Girl of My Dreams by Peter Davis

artists.
    From Houdini, Nils learned to make objects disappear and reappear elsewhere, to take the audience into his confidence, give them the impression they knew a trick as well as the performer, then with a whisk and a blinding hand-eye movement leave them astounded at how utterly they had been deceived. Nils told me a magician is really an actor playing the part of a magician. He acted his apprentice part so well that at the end of six weeks Houdini asked Nils to stay on as part of his retinue. Houdini liked to say great tricks are like unsolved crimes, and now Nils was learning to commit them.
    Houdini took Nils to Hollywood where the peerless magician made several silent films, all disappointments. Chaplin tried to give Houdini suggestions to make his pictures more believable. Houdini insisted he had only to replicate what he did on a stage, but audiences did not buy this on the screen. For Nils it was all going to school.
    After several years Nils felt he’d learned enough, and the master was becoming self-destructive. Houdini kept himself locked in a coffin under water for over an hour, which left him ill for days afterward, and he began doing something Nils found eerie. Some weeks Houdini would spend all his time exposing fraudulent mediums and spiritualists. “This was holy work to Houdini,” Nils said, “but to me it was breaking the proscenium. I love sham. It’s why I became a magician. Audiences love it. It takes them away from the deeper shams and disasters of their lives.”
    Within a year after going on his own, Nils was filling theaters from San Francisco to Savannah, seeing his name grow larger on posters. He could make anything vanish on one side of the stage and rematerialize on the other; he could cut one woman not into two but into six women, which brought audiences to their feet. He introduced himself theatrically, almost in a trance as he chanted his spell: “Hear me, O Spirits, in my torment. Numerals are the invisible coverings of human beings. We ask you to release us through numbers. Let every rope or strap, every knot be broken, every form of matter change its shape and location. Let identity itself multiply, for I am Nils Maynard but also Matheus von Bickenheim.”
    Having borrowed the name of his despised mother, Nils would begin his tricks while explaining he needed his mother’s noble heritage to invoke the powerful forces that would help him perform magic. The ancient von Bickenheim attachment to mathematics at Heidelberg resurfaced in a way his forefathers wouldn’t have predicted but would recognize. He would turn one dove into four, one handkerchief into ten, and again and again one woman into six. He took a few prisoners from Houdini: Nils could make a trumpet leave one table and arrive instantly on another playing “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and he could throw four ringing alarm clocks into the air, make them vanish and reappear hanging from watch chains on the opposite side of the stage. When he had worked his way up to playing New York, Detroit, and Chicago in the mid 1920s, Nils was making eight thousand dollars a week and pocketing virtually all of it. He was free. He never spoke to Houdini again, nor would he see his mother, even when she tried to come backstage in Boston.
    Nils tired of repeating himself. Unlike Houdini he was not a great showman craving adulation nor would his disease allow him to top himself with physical feats. But there was another form of magic Nils was certain he could do.
    The magic of a magician was mundane compared with the magic of film—what is a severed rope restored to a single strand or a vanishing dove when stacked against prehistoric monsters or a leap from the wing of one airplane to another?—which is why Nils became a moviemaker. “Magicians like to believe they can defy the Creator by doing things no human has ever done,” Nils said, “but a filmmaker becomes the Creator by