The weather was clear, and the clouds naturally parted on the Golden Stadium of St. Karruda, where the legendary trickster Jester was hosting his performance.
He threw his signature playing cards to fit perfectly in a small hole on the pocket of a wealthy patron dozens of seats away with one simple flick of his finger. He then made his clown mask disappear with one smooth wave of his sleeve and reappear on the head of another wealthy patron.
Again and again, He dazzled audiences with his deft manipulation of small objects such as playing cards, dice, and chips, each trick a testament to his razor-sharp intellect and critical thinking.
The crowd roared from the red velvet seats of the sold-out theater, their faces illuminated by the golden stage lights as he sent cards cascading through the air like a waterfall. His practiced smile never reached his eyes. "Ladies and gentlemen!" he shouted, watching the front-row patrons lean forward in anticipation, champagne flutes clutched in manicured hands.
"What everyone is about to witness defies logic itself!" His tone was bright, yet the words tasted stale in his mouth. A show every month for three years in this gilded, repetitive cage had hollowed him out, leaving only contemplation of life where passion once lived. As the wealthy spectators gasped on cue, he found himself scanning the exit signs, wondering what experiencing real danger might feel like.
After a long while of performing, amidst the reluctant waves of the massive crowd, his time was over, and another performance was set to come in the stadium.
He slipped out through a service door beneath the stage, past the bowing dancers and grumbling stagehands, his mask stuffed into his coat pocket. Outside, the chill was biting. He relished the mute hostility of the night: the jeering wind, the halo of sodium lamps, the garbage slicked in black puddles.
Home was a studio in the dead part of the city, a failed attempt at luxury converted hastily from a bankrupt casino. The only signs of previous decadence were the stubborn gold trim on the elevator buttons and the persistent smell of cheap cigar. Jester's own unit was up eleven floors, a code-locked door, the hallway lined with bland origami sculptures he'd folded from junk mail and salon flyers.
He peeled off his coat and kicked his shoes into the corner. Exhaled. The showers of applause from earlier replayed in his head, warped now, like a laugh track from a bad sitcom. The room was almost empty: a bed with no headboard, a glass table with a single burnt-out lamp, a kitchenette stocked with instant food and protein bars.
He then went through the motions. He microwaved water for instant noodles. After a while, he washed his face, staring at himself in the mirror, as if his own reflection was an adversary to be tricked. Red eyes, sallow skin, dark wet hair slicked back: a villain from pulp stories, but more tired.
He didn't perform shows for money, but for the thrill. However, he never found what he was looking for.
He sprawled on the bed, played a round of poker on his phone against AI opponents, and lost on purpose. He found it stupidly predictable. He switched to chess and attempted Scholar's Mate with black, stifling a yawn. After four moves, the phone's AI offered a draw with robotic pity. He closed the app, flipped the phone onto the glass table, and watched it bounce once, twice, then settle like a spent cigarette.
He thumbed through his bookshelf—a single shelf, really, a warped plank with a half dozen battered books scavenged from the apartment complex's free bin. Crime novels, pop psychology, a tattered Purple Sun Almanac. He skimmed a chapter on forbidden card games of the southern archipelagos and set it aside, bored by the author's forced drama.
Next, he watched a documentary on infamous con-men. Their faces glowed grainy on his wall projector; they all looked haunted, not by guilt but by their lack of worthy opponents. He scrubbed through their stories in fast-forward, scoffing at the lazy tricks.
By ten he'd reorganized his entire apartment, just to prove how little time it would take: five minutes to refold all his origami into perfect symmetry, two to rearrange the kitchen cabinets, one to swap his bedspread from black to grey. With every act of idle perfection he felt the sting of pointlessness sharpen. He flopped onto the bed, stared at the white ceiling, and once again sank into his thoughts.
He pictured himself leaping from a building, not in suicidal despair but in a kind of acrobatic curiosity, just to see what the updraft would do to his body. Would he somersault? Spiral? Or simply plummet, cards scattering from his sleeves, caught in the cyclone of a man too clever to quit anything honestly.