The Magicians at Work

After Jim Steinmeyer’s book “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear” Over the years they hunted, the wayward apprentice watchmakers, the disappointing sons who transformed their surnames, hunted over acres of hinges, cogs, calluses, hidden whiskey, mustaches a breath from feral, poured an ocean of fortune into fabrications of brass and iron, spent entire seasons strumming massive harps of wire into perfect calibrations of invisibility, prayed to the gods of adjustable mirrors, cursed the gods of temperamental gaslights, broke the legs of imitators and thieves, chewed holes in each other’s pockets, harnessed nightmares of giant silver hoops making endless passes over the bodies of the dead, hoisted high a cenotaph for hundreds of sacrificed rabbits, breathed miles of delicate thread into the lost labyrinths of their lungs, all to make a woman float to make a woman float and none of them ever thought of simply asking her.