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| Author: |
Emily Kendy |
| Dated: |
Thursday, September 10 2009 @ 05:23 PM EDT |
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“You’re not serious.”
“I don’t expect you to wait, I mean obviously I hope-”
“You hope?! Hope what? That I’ll hold a candle-light vigil or something? You’re not doing this!”
“I am.”
“Oh my God, Jerab. Look at you, you’re not even sorry.”
Astrid, who had been folding Jerab’s laundry over his bed when he told her about his latest scheme, flew into a rage. She was so shaken she could not even look him in the eye. Instead, she stared down at her fingers, nimble only from years of training. Tugging the hems of his black jeans, clasping the inseams together. Shaking, pressing, folding flat and discarding on top of the extra set of black silk bed sheets. If her mind could be as dispassionate as her hands! She hated him, then. Wondered if she hated him so much that she thought she was in love.
She plucked a white cotton robe from the laundry pile, a gift from his mother who had passed away from a brain tumor. The robe was so old and wretched it smelled musty even in the residual warmth of the dryer. Astrid tossed it against the superhero pillowcase, which two years ago she’d fooled herself into believing was ironic.
She waited for him to say something, as she always waited for Jerab to talk to her. But words were a last resort for him; mostly he was silent.
“Jerab,” she said, pinching a pair of white socks together and folding the tops down. She knew she was acting like her mother but couldn’t help the tone in her voice. “Do you even consider how I might feel about this? I don’t even think I matter to you.”
Jerab rubbed his eyes. He was tired. He was always tired. He was an insomniac whose brief bouts of sleep were habitually interrupted by night terrors. He’d once been woken up in the middle of the night by Astrid, who had had to slap his face to stop him from nearly shaking her to death in his sleep. In his nightmarish haze he’d been convinced she was lying dead beside him.
“Trix, you know it has nothing to do with you,” he said, brown hair falling into his eyes, saucer-large in earnest. He willed her to understand and support him as she had when they’d first met, almost two years ago. She, of all people, should know what it was like: the pressure to perform and her reticence to talk about any photo shoot she went on. He found himself struggling over how much he believed that he trusted her.
“I know alright? Honestly, you don't have to rub it in. I get it. You don’t need me – can’t you see that’s why…”
“What! Rub it in? What are you talking about?” he asked, but she said nothing. She looked disgusted. How could he love her and still wish for more? “Why what, Trix?”
“Why am I not enough?” she asked him, meeting his gaze. Her blue eyes welled with tears and he watched a single drop snake down her creamy cheek. He quickly swallowed his desire in an effort to accommodate her bad mood. He would wait for her to come around. Lead by example and hope for the best. “It’s what I have to do, with or without you.”
“Fine,” she said, abandoning the laundry and brushing past him, as she headed towards the door. “Break a leg, or whatever.”
“That’s for actors,” he said, without thinking.
She glared at him over her shoulder. “Then disappear.”
He said nothing –surely he had nothing to say – and inhaled the trail of her floral perfume as if flipping the pages of an old photo album. When he heard the front door slam downstairs he knew he hated her.
The sound of her car tires peeling from his driveway broke through his thoughts. Jerab promptly sat down on the leather couch in the living room, packing a bowl of hash into his glass pipe.
The following afternoon, when Jerab returned from balance training, he sniffed out Astrid’s rose perfume in the hallway and, after kicking off his sneakers, confronted her in the living room where she was smoking a cigarette and flipping through TV channels.
“What are you doing here?”
She tossed the remote on the couch and stood up, firing daggers in his direction. He involuntarily took a step backwards and eyed her fingers as they gathered into fists at her sides. “What is it going to take after this, Jerab? Jumping out of a plane without a parachute and having faith you’ll land right?”
He felt cornered as, clearly, she was not going to support his decision quietly. He said as evenly as he could manage, “That’s not fair.”
“Don’t talk to me about what’s fair?!” she yelled. “I swear, sometimes I think you do these things to… to see how much I’ll put up with. I’m so fucking sick of it!”
“Astrid I told you this is-”
“Yeah, yeah some kind of calling. More like a death wish if you ask me.”
He had no response; it was so absurd to him that she would think he chose these stunts out of stupidity. “I’m not asking you to camp out below. You don’t have to do anything.”
