The Confabulist
Steven Galloway
ALSO BY STEVEN GALLOWAY
The Cellist of Sarajevo
Ascension
Finnie Walsh
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2014 Steven Galloway
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, and in the United States of America by Riverhead Books, a division of the Penguin Group (USA) LLC, New York. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.
www.randomhouse.ca
Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Galloway, Steven, 1975–, author
The confabulist / Steven Galloway.
ISBN 978-0-307-40085-7
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-40087-1
1. Houdini, Harry, 1874–1926—Fiction. I. Title.
PS8563.A454C66 2014 C813′.6 C2013-905860-5
Cover design by CS Richardson
Cover images: (Houdini aloft) © Bettmann / Corbis; (sky) © hxdbzxy / Shutterstock.com
v3.1
for Diane Martin
Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Houdini: 1897
Martin Strauss: Present Day
Martin Strauss: 1926
Houdini: 1904
Martin Strauss: 1927
Martin Strauss: Present Day
Houdini: 1918
Martin Strauss: 1927
Martin Strauss: Present Day
Houdini: 1926
Martin Strauss: 1927
Martin Strauss: Present Day
Martin Strauss: 1927
Martin Strauss: Present Day
Author’s Note
About the Author
Every man’s memory is his private literature.
Aldous Huxley
THERE’S A CONDITION CALLED TINNITUS WHERE YOU HEAR a ringing that isn’t there. It’s not a disease itself, merely a symptom of other maladies, but the constant hum of nonexistent sound has been known to drive the afflicted to madness and suicide. I don’t suffer from this, exactly, but I have a strange feeling now and then that something wrong is going on in the background.
Today’s meeting with Dr. Korsakoff is a good example. He’s a strange little Russian who looks as though he’s never let a ray of sunlight touch his skin, and when he speaks of the human body, I begin to drift. I don’t see how he expects a man of my age to understand him. Thiamine, neurons, gliosis—all of it coated in his throaty accent, well, it goes right by me. I wonder if this is the point of such talk—a reminder that he has completed medical school and I have not. It seems to me that point was ceded upon my arrival in his office months ago. Did I tell him that as a young man I entertained notions of becoming a doctor? I can’t remember. I was not at all paying attention to him, that much I know. But then, out of nowhere, he said something that was impossible to miss.
“You will in essence, Mr. Strauss, lose your mind.”
I’d been staring at a potted philodendron placed in an awkward corner of his office. The room was even drabber than the hospital as a whole, but the philodendron was exquisite. As he droned I resolved to devise a plan to steal it. But then this “lose your mind” business caught my attention.
“The good news is that it will be gradual, and you likely won’t even notice.” He stared at me. He was probably worried I was going to start crying. I imagine a person in his situation is required to deal with a wide variety of unpleasant reactions.
“How does a person unknowingly lose his mind?”
“Yours is a rare condition,” he said, seeming almost excited, “in which the damage that is being done to your brain does not destroy cognitive function but instead affects your brain’s ability to store and process memories. In response to this, your brain will invent new memories.”
All I could do was sit there. Everything seemed louder and slower. The fluorescent lights were a hive of bees, and footsteps in the hallway thunder-clapped toward the elevator. Somewhere down the corridor a telephone rang a fire alarm. Eventually I was able to ask how long I had.
He shrugged. “Months. Years, even. While you may have some associated difficulties, your condition is not life threatening. You’re not a young man, so it’s possible you might die of something else before it becomes a problem. Although it does appear that other than this you are extraordinarily healthy.”
“Thank you,” I said, which immediately seemed stupid.
“It is a degenerative physiological condition, and there isn’t anything at this time that can be done about it. You might not even realize it’s happening.”
He kept talking, but that tinnitus feeling kicked in. Imagine if your mind was making a noise, not an actual noise but whatever the mental equivalent is. Then add a little fogginess and you have a pretty good idea of where I was. I realized the doctor had stood and moved from behind his desk. It seemed our appointment was over, so I stood too, but I felt that I couldn’t leave the conversation where things were, with me as some sort of dumbstruck simpleton.
“I really like your philodendron.” I stopped myself from mentioning that he should be careful because variegated philodendrons can be highly toxic to dogs and cats. I don’t know how I know this, or if it’s even true, and anyway you don’t see many dogs and cats in a doctor’s office so it didn’t seem like useful information.
He smiled. It didn’t suit his thin lips. “Thank you. I find it very calming.”
We both observed the plant for a moment. One of its fronds fluttered in the breeze from the air-conditioning vent. “So do I.”
“Would you like me to take your photograph with it?”
I would have, but his eagerness unnerved me and I refused. He hid his disappointment well.
