June 4th, 1920

My dear Mr. Chambers, 

Apologies first and foremost, or taking such a godawful-ly long time to return to return your letter of the fourteenth of April. Once again, you prove yourself to be an endlessly thoughtful and fastidious person. I feel in utter shambles next to you so often.  But with a  bright new shining decade at our disposal, I’m determined to be more organized. 

An auspicious start, isn’t it? Diving fully into the new decade halfway through its first year. But I’m only just back from my post-war jaunt around the globe—a trip well-earned, I’d say—and I’ve purchased an absolutely absurd estate on Long Island. More rooms and more land than I know what to do with, but I’m sure I’ll find ways of filling it all. After so many years being a respectable, responsible middle aged man, I think I’m due for some foolishness. 

To kick it all off—my triumphant return home, the sparkling nineteen-twenties, my extravagant purchase—I’ve decided to throw the party of this, and any, season. On June 21st, I’ll be hosting an enormous fête for the summer solstice, an occasion I’ve never given much thought to, but which is celebrated all around the world with great aplomb. There will be dancing and eating and libations, both legal and otherwise, and I do think it will be a rollicking good time.  

I would like to have you there. In truth, I’m not certain who will be on the guest list. It’s tricky, isn’t it? Just as you predicted, making and maintaining connection over the decades when we appear the way we do is quite difficult. And with the war and being away for so long after, my social circles have dwindled severely. I’m thinking of inviting my brothers and sister for God’s sake, so please come save my poor dulled soul. 

I know we haven’t seen each other in some time, but there would be something poetic, I think, in meeting again at the halfway point of the year.  I had toyed with the idea of hosting a New Year’s Eve party instead, but the holiday is now so wrapped up in time spent—

Say you’ll come. You can stay the weekend, the week, the month. Just say you’ll come. For now, I am, 

Humbly Yours, 

John

[a letter received by C.X. Chambers]

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May 30th, 1919

Somehow, I have found myself a fifty-five year old man. While I have had either the good fortune or the misfortune (all these years on and I’m still uncertain which it is) to avoid the ravages of age, my mind is that of a person who has been on this earth for five decades and seen a nearly world-ending war. One would think that these experiences would bring wisdom with them, but that remains to be seen. All I know I’ve gained is a kind of weariness that reminds me of being a boy, but now without any of those hardships.

To think of that boy now brings no small amount of relief, a bit of awe, and a certain measure of grief. My life is inarguably better than it was and yet, I have no sense of who I am really am. Perhaps it is the lack of possibility—when you are a young, the future stretches before you like an endless road. And then, over the years, you get set in your ways, your thinking, your very being. You become limited by your own experiences, perspectives, and, for most, your physical form.

I see it in my colleagues—those I still correspond with, too worried about the consequences of seeing any of them in person. They write of how they wish they could go adventuring as they always have but their heart or their bad leg won’t let them. Even John has sometimes spoken of how his leg and hip bother him, slow him down, though he talks of it as a mere inconvenience and nothing more. I try to be compassionate and understanding in my responses, though I always have to take special care writing him back on the subject, for every time I think of him immediately coming into mortal danger when arriving at the front, a kind of furious anger fills me, the likes of which I have not felt before. It embarrasses me, to still be so easily riled by the events of a war already being written about in history books, but everything with John always did provoke me faster than anything else.

I have yet to see him in person—travel still limited in the way that it is—but I fear he will try to hide from me the more serious ways in which his injuries affect him. He certainly went through a considerable amount of effort to hide the incident from me in the first place, always skating past my questions in his letters and having me write, not to the infirmary, but the neighboring town. In any event, the burns did not seem to slow him down too much during the war, considering he was right back out there far sooner than I would have preferred. I suppose I should just be grateful we’re both alive—I am grateful, deeply. But it irks me to think of him in pain or distress.

But all of that is old news at this point—I fear that he and I will discuss matters ad nauseam if we both refuse to move on. Neither one of us is very good at backing down from a fight.

Perhaps I am fixating on others’ troubles because I have so few of my own. I am certainly not resource limited. Especially since I began playing my luck on the stock market, the wealth that I have is practically unthinkable. It certainly would have been beyond the imagination of the boy who hawked newspapers on street corners to support his mother.

