Ambrose Astrid, Legit Wizard

They say I’m the greatest magician in the world, but I’m not even close. The hum of the audience builds as I sip my fourth Sazerac of the night in the green room. Maybe it’s my fifth. Got to find that sweet spot where the words slip out like butter but I don’t forget my patter completely.

Morglog squirms next to me on the white leather couch, throwing back shots of Espolón because he doesn’t have any more shows tonight. Cassidy Nash, flopped on the couch across from us, pirouettes a deck of cards between her hands. If I wasn’t around, either of them could easily be considered the greatest. 

“C’mon man, you gotta give me something,” says Morglog. “So it’s not string. It’s not a trapdoor—I know that stage like the back of my hand. Is it a fake hand and like...an automatic door? You’ve got me thinking it’s some kind of massive contraption.”

“It’s never a massive contraption.” Cassidy rolls her eyes as she lets the cards cascade from hand to the other in two streams. Her long brown curls drape over the arm of the couch. 

Cassidy’s right, but I can see why Morglog is grasping at straws. I close my act with a teleportation trick, the kind where you walk in a door stage left and exit a door stage right. Just to make it a bit too impossible, there’s nothing else onstage—no moving parts. Right when Morglog thought he’d figured me out, I added another detail. The audience actually sees my hand reach around to close the door behind me. 

“Maybe no one’s done it with a rig like that before but he would.” Morglog turns to me with his shot glass lolling in one hand. His mohawk glistens with sculpting gel. “Ambrose, give me something. A hint. A crumb.”

I raise an eyebrow and stare at him. Morglog knows I don’t reveal secrets. Not even to magicians, not for any price, no matter how bad I want to. What would he say if I told him the truth? It really is my hand closing the door. I really do teleport to the other side of the stage, though I spend about five seconds in a backstage storage closet in between. Popping out instantaneously would push the limits of human magic too far for magicians to believe. I walk the line between the possible and impossible. If I told Morglog and Cassidy the truth, our already threadbare friendship would evaporate. 

“Do you, like, camouflage into the curtains or something?” 

I put my hand on Morglog’s shoulder. “I’ll see you after the show.” 

Morglog grimaces, but he gets to his feet. He watches every show and begs me for hints after. Cassidy wishes me an absent-minded goodluck. I haul myself off the couch, and immediately I sway like a palm tree in the breeze. My skin prickles. Hell, maybe that was my sixth. 

“Here he is, the man of the hour,” the announcer bellows as I peek out from the wings. “The greatest magician in the world, Ambrose Astrid!”

The stage lights are bracing white, and roars from the crowd shimmy and undulate like the surface of a swimming pool. The two disembodied doors I’ll use for the finale are already onstage. I say something over my headset microphone, though I barely hear my own words, and the audience responds with a cheer. 

“How could you not be having fun in Vegas, right?” I say.

Ignoring the fact that I don’t anymore. 

“Folks, I’d like to start off with my most dangerous trick. How does that sound?”

Cheers filter up from the seats like shafts of sunlight between clouds. I hear some, but there are gaps. 

“I thought that’s what you’d say. Since it’s so dangerous, I’d love to have a volunteer from the audience. Don’t worry, you won’t be taking the bullet, I will.”

That gets a nervous laugh every time. I shield my eyes from the light and squint into the front row. There’s a burly guy with tattoos to my left and a young woman wearing a glittery body suit on the right. Today’s a vicious sort of day. I point to the guy with the tattoos, and he gleefully clambers onstage.

He’s going to witness the magic up close and personal, and he will still have no idea what he’s really seeing. The thought is sour in my mouth. 

“Sir, I have here a thirty-nine millimeter bullet.” I show one hand to the man and then sweep it around for the audience to catch a glimpse of the dull gold casing. They gasp when they realize how enormous it is. 

“And here I have five differently colored pens. I’d like you to choose a pen.” I offer the other hand, which is full of sharpies. 

The man picks blue. I have him write his name on the tip of the bullet. He writes “DANIEL” in crooked letters. I thank him. He starts to head back to his seat, but I catch him by the crook of the elbow. I yank him back harder than I mean to. 

“Fun’s not over yet. I promise.” I press the bullet back into his palm, then I turn back to the audience. The lights needle my eyes. “Many before me have caught a bullet in their mouth. They load a single round into a handgun, then it’s fired at them just once. But I like to go the extra mile.”

A crew member in the wings hefts an AK-47 into my hands. The audience catch a collective breath in their throats. 

“Yeah,” I laugh, my tone tinged bitter. “Not a handgun.”

Daniel still has his bullet pinched between his fingers. I pull the magazine out of the gun, and pull the eject latch to show that the chamber is empty. Two dozen bullets hang heavy in my pockets, and I present Daniel with a handful. 

“Go ahead and load these babies in there. I’ll turn my back so I don’t know which one it is.” 

There is a clink-clink-clink as he loads the magazine. “Done,” he says. 

I swivel back around and position Daniel on the stage how I want him. I walk to the other side. A stage hand wheels a large metal sheet onto the stage behind me. I stand there in nothing but my black suit and wire frame glasses. Daniel looks at me like I must be crazy, but the trust people have in magicians is staggering, so when I ask him to aim the AK-47 at me, he does. There’s no way he’s firing blanks, but in his mind, I’ve already swapped them around somehow. He’s convinced there is some trick hiding in plain sight, even though there isn’t. It’s not a trick, Daniel, I want to say. But even with rye whiskey and absinthe fizzling in my brain, I know it would just freak him out. So I just tell him to fire on the count of three.

“Pull that trigger back for me, and don’t stop until you’ve run out of bullets. Ready?”

