The anger that made all this possible wasn’t entirely due to Jurgen’s squandering of five million dollars. In fact, the money played almost no part in it—their wealth was close to inexhaustible. And Jurgen was correct, if a bit surly, in pointing out that Rudolfo spent vast sums collecting animals. The animals were not all for the Show. Some he acquired simply to be near them. Many of the exotic birds were too obstinate to learn any tricks; the most beautiful, the blond ringdove for example, seemed to lose all dignity when placed upon a stage, squawking in an unseemly manner, throwing off plumage and streams of sick-looking shit.
Rudolfo’s fondest memories involved his poorest days, when he’d lived as a beggar on the streets of Münich, a bizarre-looking fugitive from the law. That was when he’d met Jurgen, and they had been happy. Or so it seemed to Rudolfo. He had recollections of happiness, now lost, dried up in the vast desert that was their new home. So perhaps they had too much money—not that there was any way of getting rid of it. Not even spending five million on a bunch of old books and refuse from a lawn sale.
No, it was not the money that made Rudolfo angry.
The truth of the matter, which neared the surface as he completed six lifts and let the weight down for a painful seventh, was that he was infuriated by Jurgen’s dissatisfaction with the Show. It was what Rudolfo worked hardest at, and it was Rudolfo’s creation. When they met, all those years ago, Jurgen had known only tired and corny tricks, which he had performed in a silly manner, his eyes popped open with melodramatic intensity. His audiences were bored, always, and sometimes violent, there mostly to grope each other or watch a parade of near-naked people mount the stage, that being the main attraction at Miss Joe’s. Jurgen’s card tricks, coin manipulations, silk transformations and dove productions did not engage their imaginations. However, this had all changed the first night he, with Rudolfo standing by his side, had opened the lid of a makeshift Production Box to reveal the young Samson. The albino leopard bared his teeth and howled menacingly. The audience, after a long, stunned moment, applauded, at first meekly and then with enthusiam.
That had been Rudolfo’s doing, the first of many inspirations. While he understood little about the mechanics of the illusions—he knew his own part in several of them, but there were some he found as baffling as any child might—he understood Show Business. That thought came with the eighth lift, and it was inspiring enough that Rudolfo immediately brought the weight down and screamed again, forcing the iron up even as he lost feeling in his arms. The only sensation now was a prickly tingle around the elbows. The muscles themselves were consumed by a dull numbness which, when Rudolfo finally racked the bar, would be replaced by agony. His muscles were now “distressed,” a word in English that Rudolfo liked and used whenever he could.
He allowed the weight to come back down, resisting it all the way with his trembling arms. If you weaken and simply let the weight fall, Rudolfo knew, it becomes impossible to regain momentum, to push again. So he resisted and then resisted hesitation, driving upwards with his numb and swollen arms. He screamed, but all that came out was a small sound. This tenth lift, Rudolfo realized, was a mistake. It was not so much that he’d abandoned belief in his ability to hoist it, despite the negative aspects of that last thought. He was adept at all manner of positive thinking techniques, had for years been listening to Tony Anthony’s “YOU!” series of motivational tape cassettes. But his arms were simply not responding to orders. He watched the bar begin to sway back and forth and was reminded of something he’d once seen on television. A suspension bridge was being buffeted by a hurricane, twisting and heaving in the storm. The bridge ultimately blew apart, just as the weight would soon fall, likely crushing Rudolfo’s windpipe. He had one chance, he thought, and that was to throw the weight clear. Unfortunately, that would require at least a little control over his arm muscles. The bar was now pitching back and forth, and Rudolfo thought that he might be able to use some of this momentum to propel the weight away—but it was a vague and hopeless thought and occupied only a split second.
Just before his arms collapsed, though, a thick forefinger came and curled itself beneath the bar. “Up,” said Jurgen, and that was all the assistance Rudolfo required—the finger or the word, he couldn’t have said which. Rudolfo’s voice came with force, almost a yodel, and his arms exploded with a firing of nerve and muscle so intense that he would not have been surprised to see flames shooting out of his elbows. “Up,” repeated Jurgen, and Rudolfo pushed and somehow the weight rose, and then Jurgen pulled it backwards, guiding it still with just the one finger, and gently placed it on the rack.
Rudolfo bolted forward, and noted that oddly enough it was not his arms that hurt, but his stomach. He leaned to the side and retched, his belly wracked by spasms. Nothing was forthcoming (Rudolfo ate very little as a rule, mostly raw eggs and vegetables, and certainly never before exercise), and when the moment passed, Rudolfo realized that his arms did indeed hurt, hurt so much that it had made him nauseous. So he crossed his arms and took each bicep in hand and pinched and kneaded until close to tears. “Hoo boy,” he said softly, “are my arms distressed.”
Jurgen had crossed quietly over to the squat rack and was positioning himself under the bar. He was not dressed for the Gymnasium—he hadn’t changed out of his red leather outfit—but he stepped backwards with the weight on his shoulders and descended gracefully onto his haunches. He made no response to Rudolfo, perhaps because Rudolfo had spoken in English, perhaps because there was no response to make.
