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Tom in the Zanzibar

More than twenty years ago, an underrated Arizona schoolboy named Tom Flanagan was asked by another boy to spend the Christmas vacation with him at the house of his uncle. Tom Flanagan’s father was dying of cancer, though no one at the school knew of this, and the uncle’s house was far away, such a distance that return would have been difficult. Tom refused. At the end of the year his friend repeated the invitation, and this time Tom Flanagan accepted. His father had been dead three months; following that, there had been a tragedy at the school; and just now moving from the well of his grief, Tom felt restless, bored, unhappy: ready for newness and surprise. He had one other reason for accepting, and though it seemed foolish, it was urgent—he thought he had to protect his friend. That seemed the most important task in his life.
When I first began to hear this story, Tom Flanagan was working in a nightclub on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles, and he was still underrated. The Zanzibar was a shabby place suited to the flotsam of show business: it had the atmosphere of a forcing-ground for failure. It was terrible to see Tom Flanagan here, but the surroundings did not even begin to reach him. Either that, or he had been marked by rooms like the Zanzibar so long ago and so often that by now he scarcely noticed their shabbiness. In any case, Tom was working there only two weeks. He was just pausing between moves, as he had been doing ever since our days at school—pausing and then moving on, pausing and moving again.
Even in the daylit tawdriness of the Zanzibar, Tom looked much as he had for the past seven or eight years, when his reddish-blond curling hair had begun to recede. Despite his profession, there was little theatricality or staginess about him. He never had a professional name. The sign outside the Zanzibar said only “Tom Flanagan Nightly.” He used a robe only during the warming-up, flapdoodling portion of his act, and then twirled it off almost eagerly when he got down to serious business—you could see in the hitch of his shoulders that he was happy to be rid of it. After the shedding of the robe, he was dressed either in a tuxedo or more or less as he was in the Zanzibar, waiting patiently to have a beer with a friend. A misty Harris tweed jacket; necktie drooping below the open collar button of a Brooks Brothers shirt; gray trousers which had been pressed by being stretched out seam to seam beneath a mattress. I know he washed his handkerchiefs in the sink and dried them by flattening them onto the tiles. In the morning he could peel them off like big white leaves, give them a shake, and fold one into his pocket.
“Ah, old pal,” he said, standing up, and the light reflected from the mirror behind the bar silvered the extra inches of skin above his forehead. I saw that he was still trim and muscular-looking, in spite of the permanent weariness which had etched the lines a little more deeply around his eyes. He held out a hand, and I felt as I shook it the thickness of scar tissue on his palm, which was always a rough surprise, encountered on a hand so smooth. “Glad you called me,” he said.
“I heard you were in town. It’s nice to see you again.”
“One gratifying thing about meeting you,” he said. “You never ask ‘How’s tricks?’”
He was the best magician I ever saw.
“With you, I don’t have to ask,” I said.
“Oh, I keep my hand in,” he said, and pulled a pack of cards from his pocket. “Do you feel like trying again?”
“Give me one more chance,” I said.
He shuffled the cards one-handed, then two-handed, cut them into three piles, and then reassembled the pack in a different order. “Okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and he pushed the cards toward me.
I picked up two-thirds of the pack and turned the card now on top. It was the jack of clubs.
“Put it back.” Tom sipped at his beer, not looking.
I slid the card into a different place in the deck.
“Better watch closely.” Tom smiled at me. “This is where the old hocus-pocus comes in.” He tapped the top of the deck hard enough to make a thudding noise. “It’s coming up. I can feel it.” He tapped again and winked at me. Then he lifted the top card off the deck and turned it to me without bothering to look at it himself.
“I can’t figure out how you do that,” I said. If he had wanted to, he could have pulled it out of my pocket, his pocket, or from a sealed box in a locked briefcase: it was more effective when done simply.
“If you didn’t see it then, you never will. Stick to writing novels.”
“But you couldn’t have palmed it. You never even touched it.”
“It’s a good trick. But no good on stage—not much good in a club. They can’t get close enough. Paying customers think card tricks are dull anyhow.” Tom looked out over the rows of empty tables and then up at the stage, as if measuring the distance between them, and while he pondered the uselessness of skills it took a decade to perfect, I measured another distance: that between the present man and the boy he had been. No one who had known him then, when his red-blond head seemed to shoot off sparks and his whole young body communicated the vibrancy of the personality it encased, could have predicted Tom Flanagan’s future.
Of course those of our teachers still alive thought of him as a baffling failure, and so did most of our classmates. Flanagan was not our most tragic failure, that was Marcus Reilly, who had shot himself in his car while we were all in our early thirties; but he might easily have been the most puzzling. Others had taken wrong directions and failed so gently that you could still hear the sigh; one, a bank officer named Tom Pinfold, had gone down with a crash when auditors found hundreds of thousands of depositors’ dollars missing from their accounts; only Tom Flanagan had seemed to turn his back deliberately and uncaringly on success.
Almost as if Tom could read my mind, he asked me if I had seen anyone from the school lately, and we talked for a moment about Hogan and Fielding and Sherman, friends of the present day and the passionate, witty fellow-sufferers of twenty years past. Then Tom asked me what I was working on.
“Well, actually,” I said, “I was going to start a book about that summer you and Del spent together.”
Tom leaned back and looked at me with wholly feigned shock.
“Don’t try that,” I warned. “Nearly every time I’ve seen you the past five or six years, you’ve gone out of your way to tease me with that story. You asked enigmatic questions, dropped little hints—you wanted me to write about it.”
He smiled briefly, dazzlingly, and for a second was his boyhood self, pumping out energy. “Okay. I thought it might be something you could use.”
