He staggered back, blood seeping from his chest, and collapsed in a heap behind the boxes. A line of fire raced across the floor. If I didn’t move quickly it would beat me to the door. Smoke was beginning to fill the room, making it difficult to breathe and see. I covered my mouth and nose with my arm and ducked low.
“Strauss!” Findlay called out. I should have ignored him and left but I didn’t. I had only a second to react and instead of fleeing I made my way over to him. He was shot in the arm and one eye was swollen shut.
“Please don’t leave me,” he said.
I’d done a lot in my life that I wasn’t proud of, but I couldn’t leave him. I knelt down and tried to undo the ropes binding him to the chair, but Houdini’s knots were too difficult for me. The fire had spread and was nearly at the door.
With a strength that surprised me I was able to pull Findlay upright, still tied to the chair. I tipped the chair back on two legs and dragged him across the floor. The fire had burned its way up the wall, and the boxes of files that Houdini hadn’t burned in the fireplace were engulfed in flame. The smoke was so thick that I couldn’t see the spot where Houdini had fallen. There was no question of stopping the fire now.
I pulled Findlay out the door and down the stairs, the legs of the chair landing with a thud on each tread. Findlay was quiet—either he had nothing to say or he’d passed out. I focused on escape and survival. When I pushed open the front door, the building gulped in fresh air from the outside and glass showered the street as the upstairs windows blew out.
When we were safely across the street I was overcome by a fit of coughing and fell to my knees. It took me a moment to recover, then I turned my attention to Findlay. He was awake but breathing heavily.
“Thank you,” he said.
I suppressed the urge to cough again. “What now?”
“It’s over.”
“I just killed Harry Houdini.”
“Didn’t you do that already?”
“You saw me shoot him.”
“You can’t kill a man who’s already dead.”
He was right. I left him tied to a chair under the elevated train and walked away just as a fire crew arrived. It was possible they might be able to save the building. At the very least it seemed like they’d be able to prevent the fire from spreading. From the outside it didn’t seem that bad—a little smoke was wafting out the second-floor windows, but otherwise the building appeared to be intact.
As I walked down Third Avenue toward Grand Central Terminal I looked back and saw a man try to untie Houdini’s knots, then give up and cut the rope with his pocketknife. I never heard from Findlay again.
MARTIN STRAUSS
Present Day
THAT’S IT. I’VE TOLD ALICE EVERYTHING.
She’s listened without interrupting, her hands folded in her lap. There is sorrow in her posture but her face is calm, almost serene. I don’t know what to make of this.
“I couldn’t tell you before,” I say. “I didn’t want you to know what kind of man he was.”
“I don’t care about Houdini.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I don’t care that you’re sorry. Why did you leave her?” She’s not serene, she’s angry.
“Clara?”
“Yes,” she says, “you know, the woman you loved one moment and abandoned the next.”
My head begins to ring again. “I don’t know,” I say. “Nothing happened right. I was overwhelmed and dealt with it in exactly the wrong way. I tried to make amends, later, but her father told me never to come back.”
“And you listened to him?”
“Yes.” I shouldn’t have listened to him. I should have gone back.
“Why?”
“Because it was what I wanted to hear. That I wasn’t welcome, that the world had gone on without me.”
“Did you love her?”
I pause. “Yes.”
“Do you regret it?”
It doesn’t matter whether I regret it. Life doesn’t work that way. Once you’ve done something, it can’t be undone. That only works in magic tricks. The rope cut into pieces made somehow whole again, the object that’s disappeared reappearing. It’s magic because we know that this doesn’t really happen.
“Regret isn’t a big enough word.”
“No,” Alice says, “I guess it’s not.”
I can feel her rage. Did I expect she wouldn’t be angry? Why else would I have delayed telling her the truth all these years. It’s possible that at any moment she’s going to get up and walk away without looking back and I’ll never see her again.
“My mother raised me by herself, Martin. She was lonely and she was betrayed. But she never became bitter. She was confused, if anything. Never understanding why she’d been abandoned by my father. It was as though there was something basic about human nature that she couldn’t fathom. It eluded her, I believe, because it doesn’t exist. There’s no good reason she was left alone. It took me years to realize that I would never find it. But my mother …”
She’s crying, tears running down her face. I reach my hand into my pocket and remove my coin. I show it to her, and she wipes her eyes and smiles a little. I transfer the coin from one hand to the other, throw it up in the air, catch it, and show it to her. I transfer the coin and throw it again. We watch it rise up, and for a moment I wonder if it will escape us both, somehow keep going upward away from here and into the unknown above us. Maybe Alice is wondering the same thing. But its ascent slows and then reverses, and the coin falls back to my waiting hand, tied to the earth by the same immutable forces that govern us all. I do the false transfer and mimic a throw with my left hand.
