ever been connected to a mother and a father. He was musing now as he held this similar cup, turning it toward the window, letting the spears of light dance around the room. He wondered about the provenance of such a thing. It became his immediate fiction that the cup had once belonged to a child of Wurlitzer and Lena's, one who had died and of whom they never spoke, but who was the source of Lena’s secret sorrow. Aware of sudden movement, he turned to see her standing in the doorway, wiping her hands on a dish towel and studying him with her sad blue eyes. When she recognized the object he was holding, her face took on a resigned, knowing smile.
Michael mistook her placidity for forbearance and hastened to explain what had led him to invade her cabinet and finger her bric-a-brac. Lifting the cup toward her as though proffering it, deserted by his usual glib resourcefulness, he managed to stammer out a couple of broken sentences. “I hope you don’t mind…This looks like…something I remember…We used to have one like this…” His voice trailed off into a mute plea for forgiveness.
Lena bobbed her head slightly. “I’m not surprised,” she said benignly, moving closer to him. They stood opposite one another for a moment, their eyes on the little silver cup. Then, by unspoken agreement, the moment ended, and Michael turned to replace the cup in its cabinet. “Will you tell me more about it?” Lena asked quietly. “What does it remind you of, Michael? Why are you drawn to it?”
Her tone, her presence, soothed him, subduing his habitual tendency to obfusca
te the details of his past. “After I lost my parents, I lived with my aunts, and they kept the cup from my christening on the mantel over the fireplace. It looked almost exactly like this one. I used to stare at it a lot”—he faltered briefly—“because, because it reminded me of my parents. I guess I thought if I looked at it hard enough I could bring them back.”
Lena reached out and took his arm, gently. “Where is it now?” she asked.
“What?” Michael said, confused by the memories that were competing for his attention. “Oh, the cup. I suppose it’s still in my aunts’ house in Ohio.”
“You didn’t take it with you when you left?”
“No. It belongs there,” he said simply.
“In Ohio,” Lena mused. A pause followed, during which she scrutinized Michael’s face. Then, in a tone of convinced expectation, she asked, “Did you live in Toledo?”
The very name evoked the most painful memories he possessed, the ones he kept bound and sealed and stowed in a corner of his mind as a criminal might stow in an attic or basement the evidence of his crime. Yet as he looked at Lena’s glowing face, a blurred, bright vision pierced those shadowy recesses and floated above them, a vision of a yellow dress and a straw hat and kind, compassionate eyes. “No,” he said at last. “I was there once. In the bus station, mostly. But my aunts’ house is in the country.” “Once I was in Toledo too,” Lena said. “I remember a little boy there. Maybe it was you.”
“Maybe,” Michael said, and they stood silent for a time, their minds straining to recover the irrecoverable past. Then, with a start, Lena returned to the present. “We must go,” she said. “Lunch is ready, and Max is waiting.”
Lunch, simple and delicious, followed what Michael would later come to recognize as a virtually unchanging pattern: Lena sweet, silent, and a little distracted, as though her real business were brooding, and Wurlitzer voluble and mercurial, wielding his conversation according to his mood. On this first occasion, Michael, feeling very hungry and somewhat awkward, did little but chew and listen. After lunch, Wurlitzer stood before one of the bookcases in the living room, selected a small volume, and proposed to Michael that they go down to the theater. As they descended, Michael recognized the book: the I ching, the Book of Changes. More than once he had seen Emily consult her copy. She used it facetiously, as a kind of party game, declaring it several notches above, say, the horoscopes in Cosmopolitan.
A slide show was set up in the theater. Before turning off the lights, the master showed Michael some of the hexagrams in the book. Then he switched on the projector; a form, a specific design, appeared on the screen. Michael recalled it from the series of hexagrams Wurlitzer had just indicated to him. Then the cartridge clicked, the image disappeared and was replaced by a photograph of a box, wooden, with a hinged lid, and bound with an intricately knotted rope. He thought immediately of the Gordian knot. He got the idea at once; the problem was to know the contents of the box by application of the hexagram pattern, which in another moment reappeared on the screen, replacing the box. This was repeated several times, the hexagram, the box, hexagram, box, then both were superimposed together, long enough for the combined image to register; then they again alternated: hexagram, box.
Following the master’s specific instruction, Michael waited until the screen went blank, and on the still-lighted rectangle he tried to visualize the recalled image of the hexagram, and when he could trace its outlines clearly in his mind he now imagined the box, mentally outlining its proportions, and clearly envisioning both the rope that bound it and the intricate knot securing it. The wood, the metal hinges, the coarse-fibered rope all appealed to his tactile sense, and these items he easily comprehended in their more elemental substances. But, he realized, the idea was not simply to know the box as a box, but to reveal to himself its hidden contents. An imagined box, whose imagined contents he must mentally grasp. Either he must imagine physically opening the box and exposing its contents, or he must imagine his consciousness inside the box and conduct a mental search. It was an exercise requiring the deepest concentration, but the revelations of the box’s contents could not be attained without the use of the hexagram image that was the key to the knowing of the box.
