When I was a little girl, my grandfather showed me a magic trick. It went like this:
He placed a coin in his hand, then closed his fingers around it. When he opened his hand for me to retrieve it, the coin was gone!
“Where did it go?” I asked, a perfectly reasonable question for a 6-year-old.
He reached behind my ear with his other hand and, low and behold, there was the coin!
Amazing! I was so impressed. I laughed, and asked the customary followup question: “How did you do that?”
Granddad showed me how the trick was done. He had palmed the coin in one hand, while pretending to place it in the other. The hand that I thought held the coin was empty the whole time. The naïve girl that I was, it never occurred to me that he would tell me one thing, then do another.
It was a simple magician’s trick that had fooled little ones like me for centuries. Granddad was only trying to entertain me, but I saw it as a betrayal of my trust. A lie. Most kids would have marveled at his cleverness, but not me. I was weird that way.
A shame, too. I so wanted to believe in magic. I was at that age when fairy tales came true; when true-love’s kiss awakened the sleeping beauty inside us all.
And so I walked in to the Theme Farm Magic Shop with a head full of disbelief.
It was a small store, with rings for linking, silks for vanishing, and hats for pulling rabbits out of. It was kind of dark and gloomy inside, almost medieval in style, which might have explained why there were no shoppers.
Behind a tall counter stood a magician, or so I assumed—he wore a turban. I knew he was the Fritter I was looking for. His turban sat atop a zebra head.
The striped magician stared at me as I approached the counter. His piercing, dark eyes followed my every step.
“Good morning, sir,” I said politely. “I wonder if you can tell me—”
“Silence!” he suddenly blurted out. “Speak no more, for I know why you have come. You seek the wisdom of the ancient mystics.”
“Not really,” I said. “I was sent here to—”
“To learn the forbidden secrets of the Wizards of Tantagria.”
Then he raised his black cape above his head like Dracula. A strobe light flashed. Thunder rolled out of a hidden subwoofer. What drama!
“Do you want to hear what I have to say,” I said, “or are you going to keep interrupting me?”
A long, white cane popped out into the air. The zebra grabbed hold of it in a grand flourish.
“Come hither, ye seeker of knowledge, and I shall grant thee audience.” Then he tapped me on the shoulder with the cane, like King Arthur knighting Sir Lancelot.
I applauded him.
“You can put your tricks away now, Blackstone,” I said. “I just want to ask you a question.”
The comical zebra collapsed his cane back into a palm-sized roll, then looked at me, puzzled. “Aren’t you amazed?”
“Most entertaining,” I said, “but those old tricks don’t do anything for me.”
He removed his turban, revealing his pointy zebra ears. “No point in performing for nothing.” Then he untied his cape and neatly stowed it under the counter.
“I will admit,” I said, “your presentation is very cool. Your routine is kinda cute.”
“Cute?” said the offended zebra. “I’ll have you know, young lady, that thousands once flocked to see me perform astounding feats of magic. I amazed crowds the world over with illusions no one could figure out.” He turned his head and scanned the store. “Now look at me—in a theme park magic shop. It’s not fair!”
He brushed his stiff mane with the palm of his hand, then adjusted his black bow tie in a mirror on the wall. “Now, what did you want to see me about, young maiden?”
“I was sent here by an old friend of yours,” I said. “Robert Phillips. He’s an attorney.”
“Don’t know anyone by that name,” he said. “And I don’t socialize with anyone in the law profession, especially attorneys! They’re the only humans who can deplete your dignity and your bank account at the same time.”
“You know him,” I said. “You just forgot.”
I placed the business card Bob had given me on the counter.
The zebra’s eyes widened as he picked up the card, recognizing it as his own.
“Where did you get this?” he asked.
“From the man you claim not to know.”
The zebra was fuming. His eyes were on fire as he stared at the card. Then he pointed to the front door.
“Get out of here!” he said firmly.
“Not without some answers!” I said.
“Leave the premises at once before I call security to have you dragged out.”
I stood firm. We stared at each other intensely. Then I held the business card up to his face.
“Are you The Great Abra-ca-zebra?” I asked.
The defeated magician’s ears lowered as a great sadness filled his eyes.
“Was,” he said softly.
Apparently, showing him the card had forced him to recall a past that he did not want to revisit. I felt bad about that. But the secret to Used-to-Be TV was locked in his brain, and I wanted the key to open it.
“My failed past is my eternal curse,” said the zebra. “It’s not your fault.”
