Houdini

When I was young, I found a bird and I put her in a cage. She was beneath a blue spruce and had fallen from a nest, I presumed, because she was small and not yet able to fly. At first, I held her up to encourage her, with my palm open. But then I was happy just to hold her, gentle in my fist. I held her in the palm of my hand and gently caressed her feathers. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, I thought. I had never seen a bird with so much color in my young life. The cage I used was a hamster cage. My hamster, Fritz, had died, no fault of my own. Natural causes, the amateur autopsy went. Old age, my mother decreed. I put scraps of paper in the bottom of the cage and seeds in a cup that I hung to the side. I put water in a dish, so she could bathe, and a little mirror because they say that birds like company and they can’t tell that a mirrored image is only themselves and not another bird. I read a book about birds. That is how I knew all that I knew. 

I hid that bird in my rickety old treehouse, which was behind my house up in that very same blue spruce under which I found her. My brothers built it but had outgrown it, so I was caretaker by default. Inheritor of the estate. No one went up there but me. My older brothers were too old for a treehouse and I didn’t have many friends. They used to go up there with girls sometimes, but not after I put a lock on the door and told mom that for some reason my treehouse smelled like perfume and rotting pear trees. I never again smelled perfume or rotting pear trees in my treehouse.

I would sit up there and do my homework and listen to my bird sing. And she grew much bigger and she seemed healthy and flapped her wings and rattled the cage so much sometimes that I had to hold the cage in place with both arms, pressing my face against the wires and grinning at her. But then I noticed that her colors seemed to fade. Or maybe, so I told myself, I was just so used to seeing her and that it was only a matter of my perception, rather than a physiological change in the bird. Simply, I had grown accustomed to her and could no longer recognize her beauty as it once was. Maybe, I told myself, she was as colorful as ever and I was just a little colorblind. Exposed too long to colors too bright. 

But I learned later in life that very few good things come after the word “maybe.” And such reasoning leads to a general unhappiness and an accepted and unfortunate kind of malaise that sticks to the soul the way the sap of a blue spruce sticks to the fingers. But regardless of color, I could tell that she was no longer hurt and that if given the opportunity, she could fly. And more importantly, that she wanted to fly, and she didn’t need me anymore. 

I thought to open that cage door, but I couldn’t. I put my hand on it to do so, but my hand froze there on the latch. I had the treehouse window open, but I couldn’t open that damn cage door. The more she fluttered, the more I put my arms over the cage and cooed to her to calm her. For a while, the bigger she got, the more she flapped and tried to fly only to be repelled by the metal cage walls. There were still hints of bright color in her, but she began to gray and she became much closer to ordinary than I could have imagined her to be. But then she changed altogether. She sang less and she seemed more content in the cage. For hours I sat there and watched her and listened to her songs when she sang them. She was my pet and my best friend. She gave me purpose and someone to love. I had a lot of love to give and my mom wouldn’t let me get a dog, a rabbit, or a cat, and she said no more hamsters. I didn’t tell anyone about the bird because I was afraid they would take her from me, or they would tell me it was wrong to keep her that way and they would make me open the cage door. She was my bird and I intended to keep her.

But then one day I came home, and the bird was not in the cage, though the door was closed and tightly latched. I don’t know what happened to her. She was gone. I knew no one had been in the treehouse because I kept the door locked and I climbed in through the window, which wasn’t easy to do. I stared at that cage and there was no sign of her. But then I heard her signing and I caught sight of her out on the limb of the blue spruce – the very tree from which she had fallen months earlier. And I opened the treehouse window wide and I opened the cage door hoping to coax her back inside, but she didn’t come. She sat there perched and sang a song I must have heard a hundred times. But it was different. Much prettier. And it was like I understood what she was saying. Somehow. And she was more colorful, like she was when I found her. And I knew she wasn’t coming back and I might not ever see her again.

I named her Houdini because I liked magic and it was a great escape. And I felt bad for ever caging her, seeing her so happy. She flew away then, just before I had the chance to tell her I loved her. A silly thing to say to a bird, maybe, but I was sad I didn’t get the chance to say it for it is how I felt. It is how I still feel, regardless of where she has gone, and even though she wanted to go.

That Sunday in church the pastor said that God is freedom, and love is freedom, and he went on and on about freedom so I, even at 8, could not help but to understand exactly what he was saying. I never saw Houdini again. Nor did I ever figure out how she got out of the cage. Eventually, I nearly forgot her. I grew up and became a magician, amusing family and friends and fellow soldiers with creative tricks. You may have heard of me. The Amazing Augustus. I toured all of Germany and even traveled as far as America after the War. My career was only interrupted by that War, and I like to think if it had never been, I would have been far more successful than I am. But I have no complaints. I fought for my country but, of course, we lost. I thought a lot about Houdini in bunkers and in tanks, while in peril and at peace. In bloody battles and in the rarity of sleep. I dreamed of her and her songs. I drew a likeness of her from time to time to take my mind off the horrors I witnessed. Those that I inflicted upon others, so not to suffer them myself. But it was hard to get colors, and Houdini never looked right without. Some people, and birds, were never meant to be colorless.  

