The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  Rudolfo wrestles the door open. The child is disguised as a woman, a tall woman with glorious breasts. “Nice outfit,” says Rudolfo, and before the child can blurt out, “Trick or treat,” Rudolfo flings the treat at her.

  The meat, red and rancid, bounces from her face, leaving behind a stain of blood.

  Miranda whispers, “Hiya.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  At first Rudolfo found Jurgen very complicated and mysterious, because he was looking at him through a veil of infatuation. Before he realized that Jurgen was, well, simple, he puzzled over his personality and penchants. For example, Jurgen liked to discuss football. Between sets they would sit at the long bar—Miss Joe hovering behind—and Jurgen would keep up a one-sided conversation concerning the sport. “I think Bayern München is pretty well unbeatable this season, especially with Sepp Maier in the net.” For a long while Rudolfo was certain that this was all some code he could not work out, that meaning laced and impregnated statements like: “Franz Beckenbauer, Bertie Vogts, who could stop them?”

  When it dawned on him that Jurgen meant no more than he’d stated, Rudolfo looked for meaning in the accompanying gestures. Jurgen typically sat staring straight ahead. He’d drink beer, virtually inhaling it, three or four sips to drain a Pilsner glass. (This, of course, only after he was finished for the evening.) He smoked in those days, Revals, and Rudolfo wondered if the lighting of the smoke was significant. Jurgen would often stop mid-sentence in order to do this, leaving a strange half sentence sitting there awkwardly. He would exhale heavily, moving his mouth so that the thin stream of smoke circled and roved like a searchlight.

  During this time, the enchanted first month, Rudolfo’s career as a beggar suffered. For one thing, he simply wasn’t putting in the hours. He would spend most of the night at Miss Joe’s—which remained open until five or six in the morning—and then he would crawl off to his seedy hotel room. This room was in the basement and was, Rudolfo suspected, usually leased to vampires. Rudolfo felt very like a vampire in those days. Sometimes dawn would catch him as he stumbled through the streets of Münich, and he’d gasp and whimper, screwing his hands into his eye sockets. Mostly he felt like a vampire because of the way he’d cup his chin and stare at the young man babbling on about football. He feigned interest, he smiled and nodded and made soft noises, but basically he was just waiting for that moment when he could bite down and taste blood.

  At any rate, by the time Rudolfo did get to bed he’d collapse into a dark sleep. When his eyes fluttered open, it would be late afternoon and Samson would be sitting in the corner staring daggers. Rudolfo would leap out of the grimy bed and drag the beast out to the street corner, and the two would put in three or four hours, and then Rudolfo would take Samson back to the hotel room and leave for Miss Joe’s.

  Samson was miserable, feeling abandoned and betrayed. The hotel room had a television set. Actually, it had five, because the room was used for storage, junky old antiques that had been ripped out of the much more livable rooms upstairs. The albino leopard learnt how to turn them on, although it was tricky, because the knobs were little and could only be caught and worked with the flatter teeth well to the side of his mouth. He would get all five going at once, even though three of them usually showed nothing but snow, and he would lie in the middle of the room and turn his head languidly from set to set, as though keeping track of his harem and offspring.

  Rudolfo, over at Miss Joe’s, showed signs of financial strain. When it came time to pay for Jurgen’s beer—Jurgen, preoccupied as he was with football, never offered to pay for one himself—Rudolfo would dump handfuls of coin onto the bar and pick out pfennigs carefully. Miss Joe, noting this, one night asked, “Would you like to make a little money?”

  Rudolfo merely grunted. Truth to be told, Rudolfo didn’t care for Miss Joe, not in those first days. It wasn’t that he was frightened or confused by Miss Joe, not after all those years with the addled Anna Thielmann—well, that’s exactly the point, isn’t it? On more than one occasion Rudolfo found himself on the verge of ordering, “Nach ein bier, Mutti.” So on this occasion he merely grunted, allowing it to be interpreted however Miss Joe wished.

