The Greatest Act
Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge." The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn't clap yet. Because making something disappear isn't enough; you have to bring it back. That's why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call "The Prestige" – Christopher Priest
When my mom was seven months pregnant with me, she got into a heated argument with my dad. It was nothing unusual. These arguments happened before, during and after my birth, and we all grew quite used to them. But this particular argument, on some night in March, a month before my mother’s 35th birthday and two months before I was born, he got so angry with her that he shoved her across the kitchen; she forcefully collided with the refrigerator. Immediately, fear for her unborn child overtook her—this was the farthest into a pregnancy she had been in eight years since the birth of my sister. She had had nine miscarriages in her life—seven before Lindsay and two before me. Over the years, I remember her telling me how much pain she was in during those pregnancies, how confused she was over what was happening to her body, how after the birth of my sister, the doctors told her she would most likely never be able to carry another pregnancy to term. But, they were wrong. She got pregnant again eight years later and this time, the baby kept. I was her miracle baby, the one no one expected to survive. Later, they would learn it was lupus that had been hampering her fertility, robbing her of child after child. It took me years to understand the weight of her experience, how her body had failed her, over and over and over again. It would take me even longer to understand all the ways my own body could and would eventually and mysteriously fail me.
Magic is one of the oldest performing arts in the world in which audiences are entertained by staged tricks or illusions of seemingly impossible or supernatural feats using natural means. These feats are called magic tricks, effects, or illusions. They leave the crowd entertained and enthralled, the magician cloaked in an air of mystery and skill.
When I was smaller and more blissfully ignorant, I remember being at breakfast with my mom and sister. My mom ordered a hot tea with lemon, but as she went to bring the small teacup to her lips, her hand jerked dramatically, forcing the spoon to clatter against the side of the cup, tea spilling out all over hand and table. I watched the quiet look of concentration on her face and the determination she needed to take one good sip of her tea. Beside me, my sister let out a loud cackle. My mom said nothing and put the cup back on the table. My sister said, “Why are your hands shaking so bad? Are you nervous?” My mom remained silent as my sister continued to laugh at her attempts. Ignorant as ever, I laughed with her.
The term “magic” derives etymologically from the Greek word “magei.” In ancient times, ritual acts of Persian priests came to be known as “mageia”, and then “magika”, which eventually came to mean any foreign, unorthodox, or illegitimate ritual practice. The first mention of magic and an explanation of tricks in a written text appeared in 1584.
Eleven years later, I noticed, for the first time, a slight tremor in my left hand. I was trying to put in my earrings, but my hands kept shaking and jerking, and I couldn’t get the stud into the tiny hole in my earlobe. I kept trying to jam it in there, until eventually it fell to the floor. I decided I didn’t need jewelry that day. I hid the tremor from my mom for months, terrified deep down that my body was slowly transforming into one that was as dangerously unpredictable as hers.
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On April 3, 2016, almost a month later, I woke up with a gnawing pain in the space where my neck meets my shoulder. I immediately attributed it to sleeping funny, that it was just a crink in my neck that would eventually dissipate. I got up, got dressed, ate breakfast. My mom drove me to school. Throughout the day, I kept massaging the muscle, trying to relax the pangs, but they only seemed to grow in intensity. By 2:45 pm, I was on the bus in excruciating pain, spasms shooting every couple of minutes from my neck to my shoulders and back up to my forehead. All of a sudden, I couldn’t move my head; I couldn’t look to my sides nor up or down. I could only sit in a sense of blind terror and confusion over what was happening with my body. I sat on that bus and prayed for the pain to go away, but little did I know, it was only the beginning.
A trick (or in some cases, an illusion) is the maneuver through which magic can be witnessed. Prescribed daily medication is the method through which I am able to function and survive. Asrah Levitation. Abilify. Assistant’s Revenge. Advair. Aztec Lady. Albuterol. Battle of the Barrels. Ambien. Book Test. Amitriptalyne. Bullet Catch. Benadryl. Cabinet Escape. Buspirone. Chinese Linking Rings. Cryselle. Cut and Restore Rope Trick. Claritan. Dagger Head Box. Excedrin Migraine. Detachable Thumb. Flexeril. Devil’s Torture Chamber. Gildess FE. Dismemberment. Hydroxyzine. Elastic Lady. Ibuprofen 800. Indian Rope Trick. Imitrex. Levitation. Lamictal. Impalement. Lithium. Inexhaustible Bottle. Loestrin FE. Metamorphosis. Mobic. Monster Guillotine. Nabumatone. Quick Change. Naproxen. Radium Girl. Nortriptalyne. Predicament Escape. Prednisone. Oragmi. Prilosec. Shadow Vision. Prozac. Suspension. Singulair. Squeeze Box. Tegretol. Three Card Monte. Topomax. Table of Death. Tylenol Extra Strength. Twister. Ventolin. Wringer. Xoponex. Spoon Bend. Xyzal. Zig Zag Girl. Zyrtec.
