B Irwin is a writer from the North West of England. They are currently working on a memoir about illness, trauma and performance magic.

CONTACT EMAIL: birwi010@gold.ac.uk

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The Vanishing Act

“One thing you learn doing magic tricks for a living is how close every performance of every magic trick is to disaster. There are no robust magic tricks. They’re all hanging from a thread – sometimes literally.”

– Penn Jillette

Outside the Italian restaurant, a man was walking his dog in the rain. The rain was the kind that sweeps in from the side, lithe and barely visible but with the ability to soak you in minutes. Despite the rain, the dog still insisted on sniffing the base of a streetlight. The owner tugged on the lead, but the dog was on to something; it tightened the muscles in its legs, unmoving from its spot on the pavement.

I watched from our table, the window a square of mottled grey amongst the jolly lighting of the indoors. A waiter passed by my field of vision moving swiftly, a streak of white shirt, black apron, the glint of a tray held above his head. Someone laughed, dropped a knife, cleared a throat. I blinked away from the dog momentarily distracted and by the time I looked back the pair were gone. I think it was a Dalmatian. Maybe.

“You don’t have to eat it, Colin.” My Grandmother was whispering into my Grandfather’s ear, her voice obscured by the din.

It was my birthday, my fourteenth. The following day was my Grandfather’s birthday. I spent every one of my birthdays with him up until the year he died. We shared the same cake each year, pink on my request, with both our names piped side by side in white icing. By the time I turned fourteen his organs had begun to shut down, each element of his soft machinery dimming one by one like a series of lights. We were yet to find out about the tumour in his left lung, but there were warning signs. I always knew when someone would fall ill, the way some people can go outside, sniff the air and declare a storm to be fifteen miles west and coming quickly. My Grandfather took another small bite of his pizza.

It was his decision to come to the restaurant that night. The place was aged, a small building with signage from the eighties, wedged between a dry cleaners and a funeral home. In front there was a bright red and yellow striped canopy that was always left out as if it were perpetually summer. The rest of the city had been in a steady decline. Each time I visited Botchergate, the high street that joined onto the small road where the restaurant was situated, there were an increasing number of shops with chipboard nailed to the windows. Decades before the night with the rain and the maybe-dalmatian and my Grandfather’s tired internal organs, he and my Grandmother would go there for anniversaries or special occasions when he wasn’t having one of his episodes.

My Grandfather suddenly gagged, his throat making a clicking noise of gullet folding in on itself. His cheeks flushed, and mine, my Grandmother’s, my Mother’s and my sister’s all followed suit. His stomach was the first of his organs to decline. I had asked my Mother why one evening when she was doing the dishes, and she had replied, the alcohol of course. I had blushed then too, for having not calculated the obvious.

“Colin you’re going to be sick, stop it,” my Grandmother said, the muscles jumping in her neck, straining with speech.

The rest of us were silent.

My Grandfather kept his eyes on the meal, holding a napkin up to his mouth.

I knew only fragments of the man who was struggling to eat a pizza in front of me. I knew he liked white pepper on his eggs and used Pear’s soap. I knew that when the depressive episodes set in, my Grandmother would stand at the foot of his bed and dance for him. I knew only what I overheard about what happened before his breakdown; he was thirty, a successful chemical engineer who helped formulate Fairy Liquid and Crest toothpaste. He was a Durham graduate, a working class man with a scholarship and something to prove. He didn’t get a chance to undertake his doctorate degree before his first episode, but his Mother still called him Dr Johnson in her letters and to her friends at the bingo hall. And I knew why he brought us to the restaurant that night, why it was so important to him to finish the pizza.

And he did finish it. We left without dessert, and he was sick on the front step on arrival home. When my Mother, my sister and I drove away, my grandparents stood beneath the porch light and waved. In the distance, they looked like they could be standing in a spotlight, taking a final bow. My Grandmother’s left arm was anchored beneath my grandfather, holding him upright.

I fell asleep on the drive home and dreamt of a white rabbit in a black field. The rabbit disappeared and I stood, watching from afar, knowing I wouldn’t follow it.

The next day, I wondered which organ would go next, which part of him would shut itself off from me like a window in winter.

The Mysterious Death of Harry Houdini

*

The point at which death begins is often unlocatable. In memory, it occurs when the cards begin to file through the letterbox, lilies and cursive sympathies on their covers. But death fashions itself much earlier, quiet and unwatched. It happens at an unremarkable time, somewhere between normality and when the hospice comes to collect the bed they loaned, the one with the white metal bars on either side of the frame. Even after the body is put away like a keepsake in the ground, the process remains unfinished. The Houdinis knew this better than anyone else, as do my own family.

Harry Houdini officially died on October 31st 1926, but the process of his dying started much earlier. My Grandfather died 85 years to the day after Houdini, and much like that of the famous magician, his death was complex.

