Geoffrey Zinken, born magician.

Geoffrey Zinken was born a magician. During baseball practice he would shag balls like the rest of us, but rather than throw them back to the coach he would collect them so he could practice juggling. Once, during an actual game, he caught a fly ball and when he threw it back to the infield we all stood slack jawed as a dove fluttered away. At first the off white bundle traced the arc the ball should have before suddenly spreading its wings and veering toward a windbreak of trees. While we squinted, Geoffrey took a bow. 

The neighborhood boys hung out at the park all summer long playing boyish games like two-hand touch football or tag but Geoffrey did not usually join us. He preferred the library until his library card was revoked amid a swirl of rumors, which Geoffrey allowed to be embellished by his silence on the matter. If he did join us, he always made a show of asking questions about whatever it was we were playing.

“So you just hide the flag in the same place? Every time?”

“How do you choose the teams? Really?”

His curiosity about the tacit rules of boyhood made us vulnerable to his own inscrutable  machinations. Invariably we moved on from whatever had been occupying us to a game of his own invention. He preferred games similar to our standard versions of hide-and-seek or capture the flag except he developed them further with elaborate rules and extraordinary boundaries.

Once, after arriving at the park with an old khaki rucksack full of hand drawn maps. We stared at the soiled paper, the edges of which he had burned to appear older, and recognized a scaled version of our park with archaic symbols and some type of script he had invented.  He divided us into groups of Natives, Savages and Pilgrims. Through a bit of self-aggrandizement and obfuscation Geoffrey convinced us that his role was to be some type of solitary explorer new to our country. Our country was the park. It was all very confusing, but we went along with him because he seemed so certain of an enjoyable outcome, even enlightenment. And at it its root, the game appeared to just be hide and seek. We scattered into the farthest reaches of the park and hid.

After what seemed like hours of hiding and having discerned no attempt at exploration by Geoffrey, we emerged from the trees and bushes and the culver that bifurcated our park, only to find Geoffrey altogether engaged in a different game. There he was at one of the picnic areas talking to Heather Prophet and Melanie Isnardi. The girls wore swimsuits and had towels wrapped around their waists. 

I’d never seen anyone use the picnic areas. The tables had been carved into by teenagers, and the dirty barbecue grills were littered with their cigarette butts and bottle caps. Nevertheless, there was Geoffrey with not one but two of the prettiest girls any of us knew. The pair, the most popular and discerning at our junior high, sipped lemonade from a glass I knew belonged to my mother’s picnic basket. The table had been set with plates and a tablecloth set. My own family had never used any of this. My family did not picnic, but I suddenly remember Geofrey asking about the oversized straw basket lined with gingham fabric. 

Geoffrey was preparing lunch for four, replete with folded cards that indicated assigned seating just like I had seen once at my aunt’s wedding. Melaine and Heather were two, and Geoffrey was the third, but the rest of us boys would have been at least ten.

But Geoffrey did not seem to notice us as we returned from our separate corners of the park where we had been waiting for him to find us; instead, he was turning chicken with a pair of tongs while talking to the two girls. The only reminder that he had contrived a spectacular game of hide and seek wherein he was some type of great explorer was the hat he wore. He presided over his lunch date under a ridiculous tricorne hat that had been fashioned from what was likely one of my mother’s linen napkins, and around the table her other napkins had been folded into swans.

“Can you make me a hat?” One of the girls giggled.

“You’re not an explorer?”

“Please, Geoffrey!”

“Then, as I said earlier, put a swan on the grill. I hate chicken.” 

“You wouldn’t!” the two girls shrieked as though appalled, flirting. Pretending to protect each swan behind their backs, the girls let Geoffrey reach around them and be close to them in ways the rest of us were unprepared to be.

“I would.”

We were left to watch this spectacle, and arriving first, I had the best seat.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“The best barbecued chicken you will ever have.” Geoffrey answered. “And if Heather chooses, my specialty: roast swan.”

“No, I mean… Is this?” Neither Melanie nor Heather seemed to even notice me, but I noticed them. Their hair was still wet, and their backs and shoulders were criss-crossed by tanlines from other swimsuits I longed to see them in. They smelled like coconut and chlorine, and the whole scene smelled someone else’s perfect summer.

“Find your seat,” Geoffery entreated, a perfect polite host. “Lemonade?”

“Sure.” I wandered around slowly hoping to find that my name was on the fourth card.

“Ladies, pour my friend a lemonade, please?” Geoffery asked, as if I were a stranger to my classmates of the last seven years. “And girls, we better get that swan on the grill. We have company.” He pointed at the other boys who were slowly beginning to surround the picnic area. The expressions on their faces, I hoped, are surely unlike the expression I wore.

