I am insane. What else can I make of it? Only an insane man hears voices night after night and tries to glean some sort of sense from them. This argument itself is insane, however, because an insane man likely does not hear and understand a language which he has never learned.
It is but an enigma, yet my insanity persists. I now find myself crawling into the attic—against my better judgment—to retrieve my box of magician’s paraphernalia. The box is rather large and unwieldy and is on the verge of tearing in several places because of its age.
I sat the box on the garage floor, knelt next to it, and brushed away the dust. That sent me into a fit of coughing, but after I recovered I peeled back the flaps and saw that everything was just as I had left it. There, in the box, were the overflowing rice bowls, the Chinese linking rings, the wood-block-through-glass, the magic-tassel wands, the silks, the pulls, the multiplying billiard balls, the temple screen, and at least a dozen other tools of the magician’s trade. The familiar smells of the plastic, wood, paper and metal combined into a complex, pleasing fragrance that took me back to the days when I performed before my family and friends. I put my head full into the box and breathed deeply, savoring the aroma, and then I reminisced as I examined each item.
The temple screen sat flat on the bottom of the box. I lifted the screen and unfolded it, and an old, yellowing scrap of paper fell out of it and landed inside the box. I retrieved the paper, but my breath caught in my throat and I dropped the paper at once. It landed face-up, the Welsh writing still staring back at me. As I touched the paper again, part of it crumbled, so I picked it up ever so gently and carried it in the palm of my hand to the computer. I typed the letters and did a search, and a Welsh translator popped up. Here are the Welsh and the English:
Rydym yn falch eich bod yn dilyn eich tynged. We are pleased that you follow your destiny.
You can imagine the size of the lump in my throat. I flushed the paper down the toilet, but it appeared to completely dissolve the moment it hit the water. I placed everything back into the box and returned it to the attic.
One of the rules of performance magic is that one never repeats a trick with the same audience, because that can give the trick away. This was definitely one trick I never want to see repeated.