What would he think of me now? He would be glad, I think, to be out of the grips of poverty and equally astounded at that fact. But would he be disappointed in my fairly sedate life? Would he be horrified at my loneliness?

For all their struggles—learning a new language in adulthood, being so far from their homeland, even if there was nothing left for them in Ireland—for all the ways in which my parents were impoverished, they were never poor in company. Two people so in love they crossed the ocean with only the other to talk to; who had a child to enrich their life, not fill it; who made a warm and loving home out of a one-room tenement in the middle of a strange nation—these were not people who were lonely. It hurts to think of how they would have grown together as they aged, of the way their love would have deepened if father had never died. Perhaps mother would have been more inclined to travel, less afraid to stray too far from her husband’s grave for too long. Maybe her vibrancy and sharp mind would not have withered on the vine, the way I’ve no doubt father’s would have if she had been the one to an early grave. I never would have been company enough for either of them. No child could have filled that hole of grief.

Which is why I can never take a wife, nor have a child. It pains me—a sword in the soft spot of my chest—but there is nothing for it. Despite the fact that I’m sure I could find one—while I may not be much to look at, especially off stage, I am rich and, as far as anyone knows, of good stock and name. The myth of Charles Chambers has become so complete that no one remembers he appeared from thin air like one of his illusions. Charlie Coughlin, for them, was never alive.

So, yes, I could get a wife with ease—one who would, no doubt, be beautiful and clever and eager to start a family. Perhaps I could even contrive some kind of disguise to age with her, tell the children the truth when they are older. But I would have to watch them march off to the afterlife as well, and I’m not sure I could bear it. I’m not sure I could bear getting married—even without children—only to have to do it all over again with the same lies and secrets. When I fall in love—if I fell in love—I suspect it would be forever.

I have yet to discuss these matters with the one other person who understands, but how am I meant to write to John and ask his intentions toward marriage? I’m sure if he has eyes on someone, he’ll tell me when he means to propose. Or perhaps I will read about it in the papers like everyone else.

I know it is improper—immoral even, in some eyes—to think of such things, but even as a young man I thought that John was a striking—[the rest of the paragraph is crossed out so completely as to be unreadable]

It is best not to put it to paper, even here in the privacy of my diary. There is no point to such stray fantasies thoughts anyway.

I have forgotten father’s face. I had a photograph taken of mother and I before she passed but I can no longer conjure the feeling of her hand in mine nor the sound of her voice. Every friend or colleague I’ve ever known will someday fade from memory, or has already, vanishing like morning mist in the heat of the day.

Now, the face I see most clearly when I close my eyes is John’s. And his face, like my own, is ever unchanging.

[from the personal diary of C.X. Chambers]

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November 21st, 1918

They said we’d be home by Christmas and, against all odds, that may very well be true.

It’s over. We will not have to endure another endless winter in the mud and ice, watching our fellow soldiers’ toes turn black. I only suffered one such season, but I believe I may be done with both the cold and the outdoors for quite some time because of it.

I am not built for this. If I am being honest with myself, I don’t think anyone is built for this. There is something inhuman, unnatural, to this war. I understand that man has fought with man for as long as we’ve walked this earth, but this war is something beyond the realm of human conflict. It is as if we’ve been given the power of the gods and have decided to wage war with it despite being mere mortals ourselves.

They are calling it the Great War. Or the “war to end all wars”. I think the former lends it too much grandiosity and the latter is foolishly optimistic. We are all tired, worn out from the endless tension, the dwindling rations, the howling whistle of mortar shells before they explode, and I have no doubt that the other side feels just the same. And yet I also have no doubt that even this unending destruction has failed to sate the blood-lust that seems to run so deep in the veins of man. This war will not end wars; it has merely changed them.

There is no glory in battle. This is what I have discovered. It is not like the tales of knights and kings that I read as a boy. It is brutish and cruel, turning man into something less than he is. I feel diminished.

When it became clear that I had been given the great gift of, at the very least, an exceptionally long life, if not an unending one, I began to revel in the idea that I should get closer to experiencing every aspect of the human condition than any man has ever come before. And I set out immediately to make that true. I have traveled far and wide, have performed on the world’s great stages, have taken lovers on two continents, have read more books, attended more theatrical performances, eaten more delicious food and drank more expensive wine than I could have ever imagined. I have been to war. I have killed.