Once again the two girls played this other game of Geoffrey’s invention, this flirting. They hid their swans from him but showed him everything the rest of us dreamed of having. He clapped the grilling tongs wickedly as if he were going to pinch them and when they ran to get away they dropped their towels revealing their long tan legs and mismatched bikini bottoms. In this way, they chased each other around me while further out, around us all, was the circle of neighborhood boys. 

Those boys just stopped and watched, but I was stuck in the middle, unable to look at anything else but the improbable scene.

I made my way around the table settings to the fourth and final seat when Geoffrey sidled up and put his arm around me. The little namecard on the plate had two small words written in elaborate calligraphy.

“You’re It!” 

I cannot remember which girl did it, but one of them placed a tall conical hat on my head. It was folded from the same linen as their swans and Geoffrey’s tricorne. I felt blood rush to my head as the girls screamed in delight, jumping up and down in feet as beautiful and bare as my shame. I watched their twenty toes bounce off the ground, each painted a beautiful shade of the pool water from which they had been summoned.

* * *

By the time we were in high school, Geoffery had moved past games, including baseball and his complicated versions of hide and seek. He managed As and Bs in all his classes despite spotty attendance and late homework. He spent a semester abroad on an exchange and when he returned he told us nothing about where he had been, but he peppered us with questions about the girl from Belarus who had taken his place.

“Were you in Belarus?” We asked him, but he never answered our questions. He did not evade them either. Rather than inform us about what we wanted to know about, he managed to find some other interest that we had not known about until he explained to us its allure.

“You don’t really fly over the Atlantic Ocean,” he began, “as you fly along it, into and out of the North Sea.” 

Before our senior year, he surprised us all when he ran for student government as one of two Rally Chairpersons. This was typically a position filled by a cheerleader or a football player, so we were shocked to hear he was running.  

“It’s that of a court jester, really.” He told us.

Candidates for that post followed those for President, Vice President, Secretary and Treasurer when it was time for the school to file into the gym and listen to campaign speeches. Geoffrey was last, of course. Zinken. He wore a scarf of school colors, a decision that ran contrary to every indifference he had ever expressed about our school spirit, but the out of season accessory nevertheless distinguished him amidst a sea of crimson and gold.

Approaching the microphone, he unwound the scarf, eventually revealing a pair of knitting needles tucked into the unfinished end that had been hidden, and he began to knit. At first he knitted in such a way that seemed to show he knew nothing about knitting whatsoever, and he even dropped the bundled yarn.

When he collected the scarf I noticed that his fingernails were painted, but not in school colors, not in crimson and gold. They were perfectly painted without streaks or chips and the color clashed against the colors of the scarf. 

“Sorry.” He said into the microphone as he picked up the unfurled scarf, a good length still resting on the hardwood floor.

Then he began knitting furiously. His brow furrowed and his fingers seemed to whir. The entire student body wondered in silence what this could be about, and we watched as the scoreboard timer ticked down the three minutes his speech had been allotted. 

He dropped the scarf again. This time in disgust, which was matched with a few boos and snickers from kids who knew nothing of Geoffery’s powers.

He scanned the gym for the perpetrators.

“Come on Potter!” someone yelled.

From the pile of scarf and yarn he removed a single sewing needle, and with it he pulled at the shoulder seam of his sweater. After a bit of careful tugging, the sleeve fell to the floor and rested there like the shedded skin of some reptile.

He extended his naked arm as if to salute us, but then he turned his palm upwards so that we could all see the bicep flatten and stretch to reveal a long thin dimple underneath where there was no muscle at all.

With his other hand he took the sewing needle and ran its pointed end along the soft pale dimple, back and forth slowly, until it suddenly and forcibly stopped as though by divination.

What followed was the greatest magic trick anyone in that gym ever saw. Geoffrey concentrated on the needle for direction. Then his face calmed. He looked down at the point where his flesh met the needle and twisted it as though tightening a screw. Satisfied, Geoffrey moved the same hand that held the needle along the shaft to its opposite end, and in front of us he slowly pushed the needle into, and eventually through, his arm.

No one said a word, but the timer on the scoreboard ceased ticking down toward zero, but instead began counting down to the moment when the tip of the needle would re-emerge.

The principal rushed from his place along the wall opposite our magician through the middle of the quiet gym cutting through everyone’s gaze as steadily as the needle worked through Geoffrey’s arm.

“Geoffrey,” he demanded sternly. “Please tell me this is another of your magic tricks.”

As the timer went to zero Geoffrey made one final push on the needle, and turned his palm downward so that everyone could see his magic. 

“I made everyone be quiet and look at me, abbra cadabra.” He replied.

By a landslide, Geoffrey was elected Class President having collected a majority of votes by write-in. When this was announced, Heather Prophet and Melanie Isnardi laughed out loud and stomped their feet and I remembered then the color of their toenails that day and I could not think about anything else besides where I had never been.