breathing like houdini

I can’t point to one day in particular as the day Harry Houdini saved my life. It happened sometime after a job layoff uprooted me from a newspaper in balmy Texas and landed me at the paper in snowy Appleton, Wisconsin, the town where Houdini spent his boyhood.

The idea of living in Appleton was unfathomable to me when I moved there with my wife and our two sons just before an Upper Midwest winter. Though we once had lived in Chicago, Laurie and I were Southerners; it was with numb disbelief that we advanced into our new lives in Wisconsin, a place neither of us ever imagined calling home or even thought of that much. Was it possible to end up on another planet if our bill of lading from the movers said we’d gone only 1,400 miles?

I shrugged. “It’s a job,” I said to Laurie. 

“Wisconsin, though,” she said. “It just seems so random.”

“I know. I kind of felt that way about San Antonio, though. At least Appleton’s east of the Mississippi.”

“And a long way north.”

This moment with Laurie comes back to me now, all these years later, suffused with the odd light of delirium. Our time in Wisconsin, which began in October 2007 and ended in August 2010, seems ever more like a dream to me for the way it insinuated itself into our lives so suddenly, so unbidden and unsettling, and then was gone again just as abruptly. Thirty-four months after moving to Appleton, we left for Buffalo, where I had taken a job teaching journalism at a small college–a career change effected as an escape from the failing newspaper industry–and here we’ve stayed, that life in Wisconsin seeming ever more unreal.

It was real, though, and trying, and I have two people to thank for getting through it: Laurie, the woman who somehow simultaneously took my breath away and taught me how to breathe; and Houdini, whose odd little blue-eyed ghost strutted bantam-like across that town while I lived there so ignobly for almost three years, getting my comeuppance and wondering, who did I think I was. Houdini died 36 years before I was born and 79 years before we moved to Appleton, but while we lived in Wisconsin he felt very much alive and well and ever-present.

Not everyone in Appleton was as enthralled with Houdini as I. Sure, the town has its share of Houdini enthusiasts. So, for that matter, does the nation at large. Almost 100 years after he died, on Halloween 1926, Houdini lives on even today in sports headlines referencing impossible comebacks and séances held by devotees of all ages, including an Appleton construction company owner I befriended, Tom Boldt. But Houdini’s hold on me was different. I was drawn to the legendary death-cheat as much out of desperation as fascination. Having landed in Appleton after being downsized at the San Antonio Express-News, I felt betrayed by the industry I loved; ashamed that the career in which I once took pride lay in ruins; bereft of self-esteem and sense of self, and utterly, wholly, deeply, hopelessly lifeless, sapped by a debilitating depression. Once, I had been a go-to front-page writer for the Chicago Tribune. Now, in my shameful exile to the frozen tundra, I was, in every way, a shell of that person; the only thing that stirred my imagination, I found–the only ember flickering–was the idea of walking in Houdini’s footsteps. If he, an outlander who came to Appleton from Budapest as a child named Erich Weisz, could learn to love Wisconsin, then maybe I could.

So, I went digging through and poring over his old letters and scrapbooks in the basement of the Houdini museum, which was bedecked with a huge banner bearing his likeness, and soon my fascination bloomed into obsession. Houdini lurked around every corner and floated as if underwater against the tie-dye backdrop of my eyelids as I slept. In one dream, he was a University of Wisconsin hockey player wearing the symbol for infinity on his jersey instead of a number. In another, he was dressed in his Sunday best, lying on a gurney in the back room of a funeral home while a woman named Deb tried to comb his Brillo pad hair.

Sometimes I woke in the night with forgotten worlds and whispered voices melting at the edges of the room, and, holding my breath, wondered: Has he been here, in that wrinkled felt suit, with stale bread pudding and black-cherry sauce on his breath and his right eye narrowed in scorn at the sight of my socks on the floor? “Hey, Magic,” I whispered in the dark.

One evening, as I drove home from work across the part of the Fox River where Houdini is said to have almost drowned as a boy, my phone buzzed with a text that seemed sent from the grave: “Remember, Kaiser, you write my obit.” It was from my newspaper friend Joel who was traveling by plane to visit relatives for Thanksgiving. Over beers one night a week before, Joel had told me he wanted a great writer to memorialize him when he died and asked if I’d be the one to do it. “Will you write my obit?” he said.

Whoa. Was I being pranked? I studied Joel’s face for a sign he was joking but saw none; the man seemed serious, but I hadn’t known him that long, so how could I be sure? 

“Are you serious?” I said.

“I’m serious. I want you to write my obit. Will you?”

Better to be the brunt of a joke than offend a new friend, I decided.

“Sure, Joel,” I said. “Sure. I’ll write your obit. But only if you promise I won’t have to do it any time soon.”