“Where are you going to put all that crap?” wondered Rudolfo suddenly.
“I’ve been thinking about that,” answered Jurgen. “Maybe that funny little room at the end of the hall, beside the wine cellar.”
“Do you mean the Grotto?”
Jurgen stepped forward, slipping the weight from his shoulders back onto the support pins. He turned toward Rudolfo and nodded. His skin was mottled slightly from the brief exertion, his large square brow misted with sweat. His quivering eyelids had assumed a position of military readiness, dividing his orbs at sombre halfmast.
“The Grotto,” said Rudolfo testily, “is supposed to be for the animals that don’t like sunlight.”
“We don’t have any animals that don’t like sunlight. All of the animals are always lying around the pool.”
“There are the bushbabies,” Rudolfo argued. He plucked his wig from the fork of the weight stand and fitted it carefully on his head.
“Sure, but you don’t keep a special room for a few stupid little animals!” Jurgen raised his voice, although not angrily, really. It was more as if he were forced to speak above other sounds and voices, a din that he alone could hear.
Rudolfo sighed heavily as he tried to figure where best to attack that sentence. His mind was suddenly cluttered with thought. The bushbabies were stupid, that’s true, but how intelligent could they be with brains the size of peppercorns? And there weren’t a few of them, there were scores, and the number was ever-increasing, because if you flipped on any light in the middle of the night you would catch at least five tiny furry couples in the act of squeaky fornication. So there. Now, why not have a special room for them? For instance, wasn’t there a separate room for Jurgen’s old swimming trophies, which totalled exactly three? And leaving all this aside, why should Jurgen start screaming all of a sudden? “Why,” spoke Rudolfo, “are you screaming all of a sudden?”
Jurgen waved his thick hand in Rudolfo’s direction. It was dismissive and scornful, more so than he’d intended, Rudolfo knew. None of Jurgen’s human interaction was subtle—unlike Rudolfo, who often intended a world of hurt and insult to be expressed through the flaring of single nostril. Or laced into the words of an innocuous sentence, for instance, “When would you like to eat dinner?” which is what Rudolfo asked now.
“I don’t care,” answered Jurgen, turning away.
“Yeah,” said Rudolfo, flaring both nostrils. “I can see that.”
Out on the des
ert, the sun doesn’t set so much as surrender, plummeting melodramatically behind the horizon.
Rudolfo Thielmann doesn’t notice, though, because for a year he has survived in a vast timelessness. Clocks are generally superfluous in Las Vegas, anyway—where all is ruled by the tides of chance—but Rudolfo has somehow pushed things beyond that He has managed to warp time, to mangle and melt it until it’s useless, until time has nothing to do with the dreary business of living. Suns, moons, the journey of the stars—this is time in its simplest form, time as nurtured by the first magi, grim men with grey eyes who spent many hours staring into the heavens.
So Rudolfo doesn’t notice the sun going down; but there are creatures outside his door that do.
They pop up with the newly birthed darkness, tiny beings with hideous faces, their features frozen into grimaces and grins. They are, for the most part, black-clad, shrouded by velveteen cloaks. Some are more benevolent; they wear leotards of pinkish hues and stroke the air with sparkling wands. With the nightfall, they begin to move toward das Haus with ginger menace.
They clutch empty bags.
Chapter Four
Jurgen had not been entirely honest when he told Preston that his first book had been The Secrets of Magic Revealed, written by Preston’s father, the Magnificent. True, his journey toward professionalism had started when he’d pulled open that cover and read: Never reveal the secrets in this book. The reading itself had been slow and laborious, because the book had been translated into High German, and Jurgen had his difficulties with languages. (He also had his difficulties with mathematics, sciences and anything to do with geography or history. It was Jurgen Schubert’s well-kept secret that he was a dim-witted boy. He was handsome and could work hard, and he’d learned that a sober, silent industry was often confused with intelligence.) Fortunately, The Secrets of Magic Revealed was full of photographs, black-and-white images of a huge set of hands. These hands were pale and delicate, the nails filed into beautiful crescent moons. They were photographed from every angle, and Jurgen found it thrilling to see the secret photographs, the ones that showed the coin nestled between the second and third knuckles, the playing card bent and cupped in the hollow of the palm.
Jurgen had learned almost everything from that book. He learned the sleights and passes, shifts and manipulations. And whatever information Preston the Magnificent left out, he gave directions to its location, the wonderful Erdnase card book, for example, or the classic Modern Coin Magic by J.B. Bobo.
But, technically, it had not been Jurgen’s first book. His first book had been Houdini on Magic.
