To The Best Of Our Knowledge; Magical Thinking

It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Ann Strainchamps, and I believe in magic. Do you meet magician Nate Stanoforth? One night I was performing in an on -campus bar at a college in Chicago. I walked out on stage. And you could just feel the hostility in the room. In a minute, something's going to happen. You're not going to know what to think. The audience was pretty evenly divided between people who would come there to watch a magic show and people would come there to drink. And there was one guy, six feet, looked like a football player or a boxer. And he started booing before I even walked out on stage. I jump up on top of this guy's table. This does succeed in getting everyone to pay attention. There's a solution I developed that's called the lottery prediction. I

handed the football player my wallet. Inside there's a lottery ticket and chose six random people from the audience. Think of a number that's somewhere between one and fifty. Twenty -seven. Thirty -nine. One, thirteen. Two. And then I asked the football player to stand, open my wallet, and pull out the lottery ticket. Read those out loud so everybody can hear them. Twenty -seven. Thirty -nine. Thirty -four. Twenty -two. And two. When he read the numbers on the ticket, it was just like a fire had started in the road. People started jumping up and screaming and running away. The most incredible part was watching his face change because he had started the show totally against me. Openly hostile. As he read the numbers on the ticket, all of that fell away. Magicians get to see

people at their very, very best. And you realize that that far more than the actual illusion is the most amazing part of a magic trick. I love that story so much because it really says something about the power of magic. Even when we know it's a stage trick, to return us to our original condition. A defenseless, open -eyed state of wonder. And in my view, whatever gets you there is worth it. Whether it's love, stagecraft, hallucination, or the divine. As a performing magician, Nate Staniferth believes that's his job to bring more wonder to a cynical world. Charles Monroe came caught up with him. So, if you're ready, take a breath, you're ready to do the interview? Yeah, let's do it. Tell me about your first magic trick you ever did. I became

a magician by accident. At age nine, I read the Lord of the Rings. You know, there's that scene at the beginning of the book where Gandalf the Wizard does this firework magic. And there are a bunch of people at a party and he causes these magical dragon fireworks to explode and scare everyone. Nine is sort of a curious age because you're old enough to slog through 1300 pages of fantasy literature. But young enough to, at the end of that time, still hold out hope that maybe if you go to the adult section of the library, you can find a book of actual spells. So that's what happened. I went to the library looking for a book of spells that would teach me the firework trick. Because you can just imagine if you could do that on the playground. Yeah, dude, you'd be the man. You'd be unstoppable, right? And I wanted to be unstoppable. So you found a trick that you didn't do dragons? Yeah, no, I didn't. I mean, it turns out that's not actually how magic works. But I did find a book teaching basic sleight of hand. And my first piece of magic was, you know, a classic where you take a coin and put it in your hand and then you open your hand and the coin vanishes. There's a fundamental

difference between something that feels like a magic trick and something that feels like magic. And for the first 4 ,000 times of practicing it, it looked like a magic trick. You know, it looked fake. But the thing about magic is you do get to a point where if you learn the technique perfectly and you practice and you're ready, sometimes it doesn't feel like a magic trick. Because it actually feels like this small miracle. And I thought that was fascinating. I wanted to learn more about that. So let's fast forward. You become an adult and you become a professional magician. What's your show like? I think when most people think about magic, they think of laser beams and smoke machines and tight leather pants and top hats and rabbits, there's a lot of cultural baggage that comes along with a magician in modern day America. I'm not interested in any of that stuff. I love the experience of magic. That jolt of sort of fear and joy that is all wrapped up in the experience of wonder. And in

my show, that's the only goal. I don't tell jokes. I don't have music. I'm not even really there to entertain the audience. If you want jokes, go see a comedian. If you want entertainment, watch Game of Thrones. A magician shares the experience of wonder. Everything else is just wrapping paper. I feel like there's a question I need to ask. It's like being begged as you're talking. Because we're kind of skirting around it here. Like, what is magic? Let me say this. If you just sit down for five minutes and really look at the reality that there is something rather than nothing. And that we are here to be a part of it. That is so deeply mysterious that I can't even begin to wrap my mind around it. But it's impossible to live a life constantly in awe of the fact of your own existence. Just out of practical necessity, we have to get used to things. But the danger is that we construct this smaller, more manageable world. Just so we can navigate it. But

