Siegfried without his Roy

"Do you know what the secret to Siegfried & Roy was?" Siegfried Fischbacher asks, his blue eyes shining with tears. "It was the love -- the audience knew it, felt it."

Two months after his partner, Roy Horn, was mauled by a royal white Siberian tiger during the illusionists' Las Vegas act, Fischbacher is living in a hotel in Westwood, just a short walk from UCLA Medical Center, where he visits Horn's bedside each day. "Nothing has changed," he says. "We depended on each other onstage, and now in life."

Yet everything has changed. Horn is caged in a stroke-impaired body, and Fischbacher is disorientingly free from the predictability of their five-nights-a-week extravaganza.

"It is strange to be able to call anyone I wish, to walk to the store to buy food. Always before, everything was for the show. And you," he says in an interview he agreed to without approval from a manager or publicist, "you are here because I realized I don't have anything to sell -- the show, whatever. It is the first time in my life that I do this. It is a blessing."

The night of the attack, Fischbacher felt lost, full of despair. "When I went to see Roy, I said to myself, 'My God, my God," he recounts. "And then I went home, stood in the middle of a room, and it was as if somebody gave me a hug and told me, 'Everything is going to be all right.' "

During the sold-out Oct. 3 show at the Mirage Hotel, a 600-pound tiger named Montecore pawed Horn's arm and, as he stumbled, lunged for his neck and dragged him offstage. The critically injured Horn lost a massive amount of blood and later suffered a stroke. A portion of his skull was removed to relieve pressure on his brain.

On Oct. 28, Horn was moved to UCLA Medical Center for further evaluation and treatment, with his condition listed as serious. A medical center spokesman said Monday that he could not release any further information, at the request of Horn's family.

Fischbacher, for his part, is focusing on the positive. "Of course, he will make it. Each day, there is a new miracle."Horn is now breathing on his own, he says. Beginning to sit in a wheelchair. Listening to the radio. Watching cartoons. Laughing. He cannot yet eat or walk. Unable to speak intelligibly, he has been using gestures and writing notes. "The first thing he wrote was, 'It is good to hold your hands,' " Fischbacher says, drawing his palms together. "And last night, he wrote that he wanted a Madonna CD."