The Psychic pokes his head out of the curtain that separates him from the House of Mirrors. He stares at the seam of light where the outside world creeps in between these limpid structures. Laughter often reverberates next door as people's distorted images drive them hysterical. The psychic would like to laugh, too.

     He sighs as he dons his turban and applies the fake mole, smoothes his black velvet tablecloth that has begun to resemble a mangy cat. He dusts a spider web from his crystal mobile, starts the Phantom of the Opera music and unlocks the door.

     The Psychic decides that after the two o'clock crowd, he'll attempt another suicide. He's given up on slitting his wrists since both times resulted in a mess and a lot of pain for weeks. Perhaps death only takes the cocky, the arrogant, he muses, those who believe their time will not come until the end of a long life. If he puts himself in the way of an approaching bus, it screeches to a halt. Attempted hangings always result in bruised or broken bones. He's a busy man who doesn't have the luxury of running off to train tracks and leaping off tall cliffs.

     If only he could channel this into an act, like Evil Knevil meets Houdini. Maestro the Magnificent Death Defying...he can't finish the poster headline, because he doesn't defy death, he simply can't get the correct recipe. He's a bungler; his talents wrapped up too tightly within themselves, good only to satisfy the illusions of others.

     "Morning, Maestro," says Jamal, a tall black kid who operates The Octopus: a ride that looks like a perfect vehicle for suicide, Maestro has always thought.

     "Morning." The Psychic glances down the boardwalk. The wood seems bleached and old, which makes him sad. The ocean is a surreal cobalt blue and it glitters triumphant before him, doing its watery mambo, gloating. There are many things the Psychic knows. Voices he hears. He even hears nature speak and on quiet days like this the ocean whispers to him that it wants to take over the world. Some days he longs to wake up with the portent of an approaching tidal wave. He wouldn't warn anyone, he'd just rest his cheek against his velvet cloth, clutch the old crystal between his knees and wait for briny sweet submersion.

     The paying clients will start coming any minute. After twenty years, a good psychic garners a reputation. In his valuable inner eye he can see a group of people on their way in a car even now. Young people. His lungs feel strangely heavy since he quit smoking last month.

     The Psychic's clothing can no more keep out the chill of morning than the mauve curtain can keep out the sounds of the funhouse next door. The promise of Indian summer seems broken sooner and sooner every year.

     "Morning, Maestro!" Lily calls out. Her basket is stocked with fresh roses, closed tight like virgin girls. She strides past him in a near-translucent floral dress through which he can see the fleshy advertisements of the business she conducts when she isn't selling flowers. Her hair is dyed two clashing shades of red and Maestro calls her over to buy a rose.

     "Thanks," she says, handing him the rose, eyes downcast as usual. She's only looked him in the eye once: when she came to get his advice two years ago. He remembers how she leaned close over the table, the peaks of her bountiful breasts announcing themselves like toddler twins, how she fogged up his crystal ball.

     "I'm going to make it, right? I'm going to get married, and have a house and a baby someday. Can you see that?" She had asked.

     The Psychic, "Maestro" to his clients had peered over the crystal ball, his face so close he could see the hairs she bleached to invisibility on her top lip. And though it was in the crystal's inner dimensions that he appeared to look, it was really in the center of his own forehead that he saw her in the clutches of anonymous men.

     "I see you with a man,"

     "Yes! Yes!"

     "And he is handing you a lot of money. In cash." Maestro glanced up. Lily's face had contorted with anguish. Her eyes demanded he say no more.

     "Oh, but this is good, Lily. This man is your husband. And he is insisting that you go and buy yourself whatever you desire. Something for yourself and something for your baby...your little..."

     "Girl."

     "Yes, little girl, indeed."

     Lily chortled with delight. "Thank you, Maestro. Thank you. I knew it!"

     And for those lies she paid him twenty dollars she could not spare and now smiles at him whenever she passes by. The Psychic still sees her in his dreams, naked and broken, and wonders when she'll stop bringing roses to the boardwalk.

     He watches Lily's retreating behind, cracks his knuckles and places the rose, white, on the empty table. He retired the crystal ball ten years ago, after a client tried to use it to murder him; when death was still something he wished to avoid.

     He remembers the tall man's silhouette, but his inner eye denies him the visual of the man's face. The man was nearly seven feet tall and had to bend down to enter. He'd sniffed at the room as if it most terribly disagreed with him.

