After the Gloom Boom the Bloom

By Wassim Sayadi

This is a collection of stories delicately exploring betrayal, sharp practice, gross neglect of freedom, and marriage. Theyll satisfy your innate curiosity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 7, 2018
• ISBN: 9781532054693

Wassim Sayadi

Wassim Sayadi was raised in Calgary, Canada. He received his B.A. in French Literature from University of Calgary. He worked as creative writing workshop facilitator. He left to devote himself to writing. He learned to write fiction in three languages.

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Copyright © 2018 Wassim Sayadi.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-5468-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-5469-3 (e)

iUniverse rev. date:  07/25/2018

CONTENTS

Bull-Eye

Pressed Down Under Congo

From Virginia

The Majestic General

BULL-EYE

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Wassim Sayadi

W hat does the word, performance bring to mind? To some it may suggest images of a ballet hall or opulent opera house, others may see a simple theatrical stage, while to still others it might conjure up…conjurers? That was our chosen profession. Ironically, the places where we held our performances didn’t appear by magic. We had to go out and look for them, painstakingly searching out the really sleazy joints to hold our acts. Mason preferred it that way, finding a certain thrill in the general tumult of the dim halls. He ensured that he trained his performers under the simulation of poorly-lit magic halls and a hostile hometown audience. It was the volume of the crowd which mattered, since this was what bcececececrought in the most money.

This was the era of the traveling magician. In cities and bigger towns, on the platforms of opera houses, town halls, and magic theaters, wandering conjurers rigged with the most contemporary equipment mesmerized sophisticated spectators with intricate stage illusions. In smaller towns like ours, many a market square attracted mysteriously bearded and blackmantled conjurers. They amazed townspeople by what amounted to commonplace tricks: pulling out streams of glittering silk handkerchiefs from bare paper cones, twirling out billiard balls from children’s ears, and hurling into the air packs of cards that took on the forms of fountains, snakes, and angels before spiraling back to the hand.

Some claimed that many of the finest performers could sometimes be found only on the platforms of seedy magic theatres, with accordion music playing in the deeper shadows, saturated with the lingering odour of cigarette smoke and the vociferous clamour of an eager expectant crowd. Indeed, it was in halls such as these that we performed our most innovative illusions to a crowded, eager house, while earning a decent enough living. We could astonish our audiences of rowdy but interested spectators with conjuring tricks of great daring and innovation.

Ours was a troop of three, not including the two baboons who were an innovative feature of our act. We practiced our opening routine with as much ceremony as a sacred ritual. Fourteen-year-old Anne would sit out backstage with the baboons. The inimitable Mason would go on stage with his wife. It wasn’t just that Martha could pretend to be an eager accessory to our act; a woman on stage caused rising enthusiasm in the crowd. When the pair of them they had established the right atmosphere, a pulsating ambience of expectancy, like cousins in conspiracy, I made my entrance.

Our illusions were out of the common and the audience was spared the knowledge that they were highly dangerous as well. Perhaps we gambled for high risks. With the cents, nickels and dimes that the audience contributed, our conjuring acts earned us between five to ten dollars for each performance. We were aware that several spectators held clandestine lotteries, part of a widespread camaraderie of thrill-seekers.

We were further subjected to the pressure of outdoing other conjuring troops or another master conjurer. The crowd would vociferously cheer their favourite performer, so that by the time a performance started, the muted challenge was already issued, and as tacitly accepted. Competing masters had to vie to outdo each other. Skill alone did not tilt the balance. However dexterous a conjurer was, he couldn’t hope to earn and uphold a major reputation without inventing original acts of his own creation.

It was a difficult profession to pursue, back then in the final decade of the worn century. Yet meeting the challenge, completing a successful performance made up for everything. The times when we quietly rejoiced in our triumph together following a successful performance, were moments of supreme happiness and serenity.

Mason told me that when I had reached the pinnacles of conjuring adroitness, I could move on to London. The possibility was a distinct feature of my strategy for the future. Analytical Mason could accurately pick out the choicest of performers simply by observing them. He had been quick to mark my interest in weird effects. He made me feel like there was no greater grandeur than a man who knows his work and executes it brilliantly, he gave me assurance that he would be the first to assist me find my place with a laudable promoter in London. Mason’s forecast for my prospects uplifted my confidence and heightened my resolve to excel.

A great artiste himself, Mason no longer actively performed a routine. While still supremely knowledgeable, he had been off stage for close to two decades. From his beginnings as a cabinetmaker, Mason has triumphed over his early struggles to gain a respectability and esteem in the world of conjuring. The escalating skill was accompanied by increasingly hazardous innovations, that alarmed Martha. Dreading his safety, she had made him promise to give up stage routines at the time they were married.