Not all human experience is made equal. This is at the very heart of the discovery I have made. Fighting in this terrible conflict, seeing the light go out of another man’s eyes, has put into stark relief just how blessed I have been in my life. I had an inkling of my own good fortune, of course. Lord knows my parents always made sure to tell me that I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and that I would be a fool to spit it out. But my life had not been without its hardship. I spent decades toiling in a career that I was ready to give up on before the tides turned. I have had public failures and hundreds of arguments with my family. I have been lonely. But I hadn’t experienced true pain until this last year.

Charles has experienced pain in his life. Many times. The loss of his mother hit him terribly hard, and I suspect his childhood was difficult, though he has never told me all that much about it, despite my occasional prodding. He has always been the yardstick against which I measure my accomplishments, but in recent years he’s become a kind of mirror as well. After all, who else on this earth could understand me or the way that I experience the world?

Except he doesn’t understand me. And I don’t understand him, not really. I’m sorry to say that our arguments over my joining the war effort did not cease as the months marched on. I had gone to great lengths to conceal my injury from him while I was still under the watchful eye of the medics—he had no reason to discover that I was receiving his letters to the infirmary—but he uncovered the truth all the same. And it didn’t seem to matter that, by that point, I was back in the field with only a scarred thigh to show for it; he took every opportunity after that to chastise me for getting blown up and encourage me to abandon my compatriots and go home. Yet he refused to be reasoned with when I suggested he be the one to leave the war.

It angered me, that he could so clearly see how ill-equipped I was for the front. Especially considering that he was never in combat the way that I was. How should he know what it takes to drive a bayonet through a man when all his killing occurred in a lab?

I shouldn’t squabble over the ways in which the war has scarred us. And, to be fair to Charlie, I have no idea if he is still relatively unscathed. I know he’s alive, he wrote me on the eleventh, seemingly as soon as he had heard the news, though I only just now received the letter. But I have not seen him in the flesh since his leave in London in ’16. Despite being, I imagine, mere miles apart at times, the war never did bring our paths together. Just as he had wanted. But it does strike me as strange, that I have run into him unexpectedly so many times in my life, but the moment I make an effort to find him, he eludes me.

Perhaps that is precisely the problem. Perhaps whatever means he used to learn of my injury also alerted him to every instance I tried to learn his current whereabouts. Perhaps it wasn’t that I couldn’t find him, but that he didn’t want to be found.

[from the personal diary of J.S. Fogg]

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June 11th, 1917

My dear Mr. Fogg,

I was surprised by the contents of your last letter, to put it mildly. I expected some discussion of the war—an inevitable subject these days, even before taking into account the focus of my letters to you. So, yes, I expected to hear your thoughts on the matter, but I never could have anticipated that you’d write to tell me you’d joined up.

Do not misunderstand me; it is an admirable thing that you’ve done, but it is perplexing to me all the same. Just a few months ago, you wrote that the theater had extended your contract. When I was in London in November, it seemed just as packed a house as it was at the start of the year. And you seemed to be enjoying yourself as much as you always have. Why the change of heart?

I confess, I feel a sense of…failure may be too strong a word, but at the very least a disappointment alongside my confusion when I read your note. Were my own words on the subject not deterrent enough?

I hadn’t realized that was what I was trying to achieve in our correspondence, but it was. You know better than anyone what I’ve experienced. What I’ve seen. What I’ve done. Putting those harsh realities to paper has been daunting, but I wanted you to know it all. As it turns out, I wanted you to know because of a secret hope inside me that you would want to stay as far away from the whole business as possible. I know I am not the only person you are hearing these dire stories from, so what is it that has you running directly into the flames?

I don’t regret writing all those truths to you, even if they ultimately did not have the effect I unknowingly desired, but I do regret revealing my own methods for forging identification papers. You are a clever man, no doubt about it, so I am certain that you would have found a solution on your own, but I detest the idea that I may have helped you appear young enough to fight. We are, both of us, too old to be out in these trenches and yet that is where we find ourselves. I hope we never meet each other out here. I hope this war ends before we have the chance.

