May 22, 2024

The Magician’s Assistant
by Michael Fowler

 
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She phoned at midnight. Why she didn’t apply during the day, I had no idea. These working girls were hard to anticipate. My last assistant had left me without notice only a week ago. She cared too much for a young man, or an older man cared too much for her–it was the same with all my pretty assistants. So once again I was stuck with my props in my hotel off the French Quarter, unable to perform my act. Not the way I wanted to perform it, with a beautiful young woman at my side who anticipated my every whim. So I was taking a few days off. Everyone on the magic circuit knew it, and my hotel and phone number were well advertised. She could have knocked on my door or called anytime, but she phoned at midnight.
“Where are you now?” I said, after picking up my phone from the table where it lay charging. The room was dark except for the moonlight streaming in the window. A couple of electric fans blew warm air through the shadows. I got the feeling she was a long way off, but had something urgent to tell me. 
“Behind you,” she answered.  
I turned and she appeared, standing between me and my futon, illuminated as if the moonlight existed only for her. She looked to be in her mid to late twenties, slim in a pale dress, running shoes, no purse or baggage, and no phone. Something about her round face and thin mouth looked familiar, her dark hair too, but I couldn’t say I knew her. Did I ever know any of these footloose young women, their inner beings? I didn’t know how she got in my locked room, either, or what made her draw the moonlight.
“Neat trick,” I said, placing my phone back on the table. “Entering my room without permission and imitating a call. I can tell you have an aptitude for my line of work. When can you start? I’ll be evicted from this place if I don’t pay rent soon.” She looked so much like the perfect assistant, I couldn’t think that she had dropped in for any reason other than employment. 
“I can start tonight,” she said, not disappointing me. She turned and, with a certain authority, began to examine my stored props by moonlight, ignoring the light switch. Moving swiftly, she ran her hand along the coffin-sized sword box, wherein my assistants suffered many ostensible impalements, gave a nod of recognition to my trained birds, their cages now covered and silent, and glanced knowingly at a tall, rigged guillotine.
“It’s a bit late to sell tickets for tonight,” I joked about the hour as I watched her pale form roam about. “And then there’s the matter of training. Even if you’re experienced….”   
“Watch,” she said, and from among my things chose a small, closed case. This held a glass sphere roughly the diameter of a saucer. I did a standard turn with it in my act, making the sphere levitate from the interior of the opened case to the height of my chin, then hover in the air a minute before gently descending to its starting spot. It’s impressive even if you know how it’s done, and few do.
She placed the case on the table by my phone, opened it, and began waving her hands at the translucent sphere. Like her, the globe took on a warm glow, then gently rose in the air, to an altitude well above her head. She continued to guide it in extraordinary ways with her supple hands, along graceful arcs and curves from ceiling to floor, leaving me transfixed. My amazement increased when she herself vanished from sight, and the glowing ball traced its paths apparently unassisted. 
“Now you,” I heard her disembodied voice close to my ear, and the sphere flew toward my hands. As  the luminous ball glided before and at times behind me, I moved my hands in imitation of hers, making it appear that I now controlled the sphere, though she alone did so. However she managed it, this would be a sensational illusion for the stage. In only hours, through the night and into the next morning, she taught me the paths the ball must take, as if they were a series of ritualized dance steps. An audience would observe me directing the ball, while she remained invisible and seemingly offstage, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers with Ginger there but not there. I realized in that time too–there was no other explanation–I’d soon be working with a ghost.
Had I known her, this ghost, when she still lived? She made no such claim of me, and didn’t so much as give her name, let alone reveal why she had come to me rather than some other, perhaps more prosperous, magician. Our conversations, if you could call them that, were as much clairvoyant as verbal, and we spoke hardly a word, exercising our voices only as a last resort. Yet my ghost assistant and I shared a professional bond closer than I had felt with any prior assistant, and we soon began working the southern circuit of small theaters, dinner clubs, and carnivals, with occasional appearances on local TV, in VFW halls, and the like. 
As my name spread, our minor act brought in a steady if unspectacular income, but my assistant, who remained secretive and anonymous, declined even the meager salary I offered her. Money was of no use to her, I understood. Anyway, her expenses were minimal. She didn’t eat or drink or do drugs, as far as I could tell, and the spangled and sequined uniforms her predecessor had left behind satisfied all her wardrobe needs. 
When we traveled from town to town, by bus or train, she never paid for a ticket or hotel room, either. In a few words and by pointing, she explained that she folded herself in my suitcase amongst my stage costumes and street clothes during our trips. While I slept she wandered in her spirit world, so I gathered, and otherwise became invisible when it suited us. She favored the night, but would appear during the day as needed. Nor did she object when I brought guests, male or female, into our shared hotel room, but made herself scarce according to her discretion.
She was a quick study as well, clearly at home in the domain of magic. Under her direction the dance of the floating sphere became ever more elaborate. After handing me the case with the sphere inside, my assistant would step offstage, but at once return unseen to take charge. Then the glowing orb would emerge and follow me in inexplicable but elegant curlicues as I walked or even trotted across the stage, my hands fluttering. I also heard her speak to the sphere, unmistakably offering words of encouragement, as if the glass possessed human understanding. The words were too soft for me to comprehend, or for our audiences to detect, but I sensed their tone and import. 
To my regret, I was powerless to compel the globe as she did, and she was unable to teach me her method. Yet I became so proficient at pretending to lead the object that I easily imagined its reins were in my solid hands, rather than her invisible ones. We also took the sword box illusion to a new level, since airtight spaces and sharp implements did not imperil her in the least. Without harm and to local acclaim, I inserted more swords into an obliging young accomplice than any magician before me in this crowd-pleasing trick.     
