Vlad the Illusionist

Fall descended on campus like a cold dream and I felt like I was losing myself in the transition. Who knew the despair I felt as a first year would evolve into a benign indifference that was so appropriate and gratifying for my undergraduate adulation for listless nihilism? To study seriously is to detach almost completely from the social, and it was wonderful for someone of my nature to fall so fortuitously into scholarship. Dissociation is submergence and submergence is transcendence. I submerged myself into magic, mysticism, and totemism and hardly ever did I look up to see if anyone was watching me.

The conclusion of my Statistics class welcomed the early evening and I was off to the library for no reason at all. I carried with me, in my LL Bean Backpack, labeled with my name in a silly italicized font, Kaitlyn, two books of importance. Who said that one should not let their academics get in the way of their education?  I admit that I didn’t take that piece of advice as seriously as I could have, and focused maybe too much on my academics, to the detriment of my education. My academics was hypostatized by a couple of serious books that I have read deeply and was re-reading for advanced submersion. Frazer’s The Golden Bough and An Inquiry into some Points of Seamanship bobbled up and down in my backpack as I sauntered down the pedway, head down averting the gazes of my peers.

As surly winds rearranged the foliage of the quad, I gripped tighter the novel I held in my right hand. I was underdressed for the chilliness of the evening. Perhaps I was cooling on the immensity of War and Peace. 

I hastened my pace toward the library. Existential crisis or no, confidence or none, serious or not, I had to make my way inside the Regenstein Library before the tentacles of the cold engulfed me in Medusa’s grip. Brain-freeze is a dangerous condition when you aspire to a life of the mind. 

The streetlamps flickered on in a magical flourish, one after another, from east to west, in a brilliant wave. I was in a full sprint before I noticed that I was the only one outside. Night had descended and I was blind with fear. 

I was running so fast and recklessly that I barely noticed the figure in the near distance. Owing to my almost non-existent exposure to childhood athletics, my stride was unseemly and awkward. My legs jutted out obliquely and kicked inward in a strained and unpracticed way. I clutched War and Peace closely to my chest and held on dramatically tight. Danger was always just around the corner. Just one-week prior, my Russian language teaching assistant was mugged and assaulted just south of the Midway. My leavened and hopefully refined racial views didn’t protect me from the objective fear of a defenseless night. 

I was nearly to the library when I became aware that the dark figure was actually moving closer to me. What if we’re always colliding toward something, gravity ever connecting us in some abstract and little understood way?

The voice shouted, “Hey!”

My legs kept moving, awkward and chaotic and I couldn’t speak. My faculties were submerged in a radical and immaculate terror. Every illegitimate and unsubstantiated fear enmeshed with the palpable solitude and danger of my urban landscape. The streetlights swirled in a psychedelic haze, mixing the drab colors of the gothic campus in an awesome way. I was on top of myself and the world was a spherical carousel that tossed my focus around in a disorienting and delirious way. 

The figure was getting closer and closer and yet I couldn’t stop, nor could I respond. “Hey!” The voice yelled again; this time slightly louder, more urgent. I was swept up by the dark figure and a calm dispelled the spinning. “Hi, I’m Vlad. Very much a pleasure to meet you,” said the figure. 

I first saw Vlad in my statistics class. One can assume he was contemptuous of the undergraduate requirement prima facie. Vlad rarely attended the bi-weekly lectures, nor did he turn in the problem set due at the beginning of class each Friday. Vlad, like some of the other uninspired classmates, hoped to satisfy the bare minimum requirement to pass the class by acing the midterm and final. For that, however, he would need help. Did I choose him, or did he choose me? I can’t be certain. 

We walked into the library under a sustained silence that cloaked us in intimacy. He introduced himself as Vladimir Mager, a third-year student from Cedar Rapids, Michigan. He said he hadn’t yet found his footing, most likely due to an underfunded savoir faire; he claimed a withering, brusque temperament that he picked up from his mother, or father, both of whom were not very well-liked.

I assume he was always smart, but never studious, and eased by with a slightly superior intellect that he knew was bound to fail him eventually, which I think was failing him now. Vlad told me he and his parents, who were both engineers, emigrated from Russia in the early nineties. He said he came to college with the intention of studying physics but after listening to an orientation speech his first year that admonished him “not to let his academics get in the way of his education,” he took to seriously smoking weed and consequently failed every class he took the fall quarter of his first year. 

