for our budget. Ripley said he’d pay for his own, separate room, and Dad was about to let him, but I shut that down. He’d driven all this way to rescue us; paying for his bedbug bites was the least we could do.
Finally, we pulled into the motel that would be our home base for the next day or two. Despite its charming art deco facade, the ironically named Uptowner looked like the kind of place you’d score an eight ball—so it was perfect for our budget. Ripley said he’d pay for his own separate room, and Dad was about to let him, but I shut that down. He’d driven all this way to rescue us; paying for his bedbug bites was the least we could do.
We got a room on the second floor facing a concrete outdoor walkway. The view wasn’t bad; I could see part of the Las Vegas skyline. But when I stood at the railing and looked down, I saw only an underfilled swimming pool and the cracked parking lot beyond.
In comparison to the motel’s rundown exterior, the room itself wasn’t as gross as I had feared; the carpet was stained, but the sheets were fresh. Dad immediately crashed on one of the two beds while Ripley collapsed into a sketchy-looking armchair. I took a long, tepid shower with my flip-flops on, just in case. Then I changed into jeans and a T-shirt, grabbed Dad’s journal, and sat down at the scratched-up motel desk to work.
“What’s up?” Ripley asked, moving to sit on the edge of the desk.
I replied in a whisper so as not to disturb my dad. “We’re retooling the Truck Drop.”
Ripley raised his eyebrows. “Do you really have time for that?”
“We can’t just do what we did before,” I said, flipping to a fresh page. “We need to top it.”
For the next hour, Ripley and I spitballed new ideas. We got more comfortable with each other, and eventually we were talking in person just like we had on the phone. Bouncing ideas off each other just like we had online—only now were sitting two feet apart.
Ripley suggested adding pyro to the act, setting the truck on fire with Dad inside it. It was a flashy concept, but we didn’t have the time or the money to pull it off. I came up with a Sub Trunk variation in which Dad would put me in the truck, and we’d suddenly switch places before the drop—but it didn’t feel big enough, and I rejected the idea myself before Ripley could comment. We went round and round like that, and even though our ideas only got more grandiose and impractical, I was having a blast. This was the part of grand illusion that I loved: The design. The creativity. Weaving a story, then constructing a frame of deception to support it. After an hour or so, Ripley yawned, apologized, and passed out on the second bed.
I kept working until, sometime later, my phone buzzed. I had come to dread the sound; it only seemed to bring bad news. This buzz was a text from Liam.
I’m sorry. I can explain. Please call me back.
My heart seemed to contract. What was he sorry for, exactly? Lying? Cheating? With great effort, I pushed the anger and the sadness away. I didn’t have time to cry; I had work to do. The Truck Drop already had a great narrative: the impossible escape. What we needed was a new effect, something that would blow everyone’s expectations out of the water. I flipped to a later page in Dad’s journal and found a diagram of the Truck Drop as imagined from upstage looking out at the audience. Until now I had been picturing the illusion as the audience would see it. Maybe I needed to work on it from behind the curtain—from the magician’s point of view—until I could see something new.
From the perspective of Dad’s drawing, the trick’s infrastructure was apparent: the truss above from which the truck would be suspended, the dump hatches on the back of the tank—all the bits and pieces that would be hidden by the curtain. I focused on one element at a time, imagining how we might exploit each one to greater effect. When my eyes came to rest on the motorized winch mounted in the rafters, I paused—and something clicked.
I sketched and made notes for I don’t know how long, my mind whirring, my fingers cramping around the cheap motel ballpoint. At some point