Neither of my parents concurred with my chosen profession. They attempted to make me comprehend that a career in magic at my age was an impracticality. The very notion stirred them to alarm. Mason would say that we burned them up inside, that to do what I did best, I needed to liberate myself from the parental sway, draw into my lungs the breath of freedom. He encouraged me to keep trying with the reassurance that none of my fantasies for a future in London was futile. I accepted his confidence with thankfulness, for I yearned with all my being to fulfill his prophecy of me.

Mason’s daughter, Anne, longed to be entrusted with the authority to actively participate in our performances. At fourteen, she was quick and intelligent and a non-stop talker, who cherished life with an absurd passion. Only, she was yet too young. Besides, the initial public performances were marked less for their audacity than for their subtle comprehension of the stage illusion of the age, although even then there were astute twists and deviations. It was the era of bodies mysteriously floating in space and beheadings, of ghostly specters and abrupt disappearances, as if the tottering century were revealing by means of the agency of its magicians its clandestine desire for total destruction.

Managing to locate a suitable place to perform was in itself a trying process. Lumbering along in the carriage, often through fog and rain, we’d be close to exhaustion. Sometimes, even after an extensive search, we could find no place. Every hall would be filled to capacity with competing conjurers. We would proceed with our search through the hours of darkness, riding tiredly through the outskirts; orbiting like hungry wolves searching for a living, sometimes only locating a hall after midnight.

During these long forages, Martha would drowse tiredly in the rear of the wagon, while Mason kept a keen eye out for a suitable place. Anne would be guiding the horses, leaving me free to rest, to prime myself the upcoming act. When we found a prospective hall, Mason would order Anne to let the horses rest with their feed, while she tended to Martha.

And then, geared to perform, we’d halt the carriage at the door, pursued by gangs of street urchins. The performing halls were bleak and abject on the outside, with the muted rumble of music and voices coming from within. As we stepped through the door, the clamor would assault us like a charge of wild beasts. Large, raucous men, many with eyes glazed with alcohol, partaking in some Godless inebriated celebration amid the cacophony of piping flutes, aphonic trumpets yowling like tomcats desperate to mate, agitated strumming and twanging of banjos—an audience which was as much of a challenge as our professional competitors.

We kept a tabulation of successful acts—performances of such striking originality that it would be difficult to replicate any of them. Between ourselves, we had decided that a hundred successful acts in sequence would qualify me as a conjuring maestro. Some nights it seemed like a Herculean task. Some of the most significant illusions of that time were monuments to the skill of conjuring. There was The Tower of Vienna, where a small black cone inexplicably grew till it expanded to fill the whole stage, finally erupting in a spectacular pyrotechnical display. Then there was Babel’s Crystal Ball, wherein a spectral form called up from hell crashed through the glass sphere and rushed forward onto the stage with bizarre cries. During the act called The Tome of the Godless, dark smoke spiraled upwards from an antique tome which without warning burst into flames that produced revoltingly ugly dwarfs in hairy jackets who ran screeching in pain across the stage. In my formative years, I was to surpass these, while achieving further disconcerting effects unknown to the inured audiences.

I had the burning desire to succeed, and our tally mounted with each hard-won triumph. After such a performance, we’d ride home in jubilation, our exhaustion vanquished, exhilaration in our hearts as we hurtled down homewards, back to Mason’s little farmhouse in the woods. Anne would be driving the wagon at a thunderous pace, the performing monkeys now drowsing by my feet, while the three of us sang our triumph to the winds.

Those rides back were journeys of jubilant discussion. As we rode along deep into the night, with hurtling shadows clattering by outside, we’d all talk about magic—the fine art of a superlative conjuring performance. At twenty, I was young perhaps, but Mason claimed that I was a superb illusionist of uncommon coherence and ability. I secretly longed to be Anne’s age, with that much more time to perfect the art of a superb magician. Mason, it seemed to me, was the ideal mentor in an exploit of such momentum.

During those golden rides, I’d feel I could be great, that I really could make it to London, perform at the great opera houses, perhaps, and send my parents some money. My concern for my parents was partly to compensate for my inability to please them otherwise. They were wary of mentioning my acts, finding it impossible to accept that magic was my future. It was as if my desire to follow that inclination had caused a deep wound, as if that momentous decision had created a sensitive wound that would bleed afresh at the slightest mention.

My thoughts would then change direction…did I really want to move to London? Was there no means to make a