“Just that?” I challenged him. “Just something I could use?”
“After all this time you must realize that it’s more or less in your line. And I’ve been thinking lately that it’s about time I talked about it.”
“Well, I’m happy to listen,” I said.
“Good,” he said, seemingly satisfied. “Have you thought about how you want to start it?”
“The book? With the house, I thought. Shadowland.”
He considered that for a moment, his chin still propped on his hand.
“No. You’ll get there eventually anyhow. Start with an anecdote. Start with the king of the cats.” He thought about it a moment more and nodded, seeing it as a problem in structure, like his act. I had seen him improve it in a dozen ways, revising with a craftsman’s zeal, always bending it more truly toward the last illusion, which should have made him famous. “Yes. The king of the cats. And maybe you should really start it at the school—the story proper, I mean. If you look back there, you should find some interesting things.”
“Well, maybe.”
“If you look. I’ll help you.” He smiled again, and for the space of the smile his thoughtful tough’s face was that of a man who had looked, and I thought again that whatever his circumstances and surroundings, it was only a dead imagination that could call him a failure.
“It might be an idea,” I said. “But what’s all that about the king of the cats?”
“Oh, don’t worry about that story. It’ll turn up. It always does. Say, I ought to check over some of my equipment about now.”
“You’re too good for a place like this.”
“Do you think so? No, I think we’re pretty well suited to each other. The Zanzibar’s not a bad old room.”
We said good-bye, and I turned away from the bar toward the hazy light rectangle of the open door. A car sped by, a blue-jeaned girl jiggled past in sunlight, and I realized that I was happy to be leaving the club. Tom said that he was suited to the club, but I didn’t believe that, and to me it felt—suddenly—like a prison.
Then I turned around again and saw him sitting in the murk with his sleeves rolled up, and he looked like the ruler of that dark empty room. “You’re here two more weeks?”
“Ten days.”
“I’ll only be in town another week myself. Let’s get together again before I go.”
“That’ll be nice,” Tom Flanagan said. “Oh. By the way . . .”
I lifted my head.
“Jack of clubs.”
I laughed, and he saluted me with his beer glass. He had never once glanced at the card, not even when the trick was over. Casual little miracles like that had nailed him into his life.
The king of the cats?
I hadn’t the faintest idea of what this “story” was, but as Tom had promised, it turned up a few weeks later in a reference book. When I had read it, I knew immediately that Tom’s instincts had been accurate.
When I set the story down here, I am going to put it in the context in which Tom first heard it.
Anecdote:
“Imagine a bird,” the magician said. “Just now—flapping up, frightened, indeed tormented by fear, up out of this hat.”
He twitched the white scarf away from the tall silk hat, and a dove the shade of the scarf beat its wings on the brim and awkwardly fell to the table—a terrified, panicked bird, unable to fly, making a loud clatter of wings on the polished table.
“Pretty bird,” said the magician, and smiled at the two boys. “Now imagine a cat.”
He whisked his scarf once again over the hat, and a white cat slipped over the brim. It came up out of the hat like a snake, flattening itself down onto the table, looking at nothing but the dove. With a slow predatory crawl, the cat went toward the dove.
The magician, who was dressed as a sinister clown in white-face and red wig above black tails, grinned at the boys and abruptly sprang over and backward, landing on his gloved hands. He held himself rigidly still for a second and then folded his legs down and his trunk up in what looked like one flawless motion. Now he was standing where he had been, and he dropped the white scarf over the elongated form of the cat.
When the magician passed his hand into the scarf, it fluttered down onto the flat surface of the table.
Three inches away, the dove still worked its wings and made its terrible clattering noise of panic.
“And that’s it, isn’t it?” the magician said. “Cat and bird. Bird and cat.” He was still grinning. “And since our little friend is still so frightened, perhaps we’d better make her disappear too.” He snapped his fingers, twitched the scarf, and the bird was gone.
“Cats remind me of a true story,” he said to the mesmerized boys, speaking as if he were merely yarning, as if nothing but entertainment was on his mind. “It’s an old story, but the truest stories are very often the oldest ones. This was told by Sir Walter Scott to Washington Irving, and by Monk Lewis to the poet Shelley—and to me by a friend of mine who actually saw it happen.
“A traveler, in other words my friend, was journeying on foot to the house of a companion—not me—where he was going to spend the night. He had been walking all day, and even though it was already late and night was coming on, he was tired enough to rest his feet when he came to a ruined abbey. He sat down, took off his boots, leaned against an iron fence, and began to rub his feet. An odd series of noises made him turn around and peer through the bars of the fence.
“Down below him, on the grassy floor of the old abbey, he saw a procession of cats. They were formed into two long equal lines, and were marching forward very slowly. Now, of course he had never seen anything like that before, and he bent forward to look more closely. It was then that he saw that the cats at the head of the procession were carrying a little coffin on their backs, and were making for, were slowly approaching, a small open grave. When my friend had seen the grave, he looked horrified back at the coffin borne by the lead cats, and noticed that on it sat a crown. As he watched, the lead cats began to lower the coffin into the grave.
“After that he was so frightened that he could not stay in that place a moment longer, and he thrust his feet into his boots and rushed on to the house of his friend. During dinner, he found that he could not keep from telling his friend what he had witnessed.
“He had scarcely finished when his friend’s cat, which had been dozing in front of the fire, leaped up and cried, ‘Then I am the King of the Cats!’ and disappeared in a flash up the chimney. It happened, my friends—yes, it happened, my charming little birds.”
The true beginning of this story is not “More than twenty years ago, an underrated,” etc., but, Once upon a time . . . or, Long ago, when we all lived in the forest . . .