Published
I’m suspended by the contraption threaded through the back of Dad’s button-up. I hang on tight to the PVC pipe, even though it rubs my hands raw like monkey bars. We’ve rehearsed this a million times, and I keep my discomfort from him. I don’t jeopardize my moment to be on this side of the show.
The audience can’t see me scrunched behind the cloth resting against Dad’s shoulder. The metal music cues us to enter stage right. We hold our breaths through our choreographed beats. Without faltering, Dad raises the cloth, and I appear. To the audience, he’s done the impossible, conjured a young girl from nowhere—my arms stretched wide: ta-da, grinning ear to ear.
Dad’s garage workstation doesn’t look like most dads’. He’s got the typical tools: a drill, a saw, wood scraps lying around. But also: a diaper box with holes cut out, fake flies in a jar, a Darth Vader outfit, a giant dollar bill, endless rings, coins, rubber bands, and, always, cards.
Dad calls himself an “Inventor of Illusion” because he’s constantly tinkering away on his next big trick. He beckons me into the garage, and I know he’s about to show me something outlandish.
“Lauren, come stand here. Look at this. Tell me if you can see me flash here.”
He proceeds to stick eight umbrellas into the diaper box on his head. I stand at each angle to see if he’s exposing the trick.
Every Friday, Dad takes me to his friend Will’s house in Sunnyvale, where the Silicon Valley magicians gather. Will—a contractor-by-day, magician-by-night—has turned his garage into a theater with a stage, blue curtains, lighting, and folding chairs for the audience. They call it “The Magic Garage.” One room in his house has a bar and close-up card tables in every corner. The magicians drink martinis and show each other new tricks. Every Friday, I order a Shirley Temple (extra cherries) and get to peek behind the magic curtain.
When you grow up surrounded by illusion, you think you can spot deception anywhere. You train for it. Watching magic show after magic show, sitting in on rehearsals, and helping Dad build illusions in the garage, I take note of what magic “tells” to look for. I’m never fully immersed in suspension of disbelief. Even if I don’t know how a trick is done, I can usually make out when it might be happening based on where the magician is looking, directing attention, or covering something up. And even if I miss that moment, the knowledge that there is a moment runs through me and seeps into everything. Over time, my attention to how people conceal truths exercises my intuition and internal alarm bells. It’s probably why I was such an attentive and skeptical kid. I wasn’t quick to trust adults’ intentions and often called out my peers for dishonesty.
I remember Dad sitting me down around age ten to watch a short documentary that myth-busted mystical ruses. He walked me through how psychics are just fabricating one big illusion, preying on what we don’t understand about them, psychology, and the afterlife. Even the eerie magic behind the childhood games “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board” and Ouija Boards was disrupted by my precocious refutation that the spectacle clouds our understanding of simple physics. I would say it less eloquently than that, but you get it—I was great at parties. Growing up, I learned the world as smoke and mirrors. I learned to poke holes, to question everything.
In college, though, I meet a boy. He is everything mysterious to me—the brooding skater who paints his nails black, and whose floating head is the only thing I pay attention to when my teacher lectures on Zoom. I levitate when I discover he returns my affection.
I vanish from friends’ wine nights for midnight rendezvous in his dorm. I wait for him to want to make it official. After six months of hoping, I decide I need to end this if he’s not ready for a relationship. I walk away. It’s not long before he tells me his life is better with me in it. My disappearing act did not work. I believe him.
We date, and he moves into my college house. I lose friends in the process. Despite my training, I ignore the red flags, alarm bells, and glaring incompatibilities between us until I lose myself trying to fit into the illusion. I latch onto his back, transforming into what I think he wants. Yet, I can sense he’s not as hypnotized by our romance as I am. He doesn’t say “I love you” as often as I do. I want him to love me; I worry I’m pushing him away. “I cannot give you everything you need,” he says. I shatter when he breaks up with me.
I launch into relationship after relationship. I become bewitched by another boy who doesn’t want to date. I convince myself I don’t want to either this time.
He takes an intimate video of me without my consent. I tell him to delete it, but he insists it’s a “funny joke, just for us.”
I let him keep it like a secret, but he’s no magician's daughter. He shows the video to a friend, and I’m undone by his sleight of hand. The curtain drops from the ceiling, and a stage light crashes into my skull. He is all smoke and mirrors. In my breakup message, I’m sickeningly kind as I explain I can’t forgive him. He responds, “Ok.”
I meet a girl. She’s alluring and has hobbies and really likes eggs. I wonder if she’s real. We quickly make it official. Enchanted by queer freedom, I let things slide for her that I never would for a man. She talks to and about exes openly, cuts off her family, warns me she doesn’t think she’s a good person, and goes dark on me for days. I do my best to be there for her through her mental health struggles. But my grandfather dies around the holidays, and I can feel my body unable to hold both of our grief. So on New Year's Eve, when she tells me she doesn’t think she can do this anymore, the clock strikes midnight, and the fantasy that holds us together fades. We have an amicable, tearful breakup—I just need space and time to grieve alone.
She ignores my wishes and sends me romantic texts, a note, and a gift on my doorstep, begging to stay together. I say I need to block her number for not respecting my boundaries, but she floods my phone with harassment from multiple Instagram accounts. She sounds nothing like the woman I fell in love with.
I’m left again to wonder how it all could have gone so wrong, how I could be perfectly illusioned and then thrust into the reality that the relationship was not what I thought it to be. I wonder if I can trace it back to sitting in the audience as a young girl, watching Dad’s shows. Always being in on the trick gave me a smug sense of pride, but it locked me out of the wonderment Dad’s audiences had access to. Love offers that rush. In its suspension, reality blurs. It’s intoxicating. As prepared as I am to understand illusion, I know little about love. Yet, I learn a little each time the fantasy fades. Fool me once; I’ve learned to walk away.
Dad has watched me bring multiple partners to his magic performances. He’s watched me entranced by them, as I watch them entranced by the show. He never weighs in on my relationships until after they’ve disappeared. Perhaps because, when it comes to relationships, there’s no maneuver—no extra hidden card switched beneath a table—to spot. He knows he can prepare me for scams and psychics, but not for this.
As I grow, I teach myself what to catch, how to break the cycle, where people might flash the trick. I refuse to make the same mistakes, and yet, I refuse to stop myself from falling. I know magic is not real, but I believe there is a love that will hold you and stroke your hair with no intention of sawing you in half. Arms stretched around me: ta-da.
