Free Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers Page A

décor was casino crossed with Red Lobster crossed with the court of Louis XVI. The kids were loving it. Ana was running everywhere, touching delicate things, bumping into people, making elderly women and men gasp and reach for walls.
    “I think it starts in twenty minutes,” Charlie said, and then again looked lost. “Let me see if we need tickets.” He wandered off, and Josie knew she was a fool. Parenting was chiefly about keeping one’s children away from unnecessary dangers, avoidable traumas and disappointments, and here she had dragged them to Alaska, and had driven them around unchosen parts of the state, and then to Seward, where no one had recommended they go, and now she had them following a lonely man onto a ship designed, it seemed, by the insane. All to see magic. Luxembourgian magic. Josie paged through the years of her life, trying to remember a decision she had made and was proud of, and she found nothing.
    Finally Charlie returned, holding the tickets in his hand like a bouquet. “Are we ready?”
    There was an escalator, an escalator inside a ship. Charlie was ahead of them, and rode upward while looking back at them, smiling but nervous, as if worried they might flee.
    The auditorium seated at least five hundred and all within was burgundy—like being inside someone’s liver. They sat in a half-moon booth near the back, Paul next to Charlie. A waitress in bright red hurried by and Charlie made no move to order anything. Josie asked for a lemonade for the kids and a glass of pinot noir for herself. The drinks arrived and the lights went down. Her glass was the size of a crystal ball, and was nearly full, and Josie felt kissed by the anonymous and irrational generosity of humankind. She relaxed, anticipating a few hours of not having to do anything but sit and watch in silence, getting harmlessly plowed.
    Charlie had a different plan. The show started, and Josie realized that Charlie intended to talk throughout. And the words he wanted most to say were “See that?” For Ana, the answer was always “See
what
?,” so they made a beautiful pair. Charlie would notice something that every member of the audience had seen, and then would ask Josie and her kids if they’d seen it, too. Ana would say “See what?” and Charlie would then explain what he had seen, talking through the next five minutes of the show. It was wonderful.
    The first magician, a pretty man in a tight silk shirt, had, it seemed, been told to make his act more of a personal story, so his monologue returned again and again to the theme of how he had always welcomed magic into his life. Opened the door to magic. Said hello to magic. Or how he had learned to appreciate magic in his life. Did he say he was married to magic? Maybe he did. It all made little sense and the audience seemed lost. “Life is full of magic if you look for it,” he noted, breathlessly, because he was moving around the stage in a thousand tiny steps, as a woman in a sparkly one-piece bathing suit vamped behind him with long strides.
    The pretty magician produced some kind of flower from behind a curtain, and Josie struggled to see this as magical. She and Charlie clapped, but few members of the audience joined her. Her children didn’t clap; they never clapped unless she told them to. Were they not taught clapping in school? The magician was not impressing this audience, though who could be easier to impress than five hundred elderly people in windbreakers? No, they were waiting for something better than carnations produced from screens.
    Josie began to feel for this man. He’d been a magician in grade school, no doubt. He’d been pretty then, with lashes so long she could see them now, fifty rows back, and as an adolescent, apart from his peers but not concerned about this, he and his mother had driven forty miles to the nearest city, to get the right equipment for his shows, the right boxes—with wheels!—the velvet bags, the collapsing canes. He’d