Then Roman heard a voice from behind him. Inside his apartment.

Roman spun fast, eyeing his one room.

Who’s there? he asked, his hands up, prepared to defend himself. The dark of his efficiency gave him no answer.

Roman. The voice spoke again. Roman Emperor.

The way it was said, the lilt, reminded Roman of the thousand times he’d heard his name through speakers that didn’t crackle, spoken by a knowledgeable lover of magic. It was the voice in his fantasies of the way his career should have gone.

Who’s there!

He made to step from the door, to grab hold of an ax he kept by the closet in case of intruders.

But something in the darkness moved and Roman stood rooted to the stained carpet. He hadn’t felt this stuck in place since encountering the man in rags with the tall stack of cards in the sandy streets of his youth.

A short woman stepped from the shadows where his bed met the wall. Roman instinctively wiped his hands across his abdomen and thighs, as if this woman had soiled him in some way as he’d slept.

Get out! Roman called, but, to his surprise, the words were not commanding.

The woman wore a buttoned-up shirt, a long plaid skirt, and smelled of pipe smoke. Her eyes were made eggs by large glasses and Roman saw the wrinkles of her face magnified through the glass. He looked to her hands and arms, her neck, and saw wrinkles piled like pants around the ankles of someone disrobing for bed.

Who…

Roman Emperor…the world’s greatest magician…loved for his silence…adored for his lack of gimmick. The woman smiled and smoke escaped her lips, but Roman saw no cigarette, no pipe. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Making it to the big time without selling your soul to get there?

As she stepped into the blue light cast by the closed Laundromat sign below Roman’s one window, he saw that her hair was purple and tied up in a bun. When she spoke again, her voice was marked by a hundred thousand smokes, and the wrinkles in her neck gobbled.

Wanna be in the pages of Presto, big time? Wanna be as famous as Finn?

Roman’s entire body cringed. He flattened himself against the wood door.

Get out, he repeated, this time with even less force.

The woman wagged a finger his way. The way she did it, and the way she advanced, Roman thought one word: promoter.

This woman, this impossible intruder, was something like Roman’s fantasies of a promoter had always been. The cigarette voice, the glasses, the business-casual clothing. And the way she wagged her finger when she wanted Roman to know that she knew better than he did.

The woman promoter burped and Roman saw flies escape her fishy lips.

Your act is shit, she said, stepping toward him. Roman pressed his back harder against the closed door. And you know it is. Or you would’ve opened that door and run by now.