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36-year-old seven-foot two-inch Mennonite magician named Clyde pulls an obese, angry, buck-toothed, black-and-white-spotted, one-eyed rabbit out of a gray velour tophat at a birthday party for a five-year-old biracial child attended by four Caucasian, three African American, one Native American, and two Asian American children. Before Clyde can restrain the rabbit, it attacks and maims three of the children. The next day two police officers – one an emigre from Samoa with a disfiguring strawberry birth mark and the other a bipolar Hispanic female who is addicted to cough syrup and coffee enemas – arrest Clyde while he is performing in front of an inner city Girl Scout troop comprised of Sikh and Hindu preadolescents. Prior to his arraignment Clyde is assigned a court-appointed 62-year-old heavily tattooed Muslim lawyer who is both an Ebola and cancer survivor. The lawyer has Clyde evaluated by a 34-year-old celibate former Buddhist monk-turned-psychiatrist who for the past year has been contemplating sex reversion surgery. The psychiatrist diagnoses Clyde with posttraumatic stress disorder, having discovered that while cutting the cake at his seventh birthday party he was stung more than two hundred times by a swarm of killer bees, which it was later ascertained had come from a nest in a storage container filled with oregano, cinnamon, and an assortment of illicit drugs in the hold of a cargo ship that six months earlier had been commandeered by Somalian pirates and after being pillaged and gutted eventually ran aground off the coast of Florida not more than forty miles from Clyde’s house. After months of pretrial negotiations between the prosecution and defense, a thrice-divorced geriatric judge of mixed Asian and Aborigine ancestry who all his life had been plagued with chronic halitosis and who in his youth had dabbled in black magic arrives at a compromise that allows Clyde to plead guilty to three counts of reckless endangerment, and sentences him to one hundred hours of community service, during which time he is assigned to teach magic to high-risk adolescents confined to a secure psychiatric facility. On the first day of his community service, Clyde becomes enamored of one of the patients, a four-foot two-inch seventy-five-pound 16-year-old émigré from Albania named Connie, who one afternoon during a moment of intimacy confides that besides having a long history of setting fires and torturing animals for as long as she can remember she has had a severe addiction to eating glass. On the last day of his community service, a hopelessly besotted Clyde announces to an assembly of students and staff that he will demonstrate “The Vanishing Diminutive Girl Trick” and on asking for a volunteer Connie raises her hand, removes her Hello Kitty earrings and hijab, and comes up onto the stage and positions herself upright in an ornate wooden coffin that Clyde had hauled to the facility in a hearse he borrowed from the local funeral home. Closing the coffin and sealing it shut with masking tape, Clyde yells out “Abracadabra” followed by two flamboyant sweeps of the gaudy black cape he wears during all of his performances, and after a tension-filled minute unseals the coffin which to the astonishment of everyone is now empty. As the audience “Oohs” and “Ahs” Clyde executes a double backflip while simultaneously sprinkling into the air some sort of magic dust that blurs everybody’s vision as well as causing them to sneeze uncontrollably, and as all this is going on Clyde discretely ducks out of the building where he is joined by Connie, and for the next year and a half the two of them are not seen anywhere until one afternoon a vacationing husband-and-wife podcasting team who are aficionados of unsolved mysteries sight the phantom couple sharing a mint chocolate chip icecream cone and canoodling on the observation deck of the Grand Canyon. Within thirty minutes the fugitive couple is surrounded by an assemblage of National Park police and Arizona state troopers, which inspires Clyde to lift his diminutive companion up off the ground onto his shoulders after which he yells out “Hocus Pocus” apparently causing the two of them begin to glow incandescently and slowly ascend upwards until they come to rest at least one hundred meters above the horseshoe-shaped deck of the canyon. For the better part of an hour the shimmering couple levitate like some sort of superheated UFO, continuing to ignore repeated appeals to come back down to earth, when all of a sudden one of the state troopers (who it is later learned had not but should have been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder when he was eight years old) takes it upon himself to fire a fusillade of bullets up into the air, which has no effect except that Clyde begins to chant in a deep and alien baritone voice some sort of gibberish so loud and unique in pitch that it triggers a 6.2 magnitude earthquake. As pandemonium reigns below Clyde pulls out from under his by now fiery red cape what appears to be the very same obese, angry, buck-toothed, black-and-white-spotted, one-eyed rabbit whose outburst two years ago seemingly has triggered this whole unfortunate chain of events. After a while Clyde, Connie, and the now literally incandescent rabbit appear to collapse into some sort of fulgent amorphous mass which starts to rotate rapidly while shooting off a profusion of sparks and debris and suddenly rockets upwards into space before executing a semicircular turn and plunging toward the bottom of the canyon where it explodes with an ear-splitting intensity that culminates in an eerie-colored mushroom-shaped cloud that hovers above not only the Grand Canyon but the entire Western United States for the better part of a year. Eighteen months later when it is finally deemed safe to descend to the bottom of the canyon, the only thing a search party of ten volunteers attired in hazmat suits can find is Clyde’s gaudy black cape, Connie’s Hello Kitty earrings, and a remarkably intact and healthy obese, angry, buck-toothed, black-and-white spotted, one-eyed rabbit who has to be subdued with five heavy-duty cartridges from a tranquilizer gun.
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