at least for me, the temptation is to fall into the belief that that's the real thing. It's easier to live in the story you tell yourself about the world rather than the world itself. And magic for me is that sense of suddenly and unexpectedly discovering that the universe, the world, and the human heart are far bigger and more mysterious than you had come to believe. But it seems what you do, it's just a trick though, isn't it? Does that mean the insight you get from it, it kind of gets tricky thinking about the insight you get from it, if the whole thing itself is a deception. That's fair, but then you do have to dismiss all of fiction as irrelevant. Because I don't think anybody is willing to write off Ketcher and the Rye just because holding the coffee old wasn't a real person. You don't go see a musical and then walk out of the theater and say, well that was fun, but they weren't real pirates. The whole idea is to take the craft of magic, just like you take the craft of storytelling or

the craft of musical theater and give people something real. So you talk about that if at the end of the day, if people just ask how did you do it that you failed and that you don't want people just to dismiss this as a trick, you want it to be more than that. What would it look like if 100 people in an audience, if we all accepted it, if it resonated for all of us, what would that look like? Here's an example. You can learn everything there is to learn about lightning. You can learn that it's the discharge of static electricity from the atmosphere to the ground and you can learn all about the physics of it and why it works. But that will not, in the least, diminish the awe and fury and terror of a thunderstorm as it blows in. It's the experience of the lightning far more than the knowledge of the lightning that delivers that jolt of awe and wonder. I think wonder is not a product of ignorance. It comes with knowledge rather than instead of it.

And so I don't think an audience has to believe that I'm actually capable of reading their mind or predicting the future for the show to resonate. Have you ever been like, whoa, something happened there. Something more than just someone who practiced a lot and can perform. Something happened that really is mysterious for you. The greatest magician in the world is a 90 year old man who lives in London. In the 50s and 60s, he was a superstar in the UK. He was one of the first performers on the BBC. He was a household name. And then he sort of went underground and stopped performing publicly. But in the magic world, he's a legend. How I came to visit him in his home was another story for another time. But I went to see him and to talk about magic. And we walked into his house. He led me down the hall. And before we went into the dining room, he stopped me and said, Nate, you're married, aren't you? And I said, yes, I am. And so you would know your wife's favorite flower, certainly.

And I said, yeah, I would. It's the penny. And then he had this sort of half smile on his face. And he pushed open to the door to the dining room. And on the dining room table was a vase filled with peonies. And at that point, my knees just went weak. It didn't feel like a trick. It felt like an actual miracle would happen. But that wasn't the end of it. He said, I love this room because it has such a beautiful view of the garden. And he walked over and he opened the shutters. And there was the garden. And there were two rows of peony bushes running down at the end of the yard. Wow. And I thought that was amazing. But it wasn't until that night when I called my wife to tell her about it. I told her the whole story and she said, Nate, that's impossible. This is October. Peony's only ever bloom in May. I have spoken with some of the greatest magicians in the world trying to understand what I saw. And it's possible, it's just a coincidence. I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. But

there are very few days. And I'm saying this absolutely sincerely. There are very few days that go by that I don't think of that at least once. It just shook me to my core. Everything that I knew about magic could not even begin to explain what happened that day in London. And I will remember that forever. Nate, Stanifers. He's one of the busiest working magicians in the country. And he's the author of a wonder filled new memoir called Here is Real Magic. And that was our very own wonder junky. Charles Benroke came talking with him. Coming up the hidden magical roots of Islam. And our new producer, Halima Shah, reads my horoscope in Astrology Means. So you would be a rag doll cat. Oh, what? A rag doll cat. I don't like the sound of that. Oh, it's a rag doll cat. Do you want to hear who you are in an

Oscar Wilde quote? Yes. Okay, if you were an Oscar Wilde quote. It would be, I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word. That's totally true. I'm Anne Strange. It's to the best of our knowledge from Wisconsin Public Radio. And PRX. Did you know that magical thinking is listed in the DSM as part of the criteria for a personality disorder? That's just so interesting. And it suggests that we're so suspicious of anything we can't explain rationally that we literally label it crazy. So where do you go if you're looking for magic? If you want the world to feel more mysterious and miraculous? Even religion shons magic as devil's work, at least on the surface. Religious scholar Michael Muhammad Knight thinks that actually most religions have a secret history of magical practice, occult technologies, including his own faith, Islam.