“I kind of took the opposite approach, I think.”

“How so?” Vlad asked. 

“I am very serious. Or at least I aim to be.”

“How do you do that?”

“Several ways.” I paused, maybe because I didn’t really know what I was saying or maybe for dramatic effect. Drama is serious. Tension is serious. Flippant girls are bombastic and comical. They toss their hair around when pressed. They evade and they laugh; they breakdown.

I narrowed my gaze and swung my chin around. Laying War and Peace on a cart of books, I threw my hands out in front of me. I held three fingers at waist-level and tapped my stretched fingers three times with the same three fingers on my right hand, once for each point, deliberate and with ever-increasing extravagance. 

“Primarily because I suppose I’m more studious than most. I spend a lot of time in here. I like it here.  I basically live here. Second, I read everything that I’m assigned, including the footnotes. I read associated work of the things that we’re assigned in class. I care. Very much so I care. And lastly, I don’t date. Girls that date in college are usually not very serious. Maybe I take myself too seriously, but I believe that to be a better condition than not taking myself seriously at all.” I’m not sure I had ever so succinctly voiced my concern for the lack of seriousness of girls my age and the lack of seriousness in our milieu. It was potentially due to the previous drama of the spell I fell under in the quad. The swirling, the fear, the running into the arms of Vlad, maybe it all reorganized my thoughts in some fantastic, unabashed way. Whatever the cause, I was purposeful, resolute. 

Vlad stared at me blankly. It was then that I became aware of him and that he was high. His eyes were glazed-over and nonchalant. He was slightly hunched over, almost carelessly so, even for his considerable height. He was dressed in all black. He wore black jeans, and a black shirt with quarter length sleeves. He tapped his foot rhythmically, his black Chelsea boots bouncing off the ground with a sort of honest grace.  What was most outrageous, and most attractive, was that he donned a tall black top hat, like Abraham Lincoln, that was fashioned on the brink of his head and slid around whenever he moved with any amount of purpose. He was so silly looking. 

“Well, yes, maybe it is important to be serious sometimes I think,” he said. His Russian accent was for the first time palpable, but faint. “But don’t you think there is much to be learned from comedy?” 

How could I love him already? 

“As an illusionist, I test the expectations of my audience. Success as a magician requires a break from reality. We must intimate a familiar world, yes, first. The urbane are often the least receptive initially, but they are the easiest to convince. Once the familiar is duly established, an illusionist can initiate the revolt against the senses, against expectations, against what is regarded as normal. Which I myself find quite uninteresting most of the time.”

“Boring, maybe,” I said. “But nevertheless, reality, the serious, the sensuous is most often the most authentic rendering of existence. Religion, as Marx said, is the opiate of the masses. The pretend, masquerading as the supernatural, distracts people from the fact that they first exist. Essence is a distraction. Religion is a distraction. Politics is a distraction. I’m sorry, but magic, yes, is a distraction from the fact that we exist. I take my existence very seriously.”

“Magic is not an act of avoidance, but an act of transcendence--a gift, or exchange if you will. Magic is an ancient rite that has for millennia heralded man from one realm to another. Per the latest breakthroughs in quantum physics, we well know that other dimensions are not only possible, but necessary, given the established rules of reality in this dimension.”

I intended to argue with him some more, to plead a moot point in a more strident manner. But he didn’t give me the chance. He tossed a smoke bomb on the floor of the library and dashed away in a magnificent and strange way. Leaving visible only a large, brilliant red cape, presumably affixed to his neck, fluttering in the billowing gray smoke behind him.

I ran into Vlad several days later in Harper coffee shop. He stood out immediately partly because he was basically wearing the same thing he wearing last time I saw him: tall black top hat, quarter sleeve black shirt, black jeans, black Chelsea boots, and his majestic red cape. He was alone again, but this time I was with my friends Kate and Carolina. We were planning Kate’s 21st birthday celebration, which was tonight. He kept staring at us, not in an ostensibly creepy way, but his eyes were fixed permanently in a narrow, crooked leer. 

“That boy in the cape keeps staring at us,” said Carolina. 

“I noticed that, too,” said Kate. 

“He’s in my statistics class,” I said. “He’s an illusionist.”

