He was addicted to splatter movies, the gorier and more
explicit the better.
Death porn, I called it, and though he denied it, the lump
in his jeans gave him away.
When your boyfriend gets a hard-on watching maniacs tear the
tongues and toenails out of women, shoot them with nail guns or bury them
alive so they can listen to their pleading as they suffocate over two-way
radios—well, that's what some people might call a red flag.
I tried not to be too judgmental—at least not right away.
Connor had his good points. But the score was lopsided and not in his favor.
His problem, at least as I saw it, was that he was in love
with death and terrified of it at the same time.
For instance, he was the kind of person who scrutinized
every mole on his body for signs of change. He'd often enlist my opinion.
"Does this look any different from last time?"
he'd say, in a querulous, little-boy-lost tone. "I think its more spread
out. I think it's granulating."
I'd look up from my book, give the black dot under his
fingernail a quick glance, and shrug. "It looks pretty much the same to
me. I don't know. I really can't remember what it looked like before."
He talked about making a photographic inventory of
all his blemishes and doing a monthly comparison.
Fortunately, this plan never took root.
Then he read somewhere that you could get a melanoma on your
liver. He was incapacitated by fear for an entire week.
"What hope is there?" he groaned like Job, huddled
on the couch.
I'd had enough. I could live with him being a
wannabe serial killer but the crybaby routine was finally just too
much.
"That's it," I said. "You don't need a
girlfriend, you need a magician."
"But you are a magician."
It was true. At least part-time. I did a combination
magic-comedy act at a local club on the weekends. It was pretty amateur stuff,
more a hobby than anything else. In truth, I was awful at both comedy and
magic. I made a few bucks but mainly I did it to keep me from hanging myself in
despair at my dead-end life.
My act consisted mainly of third-rate card tricks and the
sudden appearance and disappearance of a mangy dove with a troublesome
cough. I called it a dove, but it was really a pigeon. These faded
illusions I interspersed with "wry" observations from my life as an
office-worker in a nowhere job with an infantile, commitment-phobic
boyfriend.
Let's put it this way. I was never going to make it to
Vegas.
My big finale was where I cut myself in half. I pulled it
off maybe 75% of the time. Anyway, I figured I had enough material on the bad
boyfriend front. It was time to make my relationship with Connor disappear.
I prepared my incantation carefully, but he fought me every
step of the way. He came back with an incantation of how he was going to
change, how things would be different from now on. He made a big show of
deleting several files of his death porn from his laptop but I noticed that he
didn't empty the trash bin.
It hardly mattered.
"I'll change," Connor vowed. "I swear I will.
Just watch. See? I'm changing already. Right before your very eyes.
Ta-da!"
By then I was already half-gone. I was little more than a
head and a partial torso. I was sawing myself in half again. But it's that last
half that's the most stubborn. If Connor noticed, he didn't let on. He was
still there, solid as ever. Maybe even more solid than ever. He was probably
more there than he'd ever been before.
He craned his head over his left shoulder to check on
what looked to be another troublesome mole on the tantalizing edge of his field
of vision.
Poor guy. He simply couldn't help himself.
"But first, just tell me what you think…"
I sighed like something already deflated, a kicked-out soccer
ball left behind on the playground, maybe, when someone steps on it expelling
that last pocket of air.
There was no way Connor was ever going to truly change
unless I changed him, not by magic, but like a television channel. I closed my
eyes to him and willed him gone. It’s the most powerful form of practical magic
I know.
Hearing, I'd always read, is the last thing to go. It's
true, I can report from experience. I heard his whining, pleading, angry voice
for some time after he vanished.
It showed up on my cellphone, it was transcribed on my
Facebook page and Twitter account. Inevitably it showed up at the club,
drunken, belligerent, and spewing personal details that would have been
embarrassing if anyone had been completely sober and paying
attention. Connor was just another rowdy drunk ruining everyone's good
time as far as everyone was concerned in what was the usual sparse Friday
night crowd.
Zack, our new bouncer back fresh from Afghanistan, showed
him the exit faster than you can say "abracadabra." It was a trick
done mainly with elbows and knees instead of mirrors, he later explained
to me in bed, his cock fluttering to life in my hand. He grunted and then it
was too hard for him to talk.
The first thing they tell you: a good magician never tells
you how it's done.
It's better that way, I've come to learn. Keeps the magic
alive.
The whole bedroom filled with doves.
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