And Knight is a very contemporary kind of Muslim scholar. He founded an Islamic punk rock movement. He wrote a book called Tripping with Allah about prayer with hallucinogens. And he recently wrote another one called Magic in Islam. Steve Paulson was curious. Steve Paulson is always curious. So when you talk about magic, I mean, what are you referring to? You're talking about astrology, folk healing, the gin, or the genies as they're commonly known in an American culture. Yeah, all of it. I mean, because first this was the problem. The problem is, well, what is magic? What does the word magic mean to me? Because what counts as religion in one setting maybe magic in another? What counts as science in one setting maybe magic in another? As these boundaries started to break down for me, I really celebrated the opportunity to just write about weird stuff in Islam. I say that differently in the book, but you know, this is amazing. You use a word we can't say on the radio, sir. What kind of weird stuff did you want to look into? Well, for example, the Quran isn't just a message to be received, but it's an

artifact. It's a tool and powers flow through it. There's this concept in Arabic, barakah, which people usually translate as blessings or grace. I call it the force. I'm an old Star Wars head. So I think of it as like the force, but the force flows through the Quran. The Quran is like this energy field of power. And people historically have experienced it that way. So they might, for a sick person, write a Quranic verse in ink on fabric and putting the fabric in water so the ink dissolves. And then you have the person drinking the water that the Quranic verse was written with, really. The ink of the Quran is there and they're drinking the Quran. They're drinking, they're ingesting the Quran to get its power. Some places people would call that magic and some people would call religion. So the boundary gets slippery. Tell me about the Jins. I mean, so in American popular culture, you know, we've seen the movies or the TV show, I dream of Jini. You know, the Jini pops out of the bottle as powers, but it's kind of a trickster figure as well. What do the Jins mean in Islamic traditions? These Jins are these invisible,

smokeless fire type of beings. They're often seen as either outright satanic or at best mischievous. Actually, they can run the whole moral spectrum that human beings can run. So Jins, they're good ones. There's bad ones. They have their own religions. There's Muslim Jins. Like you said, having Jins at your service is that religion? Is it magic? It depends on who you're asking, really. And just to talk about Christianity for a moment, there is magic in the Bible. The Magi, the three wise men who came to see the baby Jesus. They were basically magicians, weren't they? Sure. The birth of Jesus is heralded by these Iranian astrologers. And we don't like to think of it in those terms today. And so it just translated as wise men. But historically, the Persian priests were seen as possessing a special knowledge that today, we would call occult or magical. But much of that related to knowledge of the stars. But part of your project is to break down that distinction

between pre -modern and contemporary. You're saying it's not as if those sort of archaic pre -modern beliefs disappeared that they're still with us in some ways? Well, astrology is still a booming industry. And that's not a limited to a Muslim thing or a non -Western thing. Even when people in the West often congratulate themselves about how modern and rational and enlightened they are, there's still plenty of astrology books in what bookstores we have left. Certainly, there are a lot of people who believe in astrology now, but among intellectuals astrology is considered a no -go stone. Are you trying to resurrect astrology as well? No, I don't have a personal investment in astrology, but these boundaries between religion and magic, or religion in science, or magic in science, or between religions and each other, right? They all are permeable. So astrology now doesn't go in the religion section of the bookstore. It used to. There was a time when Muslims, Jews, and Christians were all

using astrology to argue with each other proving the supremacy of their own religions. So there were Jewish astrologers saying, look, you know, this Etern Jupiter conjunction theory proves that the Messiah is going to come and Christianity and Islam aren't going to last another hundred years. Isn't that 13th century? But for a thinker such as Elkindi, astrology proved the oneness of God, the fact that all the universe seemed to be working in harmony with itself, to him that proved it was all under one creator's control. Do you relate to these stories just as an academic? Is this sort of intellectual curiosity, or is it more than that for you? My professional academic life is inseparable from my personal religious path, because I am a Muslim convert I got into this field of study, in part for my personal investments. I draw from a lot of different sources in my life. Star Wars has informed my thinking about religion quite a bit. Pro -wrestling, strangely. Pro -wrestling. Yeah.