  “Here’s the thing, Rudolfo.” Miss Joe folded long brittle arms across the bar and collapsed upon them. The wig, a towering burial cairn, pitched forward and smote Rudolfo upon the head.

  Over on the stage, Jurgen was going through his routine. This was the word that Rudolfo used, not show or act but routine, because the lack of variation was astounding. Even the doves, despite being healthier due to Rudolfo’s intervention, behaved always in the exactly the same manner, fluttering out from behind the fans, flapping four times, tumbling to the ground. And given that the clientele was mostly the same night after night, Jurgen’s act became routine very quickly. Several people left the club as soon as he mounted the little stage. That was, in effect, Jurgen’s function, although Miss Joe kept up the fiction that the Chaser was the big star. Miss Joe even gave Jurgen a raise, not that he’d asked for it or deserved it in any way.

  “Here’s the thing, Rudolfo.” One good thing about Miss Joe, she never took liberties with his name, never called him Rudy, the name of the long-haired boy who had shot General Bosco in the heart. “Karl—you know Karl, the dark one with the big mole on his forehead?—well, he has larked off to America, to fucking Cincinnati for Christ’s sake, where his uncle operates a rendering house, so bye-bye Karl, which leaves me a little in el lurcho, because he at least had a sense of fucking rhythm even if his only dance move was the Buttock Clench-and-Release. Though, I must say, it is a crowd pleaser. So, I’m shy to the tune of one Go-Go Boy. What do you say?”

  Rudolfo accepted without hesitation, or contemplation, and became an immediate success. Although it had been months since he’d been inside a gymnasium, his body was still exaggerated by muscle and his beggar’s hunger had devoured much of the subcutaneous fat. His stomach was especially impressive, because Rudolfo did sit-ups constantly, that being an exercise he could, and would, do anywhere. Rudolfo would do them on the street corner, when the pedestrian traffic was distant and infrequent. He would command Samson to sleep, and the boot-blackened beast would collapse with appalling servitude. Rudolfo would then lie down on the pavement, hook his toes under Samson’s belly and begin an agonizing series of crunches. The result of all this was a little rippled oval in the centre of Rudolfo’s being. Miss Joe framed it nicely with his costume, a pouchy G-string and a truncated fishnet singlet. Of course, Rudolfo lost these early in the set, peeling them off so that the patrons could admire, without obstruction, his physique.

  Mind you, his popularity was not based on looks alone. There was something in his manner that made him a favourite at Miss Joe’s, something to do with his circus training. All of his gestures were outsized and ridiculously self-aggrandizing, because, as General Bosco had told him constantly, you play to the benches at the back of the tent. So Rudolfo would spread his arms wide, stretching the fingers until the tendons connecting them almost sounded with pain. He would smile so hard that his neck became laced with suspension-bridge cabling. And when he was in motion, he became, once more, a lion tamer, in a cage of invisible cats; every movement was imbued with menace and authority.

  And there was his hairlessness, too, which polished his body and made even the weak light at Miss Joe’s explode in all directions.

  So Rudolfo would finish every dance to an ebullition of applause rarely heard at the seedy shadowed nightclub. He would leap off the stage and race to the back of the bar, barely able to breathe, his heart all twitchy and spasmodic. There Jurgen would be, pulling a bottle of beer out from between thick lips. “You know,” he would say, drawing deeply on his cigarette, “I don’t think Stuttgart will make it even into the semi-finals.”

  As Rudolfo’s status ascended, Jurgen’s stalled on a remote road where no one even noticed or cared. The audience passed from indifference into, well, a more profound kind of indifference, one with ph
ysical manifestations. Some patrons would immediately fall asleep. Others would rise and attend to business long neglected. The lineup at the washroom during Jurgen’s set snaked through the little round tables and almost out the door. Jurgen didn’t seem to notice. He stood unreasonably erect, his complicated hair balanced perfectly atop his head.

  One day Jurgen said, “I’ve got us a couple of girls for after.”

  Rudolfo was in the process of stuffing things into the little G-string, of climbing strenuously into the fishnet singlet. “What?” he demanded.

