“Yes. I suppose we are.”
“It actually might be better this way.”
“Yes.” I feel an unexpected spark of excitement at the thought. “It just might.”
Daymares
I find myself dozing on and off as we fly east. Eventually I wake to Amil’s voice telling us that we’re approaching Chicago’s Midway International Airport. The lights in the cabin, which have been low for the last few hours, are still dimmed, but he turns them up slightly.
Xavier is in the back of the plane snoring contentedly, but Charlene is across the aisle from me resting, her eyes closed. I’m not sure if she’s asleep.
She has a blanket pulled up to her chin, and I watch her for a moment, thinking about when I observed her in the Faraday cage earlier today. She’s as unaware now that I’m watching her as she was when I was viewing her on the video screen.
I feel like I’m intruding on her somewhat, admiring her like this, and just as I’m looking away she opens her eyes. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
She yawns. “So we’re almost to Chicago?”
“It looks like it, yes.”
She rubs her eyes and repositions herself in her seat so it’s easier for her to talk with me. “I guess we didn’t get a chance to connect with your father.”
The comment takes me back a bit. I hadn’t even thought of my dad since my conversation with her earlier in the day.
“When this is over, I’ll be in touch with him. I promise.”
“It might not be over for a while.”
I wasn’t exactly sure why it was so important to her that I talk with my dad, especially since she’d never brought it up before this week, but I figure she has her reasons, and right now I decide I’m not going to probe. “Give me a couple days. I’ll call him on Friday afternoon, okay? Even if we’re still caught up in the middle of all this.”
Another small yawn. “Fair enough.”
She closes her eyes again, snuggles up in the seat, and I wonder how awake she really was, if she’ll even remember our brief conversation later.
Far below us, the steady flow of cars accelerating, decelerating, pumping through the city streets looks like glowing blood cells passing through dark veins. The cars look so small, but obviously, their size and speed are distorted by distance and by the plane’s velocity.
It’s all about perspective.
Only by taking into consideration our current elevation and airspeed could a person calculate the actual size and speed of the cars. As my mentor in magic, Grayson DeVos, used to tell me, “Only perspective brings truth into focus. Where you stand when you look at the facts will determine how they appear. Never forget that when you design your show. The audience’s perspective is even more important than how well you execute the effect.”
Maybe that’s what we needed here.
Perspective.
Maybe you’re looking at all of this from the wrong angle entirely.
When you study illusions, you have to study the limits of memory to better understand short-term and long-term memory and how to use them to your advantage in a performance. Long ago I read about memories people have in which they see events not through their own eyes but as if they were hovering in a corner of the room watching the events take place.
Most people have them, often from traumatic incidents. In fact, they’re so common that neurological researchers have a name for them: observer memories.
I have one of them myself, from when I was nine and a group of half a dozen junior high — aged boys surrounded me. They began to drag me toward an old quarry that people had turned into a junkyard before it was filled with water to create a small lake for fishing and ice-skating on that otherwise neglected side of town.
No one dared swim in the lake because the bottom was still strewn with junk — bedsprings and broken glass and rusted car parts that were visible beneath the surface on the rare days when the lake was clear enough for you to see down more than a few inches.
It was a lake we all feared. But they dragged me toward it, and when I recall it now, it’s not from the point of view of a boy being pulled toward the water by the other boys, but from a distance, as if I’m watching it unfold from a perch in a nearby tree.
I can see the older boys laughing and I can see myself struggling to be free, crying out for them to let me go. Finally, at the water’s edge they shoved me to the side, into a stand of tall grass. Then they smiled at each other and patted me on the shoulder: It was just a joke. We were never gonna hurt you; we were just kidding around.
I ran home but never told my parents for fear that they would think I’d overreacted or, worse yet, been a coward.
And since then, when I remember that day, I don’t see the events through my own eyes, but as if I were watching it all happen from somewhere beyond myself.
Observer memories.
But how could they even be called memories when my mind was filling in the blanks, making up the details, viewing things from another, imaginary person’s point of view?
Observer memories are fictions that our minds tell us are true.
The same as optical illusions.
In magic we play people’s expectations against them. The observer’s mind fills in what he or she would expect to see rather than what’s actually being seen.
I notice that Charlene has her eyes open again. She’s watching me quietly. “You look deep in thought.”
“Just thinking about how our minds can do strange things, can convince us of things that aren’t real. Sometimes we see things that aren’t really there, sometimes we don’t see things that are. We’re all experts at fictionalizing the truth.”
For a moment she’s quiet. “There’s a legend that when Columbus was sailing toward the New World, none of the natives saw the boats, that the idea of the giant boats approaching was so foreign to their way of thinking that even though their eyes sent the signal to their brains, it didn’t register.”
“Not until they landed onshore, you mean?”
“Well, actually, while they were still out in the water, a shaman saw the ripples and was curious what was forming them. He stared at them, studied them, until eventually he saw the boats. When he told the villagers, they were shocked and at first didn’t see anything. But they all believed in him and eventually came to see for themselves that the ships were there. So the story goes.”
“So, it was their belief in him that helped them see the boats.”
“Yes.”
We begin our initial descent to the airport.
“Jevin, you’ve told me you have nightmares. About your boys. About Rachel in the van.”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever had one when you were awake?”
“You mean a hallucination?”
“A nightmare, but only you have it during the day.”
“No.” But there’s something in her tone, something beneath the words. Then I catch on. “But you have? Is that what you’re saying?”
“When I was a girl, a man killed three people in my neighborhood. Stabbed them. His wife, his daughter, then the woman who lived next door.”
I’d never heard this before. “That’s terrible.”
“I was eight at the time and I heard the sirens outside — you know, from the police. Someone from the neighborhood had called them. I was standing at our front window; I saw the man walking toward our house, right down the middle of the street, holding that knife in his left hand. It was still dripping blood.”
The plane banks and we slope down into the final descent.
“My parents had gone over to a neighbor’s house just down the block when it happened. I don’t remember exactly what they were doing or why they’d left me alone, but they didn’t make it home until it was over. The first police car came racing around the corner, but the man, Mr. Dailey, didn’t stop. He just kept walking directly up the driveway to my house. He must have seen me inside the window because he smiled and tipped the knife in my direction. I should have run, I suppose, or hidden in the closet or something, but I didn’t. I was just too terrified to move.”