The Ghost Sequences Read online

  The constant movement of the Magician’s hands was what caught Angie’s eye. She watched as he tried the same cheap card trick, only slightly clumsy with his injured hand, on almost every patron in the bar. No matter which card his mark chose, when the Magician asked, “Is this your card?” he revealed the Tarot card showing the Lovers, and smirked at the implications of flesh entwined. She watched until it worked, and someone left on the Magician’s arm. Angie found herself simultaneously annoyed and amused, and the following night, she returned to the same bar, curious whether the Magician would as well.

  The Magician did return, but there were no card tricks this time. She spotted him alone in a corner, his head resting on his folded arms. Angie slipped into his booth, holding her breath. If this was a performance, it was a good one. The Magician looked up, and Angie couldn’t help the way her breath left in a huff. His face was stark with a grief, thick enough for her to touch.

  “He’s dead,” the Magician said. “The little bastard bit me. He was my best friend, and now he’s gone.”

  The Magician blinked at Angie as if she’d appeared out of thin air. Angie said nothing, and the Magician seemed to take it as encouragement to go on. He held up his gauze-wrapped finger, and poured out his pain.

  “Maybe I left his cage open after he bit me because I was mad. Maybe I was distracted because I’d just fired my assistant and I forgot to latch it tight. Whatever happened, he got all the way outside, across the parking lot. I found him on the side of the road, flat as a swatted bug.”

  Tears glittered on the Magician’s cheeks. They had to be real. If he’d been putting on a show, he would have made a point of letting Angie see him wipe them away.

  “I put his body in a shoebox in my freezer. I’m going to bury him in the desert.” The Magician laughed, an uneven sound. “Have you ever been to a rabbit funeral?”

  The faint sheen at his cuffs spoke of wear. Despite the show he’d put on the night before—cheap card tricks to tumble marks into his bed—she saw a man down on his luck, wearing thin, a man whose deepest connection was with the rabbit who’d bit him then run away.

  The Magician looked lost, baffled by grief—like a little boy just learning the world could hurt him. There was something pure in his sorrow, something Angie hadn’t seen in Vegas in a long time. It looked like truth, and Angie wanted to gather it into her hands, a silk scarf endlessly pulled from a sleeve.

  A shadow haloed the Magician. A death that wasn’t the rabbit’s clinging to his skin; he didn’t even seem aware it was there. Angie caught her breath, deciding before she’d fully asked herself the question. That bigger death wasn’t one she could touch, but the rabbit—that was a small thing she could heal.

  “Do you want to see a magic trick?” she asked. “A real one?”

  The Magician’s eyes went wide, touched with something like wonder. Maybe it was his grief making him see clear, but for just a moment, he seemed to truly see her. He nodded, and held out his hand.

  The Magician led Angie to his shitty apartment. As they climbed the stairs, her nerves sang—a cage, full of doves waiting to be released, a star-spangled box with a beautiful woman vanishing inside. Her skin tingled. She considered that she was about to make the biggest mistake of her life, and decided to make it anyway.

  “His name was Gus.” The Magician set a shoebox on his makeshift coffee table.

  The rabbit lay on his side. Despite the Magician’s description, he wasn’t particularly flat. He might have been sleeping, if not for the cold. It seeped into Angie’s fingers as she held her hands above the corpse. The Magician watched her, all curiosity and intensity, and Angie blushed. A rabbit was different than a houseplant—what if she failed? And what if she succeeded?

  The rabbit twitched. His pulse jumped in her veins, a panicked scrabbling. Angie placed her hands directly on the rabbit’s soft, cold fur. She meant to make a hushing sound, soothing the rabbit’s fear, but the Magician’s mouth covered hers. Salt laced his tongue; was she crying, or was he? She lifted her hands from the rabbit and pressed them against the Magician’s back instead to still their shaking. Death clung to them, tacky and oddly sweet. She resisted the urge to wipe her palms against the Magician’s shirt, pulling him closer.

