The Confabulist by Steven Galloway Read Free Book Online Page B

diagnosis, but now, obviously, it has taken on a new significance. If he’s right, if there really is nothing he can do about my condition, then maybe I should start to keep progress reports, like Charlie Gordon in Flowers for Algernon . It might prove useful to document whatever is going to happen to me. Perhaps if I write things down, I can create a story for myself that, through rereading, will become a sort of new reality as my ability to distinguish between illusion and substance worsens.
    And Alice. If there’s any substance left of me, then I owe her the truth. I deprived her of a father. I can’t even now explain fully why I did it. It all seems a lifetime ago, and from where I’m sitting now, it’s easy to make excuses and justifications and hard to remember how it all felt at the time or exactly what happened. But I owe Alice something. An apology? It’s a little late for that. An explanation is something I’m not sure I have to offer. All I can give her is the truth as I know it, or as I can recall it. If I’ve learned anything in my life it’s that magicians aren’t the only ones hiding their identities from the world.
    A woman with a small child passes me. The child, a girl withcurly brown hair tied into pigtails with red ribbons, looks unhappy. Her mother is holding her by the hand and pulling her along. The girl is lagging as best as she can, making it clear she doesn’t want to go inside. I can’t say I blame her one bit. I wouldn’t want to go either. I feel a strange kinship with this sprite in her blue dress and knee socks. The doors open and admit first the mother and then the girl, her childish attempt to avoid the inevitable defeated.
    None of us wants to go. And I don’t mean inside the hospital, though that’s true. What I mean is no one wants to die, but we each know that sooner or later it’s going to happen to us. We tell ourselves that it’s a long way off, and turn to notions of religion or spirituality or science to make sense of it, and for some that does bring some existential comfort, but still most of us lag as much as we can, just like this girl. No one gets to stay. Yet we live and act as though it is otherwise.
    The magician trades in this human struggle. Magic that is not real magic affects us because it mirrors our existence. We know that what we see isn’t as it seems, but we want it to be and want to understand it. We want to be fooled, and then want to know how we were fooled. We cannot prevent our minds from trying to figure out how the trick was done. I believe this is more than just intellectual curiosity. We strive for immortality in the face of its impossibility.
    But magicians are clever. They understand that a magic trick is all about turning illusion into substance in such a way that we never fully comprehend what happened, or what we think happened. They know that a trick loses its power once we understand how it was done, and also that it loses its power once we no longer wish to understand how it was done.
    There are four elements to this grand tug-of-war between substanceand illusion. There is effect, there is method, there is misdirection, and finally, when it’s all over, there is reconstruction. Magic is a dance between these four elements. The actor playing a magician seeks to choreograph a way through the trick with these component parts. If he does so, he will have achieved magic. If not, he is a failure.
    Effect is the reason the trick exists. Without it there’s no point. It’s the rabbit coming out of the hat, the woman shown to be sawn in half, the ace of spades somehow inside your coat pocket. Often a good effect is kept secret until the moment of its reveal. You don’t actually know what the trick is until it’s finished. Other times the effect is announced at the start, and you’re watching for it, waiting for it, but then when it happens, you’re still amazed. Either way, the audience lives for the effect, we desire it more than