“Oh great, then maybe I’ll watch you on the news and bake nutrition bars for your homecoming.”
She was trying to hurt him but he could not help perking up at the suggestion that she trusted him to succeed.
“I’m not going to stand by Jerab. Not again, not after the water tank…” Her voice faltered. Frustrated by his relentless wise-eyed expression – as if he was as innocent as he acted – she stomped off towards the boot room and struggled into her coat with a clumsy determination that would have been comical in a different context.
There was suddenly a knock at the front door and with a small sigh of relief Jerab moved to answer it, slipping the chain into the lock and prying the door open a crack. He cleared his throat. “Oh, hi Mrs. K.”
The old Irish lady had more cracks in her face than a sidewalk and her hair was a beehive of glossy purple. Her pink lipstick had been liberally applied onto her almost non-existent lips in clownish over-exaggeration. She looked like a three-year-old playing dress up.
Spitting saliva onto his face, she peered up at him and growled, “What’s going on in there? I can’t listen to my telly with all that racket…”
“I’m sorry,” said Jerab, running a hand over the stubble on his cheeks and gazing at her plastic white sandals sheepishly. He was pushed aside by Astrid who undid the lock and stepped out into the hallway alongside Jerab’s disgruntled neighbor.
“Hi missy,” said the old lady.
Astrid smiled at her, ignoring Jerab. “Hello Mrs. Kernaghan, sorry I can’t talk, I’m on my way out.”
“Bye Astrid, I’ll call you,” he called after her as she disappeared through the door to the stairwell without looking back. “I’m sorry about the noise, Mrs. K. We were watching a movie, it’s over now.”
“Hmph,” she grunted, peering up at him with a queer expression. “You’re gonna lose her, you know.”
Her tone gave Jerab the creeps and he closed the door with the ringing of a warning going off inside his head. That night, he had nightmares and woke up to find himself biting his own hand as if defending himself against some imaginary attack.
“Before we start Jer – can I call you Jer – I just want to ask if there are any topics you’re, you know, that are off-limits.”
“Well-”
“Ha, you wish! You’re on Dennis Delirium for Christ sake. I can’t believe you took me seriously!”
Jerab leaned in towards the microphone. “Are we on air right now?”
The portly radio DJ let out a machine gun laugh. He answered with, “So is it true your dad was a maniac?”
“Well-”
“I heard that he’d dangle you over the edge of buildings as a kid.”
“Training. Yeah, he called it training.”
“And your old lady?”
“I was there when she died. That’s uh, I mean… Listen I’d really rather not…”
“Yeah, that’s fine. Nobody wants a buzz kill. Moving on I wanna ask you this if I don’t get another chance, ha-ha-ha-ha-ha har har… You really think you can pull this one off?”
“I doubt I’d attempt something like this if I didn’t,” said Jerab, and immediately his palms started sweating. The radio room grew hotter than a beach in Mexico at high noon. His tongue began sticking to the roof of his mouth. “I have trained for this and I’ve been practithing meditation for yearth, which I think will really help me out. I’m nervouth, I’m not gonna lie, but I have to keep upping the staketh. Otherwise I’ll thtagnate and turn into a 40-year-old with a purple cape on a Vegath thide thtage.”
Jerab was humiliated by his dry mouth.
The radio DJ casually signaled the control room and barked into the microphone, “Do you hear that folks! Jerab Noble confesses his secret grudge against Pen and Teller! Someone call Celebrity Knock-Out!”
The Dennis Delirium rambled on, making jokes and belittling Jerab until it was time for a commercial break, at which point Jerab spent several minutes in the bathroom drinking water from the tap and thinking up witty comebacks to all the swipes his ungracious host had already taken.
“Jer, it’s for you,” said Astrid, later that night. She was eating a pear and reading his magazine article, again, as she handed the phone to him without glancing up from a page she’d read at least a dozen times before.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Jer, Dicky Wilder.”
“Hey Dicky, sorry I haven’t called you back.”
“No worries. I know you have no intention of brushing off the world’s raunchiest late night talk show host.”
“Wow, that’s a bit of a mouthful, eh?”
“Yeah, if you’re asking your mom. Hehe. Just jokin' with you. Listen we need to talk about you. On my show. After this great feat you have planned. As far as this magic thing being a spectator sport you should really consider going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. I’m telling you, that never gets old. Something to think about, anyway, how's it feel to be the next big thing, Mr. Master of Illusions.”