You're going to have to explain that one. What does pro -wrestling have to do with religion? I mean, I grew up on Holkogen. I grew up on this transcendent masculinity that he was offering, and it was a very, very specifically Christian masculinity. He talked about Jesus a lot. And later on, I switched him out for Malcolm X, and I switched Malcolm X out for the prophet. Wow, those are big transitions there. I have the autographs of Vince McMahon and Elijah Muhammad, and I think I'm the only person in the world who has that particular autograph collection. I have a signed check from Elijah Muhammad to his daughter, and I have a signed ticket stop from Vince McMahon. Now I'm a strange guy. What about mystical experience? Is that essentially magical as well? Well, I'm interested in the ways that mystical experience confuses the boundary, right? So again, we tend to think of religion as this very, very

textually defined, very cemented, very rigid, very concretely bounded entity. And mysticism confuses that. Mysticism, particularly what I was looking at in my work, was dreams. The ways that dreams can expand a tradition. In the Christian tradition, particularly in American Pentecostal tradition, there was a story of a woman who was visited by Jesus, and Jesus told her, this is 20th century America, Jesus told her to start her own church. And she said, well, Jesus, the Bible says that women can't be preachers, and Jesus tells her, yeah, but I'm Jesus. I know who I'm talking to. And so there's also stories like that in Muslim traditions of, for example, women who are preaching in places where they shouldn't be preaching, according to a particular legal perspective. And someone like Ibn Taimiah, seminal, seminal jurist, theologian, alternately hailed or condemned as the foundation for modern, and Salafi slash Wahabi thought, Ibn Taimiah gets corrected by the

prophet in a dream, because Ibn Taimiah disproved of this woman speaking out of place. The prophet comes to him in a dream and says, you watch it, because she was the pious person. So I think when we do feel smothered sometimes by the strictures that are imposed on a religious traditions, I think dreams are often, at least a temporary line of flight out of that. Have you had any especially visionary dreams yourself? You know, they were chemically assisted for the most part. What's interesting in relating to magic is, you know, after I published my work on Ayahuasca, someone wrote to me, they were Muslim, they were interested in Ayahuasca, but they were concerned that drinking Ayahuasca constituted black magic. And so that, in part, informed this project. Did you have visions during your time on Ayahuasca? I mean, I don't know, visions of figures in the Quran or, you know, figures from Islamic history? Well, what I read prior was that men who drank Ayahuasca tended to experience the divine in the form of

women or in feminine form. So Catholics who drank Ayahuasca saw Mary. And coming from a Muslim perspective, I decided I was going to focus that intention on Fatima, the daughter of the prophet. You know, it took me a couple of times, but I got that vision. I got to see Fatima, and at one point I asked Fatima about the Quran. Fatima said, that's for the boys, you stay with me right now. So I stayed with Fatima, I stayed with Fatima, and I suspended that problem of what does the book tell me? What am I supposed to be getting from the book? And then the next day I was reciting the book in Arabic and a mosque with that guidance. Do you get a lot of flak for saying this kind of stuff? Sure, because there's something that I do with the alienates everyone. I'm very, very invested in progressive Muslim communities in North America that seek what you could call gender reform or gender egalitarian readings of the tradition. So I've alienated them. I alienate

some of the communities I prefer in terms of racial justice and racial equality because I am so pro -queer in my Islam. And I alienate Sunnis because I like she is. And I do something wrong for everybody. So I don't have much of a lived community in the sense of a community that I really, really call my home at this point. You are sort of listing various groups of people who don't like what you do or say. It almost sounds like you wear that as a badge of honor by trying to bust these boundaries. You do get those hostile reactions. Yeah, I mean, maybe this is where the pro wrestling thing comes into because there's a virtue to playing the heel. You know, sometimes I'm the heel for people and that's, I'm okay with that. I can even embrace it because I think I'm a heel for the right reasons. You know, the best heel, keep down believes that he's right. I can't think of a better way to end this conversation.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. It's a good time. Michael Muhammad Knight is a religious scholar and the author of Magic in Islam. He was talking with Steve Paulson. So Knight found a source of magic hidden in his religion. But you know who's having trouble finding it there? Millennials. They are famously not interested in God. But you know what they are interested in? Astrology. Seriously, Millennials are all over their horoscopes. So meet Halima Shah, our new producer. Hey, now meet my roommate, Alana. She is really into astrology. You're into your horoscope, right? Ironically into my horoscope, yes. So what does that mean? It means that I don't really believe what my horoscope says. But you know, I also totally do. Our birthdays are actually very

