In the underpass market the magician keeps a folding table between the key-cutter and the man who sells rain jackets in every season. Water comes down the tiles in a season of its own. The damp has lived in the magician’s knees for years. His hands are the cleanest thing in the tunnel.
People bring him what they cannot keep and cannot throw away. A ring. A key that has outlived its door. A letter, sealed, addressed to the bringer. Lately, the gray cards — a name on the strip, a renewal date.
The woman this morning holds hers in both hands like something warm. Her husband’s name is on it. It renews on Thursday. She has canceled it four times and paid the reinstatement four times. She does not ask the magician to destroy it. She asks him to make it disappear.
He does not touch it. He does the trick.
“Where did it go?” she says, her hands still shaped around it.
“To next year,” he says. “The one address that never changes.”
She pays what he asks — less than a reinstatement — and climbs toward the light. The key-cutter does not look up.
After her comes a man with a canvas bag, and in the bag, wrapped in a shirt, a hand — the made kind, heavy, its fingers closed on their last instruction. He cannot keep it. He has tried the other thing twice and stood at the bins and come back. The magician looks at the fingers, at what they hold, which is nothing, which is everything the man has. He does not touch it. He does the trick. The man breathes like someone set down at last. He does not ask where it went.
He never asks for money. He asks for one word, said clearly, and does not say what he does with it.
He has been at this table since before the plates and has a hundred and forty words in him that are not his, and he can feel which ones are load-bearing, and the woman’s was.
Behind the folding table there is no drawer.