Sandman Slim (Sandman Slim 1)

I stretch out full on the bed and something else occurs to me. "I guess I'm in the video biz." Damn, I even have a job.

I want to go and wash off the blood that's drying on my belly and chest, but when I try to stand, my cracked ribs shoot to the top of my pain threshold and convince me that I can wait until morning. I shrug off Brad Pitt's jacket and lie back carefully. The moment my head hits the pillow, I'm out.

Alice had short, dark hair and almost black eyes. There were rose thorns tattooed around the base of her long neck. She was slim and it made her arms and legs look impossibly long. We'd been going out for three or four weeks. While we were lying around in her bed one night, out of nowhere, she said, "I can do magic. Want to see?"

"Of course."

She jumped out of bed, still naked. Candles and light from the street slid over her body, shadowing the muscles working under her skin, making the tattoos over her arms, back, and chest move like dancers in some eerie ballroom.

She went to her dresser and drew a curly little mustache on her upper lip with eyeliner pencil. When she came back to bed, she had a top hat and a deck of cards. She sat down and put on the hat, straddling me on top of the covers.

"Pick a card," she said. I took one. It was the jack of diamonds. "Now put it back in anywhere you want. Don't let me see it." She made a point of closing her eyes and turning her head away.

"It's back in, Merlin," I said.

She waved a hand over the deck and mumbled some made-up magic mumbo jumbo and fanned out the deck across my stomach.

"Is this your card?" she said, holding up one of the cards.

It was the jack of diamonds. "Right as rain," I told her. "You're the real thing, all right."

"Know how I did it?"

"Magic?"

She flipped the deck so that I could see the cards. It was fifty-two identical jacks of diamonds.

"That's not real magic," I said.

"Fooled you."

"Cheat. You distracted me."

"I have the power to cloud men's minds."

"That you do."

She slid under the covers still wearing the top hat and mustache and we made love that way. The top hat fell off, but she wore the mustache until morning.

The night after her card trick, I told Alice about magic. I told her it was real and that I was a magician. She liked me well enough by then not to fifty-one-fifty me to the cops, but she looked at me like I'd just told her that I was the king of the mushroom people. So, I pinched the flame off one of the candles she'd lit and made it hop across my fingertips. I charmed old magazines, dirty shirts, and Chinese-restaurant flyers up from the floor, formed them into a vaguely female shape, and had them strut around the apartment like a fashion model. I made my neighbor's yowling cat speak Russian and Alice's tattoos move around like little movies under her skin.

She loved it. She was like a kid, shouting, "More! More!" What she didn't want was anything serious. Every civilian I'd ever shown magic to had the same response - how can we use it to get rich? Let's manipulate the stock market. Turn invisible and rob a bank. Throw on a glamour so that cops can't see us.

Alice didn't ask for any of that. I showed her magic and that was enough for her. She didn't instantly wonder what the magic could do for her. She loved the magic itself, which meant that she could love me because I wasn't likely to make anyone rich. We hadn't been going out that long and she wasn't sure about me yet. It didn't matter. I was already nine-tenths in love with her and could wait for as long as it took for her to come around.

It took two more days.

She showed up at my door with a box from a run-down magic shop in Chinatown.

"I can do magic, too," she said.

"Let's see."

The magic box was about the size of two matchboxes. She lifted the top off. Her middle finger lay inside the box, wrapped in bloody cotton around the bottom. The finger wiggled. Stiffened. She held up her hand so the severed finger flipped me the bird, the cheapest of cheap gags. Of course, she hadn't chopped her finger off. She'd slid it up through a hole in the bottom of the box that already had cotton and fake blood inside. It was about the stupidest thing I'd ever seen.

I kissed her and took her inside. We never talked about her moving in. She just came in and never left, because she knew this was where she should be.

Later, when Alice and I were in bed and still drunk from our one month anniversary party, I told her that I had a dream where we were on a road trip, eating lunch in some anonymous little diner. She told the waitress that we were driving to Vegas to get married by an Elvis impersonator and held up her engagement ring for everyone to see. It was the magic store box, still on her finger. When I finished telling her the story, she bit me lightly on the arm.