You Are Here by Karin Lin-Greenberg

Author:Karin Lin-Greenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2023-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

SO IT WILL have to be close-up magic using small, everyday objects. There is one spectacular trick that doesn’t require big and heavy things, but that trick is even more impossible than cutting Maria into four. That trick is the bullet catch: an assistant shoots a bullet across the stage, and the magician catches it in his teeth. Or in a metal cup in his mouth, so the bullet hitting metal makes a loud sound that every person in the room can hear. The bullet catch has been called the most dangerous trick in the world because sometimes it goes wrong. Magicians have died doing it.

The trick can be performed with a real gun or a trick gun that fires blanks or wax bullets. It always involves sleight of hand, so the magician is only pretending to catch a bullet. The most famous magician to have died doing this trick is Chung Ling Soo, who was shot in the chest in 1918 when a real bullet was fired, instead of a blank that was supposed to come out of a tube below the barrel of the gun. Soo was really a white man named William Ellsworth Robinson, who pretended to be Chinese. He was an unsuccessful magician who was not good at stage banter, like magicians are supposed to be, so he stole an act from a Chinese magician named Ching Ling Foo and he claimed he couldn’t speak English, so he no longer had to say much onstage during his performances in America, just mumbled some words audiences thought to be Chinese. William Ellsworth Robinson shaved his head except for a long, black braid, dressed in Chinese silk jackets, and no one in the audience figured out he was a white man. Jackson is not sure how people could have been so dumb, but back then people didn’t have cell phone cameras and the internet in order record things and scrutinize them.

William Ellsworth Robinson died the day after he was shot onstage performing the bullet catch. The gun used in the act malfunctioned because Robinson hadn’t cleaned it well enough, causing a real bullet—which had been loaded for show—to fire instead of the blank. Maybe that’s the problem with stealing an act; maybe you’re not really as good as the magician whose tricks you’re stealing. Maybe Ching Ling Foo would never have left his gun improperly cleaned. There’s something wrong, Jackson thinks, in stealing someone’s name and act and even his race, but there’s also something very appealing about pretending to be someone completely unlike yourself and getting popular doing so. It’s interesting to think you can erase who you are and where you’ve come from and no one would know. But who would Jackson be if he wasn’t himself?

If Jackson wanted to do the bullet catch, who would sell a gun, even a trick one, to a nine-year-old? And who knows what would happen if he brought it to school. So far his school hasn’t installed metal detectors or forced students to use clear plastic backpacks, but he knows a lot of schools do these things.

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