  “Girls,” said Jurgen. He, too, was preparing for performance. He ran a filament, thin as spiderwebbing, through a pocket, up through the waist, into the sleeve of his shirt. “Good-looking girls,” he stated flatly. “Big tits.”

  They met the girls in a tavern, very late at night. Their names were Monica and Monique. Actually, they explained, speaking together and performing an elaborate ritual if they should happen to speak the same word at the same time, both of the girls were named Monica, but they were roommates, so they had tossed a coin and one took the more Gaulish version. As if to live up to this, Monique wore a dark, pointy brassiere that lingered menacingly beneath her white sweater. She wore hot pants and long boots. Her hair swept like a blade across her face, covering features that were small and budlike. Monica was more Germanic, a large girl, heavily muscled from the two miles she swam daily. (Jurgen had encountered her at the pool. He swam only occasionally, but when he did, it was with relentless determination.) Monica’s hair was black and short. She wore straightforward clothes, but didn’t seem to wear enough of them. Those that she did wear weren’t up to the task of coverage or protection from the elements. Her short skirt rode up her thighs, and when she sat down her panties were plainly visible. Her sweater gaped around the armholes and folded back above her stomach. Her breasts, smoothed and tightened by the swimming, didn’t need a bra.

  She was clearly Jurgen’s favourite. Rudolfo knew this because Jurgen chose to sit down beside her. That was the only clue. Jurgen didn’t speak to either girl, really He ordered some food for them, meats and pastries that they clearly didn’t want, and every ten minutes or so he would flip open his pack of Revals and stab at them with cigarettes. Neither girl smoked, although Monique finally gave in and had one. Otherwise, Jurgen remained silent, staring at the other patrons cautiously, as though he suspected that an assassin lurked amongst them.

  So Rudolfo engaged them in conversation as best he could, although the oddness of his life didn’t allow for much of a connection to other people. Monique, for example, frequently announced how much she loved movies. Rudolfo had never seen one. General Bosco, he recalled, had once taken him into a small dark room where images flickered upon an uncovered wall; images of men and women, greyly naked, people intent on devouring each other. Rudolfo intuited that Monique was speaking of a whole other experience. He pressed her about it, asking that she tell the stories. Monique complied, and showed an aptitude for condensing complicated narratives into five or six short sentences, but finally she decided that Rudolfo was strange and fell silent. Monica’s life was informed by athleticism, so Rudolfo asked how much weight she could bench press, how big a load she carried during squats. Each of Rudolfo’s questions served to make Monica feel monstrous and outgrown. She shrivelled up, drawing in her broad shoulders and sinking her chin toward her chest. That’s how the date proceeded, in silence, broken occasionally by Jurgen’s irritating, “Anybody want a smoke?”

  Despite this, Jurgen and Rudolfo were invited back to the girls’ apartment. Monica took Jurgen by the hand and dragged him off to her bedroom. Monique, for whatever reason, didn’t take Rudolfo to hers, even though she did point toward the door. Instead she sat Rudolfo down on the sofa in the living room, and began an amateurish striptease, peeling off the long white boots and hot pants. Her panties were blood-red. She worked off her brassiere, her hands hidden behind her back, her elbows thrust so far forward that Rudolfo involuntarily grimaced with empathetic pain. Naked, Monique flitted over to the sofa and sat down rather daintily. Rudolfo felt her left breast, but was slightly alarmed when the nipple flared up. He pulled his hand away. Monique chuckled at this, which deepened Rudolfo’s sense of plummeting down a deep well of mystery. Monique undid Rudolfo’s zipper and lowered her head; Rudolfo, resigned, leaned back, closed his eyes and lost himself in the sensation.

  There was noise coming from Monica’s bedroom, grunts and padded thuds. Rudolfo imagined that the two were playing soccer, Monica guarding a makeshift net, Jurgen prowling nakedly before her, suddenly launching the ball with the thick calloused side of his foot. “Score,” Rudolfo muttered, just as Monique grunted with some dismay, and the door of Monica’s bedroom opened. Jurgen walked out with a fresh cigarette caught between his lips. He was obviously on his way home; Rudolfo stuffed himself back together and ran out after his friend.

