The magician is tearing apart his napkin, balling the fragments in his hands. “Need a napkin?”
“I’ve got one, thanks,” Reese says before realizing that his napkin is no longer on his tray.
The magician opens his hand, revealing the shredded napkin whole again. “I’m working on this nail routine, it’s kind of like Houdini’s Needle Trick. He’d swallow, like, dozens of needles then regurgitate them with all the needles threaded.”
Reese peers over the rows of heads in front to see his family. Before takeoff, he managed to hover near them. Roberta had little to say to him, but Clara waved the colouring book the pregnant flight attendant had given her. “Look, Daddy, dinosaurs!” Derek, twitching despite the Ritalin, was absorbed in his Game Boy.
“So my nail act,” the magician says, “is like the Needle Trick except that instead of needles I use nails, and instead of swallowing them, I hammer them up my nose.”
Clara was the first to spot him. “That’s the magician!” she shouted. “You are so lucky, Daddy! You get to sit beside the magician!”
On the ship, Reese had avoided him by remaining on the pool deck, but now, with their arms frequently touching on the arm-rest, interaction has become inevitable.
“I’m into the classic illusions,” the magician explains. “None of that laser crap Ernesto’s been doing. Magic’s gotten way too safe. You don’t see guys in straitjackets dangling from their ankles over major intersections anymore. You don’t see guys handcuffed, bagged, crated, and dumped into rivers. Nothing but wussies out there.”
Reese smiles politely and glances past the passenger in the window seat who, prior to takeoff, had been speaking heatedly into his cellphone in another language, guttural but unidentifiable. “H’what’s your problem?” the man demands. He has an abundance of nose hair.
“I was just trying to look out the window,” Reese explains.
“H’what, you never seen sky before?”
The pregnant flight attendant appears to collect their trays. The nose-haired man calls her “sweetcakes” and orders more rum and Coke.
Reese assures himself that it was a successful vacation. He and Roberta didn’t fight, and the children were occupied with the Kid’s Club, which freed their parents. He slouched on various deck chairs, focusing on his bird books to stop contemplating the effect twenty-five hundred passengers defecating into the ocean was having on the fish below.
Inside their cabin, Reese refrained from voicing his concerns regarding the lack of any windows and their dependency on a ventilation system and elevators. He had come on the cruise to show he could be positive — to prove Roberta wrong. He knew that this was his last chance. Even Greenpeace had called him negative. “You’ve changed,” they said, just before they fired him.
“I’m older,” he replied.
There had been complaints about his “leadership skills.” When people did stupid things, he told them so.
On the cruise, to his amazement, he was able to behave like a man on vacation, even attending a Fine Arts Auction where he was shown “some of the most beautiful artwork produced in the last century.” He put his name in a box and won, yes, actually won, a Chagall print said to be worth a thousand dollars.
“That’s a lithograph,” Roberta told him.
“They say it’s a limited edition. They say it’s worth a thousand dollars.”
“Puh-lease.”
Derek and Clara took the upper bunks, Reese and Roberta the lower. It was really quite jolly, Reese thought. The lower bunks came with a slide-together option, but Reese and Roberta hadn’t slept together since the separation. The cruise was for the children, particularly Clara, who’d longed for them to be “a family” again. They ate spring rolls and fruit kebabs from the buffet, played minigolf, swam, and watched first-run movies in the movie theatre. Movies overwrought with sentimentality, violence, and the promotion of material gain that, under normal circumstances, Reese would not permit his children to see. But mid-Atlantic, in a stadium-sized boat rigged with stabilizers to free passengers of any sensation of being ocean-borne, the movies seemed appropriate. He enjoyed the popcorn and being in close proximity with his children and even agreed to go dancing, performing the Tush-Push and the Achy-Breaky at the Country Western Party. Roberta, energized from Pilates classes, hot tubs, and foot massages, insisted on attending the Tropical Island Night deck party where she took first place in the limbo contest. Reese joined the Martini Club, which served exclusive designer martinis in ten-ounce martini glasses. He played mystery and trivia games with an oil rig industrial safety consultant and an MP from Alberta who wore a cowboy hat. Not once did Reese mention environmental degradation. Roberta cannot complain.
Although, he almost threw a banana peel into the ocean where surely a seagull or some sea creature would eat it. But no, he pushed the banana peel into the chrome trash bin by the elevators. Yes, he has behaved well. And what joy to sit with his family again, particularly last night in Le Bistro. Derek performed his eating eyeball trick, which he hadn’t done for months, and when Reese hugged him he didn’t recoil. Clara performed her raising-eyebrows-while-wiggling-ears stunt, and Reese, because his children demanded it, did his Porky-Pig-buzzed-on-Smarties impression. Roberta was laughing, actually laughing the way she’d laughed before the children were born, when Reese would take her for bike rides, standing on the pedals while she sat on the seat gripping his waist, her long legs stretched out for balance. Only once, in the rain, did they skid into some shrubbery, and even then Roberta laughed. So why hadn’t she laughed until their last night on the cruise? Was it because Reese refused to go to the Sock Hop where rumour had it “Elvis” was going to make an appearance? Would it have been different if Reese agreed to attend “Band on the Run,” a musical extravaganza featuring music from the sixties, seventies, and eighties? “You don’t even like rock,” Reese protested.
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“The point is we’re trying to break patterns, try something different.”
Is that what we’re doing?
He endured all of it, the Beatles, the Bee Gees, the Stones, the Eagles, Pink Floyd, Creedence Clearwater Revival. Yes, he has behaved well.
The nose-haired man nudges him and signals that he needs to get up. Reese and the magician stand in the aisle while the nose-haired man, off-gassing rum, stumbles towards the toilets. As he squeezes past the pregnant flight attendant collecting garbage, he cups his hands over her buttocks. “’xcuse me,” he says, “so sorry.” Reese expects the flight attendant to draw attention to this sexual harassment but she only reddens. Since takeoff Reese has felt some concern about her fetus, how it is coping with the changes in cabin pressure. Elevated body temperature due to sexual harassment can only add stress to the unborn. Fetuses, he believes, experience all. Nothing can be hidden from them. When they’re forced into Earth’s atmosphere, they have supreme knowledge and an awareness that is systematically blunted by human conditioning. They cry out when they are born because they know.
“The bottom line is,” the magician states, applying lip balm, “it’s one big schmooze fest. That guy Cooney, he’s, like, Copperfield’s bum boy. That’s how he got the three tours in the Middle East. Plus, get this, eight winter seasons as head of entertainment at Santa Claus’ Village in Lapland.”
At the very least, Reese thinks, Roberta will allow him to visit the house and garden again, now that he’s proved that he is capable of behaving like a contented