“He looks like one, I guess,” said Carolina. 

I excused myself from the conversation and walked across the cafe where I plopped down right next to Vlad. His cape was frayed at the edges and stuck underneath his chair in a kind of careless, adolescent way. 

“Hi Vlad.”

“Very much a pleasure to see you again, Kaitlyn. How are you?”

“I’m well. I’m nervous for our statistics midterm, though. Are you?”

“No, not really. But I must do well on it, or I will probably fail the course.”

“I’ve noticed that you don’t turn in any of the problem sets.”

“Yeah, a friend of mine said the class would be really easy. But after looking at the material for the first time yesterday, I disagree, I must say.” He scowled so his forehead would crease, and I smiled at his sincerity. His expressions were so authentic and unintentional. 

“Well, maybe I could let you borrow my notes and graded problem sets, if you want,” I suggested.  

“Sure, I would be grateful for your kindness.”

Vlad was sipping on his coffee, tight lipped, and steam was billowing out of his mug into his face. He was wearing circle sunglasses that casually hung from his nose. The steam from his drink fogged his glasses considerably. The whole scene gave him an eerie aura that bordered on ghoulish, but the expression on his face was gentle. I liked his temperament, despite his obvious sloth and absurdity.

Kate and Carolina kept making faces at me from across the cafe. Initially, I engaged them and darted my eyes around the room and back at them in a mock, exaggerated fashion. But Vlad’s serenity put me at ease, and I eventually attempted to ignore them as they coughed and sneezed and all but streaked around the room to manifest our closed conviction that Vlad was a irrevocable weirdo. He was, but he was wearing a cape, how could I resist?    

“Vlad, my friends think you’re strange.”

“Of course they do, they keep making faces at you.”

“I think that means they like you. Well, at least, I like you.”

“Very nice to hear.”

“What are your performances like?”

He waited a minute to respond. “How about a proposal? Russia is very much different than the United States, culturally, and such. My parents understand it better than I do, but I’ve at least picked up the healthy, mutual benefits of quid pro quo. I believe that no present should go unreciprocated. The illusion of the free exchange does in way elevate the relationship between the giver and the recipient. Is this something that you might be interested in? To practice, what is fundamentally, a human enterprise.”

“What do you suggest?”

“How about I perform for you, free of charge, and you help me pass our midterm statistics examination?”

“Deal.”

There was a dialectical exactness about Carolina’s apartment that was completely unnerving. Her aesthetic was congruous with her philosophy that space and identity were inextricably and necessarily moral issues. Everything in her home was sharp, certain, angular. No arrangement was ill-considered and no item was meaningless. Her home was a white daze. She had a white couch and a white love seat, white floors and white rugs. If purity was the aim, then it was nearly achieved, I believe, in an unhinged mania.  

There wasn’t much to entertain us while we sat patiently still on Carolina’s bleached cowhide rug. We weren’t really talking or anything, mostly we waited as the storm grew in power outside her window. 

I noticed in the midst of the colorless milieu, which seized the senses in an unreasonable taking, a sacred plain, an immaculate depiction of votive sacrifice, a near perfect encapsulation, in its present context, of the ideal of moral and eternal recursion; rather, what I felt in the sea of white noise, that was just as audible, almost deafening, as it was visible, nearly blinding, was a dialectical wholesomeness expressed: good versus evil, heaven versus hell, life ergo death ad infinitum. How many artists were inspired likewise? The ritual of the fisher king sets the terms for us all in this age of ambition. I wondered why we all didn’t have a print of Turner’s magical wasteland hanging center stage in whatever place we call home. It seemed so fitting. 

Counterinsurgency is an occupation of both body and mind, space and spirit, perhaps there is no strategy more vile or refreshing. Vicious and virtuous musings on psyops and 1 Corinthians 3:16 occupied my mind until Vlad arrived nearly two hours late. He knocked on the door in an exalted way, five times in an essentially rhythmic manner. Carolina got up to answer door, but he was inside the living room before she could even detach the chain maze. The show had begun. 

We sat trembling, staring at him from below in a guileless indian-style. He was dressed in his trademark regalia, but today he also had a ceremonial scepter that was twice the length of his forearm.

