The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  Jurgen would walk by, nodding politely. “Hello, Oma.” But his grandmother would get agitated by this, raising her trembling fingers, long after he’d gone, in a desperate attempt to clutch at his shirt sleeve. Jurgen was too polite a boy to keep ignoring her, particularly when he began to suspect that she was weeping in an odd manner, would have actually been weeping except that she seemed to be dried up inside and could summon no tears.

  He felt very bad about all this. In a sense, it was his fault, or rather, the fault of the Cingalese. But it was Jurgen who had unleashed the Cingalese into the Schubert living room. Oma had never been very far from gaga, not even as a young woman, but she had undeniably been pushed over the edge by the Baby Levitation. Now she sat, her brittle body all a’thrimble, calling out desperately to the haughty Zauberer.

  But Jurgen knew no magic secrets. The things in Houdini’s book, he realized bitterly, were traps, set-ups for little boys to humiliate and destroy themselves. It was Houdini’s way of protecting his vaunted status as Master Magician, to dissuade if not to actually maim, disfigure, possibly kill any pretenders to that throne.

  Jurgen found help in an unlikely place—at home. His brother Dieter, nine years older, a pudgy and pale young man with clownish circles of flushing on his cheeks, one day pointed a deck of cards at him. Dieter belched, and Jurgen was made faint by the previous night’s effluvia, spiced by cigarette smoke and marinated in slumber. Dieter was a great frequenter of beer cellars and taverns, and it was there that he learned the trick he was about to show his little brother. “Pick a card,” he muttered, making a very clumsy fan with the deck. “Any fucking card. I don’t give a shit.”

  Jurgen pulled out a card, the king of clubs.

  “Right. Okay. Now, put that card back on top. Yeah. Now. We’re going to cut the deck, right, so the card is in the middle. Here. Take some of the deck. Okay. Now I put my half down and you put your half on top. Now, your card is in the middle, right? So watch this.” Dieter lifted the cards into the air. “This is great,” he muttered. “Hocus-fucking-pocus.” Dieter allowed the cards to drop, carpeting the floor. One card—the king of clubs—lay overturned.

  Jurgen wrapped his hands around his brother’s throat. He was almost as big, and certainly more powerful. He spoke calmly, although Dieter was clearly alarmed. “Show me how to do that.”

  “Yeah, sure, Jurgen,” said Dieter, which gained his release. “It’s easy. Look. When you cut the deck, I take my half and go over top of yours to put it down. And then I say, put your half on top, okay. You see?”

  “I put the cards back where they came from in the first place?”

  “Yeah!”

  “But I’m not that stupid,” he insisted.

  “Nobody ever notices. It’s because I move my cards over yours. It seems like it was always the top part.”

  “Nobody notices that?”

  “You know what? People just aren’t as bright as you think they are.”

  “Huh.”

  “Then,” continued Dieter, shoving the cards together, “you just shove the top card over a little, like this, so when you drop the deck it flips over.” Dieter demonstrated.

  The next afternoon, Jurgen sat down beside Oma on the sofa.

  The old woman allowed herself to keel over so that she butted up, shoulder to shoulder, with her grandson. She smelt as though she’d been kept in an old wooden chest for many years. “Show me magic!” she whispered.

  Jurgen took the deck of cards from his shirt pocket and spread them into an awkward fan.

  “Pick a card, any card.”

  Oma nodded and reached forward with a trembling hand. “Tell me,” she asked, “will it be very painful?”

  “No, Oma,” answered Jurgen truthfully.

  Oma excitedly ripped a card out of the deck and studied its face. “Oooh,” she grinned. “A good one.”

  “Remember what it is, Oma.”

  “Yes.”

  “Really remember what it is very well, Oma.”

  “Yes.”

  “Put it back on top.”

  Oma lingered with the card, not impressing it upon her memory, merely studying the face as though she found it pleasing.

  “Okay, Oma, cut the cards, okay?” He offered the cards, cradled upon his palm. Oma lifted off three cards, about as much weight as she could bear.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said Jurgen encouragingly. “Now …” He was still unsure about this next part. It angered him, somehow, that the art was based on people’s stupidity. Suppose people weren’t stupid? Suppose only Jurgen Schubert was stupid, and every time he assayed this trick he was discovered and ridiculed?