     "Welcome to the truth," The Psychic announced, as he always did with a sweeping bow and a knowing smile (perfected at long last after countless performances in the mirror).

     "You got some shitty incense," the man said, then sat down roughly in the chair opposite Maestro. "You're supposed to be a woman."

     "Terribly sorry to disappoint, my good sir. How else may I be of service?"

     The tall man narrowed his eyes, and leaned forward as all clients did when prepared to tell or receive confidences.

     "Tell me where I can go and be sure they will never find me."

     "They, sir?"

     "The law, man. The cops."

     The Psychic pulled his crystal ball toward him, aware suddenly of a dark wall in his inner eye. Reveal yourself to me! He demanded of his sight. And as if hesitantly, the darkness dissolved and revealed a grizzly image of blood and brutal death. He saw the man, then, in a small cabin atop high mountains. Costa Rica delivered itself into his mind.

     "I...I do not see such a thing, my friend.

     The tall man clenched his teeth.

     "Well look again. I got a lot riding on you being for real. I know you know."

     The Psychic swallowed and found little moisture in his throat. He looked again in his crystal ball and the images of murder became more gruesome. Startled, unable to contain his horror, he peeked at his client. The tall man caught his eye.

     "You can see what I done, can't ya little man? Well that's what I'll do to you too if you don't tell me where I can go."

     "You have to turn yourself in," The Psychic whispered.

     "I'm prepared to drop a thousand dollars on this table if you just tell me the name of a place. I can see it in your eyes, man. And I'm not even the psychic one here."

     "Let me see the money," the Psychic choked out, and the tall man pulled the ten hundreds from his wallet.

     The Psychic stared at the money, crisp and smelling of dark places. He looked into the crystal ball again, for good measure.

     "Ah yes, here it is," he said, and his heart seemed to close in on itself. "Costa Rica. I see a small cabin atop a mountain somewhere."

     The tall man snapped his fingers.

     "Damn, that's right! Mario!" he said, and stood up.

     The psychic breathed a sigh of relief as the man prepared to leave. But the tall man grabbed hold of the crystal ball, pulling back with a ball player's skilled aim. "This is for holding out on me," he said and then the psychic's world went black.

     Everyone had the same thing to say when he returned from the hospital, bandaged and disoriented. Why didn't he see it coming? It was difficult to explain even to himself. Maestro couldn't tell his friends and clients that his own date with death was hidden from him; it would invalidate his credentials. He told them: "I just didn't believe what I saw." And while his soul continues to keen for that imagined quiescent darkness, the laws of the universe dictate that he'll never know when. He longs for the silence of death and is terrified of the force that won't let him know its eventuality.

     What he does know are the secrets people keep: forging signatures on elderly parent's bank accounts, adultering lovers, parents abandoning children. He even knows the lesser ones: tiny lies, stolen moments, and things insignificant. His mind is full of the moments between picking one's nose and getting away with it to plunging a knife into the tires of someone who has betrayed. All this, and the only answer he seeks laughs at him the way the funhouse shakes with laughter, day and night.

     The familiar reverberation of feet on wooden slats announces that the boardwalk has opened. Maestro has only eaten toast this morning and his stomach is a gnarling gurgle of emptiness.

     Laughter erupts outside and he knows they have arrived, the teenagers he saw earlier in his mind's eye. He wishes he still had the crystal ball for show; it impressed the younger ones once. He has played with the idea of adding a wand to his repertoire, but he's tired of the pretense of objects that hold no real magic.

     The curtains soon part in a bustle of youthful energy and swagger. Four teens: two girls, two boys suddenly occupy the space before him.

     "Welcome to the truth," he says, bows low, and smiles.

     The girls snicker and throw embarrassed glances at the tall boys.

     "How much?" One boy asks. He is muscular and bearded already, and the Psychic has instant sight. Some impressions make their way in unbidden. He knows that the boy sneaks out to his garage at night when his father is asleep, injects himself with steroids and then returns like a silent cat to his own bed. Maestro knows that the boy's parents wonder why this son is so much more developed than his brother who is two years older, and that the parents have already set up appointments with specialists for the weaker son. The psychic is already leaping into the future where the weaker son, older but denied his place due to his brother's meddling with nature, will betray the boy who stands before Maestro. Maestro knows this boy will die at his brother's hand.

     "Ten dollars for twenty minutes," Maestro announces.

