I never saw New Orleans before Katrina. By the time I had dropped out of art school and followed my then-girlfriend to Louisiana, it had already had several years to recover from the damage that the hurricane had caused, though most people said it still had a long way to go. Crime, buildings that still needed to be torn down or rebuilt, toxic mold…I was always told New Orleans was still a ghost of what it had been before.
That may have been, but I still loved it. I’d been nervous about setting up as a street artist—I’d do caricatures and try to sell some of my real art on the side while my girlfriend set up nearby selling handmade jewelry and doing palm readings. I figured we’d starve, or someone would run us off as soon as we tried to set up, but it wasn’t like that. There were hard times, sure, but overall we had a good time and made enough to get by. Even when we split up and she moved back to Michigan, I stayed. I’d made a life there, and I loved the city and my friends there more than any I’d ever known.
My best friends were a married couple that were street performers themselves. Peter and Magda had come over and introduced themselves not long after we came to town four years earlier. They tended to work the same part of the French Quarter we did—him doing street magic and her reading tarot.
Peter was a bit of a surly asshole, but Magda made up for it by being really sweet and kind. And to be fair, from the start both of them helped us figure out the unwritten rules of street work. The places you didn’t go, the things you didn’t do. What could get you hassle from the cops or the dealers or the gangs. What could make you extra money if you were smart, and what could get you robbed or killed if you were stupid.
When I was single again, I took to hanging out with them more, and over time I’d gotten used to Peter’s weird mood swings. He wasn’t a bad guy, he just had a lot of anger. He’d get pissed off and fixated on random shit once in a while, but if you ignored it, he’d usually drop it after a day or two. So when he started ranting about a new magician in the Quarter, I didn’t pay that much attention at first. By the end of the next week though, I was starting to get concerned. We were all sitting in the park one day eating lunch when I asked him what the big deal was. When Peter turned, he reminded me of a gargoyle, his shaved head gleaming in the afternoon sun as he scowled angrily in my direction.
“What’s the big fuckin’ deal? The big fuckin’ deal numbah one is that that it’s money out of our pockets, innit? The big fuckin’ deal numbah two is that he’s a fuckin’ ponce who thinks he’s our better.” Magda was already shaking her head and touching his arm, but Peter shook her off with a withering glare. “No, our friend here wanted to know what the big fuckin’ deal was. So I’m just educating him.” He turned back to me. “He comes in here, setting up just two blocks away from us. Stealing our customers with his flashy bullshit.”
I was torn between being confused and irritated. “What’s he doing exactly? Is he a bad magician or something?”
I thought acting like I gave a shit might calm Peter down some, but my question only seemed to make him angrier. He glanced back at Magda with another hard look. “I guess it depends on who you ask, right? I think he’s a cheap fuck, right? He’s using money and gadgets instead of skill. Some bullshit like he’s in Las fuckin’ Vegas instead of in the fuckin’ Quarter. All the tourists think it’s great, o’ course.” He spat idly. “What the fuck do they know, right? But he’s down here on a fuckin’ lark with his…whatever he’s got…when he don’t haveta be. While people like us scrabble and suffer.” With that, Peter trailed off into a morose silence. When I looked questioningly at Magda, she smiled and rolled her eyes a little as she patted Peter’s head.
“He’s a good magician. Been around a couple of weeks, keeps to himself mostly. We went over once we noticed him and watched his act for a few minutes. It’s really good stuff…” She paused as she felt Peter tense under her hand. “Different than what we do, but still, it’s good. I don’t know nearly as much about the magic stuff as Pete, but I know some, and I haven’t been able to spot how he’s doing any of the tricks, even close up.”
Peter raised his head again. “He’s slick enough, I’ll give him that. I’ve been back over a few times. Watching for the cracks and the tells. His tricks don’t got no angles. No plants in the audience either that I can tell. I haven’t seen him use a pull, a slide, a m5 or even a palm, even though he should be using all that. And I can’t see where he’s hiding anything either. He just uses a little wooden table, and…well, I checked it one day when he was off taking a piss. It’s…” Magda jabbed him in the ribs.
“You did fucking what? You don’t mess with other people’s shit, Pete. Especially magicians. You taught me that.”
He winced and looked sheepish. “I’m sorry, babe. I know. I just wanted to know. I don’t get how he’s doing what he does and it pisses me right off. He’s a fuckin’ tosser, right?” He snorted and shook his head. “Fuckin’ shut-eye.” I looked at him and then Magda in confusion. Shooting a last glare at Peter, she nodded to me.
“A shut-eye is what magicians call someone who believes their shit is real. They get so good, or they get so fucked up, that they think they’re doing real magic instead of tricks and illusions.”
Peter glanced at me apologetically. “Sorry, mate. Don’t mean to be an arse. Just been making me a bit mental. I’ll leave off.”
And for awhile, he did. I’d never seen the other magician except at a distance, and despite Peter’s complaints, he’d never really set up that close to the areas we frequented anyway. I guess that’s how I’d half-forgotten he even existed until one day when I cut over a street and saw a tall man standing behind a small, black wooden table in one of the small courtyards as I passed. Realizing who it must be, I decided to watch for a bit.
There was a crowd gathered already, watching intently as the man appeared to pull a small ball of fire out from behind a little girl’s ear. She let out a delighted shriek and recoiled, her mother wrapping a protective arm around her as though afraid her child might get burned. But the fire was between his hands now, slowly rolling back and forth between the magician’s fingers like it was a small red balloon instead of a tiny star of heat and light.