  He passed his portion over those trembling in his grandmother’s hand and placed them on the coffee table in front of them.

  “Oma,” he said very quietly, “put your cards on top of those.”

  She did so without hesitation, and as gleefully as she could manage.

  Having gotten away with it (though his grandmother wasn’t much of a test), Jurgen sighed and reached for the deck.

  “No, no, no!” shouted Oma.

  “Hmmm?”

  “Magic,” said Oma, with trenchant precision.

  “Yeah, watch.” Jurgen reached for the deck again.

  “No, no! Magic.” Suddenly her face was in curious motion, the wrinkles flowing, bumping up against each other. Her eyes widened, her mouth all but disappeared. Jurgen was about to call for his mother when his grandmother’s face suddenly blanched and recomposed itself. “Like that,” she explained.

  “Oh!”

  Even as a twelve-year-old, Jurgen Schubert could fashion a pretty intimidating face. He ran the two halves of his huge, squared brow into each other, producing creases as sharp as lightning bolts. He pursed his mouth, flared his nostrils and then, to deal with the dark, flickering lids, he forced his eyes open until the irises were like little blue stones in a pond of milk.

  “Good,” nodded Oma appreciatively.

  Jurgen suddenly and urgently threw the cards to the ground. He threw his eyes heavenward, cupped his hands and raised them as though to say, “You want me? Come and get me!”

  He’d expected one of his grandmother’s skittish shrieks. Instead there was silence, or what counted as silence given her rheumy lungs. Jurgen looked down. Oma was smiling at the overturned seven of diamonds, smiling like a young girl walking in the forest who notices a rare bird perched on a low branch.

  Every day she asked to see magic. Jurgen had a great problem, however, in that he only knew the one trick. Even his grandmother eventually grew bored, sometimes not even bothering to look down to see her card, merely muttering, “Nicht schlecht,” and going straight to sleep.

  Jurgen brooded about this at night. He enjoyed performing for his grandmother, he enjoyed the way she said Der Zauberer without irony and he was determined not to lose her. It occurred to him one night that as long as she remained none the wiser about the “cut,” he could produce the chosen card in many different ways. One day, for example, instead of hurling the deck to the ground, he held it up in his left hand, showing Oma the faces. “Look,” he whispered, raising his right hand, holding it over the cards, waggling his fingers in an odd manner, overly strenuous and jerky. He pushed with his forefinger, which was bent against the top card. The four of clubs appeared to rise from the deck, summoned by Jurgen’s strange magical finger waggling.

  “Good,” said his grandmother, touching the tips of her fingers to his cheek. They felt as cold as plumbing on a winter’s morning.

  Jurgen canvassed his siblings and their mates for new tricks. One cousin, Volker, a pale young man who, like Dieter, spent far too many hours in beer cellars, nodded and placed a cigarette between his thick lips. “Okay, watch.” He fumbled with the deck of cards, not shuffling them so much as forcing them to commingle, bending the edges. Volker made a fan. Instead of saying “Pick a card,” Volker merely nodded toward the deck in a cursory manner. Jurgen selected one, looked at it and then
, at Volker’s urging, shoved it back into the middle of the closed deck. “Watch this,” muttered Volker. He again fanned the cards, showing Jurgen their backs. One—the king of spades, Jurgen’s selection—faced upwards.

  The secret, Volker divulged willingly, was to reverse the card on the bottom. When the person isn’t looking, flip over the deck and offer that for the reinsertion of the card.

  “Ah!” said Jurgen, racing off to show it to Oma.

  Some of the boys at school knew little tricks too. One friend showed him a neat effect with safety pins—and God knows, the Schubert house could yield up any number of safety pins—interlocking two in such a way that they could be pulled free of each other and yet both remain closed.

  In this manner Jurgen managed to assemble a tiny repertoire. He did a trick with a box of matches: you half-open the box, demonstrate that all is normal, then turn the box over and pull the inner compartment out all the way. None of the matches drop until you say the magic words, “Hocus-fucking-pocus.” Then they shower like spring rain. The secret is a broken matchstick inserted crosswise. It holds the matches in place until you squeeze, and then it falls to the ground with all the other matchsticks.

