In nineteen forty-nine New York City seemed to us who lived there the capital of the world: center for a rising U.S. materialism and power at the time of an interregnum between the narrowly averted doom of the century’s second global war and the atomic clouds of the third one we all expected. A low-level ominousness of the period invaded our nerves and made our gestures seem both expansive and futile.

I met the illusionist at a Manhattan art gallery where I had gone for an opening with my old friend Solz and his protégé, Joseph Darkwater. Joseph was a genius whom Solz had spirited away from his home on an Iroquois reservation upstate and was in the process of corrupting, filling with impossible dreams. But that’s another story. Or perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps there are no stories, only certain turnings upon turnings that our minds turn into stories. The illusionist seems to me to illustrate this.

The gallery was a large loft with square pillars in an old industrial building that overlooked a grid of streets stuttered with traffic. The gallery owner was a European friend of Solz, a bald-headed, cultured Bohemian who promised us various "entertainments." The guests milling in his gallery among the thicket of blobby, ta-citly obscene shapes on pedestals seemed as much on display as the artwork. They were mostly foreigners with a sprinkling of Americans. I learned by circulating on the fringes of conversations that this hodgepodge included a kamikaze pilot who’d never gotten to fly his mission, a single-lung victim of a World War I poison gas attack, an atomic physicist, a Polish Dadaist, a Hindu associate of the recently assassinated Gandhi, various refugees from Colonial oppressions in Africa and the Middle East, a survivor of the Ravensbrück death camp raising funds for Israel, and a couple of American bankers and financiers.

Our host summoned us after a half hour of mingling to a blank spot on the wall for the first of our entertainments, an avant garde film. The lights dimmed and a projector ground out a light beam with the title, "Illusions of Time." The screen blinked a series of still photos of a bullet frozen in flight, its fragments flaking off. Then images of a bird falling through the trees in slow motion, and a time-lapse sequence of the process of the bird’s decay —its body beside the road swelling and collapsing, the flesh of its head disintegrating, eyeballs vanishing, feathers pulling loose and disappearing. Then a still picture of the highway beside the bird’s skeleton—a time-exposure shot of the paths of car headlights (the vehicles themselves invisible) then, a slow-motion sequence of surf along a beach, its vast arabesques of spray slowly inhaling and exhaling until frozen into a single multiple exposure shot which blurred surf and beach into an incandescent white mist.

For a few moments the screen went blank; flashing motes and flapping darkness accompanied the whir of the projector. An old newsreel clip shuttered up with a subtitle indicating the nineteen thirty-seven Japanese bombing of Shanghai. Masses of people ran down streets filled with smoke and soundlessly falling debris. Black and white fire raged from building windows. A crowd swept tidally around abandoned vehicles and broken walls, scurrying in that kind of artificial quickness and slow motion created by the primitive cinematographic technology. Among the fleeing masses, a girl of about twelve or thirteen ran past, turning her head so that her beautiful, tragic face with its terrified expression loomed on the screen; then she turned her head again and disappeared into history.

Afterward, the lights came up and the guests milled among the ironical abstract shapes on pedestals and walls. Minutes later our conversations were interrupted by our host’s stagy assertion that he had uncovered a "leel magiccian" among us and had prevailed on him to perform a few impromptu illusions. He then introduced into the center of the room a stark, gigantic figure dressed formally in a bulky coat with dramatic lapels. He declared that the illusionist’s name was Lascivas. The guests circled quizzically with their drinks.

The proposed magician leered for a moment at the gathering through a pair of tiny eyes, showing ravenous animation, like a crow’s. His face was otherwise expansive and bland.

"Yes, I am Lascivas," the illusionist said with a heavy Russian or Slavic accent. "Your host has requested me to do for you a trick of escape that I have learned from the Great Houdini. It is your wish?"

There was a general muttering of assent.

"Yes. If there is somewhere a rope?"

One was immediately produced, and Lascivas called for volunteers to try their hands at trussing him.

"Do not spare me," he encouraged them. "You will not exceed my powers."

During the nearly quarter of an hour it took for the volunteers, arguing over details, to wrap the magician like a mummy, Solz told me about Lascivas. He said the illusionist and his wife ran a fortune-telling establishment on the upper West Side, which, along with freelance party engagements as a magician and escape artist, were his concessions to necessity—since he was by inclination and training a sorcerer. Solz related his story. Listening to it I had the feeling of hearing about a phenomenon hatched from its cocoon once each millennium—like a thousand-year cicada—to be displayed now at this party. Or perhaps it was like one of the obscene and comic artifacts poised on their pedestals around the room.