Atlantis: Three Tales by Samuel R. Delany

another two months, I haven’t heard from you, then I shall do me magic and ju-ju spells on the assumptionthat thou hast forgotten thy brothers in the southlands.”
    Sam slid the oversized magazine into the top drawer, wondering whether he’d really have the patience to wait for the next two installments before reading it in a night.
    The first of Mr. Horstein’s tricks he’d bought was the magic coin that disappeared. Actually, the trick was just a length of black elastic with a clip on one end you could fasten up your sleeve and a bit of gum on the other that you could stick to any quarter or nickel. But now, as he kneaded the stickum, he realized it was losing its adhesion. More and more times it pulled loose from the coin, letting it fall to the rug as often as it snapped the metal glittering from sight.
    The most effective trick—and the most expensive (eighty-five cents)—was a little guillotine in which you could cut a cigarette in half; but if you put your finger through the same hole, you could make the blade slip aside so that it appeared—magically—to pass through your finger, leaving it unhurt and whole.
    The third one—though it had cost only a dime—didn’t work at all: a hollow, metal cup in the form of a thumb’s first joint. Smoking a cigarette, without letting anyone see, you secreted the false thumb in your fist. Then you took the cigarette and poked it into your fingers, putting it out on the bottom of the metal cup the false thumb made. You kept packing the cigarette in, until it was inside your fist completely. Finally you used your other thumb to tamp it down further—only you slid your thumb into the false metal one, got it seated good—then opened both your hands.
    The cigarette had disappeared. And nobody was supposed to be able to see the thumb cap (with the cigarette inside) over your real one.
    The cap was large enough so that, when Hubert tried it on, it just fell off. And Hubert’s hands weren’t small. Still, Sam’s own thumb was too big to wedge into it. Also, the thumbnail on the cap didn’t look like the broad, oversized nails curving down over Sam’s fingers. And it was painted a luminous pink, that, when Clarice examined it, she said didn’t look like anyone’s skin color she knew—black, white, gray, or grizzly!
    Hubert had suggested Sam ask Mr. Horstein for his dime back. Butthen, though he liked Mr. Horstein, he was still a little afraid of him (he
was
a Jew, after all), and a dime wasn’t a lot.
    Sam pushed all three tricks off the dresser, into the drawer on top of
Weird Tales
, and closed it.
    And, for Clarice, he put on his suit jacket. And his cap.
    â€œRemember—” That was Hubert, reading the paper in the wing chair; he had folded it back to an advertisement for a new kind of suitcase, made from something called . . . Naugahyde? “Elsie wants us all over there by four.” Hubert looked across the dark room from under the tasseled lamp. “Since your birthday’s this coming Tuesday, she and Corey are probably going to do something a little special today. So don’t you be late, now.”
    When he asked the man behind the bars how to get to the Brooklyn Bridge from the station, Sam was told he should have gotten off at City Hall—which was closer. This was the old stop (Brooklyn Bridge) for workers who repaired the bridge—not for people who wanted to walk across it. But if he went two blocks to the east and turned left, he’d come to the walkway.
    Beyond the Oriental ornateness of the Pulitzer Building, he saw the structure between—and above—the swoop and curve of trolley tracks, the girders of the El.
    It really
was
immense!
    He turned left onto Rose Street, which took him down under one of the bridge’s stone archways. The arches left and right were walled and windowed, with padlocked doors.
    Did people live there, in