Jurgen had found the book while hiking. Though there were no true forests anywhere in the vicinity of Bremen, only spare outcroppings of diseased trees and moonlike shelves of slate and granite, Jurgen often tramped away into the countryside. He had a vague sense that there was a romantic rightness to this, which he got not from poetry, but from some paper placemats he’d once seen in a restaurant. The placemats showed a strapping blond German youth all decked out in hiking gear, his upper body criss-crossed with leather straps. The lad’s legs were thick with muscle and dressed lightly with golden hair. Jurgen hoped, actually expected, to encounter this creature sometime on the trails. An even more compelling reason for his hiking had to do with the overcrowding back at his own house. The house was tiny to begin with (Jurgen would realize one day that he could fit his entire childhood home into the trophy room of das eindrucksvollste Haus im Universum) and the Schubert family grew as if by cell division. His mother was usually both pregnant and nursing, his father was frequently announcing a visiting relative, the elder daughters were constantly getting married and their feckless husbands were never working and the elder sons would disappear briefly and then return with their own burgeoning broods. Jurgen was a middle child, but what he was in the middle of was a vast sea of humanity. This is why he loved to lace up his hiking boots.
The boots were actually street shoes into which he’d forced long, thick laces, twisted and ribboned into complicated outdoorsy knots. Lacking not only lederhosen, but shorts of any kind, Jurgen hacked off the legs of some faded flannel pants and then rolled up the bottoms to reveal the entire length of his pale blue thigh, blue because the rolled-up pant leg cut off the circulation below his groin. He crossed two small belts over his chest, cinching them so that they, too, were biting and painful. He found a hat which he managed to persuade himself was Tyrolean. The one good thing about his home was that strange articles of clothing were easy to find, especially accessories, materializing suddenly in odd places and remaining unclaimed. Ties stayed hooked over newels for months, sweaters languished on the floor and hats grew like buds on the furniture. This particular hat had been purchased by Jurgen’s brother Oscar, who originally thought that it made him look like an American gangster, before realizing that it was far too large and made him look like the thing he least wanted to be, a country bumpkin. Jurgen, even at a very young age, had a head so large and blocklike that he had to take hold of the brim of this hat and tug it down over his brow. The hat made Jurgen look like an American gangster, and he could never understand the looks of mistrust he received when he’d tramp into restaurants for a cup of coffee.
Jurgen would sometimes hike from dawn until well past dusk, consulting his compass dutifully and recording his route in a small notebook. He would record landmarks and town names; sometimes he’d jot down his impressions of the same: nett, he would write, sehr nett. When he returned home, Jurgen was often surprised—not really surprised, not after the first few times—to find that no one had noticed his absence.
It was a day of no particular distinction, neither sunny nor cloudy, hot nor cold, when Jurgen came across Houdini on Magic. It was lying in a pile of dead and dried leaves the same colour as the cheap parchment used to bind the book. He would never have noticed it except for the light hitting the tarnished gilt of the cover’s lettering, sending up a reflection that crackled with something like electricity. Jurgen hurried over, imagining that he’d stumbled upon a cache of gold or gemstones. Instead, he found the little book, the paper burned by time. As soon as he lifted it, the sunlight ceased to play upon the leaf, and the lettering, although ornate and curlicued, looked very plain indeed. Houdini on Magic. He almost tossed the book away. His arm actually moved, his wrist cocked and then snapped. Jurgen was never sure why his fingers never let go. The fingers themselves decided they wanted to hold on to the book, so Jurgen pulled it back in and opened it, mildly curious.
He’d heard of Houdini before, of course, but realized at that moment that he had no idea what Houdini actually did. This struck him as wondrous, that this man could be so famous, almost without reason. He was simply famous. Jurgen’s heart began to ache for fame, for elevation above all the people, a thousand times higher than the shitty little hills that surrounded Bremen. Here, apparently, was how Houdini had accomplished it: by magic.
He took the book home and hid it in his drawer. He waited until, one afternoon, there were no cousins or brothers, either natural or in-law, hanging about the bedroom. Then he opened the book and read:
THE PAPER BAG ESCAPE
An escape from a paper bag, as from the pasteboard box, is convincing because the item used is too simple and easily examined to be faked in any way.
This man escaped from paper bags?
Jurgen reread the words, confident that he’d misread, been misled, but Houdini was clear on the point: he climbed inside a paper bag seven and a half feet long and then freed himself. Where did they have such bags, wondered Jurgen, and why?
He flipped more pages.
CARD IN EGG
Jurgen read on, if for no other reason than he liked eggs.
Oh, this was more like it. Houdini described an effect whereby a chosen card is torn up and then found, miraculously restored, inside a fresh chicken egg.
This would make them take notice, thought Jurgen, this would surely silence the riotous breakfast table.
The card
selected must be forced; that is, you compel the party selecting a card virtually to select the card that you almost push into his hand.
Jurgen could compel the members of the Schubert household to do absolutely nothing. He turned more pages.
LIFTING A HUMAN BEING WITH POWER FROM EYES (A Rare Trick of the Cingalese)
Jurgen read on.
One stormy evening, Jurgen Schubert assembled his family in the parlour. He hadn’t selected the night because of the tempest; in fact, he was a little annoyed with it, as if God were trying to steal his thunder. The Schuberts crowded in, the parents and Oma claiming the spring-poked sofa, others squatting on the floor, the smaller children perching on the credenza and woodbox.
The Spirit Cabinet Page 4