“I actually prefer the term Disillusionist,” said Jerab, to which Astrid raised her eyebrows.
“Kid, don’t get all uptight,” said the host, sipping his second margarita of the day. “You’re a magician. However you want to say it so the cool kids don’t throw flaming dog shit at you for being all into Dungeons and Dragons and shit, you know, far be it for me to judge.”
Jerab stumbled over his tongue to explain himself. “I know that it’s uptight to be picky with labels, uh, and I don’t play Dungeons and Dragons. See, that’s why – uh, shit. I don’t know. I just don’t think people get what I do-”
“You do tricks, man. Like the levitating cigarette.”
“That isn’t a trick,” said Jerab. “See that’s it right there. You’re missing the point.”
“What the hell is the point if it’s not about floating objects and magic wands?”
Jerab closed his eyes for a moment in a concentrated effort to pick the right words. “Do you know the difference between illusion and magic?”
“Magic doesn’t exist?”
“Of course it does! Illusion is what doesn’t technically exist – it’s make-believe that’s been conceived in the real world, much like a movie on a reel of film,” said Jerab, his voice rising along with his level of insistence. “The difference is that illusion is an outcome, a dog and pony show. Magic is a process; magic is a product - a new way of believing in the nature of the world. When I submit myself to a death-defying task, the time it takes to pull it off – or not - is the creation of magic. If I succeed, the impossible becomes real. Illusions are fine as party favors but there’s no significant meaning to their outcomes – no real deeper understanding of life besides knowing that the old 'cut the assistant in half' trick is really just two people crammed inside identically small boxes-“
“Oh no way.”
“Well, that’s not magic, it’s hardly even illusion.”
“So then what’s illusion?” asked the TV host, who was jotting down notes in a hotel notepad.
“That’s not the point, I hate that word! I call myself a Disillusionist because I have yet to prove myself as a true magician.”
“What’s the big deal about using Illusionist? Creating illusions is what you do, isn’t it?"
Jerab snorted. “It’s been coined by every hack including David Copperfield. I’m not those guys.”
“Well if David fucking Copperfield isn’t a true magician who the fuck is? Sigmund and Freud?”
Jerab shook his head at the phone. “Siegfield and Roy? No, definitely not. Jesus has pretty much set the bar for that title.”
Dicky nearly swallowed the toothpick he’d been chewing on. “You religious?”
“Nah,” said Jerab, “But I believe Jesus found magic in lending his physical body to the extreme process of pushing past the human limit. Athletes are nearly magicians because they get this idea of pushing past limits in order to create a new reality.”
“I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about, and I’ve only had two of these coconut thingamagigs…”
“The difference is that there’s a difference. Illusion can be conjured by anyone – my girlfriend is a model and she works with the laws of illusion every day. You know, how to pose so her legs look long and I’m not discounting how good she is at it – she’s amazing – but I don’t use the same rules.”
Dickey suddenly sat straight up on his floral bedspread. “I understand exactly.” He proceeded to talk about his personal cleaning lady at the resort hotel. Using towel origami she had, since his arrival, created “hello,” “two swans kissing” and “sunflowers” out of his clean linen. He’d been scared out of his wits at 3 am, when he unlocked his hotel room and flicked on the light to discover some kind of Loch Ness Monster she’d sculpted out of his bed sheets.
“So your maid is an illusionist.”
“Yes,” said Dicky, waving a chicken wing in mid-air. “But she’s not a magician. So if you’re not an illusionist, and you’re not a magician you’re a – a Disillusionist, is that it?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
Even though she didn’t want to, Astrid glowed from Jerab’s flattery and listened to soon to be ex-boyfriend’s conversation with great interest. Jerab rarely spoke with such candor and she figured it had to do with a build-up of adrenalin. As impressed as she was, she was at his side tonight only because she would never be able to forgive herself if he got hurt up there in the sky as a result of her own, negative attitude. Tonight she would pretend to be capable of loving Jerab forever.
But tomorrow, after his climb up, onto the platform – where he would stand for seven days and nights - she was going to take a bus trip to her mother’s house, four hundred kilometers away, and cry until she exhausted her desire to give him another last chance. His sweet words about her to the man on the phone were so late they might as well have been dripping in sarcasm. Jerab’s perennial argument that he didn’t have a death wish was bullshit. He lived for the possibility that he would be conquered.