     "Come on Will...I want him to read my future!" The shorter, dark-haired girl prods. She is petite, tightly fitted into a small dress that gives her the appearance of being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste.

     Will nudges his friend. "Cough up some dough, Jake. I've only got twenties."

     'Jake' is the thinner, dark-haired boy and he fishes in his pants pocket for a ten-dollar bill.

     The two boys snicker, the other girl, tall, blonde and quiet looks as if she could fall asleep standing up.

     Maestro looks at his client, receives the bill from the boy, but his inner eye is drawn toward the other, silent, blonde-haired girl. She seems developed beyond her age and wears an expression of seriousness that belies the company she keeps. Her hazel eyes rove around the maestro's studio and he feels the nearly uncontrollable pull into her psyche before he can help himself, drawn this time by something familiar in her. Rather than her future, he sees what her mind sees: herself, lying on the bottom of the ocean, looking up through salt water at the world fathoms above. Down there the world is absolutely silent. This is the only thought she holds, until the faces of her friends disturb the water's silence, and she finds that she can no longer breathe down there. She sits down in a chair with a sigh, releasing the psychic's hold on her. She holds her secrets tightly inside her, that all Maestro can see are blurry images of something she is too ashamed to acknowledge even to herself.

     "All right my dear, do sit before me at the table," Maestro speaks to his dark-haired client. "And how shall I address you?"

     "Marie," she says, a smirk and eruption of laughter not far behind her smile.

     "What do you seek to know, Marie?"

     Marie, curls of black hair as tight as the cloth of her dress, turns to the boys in the room. "You guys have to leave," she says.

     The tall muscled boy, Will, pinches his eyes together in irritation but then grabs Jake's arm and pushes him outside. Maestro knows they won't be far, their ears pressed up to the wall, listening.

     "I um...I don't know you so this is kind of embarrassing," says Marie.

     Ah, but I know you, Maestro thinks, and he sees the rose petals and tulle of a wedding veil in her mind, the tall iced cake and the groom whose face is blank.

     "You want to know if you'll marry the boy outside."

     Marie's smirk is completely wiped from the slate of her face. "Wow...you really are...you really can..."

     The serious blonde sighs again behind them, lifts her long-limbed self as if she is holding up the weight of two bodies and goes outside. The psychic can feel that oceanic vacuum of her mind-like muffled background muzak-as she strolls past the eavesdropping boys, down the boardwalk away from them all.

     "So, will I?" Marie calls his attention back.

     "The muscular one, what is his name?" Maestro asks.

     "That's William. He goes by Will, actually."

     Will. Something the boy doesn't lack.

     Maestro stares into Marie's incandescent blue eyes. She is seventeen, he knows without asking. She is an only child. Her father never speaks to her unless to give her orders. Her mother is hypochondriac, in bed often with migraines and ailments that go undiagnosed.

     All that Marie wants is a comforting notion, even a false one. And the psychic wants to give it to her more than anything, the way he does to so many. Yet he also understands suddenly, as the black mind of Will crowds into his inner eye from outside, that in Marie he might find the way out. He baits her.

     "Marie... I'm going to give you the opportunity to get up now, and go outside, take the ten dollars you have given to me and leave here without any answers." Maestro is careful to whisper.

     "What? Why? If I'm not going to get married, it's no big deal," she says with a frown.

     "You can stay and I will honor the truth, or you can leave now, Marie, and let fate show you its design as intended."

     "Oh give me a break. Just tell me the stupid future. I don't even care." She folds her arms across her chest and Maestro knows she is angry. He smiles and leans in close to deliver his confidence.

     "Marie, there won't be any marriage to Will. He has plans of his own and they don't include you. Will has secrets he doesn't want the world to know. About the boy who comes to his house on the weekends and steals into his bedroom with him, slides into his bed. About the things they do there that Will cannot reveal to anyone."

     Marie's face contorts with anguish and disgust.

     "You're an old pervert," she says, standing up abruptly and planting her feet heavily with each step she takes to get outside.

     Maestro can already feel the cloud of black turn red inside the boy Will's head. He has heard some piece of what Maestro said to Marie, but he will wait just a moment, then guide his friends away down the boardwalk before he returns with his steroid enhanced muscular arms and pummel Maestro into his desired oblivion. Maestro pulls out a long piece of wood that he barricades the door with at night. He displays it obviously so the boy will not miss it. The anticipation is agonizing.