But her behavior, while more than accommodating in most regards, left me uneasy. I found myself increasingly tormented by her secretiveness. What was she really doing as my assistant? In particular, what was the purpose of this repetitive and ritualistic dance of the glass sphere? Though no audience ever complained, and I myself never protested, in my view it dragged on too long, longer than necessary to make its artistic point, and even passed into languor. 
The drawn-out motions of the glass, as it glowed softly, together with her low voice that I alone heard, at last convinced me that it was not merely a show in my world, but the working out of some practical task in her spirit world. Here my imagination spun freely: Was my assistant a princess who, dressing for a ball at the palace, carried from room to room with her a shining mirror? Was she a mighty goddess who, walking along a forest path at night in another realm, arranged the moon in the sky with her marvelous hands? Or was she–and this more mundane notion stuck in my mind–the caretaker of some animal, nestling a large egg or small, round creature? 
None of these was obviously the right answer, but it was the last one, about nurturing an egg or a creature, that I came to believe, due to a certain occurrence. One night during our performance, I heard the squeal of an infant from the mesmerized crowd. That had to be it: she was caring for an infant on the “other side,” and her rocking motions and cooing sounds were her interaction with the child. This scenario explained all the facts, as I understood them, and on the spot I felt its truth. At once, too, a foreboding came over me, that the ceaseless demands of an  infant might dissolve our union, which for career reasons I was of course anxious to prolong. 
Later in our room I told her that I was aware that she was caring for an unearthly child, presumably at all hours around the clock, and even during our stage performances, using me as an intermediary nursemaid of sorts. Perhaps, by gliding about onstage and waving my hands, I was helping rock it to sleep, or even change a diaper, who knew? After she confirmed the identity of the sphere with a subtle nod of her head, I pressed her with further issues: “Why have you come here? What do you want from me?” She had never explained any of these matters, and I had gone on thinking of her arrival in my life as an odd fact that perhaps I would never fully grasp. 
“I don’t know myself,” she responded, at last moved to speak frankly. “But I felt I had to seek you out, since you’re the father. When I was alive I was your assistant too, in Mississippi near Biloxi, and bore your child. But I see you don’t remember me, though it was only a year ago we met. After you left me, I drowned by accident in a flood.”
“There have been many assistants over the years,” I acknowledged, “and it’s likely some have died by now. That much I find believable. But I don’t recall you, and I never knew of a child.”   
“The child drowned inside me,” she said. “She was born…after.”
“She was born after she died, is that what you mean?” I was intrigued by this notion. “Can she ever know her father?”  
“She may someday see you, as I see you.”
“Look,” I said, anxious to console her but still unsure of what she wanted from me. “Let’s go away from here. With your help my career is building steam. We can quit the Gumbo Circuit. Let’s all three of us head north to LA, Chicago, and New York. You help me, and I’ll help you any way I can.” 
“It’s beyond my power,” she said. “I’m bound to the region where I was born and died, here in the South, the infant also. The child and I would be two fish trying to swim on dry land. As it is I’m not well and may vanish soon, my daughter too perhaps.”
Having no secure future without her, I remained, but only until I hired another assistant, this one quite alive and willing to travel. Nannette and I caught a train for California as soon as we finished her training. My ghost partner was of course aware of my plans, and even encouraged me, adding that her own health was getting worse, though I didn’t ask what declining health meant for a spirit. I was determined to flee her and her ghost child without delay, since I felt she had taken over my act and even my soul in ways I was helpless to prevent. In plain words, I had become spooked by her.   
 In my travels, though, I thought of her daily, well aware of how much my act had fallen off without her. Bigtime agents refused to see me, and Nanette and I could not get bookings on the popular late night TV shows or big show halls in Vegas and New York, any more than my homebound ghost assistant and I had, though I had trained the lovely Nanette well. I was still relegated to dinner clubs and old theaters and a meager subsistence. After Nannette left me one night, my inevitable fate with assistants, I caught a train south, and a year from the date of my departure arrived back at my old decayed digs near the French Quarter, alone once more.   
As I lay in bed late one night, staring at the moon beyond my open window, I wondered if I would again be visited by my spirit assistant and her daughter. Or was she done with me, perhaps even nonexistent now, due to her sickness? I had heard nothing from her in a year. 
Then the moon, shrunken to the size of a saucer, sailed into my bedroom, leaving only blackness in the night sky. The glowing globe looped over my pillow once and once again, then landed in a splash of light  on my bedroom floor. When the glow faded, a young girl, not more than four or five years old, stood before me, dressed as a magician’s assistant. 
“Daddy?” she said.  
Could it be? Could she have grown to this size already? But how did time pass in her world? Did I know? She had her mother’s round face and thin mouth. Her dark hair, too, was the same, that’s all I knew. 
“Mommy can’t come, Daddy. She’s gone away for good. But she wanted me to tell you, I’m taking her place.”
I climbed out of bed in my rumpled pajamas, my step faltering a bit. I had lost track of my own time too, and had aged more than I could account for. But I felt nimble and eager as I stood looking down at her.  
“You know all my routines, my props, my secrets?” I asked. “All my feints and ploys to fool an audience? Your mother taught everything to you, a mere child?”
“Yes,” she said, “and I’m not bound to the Quarter or the deep South, like Mommy was. We can go as far as you wish to go, Daddy. Listen, we’re performing on The Midnight Show with Sonny Miller in New York City in twenty minutes. We’re a special attraction. Look, you’re already in costume, like me, and the stage is set up for our father-daughter act. Come on, Sonny’s announcing us now.” 
I really was decked out in my flashy stage suit, and I took my daughter’s firm hand. We sailed through my window into the dark sky, a new moon shining on us like a silver spotlight. Together we basked in the thunderous applause.   

                                                                  💀💀​💀

Michael Fowler is a humor and science fiction writer living in Ohio.

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