  She’d never brought back anything larger than a sparrow. Now she could feel the rabbit’s life in her—hungry, wild, wanting to run in every direction at once. The other, larger death continued to nibble at her edges—feathers itching beneath her skin, wind blowing over lonely ground.

  The rabbit’s pink nose twitched; his red-tinged eyes blew galaxy-wide. He ran a circle around the Magician’s apartment, and the Magician laughed, a joyous, bellowing sound. He lifted Angie by the shoulders, twirling her around.

  “Do you know what this means?” His voice crashed off the cracked and water-stained apartment walls.

  He scooped her up, carried her to rumpled sheets still smelling of last night’s sex. Angie’s teeth chattered; the rabbit was still freezing, and the Magician was warm. She dug her fingers into his back, and leaned into him.

  The sex was some of the strangest Angie had ever had. The Magician touched her over and over again, amazed, as if searching for something beneath her skin. For her part, Angie kept getting distracted. She snapped in and out of her body, pulled to the corner of the room where the rabbit rubbed his paws obsessively across his face. She giggled inappropriately, her limbs twitching beyond her control. She developed an insatiable craving for carrots. The Magician, lost in his own wild galaxy of stars, never seemed to notice at all.

  In the morning, she found the Magician at his cramped kitchen table. The sense she’d forgotten something nagged at the back of her mind—something sad, something with feathers—but the more she reached after it, the further it withdrew. She watched the Magician scribble on a napkin, coffee cooling beside him, burnt toast with one bite taken out of it sitting on a plate. He looked up at Angie with a wicked grin.

  “How would you like to be part of a magic show?”

  *

  The Assistant Returns

  The bell over the door chimes, and Meg flinches, her shoulders rising like a shield. She and Angie both look to the entrance, but there’s no one there.

  “We should go.” Angie might be about to make the second biggest mistake of her life, but she decides to do it anyway. “Would you like to see a magic show?”

  “I did magic once.” Meg’s voice is dreamy. “I think, but….” She frowns, then shakes her head, a sharp motion knocking the dreaming out of her voice and eyes. “I don’t remember.”

  Hunger flickers in Meg’s eyes now, tiny silver fish darting through a deep pool of hurt. Will seeing the Magician help, or add one more scar? Angie holds out her hand. Meg’s touch is insubstantial, but she takes it.

  Here’s the secret to what Angie does: dying is easy. Being dead is hard. And coming back hurts like hell. But it’s easier if you’re not alone, and Angie doesn’t let go of Meg the entire time. She’s come a long way since the rabbit, but it’s an act of will, consciously holding space for Meg’s hand, bringing her—not back to life, but back as a ghost. The act leaves Angie’s vision bursting with grey and black stars. She has to steady herself against the dressing room table as she and Meg emerge.

  “I’ve been looking all over for you.” The Magician puts his head around the doorway, impatient, distracted. “We’re about to start the show.”

  He barely looks at Angie; he doesn’t see Meg at all. In Angie’s peripheral vision, Meg’s expression falls. She’s braced, but nothing can truly prepare her for the Magician failing to see her one last time.

  “I won’t let go.” Angie adjusts her grip, straightens, and Meg follows her to the wings off the stage.

  Angie keeps Meg grounded throughout the show. The extra effort turns her skull into an echo chamber, her bones grinding like tectonic plates shifting through the eons. When the bullet kisses the Magician’s flesh, Meg gasps. Once it’s done, and the Magician reappears i
n the back of the theater—a combination of misdirection and Angie’s resurrection magic—Meg finally releases her death grip on Angie’s hand. Love is a hard habit to shed; Meg applauds. Angie is the only one to hear the sound, and each clap sounds like the cracking of ancient tombstones.

  The Magician makes his way back to the stage, smiling and waving the whole way. Circles of rouge dot the Magician’s cheeks. The lights spark off his teeth as Rory cycles through gel filters, making a rainbow of the Magician’s smile. He takes his bows, gathering the flowers and panties and hotel keys thrown his way. Meg’s features settle into something less than love, less than awe. She frowns, then all at once, her mouth forms a silent ‘o’.

  “I remember why I came back,” she says.

