But Roman was rooted to the sandy street.

How did he know which card I’d take, Father?

Come on, Roman.

Father?

The man in rags put a finger to his lips, letting the child know he wasn’t going to be the one to tell him.

It’s called a trick, Father said, impatient. Low art.

But Roman stared at the man’s sandy hands. He could have easily picked the next card over. He almost had.

Possibilities, things he’d never considered before, traveled fast through his mind.

All the cards in the stack were the same.

The man somehow made the card more attractive in the spread.

The man could predict the future.

The man could read minds or at least force someone to do something.

Whatever it was, in the end, it didn’t matter. What got Roman’s blood rushing was the suggestion the trick made. The hint that mysterious powers could exist.

His father dismissed it, but the man in rags had exposed Roman to the core of magic. Years later he’d call it his first glimpse behind the curtain…down the comforting hall of the beyond.

Roman started studying magic at a rapid pace.

At the library. At the bookstores. At school. In the early days, he didn’t even want to be able to explain the tricks to himself. With each new trick he learned, he was struck by two very different emotions: the satisfaction for figuring it out and the disappointment for knowing how it worked. Roman learned fast that a magician had to remind himself how glorious magic was by eliciting that wonder on the faces of his marks.

He would struggle with this paradox for a long time.

He told his father about it but Father only dismissed it. Told him his mother wouldn’t have approved. Roman didn’t believe that. In fact, sometimes he imagined he performed for her ghost. He imagined her sitting up in her casket, the last way he’d seen her, her skin dry as parchment, flaking as she smiled, as she said,

How’d you do it, Roman? Tell me.

Other times he pretended his dead mother was his assistant, bringing him the table upon which he would work, adjusting the strings and small pulleys, even speaking to the audience on his behalf.

If Father had known how much Roman was practicing, he’d have sent him to the academy. And by hiding it, Roman had to work twice as hard; deception upon deception. And yet, he did not avoid Father altogether. Doing so would be admitting he was hiding something. Instead Roman overcompensated, trailing Father through the house, bothering him endlessly, and playing him twice daily at chess.

Father always won. Father loved chess like Roman loved magic.