Houdini's Box:art of Escape

Chapter One A five-year-old girl comes into my room ready to play another round of her favorite game, hide-and-seek, a game she has been playing with me twice a week for several months. It is the way, down to the smallest detail, we always begin our time together. In the room there is an armchair, a table, and a chair. She stands in the middle of the room, closes her eyes, and says, "Start looking." I have watched her, as usual, walk into the room and simply close her eyes. But in her mind she is now hiding. And quite quickly getting impatient. "Look!" she says. "Start looking!" Of course I am lookingwhat else could I be doing?but I don't seem to be playing the game. It occurs to me, for once, that perhaps I should close my eyes, which I do. And then she says a bit crossly, "OK, I'll give you a clue. I'm not behind the chair." I say to her, not too plaintively, "How will I ever find you?" "Just keep looking," she says blithely, clearly wanting to be helpful. Then, a bit more frantic, a bit more Alice in Wonderland, "I can't escape, I can't escape . . . I must be here somewhere." "No one can look everywhere," I say. "We can't escape, we're doing that," she replies thoughtfully, as though this was the most sensible, least histrionic of acknowledgments. She waits, eyes squeezed shut, while I keep failing to do what it looks like I've already done. So what I have foundindeed can't help seeing: her in the middle of the room, hidingis obviously not what she wants me to look for. "Will it be dangeroos when I find you?" I ask. (Her mother would read the sign at the zoo as "Do not feed these animals, they are dangeroos," so "dangeroos" is her word for it.) "You'll die," she replies. Then there's a pause, and she says in her most world-weary voice, "I give up." It is as if the rehearsal is over, and we can now resume, after another failed attempt at something, our ordinary life in the room. There is a drama, a tableau that she has to show me, that we are both trapped in. This is what we have to take for granted, she seems to be saying, this is what we need to do together, to get things started. And the sign of our entrapment is that she never changes; whatever I say, her lines are always the same. So what I sayeven though it is as different as I can make it each time, even though I rack my brains for what she wants to hearseems equally repetitious. I am her desperate improviser, trying to spring her. I will only know if I am someone else to her if she wants to change her tune. But in this strange duet for one the hide-and-seek is like a dream game, secluded away; a play within a play that we both briefly enact and watch, and then give up on. She rarely refers to it afterwards, and I refer to it as much as I can, trying to fit it in or link it with the rest of her life. But because there is no conversation about it, because it is at once open and unopened, it is, to all intents and purposes, an unspoken thing between us. I thought sometimes that there was a note of triumphant relief in her apparent dismay inside the game. She wants me to find her, but she warns me that I will suffer if I do; or she fears that no one really wants to find her because they wouldn't be able to bear the consequences. Either she is practicing her privacy or there is a solitude she feels imprisoned by. The girl standing in the middle of the room with her eyes closed sometimes seems to be parading her safety, and sometimesPhillips, Adam is the author of 'Houdini's Box:art of Escape' with ISBN 9780375406362 and ISBN 0375406360.