Joel’s text reminding me of this macabre pact, sent one week later as I crossed the Fox River, struck me as a message that might have come from Houdini himself. The man loved his own press clippings so much I could just imagine him, like Joel, prevailing on a favorite writer to craft his obituary. Maybe he had. I’d have to get back to the basement of the museum Monday after work, I told myself. All the answers I needed were right there.

The most fascinating find I made in the Houdini museum’s basement was a letter from the escape artist to one of his brothers detailing an aching dream about Appleton that haunted Houdini’s sleep one night. 

In the dream, their parents were still alive and drinking coffee in the park and the kids were running around playing and the child who would grow up to be Houdini knew even in the dream that it wouldn’t last, knew in the dream that it was just a dream, and so he looked desperately for a camera to preserve the scene but couldn’t find one.

There are many things about this that speak deeply to who Houdini was, including the fact that in his dreamed-up memory of Appleton the town did not appear as it does so much of the year, covered in snow, but was alive with summer, green and lush and ablaze, rank with the scent of deep-pile lawns and mowed grass, ripe with possibility and hope. To Houdini, Appleton was home; though born in Hungary, he wrote in “Appleton, Wisconsin” as his birthplace on all the official papers he filled out as an adult. Like so many of us, he lived a life full of things he couldn’t escape because they were locked inside of him, not because he was locked inside of them–things that wouldn’t turn him loose, nor he they. Letting go, it’s been said, is the opposite of holding one’s breath. Which may explain why Houdini wasn’t very good at it. Indeed, the world’s greatest escape artist was and probably always would be hopelessly captive to an oddly long list of people, places, and things. Including the snowy little town in Wisconsin he dreamed about–a place I myself longed to escape Houdini-style: before it killed me.

To say I was part of a very small minority of ’Sconnies who wanted to leave Wisconsin would be an understatement. The rootedness of Wisconsinites made Laurie and me feel even more like outlanders. A 2008 study showed Wisconsin to be the third-most homegrown state, with almost three out of every four residents a native. Evidence of this was everywhere in our own little town. 

Houses and neighborhoods and entire towns grew up around the paper mills where generations of men and women work all their lives and then retire to live next door to family members. Home was a concept I could learn something about from the ’Sconnies all around me–Joel included.

“There’s just something about the way people in Wisconsin relate to the soil,” he told me one day.

“You mean farmers?” I said.

“More than that,” Joel said. “I know people who can tell by the way the land smells if they’re home. When I go back to Madison, as I’m getting close, I can smell the soil and I know I’m almost there. It’s richer and darker there, and it has a smell, especially when it’s just been turned.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah.” Joel smiled. “I know it’s weird.”

“You can tell you’re in your hometown by the way the land smells?”

“Yep. It just–it just smells like home.” 

By the time we moved to Wisconsin in October 2009, the Great Recession that began sweeping through America in late 2007 had ushered in an age of trial and suffering like few others.

That recession was the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s, and for journalists it created a perfect storm. Largely because of the internet, American newspapers had been losing circulation and advertising revenue for years, but it wasn’t until 2007 that the industry seemed to enter a death spiral. Papers across the country laid off reporters, editors, and photographers in round and round of cutbacks. Some papers closed up shop. Unemployed journalists littered the landscape like discarded Coke cans, most of them with dim prospects for future employment. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures showed newspaper payrolls shrinking by about 25,000 positions in 2008. 

Against this backdrop, moving to a small paper in Wisconsin seemed like not only a step back but a misstep. I should be finding a job in another field, not one racked by death spasms. But a decision to get a terminal degree in preparation for a switch to teaching journalism, making this my last newspaper job, and an extensive Google search about Appleton and Wisconsin lifted my spirits–the latter by revealing that once, long ago, Appleton had been the home of the precocious little boy who grew up to be Houdini.

“Can you believe it?” I said to Laurie. “Listen to this.”

Houdini settled in Appleton with his parents and siblings in 1878, after the family sailed to America from Eastern Europe. He was four then. Our son Jacob was four. His brother, Sawyer, was five. 

“How about that?” Laurie said.

“How about it?” I said, grinning. “You know who Houdini was, right?”

“A magician?”

“An escape artist. He got himself in and out of watery death traps.”

Laurie looked at me. “Your voice is getting all squeaky,” she said.

I started to say something in my defense but realized she was right–and how great was that? My deflated monotone was gone. That hadn’t happened since the layoff.

Losing my job in Texas had made me acutely aware of the specter that rides in the back seat for the whole of life’s journey: Whatever we have we stand to lose. Loss is our heritage, emptiness the one thing to which every human can stake a claim. What I needed was something or someone to bring me back to life, and it was a dead man who rose heroically to the task. Looking at old photos of Houdini, I caught myself talking to him, and soon I was not in my own life anymore, I was in his, far-gone lost in a long-lost world.

–“Look at you, the sun on your face,” I said, studying a photo of two cops strapping him into a straitjacket. “What do you see? What should we know?”  

–“You must have spent a lot less time combing your hair in the morning,” I said, scrutinizing a photo of him at 52 after looking at one of him at 32.

–“Plotting your escape, aren’t you, Magic?” I said, squinting at a grainy picture of funeral visitors lined up to view him dead in his coffin.

Coming back from the dead wasn’t a linear process, though, for me or Houdini. I coughed and sputtered my way back to the land of the living haltingly, like an old Buick, starting up only to stall out again, time after time. 

“Breeeathe,” Laurie urged me one morning, lifting her hands, palms up, in front of her chest, like a symphony conductor motioning for a crescendo. “You have to breathe.”

We were at the kitchen table, bowls of soggy cereal in front of us, that other life behind us. 

“Take a deep breath,” Laurie said. “Come on. Breathe with me now. Deeeeeep.” 

“I don’t know anybody here,” I said, apropos of nothing.

“You know me,” she said. “Be with me.” 

I looked out the window at the snow falling, erasing the twin blue spruces in the back yard.

“How long you think this winter will last?” I said, but I wasn’t listening for Laurie’s answer; I was listening for something else. Whenever the wind rose and blew hard across the flat open spaces of Wisconsin and the prairie grass flattened against the ground and those big white turbines wheeled in the sky like spooked horses and the snow came thick and white, erasing all that the intervening years have wrought so that this might be any place in any age during the history of the world, I could almost hear him. Only later would I come to fully understand what the voice whispering to me on every prairie wind was saying–something about the difference between escape and freedom, living in the moment and merely surviving. 

At the urging of fellow enthusiast Tom Boldt, I considered attending one of the annual Houdini séances held around the country, which more effectively bring back to life the living than the dead.

“You should come to a Houdini séance,” Boldt said.

“I might,” I said.

“You really should.”

“I might.”

I arrived with the living, my rental car crunching and popping up the gravel driveway toward the cabin where we would try conjuring the dead. This year’s Houdini séance would take place at Heathman Manor in Melrose, Massachusetts, the family estate of early 20th-century illusionist and medium Anna Eva Fay. It would begin a few minutes after 1 p.m. and continue through the hour of Houdini’s passing. He died at 1:26 p.m. on Halloween 1926. It was now 12:25 p.m. on Halloween 2009.

Steering past the stately house at the front of Heathman Manor, I saw the cabin in back. I saw more than a few locals milling about and more coming in. I felt a cloud move across the sun and heard the wind rise. Something was coming, the weatherman said. Gusting up to 40 miles an hour on its way to the sea, the wind whipped the fallen leaves of honey locusts and red oaks into brittle orange vortices that whirled about with the scratch and rustle of silk taffeta at a waltz. It moved the clouds too. They scudded fast and low, cut here and there with the clear blue of meltwater. The clouds and the breaks in the clouds cast a racing pattern of shadow and light that flickered unspooling over the prim houses and winding lanes of New England like a time-lapse film known only to God.

Parking and getting out of the car, I stood looking around. The cabin was made of knotty pinewood and bigger than I expected. Leading up to it were tiki torches stuck in the hard earth amid moldering rubber corpses and other Halloween decorations. The flames of the torches alternately convulsed wildly and burned strangely still. 

At the door of the cabin, loudspeakers issued forth with Bach’s Piano Concerto No. 1. “Walking music,” said a small man in black who was greeting people at the open door. He introduced himself as Gene Yee. He and his wife, Jennifer Yee, owned Heathman Manor. Jennifer was the great grandniece of Anna Eva Fay. The week before, Gene had sent an email to everyone who would participate in the séance, writing: “From past séance pix, it appears that a tapered white candle on a candelabra is par for the course. Is this correct? Or is a pillar candle acceptable?” 

Inside the cabin, I saw a pillar candle. The inner circle assembling around it comprised professors, entrepreneurs, writers, businesspeople, and real-estate brokers. We had creased pants, leather soles, and haircuts that cost more than $12. We made good choices, spent our time wisely, and knew when the show was over. And yet we’d shelled out hundreds of dollars each traveling to Boston this weekend despite knowing that many other people have tried bringing Houdini back and failed, knowing that it’s not just him being him but also the dead and how they are. Why? Because a life without wonder and imagination is no life at all. Houdini himself taught us that. It’s why he abides, even in this reductive and faithless age. Like Kierkegaard said, life is a mystery to be lived, not a problem to be solved.

This séance isn’t really about bringing the dead back to life, after all. It’s about bringing the living back to life.

Sinking with a metallic rattling scrape into one of the folding chairs spaced carefully around the big circular table at the front of the cabin, I realized I was breathing like Houdini. Which is to say I wasn’t breathing at all.

“Let’s bring him back today,” someone said. 

“Yes,” I said, “let’s.”