Nicola Barker - Clear - A Transparent Novel

What makes us so angry (we puffed-up, sensitive, Western ticks ) is seeing all the aspirations of capitalism degraded by the man who has pretty much everything (this young, handsome, charming, intelligent, multi- multi millionaire). He has it all- everything we yearn for- and yet he casts it casually, haughtily- publicly - aside…

Well , for the princely sum of five million dollars…

The ultimate Capitalist gesture of Anti -Capitalism.

No wonder we’re so pissed off.

He’s magnificently lit. Blaine . I ponder this fact as I turn my light off.

At night you can see his bright little glass pod from miles around. In ‘A Hunger Artist’ Kafka says how the Artist loves to have the full glare of artificial light upon him. The Impresario actually provides especially enthusiastic ‘watchers’ with pocket torches so that at night they can shine them full in his face as he tries to rest.

And the Artist welcomes this. Screw sleep! He loves the light. He wants everything to be seen. He wants the light — he needs the light — to dispel all doubt.

Blaine is also lit — day and night — for TV. I’m not certain how he feels about it. But I suppose this masochistic urge to be focused upon is all very much part and parcel of the modern idea of celebrity. Why else would they call it ‘the limelight’?

The light brings truth and it brings validation (‘If everybody wants to look so badly,’ the tragically hounded yet horribly insecure star reasons, ‘I must be worth looking at…’).

The light also brings moths. And mosquitoes. And all manner of other pests.

But that’s just the arse-end of showbusiness, I guess.

Can’t sleep.

I lie in bed, shivering, my mind infested by the Kafka. To temporarily distract myself, I try and remember Blaine’s TV shows. I half-recollect seeing them — ages ago now — the one with the pole-standing stunt and the one when he was packed up in ice. The stunts (so far as I can recollect) were interspersed with Blaine wandering around the place, just doing his tricks.

He had this one scam with a discarded beer can: approached a couple in a park (lying on their picnic blanket), picked up this spent beer can next to where they were sitting (was it their can? Or his can?), tipped it up (it was empty) then ran his hand over the ring-pull so it looked — for all the world — like he’d resealed it (how he do dat?). Then he opened the can again and started pouring. Beer spills out in apparent abundance. He even offers the can to the blanket man so that he can drink some, and he does.

Right .

So it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how that particular trick worked…Some kind of tiny, sliding door inside the can which — when you tip it a particular way — latches back and allows a portion of beer — previously trapped in the can’s bottom, to pour forth.

Then there was a trick with a pigeon, a dead pigeon. Blaine (apparently arbitrarily) attracts the attention of a passing eccentric (this oldish guy, walking about the place, ‘exercising’ his pet budgerigar on his shoulder) and shows him this pigeon lying dead in a patch of sun…

I open my eyes in the dark

Yeah like your average New Yorker is gonna be so incredibly distressed by the premature demise of a ‘Rat o’ the Air’.

Anyhow, Blaine holds his hand over the bird (like a Healer, if I remember correctly) and after a short while it stirs, then it stands up, then it flies. Apparently (if my investigations on the internet are anything to go by) he does the same trick with a fly (maybe the fly was just a dry-run for something bigger).

This prank is all about timing, the way I’m seeing it, and refrigeration. The only thing that’ll simulate death in any sentient creature is the cold. So Blaine sticks some godforsaken pigeon into a refrigerator until it passes out, calculates the time it’ll take for it to come back to again, then engineers the entire ‘meeting’ to take place at the exact midway point in this process — keeps the guy talking for as long as he thinks he needs to etc.

I presume his ‘team’ will’ve picked on this guy for a reason. He probably exercises his bird at the same time in that park every day. He obviously likes birds, maybe he feeds the pigeons or something — I mean this trick is hardly gonna work out so well if Blaine randomly picks on some passing neurotic female who happens to think pigeons are a pest — has 3,000 of the fuckers ruining the masonry on her building, shitting everywhere etc. or is phobic about them (just imagine, he calls her over, shows her the dead bird — a cause, in her mind, for righteous celebration — and then brings this vile creature straight back to life again. Good God . I see a major lawsuit pending).

I clearly remember him doing a load of tricks on kids, and one particularly bad one where he takes this young boy’s penknife and sticks it — with much oohing and aaahing —through his tongue.

The kid isn’t entertained. He’s absolutely fucking horrified .

And Blaine? Totally delighted. Eyes shining. Feeding on his disquiet. Smiling crazily. Eating it up.

Now I don’t want to come over all Mary Whitehouse (and if I do, and it creeps you out, then just bear in mind the traumatic legacy of Douglas Sinclair MacKenny, Post Officer extraordinaire ), but wasn’t that tongue-stabbing thing just a little bit too much? Kids are suggestible, and that makes them vulnerable. So maybe (and I have to give the guy a fair go , I suppose) Blaine showed the boy how he’d done the trick, afterwards, to make sure he wasn’t utterly fucked-up by it.

Maybe.

( How’d he do it, anyway? Has he got a pierced tongue? Was it an optical illusion?)

His public manner (magic-wise) — now I come to think about it — is not at all what you might expect. In interviews he can be difficult (unhelpful, sarcastic, slow, monosyllabic — that’s all part of his mystique) but on the TV shows he’s almost sycophantic. He really wants to please. He actively seeks approval. And he’s clumsy . Most of the tricks depend on him distracting the attention of the trickee for a second, so he drops an object or stumbles. Then he repeatedly apologises (another distraction, you fucking moron, so stop saying ‘that’s okay’, and start looking at what he’s doing …).

He’s not a scary magician. He’s a friendly one. He smiles a lot. He maintains plenty of eye contact (can’t be shifty, can’t look down, can’t seem uncertain…)

Shit .

(My own eyes fly open again.)

I suddenly remember how he did this whole section on one of the shows from Haiti (or somewhere), a place where magic isn’t just a beguiling branch of the entertainment industry, but a fundamental part of the culture — a religion —and he’s doing all these tricks for these people who plainly think he’s the Devil (or at the very least, the Devil’s proxy — his American catspaw). And they’re scared. Really scared. And — at points— he seems a little scared (by the fear he’s generating). Man . That was so… Uh …

A second later — I remember how, in another episode, he went into the South American rainforest and met this tribe of primitive people and did a bunch of tricks for them. In the commentary he’s going, ‘They could quite easily kill us if they get at all frightened or suspicious…’, then the next thing we see is Blaine on his knees in front of a pack of rainforest children , cutting circles with a knife into the flesh of his hand, then telling one of the kids to open up his hand, where he sees — to his palpable horror — that he has the exact-same blood-mark etched into his own tiny palm.