Michael had to exhaust himself in many slide sessions, staggering away with his brain as hot as an overloaded circuit, before the day when, Eureka! it happened. It was, upon later reflection, really a simple matter, like forever trying to unlock a door with a set of keys that failed to fit, trying one after the other in frustration, and knowing all the time that none of these keys would do the job, and then being handed the proper key, and how easily it fitted into the lock, how effortlessly it turned, and with what satisfaction he heard the click that signaled its opening…
Yet it was not precisely like an opening. It was a going in, an act of entering, the sensation of being present in the box but at the same time standing aloof and removed, seeing himself—or was it only his mind—inside the box. The knot he could never hope to understand, it would require Alexander’s sword to solve it, but the hexagram he seemed now to know, to comprehend in all its esoteric meaning. He understood it as he understood a key, and this he could employ in the formidable use it was meant to be put to.
Thus the unknowable became, for how long he could not tell, the knowable. He knew the box, he comprehended its “boxness,” and he knew what it contained. The knot was undone, the ropes slipped aside, the lid lifted, and inside he found, as he now knew he must, another box, exactly like the first, only smaller, this one bound by similar rope gathered into the same hopelessly tangled knot. But the application of the hexagram had worked, and he felt satisfied in the knowledge that the hidden meaning of the box stood revealed to him.
Now he found that he could successfully plan the same experiment in other circumstances, regarding other objects. Choosing various hexagrams, he rigorously applied his newfound ability to imposing them on other imagined forms: a subway entrance, for example, himself standing above, not seeing down into it, but then little by little finding himself able to move from one imagined point to another, to the steps, down them, to the change booth, purchasing tokens, clanking through the turnstile, noting the people waiting, glimpsing newspaper headlines: SECRETARY OF STATE RETURNS TO MIDEAST FOR TALKS, catching fragments of conversation: “An’ I says to her, look, I says, you gotta get aholt a yaself,” hearing the cry of the train as it slid into the station, the doors opening, and himself getting on, being carried away into darkness.
Downstairs, in the main workshop, there was a black door which, as far as Michael could tell, was the only locked door inside the building. After nearly three weeks of slide sessions, Michael decided to make this door the subject of an experiment.
He made a careful selection of the hexagram he would employ in his endeavor. Having no certain way of determining which one might be the correct one, he indulged himself in a bit of a psychic crapshoot, leaving the choice to fate, or to whatever he imagined might be fate.
Having made his selection, he copied it and taped the copy to the mirror over his bureau, then sat hunched on his bed, back to the wall, eyes fixed on the hexagram. When he could feel its elements like hot lines etched across his eyeballs, he closed his eyes and stamped the image on his brain, opening them again to check for accuracy, then shutting them and reproducing the lines inside his head once more. After he felt certain that he knew the symbol, he undertook the long journey from his third-floor room (“in the attic,” as the Wurlitzers said), down the private stairway that both he and his hosts considered an outstanding feature of their arrangement, along the basement passageway into the workroom and from there to the black door. He pulled up a chair and sat staring at this door, forcing his eyes to remain open until they watered, then shutting them and repicturing the door. Open; close. Door; door. He repeated this process several times, then went to the door and felt it with his hands, the metal sheathing, the hasp, the lock. He stuck out his tongue and pressed its tip to the metal, actually tas
ting it. He leaned against the door, shook it, rattled it, listening to its impermeableness rebuff his desire to penetrate. He slid it the mere half inch it would give on its rollers, listening to the sound. He even sniffed the door: an oily, metallic scent, equally unyielding. At last he returned to his room.
Ignoring the hexagram on the mirror, he sat on the bed and closed his eyes, gently rubbing his temples as the master had demonstrated, bringing into focus the symbol, then his vision of the door, symbol, door, until the two images were clear, the symbol superimposed on the painted metal. He knew enough now to relax and not try to force entry, but to let it happen, a little at a time, not pushing but easing himself into it, and when he felt this ease, accompanied by the knowledge that what he was doing could actually be done, he discovered that though he had no sense of having unfastened the lock it was sprung, the hasp was free, and the door was grating on its track and sliding aside as he moved toward it, and then he stepped through. He took up a pad and pencil and began to write.
This is me, here on the bed. I’m in my room on the bed. I’m here. At the same time I’m in the workshop. The black door isn’t locked, it has opened. I’m passing, not through the door but through the opening of the door. I’m in the room. It’s not at all as I imagined it. I see that it’s a room that isn’t a room. There is light, but without light. M’s things are here, his papers and books. There’s a desk, some chairs, a stool, filing cabinets. A coat stand in one corner. His green coat sweater hangs on a hook. I can smell his pipe tobacco. I will sit here in this chair and experience the room. Why did I imagine it differently? The alchemist’s laboratory? It’s just a room. I’ll sit here and wait.