Psych: Mind Over Magic by Rabkin William

Author:Rabkin, William [Rabkin, William]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781101104101
Publisher: NAL HARDCOVER
Published: 2009-07-06T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

It was about the art. About the precision of his movements, the subtlety of his misdirection, the speed of his fingers, and the stealth of his hands. It didn’t mat-his fingers, and the stealth of his hands. It didn’t matter whom he was performing for. He had astonished the crowned heads of Europe and amazed the jaded jet-setters of Monte Carlo, but their reaction was no more important to him than that of any other group who sought release in the presence of miracles.

There were those who claimed to pity Barnaby Rudge. He could hear them whispering in the Fortress of Magic. He, the great Rudge, who had traveled to India to meet the guru, if not quite with the Beatles, then at least with Herman’s Hermits. Rudge, who had been painted by Warhol and filmed by Jodorowsky, who had exchanged phone numbers with Anita Pallenberg and Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias before losing both beauties to Keith and Mick. Rudge, who would have electrified an entire nation when he performed his greatest illusion, the Groovy Gap, on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on April 11, 1969, if only those idiots had shut up about the Vietnam War for one more week instead of getting themselves cancelled.

Now, he had heard the whisperers say, Rudge was so forgotten, people assumed he stole the idea of using a Dickens title for his stage name from David Cop- perfield, when it was so obviously the reverse. He was reduced to playing to tiny crowds for peanuts. He had lost everything.

But Rudge knew he had lost nothing. As long as his fingers could still move, his art was still alive. And his art was all that mattered.

Barnaby Rudge bowed to his audience as he transitioned between illusions. The show had been going superbly. The scarves had flowed out of his sleeves like water down a mountain streambed. The Chinese linking rings had clashed together like armies in the night. There was a small hitch when he reached into the false bottom of his top hat and discovered that he’d left his pint of Cutty inside with the cap partially unscrewed and the dove he’d meant to produce had suffocated on the whiskey fumes. But he had improvised a clever bit of patter to distract the crowd as he disposed of both chapeau and oiseau, and no one seemed to notice the lacuna in the performance. And the rabbit, that irresistible pink-nosed climax to his act, the one that never failed to rouse the audience to a standing cheer, was nestled safely beneath the false bottom of his dove cage. This would be a show for the ages.

With a grand flourish, Rudge produced the cane that in moments he would transform into a bouquet of lovely flowers. The sight of so much color exploding from a simple black stick would elicit awed sighs from his audience, and while they were marveling, he’d use their stunned focus on the blooms to set the switch on the dove cage.

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