On the way to his show my heart raced. I felt
high-spirited, giddy, like a kid going to the circus for the
first time. As I approached that same corner, sweaty palmed,
nervous with anticipation, I couldn't see him, but I could hear
the boisterous laughter of the audience. There must have been
two or three hundred spectators gathered at the spot, maybe
more. The crowds were always much larger in the spring, but
today was packed unusually tight. Briefly, I saw him hop up on
his old trunk, above the crowd, and I could once again hear his
loud bass voice booming over them and listened as it muffled
when he stepped down, disappearing into the huge circle of
people. I breathed a sigh of relief. It was Max Vi, all right.
He was for real.
Max seemed much more ordinary than I
remembered, and I began to have second thoughts about the
psychic nature of our first meeting. Deciding not to stress the
supernatural experiences when I saw him, unless he brought them
up, I resigned myself to just having an ordinary conversation
with him. However, just in case we did get a chance to talk a
little about magic, I had brought a couple of my new magic
tricks with me. Perhaps he could show me a few tricks of his own
or something. I really didn't know what to expect, but most
important I was going find out what he had meant when he said, “You
are the one,” before he conveniently disappeared. Maybe
I imagined the whole vanishing thing. I don’t know.
It would have been impossible for me to get up close to the
front to see him, so I decided to wait out of the sun, eat a
corn dog, and maybe drink a cold one. Then after the crowd had
dispersed a little, I could rush up and quickly intercept him
before he started the next show.
While I was sitting on a bus bench next to the
food booths, waiting for the crowd to clear, a cute little
blond-haired, blue-eyed boy wearing a blue tank top and red
shorts, sat down beside me to eat his lunch. He hadn’t a
care in the world. How lucky he was to be just a kid, I thought.
Totally absorbed by the moment he concentrated on, what to him
was, the most important thing in the world – getting the
right amount of mustard on his corn dog.
Since I had already devoured my overpriced
corn dog, I was left sitting there with nothing to do really.
After practicing magic for several hours the night before, I
felt up to an audience of one. Once I’d started reading
about the “cut-and-restored rope,” it was like riding
a bicycle. How to do it came right back to me. Since the
opportunity was presenting itself, I decided to perform just
this one trick for the little boy.
