“Hospital, young man,” said the driver, concern in his voice.
Clarence struggled to get his crutches under his arms.
“No need. I’ve sent someone in to get you a wheelchair.” He placed his hand on Clarence’s shoulder. “You don’t look good.”
A nurse appeared at the trolley door and helped Clarence into the wheelchair.
“I’ll take him to emergency,” said the nurse. “We can evaluate him there.”
“No,” said Clarence. The trolley driver wrung his hands. Passengers crowded at the windows. A little girl holding a book waved at him through the glass. Clarence waved back weakly. “I need to go to the polio ward. I need to get to the iron lung.”
The nurse started pushing him up the sidewalk toward the ramp. “You have polio? Are you experiencing breathing difficulty?” She sounded businesslike.
Clarence relaxed his head against the back of the wheelchair. He rested his hand on the quarter eagle in his pants pocket, its shape a solid comfort. “I’m not sick. I’m visiting. I want to see it.”
“You look sick.” The nurse walked beside him as they rose up the ramp and into the hospital’s entrance way.
“Honest, I’m okay. I think I probably tried to do too much today. My legs hurt a little,” he lied, “but I really want to see the polio ward.”
He rolled into an elevator.
“There’s someone in the iron lung already,” she said.
Lights flicked beside each floor as the elevator went up. Clarence had never been in an elevator before. “I know. Sean Garrison. He was in the paper. How is he doing?”
“You’re really not sick?” She looked down at him doubtfully. “If you’re not, you’re the sorriest looking healthy boy I’ve ever seen.”
“I walked to the trolley all by myself.”
“Hmmm.” The elevator stopped and the doors opened. “I hope you don’t mind if I have a doctor check you anyway, and we need to talk to your parents.”
Forty beds separated by light green curtains filled the polio ward. At some, family members sat by the wan children. Antiseptic smells filled the air.
She wheeled him into a broad hallway, and then into a room where a large steel canister dominated the middle. A compressor whirred under the device, stopped, shifted, then whirred again with a lighter tone. Clarence knew the machine was switching back and forth between exhaling and inhaling. A dark-haired boy lay face up, only his head outside of the iron lung, looking at him blankly through a mirror positioned above his face. Grief lines marked his face. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed. Clarence had never seen anyone so sad. A long window in the metal showed his arms and chest, while another showed his legs. Two rubber-lined holes permitted doctors to reach in to rearrange the patient if necessary, but the only way to actually touch him would be to undo the heavy clasps that locked the head end to the rest of the machine.
Clarence pushed the top of the wheels to move closer. “Hi, I’m Clarence.”
In the background, the motor clicked. “I’m sick,” whispered the boy, and Clarence knew that he could only whisper because the power to speak came from the machine compression. He could talk when the iron lung made him exhale. Putting his hand on his own chest, Clarence tried to imagine being inside the canister.
The motor cycled several times. Clarence looked at Sean’s reflection in the mirror. Sean looked back.
“Would you like to see a magic trick?” said Clarence.
The motor whirred.
Sean’s voice was a falling leaf. “No.”
“I’ll show you anyway.” The 1910 quarter eagle came out of Clarence’s pocket. In the sterile hospital light, its gold glowed. He did knuckle rolls for Sean. He did false drops and sleight of hand passes, showing the coin and then vanishing it. He stacked the gold coin with the three dimes he had left, hid them under a tissue, then asked Sean where the coin was, top, bottom or middle. Wherever Sean said it was, when Clarence uncovered the coins, there it was.
Two more nurses came into the room, watching Clarence go through his repertoire. They clapped when the coins reappeared in unexpected places.
“Magic is about perception,” said Clarence, leaning close to Sean. Sitting in his wheelchair, his head was on the same level. “What we perceive is our reality. If you think you are hungry, then you find food. If you think you are cold, you shiver.” Clarence paused. He thought about Professor Gilded on his stage talking to an audience. What happened that night when the horse turned into bones? How did Gilded perceive it? Did the animal shimmer before the flesh dissolved? Clarence flourished the quarter eagle. Sean watched, his eyes dark and intent.
“Now I’ll show you a trick that will amaze you. I don’t even know if I can do it, but I’ll try. Are you ready?”
Sean nodded, mostly with his eyes.
The nurses leaned in.
Clarence clasped the coin in his right hand hard enough that he could feel the ribbed edge marking his palm. He let his thoughts drift from it, so that he was both holding the coin and not holding it. Forced distraction, but to himself, not his audience. He thought about war news and Pepsodent and Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. Instead of the coin, he imagined the Edison’s polished wood tuning knob in his fingers as he slowly turned from station to station, of how delicious the sound tasted late at night when his parents had gone to bed and the search for voices made the time flee. Clarence thought about magic. He thought about “take a card, any card” and “abracadabra” and “there’s nothing up my sleeve.” There were illusions and tricks, and then there was magic. There was a horse that was there and not there. Perception made it real. Perception ruled.
When he opened his hand, the coin was gone.
One of the nurses sighed, disappointed. After all the other tricks Clarence had done, this one must have seemed anticlimactic.
Clarence smiled. He said to Sean, “The coin is gone. Do you know where it is?”
Sean waited until the machine reversed so he could speak. “Is it…” The motor clicked. He inhaled. It flipped into the exhalation cycle. “… in my hand?”
“What?” said a nurse. She stepped to the side of the iron lung to look through the window. “Oh, my gosh.” The other two nurses crowded around her. “He’s got it in his hand! How did the coin get in there?”
Clarence touched Sean’s forehead. “A friend of mine told me the world is a dark, dark place, if we see it that way, and if we’ve got any magic, we should share it.”
Sean waited for the machine to give him the air. “Okay.”
“You need to get better. Someone else might need that iron lung.”
“I will.”
Clarence shifted in his wheelchair. One of the braces clanked against the chair’s metal frame, and he realized his legs didn’t hurt as badly as they had on the trolley. He’d barely thought of them while he did the magic. The thought made him happy.
The nurses were still marveling about the coin. Clarence could see it through the window in the paralyzed boy’s hand.
Slowly, Sean’s fingers closed over it.
WHERE DID YOU COME FROM?
WHERE DID YOU GO?
Monday started bizarre. At the bus stop, the sun rose like a diseased orange, dark and ruddy at the bottom and a sick yellow at the top. “It’s the fires in California,” said someone as we shivered in the October cold, but it looked like an omen to me. I shouldn’t have worn a skirt.
The bus arrived late. A little girl who’d missed her ride to the elementary school sat in my seat. I asked her to move. She said, “Who do you think you are?” I had to sit on the other side and watch houses slide by I’d never watched before. At the high school, scraps of paper and an empty milk carton littered the hallway by my locker. The janitors must have taken the weekend off. My locker combination didn’t work the first three times, and then it did. In the meantime, kids walked back and forth behind me, headed to their rooms. I didn’t catch what anyone said, and what I did hear sounded foreign.