Lucie Faulerová

Translated from Czech by Alex Zucker

See the little choo-choo chugging down the track. Hear the whistle, toot toot toot, as it goes down and back. Hear the whistle, toot toot toot, as it goes down and back.

Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-ooo.

I watch the fields and meadows and woods and sky, or the fields and meadows and woods and sky are watching me, just like if you gaze too long into the abyss it gazes into you, or something like that, and I could tell you all about it, I could tell you about it right now even, while it’s passing by the windows and I don’t have to move an inch—time here dances to my tune. Outside the windows the years go flying by, but here inside, everything waits along with me.

We barrel along, faster than the river, the river I can’t step into twice, three times, a hundred times, no! I see an effigy of Morana, goddess of death and winter, floating downstream in the distance, a new summer is headed our way. I reach into my pocket where I always keep a stone tucked away. Out of habit.

But the river isn’t outside the window anymore.

Now, instead, it’s the two of us, me and Madlenka, flying a kite. Up, up, up it goes, flying over the cornfield, and the field is full of Madlenka’s laughter as she lets out the string from her fingers, feeding it to the wind.

Ta-dum ta-dum.

Now, instead of a kite, my dad’s face, which in the space of a moment changes into the four seasons. He tries to speak, but the line of his mouth just keeps getting thinner. A Russian melody wafts through the church—

Ta-dum ta-dum.

My dad turns into a leafy tree, and underneath me the branch breaks and I fall, ripe apricots tumbling down around me. Karamel barks. Something cracks and it isn’t a branch. My arm at a funny angle. Roots digging into my back. Karamel’s snout on my forehead. Adam screams: “Máry!”

Ta-dum ta-dum.

A gym full of people bent into camel pose. “Breathe shallowly so you don’t get dizzy,” I hear the instructor say, watching everyone upside down from upside down. “Breathe shal—” I hear upside down. Then start holding my breath.

Ta-dum ta-dum.

My mother’s back in the doorframe, feet barely grazing the threshold as she quietly slips out of the house. From my hiding place in the entryway I hear the click of the lock and watch the door handle return to a horizontal position as my mother carefully, quietly, ev-er so slow-ly closes it from the other side.

Ta-dum ta-dum.

Madlenka’s hand is a gun, which she holds to her temple, and she pulls the trigger.

Ta-dum ta-dum.

And the water, the water! The icy water . . .

Ta-dum. My dad’s face. Madlenka’s laughter. Licking my nose. Breathe shal—. Pulling the trigger. Ev-er so slow-. Adam. Screaming. Máry!

Clack-clack.

And then—you. Opening the door for me.

Ta-dum ta-dum. Ta-dum ta-dum.

***

They say nobody noticed the girl lying on the subway tracks. They say she walked down the stairs right at the mouth of the tunnel, in front of the big black hole—just walked right down and lay on her back across the tracks with her neck on the rails. And waited. For the C line, Letňany—Háje.

And now that girl’s in my head, lying perfectly perpendicular across the tracks, neck on the rails. I see her standing on the platform, a few minutes maybe, maybe hours, and every time a train pulls into the station she dissolves into the exiting crowd, disappearing from view, then reemerging again, and when the space around her empties—there she is, standing the same way she was a moment before, as if washed over by a wave, barely licking the shore and receding back into the sea. Then, after some length of time that she decides, she walks slowly to the edge of the platform, descends the stairs, one, two, three, and lies down, perpendicular across the tracks, neck on the rails—like a sleeper, holding the rails in place.

I wonder if her eyes are open.

I wonder if she’s scared.

I wonder if she feels relieved.

I wonder about the girl and the head that detached from her body unnoticed as she waited for line C of the Prague Metro, Letňany—Háje.

Ta-dum.

When I was little, I wanted to be a magician. There are times when I still do. But mostly it was just when I was little. I used to videotape David Copperfield’s show on TV, then rewind it to the best scenes and practice along with him, standing in front of the screen. I also used to watch the Czech illusionist Kožíšek perform sometimes on The Golden Cage or some other variety show. But I never got into him the way I got into Copperfield. I even watched reruns of Maybe a Magician Will Drop By, every episode, all the way to the end. No magician ever showed up. It was just a stupid line. Adam, my brother, made fun of me. And meanwhile he was the one who told me to watch, since it said there’d be a magician.

Even back then I thought it was weird that only men did tricks and the women were just there as underlings and ass-shakers, handing the men their props and smiling radiantly, or playing the role of mock victim, climbing into the coffin with a radiant smile to be sawed in half and glued back together again, or locked in a closet to disappear, then reappear—it’s magic! To be clear, I didn’t find it weird in a fascist sexist gender way, just a regular kind of weird, which only made me want to be the world’s first woman magician even more, and I wouldn’t need an assistant to smile radiantly or hand me props or use me as a guinea pig. I could do it all on my own. Back then, there was no Internet yet, and the town where I lived took a long time to get it even after they already had it everyplace else, so I would go to our local library, which was so little they didn’t have much of a selection of any books, never mind books of magic tricks. But there was one that I used to check out and take home with me, and I flipped through it so many times practicing the tricks that I flipped it to death and practically wore the magic right out of it. The tricks in it were mostly for little kids. I learned them all, no need of any assistant or helper. All I could do, of course, was sleight of hand with cards and coins and scarves and a matchbox. I performed the tricks for my family, the neighbors, Mr. Voráček down at the pub, the doctors at the hospital, my classmates at school, even the teacher, when it was her turn to be hallway monitor. I did tricks for everyone, over and over again, but pretty soon we all got tired of it.

I wanted to learn bigger tricks so people would be crazy amazed, not just to make me happy, but so they would be amazed for real, and say to themselves: Wait, how did she did do that? And then say out loud to me: Wait, how did you do that? And I would just smile that mysterious smile I practiced in front of the mirror, and maybe super-mysteriously raise an eyebrow, but I wouldn’t give away nada. The only problem was, there was nowhere to learn those tricks. I kept bugging the librarian to order a book of witchcraft, but the closest she ever came was Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She didn’t have a clue. Then one day my dad took me and Madla and Adam into the city. I was eight, Madla was six, and Adam was fifteen. Adam got the latest version of Dragon’s Den and the Dungeon Master’s Guide with it, Madla got a book of nursery rhymes, and I got a magic book. It had glitter on it and a picture of a boy in a hat—probably like the one Harry Potter wore at Hogwarts—and finally I learned some new tricks.

But still, the one trick I wanted to learn the most wasn’t in there. It wasn’t in any book I’d seen. You can probably guess, right? Tell me, if you were going to be a magician, what’s the first thing you’d want to learn? I wanted to know how to disappear. OK, sure, but why? Because whenever I saw a magician, or their female assistant, disappear, I wanted to know what happened to them. Did they just, like, dissolve into space, or did they actually go someplace else? And if they did, where did they go and what did it look like? Was it someplace they knew? Did they go back home, quick wash the dishes they didn’t have time for before the show, and then come back? Or did they go someplace nice? Like the plains or the woods or a desert or a beach? Or was it not a place at all, like maybe another dimension, a place just for magicians? Was it just their bodies that disappeared, or their souls too? Was it up to them, or was it out of their control?

I wanted to vanish. To explore whatever place it was they disappeared to. And then come back again. Come back.

Ta-dum.

I watch myself reflected in the train window while at the same time I watch myself reflected in the window of Adam’s room. His head is six feet behind mine in the reflection and I’m bawling because I just found out there is no such place. And I’m a little baby if I believe in magic, because all magic is just make-believe, duh!

Sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh.