The Game

Mystery wasn’t backing down. He was an idiot.
    I looked at the AMOG’s hands and wondered how many Croatian necks he had snapped in his day.
    The AMOG lifted his waistband, exposing the black handle of a pistol. “So, magic man, can you bend this?” This was no invitation; it was a threat.
    Marko turned to me, panicked. “He’s going to get us killed,” he said. “Most of the guys at these clubs are ex-soldiers and mobsters. Killing someone over a girl is nothing for them.”
    Mystery waved his hand over the AMOG’s forehead. “You saw me move that beer bottle without touching it,” he said. “It weighs eight hundred grams. Now imagine what I could do to one tiny brain cell in your head.” He snapped his fingers to indicate the pop of a brain cell.
    The AMOG looked Mystery in the eyes to see if he was bluffing. Mystery held his eye contact. One second passed. Two seconds. Three. Four. Five. It was killing me. Eight. Nine. Ten. The AMOG lowered his shirt back over the gun.
    Mystery had the advantage here: No one in Belgrade had ever seen a magician perform live before. They’d only been exposed to magic on television. So when Mystery disproved in an instant the belief that magic was just camera tricks, an older belief replaced it: the superstition that just maybe magic is real.
    The AMOG stood there, silent, as Mystery walked out unscathed.
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    4 A set is a group of people in a public place. A two-set is a group of two people; a three-set is three people, and so on.

Some girls are different.
    That’s what Marko thought. After everything he’d seen during Mystery’s workshop, he was in no way a convert. Goca wasn’t like those other girls, he insisted. She came from a good family, she was well-educated, and she had morals, unlike that materialistic club trash.
    I’d heard it all before from dozens of guys. And I’d heard just as many intelligent women say, “That wouldn’t work on me,” when I told them about the community. Yet minutes or hours later, I’d see them exchanging phone numbers—or saliva—with one of the boys. The smarter a girl is, the better it works. Party girls with attention deficit disorder generally don’t stick around to hear the routines. A more perceptive, worldly, or educated girl will listen and think, and soon find herself ensnared.
    And so it was that Mystery and I found ourselves out on New Year’s Eve with Marko and his one-itis, Goca. Marko put on a gray suit, picked her up at 8:00 P.M., ran around and opened the car door for her, and handed her a dozen roses. She seemed like a bright, successful, well-bred girl. She was short with long chestnut hair, gentle eyes, and a smile that arced just a little wider on one side. Marko was right: She did look like the marrying kind.
    The restaurant was traditional Serbian fare, heavy on the red peppers and red meat. And the music was pure anarchy: Four brass bands wandered the rooms, blaring a cacophony of overlapping parade marches. I watched Marko and Goca carefully all night, curious to see if this whole dating thing worked.
    They sat next to each other awkwardly. Their interaction consisted only of the necessary formalities of the evening: the menu, the service, the atmosphere. “Ha ha, wasn’t that funny when the waiter gave you my steak?” The tension was killing me.
    It wasn’t as if Marko was a natural. In grade school he’d never been that popular, largely on account of being foreign, having the nickname Pumpkinhead, and joining the Young Republican Club. By the time he had graduated, he was probably worse off than I was: At least I’d kissed a girl.
    In college, he began taking steps toward relations with the opposite sex. He purchased a leather jacket, invented an aristocratic background for himself, put Terence Trent D’Arby braids in his hair, and bought his first Mercedes-Benz. The effort earned him some attention, even a few female friends. But it wasn’t until junior year that he was finally comfortable enough around women to start removing clothes with them, thanks largely to a younger student he befriended: Dustin. The taste of those first small victories was so sweet that Marko stayed in college for three more years, basking in his hard-won popularity.
    One of Marko’s more peculiar habits is that he takes hour-long showers every night. No one has ever come up with a plausible explanation of what he does in there, because nothing makes sense—masturbating, for example, doesn’t take that