close to each other. We're born about two weeks apart and so we do often talk about how we're both Libras and we're varying to pretty things and we like thinking deeply about just about everything. And when I moved in with her, it really did give us kind of a talking point to build our relationship. I've done this with everyone I've ever met, including everyone I interviewed for my job by the way. She does use it at work. At the end of the interview, I would be like, so there's just this fun, really nonsensical thing I do. And can you tell me your birth month and birth day? Because you can't ask their year, you know, because it's illegal to ask someone's age and an interview. And he was very explicit about that. But then they would give me their birthday and I was like, cool. I can't imagine having somebody in a job interview ask me what my sign was. You know, a part of me wishes people did. They loved it because it gives us a talking point. It's just like for me, the Myers -Briggs. I had no idea you were reading these every day. Oh yeah, and every time I meet a boy, I absolutely check to see if we're ideal for love, marriage, or friends.

Right now in my life, there's a guy that I'm seeing and we're ideal for love. But it says that the more attuned of these people who are born on these days would never seriously consider marriage. So I'm like, I guess I can date him for a while, but it's not going to work out. Like how certain do you? Very certain. You feel really certain you're not going to marry him. Yeah, but I think we're going to date. Oh my gosh, does he know this? Technically, because I read it out loud to him. Would you be surprised if it was more than that? More than dating? Yeah. Stocks. Yes. It's so interesting, because I would have thought, you know, if we're talking about millennials, this is the digital generation. They're data -driven, tech -savvy, career -oriented. I guess, why do you think millennials are flocking to astrology? Something to keep in mind about millennials is that they're also this generation that at this present moment is in their 20s, this time that is existential and when you're forming your political identity and your views on other things,

independent of your parents, possibly for the first time, and you're building your career, you're trying to find your place in the world. So Alana is an example of somebody who's gone through a lot of transition. And then she left a very challenging relationship. She had a change in her job. And so astrology kind of provides her with a way to contextualize all the changes she's going through. It doesn't have to be true. The point is to read it with the lens of your own life on it so that you can decide, like, this is kind of true. Oh, I can kind of see how this part of my life is like this. So what it does is it helps you reflect in a way that's sort of fun and a little bit like spiritual. So we're going to go see this person who is an astrologer, Ryan. I've heard multiple good things. Yeah, what have you heard about him? Well, my friend Anna went and apparently her husband had seen him a couple weeks by her and she said

it was extremely helpful. How are you? I don't know, a little chilly, but seriously. Thank you. I've never been here before. Yeah. It smells amazing. This is Ryan. He's 45. He was interested in studying psychotherapy, actually, than when he turned 19. He got his first astrological reading and he said it had a really big impact on him. So he decided to study astrology. Do you in your experience see people more interested in astrology now? Yes, I think it is becoming more popular and I think that a lot of that is thanks to the internet. And it seems to actually becoming ubiquitous in people's lives. I'll wake up, I'll get a cup of coffee, I'll check my horoscope from one of my favorite astrologers as opposed to just some random checking of the horoscope in the newspaper. I do believe that someday we will have

the right instrument to detect and observe how the astronomical forces affect us on a bio -psychic level. Wait, he thinks you can make a scientific case for astrology? He does. He thinks that the science is eventually going to catch up with the myth. So what Ryan told me was that astrology is a physical representation of a relationship between the seasons and the electromagnetic and gravitational grid of our solar system. I can hear 80 % of our listeners rolling their eyes right now. And probably most of the scientific community at this point too. Science at this point does not accept astrology. And even astrologers I think many would still place the practice in the realm of spirituality. It is as ancient as human consciousness as soon as we humans started to look up into the vastness of space and ask

big questions why are we here? Where did we come from? And where are we going? That we have always looked to the natural world and the night sky for clues. Before I jump in, this is a parrot that I give you my astrology disclaimer. Ready. I am interpreting. So Alana provided Ryan with her birthday October 2nd. The time she was born 10 p .m. and the time she was born in. And I should add that this didn't take place in some kind of cozy setting with a lot of candles and music or anything. We were in the back of supercharged foods in the yoga room and all Ryan had was a laptop and he was plugging in numbers and it turned out a chart. You are a Libra in the fifth house. Libra, the sign of the scales. One of the most insidious shadows of