The symptoms seemed to pile up. I went from a relatively healthy high school girl to invisibly and chronically ill within the span of a month. On top of the tremors and the spasms came the insomnia. I was sleeping for two hours at a time before I would wake up and take another thirty minutes to fall back asleep. Every muscle in my body ached, even my eyelids and my toes. I began crying more often than not. I noticed a rash across the bridge of my nose if I stayed in the sun too long. I got nauseous and lightheaded whenever I ate, dizzy if I stood up too fast, burning hot in any climate. All of the symptoms sprouted up at the same time, but none of them seemed to be related. We went to doctor after doctor, racked up medical bill after medical bill, but left every appointment as uncertain as ever. I began living a life of waiting, one cloaked entirely in fear and anxiety. I sat up at night wondering when the next shoe would drop; what else could and would go wrong? I lost all sense of connection to myself. I became a ghost forced to live and function as if I wasn’t constantly experiencing life-altering and unexplainable trauma induced by my body’s own line of defense. I was a shell that undulated from breaking down to effectively broken in the blink of an eye. I was a walking trick gone horribly wrong.
“According to some historians, the oldest trick in the book is more like the oldest trick on the wall. A painting on the interior walls of an Egyptian burial chamber, created as early as 2500 BCE, appears to show two men performing what’s known as “the cups and balls” and may be the earliest record of a magic performance” – Matt Soniak, “What’s the Oldest Trick in the Book?”
In 2009, the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported that around 133 million Americans (about 45% of the population) have or will develop a chronic disease in their lifetime, that 7 out of 10 deaths among Americans are caused by chronic diseases, and that mental illnesses and chronic diseases are very closely related in that chronic diseases can exacerbate symptoms of depression and depressive disorders can themselves lead to chronic illnesses.
A typical cups and balls routine includes many of the most fundamental effects of magic: the balls can vanish, appear, transpose, reappear and transform. Basic skills, such as misdirection, manual dexterity, sleight of hand, and audience management are also essential to most cups and balls routines. As a result, mastery of the cups and balls is considered by many as the litmus test of a good magician.
Throughout time, there have been many famous magicians that have mastered these tricks. Many men that have dedicated their life to their craft, let it consume them until illusionist was their only identity. The list includes: Harry Houdini. David Copperfield. David Blaine. Teller. Penn Jillette. Jean Foley. Harry Blacstone, Sr. Criss Angel. Harry Blackstone, Jr. Howard Thurston. Jean Eugéne Robert-Houdin. Dai Vernon. Harry Kellar. Paul Daniels. Jasper Maskelyne. John Henry Anderson. Alexander Hermann, etc.
After years of unexplained pain and fatigue, I finally received the answers I am looking for: Insomnia. Asthma. Anxiety Disorder, Chronic Pain Disorder. Fibromyalgia. Arthralgia. Migraines. Manic Depression. Bipolar 2 Disorder. Hapephobia. Gastritis. Disorder, disorder, disorder, disorder that left me feeling confused and completely outside of myself. On the one hand, they were the answers I had spent years searching for, the validation that I was not crazy, that all of this was not something I had conjured up from thin air. I had medical proof to back me up. I was not crazy. I was not crazy. I am not crazy. Yet still I felt like something was missing. Betrayal is a funny thing. Your body can turn against you time and time again, yet still it is your job to take care of it, your job to understand it in a vain effort to prevent it from betraying you again. Isn’t it funny how all the proof in the world can still not be enough to satisfy you?