“Ready.”

“One...two...three.”

The theater echoes with cracks as Daniel fires the contents of the magazine into the air between us. As each bullet sails towards me, I shuffle the air around it, and it arcs gently around me before lodging itself in the metal plate. When the correct bullet comes my way, I carefully decelerate it and redirect it into my mouth. The rest are sent curving around me until the gun clicks without releasing anything, and Daniel drops it to his side. 

Shells litter the stage. Twenty-four bullets are burrowed into the metal plate. I spit the 39mm into the palm of my hand and hold it out to Daniel. He staggers back when he sees that his name is written on it. There’s the moment of silence as everyone processes, then the theater quakes with applause. 

The cheers feel far away. This is someone else’s glory. 

“I get asked all the time if this is my real name...” I trail off. A shallow cough shakes the silence. “This is the part where I’m supposed to make a joke about how I’ll never tell if this is my real name or not. But it is. My birth certificate says Ambrose Astrid on it.”

If I’d continued with the joke as planned, they’d be laughing now. Instead they shift in their seats, trying to look at my words from the right angle to make them funny. 

“Every time a magician gets on stage, it’s expected that they’re lying, but I’m sick of lying to you all. Do you want to know the truth?”

There is a hesitant chorus of yesses. I ask them again, “Do you actually want to know the truth?”

This time it’s decisive. “Yes!” the crowd roars. 

“I’m a wizard.”

A shiver of laughter runs through the audience, but some of them hold their breath, waiting for the trick that justifies this bit.

“No, I’m serious. I’m a wizard. Like a for real...a legit wizard. Look.” I conjure a fireball in my hand and let it sit there, flickering and glowing. The audience ooohs like this was any other trick, so I close my hand and extinguish it. 

“I’m not joking. This isn’t patter.” I grab my hand and rip it off my wrist. I brandish my disembodied hand at them. “I’m an actual goddamn wizard.”

The audience cries in disgust, but they still sound impressed. They don’t believe me because these are things magicians can do, albeit not in the way I’m doing them. I consider levitating, but even that might not shake them out of their awe. I want them to understand. To make them see me.

My next trick is supposed to be card magic, so I pull the deck out of my pocket. I throw it and a pen to the glittery woman in the front row. “Pick a card. Any card. I don’t care.”

She opens the deck, slops it into her hand, and hesitantly grabs a card. She holds up the four of diamonds. 

“Yeah, that’s great,” I spit. “Now write your name on it. Or draw something. Literally anything, it doesn’t matter.”

The woman draws a smiley face on the front of the card. 

It occurs to me that the audience might think she’s a plant. This isn’t the trick I planned at all, but I need them to understand. 

“That’s great,” I say, trying to pull the kindness back into my voice. “Hand it to the person behind you. Just keep passing it back. That’s it, all the way to the back.”

Squinting through the lights, I make out the wiggly figure of a bald middle-aged man. A couple seats over sit Cassidy and Morglog, transfixed. My stomach spins and my head feels like it’s expanding. They’ll know how impossible these tricks are, so they might actually believe me. If they hate me for it, there’s nothing I can do now. Too late to turn back.

I call up to the bald man in the last row. “Sir, can you confirm that the card you’re holding is the four of diamonds with a smiley face drawn on it?”

“Yes!” comes the faint reply. 

“Great, now rip it up for me.”

The man happily shreds it. The pieces are still in his hands, but I’m not feeling particularly compassionate. I snap my fingers, and the pieces burst into flames. They burn quickly, and ashes rain into his lap. The man yelps. The audience murmurs with delight. 

“Okay, so we all saw that card get destroyed, right?”

“Yes!” thunders the crowd.

“And it really did. I cannot be more serious about this, I actually incinerated that card.” I hold up my hand and summon the ashes, reconstituting them into the four of diamonds with the smiley face drawn on it. I hold it up for the crowd to see. “And here it is again,” I say flatly. They cheer. I still haven’t convinced them, and I want to sob. 

I desperately look around the stage. My only company is the doors, waiting for me to stride through one and pop out the other. But the doors have been done. Anyone can do the doors, even if they can’t do it as fast or as simply as I can. If I want to really show them, I need to do something completely impossible. Without saying anything else, I simply walk to the far left of the stage. I stand there for a moment, swaying slightly. The theater takes a breath in and holds it. 

With a sucked-in pop, I disappear from stage left and materialize stage right. There is no way to appear all the way over there instantaneously. But still the crowd just claps and shouts and whistles. They have no idea that what they have just witnessed is actual magic. 

My heart pounds, and blood swirls in my ears. I want to rip off my microphone headset and stomp it to smithereens. Instead, I march off the stage without another word. Cheers follow me into the wings. I rush to the green room so I can grab my things and go and probably never come back. I’ll return to the woods and hide myself from society. There’s no point in being so close when I always feel a million miles away. 

When I open the green room door, Cassidy and Morglog are already inside. Their eyes swell like waxing moons. 

“I’m speechless,” says Cassidy.

“I’m flabbergasted,” says Morglog. 

I’m about to tell them to take off when he adds, “I get it now, why you wouldn’t tell me anything. I wouldn’t have told me either.”

“So...you believe me?”

“There’s no way to fake such instant teleportation. Just no way,” says Cassidy. “So yeah, we believe you.”

I pull her into a hug, then Morglog. 

“You know I have a million more questions now, right?” says Morglog. He looks at the ground. “But, uh, if you don’t want to answer, then that’s fine.”

I grab him by the shoulders and stare him straight in the eyes. Or as straight as I can; I’m seeing double. “I will answer every last question. I promise.”