  But Jurgen’s true education in magic came about in a magical way. One Saturday morning he came downstairs for breakfast and found the dining room table deserted. The oddness of this cannot be overstated. The table should have been thronged. There was evidence that the clan had been there only recently. Pablum decorated the high chairs. The table was covered with half-cups of coffee and empty cereal bowls. And the newspaper was spread across the length of old oak.

  Later that afternoon, Jurgen learned what had happened. Oddly—magically—it was not a single exigency that had ripped the family from the breakfast table, it was a series. Papa Schubert cracked a tooth and began to roar with pain. He lashed out and knocked over one of the high chairs, toppling Ha-Jo to the ground. Ha-Jo himself was unharmed, but he bounced and rolled and acted as a kind of bowling ball, taking out the legs of all the other high chairs. Infants tumbled to the ground. Brows cracked and limbs were twisted. Mothers screamed and picked up children, husbands began to race around searching for car keys. Dieter and Klaus collided head-on. Dieter, never far from unconsciousness, blacked out immediately. His wife, Maria, screamed, not because she cared particularly, but because her water had just broken. There was nothing for it but a mass exodus to the local hospital. No one gave a thought to Jurgen, who was just waking up.

  He’d been having a dream in which he was a great Conjuror. In the dream he wore a long cape, emblazoned with silver and gold stars. He was otherwise naked. Lately, Jurgen was naked in many of his dreams. This was vaguely erotic, true (he usually woke up with a tingling sensation at the tip of his penis), but had more to do with the fact that he could never decide what to wear.

  Anyway, in this dream he was performing miracles. He motioned at his baby brother, for example, and the bloated Ha-Jo floated into the air, making a loud sound, half grunt, half giggle. Suddenly Jurgen was levitating all the babies in the family, and the air was filled with their startled gurgles. The mothers started to scream. Jurgen merely smiled sardonically and left the infants suspended in nothingness. The fathers rushed toward him, his graceless brothers and brothers-in-law, but Jurgen threw up his hands and they collided with eldritch invisibility. Dieter fell to the ground; Maria screamed. Jurgen waved a hand and they all disappeared.

  By the time he arrived at the dining room table, the dream was forgotten and Jurgen was startled to find his family gone. Alarmed, even, but not so much that he couldn’t pour himself a small cup of coffee and sit down. He realized that he could, however briefly, conduct his life as a man of leisure. He leaned back in his chair, scratched where there was only the vaguest of itches, and then, as his father had done many times, he reached out and gathered in a section of the newspaper.

  His eye was immediately drawn to a small box in the corner of the page. It was an advertisement for a bookstore. It was a very unremarkable advert, too, merely a listing of books that had recently arrived, trails of dots leading to numbers designating prices.

  So the magic is there to see, if you linger over it, and unwrap each moment as though it were a cough drop: that Jurgen should be alone in his house, that he should have access to the newspaper at all, let alone decide to read it, that this book title should immediately catch his eye:

  THE SECRETS OF MAGIC REVEALED

  (PRESTON THE MAGNIFICENT).………DM 20

  At the same time as young Jurgen Schubert was earning those twenty Deutschmarks, labouring at the docks in Bremerhaven, loading the supercargos that could not navigate down the silted Weser, Rudolfo Thielmann was having a hard go of it at the Berufsschule. Rudy was not regarded there as an interesting case study. He was regarded as a moron. Considering that his fellow students had misshapen heads and wore glasses with lenses as thick as the bottom of coke bottles, that was going some. Rudy learned welding, lathework, and during lunch hours he was taken into the shower stalls. The other boys would tear off his clothes and then bugger him, biting their tongues with concentration, their heavy glasses knocked askew.

  When Rudolfo was thirteen, his body began to fill out and harden, at which point he began swatting away these boys like vermin. Girls appeared, equally googly-eyed and thick-lipped, equally eager to abuse him in shower stalls.

  At no point did he perceive any of this as unfair or unjust. He was a little surprised at how odd life turned out to be, that’s all. But he was prepared for all manner of twists and turns. So when the circus appeared, three tilted tents hastily erected in a soccer field, he merely shrugged and began to pack his few belongings into a knapsack.

