The Game

had been a fruitless drive so far. Mystery was slumped in the back seat underneath a blanket, unable to conjure his way out of a fever. Oblivious to the dramatic snowy Romanian landscape that passed by each day, he covered his eyes with his hat and complained. Every so often, he’d leap to alertness and disgorge the contents of his mind. And every time the contents of his mind were another map of sorts.
    “My plan is to tour North America and promote my shows in strip clubs,” he said. “I just need to come up with a good illusion for strippers. You can be my assistant, Style. Imagine that: You and I touring strip clubs and taking all the girls to the show the next day.”
    After a couple of uneventful days in Chisinau—where the only beautiful women we saw were on magazine covers and billboards—we figured, “Why stop there?” Odessa was so close. Maybe the adventure we were seeking lay further ahead.
    So we left Chisinau on a cold, snowy Friday and drove northeast to the Ukrainian border. The snow-blanketed roads out of the city were recognizable only by icy tire tracks stretching into the horizon. The vista looked like a scene from an epic Russian romance, with tree branches coated with crystallized ice and frozen wine groves running along the hilly landscape. The car reeked of Marlboro smoke and McDonald’s grease; every time it stalled, it became trickier to restart.
    But soon, all of that was the least of our problems. What looked on the map like a forty-five-minute trip to Odessa ended up taking nearly ten hours.
    The first sign that something unusual was afoot came when we reached a bridge over the Dniester River and found a military checkpoint complete with several army and police vehicles, camouflaged bunkers on either side of the road, and an immense tank with its barrel pointing in the direction of oncoming traffic. We stopped in a line of ten cars, but a military officer directed us around the queue and waved us through the checkpoint. Why? We will never know.
    Mystery wrapped himself tighter in his blanket in the back seat. “I have a version of the knife-through-body illusion I want to do. Style, do you think you can dress up as a clown and heckle me from the audience? Then I’m going to bring you onstage and push you into a chair. I’ll play ‘Stuck In the Middle With You’ from Reservoir Dogs while I put my fist straight through your stomach. I’ll wiggle my fingers when they reach the other side. Then I’m going to lift you straight up, out of the chair, impaled on my arm. I need you to do that with me.”
    The second sign that something was not quite right came when we stopped by a gas station to stock up on snack food. When we offered them Moldovan lei, they told us they didn’t accept that currency. We paid in American dollars, and they gave us change in what they said were rubles. When we examined the coins, we noticed that each had a large hammer-and-sickle on the back. Even stranger, they had been minted in 2000: nine years after the Soviet Union had supposedly collapsed.
    Mystery pulled his hat down to just above his mouth, which was moving with the grandiosity of a carnival barker. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced from the back seat as Marko worked to start the car, “he levitated over the Niagara Falls, he jumped off the Space Needle and survived…presenting superstar daredevil illusionist, Mystery!”
    I guess his fever was breaking.
    As we drove on, Marko and I began to see Lenin statues and communist posters through the car window. One billboard depicted a tiny sliver of land with a Russian flag on its left and, on its right, a red and green flagwith a slogan beneath. Marko, who spoke some Russian, translated it as a call for a Soviet Re-union. Where were we?
    “Imagine this: Mystery the superhero.” Mystery wiped his nose with a shredded tissue. “There could be a Saturday morning cartoon, a comic book, an action figure, and a feature film.”
    Suddenly, a police officer (or at least someone dressed as one) stepped into the road in front of the car with a radar detector in his hand. We’d been driving ninety kilometers an hour, he told us—ten over the speed limit. After twenty minutes and a two-dollar bribe, he let us go. We slowed down to seventy-five, but a few minutes later we were pulled over again. This officer also told us we were speeding. Though there were no signs, he claimed that the speed limit had changed half a kilometer back.
    Ten minutes