I stood at the edge of the crowd for the next half hour or so, increasingly amazed as I watched him move tirelessly from miracle to miracle. He played with tarot cards, read people’s minds, floated objects out of a man’s pocket and a woman’s purse in clear view of everyone. But the most incredible thing was when he asked a little boy what his favorite animal was. When he said elephant, the man simply nodded and asked five people in the crowd to give him a small object they didn’t mind parting with for good. Three gave coins, another gave a hair clip, and the last gave a broken pair of sunglasses. He somehow took that and made it into a tiny junkyard elephant in a matter of moments. It wasn’t a trick or a swap out. His hands had blurred as he shaped the disparate items together, but when he was done, I could still see the pieces of a quarter, the rubber earpiece of the sunglasses, the black metal of the hair clip. That was amazing enough, but then he told the little boy that before he gave it to him, he wanted to show him a secret. To let him know that he didn’t just have a pile of junk, but something that really was an elephant, at least in its heart.
The magician cupped his hands around the small elephant sculpture for a moment, obscuring it except for a hole at the top. Putting his mouth to the opening his cupped hands had left, he breathed in twice before lifting his hands and stepping back.
There was a tiny, living elephant on the table.
It wasn’t a trick, and everyone knew it. People gasped and then fell silent as they watched in amazement. The little elephant walked around on the table, looking at the audience and giving out a barely audible trumpet as it moved further down the line. After it completed two circuits, the man swept it back up in his hands and held it out to the boy—once again as a small, but remarkably accurate, sculpture.
It was then, as the wide-eyed boy took the sculpture and held it carefully, that people began to cheer and applaud. The man smiled, nodding humbly before moving on to the next bit of magic. A part of me wanted to stay and see more, but the twisting in my stomach forced me to step back and head out of the courtyard instead. It…it wasn’t right. What he was doing…I wasn’t some expert or anything, but it didn’t feel like a trick or an elaborate illusion. It felt like something alien, unnatural, antagonistic to my understanding of how things worked.
It felt like real magic.
I didn’t mention what I saw to Peter and Magda. I tried to forget it myself, but I couldn’t. Instead, I just made sure I avoided any trips to areas he was performing at. Live and let live and all that, but I didn’t want any part of whatever it was he was doing.
Unfortunately, Peter didn’t agree.
“That fucker is bleeding us dry.”
This was three nights later, and we were all hanging out drinking. I could tell Magda was just about done for the night, and I was ready to go home before I got too far gone, but Peter was still going hard, and the more he drank, the madder he got.
“I want to see what makes that fucker tick. I bet, I just fuckin’ bet, if I pushed him, he’d crumple like fuckin’ paper. Tell me how he does that shit. If I could pick up even one or two things…”He glanced over at Magda who had started to softly snore against him, “Just a couple of his big tricks, we’d be set. We wouldn’t have to scrabble and I could get some proper gigs from time to time.” He licked his lips. “You know, I asked around about him. Name’s Jeremy. He’s been squattin’ in an old house in the lower ninth. I bet if I caught him unawares, he’d give up all kinds of goodies.”
I didn’t want to start another argument or rant, so I just shook my head and stood up. “You’re drunk, man. Go to bed. That dude will get tired and move on like most of them do. And we’ll still be here kicking ass, right?”
He looked at me solemnly for a moment before nodding. “Yeah. We’ll still be right here.”
The next day, Peter and Magda were no-shows. I figured at first they were just sleeping it off, but when they didn’t answer my texts and didn’t show the following morning, I went over to check on them. My stomach sank when I saw their front door was partially open. Had someone robbed them? I needed to make sure that if they were in there, they were…
I saw as soon as I pushed the door open. Their bodies were stuck to the far wall of the living room somehow, a thick coating of what almost looked like webs holding them there. But as I stepped in, my eyes and mouth wide with horror, I saw it wasn’t webs. It was plastic and fabric and plaster from the wall itself, stretched over them in places, as though the apartment had started to eat them before thinking better of it. The parts of them I could still see were naked and unmarked, so I wasn’t sure if whatever had pulled them into the wall had killed them or if it was something else. But I could see clearly that they had felt it when it had come.
Their faces were both bare and clean except for what I mistook at first for a dusting of dirt or drywall. As I got closer, I saw it was neither, but fine pinprick clusters of something black…it looked like tiny black rocks were growing out of their pores in places. I would have been more bothered by it at the time, but I couldn’t get away from their eyes.
They were wide-open, frozen and staring as they screamed in silent agony. It was as though my best friends had been turned into monuments to pain and fear, and as I looked into their eyes, I tried to tell myself that they were gone. That they no longer suffered. That maybe this wasn’t even really them in the first place. It was a trick after all. That would justify this unnatural horror being able to exist. That would explain how their eyes had turned so black and shiny.
The police talked to me, of course. It was ruled an unsolved double homicide and quickly forgotten. And at first, I thought about looking into it myself. I asked around about Jeremy. Where he might have lived, where he’d gone to since Peter and Magda were murdered.
But then one day I woke up to find a small red box sitting next to my bed. When I opened it, there was a card laying on top of purple tissue paper wrapped around a small object. Taking out the card first, I read the four lines there.
You sought the truth
It sought you as well
Now hand in hand
You walk into hell
My hands shaking, I reached into the box and peeled back the tissue paper.
It was the little elephant.
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