     But the boy, Will, doesn't return immediately, and Maestro hears a flurry of voices outside instead. He is drawn strangely back into the watery depths of the serious girl's mind. Her name rises like a piece of kelp to the surface of his inner eye-Sarah-and then disappears again. Then there is yelling and footsteps and Maestro, who doesn't like to join the crowds on the deck, finds himself running out to view the ruckus nonetheless. He stands behind the crowd.

     The girl Marie is wailing and clutching at her dark curls, screaming "Sarah, Sarah!" Maestro goes to Sarah then with his inner eye, passes by the paramedic who is pulling the girl up to shore, and enters the girl's final breath, pushed from her lungs by the paramedic's hopes that his trained hands can return her to life. Maestro feels a dark slash of jealousy. She went there so easily, just held her nose, put her head in the mouth of the watery beast and found her way to that ocean floor in her mind. How unfair that I can recognize the death knell as it hovers over others.

     Maestro is suddenly empty of all impressions, perceptions, and thoughts for a moment. He watches the ocean dance, victorious over its human prize. Why won't you take me?

     But soon enough, the fist of the boy Will arrives out of the air, fills him with the sound of small bones breaking in his face. He feels no pain at the boy's first punch and the throng that has gathered over the drowned girl doesn't even notice the muscular boy drag Maestro by the arm back to his own studio and shut the door.

     "What the hell did you say to Sarah? You perverted asshole. Why the hell did you say that shit to Marie?" Will is kicking Maestro, the rough tread of his sneakers finding all the soft places on Maestro's body. Still, Maestro feels nothing; he is suddenly a blank slate again, like the hour of his birth.

     "How do you even know that shit?" Will is wailing, is crying, and Maestro begins to feel the boy's mind again, feel the shame of his nightly visits with his neighbor, and at the same time, the rightness of them, the perfect complement of skin to skin. Marie is his façade to the world.

     Maestro wants to urge him on. Wants to yell epithets and curses that will encourage the boy to finish the job. It will take only a few more minutes of the boy's rage.

     But the door is thrust roughly open and Marie bursts through the curtain still screaming, adding "Don't Will" to her litany of "Sarah's." Then she is dragging him away through the open door, where the light of day seems more intrusive and brutal than any violence.

     Maestro's own inner eye blinks and closes, quickly occludes the world around him and he lapses into an unconscious sleep that only goes deep enough to treat his body's shock. He will not follow the girl to the ocean floor; it is not his time

     Maestro doesn't know minutes or hours when he opens the eye that is not swollen shut. He knows the sting and throb and molten answer of pain though, speaking to him again as the response to another wasted attempt at thwarting life. There is a passel of voices, blended and muddy in his ears, and he feels like only the soft touch of moonlight on his skin will soothe him now. He can crawl if he stays on his left side and drags himself with that arm. He doesn't even inspect the damage, but with the claws of his fingernails pulls himself to and then through the door, roughly out onto the now deserted, darkened boardwalk.

     In the alleyway between the quiet house of mirrors and his own studio, he hears the quiver of tiny laughter. Are these shadow echoes left over from the day? Reality is blurred, but he continues to crawl, satisfied some by the light of the full moon. When he is close enough to peek down the alley, he is startled to find another body there, not laughing, but moaning.

     His good eye tries to adjust to the face.

     "Maestro?" a usually delicate voice greets him in a croak. Her voluptuous form, bent and possibly broken emerges from the shadow.

     "Lily?"

     "What happened to you?" she asks, her breathing heavy, her face a tangle of hair and violet patches of bruise and blood.

     "Perhaps the same thing that happened to you…" he whispers, and Lily pulls herself up, crawling close to him. She lays her head on his good side.

     "I doubt that," she says, and Maestro already knows she spurned the wrong client tonight.

     "We're…a…pair," he says, a sensation that might be joy rising from the center of his body.

     Lily laughs weakly.

     "Let's run away, Lily."

     "I have no money," Lily says softly. Maestro can feel that she is resigned to death too.

     "I know a place," he says. "Where we don't need any money. In Costa Rica."

     "Sure," she murmurs, then falls unconscious on his good side, the flesh of her cheek warm against the chill of his body in shock. Maestro rests his hand on her hair, closes his eyes and knows that he will open them again in the morning, whether he likes it or not.