He swung it around without prejudice. This was not the lackadaisical Vlad of the coffee shop or library, he was frenetic and spooky. Vlad was twirling around the apartment. His cape was fluttering through the air sensationally, the enlivened crimson of the cape juxtaposed the pallid habitus and disposition of the room, which exposed yet another unequivocal dialectical pair, a Newtonian certainty: movement and rest.

“Why are ye fearful, oh ye of little faith?” he said. “The dark arts are more than alchemy or subterfuge, more than a Faustian bargain. Magic, ladies, is a portal to the extrasensory, extraordinary, extradimensional. You may be familiar with Mauss and you may have read your Durkheim, but the modern mind shuns our mystical impulse. I beg you tonight, to escape your self-imposed limits, if only for your own sake.”

The thunder roared and the lamps of the living room flickered off and on, off then back on again. He pointed his wand at Kate. “You!” Vlad said.  Kate was catatonic from fear and blinking nonsensically. 

“You came here to watch the Magnificent, the Powerful, the secretive Vlad the Illusionist perform magical tricks.” He was standing on top of Carolina’s beige coffee table, peering down on Kate, his cape wrapped around his waist and sweat was pouring down his face. She waited several seconds before responding. 

“I did,” she muttered. 

“Do you know the first thing about magic, no?”

“No?” 

“Magic is power!” he roared. She jumped back and Vlad cackled like a villain. 

“Really?”

“No, just kidding, I’m just going to do some card tricks.” At this, Vlad hopped off the table, landed on one foot, pirouetted, curtseyed and whipped out a deck of military playing cards from his pocket. 

The tension dissipated. He had brought us to the brink of horror and back. He had so much control, and grace, and manic charisma. 

He took the deck out of the case and shuffled the cards hyperbolically, apparently tossing the cards back and forth from one hand to the other with total sovereignty.  Vlad continuing this charade, but now staring directly at Carolina, said, “Now I want you to think of a card, any card, and whisper both the suit and the rank to Kaitlyn.”

Carolina moved away from Vlad and toward me, taciturn, and whispered in my ear “Ace of Spades.” 

Vlad threw the cards on the ground in such a way that they all landed face down, camouflage backside wistfully contraposed to the chiffon hue of the tile floor. He traveled around the perimeter of the mess of cards, hopping and skipping in odd beats and measures, tapping cards at random with his wand and saying things like “no that’s not it” and “no not that one either,” et cetera.

He looked up toward the ceiling, right hand glued to his chin, and his left grasping his scepter, which was pointing at the window, and said “lightning!” The thunder roared once more. “That will be the last time it does that,” and the rain abetted almost immediately, I believe.

Waving his wand in dramatic fashion, Vlad bent down so that one of his legs bent in a 45-degree angle and the other jutted out horizontally, making it parallel with the ground. “This one,” he said as he tapped his wand on a card that was closer to the center of the gravitationally shuffled deck.  

“Kaitlyn, can you pick up this card and turn it over please?”

I picked up the card. It had a portrait of Saddam Husayn Al-Tikriti on it, labeled President, and it was, sure enough, the Ace of Spades.

“Wow,” said Kate. “The Ace of Spades.”

“Wow, indeed” I agreed. 

We all clapped gingerly. More, more we begged. He told us not to clap, that the show had “only really just begun.” But he bowed for us and stood triumphantly like a conqueror. 

A faint vibration and sound disrupted Vlad’s glorious moment. It was a familiar sound, and it was coming from his pants and it grew louder with time. In fact, I had heard it before. It was music; it was Tchaikovsky. The overture trounced the room in a defiant siege, yet again dialectically establishing the experiential alongside the rational, blurring the two irrevocably in the moment. Fate gave our Sunni despot a Queen of Spades, the sound of lovers, the poetry of Fortuna; inexplicably, how could it be any other way?

“It’s my phone,” Vlad said as he dug into his pockets frantically. “I thought I turned it off. One second, excuse me, just one second.” Finally regaining his composure after more than a dozen seconds of Pique Dame, he answered. “Hallo.”

Vlad was speaking in Russian, but I understood -- he was as clear as Cronkite. I was new to Russian, Kate and Carolina knew not a word, however we all followed, spellbound. 

“Comrade” Vlad said. “How are you?”

Vlad shifted his weight, looked at us, and then looked down again. A naughty smile developed at the corners of his mouth. 

