Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"You like magic, eh?"

Tommy nodded. Joe reached into his pocket and took out a deck of playing cards. They were a French brand of cards called Petit Fou. Tommy had an identical deck at home, which he had bought at Louis Tannen's. The continental cards were smaller in size, and thus easier for small hands to manipulate. The kings and queens had a lowering, woodcut air of medieval chicanery, as if they were out to rob you with their curving swords and pikes. Joe slid the cards out of their gaudy box and handed them to Tommy.

"What can you do?" he said. "Can you do a pass?"

Tommy shook his head, feeling his cheeks grow warm. Somehow, his cousin had managed to cut directly to the center of Tommy's weakness as a card manipulator.

"I'm no good at them," he said, shuffling morosely through the deck. "Whenever it says in a trick that you need to make a pass, I just skip that one."

"Passes are hard," Joe said. "Well, easy to do. But not easy to do well."

This was far from news to Tommy, who had devoted two futile weeks at the beginning of the summer to the spread, the half, the fan, and the Charlier pass, among others, but never had been able to finesse the various halves and quarters of the deck quickly enough to prevent the central deception of any pass-the invisible transposition of two or more portions of the deck-from being patent even to the least discerning eye, in Tommy's case that of his mother, who, during his final attempt before he abandoned the pass once and for all in disgust, had rolled her eyes and said, "Well, sure, if you're going to switch the halves like that."

Joe lifted Tommy's right hand, examined the knuckles, turned it over, and studied the palm, scrutinizing it like a palmist.

"I know I need to learn it," Tommy began, "but I-"

"They are a waste of your time," Joe said, letting go of the hand. "Don't bother until your hands are bigger."

"What?"

"Let me show you this." He took the deck of cards, opened them into a smooth, many-pleated fan, and offered Tommy his choice of them. Tommy glanced instantaneously at the three of clubs, then poked it resolutely back into the deck. He was intent on the movements of Joe's long digits, determined to spot the pass when it came. Joe opened his hands, palm upward. The deck seemed to tumble in two neat sections from the left to the right, in the proper order, and as Joe's fingers rippled with magicianly flair, there was a baffling suggestion of a further tumble, so brief as to leave Tommy questioning whether he had imagined it or been fooled into seeing more than was there by the artful anemone flutter of his cousin's fingers and thumbs. It seemed, on balance, as though nothing at all had happened to the cards beyond a simple lazy transfer from left hand to right. Then Tommy was holding a card in his hands. He turned it over. It was the three of clubs.

"Hey," Tommy said. "Wow."

"Did you see it?"

Tommy shook his head.

"You didn't see the pass?"

"No!" Tommy could not help feeling slightly irritated.

"Ah," Joe said, with a faint bass hint of theatricality in his voice, "but there was no pass. That is the False Pass."

" 'The False Pass.' "

"Easy to do, not so very hard to do well."

"But I didn't-"

"You were watching my fingers. Don't watch my fingers. My fingers are liars. I have taught them to tell pretty lies."

Tommy liked this. There was a sharp yank on the cord that kept his impatient heart tethered in his chest.

Could you-?" Tommy began, then silenced himself, "ere," said Joe. He walked behind Tommy and stood over him, arms reaching around, the way Tommy's father had once done when showing him how to knot a necktie. He notched the deck into Tommy's left hand, arranging his fingers, then took him slowly through the four simple motions, a series of flips and half-turns, that were all one needed to get the bottom of the deck onto the top, with the dividing line between portions, naturally, being the chosen card, invisibly marked with the tip of the tip of the left pinky. He stood behind Tommy, watching him imitate the movements, the vapor of his breath billowing steadily and bitter with tobacco around Tommy's head as the boy struggled to produce the effect. After the sixth try, though it was sloppy and slow, he could already sense that, in the end, he was going to get hold of it. He felt a softening in his belly, a feeling of happiness that was hollowed, somehow, with a small, vacant pocket, at its center, of loss. He laid his head back against his cousin's flat stomach and looked up at his inverted face. Joe's eyes looked bewildered, regretful, troubled; but Tommy had once read in a book on optical illusions that all faces looked sad when viewed upside down.

"Thank you," Tommy said.

Cousin Joe took a step backward, away from him, and Tommy lost his step and nearly fell over. He caught himself and turned to face his cousin.

"You really do have to know how to do a pass," Cousin Joe said. "Even if it's only a false one."

The following Monday, Tommy went swimming at the Bloomtown Community Swimming Pool and Recreation Center, which had just reopened following a polio scare. When he came home on his bike, he found a letter waiting for him, in a long business envelope whose printed return address was Louis Tannen's Magic Shop. He did not often receive mail, and he felt his mother watching him as he opened it.

"They're offering you a job," she guessed. She stood by the kitchen counter, pencil poised over a grocery list that she was making out. Sometimes it took his mother as long as an hour and a half to compose a relatively simple shopping list. He had his father's stoical tendency toward bullet-biting, but his mother was never one to hasten a task that she despised. "Louis Tannen died and left you the shop in his will."

Tommy shook his head, unable to smile at her jokes. He was so excited that the sheet of foolscap, with its typed mishmash of grandiose and exotic terms, rattled in his hands. He knew that the letter was all part of the plan, but for an instant he forgot what the plan was. He was baffled with delight.

"So what is it?"

Boldly, his stomach twisting, Tommy thrust the sheet of paper toward her. She lifted to the bridge of her nose the reading glasses she wore on a silver chain around her neck. These were a recent development, one that his mother hated. She never actually settled the glasses onto her nose, but merely held them up before her eyes, as though she wanted to have as little to do with them as possible.

Garden of Blooming Silks? Empire of Pennies? Haunted Fountain en?" She squinted a little as she read the last word.

"Tricks," Tommy said, pulling the paper back from her lest she study it too closely. "It's a price list."

"I see that," she said, eyeing him. "Pen is spelled wrong. Two N's."

"Hmm," Tommy said.

"How many tricks do you need, honey? We just got you that demonic box of yours."

"I know," he said. "It's just for wishing."

"Well, wish away," she said, lowering the glasses once more. "But don't take your coat off. We're going to the A &P."

"May I please stay home? I'm old enough."

"Not today."

"Please."

He saw that she was probably going to accede-they had been experimenting lately with leaving him by himself-and that the only thing giving her pause was her detestation of grocery shopping.

"You're going to make me go into the heart of darkness alone?"

He nodded.

"You'll be all right?"

He nodded again, afraid that if he said anything more, he would somehow give it all away. She hesitated a moment longer, then shrugged one shoulder, picked up her purse, and went out.

He sat, holding the paper and envelope in his hands, until he heard the muttering of the Studebaker's engine and the scrape of its rear bumper as she backed out of the driveway. Then he got up. He got the scissors from the kitchen drawer, went to the kitchen cupboard, and took out a box of Post Toasties cereal. He saw that his mother, as she always did, had left without the grocery list. It was written, he noticed, on the back of a strip torn from a page of artwork-it looked like it might have been from Kiss -that she had given up on. A pretty blond girl hid behind an old beached rowboat, spying on something that was making her cry. It was probably her doctor boyfriend kissing her best friend the nurse, or something like that.