  “Come with me.” Angie slips out of the theater, not that anyone is looking for her to notice.

  She keeps a room in the hotel attached to the theater, and there, Angie collapses onto her bed. Meg hovers near the ceiling, turning tight, distraught circles like a goldfish in a too-small bowl.

  “I don’t know if it’s happened yet, or if it’s happening now.” Meg stops her restless spiraling and sits cross-legged, upside down. Her hair hangs toward Angie; if Meg were solid, it would tickle Angie’s nose.

  “Can you show me?” Angie’s skull is as fragile as a shattered egg, but Meg came back for a reason, and Angie wants to know.

  Meg stretches. Their fingers touch. The room shifts and if Angie had eaten anything besides the ghost of bacon and coffee in the diner inside Meg’s death, she’d be sick. Her body remains on the bed, but Angie’s self stretches taffy-thin, anchored in a hotel room at one end, hovering above a swirl of music and laughter and brightness at the other. She isn’t Angie; she isn’t fully Meg either. They are two in one, Angie and Meg, Meg-in-Angie.

  And below them is the Magician.

  He burns like a beacon. A sour vinegar taste haunts the back of Angie’s throat. Pickled cabbage and resentment, brine and regret. Angie can’t sort out which feelings are Meg’s and which are hers. She must have loved the Magician once upon a time. Didn’t she?

  The room is full of strangers, but another familiar face catches Angie-Meg’s eye. Rory stands at the edge of a conversation where the Magician is the center. He sways, too much to drink, but also blown by the force of yearning, a tree with branches bent in the Magician’s wind.

  Angie and Meg watch as Rory orbits closer, his need fever-bright. The Magician turns. He stops, puzzled at seeing something familiar anew. After so many years of being careful in the Magician’s presence, Rory’s desire is raw. Something has changed, or perhaps nothing has, and Rory is simply tired, hungry, willing to take a chance. And after so many years of looking right past his stage manager, the Magician finally sees something he needs—admiration, want, fuel for his fire. He sees love, and opens his mouth to swallow it whole.

  A flick of the hand, a palmed coin, a card shot from a sleeve—the first and easiest trick the Magician ever learned and the one that’s served him best over the years. He turns on his thousand-watt smile, and Rory steps into that smile. Parallel orbits collide, and their kiss is a hammer blow, shattering Angie’s heart.

  She gasps, coming up for air from the bottom of a pool. Meg floats facedown above the bed, a faint outline haloing her in the shape of wings. Tears drip endlessly from her eyes, but never fall.

  Angie is angrier than she’s ever been.

  It’s not the Magician’s infidelity. Like the Magician himself, she’s grown used to that. The Magician could kiss hundreds, flirt with thousands, fuck every person he meets, and Angie wouldn’t care. The kiss means nothing to the Magician, and to Rory it means the world. That, Angie can’t abide.

  Rage widens cracks in Angie she hadn’t even known were there. She can see what will happen next, Rory fluttering to the ground in the Magician’s wake like a forgotten card. There’s already forgetting in the Magician’s eyes, his mind running ahead to the next show, the next trick, the thunder of applause.

  Angie makes fists of her hands. She wanted better for Rory. She wanted him to be better. She wants to have been better herself. Smart enough to never have fallen for the Magician’s tricks, clever enough to see through the illusion and sleight of hand. Angie meets Meg’s eyes.

  “We have to let the Magician die.”

  *

  A Rabbit’s Funeral

  “Shit, shit, shit.” Heat from the asphalt soaked through Angie’s jeans where she knelt in the Magician’s parking lot, the shoebox by her side.

  Tears dripped from the point of Angie’s nose and onto the rabbit’s fur. She’d woken in the Magician’s rumpled sheets, wondering if she was the first to see them twice, even three mornings in a row, and she’d found the rabbit curled next to the defunct radiator, empty as though he’d never contained life at all. Nothing she could do, no amount of power she could summon, would unravel his death again.

  “Are you okay?” A shadow fell over her, sharp-edged in the light, and Angie looked up, startled.