“Fibromyalagia syndrome is a common and chronic disorder characterized by widespread pain, diffuse tenderness and a number of other symptoms, including but not limited to: chronic pain and fatigue, cognitive and memory problems (sometimes referred to as “fibro fog”), sleep disturbances, morning stiffness, headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, painful menstrual periods, numbness or tingling of the extremities, restless leg syndrome, temperature sensitivity and sensitivity to loud noises or bright lights. The cause is unknown… It is a chronic condition, meaning it lasts a long time- possibly a lifetime. There is no cure” – from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases
Days, weeks, months, years of the same routine – experiencing immense pain, trying my best to understand what is happening to body while keeping it a secret from those around me. Before I know it, I’m nineteen and in my sophomore year of college. I’m out with three friends of mine and we’re running late for a party in Brooklyn. I have on four-inch heels and an itty-bit dress and am trying my absolute hardest to keep up with the group that seems to be miles ahead of me. They don’t know the extent of my illness, just that I have bad knees that give me trouble sometimes. It would take too much to explain everything to them, mostly because I didn’t yet understand it myself. They are good friends but sometimes they forget that I have limitations and sometimes they simply don’t care. “Come on, pick up the pace!” One of my friends calls from a block ahead. “You know she can’t. She’s got bad knees- her fibromyalgia” another shouts back to him. They laugh together as if it was the funniest joke they ever heard. “Sorry, I don’t mean to laugh at you,” he says. “It’s just crazy to me a nineteen-year old girl in college has arthritis. I’ve never heard of that!” I laugh because it’s funny. It still is.
Since my diagnosis, I spend my days charting symptoms, frenetically looking for connections and links between disparate signs whose only connection is the fact that they are happening to me. I go to the doctor’s with a bullet point list of symptoms, convinced that something new is happening, the likes of which we had yet to encounter together. Like sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, there’s a tingling in my left foot that doesn’t go away for hours. Or three out of five of my muscle spasms happen in my left forearm/left hand. Or my left ankle is the one that was sprained and hasn’t healed right since. Or that my left knee is the weaker knee that gives out on a random occasions. And my left eye is the one that gets pink eye more often. The left, the left, the left, the left. I became slowly convinced that the left side of my body was slowly deteriorating, the muscles and nerve endings dying off and no one was noticing, no one was taking me seriously. Instead they gave me medication after medication, told me to try physical therapy instead of testing for anything. Because it’s fibromyalgia, that’s all. It’s always just fibromyalgia.
The curtain rises. There stands the magician, the man of the hour, the god we have all been waiting for. Beside him is his lovely assistant and a large, body-sized cabinet. In his hands he holds three blades. He proceeds to lock his lovely, innocent assistant into said cabinet. He slides the blades into the box, one by one, dividing the poor girl into thirds. A volunteer from the audience is called up to the stage to push the segments out into an impossible arrangement. The assistant is seemingly cut into threes, her body contorted and held in the three smaller boxes. Then the magician pushes the three parts back to their original position, removing the blades. He opens the larger cabinet door and out walks the assistant, completely unharmed and in tact. The crowd goes wild.
I am in my NYU dorm room, in bed alone, on the phone with my mother and most likely crying. It had been raining for the past three days, and my knees are so swollen and painful that I can’t even get out of bed. Throughout this journey of unexplained pain, I had lost my vibrant self and was now giving every ounce of energy I had left trying to retrieve all the pieces that illness had stolen from me. My mother, at home sixty miles away, listens quietly as I tell her once more how I can longer do this fight with my body. It is becoming too much and I am losing far more than I am winning. She’s quiet for a while, just breathing with me. Just when I am about to say goodnight and hang up, she speaks. “It’s got to get better than this,” she whispers. “What? What do you mean?” I ask. “Life, it’s got to get better than this.”
Another wildly popular, yet minimally understood trick is that of the Zig Zag Girl. “This trick is actually quite simple. When the assistant steps into the box, she turns her body sideways so that when the blades go in, they slide right past her body. When the midsection of the box is pushed out, only her hand goes with it, but the black lining of the box gives the illusion that her midsection has been completely shifted. The black stripes on the box are usable space. They are not very visible when viewed from the sides or on TV – thus making the box look smaller.” Essentially, the girl is barely moving. She is still present. Nothing is as it seems – Celine Armstrong, “Answers to 14 Classic Magic Tricks”
Since the first incident with the muscle spasm in my neck, I have had a reoccurring dream in which I lose my body. What I mean is I shed myself so completely I don’t even exist anymore. Layer by layer my skin, my body, my home is whittled away until there is nothing left but the core of me, my essence, the thing that makes me tick and keep going when every cell in my body seems to be telling me not to. I have dreamt this time and time again, but still I fail to grasp what message it is trying to relay.