Libra is being nice. Because what ends up happening when we're too nice, when we're too giving, is we detract from ourselves and we cut ourselves short in order to see the other person happy. Right now I'm thinking about past relationships that I've been in where I have absolutely been giving way more than I was receiving in my desire to keep the harmony between us because I could always see his side of the story. You may be the Libra out in the world, you may be the peacemaker, the lover, the artist out in the world. But inside of you, behind that rib cage, what is it that your heart needs, your soul needs, your interior being? That is your tourist moon. You are here to ground. I'm actually crying. It's because right now I'm feeling

so grateful because that's a huge realization I've had. And I realize that so much of my life, I've really had this achievement track, like as a high achieving student, I've become a high achieving adult and it hasn't really necessarily felt right. Oh, I had no doubt. I was sold. I was definitely having that thought that this might be a self -selected audience because how many people are going to pay somewhere around $100 for an hour long reading. For starters, millennials are a very stressed out generation. So I think astrology still does provide this kind of soothing reassurance. And the way Ryan even does his reading, he says that he tries to put a almost a positive light on what somebody's future might be and how they might be able to live out their best life. The other

thing is that millennials have put their own flavor on this. If you go on the internet, it is full of the stars or the horoscopes in stranger thing characters or types of french fries or cat breeds. Wait, wait, what? Yes! French fries? Cat breeds? Yeah, so and you are a Gemini, correct? Yeah. So according to this website, if you were a French fry, you would be a curly fry. And what would you be? I would be a waffle fry as a Libra. And that just says everything about us, doesn't it? Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Thank you. Thank you. And that is Halima Shah. You'll be hearing more from her in the future. She's the next generation of to the best of our knowledge. We are so happy to have her on board. Coming up, four siblings, one fortune teller, Chloe Benjamin's runaway bestseller,

The Immortalists. I don't understand. What exactly does this woman do? I told you, she has powers. What I heard is that she can tell fortunes. What will happen in your life, whether you'll have a good one or a bad one? And there's something else. He braced his hands in the door frame and leaned in. She can say when you'll die. Clara looked up. That's ridiculous. Nobody can say that. Daniel's face deepened in color. I'm serious. I'm going. I can't make another day in this apartment. I refuse. So who the hell is coming with that? I'm Ann Strangehamps. It's to the best of our knowledge. From Wisconsin Public Radio. And PRX.

If someone could predict the day you'd die, would you want to know? And how would knowing change your life? That's the premise behind The Immortalists, a new novel from Chloe Benjamin, about four siblings whose lives are profoundly shaped by a moment of, could be magic or it could be something else. The story begins on a hot summer day in 1969. Daniel, who's 13 years old, has heard of a mysterious woman who claims to be able to tell you the day you'll die. And he and his brother and sisters decide to pull their allowance and go see her. It's this tense, rich moment in American culture. So much is happening the summer of 1969. And the siblings are feeling both left out from that larger cultural moment and kind of shaken by it. They want some knowledge that will ground them. They want something that they can know for sure. So they go to see this woman and the book then follows

each one of them over the next 50 years. So she tells them their death dates? She tells them what she claims are their death dates. And that difference is what drove the book. What is the difference between knowledge and expectation and how do those questions shape our futures? How did you even come up with this premise? Because it feels so mythic almost. It's like a classic fairy tale or a Bible story. You know, it's set in the lower east side of it. You know, I think some of those big mythic stories were in my bloodstream. I grew up reading what I now think is kind of a golden age of YA. The Golden Compass, the CS Lewis books, a wrinkle in time. And I think all of these really rich, slightly speculative but really grounded in character books were some of the ones that shaped me. And then I always say also that as much as I wish I had an interesting fortune teller story, this book really just comes out of my own neuroses. I am somebody who really struggles with uncertainty. How so?