He reached his hand out to me. “Call me Zeb.”
I shook his hand. “Call me Amy.”
Just then a young boy with a bright red, mohawk haircut strolled into the shop. He wore a black leather jacket with an insignia on the back. Dante’s Magic Society was written above an embroidered picture of a human skull, with lightening bolts shooting out of its eye sockets. He couldn’t have been more than twelve.
The boy swaggered up to the counter, like he was the head of a motorcycle gang.
“Hey you, zebra man!“ said the cocky juvenile. “You got any Mystery Smoke?”
Zeb looked down at him. “Whatever are you talking about, my little maggot?”
“You know, the stuff you rub on your hands and smoke comes off your fingertips. It comes in a little, white tube.”
“Are you a magician?”
The boy turned and pointed to the insignia on his jacket. “Don’t diss me, you striped jackass. I’ve got the Rule The World magic set, the Make Fools of Your Friends kit, and the Magicians Get The Girls instruction book.”
“You don’t need smoke,” said Zeb. “You need someone to hose you down.” Then he leaned over the counter and squirted water in the boy’s face from a fake carnation on his lapel.
The boy opened his jacket, and a white dove flew out. The bird circled the shop, then passed over Zeb’s head, where it deposited a smelly, white blob on his shoulder.
Zeb grabbed a plaster Wolf Man statue from the shelf behind him and took a swing at the dove, then threatened the boy with the heavy object.
“Be gone, you little savage!” shouted Zeb. “And take your infernal arrogance with you!”
The boy turned up his nose as the dove perched on his shoulder. Then they casually sauntered out of the shop together.
Zeb put away his Wolf Man weapon.
“I’ve seen it a thousand times,” he told me, wiping the poo from his coat with a red magician’s silk. “That ‘I know the secret of magic, and that makes me better than you’ attitude. Frightful behavior for one so young. And where does he come off talking to me that way? I remember a time when the youth of this country showed respect for their elders.”
“Like, back in . . . 1963?” I said.
Zeb looked at me suspiciously. “Why did you pick that year?”
“It’s what I’ve been trying to ask you about. That’s the year you tune in to at Used-to-be-TV.”
Zeb tossed away his soiled silk and looked me in the eye. “What is it that you want to know?”
“I’ve been told that you can put a stop to the bleeping.”
“Is that so? Well, maybe I can, and maybe I can’t. Why do you want to?”
I was uncomfortable telling him about Clifford. I would be opening up my personal life to a total stranger. Confessions like that are usually shared between mothers and daughters. But since my mom and I weren’t speaking, a magic zebra would have to do.
“I met someone on channel ‘63,” I said.
“Define met.”
“What I mean is, I’ve been talking to a boy, but there’s all this bleeping, and . . . I think I like him.”
The inquisitive zebra put his elbow on the counter, rested his head on his hand, then stared wistfully into my eyes. “How much?”
“A lot.”
“How, a lot?”
His questioning was getting more personal by the moment, and I was starting to feel a little embarrassed.
“No need to answer, my dear,” said Zeb. “I know that look. You’re in love.”
“That’s not possible,” I insisted.
“It’s true, and don’t ask me how I know. A magician never reveals his secrets.”
“But we barely said anything to each other. I only talked to him a few minutes. ”
Zeb let out a laugh. “A few minutes? You have fifty years between the two of you, and you’re worried about a few measly minutes? Stop watching the clock, Amy, and start following your heart. Tell this boy how you feel, and leave Time to the watchmakers.”
“I’ll feel foolish if I do.”
“Only fools run from a chance at love. Used-to-Be TV was created to bring people together, not keep them apart.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
Zeb placed a glass pitcher of milk on the counter, then rolled a newspaper into a cone. He poured the milk into the paper container, and when the pitcher was empty, he quickly unrolled the paper. I expected milk to splash all over me, but the newspaper was perfectly dry.
Then I noticed the headline: Fritter Discovers Time Portal. Zeb’s face was pictured below it.
“You?” I said, pointing to the headline.
Zeb smiled and nodded.
“Now I am amazed,” I said. “How did you come up with that?”
“I don’t rightly know. Some bit of genius must have gotten into my DNA when I was cloned into a Fritter. I always enjoyed science and tinkering with electronics.