It was only a matter of time until America entered the war, and sometimes I wish I had waited until we had before volunteering. The British forces have been bright and brave compatriots the past fifteen months, that isn’t from where the remorse originates. But perhaps if I had waited for our nation to join before offering myself up, I wouldn’t have “accomplished” what I have over the last year.

Perhaps it is wrong of me to write such things, or even think them, but that doesn’t lessen their truth. It is truly horrible, what I’ve created, and I will live in shame for the rest of my life. It causes me to wonder if our shared state is, in fact, a punishment after all, at least for me. That I should live forever with the knowledge that I helped create such terrible toxins. That I’ve choked men to death with my creations, left them disfigured and in pain, resigned them to a daily terror of gas creeping toward them. It matters not one whit who these men are. We are all the same in death and I have ensured that death is a thing that blisters and strangles and drags its victim across hot coals.

I know what you’ll say, because you’ve written it to me before—that if not me, some other poor, arrogant fool would have come up with it. That chlorine and mustard gases were already plaguing the battlefield, that it is only a matter of time before our enemies uncover an even more horrifying compound. But save your ink. None of it, however true or well reasoned, changes the fact that I’m here, that I’ve done what I’ve done.

Why couldn’t you just be selfish, John? Why couldn’t you do what you do best and hold yourself above all other considerations? Are you already so bored of your illusions? Do you feel the need to prove that Fogg the Fearless can escape a war so few have?

Promise me this: treat your gas mask as if it is the heart that beats in your chest. Go nowhere without it. Do not test the limits of our unnatural existences, lest you discover you really are unable to be killed and wind up in a perpetual state of misery for the rest of eternity. Do not be too proud to run.

I am currently far afield, huddled below no man’s land and dripping mud onto this letter, written on the very last of my current paper supply. So I will not chastise you further except to say: I have known too many good men who have died. Indeed, I have not allowed myself more than a passing cordiality with the men I fight with, lest I gain affection for a fellow only to see him killed in the way I have seen so many killed. I would ask—I would beg you—to reconsider your decision if it isn’t already too late, but I suspect it is. All I can ask then, is that you put that impressive brain of yours to good use and look out for yourself. I could not bear to lose

Please be careful. I am, reluctantly, now your brother in arms,

CXC

[a letter received by J. S. Fogg, in a medical tent in France]

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November 19th, 1915

Dear Reg,

I think you’ll be pleased to know that I’m currently smack dab in the middle of the Atlantic. That’s right—I’m on my back to London, this time to stay for quite the duration.

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May 15th, 1914

Against all odds, I have reached my fiftieth birthday. And I am now forced to admit that John Fogg was very possibly right.

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April 15th, 1913

When I opened the paper this morning, I was rudely confronted with not one—but several articles—remembering...

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May 2nd, 1912

My dear John Mr. Fogg,

I have vacillated on whether to send this letter, as you and I have not spoken for nearly a decade now.

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December 20th, 1911

I have somehow found myself in the most bitterly cold and dark place on the planet earth, just in time for the longest night of the year.

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July 5th, 1910

Yesterday, I attended my first fourth of July celebration since...

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February 2nd, 1909

“Wonder and Spectacle Abound! Renowned American Illusionist Sets His Sights on Europe”

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May 15th, 1908

Another year gone by, another birthday candle blown out (metaphorically speaking, given that this day has been like any other), and I find myself more lost and meandering than ever before.

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February 17th, 1907

At last, I am beginning to see the kind of due I have long known I’m owed. All the business is settled, and I’ll be starting my first United States tour...

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April 9th, 1906

Charles Xenophon Chambers gratefully acknowledges your expression of sympathy upon the death of...

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September 5th, 1905

It was a smash, just as I knew it would be. How could it not be, when I’ve finally premiered an escape before Houdini had the chance?

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January 1st, 1904

A whole year back in New York and I’m uncertain what I have to show for it. The magic trade is as good as ever, but I find myself tiring of the whole business. Twenty years now of nearly endless work at it and I’m as proficient of ever, but I don’t feel...

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December 31st, 1902

It feels particularly appropriate that I should end the year with another rejection from a theater. Part of me wonders why I even bother to try...

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