Alice places her hand on my right hand. She’s stopped crying, but her face is blotchy and stained.
“She’s dead, Martin.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So you keep saying.”
But I am sorry. A grief envelops me, one that goes far beyond the bounds of normal empathy, even for someone I care for as much as I do Alice. I grieve for parents, and for parenthood. Being a parent is a monumental thing. You shape reality for another person. You cannot be an illusion. You cannot be paralyzed by the fear that you are an illusion. If you have done a bad job, or no job at all, what remains of you is proof that the world is an unfeeling place. If you have done a good job, what remains is the part of you that was magical.
A man walks by us, talking loudly on his cell phone. What do you say to a person who’s lost her mother? It’s a horrible thing to lose your mother. I know this as well as anyone. Now, in my old age, I can barely remember my mother. I have flashes of her, and I have an impression, but all that is left now is her faint reflection.
A memory isn’t a finished product, it’s a work in progress. We think that our minds are like a library—the right book is there somewhere if you can find it. A whole story will then unfold with you as the narrator. But our memory changes, evolves, erases. Moments disappear and are replaced and combined. What’s left of a person after they’re gone is a spirit of who and what they were.
This is where our pain comes from. Because we know this is going to happen. We feel it and it underwrites our mourning.
For all of us the future is an unmade promise. For the living there is the present and the past. The past is always moving, always changing, as the people we lose are transformed in us. The past is no place to live. But it’s the only place the dead lived.
The spiritualists Houdini hated so much capitalized on these memories. Or at least that’s what he believed. But the ghosts of our dead don’t need to be used against us by mediums or fortunetellers. We do it ourselves. We measure ourselves against ghosts. I’ve done this. I see that now. It’s left me alone and remorseful. I’ve denied myself a life in the attempt to appease my flawed remembrances.
Alice reaches into her purse with her free hand and retrieves a small, leather-bound notebook. I recognize it as the book I write in to help me remember. Inside it is a
square of newspaper. She hands it to me and I take it. Her left hand still grasps my right, so I hold the paper in one hand and squint to read the tiny type.
Clara Strauss: March 28, 1947–September 2, 2010
Clara Strauss passed away peacefully of natural causes at the age of sixty-three. Clara was born in Montreal, Quebec, where she lived and worked as a registered nurse. She is survived by her daughter, Alice, and predeceased by her parents, Isaac and Judith Weiss. No funeral services to be held.
I hand Alice back the obituary notice. I remember sitting in a waiting room, wanting to go inside, being told I was too late. I left everything too late. I had once woken up beside her on a cold morning, I had sat with her while our child cried, and I had left her. No, none of that is right. My confabulations are closing in. My head buzzes. I am dizzy.
I refocus on Alice. “There should have been a funeral.”
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and returns the clipping to the notebook. “She didn’t want one.”
“Why not?”
Alice shrugs. “She didn’t think anyone would go.”
“Was she right?”
Alice thinks about this. “No. Lots of people would have gone. Everyone loved her. She just never believed they did.”
“I think,” I say, “it’s important to put people to rest properly. I never went to my mother’s funeral. I found out about her death a month after the fact in a letter from my father.”
Alice nods. “I know.”
I don’t remember telling her this. But Dr. Korsakoff has warned me not to trust my recollections. I should heed his words.
“All these things you say about Houdini, Martin. The flaws, the way he treated people. You do know that you did all these things?”
“Yes, I know it. It’s ruined me, and I’ve let it ruin me. I wish I’d known how to be better.”
“You want there to be a moment. A grand mistake, like punching Harry Houdini, that is the cause of your leaving her. But there isn’t.”
Alice lowers her chin and turns over the hand she’s been holding onto. She opens my palm and plucks out the coin.
I smile. She hadn’t fallen for the trick at all; she’d detected the false transfer right away.
“Well done,” I say.
Alice smiles back at me, and I realize that she looks a little like my mother. Funny that I’ve never noticed that before. “I’m my father’s daughter,” she says, and drops the coin into her bag.