“It was the art of illusion. They were not magicians, they were illusionists,” says George Hardeen, great nephew of Harry Houdini and grandson of Theo Hardeen. Often times, the illusions included their own personas. Harry Houdini was born Ehrich Weiss. He ‘borrowed’ Houdiini from the French magician Houdin. His younger brother, Theodore, picked the name “Hardeen” because it sounded like Houdini” – Daniel Kraker, “Houdini Relative Unlocks Some Family Secrets”
My body has changed. Since I first started on medications during my junior year of high school through the end of my senior year of college, I have gained a little more than fifty pounds. The weight has distributed nearly everywhere– my breasts, my face, my thighs, my stomach, my back, everywhere except fun places that need it the most- like my ass, for example. I can no longer fit any of the cute little dresses I used to love. I have grown from a size six to a size twelve. From being 5’2” and 135 pounds to 5”3 and 185. Everyone around me claims they can’t see the difference, that I haven’t changed that much, that it’s all in my head. I play along every time, smiling, hiding, concealing the discomfort, transforming the inner pain into pleasantries. But what they say doesn’t matter because I can tell the difference, I can see it. I remember who I used to be, and that memory is in direct contrast with who I am now. I can hardly recognize myself anymore when I look in the mirror. I barely even want to look.
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I’m beginning to feel like a hypochondriac again, making up phantom symptoms that only exist in my mind. For years, I spent my life waiting for the bottom to drop out, for the other shoe to fall off, for the floor to give way, or whatever other metaphor you want to use and time after time, again and again it did. Over and over again, my body gave out in a new and old ways, both inventive and patented, common and uncommon but always unexpected and uncontrolled. Even with a dozen diagnoses, I still spend so much time fantasizing and anticipating the next one. Most days, I feel like this is all pretend. Some elaborate trick I am playing on myself - you’re not actually sick, you just want something to be wrong with you so badly, you’re body is willing to do anything possible to make it come true.
Brooke Kamin Rapaport, curator of the Jewish Museum's exhibit, points to an archival silent film from 1907 of a bridge jump Houdini did while handcuffed. In the film, Houdini gets stripped down, then chained up by the police. Crowds stand by as he dives over the bridge and into a river. Then, they all wait for him to resurface. They wait with bated breath, counting the seconds that his body remains submerged in the water. As the seconds tick by, their anxiety mounts. Where is he? they wonder. Is he okay? Have we just witnessed the tragic death of the great Houdini? Just as their fear reaches epic proportions, there is movement. "He [Houdini] comes up with the handcuffs brandished in the air," Rapaport says. "There's a great storyline and it's absolutely cinematic."
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the instability of existence, the fickleness that is life. I daydream a lot about what it would be like to be in love. To be so interested in another person that, for once, all the focus would no longer be on me. The fragility of my body has encircled my identity, becoming an impenetrable façade around me. I mask myself so frequently and so skillfully from those around me that sometimes I forget who I am myself. If even I can’t fathom the depth of my fear, how could anyone else? What kind of man will be strong enough, determined enough, loving enough to break me open? … I’ve been dreaming about you. I’ve been dreaming about you. I’ve been dreaming. Where are you, my love? Where are you hiding from me?
“I do believe in an everyday sort of magic -- the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.” – Charles de Lint
If you think about it, we are all magicians, performing tricks out of necessity and the need to communicate in order to survive. Each and every day, we all do our own kind of magic, a plethora of small, yet meaningful tricks and illusions. With each rise of the sun we become a magician, existing and moving through the public in masks, masks we use to cope, pretty cover ups to our pain, our inner truth. We are all cloaked by some kind of lie, some illusion that promises that we are normal, just like everybody else, just fine.
I still struggle with explaining the differences in my body to those around me, so I pretend they don’t exist – the inflammation in my hands in my knees is just from exercise, my hands are shaking because I had too much coffee today not because the muscles are spasming and firing off at a rate I can’t control; I can’t get out of the bed because I don’t want to – forget the fact that I can’t move my legs. I push and I push, determined to be just like everyone else. Every day I do magic. I transform and transpose. Make symptoms disappear in an instant and conjure them back up in the next. Every time I am able to leave my house and move through life is a trick I still do not understand the inner mechanisms of. To be “normal” is a skill I will always be learning.
“In March 2015, Rep. Pete Sessions, along with six Republican co-sponsors introduced an official resolution “recognizing magic as a rare and valuable art form and national treasure.” The resolution includes a long list of merits of magic, “an art form with the unique power and potential to impact the lives of all people, that enables people to experience the impossible [and] is used to inspire and bring wonder and happiness to others” – Elise Foley, “Do You Believe in Magic? Congress Does.
Fibromyalgia is naturally a burden to me, but often I forget about the burden it places on those around us. Our inability to move throughout life with the same ease as our peers weighs on our loved ones as much as it weighs on the afflicted. People with chronic diseases are always worn out by the exhaustion that is native to me. It is an old tale we hear time and time again. I guess, sometimes, it is just important to keep some things to ourselves.
Mind over matter is magic. I do magic.
If you think about it, it’ll be over in no time
And that’s life
– “White Ferrari”, recorded by Frank Ocean