Here’s the secret, and it’s a simple one: dying is easy. None would dare admit out loud that deep down, a tiny part of them desperately wants to believe. They hold this truth like shield against the swoop in their bellies every time the Magician falls and gets back up again.
The world is rational it obeys certain rules. Variations on tricks of every kind are a grand tradition in the magic world, and everyone knows none of it is real. Just because Houdini flashed bullets in his smile years before the Magician was born, people think they have it nailed down. Once, he came back as a waiter and spilled a drink on an audience member who was confidently whispering that they knew exactly how he pulled it off. Once he reappeared as a vendor selling popcorn, his satin-lapeled jacket smelling of butter and heat and salt. Sometimes the Magician reappears in the balcony, waving, and sometimes by the exit doors. She revels in these brief moments in the spotlight, dreaming of being a magician herself some day. Sometimes the Magician’s Assistant fires the gun, if the audience is squeamish, or especially drunk. The Magician reappears alive and at back of the theater.
A real gun is fired by a willing audience member. The end came for the Magician, fittingly, during the Bullet-Catch-Death-Cheat, the trick that made him famous. Of course very few people making the claim, then or now, are telling the truth. Vegas is a city of illusion, and everyone likes feeling they’re in on the secret, understand how the trick is done, but very few do. How many people can say they were there the night the trick went wrong and the Magician died on stage? Certainly, that first morning on the strip-dazed gamblers blinking in the rising light, the ambulance come and gone, with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air-everyone claimed they knew someone who heard the Magician’s Assistant scream, saw the spray of blood, saw a man rush on stage and faint dead away.
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