“Then you know that magic isn’t real,” I say.
“Yes,” she answers, leaning in to rest her head on my shoulder, “but I never stop wanting it to be.”
I exhale and close my eyes. It’s a sunny day and I’m here on a bench with Alice. It’s not a picnic with my mother and father, and there is no packed lunch and there is no reassuring breeze, but it’s just as good. Better maybe. This, I’m sure, is real. Maybe soon I’ll have cause to doubt it, but for now there’s no questioning it. I am happy.
“That dog that took your toy when you were a child,” I say.
“My rubber chicken.”
“Someone should have chased that dog down and got it back for you.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t do that,” I say.
“I am too.”
Her voice cuts through my tinnitus and my mind clears as though a strong wind has blown fog out to sea. I picture Alice and Clara sitting on a blanket in the sand, can hear the gulls screaming and the waves collapsing on themselves. I hold out the rubber chicken, still wet with the dog’s drool, and Alice takes it from me, relieved and content. Clara hasn’t seen me yet, preoccupied with something off to the side, but soon she’ll turn and see me. She’ll laugh as I wipe my hands on my pants and sit down beside them on the blanket.
“This doesn’t make up for anything,” Alice says.
“I know.”
But she leans in closer, and I feel something shift. The past isn’t gone, it never is, but that doesn’t matter. The spiritualists were wrong and Houdini was wrong and I was wrong. I had to lose my memories for me to understand. Magic is believing in what we understand is not real because we want it to be. Magic is that tiny fraction keeping you from infinity. And this, right now, is magic.
The ice cream orderly strides through the automatic doors. He is intent on something. He turns and looks at me and taps his finger on his watch in a way that feels familiar to me. I can tell we’ve done this before and I understand that in a few minutes I will have to get up and go with him back inside the hospital.
But not yet.
Author’s Note
Martin Strauss would have been intimately familiar with the major works related to the life of Houdini; particularly William Kalush and Larry Sloman’s The Secret Life of Houdini, Kenneth Silverman’s Houdini, and Ruth Brandon’s The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini. These texts were certainly invaluable to me, as were many others. The writings of Jim Steinmeyer are where I learned most of what I know about magic, and Greg King’s The Man Who Killed Rasputin was an invaluable source of Russian intrigue. Houdini himself wrote many books on both magic and spiritualism, all of which give good insight into both their subjects and their author.
Where possible I have attempted to use both Houdini’s and Arthur Conan Doyle’s words, sometimes slightly edited. Lady Doyle’s transcription of her Atlantic City séance with Houdini is one example; Houdini’s speech to the audience containing Martin and Clara in Montreal is another (though he didn’t say those words in Montreal).
Most of what you read in these pages is made up, though many of the people did exist in one form or another. Regarding the descriptions of methods of magic, I make no claims of veracity.
I am indebted to Kevin Baker, Joseph Boyden, David Chariandy, Andrew Davidson, Jennica Harper, Lee Henderson, Nancy Lee, Keith Maillard, Diane Martin, John K. Samson, Timothy Taylor, Miriam Toews, John Vigna, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Katherine Wagner for suffering various drafts and offering invaluable comments, to Taylor Brown-Evans for some terrific researching, and to John Cox of wildabouthoudini.com for help with an issue regarding locks. To Kevin Patterson and the Sea Mouse Writers’ Trust: your hospitality is magnificent and helped me immensely. Thanks as well to all my colleagues at the University of British Columbia for providing me with the best place on earth to spend my days.
My editors and friends, Louise Dennys, Michael Heyward, Sarah McGrath, and Ravi Mirchandani have made me happy to be a writer; my agent, Henry Dunow, is simply the best guy around. Thanks to Anne Beilby, Nina Ber-Donkor, Marion Garner, Anthony Goff, Liz Hohenadel, Amanda Lewis, Nicola Makoway, Yishai Seidman, and Sarah Stein. It is a privilege to work with each of you.
Lara, Katharine, and Margaret Galloway have seen me vanish while writing this book, and have worked hard to forgive me and let me reappear. I hope to repay their faith.
Steven Galloway is the author of Finnie Walsh, Ascension, and The Cellist of Sarajevo, which was a national bestseller; won the George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature and the Ontario Library Association Evergreen Award; was a finalist for the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year and the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize; and was longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia and lives with his wife and two young daughters in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Steven Galloway, The Confabulist
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