Some People Are Just Attracted to Stillness

I’m visiting my friend Molly’s flat, where she shows me the antique dining room table she scored on Wallapop. It’s a good, brown, solid-looking table, big enough for company, but not so big you wouldn’t have to reach too far when you’re playing Scrabble. I’m a bit envious; I’ve been making do with a folding table for way too long. “But this is the interesting part,” Molly says. “Alacazam!” and instead of a table there’s a magician in a tuxedo, his jacket covered with medals, looking nervously at us. She throws him a plate; he catches it, grins, and suddenly he’s holding two plates, four plates. He throws them up one by one like he’s juggling, but one by one they disappear. Molly throws him coins; he does things with the coins. She tosses him a deck of cards: the same. “He’s amazing!” I tell her, as the magician fans the deck, holding it out to us: pick a card, any card. “I know,” she says, picking a card like she’s seen this trick a thousand times. “A real honest to God magician in my apartment, any time I want. And not just tricks: if you ask nicely he’ll read your tarot cards, and trust me he’s the shit.” “The Queen of Hearts,” the magician says without waiting for us to confirm as we hand it back unturned. “Always the Queen of Hearts.” He throws the cards into the air and they float around like hummingbirds. He whistles and they return one by one to his hand. “So,” I say. “What’s the catch?” Molly draws from the deck he holds out to us once more. “After awhile he starts looking sad, and you have to say the magic words. Turn him back into a table. And then you have to realize that this table you’re using isn’t a table, it’s the body of a magician, frozen in the exile of an enchantment.” “Why is that so?” I ask the magician. He bids me to draw, and this time it’s the Jack of Spades. “I’m just more comfortable being a table,” he shrugs. “Always been that way, ever since I left the carpenters.” He winks at us, most theatrically. “Alacazam,” Molly mutters. And once more there’s the table, with the cards spread out like a river, every one of them the Queen of Hearts, except for a Jack of Spades and a modest Two of Clubs at the end. When I look past the cards on the table I see all the details of the carpentry, the quality of the wood, the tiger striped grain, the craft. It’s a beautiful table. “The thing that stinks is that I kinda like the guy,” Molly says. “I mean at first the tricks were amusing, but then we started talking and talking and I’ve never encountered such an insightful person. So I kept turning him back into a person, and not turning him back into a table, until I couldn’t stand the sadness. And now I feel sad whenever I sit down.” “Is there any sort of halfway point, some compromise the two of you could make. I mean, I hate to say this, but the way he looked at you, I think he likes you too.” “Do I look like someone who’d be happy as a chair?” Molly asks. I drink some more of my coffee while I think about what to do. “But,” I say. “If you can’t live with this sort of situation, maybe you should just return the table?” “Do you have any idea what people do to their tables?” Molly says, like I was a person who didn’t understand people’s capacities for negligence or cruelty. “I’m not a monster.” I look at where I set my coffee cup, the overlapping rings from my picking it up and putting it down without a coaster. I try to clean it up with my finger, so that Molly wouldn’t notice my negligence, wondering if by doing so I might be tickling the magician in a place I shouldn’t be. Wondering if he’d mind.