He believed in magic, and the magic he believed in was money. He bought scratch-offs, quick picks, PowerBall, MegaMillions, crossed state lines twice weekly, kept lucky pencils with which to mark lucky numbers, birthdays, anniversaries, court dates, electricity turn-off dates. Once he won seven dollars off fortune cookie numbers. Once he won seventeen in a Detroit bingo hall. Once he won seventy-two at an Indian casino in Mishewaka.
He tried to stir up magic by stirring up magic. Every Saturday and Sunday he haunted the stacks at the University of Michigan library in Ann Arbor. Up on the eighth floor he parsed voodoo legends, vampire lore, vamped Merlin, Houdini, and Vishnu. His manuscript was polymath and up to 3,000 pages. He figured fallen angels were the next big thing, and flew them into Chapter Fifty-Two.
He believed agents were magic, and stuffed envelopes and kissed them out the door, for good luck. If cereal mattered, as everything mattered, he filled his Lazy Susan with Lucky Charms and ate the marshmallows before the milk turned pink and green. One weekend he worked three doubles at the sports bar to raise plane ticket money to Maui. On the beach he pressed his packet of paper on a wizened woman from Madison Avenue. Make it happen, he said. I know you can make it happen.
Sometime late summer the gray clouds lifted and the sun’s magic rays made a halo around the sunflowers he grew in the backyard. Somebody told somebody something about rent money. Somebody took a trip to Florida and saw a seventeen-inch crocodile floating in a tank under a wet bar. Inside his dreary house he conjured what he could conjure and ate his Ramen noodles, drank his tap water, waved his mechanical pencil like a wand, but nobody cottoned to his Abracadabra.