  Jurgen Schubert diligently worked his way through The Secrets of Magic Revealed. He began with the card tricks, because Oma seemed to like them, progressing from effects that were based on pure mathematics to the sleights-of-hand. As per the instructions given by Preston the Magnificent, Jurgen practised the Two-Handed Shift for one hour a day, until the transposition was silent and instantaneous. He laboured over Chenier cuts and buckle displays, little finger breaks and false counts. Then he started working with coins, which required an additional hour of practice each day, perfecting things like the Improved French Vanish. He couldn’t work with silks, per se, not the elegant silks that Preston the Magnificent wrote about and which were pictured in his book, but Jurgen purloined some underthings from the mountain of dirty laundry, cut them up into squares and added tricks like the Sympathetic Cut and Restoration to his repertoire. His daily practice session now totalled three and a half hours.

  Mind you, Jurgen continued an adolescence that was essentially normal. (Unlike Rudy, over there at the circus. The first chore Rudy was given was the feeding of Boris, an ulcerous and peppery lion. Rudy impressed everyone, especially the lion, by merely wandering into the cage, the meat hanging limply in his hand, and placing the food into the maw of a rather stupefied Boris. “Eat that,” he commanded.) Jurgen continued to swim with die Haie, competing several times a year, often finishing in the top rank. He was widely sought after for soccer teams, wooed by coaches, changing affiliation easily with no qualms or guilt. Indeed, it never truly occurred to Jurgen that people might be angry with him. He never noticed the increased viciousness of former teammates, the boos and hisses from their parents.

  His first public performance, not counting the Cingalese swami incident, was given at Ha-Jo’s fourth birthday party. Ha-Jo had by this time achieved an even more remarkable size, and at his birthday party he sat squeezed into a chair, cake in one hand, flagon of punch in the other. His friends looked like royal minions, clustered at his feet.

  Jurgen entered wearing a dark suit that had been discarded by one of his older brothers or brothers-in-law. Appearance had been stressed over and over by Preston the Magnificent. One should look “prepossessing and as well-heeled as one’s present economic modality would mitigate.” Jurgen bowed deeply (“courtly manners impress
more indelibly than any number of illusions”) and spoke (“never betray an abbreviated education nor paucity of breeding”).

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Jurgen began.

  “Hey, idiot penis,” croaked Ha-Jo, spraying cake crumbs. “There’s no ladies here.”

  Fortunately, Preston the Magnificent had supplied a retort to this very heckle. “Nor gentlemen neither,” said Jurgen, smiling suavely.

  “Shut up, crazy testicles.”

  The little crowd began to stir, excited by Ha-Jo’s brashness.

  Jurgen began to perform the Miser’s Dream, pulling coins from thin air. As he did this, Jurgen maintained an idiotic expression, which he’d adopted from the photographs in The Secrets of Magic Revealed. His eyebrows were raised, as though by astonishment. His mouth was bent into a small grin (“one must look confident and unfearing, though never smug”). The little crowd was not impressed. They shifted their bottoms in happy expectation of further invective from Ha-Jo.

  “Hey, fart hair,” the little despot ventured, “give me that money.”

  Though Preston the Magnificent warned against it (“never exhibit a negativity of demeanour”), Jurgen scowled. He could feel his eyes tightening into black stones, and when his eyelids began to flutter, he wrenched them apart by sheer dint of will, until they framed his eyes with blackness.

  The little crowd hushed, and when Jurgen produced a tiny speckled dove they gave forth a whisper of obedient awe.

  The chimes fill das Haus again, simple round notes that bump and collide like footballers trying to dance ballet. The music rouses Rudolfo; it prods and shakes him like a landlady. He climbs to his feet, then freezes, his body cocked as though ready for action but his face washed with an expression of bafflement. He stands there for a very long moment, motionless except for a small flickering of his eyes. The doorbell rings again, and this forces his decision. He smacks his hands together, which is what he always did in the Show to indicate that he was about to do something worth watching. The resulting sound is barely audible. In the old days, Rudolfo remembers vaguely, he could make little thunderclaps with his long, naked hands. He and Jurgen would punctuate the Show with meaty cannonades and rim shots.