Well, I think uncertainty is so core to human life. We have to put one step in front of the other every day without knowing how long we have in the world. You buy a house, you have children, you get married, all with the supposition that you'll have many decades to enjoy these things, but there's no guarantee. Most of us were managed to suppress that knowledge just to get them better for days. Exactly. And I'm like, how do people do that? I have a hard time suppressing and it's very present for me. There's a moment after the kids have met with this old woman and she makes them go inside one at a time and give some tea and tell some their death date. It's all very civilized. Each of them, when they walk out of that apartment building, they're each shell shocked and there's a sense that they're not walking back into the same world. Everything is different. Varia scoots to the edge of her chair and offers her hand to the

Rishika, whose own hands are nimble and cool. Can you really do it? She asks, do you know when I'll die? The woman looks at Varia. Her eyes are bright, black, marbles. I can help you. She says, I can do you good. She turns to Varia's palm, looking first at its general shape, then at the blunt square fingers. She squeezes the tip of Varia's pinky. What are you looking for, Varia asks? Your character. Have I ever heard of Heracalitis? Varia shakes her head. Greek philosopher? The character is fate. That's what he said. They're bound up those two like brothers and sisters. You want to know the future? Look in the mirror. The Rishika turns Varia's hand over and sets it down on the table. January 21st, 2044. Her voice is matter

of fact as if she is stating the temperature or the winner of the ballgame. You got plenty of time. For a moment, Varia's heart unlatches and lifts. 2044 would make her 88 and altogether decent age to die. Then she pauses. How do you know? What did I say about you trusting me? The Rishika raises a furry eyebrow and frowns. No. I want you to go home and think about what I said. If you do that, you're going to feel better. But don't tell anybody, all right? What it shows in your hand, what I told you, that's between you and me. Do you play that out for yourself? Do you ever try to think, what would it be like if you did know the day you were going to die? I think I played out less in my

own mind about myself than I do about these characters. And that's my way of doing the former, probably. And I think you're right that not only do they leave with a changed sense of the world, but they leave in much greater isolation from each other. Instead of being a group, a family, they've become individuals. And instead of being children, I think to some extent this knowledge has made them adults. Wow. Well, go talk about Biblical. Well, yes. I was thinking. I was thinking after the forbidden knowledge and you're exiled from the Garden of Eden, this innocent time of childhood. Yeah, I think that was definitely in the bloodstream. Years later, Daniel, the oldest boy, tracks down this fortune teller and the confrontor and says, how could you have done this to us? We were just children. And she says, all children are fascinated by death. Do you think that's true? I mean, were you fascinated by death as a child? I do think that's true. I think that children haven't learned how to suppress it, the way that adults have. And I think that the wonder and

joy of the world is very present for them just as the fear of loss is present for them. I was always an anxious child. And I think some of us are just wired that way. It was very attached to my mom as a young kid. And I remember once asking her very seriously, are you going to die? Every child is different. But I do think that kids lack a certain veneer that we gain in adulthood. And that's a protective film that allows us to affect ignorance, even if we aren't actually ignorant. But that protective film is also what then makes the world prosaic, right? You were talking about loving those wonderful childrens and YA books. And I did too. That's almost all I read. And as a result, I think of my childhood as almost this enchanted time. And I'm aware of how incredibly lucky I am to be able to say that. But I do feel that that sense of enchantment, the sense of that the world is potentially a magical place.

It's awfully hard to hold on to as an adult. I most of the time don't feel it. Yeah. How about you? I agree. I mean, I feel it when I come across total mystery. And maybe that's part of what this book is exploring. Since writing the book, I've heard stories from people about their own relationship to death or stories of people they know who predicted correctly their own dates of death. I mean, again, those kinds of things that you just can't explain. And so as much as I crave certainty and knowledge, I also paradoxically find enchantment and magic in what science can't tell us. Yeah, it's interesting that we want so much to believe that science will be able to explain everything. And at the same time, we don't want to live in that world. Yes, yes, it's true. Yeah. You did a ton of research for this

book. One of the characters Clara develops a really strong interest in the stage magic. How did you even do all of that research? You must have uncovered so much that was fun. That research was so fun. I have no background in stage magic, but I did have a background in the performing arts. And so I think through Clara, I could channel some of the experience of being on stage, the relationship with an audience, and the kind of risk and precarity that comes from performing by yourself. I have to ask you to read a section from that. That's one of my favorite sections in the book. Okay. So in this scene, Clara is auditioning for the biggest show of her life, and she's trying to convince two very hardened executives at a major Las Vegas casino to give her a chance. Mind if I use that? Thank you. You're very kind. She holds the mug in her right