On October 24th, a week before Houdini’s death, Houdini took the stage at the Garrick Theatre in Detroit and performed his final show to a full house. Moments after the curtain closed on the cheering crowd, Houdini fell to the ground. He was rushed to Grace Hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with peritonitis as a result of a badly ruptured appendix. The actual rupture had occurred several days before his hospitalisation, poisoning the surrounding organs. Throughout the week following his admittance to Grace Hospital, Houdini is said to have remained hopeful of recovery.

When my Grandfather was diagnosed with lung cancer, he was offered treatment but declined. It felt nauseatingly ironic that a man who had spent most of his years either actively trying to take his life or depressed enough to be considering it, would die at the age of seventy-four from something like cancer. When Houdini died, the obituary in the New York Times marvelled at the passing of a man “who so often had seemed to thousands to be cheating the very jaws of death”. Similar remarks were made about my Grandfather, who had a reputation for spectacular suicide attempts, including wiring himself up to the mains in an attempt to electrocute himself. Aside from his suicidality, there were many threats to my Grandfather’s life. His incessant drinking was always our predominant concern. His fatal allergy to bees, each summer punctuated with epipens. There was the heart bypass and countless drunken falls, one of which blinded him in his right eye, others causing fractures and sprains and bruises.

During the last months of his life however, he was the happiest I’d ever seen him. He wasn’t elated in the way he was during manic episodes. Instead, he was simply placid as his frame thinned and his skin grew pallid. He moved with my Grandmother to a bungalow down the road from us, one that came cheap due to the asbestos in the ceiling. I didn’t visit as much as I should have, and when I was there I said very little. I was fifteen and selfish, but it was more than that.

On October 11th, thirteen days before his hospitalisation, Houdini was constrained and lowered headfirst into a rectangular glass tank filled with water. During the trick, known as the Water Torture Chamber, Houdini was injured in the leg by faulty equipment. In typical style, the magician pushed to finish his performance, discovering afterwards that he had in fact fractured his ankle. Eleven days later, Houdini was reclining on a couch in his dressing room at the Princess Theatre in Montreal, resting his damaged leg. He had continued performing to audiences despite recommendations from doctors that he take a period of rest. During his time in Montreal, he also gave a lecture at McGill University, after which he allowed students to visit him in his dressing room at the theatre. One student who visited was 31 year old Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead. According to one of the witnesses present at the time, Whitehead asked the magician two questions: did he believe in the Bible and was it true that he could withstand being repeatedly punched in the stomach.

In response to the latter question, Houdini stated that his abdomen was capable of enduring a great deal of force. Whitehead then delivered a number of powerful blows to Houdini’s lower stomach. Price reported that Houdini stopped Whitehead mid-punch, wincing in pain. Houdini’s doctors believed there was a link between Whitehead’s blows and the ruptured appendix that would go on to take the life of one of the most renowned magicians of all time. But there was also a connection between the incident in the Water Torture Chamber and his eventual death. If Houdini hadn’t injured his ankle, then he wouldn’t have been lying down when Whitehead punched him. If he hadn’t been lying down when he was punched, he might have dodged the blow or braced himself.

When people became sick in my family they usually did it at night, after the curtain was lowered and the crowd dispersed. Because of this, I developed a terrible responsibility to stay awake. I came to the false conclusion that there was a direct correlation between my ability to remain alert and the wellbeing of those around me. I still wake up panicking sometimes, the way I did when I was younger and my Mother would enter my room. She would sit on the end of the bed, crying quietly as if she were ashamed of the fact that after all the illness we had seen it still had the capacity to hurt her. The silence would stretch momentarily between us, her hands interlocked in her lap as she built up to telling me who had been taken to the hospital. I knew the routine well; I still know the routine well.

When people became sick in my family, they did so when I wasn’t paying attention and I have never managed to forgive them for that. I thought about this whenever I went to visit my Grandfather in the bungalow, how it could be the last visit and I wouldn’t know until I was shaken awake with the news of his passing. The pressure swelled over me and I chose to avoid the sticky fact of his death until it had already happened. It was just gone five in the morning when my mother finally slipped into my room. She sat with her back against the flat of my shins beneath the covers and told me that my Grandfather had died. This was more a courtesy than anything else; I had known it had come to an end as soon as she had opened the door.

We buried him in an unmarked grave, as per his requests. When we arrived at the funeral home it was already raining, coming down in dense sheets that bounced on the bonnets of the cars as people I vaguely knew drew black umbrellas above their heads. Had everyone bought black umbrellas for the occasion? Or did they already have black umbrellas anyway, just in case they had to attend a rainy funeral? Is that how adults prepared for the increasing flood of illness and death? I thought about this as the hearse pulled up and the parade of umbrellas collapsed simultaneously, their inhabitants hurrying in through the double doors. The family followed suit, and we took our seats in the front row.