I moved to New York in 1953. I opened a magic shop in Manhattan. I liked when children came and asked me to do tricks for them. On weekends I toured, usually by train, perfecting my magic as I watched pillars of smoke pour from the engine and the factories out my window. Entertaining other passengers, kids when I was lucky. Women, sometimes. I watched trees pass and birds on the cables and wires of all that progress, and I thought of Houdini. But they were plain, ordinary birds that blended in to their setting as though they cared not to be noticed. 

I made things disappear. Big things, small things. Anything. I pulled coins out of ears. I cut a thousand people in half. I pulled millions of rabbits out of millions of hats. I escaped from straight jackets, chained and padlocked, submerged in water. Disappeared from boxes I caught on fire in front of millions of captivated people. But it was all a trick, or an illusion. It all went back to normal when it was over. Nothing, nothing, ever lasted, and I couldn’t help but to feel discouraged by it. The moment the trick ended, and the applause was over.  

          I never married. Never had kids. It wasn’t in the cards for me, I guess. I fell in love once. Truly, in love. One summer before the War. She was a singer. A beautiful singer who played guitar and had dreams of recording music and touring the world. But all I could think of when I was with her was that bird. My Houdini. And I didn’t want to be a cage. The War took her away from me. I enlisted. She and her family escaped to Spain. But I met her again, years later in New York. She came into my shop, visiting from Hamburg. It was December of 1957. We were in our late thirties and not the youthful pair we had been, but I still felt her electric and being around her thrilled me and gave me peace. She said she didn’t know I was the same Augustus Prowl when she walked into my shop. But how many Augustus Prowls are there in this world? That do magic. I laughed at her and she grinned back. 

She said she didn’t sing anymore and that she didn’t even own a guitar. She had lost so many loved ones in the War and the Holocaust that she had nothing to sing about, she said. I doubted that was the reason, but I didn’t challenge her. We ate dinner and ice skated in Rockefeller Plaza. We took in a show and I walked her to her hotel. I was leaving to tour the next morning and she was going back home to Hamburg. She had a husband and kids, she said. It was good to see you, I said to her. Giant snowflakes fell around us like confetti or ashes, occasionally upon us as though we were anointed by God and our time was enchanted. She smiled and kissed me on the cheek and I stood there without a trick. Without the ability to do anything, but to watch her walk away. 

She disappeared into the hotel and I watched through the glass doors as the elevator closed in front of her, like a girl I put in a box in some town, somewhere. Kansas City, Kansas. Tulsa. Las Vegas. Somewhere. And when those elevator doors opened, she was gone and someone entirely different spilled out into the gold lights of the lobby. Ta-da! The audience that didn’t exist, but in my mind, applauded wildly. And that was my cue to smile and bow and feel a little morose because the trick was over. 

I stood around for a while and watched the windows of that hotel light up and go dark. I looked for her window but didn’t know which it was. The words I intended to say to her, rested uneasily upon my lips. Fat and lazy, discouraged by time and a lack of confidence to express them properly. Broken and scattered like bodies and machines I saw in the War. I wanted to tell her about the bird. About Houdini. I had never told anyone before. I wanted to tell her why I never came back after the War. Why I didn’t look for her. I wanted to tell her what I wanted for her. How I felt about her. But maybe, things are best left unspoken. Undone. Regardless, I stood there in the snow in my long coat and I told the yellow window of the room I thought to be hers all that I wished to say.

“I offer you not a cage, but a tree. Not a mirror, but a companion. Not seed in a paper cup, but endless words and adoration to nourish your soul. To feed your spirit. I want to mend you, not break you. Heal you, not hinder you. I offer you the nest of my heart that is the safest place on this earth. It is not enclosed. It is not a cage. And you would never be captive. And though I offer these things to you, you perch there on that limb of that blue spruce in all your glorious color, and you look at me and sing your song. And you may fly away and might never return, but I will never forget you, or your song. Therefore, you do, in fact, nest in my heart that is an eternal universe of perpetual freedom and love for you and of you. How silly is it to say I love you to a yellow hotel window. But that is what I say to you. Goodbye, M.”

I don’t know if she came back down after going to her room. She might have when she realized my trick and discovered what I left on her bed. I walked away after saying those words and caught the train to Detroit where I would risk death once more in a ball of fire, make some children disappear, and cut several people in half, a little sadder, but happier all the same. Someone asked me what my greatest magic trick ever was. And I told them that I once put a magnificent and rare guitar in a beautiful lady’s hotel room without her knowing it, while I was with her even, with the hopes that she would sing again, sometime, somewhere, to someone, and maybe think of me. Or that I let a caged bird free without ever opening the door because nothing can love anything that isn’t free.