Free The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital

his grasp. “I’m going.”
    At the apartment door, she turns back. He has not followed her, and the emptiness of the living room seems immense. She cannot bear it. “Who are they?” she calls out, to fill the emptiness.
    He does not answer.
    When she goes back to the workroom, he is sitting huddled on the floor beside the bench, rocking himself, his arms folded across his chest. He holds his sides as though he is in terrible pain, as though his ribs are bruised and flayed, as though he is stopping up the bloody openings from which the two Catherines have been ripped.
    â€œWho are they?”
    â€œThey are part of me,” he says.
    â€œFuck,” she says wearily, ridiculously and violently jealous (but of what , exactly?) hardly able to stomach her own idiocy Gabriel is certainly not part of me, she tells herself Nobody is part of me and they never will be.
    â€œI’m off,” she says savagely. “I’m working . Can’t stand around talking all day.” At the door she calls: “And keep your bloody hands to yourself. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s touchers.”

5
    Yes, where the road crosses Cedar Creek, you must make a sharp turn, and follow the unpaved detour until it ends, and then you must leave your car and enter the dark wood on foot and keep going until the straight way is lost.
    When I said that I came to myself in that dark rainforest, I meant it literally I blacked out. Shock hit me in a cinema full of strangers, once in London and then a second time in Sydney, in dark rooms full of those projections of moving light where Charlie regularly cobbled together time past and time still to come.
    I remember once in Charlie’s apartment commenting on a large blow-up of a hooker, done not in black and white but in sepia, so that the girl looked as tawny as one of the great cats. Stripes of shadow fell across her. In standard bodysuit (long sleeves, backless, cut high over thighs and buttocks) and fishnet pantyhose, she had her hands in front of her face like rapacious claws. The image was elongated, not quite human. The mouth was distorted in a feral hiss, the bedposts were like bars of a cage.
    â€œGod,” I said, awed. “Is that Cat?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWho is it?”
    â€œI call it Wildcat. ”
    â€œIt’s horrible.” Because of the way he looked at me, I said uneasily: “It’s not me, is it?”
    â€œIt’s Wildcat ,” he said. “It is itself.”
    That was the maddening sort of non-response Charlie hid behind when you tried to pin him down. Catherine and I expect to bump into him again in New York shortly, and when I see him I’ll insist on a proper answer. Would it shock me? The johns thought I was unshockable. Quite frankly, from that day on the railway platform in Brisbane until I lost my way in the dark, I myself thought I couldn’t be shocked. ( I myself. What a riddle that is. Where, in the grab bag of costumes and masks, does the self hide out?) Insatiable, invulnerable, beyond the reach of dismay, that was what I thought. That was in the time of the Second Innocence, before Charlie, before I got tangled up in Gabriel’s riddle, before I stumbled into the way Charlie saw things. Sees things. Saw. He’s thrown it all away now, he’s stuffed the past in a bag and dumped it somewhere and shot through to New York again. He left his camera in the workroom where someone else lives, his photographs are in boxes under Sheba’s bed, he’s through with all that, he doesn’t care to see like that anymore, but he used to juggle coincidence, he used to shuffle incongruities and hold them up to the light and show that their contours matched.
    This was part of his black magic. This was part of his uncanny power. Second sight, intuition, precognition, I don’t know what to call it. He himself would have had an artist’s explanation, which would