Lift
1
Anya did a magic trick the day before she disappeared.
Although I ventured into close-up magic once, I still cannot fathom how Anya's trick appeared to me like real magic, like some glitch on the matrix, like a hiccup of reality. Is it the sex, the moonlight, the shadows of our bodies, the silent hum of the fan? Or is it something else entirely, a temporary trick of memory?
2
The magician allows the spectator to inspect a deck of cards. The deck seems real, the volunteer says, and the magician nods in agreement. Take a card and show it to the others. The volunteer does his best to hide the card from the magician as he pans the card to the audience. The magician smiles. It does not matter to him. Place it on top of the deck. The others crane their heads closer as the magician waves his hand over the pack. Some Latin, some bastardized Tagalog. The magician lifts the top card and asks if it is the same card. It is. The magician replaces the card on top of the deck and a second later lifts it up again. Is it still the same card?
It is a different card. The volunteer allows himself to let a look of surprise (and a sigh of relief?) as the others laughs at the trickery and leaves.
3
It was night. I was struggling to light my cigarette when I noticed Anya take the cards from the small table beside my bed. Looking back at the memory now, months later, I don’t know why the cards were there. I always keep them hidden somewhere. I don’t know. The cards were there and Anya was there.
“Take a card.”
Anya fanned the cards and showed them to me, face up. It was dark, we left the lights off, so I made a motion to turn my lamp on. To my surprise, Anya dropped the cards and held my hand.
“No,” she said. “Leave it. We have the streetlamp outside, anyway.”
I raised my eyebrows, my hand still outstretched. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.” Anya released my hand and already began picking up the cards from the bed. I shrugged my shoulders and faced her.
She fanned the cards for the second time. “Take a card.”
I took the last card. It was the Three of Diamonds.
4
Anya was my classmate on law school. We were not even classmates on the best sense of the word; I mean, we were batchmates, but I only moved to her section after some trouble with my old section.
Anya, to put it simply, dominated the class. She got some questions wrong at times of course, it’s law school for a reason, but that was not what was special about her. She had this conviction that borders dangerously on cockiness. Some of the professors made it a point to shower her with praises every meeting. Some made it a point to humiliate her. Some made it a point to just ignore her.
We greet on the hallways and promptly forget a minute later.
5
It was a Wednesday, and Wednesdays meant Labor Standards, and Labor Standards meant passing through hell and back.
Naturally, the library.
“Hey, do you want to have dinner?” Anya laid her arm on the carrel desk and laid her head on it, looking at me. It never struck me until then how black her eyes were.
I stammered. “I don’t think…”
“I already told the beadle to excuse us from Labor Standards,” she interrupted.
“You what?”
Anya raised her head, smiled, and made a motion to close the book on my desk. I held her hand and stopped her. “You are crazy!”
She shrugged. “Please, I’m not in the mood to argue today.”
6
“I don’t like books.”
“Why not?” I asked. I was genuinely curious. I love books.
“They seem, I don’t know, permanent. Think about it. I want to destroy some book, right? Well, I can’t. They are just too numerous. The Nazis tried to burn books before, but look, you can’t destroy words. They persist, like bugs.”
“Why do you like to destroy a book in the first place, anyway?”
Anya toyed with the straw of her now empty iced tea and pushed the glass to the middle of the table. There was a clink as her glass hit the edge of my plate. There were still three or four shrimps on it. I do not particularly like shrimp.
“I don’t. I just don’t like the idea of an object, that is.”
There was some silence. I thought about Labor Standards.
7
“What was the card?” Anya asked as she took the playing card from me and placed it on top of the deck. She made a quick shuffle, but my eyes managed to follow the card. It was a false shuffle; the top card was still on top of the deck by the time she finished shuffling.
“A Three of Diamonds.”
She lifted the top card from the deck. It was the Three of Diamonds.
“Ah,” I said, trying to be cordial. “Cool. How did you do that?”
And then, before my fingers could even touch the card, the face suddenly shifted. The diamonds faded into the whiteness of the card and the whiteness of the shadows of the room. By the time Anya held the card in my hand, the diamonds had entirely disappeared. The Nine of Clubs stared back at me from the darkness.
I heard a soft whimper and then a sob. I dropped the card on the bed and held Anya in my arms as drops of tears fell from her eyes to our bodies and the sheets and the scattered cards. She did not stop crying until well through the night.