And now I’m sitting outside on a bench by the main doors of the hospital. I could go straight home—there’s no one waiting for me, no one whose feelings I need to concern myself with. I can stew away as much as I like in my one-room apartment, and I probably will later on. Right now I can’t find the energy, and anyway I have a feeling I’m supposed to be somewhere this afternoon. If I can’t remember where, then I’ll have to go home and see if it’s written down in the notebook resting on my bedside table, but at the moment it doesn’t seem particularly important, and if it is I’ll remember soon.
Watching the various people go in and out of the swishing automatic doors is soothing. They all have problems too, or else they wouldn’t be here. Different problems than I, some more serious, some less serious, but problems all the same. One man in particular catches my attention. For some reason the sensor on the door doesn’t register his presence. He continues forward and very nearly collides with unyielding plate glass. He steps back, startled, and waits for admittance. When it’s not forthcoming, he waves his arms above his head and, as though recognizing him from across a crowded room, the hospital swings open its doors and the man ventures through them, appearing afraid they might close at any moment. I know how he feels.
Okay then, what is to be done? I am, apparently, going to lose my mind. Not all of it. I will still know how to tie my shoes and boil water and rea
d and speak. But I won’t remember my life. I don’t know what to make of this. My life has been a mixed bag. I’ve spent much of it trying to atone for a mistake I made long ago as a young man. It was a stupid mistake and I often think that in attempting to settle my debts I’ve fouled things up even more. Other times I think I did the best I could. Likely I’ll never know for certain which is right. But what if all that is gone, if each memory that is mine alone slips away forever? Will my burden be lifted or will it increase? What is a memory anyway, other than a ghost of something that’s been gone for a long time? There are secrets I’ve kept. Maybe they should stay secrets.
No. I will have to tell Alice what has happened, explain myself, clarify what has been left obscure. She deserves to know the whole story. It has been a mistake to keep it from her for all these years. But I’ll have to tell her properly, or it will only make things worse.
Alice knows most of the story already, but in any story there are details that can be pushed one way or another, and I have definitely pushed them in my favour. There are other details that can be left out entirely, which I have also done when it suited me. The only way is to start at the beginning and tell it as I believe it to be, not as I want it to be. I no longer have the luxury of time. My mind will soon become another door that is no longer open to me.
I deprived her of a father. This she has long been aware of. I could tell her all about him. The whole world knows me as the man who killed Harry Houdini, the most famous person on the planet. His story is complicated, though most of it is widely known. What no one knows, save for myself and one other person who likely died long ago, is that I didn’t just kill Harry Houdini. I killed him twice.
HOUDINI
1897
EVERY SEAT IN THE OPERA HOUSE IN GARNETT, KANSAS, was filled. Any free place to stand was occupied. The electric lights hummed and radiated heat, every particle of dust in the room whirling as though alive. From where he stood at centre stage Houdini, already a veteran performer at twenty-three, could feel the crowd breathe as a single organism. The room was his to do with as he pleased.
His wife, Bess, sat in a chair to his right, shrouded by a sheet. It was for effect—the spirit reading they were doing required no such concealment, but a little misdirection never hurt. These parlour tricks were all about the showmanship. He disliked them. There was no point to it if there wasn’t any skill involved.
Three years earlier, when his new bride had still been superstitious and ignorant, he had begun to teach her the tricks of a false medium. Her sister’s fiancé had died as a result of what Bess believed was the evil eye. At first he’d thought she was joking, but when he’d realized the extent of her belief he’d decided to show her what a simple matter deception was.
He waited until it seemed that Bess had cried herself out, and then smiled at her. “You’ve never told me your father’s first name,” he said. She opened her mouth, but he hushed her. “Write it on a piece of paper and fold it up.”
As she wrote he paced away, appearing lost in thought. He couldn’t understand how people believed such things. No, he could. There was a time he believed as she did. Maybe he still did a little.
He’d been gutting it out in the low-end museum shows of vaudeville for years without success. His brother Dash had been his partner, but once Houdini married Bess there wasn’t room in the show for three people. The act could barely support two—their one-room tenement was evidence of that. It pulsed with smoke, rats, and clamour. In a few days they’d give it up to go back on the road.
He turned back to her. She was trying to act calm, but he could tell she was nervous. She held a folded square of paper.
“Burn it on the stove,” he said.
She did as he directed, and he rolled up his left sleeve.
“Very few things in this world are as they seem,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an explanation for them. We are surrounded by what we do not understand. We will always be surrounded by what we do not understand. The mind plays tricks on us, makes connections that aren’t there. We must remain on guard against the deception of our own minds. If we can stop our minds from deceiving us, then we can stop the treachery of others.”
Houdini went to the stove and put his fingers in the burned remnants of the paper. He rubbed the ash from the paper between his thumb and fingers, and then briskly up and down his forearm. He extended his arm toward her. Her face went from grief to rage and then, unexpectedly, to fear. Bess slowly backed away from him, hands outstretched, until she reached the door and ran from the room. On his forearm the name Gebhardt rose from his skin.