  “Yes. No. Shit. No. Sorry.” She wiped frantically at her face, leaving it smeared and blotchy.

  The sun behind the man turned him into a scrap of darkness. Angie wished she’d brought sunglasses.

  “I’m fine.” She stood and lifted her chin.

  “You don’t look fine.” The man’s gaze drifted to the box.

  Exhaustion wanted Angie to drop back to her knees, but she turned it into a deliberate motion, scooping the box against her chest and holding it close.

  “I know that rabbit,” the man said. “The Magician—”

  “The Magician. The fucking Magician.” Angie couldn’t help it—a broken laugh escaped her. She held the box out. “Do you know his name? It’s not Gus.”

  “No.” The man looked genuinely regretful, and it made Angie like him instantly, and study him more closely.

  The air smudged dark around his shoulders, curling them inward. A shadow haunted him, like the one clinging to the Magician, with the same flavor, but unlike the Magician, this man felt its weight.

  “I’m Rory.” The man frowned at the box. “I’m the stage manager, I was looking for the Magician.”

  “He’s out. I don’t know when he’ll be back. He doesn’t even know yet.” She indicated the box again.

  Guilt tugged at her briefly, recalling the Magician’s grief at the bar, but Angie doubted she’d see such a display again. The Magician had already moved on, his head too full of plans for his own death and return, overfull with confidence not in her abilities, but that he was too important to properly die.

  She caught disappointment in the stage manager’s eyes. Angie recognized it; Rory was as big a fool as she was, maybe bigger still. Like a compass point finding North, Rory’s gaze went to the Magician’s window. He didn’t have to count or search, pinpointing it immediately. Love was written plain on his skin, letters inches high that the Magician was too stupid to read.

  “Will you help me bury him?” Angie held up the box, drawing Rory’s attention back, his expression smoothed into one of weary pain.

  “I’m—” Angie stopped. She’d been about the say the Magician’s girlfriend. But they’d only just met; they’d fucked a few times. She’d brought his rabbit back from the dead, and that was the most intimate thing they’d shared.

  “Angie.” She coughed.

  Her name felt awkward, a ball of cactus thorns she wanted to spit out. Now it was her turn to glance at the building, though she had no idea which window belonged to the Magician. Dread prickled along her spine.

  “I have a car.” Rory gestured. “We could bury him in the desert.”

  Angie followed Rory across the parking lot. She climbed into the passenger seat, and set the box containing the dead rabbit in her lap. The car smelled faintly of cigarettes—old smoke, like Rory had quit long ago. Angie found it oddly comforting.

  “I’m a Resurrectionist.” Angie tested the word. The Magician had suggested it last night, bathed in the after-sex glo
w. She tried it on for size. “I bring things back from the dead.”

  She expected Rory to slam on the brakes, swerve to the side of the road and demand she get out. He did neither. She kept talking.

  “Simple things fall apart more easily—mice, sparrows, rabbits.” She tapped the box, finger-drumming a sound like rain. Telling Rory her secret felt necessary, an act of defiance. The Magician didn’t own her or her truths, not yet.

  “Small things know the natural order of the world. Only humans are arrogant enough to believe they deserve a second chance at life.”

  Angie let her gaze flick to the side, finding Rory’s eyes for a brief moment before he turned back to the road.

  “How about here?” Rory parked and they got out.

  Desert wind tugged at Angie’s hair. She held the box close, sand and scrub grass crunching under her feet. Rory kept a small, collapsible shovel in the trunk of his car for emergencies, a habit held over from when he lived in a climate with much more snow. He also kept a Sharpie in his glove box, and once they’d dug a hole, and laid the rabbit inside, Angie chose a flat, sun-warmed rock and uncapped the pen.

  “What should we write, since we don’t know his name?”

  “He was a good rabbit. His name was his own.”

  Angie scribed the words. The moment felt like a pact, and when Angie stood, she took Rory’s hand. The sun dragged their shadows into long ribbons, and at the same moment, they turned to look behind them, as if they’d heard their names called. The city glowed in the gathering dusk. The Magician was waiting for them.