I cannot remember whose shoulders he entered the room on, but I recall the dark polyester suits beneath the coffin, how each tie seemed badly chosen. My Grandfather had died a large man despite the weight that the cancer had stripped him of. Even so, he had insisted on an eco-friendly coffin, one made from cardboard. Only the casket had been dampened by the weather, and as we watched it being carried down the aisle, I couldn’t help imagining the underneath collapsing and my Grandfather’s body tumbling out onto the floor. But the cardboard remained intact, placed on a red velvet stand as people gave their speeches. They carried the coffin back out of the room as the shipping forecast played, another one of his requests. It wasn’t until after the funeral that I realised I had been uncontrollably weeping throughout the service, to the point that a relative remarked, “I didn’t know they were so close”. Anyone who had witnessed my distant attitude to his final months would’ve drawn a similar conclusion. Thinking about it now, I don’t believe I was crying because I loved him. I did love him, but in his own illnesses I saw fragments of myself, my desire to disappear growing to match his. I was fifteen and selfish and frightened that one day I’d welcome death the same, exhausted and sick and happily vanishing.

After Houdini’s death the man who had punched him in the stomach, Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead, was believed to be partly responsible. Since then this theory has mostly been dispelled given that cases of traumatic appendicitis are extremely rare. It is now believed that the pain induced by Whitehead’s punches may have masked that of the already bursting appendix, preventing Houdini from seeking help. Beyond this complication, Whitehead is no longer seen as a culpable party. Following the death however, Whitehead’s life is widely reported to have gone into a rapid decline. He spent the rest of his life in solitude in Montreal and developed a serious hoarding problem as he aged. He died in 1954 from malnutrition and was subsequently buried like my Grandfather was, in an unmarked grave. Perhaps Whitehead never forgave Houdini for dying either.

Ten years on from my Grandfather’s death I think about how impossible it would be for me to locate the shadow of his remains. That is, of course, the way he wanted it. He openly expressed how it made him itch, the thought of us standing over a piece of earth lamenting his absence. He was a firm atheist, a disbeliever in anything that didn’t align with what he saw as cold hard fact. A grave meant nothing, he told us, and mourning at it made no logical sense. When I think about it now, I believe that it was more his anxieties around the kind of life he had led that made him uncomfortable with those who wished to mourn it rather than his commitment to fact.

Houdini was also a firm disbeliever in ghosts. One of the most popular theories around Houdini’s untimely death is that spiritualists conspired to murder the magician after his very public scepticism surrounding the paranormal. Some also believe that his scepticism led to the spirit realm claiming his life, as prophesied by a number of mediums. Despite this, before Houdini died he instructed his wife Bess Houdini to hold regular seances in an attempt to contact him. He told her that if there was any truth to spiritualism, he would return to her to confirm his ghostly presence. The Houdinis refused to believe, yet Bess kept a candle lit beside a photograph of him every day since his death, the same way one might leave the hallway light on for a family member returning home late. She held the seance as per her husband’s request and continued to hold a seance every Halloween in hopes that Houdini would disprove his own beliefs by returning from the beyond. After the Final seance a decade later, Bess blew out the candle, reportedly stating that “ten years is long enough to wait for any man”.

I have photographs of my Grandfather pinned to the walls of my bedroom. There’s one of us sitting together on my parents’ old brown sofa in the living room of the council house I grew up in. Between us, a large neon green rabbit that somebody won at the summer fair protrudes, its ears separating our heads. In another, he is holding me on his hip as he stands on a ferry, our hair caught up in the wind. Some of the photographs happen to be near candles, but I like to think that the two aren’t connected. I do not keep a light on for my Grandfather, yet he remains.

Throughout my younger years, there were many attempts at family interventions where my Grandfather was concerned. My Mother, her sister and my Grandmother would sit him down in the living room and try year on year to tell him he was an alcoholic. But my Grandfather wasn’t able to accept this as a possibility, in the same way he couldn’t fathom the potential existence of a higher power or the prospect of magic. The interventions would end in screaming, my Mother in tears threatening to leave with her car keys in her hand, me standing in her way insisting she was too upset to drive.

I have tried many times to figure out why I am incapable of letting go of my Grandfather’s death. How can I continue to be so shocked by the death of a man ten years on, a man who died old and slowly and in some ways, unbelievably normally. Bess Houdini had fair reason to spend ten years looking for a ghost. Houdini died young and suddenly at the height of his fame.

When Houdini left Bess with the task of finding him in the afterlife, he promised that if he were there, he would communicate a secret code that only the two of them knew:

Rosabelle- answer- tell- pray, answer- look- tell- answer, answer- tell.

The code formed their own secret language, and when translated spelled a singular word – believe. Therein lies the difference between the Houdinis and my family. Harry left Bess with the possibility of belief, the opportunity to reach across the nexus between living and dying and pull a small part of him back into her world. With my Grandfather, our attempts at communication had always failed; there was no reason for us to expect that this would be any different after his death.