Spoonbenders

And it was play. A few months into the experiments, the subject pool was down to just Clifford, Teddy, and Maureen, and protocol had broken down completely. They still performed in a “controlled environment,” an observation room with a one-way mirror, behind which an assistant filmed them. But within the observation room it was anything but controlled. Teddy had nudged Dr. Eldon into abandoning his original test plans in favor of an “improvisational approach.” Cliff still did solo sessions, but Maureen and Teddy would come into the room together (another protocol breakdown that Teddy had encouraged, noting that psychic activity seemed to be stronger when they were in the same room), and do whatever popped into their heads. “What do you feel like doing today?” Dr. Eldon would ask them, and then Teddy (most often it was Teddy) would propose some new experiment, which of course he’d prepared for.

In short, the inmates had taken over the asylum.

A newcomer to the scam biz might suppose that scientists were the hardest to fool, but the opposite was true. Each letter after a name imparted a dose of misapplied confidence. PhDs believed that expertise in one field—say, neuroscience—made them generally smarter in all fields. Belief that one was hard to fool was the one quality shared by all suckers. And if the suckers wanted the results you were giving ’em—if they were already imagining the publications and fame that would come from proving psychic abilities were true? Everything would have been different if Eldon’s career depended on debunking Teddy and Maureen instead of confirming them. Hell, all the man had to do was hire a stage magician to watch them work and the psychics would be sunk.

Well, Teddy would be. Maureen he wasn’t so sure. What amazed him was how she could outperform him, even when he set up the scams. He’d practice pencil reading all week, come in with prepared envelopes, his pockets crammed with blanks and dummy cards—and Maureen would toss off some feat of casual clairvoyance that would knock his socks off.

“You’re killing me,” he told her. “Absolutely killing me.”

She laughed. Oh, he liked that laugh. They were strolling around that improbably sunny courtyard, on break after spending a couple of hours fascinating Dr. Eldon and the invisible assistant.

“You’re the one who’s killing them,” Maureen said. “You saw Dr. Eldon’s face when you guessed all three wishes.”

This morning it had been mostly Teddy’s show. He’d started with some matchstick divination, followed up with his go-to shtick with the hat and paper. The doc had been suitably impressed.

“Oh, that?” he said. “That’s just billet reading.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“One of the first tricks I learned. There was a kid in my neighborhood who did nothing but read magic books all day and get beat up on the weekends. Tiny little guy. I kept him from getting his noggin caved in, and he showed me the ropes.”

“So how’s it done?” she asked. “The billet reading?”

“The hardest part is palming the first slip. The rest of it’s just reading ahead.”

“I didn’t see you palm anything,” she said. “You never even touched the papers except when you held them to your forehead. Unless…”

“It was when I—”

“Shush, let me think,” she said. “It wasn’t when Dr. Eldon folded the squares and dropped them into the hat—he did that on his own. And when you dumped the messages onto the table, you were holding just the brim of the hat. Your fingers didn’t go near the table.”

“Do you want me to explain?”

“Hold on, bucko. Now, when the squares were on the table, Eldon touched them—you asked him to arrange them into a triangle—but you never did. No, the only time you touched them was when you held them to your forehead—and you couldn’t have read them like that.”

“Oh, my dear Irish rose, I’ve spent my nights at the gaming tables, and I can’t tell when you’re bluffing. I know you’ve got moves much more complex than what I’ve shown the old man.”

“Mr. Telemachus,” Maureen said in that mock-prim voice that made his skin tingle. “It’s your moves that are under inspection here. The folding business—that’s quite suspicious. Why the little squares?”

He started to answer and she held up a hand. “You do know what a rhetorical question is, don’t you? Try to be quiet for a single minute.”

They walked in silence. The people they passed were mostly students, much younger than Teddy, and most were men. He watched them steal glances at Maureen, and he thought, Yep, boys, the girl’s with me. If only she’d let him say so out loud! When in public, she wouldn’t allow him to hold her hand, or put his arm around her waist. Her mother, she claimed, would be scandalized, as if her mother had eyes everywhere in the city. Maureen had only allowed him to kiss her (and yes, a bit more) twice, and both times it was in the pitch dark of the building’s supply closet.

“The shaking of the hat,” Maureen said finally.

He laughed.