hand and splays her left to show the mid -semit. When she snaps, a quarter appears between her left thumb and forefinger. She drops it into the mug where it clinks. She pulls two coins from the bald man's shirt collar, one from each of his ears, and two from the larger man's shirt pocket. Now this is your mug. Not mine. There's no secret compartment, no storehouse of coins. So I bet you're wondering how I'm doing this. I bet you already have your predictions. You see me producing coins over and over. Well, you assume they must be in my left hand. And when I show you my left hand, when you realize that I can't be holding them there, you change the logic. Now you're thinking they're all in my right hand. It would be useful, wouldn't it? So close to the mug. You can't see that I might... She passes the mug to her left hand. Be shifting. She reveals her right hand empty.

Methods. She coughs. Two coins tumble out of her mouth. The dark man puts his pager in his shirt pocket. Now she has his attention. Your religious man says Clara, eyeing the cross around his neck. My father was too. But what I've realized, what I think he already knew, is that we believed in the same thing. You could call it a trap door, a hidden compartment. Or you could call it God. A placeholder for what we don't know. A space where the impossible becomes possible. When he said the kiddish or lit the candles on Shabbat, he was doing magic tricks. We know something about reality. My father and I. And I bet you know it too. Is it that reality is too much? Too painful? Too limited? Too restrictive of joy or opportunity? No. I

think it's that reality is not enough. Clara sets the mug on the floor and retrieves a cup and ball from the drawer. She puts the empty cup face down on the table and places the ball on top. It's not enough to explain what we don't understand. It's not enough to account for the inconsistencies we see and hear and feel. She opens her fist. The ball has vanished. It's not enough on which to pin our hopes, our dreams, our faith, she raises the steel cup to reveal the ball beneath it. Some magicians say that magic shatters your world view. But I think magic holds the world together. It's dark matter. It's the glue of reality, the putty that fills the holes between everything we know to be true. And it takes magic to reveal how inadequate. She puts the cup down. Reality. She makes a fist.

Is. When she opens her fist, the red ball isn't there. What's there is a full, perfect strawberry. I love that scene so much. I love your reaction. There's no better gift to a writer. Oh, and I read that scene. I put the book down and I just, I just thought, wow. I love that scene too. And it was a beast to write. I have very strong memories of agonizing over that and trying to figure out the blocking in theater terms. The philosophy of what she's saying lined up with what she was doing mechanically. So I think that was the tricky part. But you know what also strikes me about that is you write in such a heartfelt way about that longing that hunger for magic and mystery and the unexplainable the thing that makes reality so much bigger is writing for you a kind of

magic? That's such a great question. I think it is. I mean, I know it is because of how real these characters feel to me. Now maybe that just means that I'm crazy. But I really do feel like they're sort of in some parallel universe. And you can cut this out. But sometimes I even have this thought like, yeah, you all died. But the book is impacting people so you didn't die for nothing. Which is crazy. But it's not. A book is an alternate reality in the sense that you made this whole world and these characters up and now they live. And now they exist. I think you're right. It goes back to kind of the power of thoughts if something feels real in some ways it is. And there's a line in the book that one character knows that the narratives she has about her life are stories. But is it a story if you believe

it? Once you start to incorporate thoughts into your belief systems, they do become part of your reality. Do you believe in fate? I believe in things that can't be explained. And that is the conclusion that I came to in writing the book when people ask me if I believe that the woman's fortunes were true that she had this power or if it was a real strawberry that Clara produces in that magic scene, I don't know myself. And I like to live in that place of debate. So ironically, as much as I struggle with gray areas in real life, I think fiction is the one place that I allow myself to embrace them. That's Chloe Benjamin. Her new novel is called The Immortalists. And if you want to know more about her, you can read a great profile by our new writer and producer, Shannon Henry Clyber. You'll find it and more stories by Shannon on our website

at ttbook .org. To the best of our knowledge, it's produced at Wisconsin Public Radio by Charles Monroe Kane, Shannon Henry Clyber, Mark Rickers, and Halima Shaw. Our sonic wizard is Joe Hartke. Steve Paulson is our executive producer and I'm Ann Strange -Hamps. Thanks for spending time with us today and to quote another famous vanishing act. That's it. We're going. Goodbye. PRX.