A slightly crazed look was added to his already dark demeanor. The look of a man halfway up the mountain of his own ambition. If someone were to sneak in and witness his performances, they might not be able to guess his age; Roman was in the timeless grip of frenetic passion.

In his more lucid moments, able to see the scene he’d created from above, himself dressed in clothes from the warehouse boxes, the mannequins angled toward his pacing silhouette, he was able to name it in a word:

Ghastly.

But very soon all manner of lucidity fled him, leaving him completely immersed, behind.

These six months became another at an abandoned sugar plant forty miles from the warehouse. Here Emperor performed for the machinery. The black boots he stole from the warehouse once again rang out against the stone floor but here the echoes were returned by a hard, steel audience that was ever less forgiving.

And yet, by then he was performing for faces. Eyes and noses, ears and tongues, expressions he conjured in his imagination and held fast to as one might reality. The machines became old people and kids, newcomers and regulars, too. In the right mood, he fielded questions.

Mr. Emperor, how is it done?

Look closely. I hide nothing.

Before ever having opened a book on magic, Roman knew not to reveal his secrets. Soon the ferocious hold he held over this principle would come back to hurt the very career he cared so much about cultivating. But the Roman Emperor-to-be was very different from the one performing for steel vats and rusted gearings. And to get from one man to the other, Emperor understood that it was time to play out.

To play out for people.

11

He got on an open-call bill at the Comedy Canteen, one hundred and twenty miles from the sugar plant, a venue he never dreamed he’d enter. He called from a phone booth, trembling, and they said yes, yes with a name like his they’d be happy to add it to the list. But you better be good! they said. Yes, but you better…be…good.

He was slated to play at nine thirty. Emperor was so excited he showed up three hours early. He didn’t know how shows and times and timing worked, and he hardly understood it when a lady there told him to come back half an hour before he was scheduled to perform. Or, she said, if he wanted to come back at seven thirty, the first of the four magicians slated before him would be starting and if he wanted to see the others—

Of course I want to see them, Roman said, astonished that anybody could think otherwise. When he came back at seven thirty the same lady smiled, told him things were running behind, and let him inside. The room was on its way to being crowded. Roman felt a lump in his throat that shamed him.