Houdini lowered his head and closed his eyes. Bess was prone to these sorts of outbursts, but he hadn’t intended for this to happen. So often this was the case; he thought he was being reasonable and full of sense but now he’d only made things worse.
He caught up to her on the street. Where she was going he had no idea, but when he finally stopped her they were both panting.
“The devil, you are the devil—my husband has been taken!” She kicked at him, and tried to bite him as he embraced her.
“It’s me, Bessie. I’m no devil. Come back and I’ll show you how I did it. It’s just a trick.”
She didn’t believe him, but she came with him anyway. Her eyes flitted from left to right, plotting escape. But he could see her realize that if he was the lord of darkness then escape was not possible. If the devil asks you to dance, you dance as well as you can. He could feel her resignation and fear.
With his arm around her they walked back up the street and ascended three flights of fetid stairwell, stepping over a man passed out on the second-floor landing. Back in their room he sat her down in the chair by the stove.
“Look here,” he said. He rolled up his left sleeve and took a vial of clear liquid and a toothpick from his pocket. “When you were writing down your father’s name, which I have known since a few days after we first met, I was doing this.”
He opened the vial and poured the liquid on his forearm. “Salt water,” he said. He breathed hard on his arm and the water evaporated. Then he took the toothpick and scratched out a message on his skin. “You have to wait until the initial redness fades,” he said. “It only takes a minute or so.”
There was nothing visible on his arm now. “It will bear inspection. It’s key to know just how hard to press into your skin. Too hard and your markings will be visible. Too soft and the effect won’t work.”
He took some ash from the stove and rubbed it over his arm. “You can use varnish thinned with turpentine and paint the name on your arm—then the ash will stick only to the varnish, but I find the effect lesser.” She read what he had written and held out her hand.
He placed the vial of salt water and toothpick in her palm. She did as he had instructed, waiting for the water to disappear and then etching into herself with the toothpick. She refused to look at him. It seemed to him that much more time than was necessary went by before she dipped her hand into the ash and moved it over her arm. She hid her arm from his view and looked at him. His arm read
Forgive me
The fear and skepticism left her face. Her shoulders dropped and her whole body seemed to slacken. She stepped toward him, her arm extended.
I do
She’d lost her sense of superstition after that, becoming a valuable part of his show. Their modest act took them from shabby dime museums into larger theatre engagements, though they were still living hand to mouth. Houdini now felt sure he was on the verge of a breakthrough. He signed on with Dr. Hill’s California Concert Company, but soon heard rumours it was about to go bankrupt. In Garnett, Kansas, Dr. Hill asked Houdini for an act that would fill the house. So Bess agreed to another séance, even though it was risky.
From behind the sheet, Bess spoke, her voice high and ethereal.
“Is there a Harold Osbourne present here tonight? And his wife, Mary, as well?”
There was a rustling sound as people looked aroun
d to see who among them was being summoned.
Houdini stepped forward. “Is there anyone here who wishes to receive this message?” He made a show of peering out like a man looking through fog for a ship.
A couple in their late twenties and modestly dressed stood up. The man held out his arm to support his wife, and Houdini couldn’t tell if they were afraid or excited. “I’m Harold Osbourne, and this is my wife,” he said, firm and clear.
Bess waited for the crowd to quiet. “I have a message from little Joe.”
“Is this message for you?” Houdini asked, pointing at the couple. The man tried to speak, but either changed his mind or was unable. After a moment he nodded his head.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Houdini said, “please give your full attention to the stage, as the spirit world has a message for our dear Osbournes. It is of utmost importance that you allow the spirits to speak now, for the sake of both the spirits and these good people.”
Bess didn’t move. People whispered, shifted in their seats. The tension in the room reminded Houdini of holding a wishbone with one of his brothers, each pulling it apart, knowing it would snap but not when. Bess remained quiet until the theatre was completely silent. “Little Joe says he’s in a happy place,” Bess intoned. “And he says, ‘Don’t cry, Mama. There will soon be another to take my place.’ ”
Those in the room who knew the Osbournes gasped, and the woman lost hold of her husband’s arm and slumped back. Word circulated that the couple had recently buried their six-year-old son, Joe, and that Mrs. Osbourne was two months pregnant. Slowly the furor rose, with cries of “Can you get a message from my father?” and “My wife, is she there?”
Houdini let this go on for a while, and when the crowd reached a frenzied pitch, he announced that the medium was spent and would rest for the night. He thanked the audience and made a pretense of removing the shroud and helping an exhausted Bess from her chair. She looked out into the theatre at the parents of the dead boy, her face blank. She didn’t resist him as he guided her offstage, nor did she go of her own accord. Her body remained stiff to the touch, like an overstarched collar, until she could no longer see the couple; then he felt her relax. The curtain fell and they stood there, listening to applause punctuated by desperate shouts. After ten minutes there was still no sign of anyone leaving. Dr. Hill, fat, white-bearded, and professorial, ushered them down the hall, breathless and grinning.