“Then one day it hit me, that space never changes; that the ground we stand on today is the same ground no matter where we are in Time. The problem is that we only get to experience that space in that fleeting moment called The Present. Video signals, once broadcast into the ionosphere, never completely disappear. So, I invented the Time Transducer: a device that intercepts those signals from long ago, and displays them for us to enjoy today. I later sold my concept to Theme Farm—and voila! Used-to-Be TV!”
“But why did you add all that bleeping?”
“To prevent anyone from tampering with history. Without it, how would we know that the world we see today wasn’t shaped by someone fooling with the past? There are a lot of wicked people out there who would just love to abuse this power.”
“Forget about those bad people,” I said. “Think of all the good you could do with something like this. You could reverse all the tragic events that happened in the past. Save lives. Maybe it wouldn’t work every time, but at least you could try.”
Zeb paused and stared up at the ceiling—his mind traveling to some other region.
“I did try,” he said sadly. “In early testing I tuned the device to channel ‘64, and locked on to a video signal in the White House. Lyndon Johnson was president then. He was seated at his desk in the Oval Office when my face popped onto a TV screen in front of him. What if I told you that there was no Vietnam War?”
“Of course there was,” I said. “It’s in all the history books.”
“Now it is. Johnson had only been in office a few weeks, and was mulling over what to do with the American troops that were already there. I told him that the Communists had overrun the country in the future. He wasn’t happy to here that. But when I told him that Richard Nixon would defeat him in his reelection, he went ballistic.”
“But Vietnam was taken by the Communists, and Nixon did become president. So you see, you didn’t change history at all.”
“Yes. But what I didn’t know then was that Johnson was about to withdraw our military forces and be done with the whole mess. Instead, he escalated our involvement. His unpopularity from that decision forced him not to run for a 2nd term. Then came the draft, the protests, the riots. I tried to reestablish my connection with 1964, to dissuade Johnson from doing anything rash, but by then the signal was lost for good.”
The zebra turned his back to me and reached for a metal flask he had hidden on the shelf. His head tilted back as he took a long swig from it.
“50,000 soldiers died from me interfering with history,” said Zeb, returning the bottle to its hiding place. “That’s a hell of a burden to carry. I sought to rid the world of hatred between nations, but I caused more hostility and death as a result.” He reached out and took hold of my hand. “You, on the other hand, seek love—and maybe you’ll find it in 1963.”
Then Zeb waved his hand in the air and, seemingly out of nowhere, produced a small metal box with a single push-button on the top.
“What’s that?” I asked, mystified.
“A clicker. Pressing this button will defeat the bleeping feature in the Time Transducer program.”
Zeb reached out and offered it to me, but stopped short of placing the device in my hand.
“I wasn’t really a world-class magician like I told you,” he confessed. “I worked in a traveling circus as a sideshow freak: The Amazing Zebra-headed Man. Many Fritterz made their living that way, before the Fritter Rights Act. Traveling the world as a famous magician was a dream that never saw the light of day. Performing at birthday parties and working in this ridiculous shop was as close as I got to it.”
“What about the Time Transducer?” I said. “That’s magic if I ever saw it.”
Zeb looked closely at the clicker. “I was going to destroy this thing, with all the grief it has caused. But I give it to you with all my heart, with the prayer that you will use my invention for which it was created.”
He handed me the device, then suddenly clasped his fingers around my hand. “But be warned,” he said sternly. “Watch what you say. One wrong word and history as we know it will be changed forever.”
“I’ll be careful.”
“I know you will. You’re a brave and intelligent girl, and you now know that the past isn’t something to be toyed with. But that’s not what I’m really worried about.”
“Why? What else can go wrong?”
“There are consequences to finding love on Used-to-Be TV. Love is a magical thing, but it can cause more pain than you can imagine. Take what you will from this relationship with this boy. Share your thoughts, express your feelings, but let it go no further than that. Remember, you may make a deep, emotional connection with him, but there will be no physical bonding. You may find his companionship comforting, but you will never hold his hand. Keep his memory in your heart, but come back to the present. Embrace today, for you cannot touch the past.”
I appreciated Zeb’s concern, and heeded his warning. But as I took hold of the magic clicker, all I could think about was running over to Used-to-Be TV to have a real conversation with Clifford.
It occurred to me that the clicker might not be for real. Maybe it was just an empty box with a switch on top. I was in Theme Farm, after all, where nothing is what it seems. The Great Abra-ca-zebra might have been using slight-of-hand to fool me—like my grandfather had done so many years before.
I hoped that wasn’t so. This was no time for deception. My fondness for Clifford was beginning to make me believe in magic all over again.