Astrid watched him where he stood, in the middle of the kitchen, tugging unconsciously on the ends of his shaggy hair. This decision to leave her selfish lover felt like a winning hand of poker after a losing streak. Astrid had been losing herself long before Jerab provided her with an explanation for the past three months of distracted 100-yard stares, the standing-meditation rituals and the god damn endless cans of stewed tomatoes.
"They're good for hydration," he explained, when she eventually asked.
His girlfriend had not been as impressed with this scientific insight as Jerab had expected. Tomato seeds were capable of retaining water and keeping a person hydrated. Who knew! But she was impassive after he’d told her and now that he thought about it, Jerab could no longer remember the last time he’d impressed Astrid. While part of him hoped his inevitable success and subsequent fame and fortune would fix their problems he questioned, to a small degree, if this was ultimately a battle he wasn’t willing to choose. On the bright side Jerab was about to have a whole lot of time to think about exactly how he felt.
Meanwhile, Astrid came to the conclusion that Jerab was long overdue for a wake-up call– it just wouldn’t be this night. Tonight she was going to play along and let him mesmerize her like he had in the beginning, before she was sick of it all.
“Of course she supports me,” said Jerab, raising a skeptical eyebrow at Astrid, who had glanced up quickly from the magazine and was trying to read his face for insights into the conversation. “That’s why she’s my girlfriend. Speaking of which, I’m gonna have to let you go. I’ll talk to you in a week, Dicky.”
After a quick exchange of good byes, Jerab hung up.
“Jer? Are you awake?” Astrid had been watching the headlights from vehicles shining up from the street below and running across the dark walls of the bedroom as she followed the beams with her eyes, like she was counting sheep.
When Jerab didn’t answer her she rolled over and stared at his sleeping face, not surprised that he didn’t look to be at peace. His features were set in a slight grimace, as though fighting off a nightmare behind his lids. She poked his cheek. “Jer? Jerab?
He groaned, but did not open his eyes. “What baby?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Can it wait until the morning?”
“It is morning. Early morning.” she stopped then, with no clue what to say.
When Jerab opened his eyes he reached out and swiped a tear from her cheek with tender care, having a sense of deja vu. He wasn’t supposed to have girlfriends that looked like Astrid; she belonged in magazines and on billboards not in bed beside an anti-social madman. He knew he didn’t deserve her, which was maybe why it was so hard to let her go.
“I’m sorry Astrid,” he started, but she shook her head and told him to kiss her. Their lovemaking was the most intimate either had ever allowed themselves to be with one other.
Afterwards, Jerab fell asleep again, his breath falling into soft sighs like a snare drum pacing out a melancholy beat. Astrid continued to lie awake for nearly an hour. She ran her hands along his dark eyebrows and through the cowlicks in his hair, watching the muscles tighten in his face and truly wondering where she would be without him.
The wind was strong – far stronger than Jerab anticipated. Nothing he couldn’t get used to, not that he had much of a choice. He looked down at the large crowd of curious on-lookers and TV crews below. They stared up at him with rapt concern and it amused him. This expression from the audience was what he wanted: an accumulation of fear and anticipation.
The coroner would later offer - by way of condolence - that Jerab could not have seen it coming. It was an unfortunate freak accident that happened during a freak stunt. While obvious to everyone now, in hindsight, this could not have been avoided. It happened so fast Jerab didn’t even know what hit him. Or what he hit – in this case, the sidewalk.
The coroner was incorrect.
Moments before Jerab crashed to earth in a very real end to his imaginary life; he was tuning out the world and remembering a lullaby his mother had sung to him as a baby. Amazed he could remember the words and their haunting melody. He sang the song softly as he gazed upon what he pretended were his worshipers:
In a wagon bound for market
Is a calf with a mournful eye
High above him there’s a sparrow
Drifting swiftly through the sky
How the winds are laughing
They laugh with all their might.
Laugh and laugh the whole day through
And half the summer’s night...
Jerab was interrupted by the unfortunate sound of poor workmanship cracking under the elements - an ironic sound of disenchantment that was to signify the end of his life. As Jerab Noble fell, he found no magic flashing before him, only sky.
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