“I’m very well sir, I am currently providing free services to several friends of mine in Chicago.” He nodded, “Yes, the 21st century,” he said. 

Vlad winked at us and put his hand over the bottom of his phone and said, “It’s Koba, the Man of Steel, his excellency Joseph Stalin of Georgia.” Vlad removed his hand and brought the phone back to his ear.

“Vlad, what are you talking about?” I said.

Vlad returned to his phone call, nodding rapidly, ignoring us almost completely, shifting his balance several times before responding. 

“No sir, I have not read that yet! However, I love him so, comrade. There’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance.”

“Vlad!” I yelled.

“One moment please.” He put his hand on the speaker again. “Yes, Kaitlyn?” He asked.

“Whom are you talking to?”

“I told you.” He said patiently.

“Joseph Stalin?” I said.

“Yes, Joseph Stalin.”

He returned to the call. “And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in our last conversation—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Comrade?”

“Vlad, if it’s really Joseph Stalin, put him on speaker,” Kate said defiantly.

“Okay,” Vlad said. “Koba, they want me to put you on speaker.” Vlad pulled the phone away from his ear and held it level with his abdomen and wrestled with the screen before a crackle indicated success. 

“Say hi Koba,” said Vlad.

“Hello, Americans,” said the jolly voice. 

Vlad spoke clearly and slowly into the phone. “Koba, these are my friends, Kaitlyn, Kate and Carolina. Tonight is Kate’s birthday. She is 21 years old.”

“Well congratulations, Kate, on making it 21 years. I will have 138 in December!” 

“...”

“Koba, they are uncertain about the veracity of this conversation. They are not yet ready to believe in magic, nor the extrasensory.”

“The American bourgeoisie is particularly resistant the supernatural. Which is strange, given their puritanical roots. I suppose that manifests in other areas, though. No?”

“My goal tonight is to prove to them that everything is not as it seems, I am under the impression that we had a successful start, at least.”

“Ladies, I hope that you are all ladies, what can I do to prove to you that I am who I claim to be?”

“Kaitlyn, you know a lot of Russian stuff, ask him something personal,” said Kate.

“Hmm,” I stood up to speak into the phone as Vlad did. “What is the name of your youngest child?” I asked.

“It is my dear Svetlana.”

“Okay, how did your first wife die?”

“I am to this day sad about the conditions in which she died in the brutal winter of 1906. Typhus is such a terrible way to leave this realm... Any more questions?”

We paused for a moment or two, then Carolina frantically googled the cause and date of Ekaterina Svanidze’s death: typhus in 1906.

“Life is not the end, the goal, or the point of existence. Death is not a conclusion but watermark. Whether you are alive or dead, comrades, is of no concern to the universe. Frankly it doesn’t matter very much. That’s the absurdity of it all. The horror is beyond cause or purpose. Godlessness is state of being rather than a belief.”

“Comrade,” Kate stood up too and began speaking into the phone, “Comrade, you are responsible for more death and torment than almost any other person in history. Why do you speak so callously? If I may ask.”

There was a silence over the line, one that was felt over time space. “Dear, life, for me, isn’t very valuable, I suppose. Is that the answer that you wanted?” said Stalin. He was matter of fact, unremorseful. 

“How did you get that way Mr. Stalin?” Carolina asked.

“American movies, most notably. They are so brutal. But I must really get going. I didn’t intend on such a long conversation.”

“I understand,” said Vlad. “It was nice speaking with you again.”

“Yes, it was a pleasure speaking with all of you, as well.”

“Agreed,” said Kate. “Whoever you are.”

“Goodbye.”

“Bye.”

“Wait,” I said. 

“Okay.”

“What’s your favorite movie?”

“Apocalypse Now.”

“I love that one.”

The line went dead.

There’s no judgment in a dream. The terror of a nightmare is an ex post facto renunciation of the mind’s wanderings. Freedom is a blur. Time distends inexplicably in many directions when liberty reigns. The way that Vlad harnessed magic, how he channeled the impossible, is only remarkable now that it’s over. He made everything seem so ordinary. All this was true the night that he performed for Kate's birthday; Vlad set us free, and the way he did it was as strange as a dream. Time is neither immutable nor unidirectional; it acquiesces like we all do. Gravity warps it like it warps us. 

The end.

Chandler James