  They walked in silence, both absorbed with the moon’s reflection. It covered the river with light and made the garbage look like sea serpents. Rudolfo wondered where they were going, but soon realized that they were wandering aimlessly. “You know what?” he said suddenly. “I live near here. Do you want a cup of coffee?”

  It was a bit unfair, really, to bait the trap that way. It was one thing to play on a serious vice or addiction, it was another to ensnare a fellow because of his affection for caffeine. It was likewise a bit underhanded for Rudolfo to claim that he lived nearby, which was true only in an astronomical sense. Indeed, his squalid apartment was no less than four miles distant. He considered raising an arm and flagging a taxicab, but he felt that that would make Jurgen suspicious and put him on the defensive. At the same time, he half-suspected, half-hoped, that Jurgen knew what was going on. He was sorely tempted to simply state out loud, “The thing of it is, we’re both queers. Right?” But he couldn’t quite predict Jurgen’s response. He would either a) make a tiny grunt of agreement or b) punch Rudolfo until his eyeballs popped out of his skull.

  The dawn came, leaking through the bricks, bleeding into the skies. But the dawn only seemed to come so far; the light ascended and then was stopped dead by a curtain of black. Thunderheads approached the city, the bottom of the formation smooth, as if cut by a heated knife, the upper portions in constant motion, as restless as pitted vipers. Jurgen, much more of an outdoorsman than Rudolfo, nodded toward the clouds and muttered something about bad weather. After his forecast, he smiled slightly, perhaps the first true smile that Rudolfo had ever witnessed. Rudolfo was now even more smitten. “What?” he asked quietly.

  “I like storms,” answered Jurgen.

  “Oh, you do, do you?”

  “Sure.”

  It wasn’t much of a conversation, Rudolfo thought, but it was something. They walked in silence and felt the first few raindrops fall.

  Then, astoundingly, Jurgen began to speak. “One time, I was hiking, and I got caught out in a storm. A big storm, a terrible storm. I was near the top of a mountain, well I guess it was just a big hill, but it was like a mountain. I was near the top, and lightning was shooting all over. The rain was falling very hard, just pounding down. And in a few seconds my clothes were soaking wet, and very heavy, so I took them off. Then I was naked, on top of the mountain, and the trees were shaking and the ground was rumbling, and all around me was lightning.”

  “Wasn’t that dangerous?”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “You might have been hit by lightning.”

  “Exactly.” Jurgen smiled again, and Rudolfo, even though he felt more at sea than ever, made his move. He slipped his hand into Jurgen’s, then moved quickly to press his body against the other, knowing that his only chance lay in Jurgen’s sensing the urgency and magnitude of his need. He then knew that he’d made a large miscalculation; Jurgen wrested his hand away and stepped back, bracing for a fight. Rudolfo knew of no other way to react other than as with a big cat, so he continued to press physically, advancing with all the confidence he could muster.
He tried soothing words, “Just calm down,” but they didn’t work; suddenly his nose was popped and bleeding. Rudolfo hadn’t even seen Jurgen’s fist move.

  Neither had Jurgen, mind you, because he hadn’t hit him. As far as he could tell, a rock had fallen from the sky and bounced off Rudolfo’s face. Jurgen craned his neck to look skyward and was alarmed to see a turbid black cloud filling the sky, as rough and boiling as an ocean hungry for ships, spitting stones. The one that had smacked Rudolfo was merely the vanguard; in its wake came thousands, millions, more, many of them not much smaller. They landed upon the two men with the power and enthusiasm of crazed football hooligans, pummelling them to the ground. Jurgen was the first to right himself, drawing up onto his hands and knees so that his broad back received most of the damage and pain, although it was impossible to tuck his head completely out of the way. Rudolfo was folded over onto his side, desperately trying to protect vulnerable parts of his anatomy. Jurgen placed a hand on Rudolfo’s shoulder and pushed with all his might, righting him. The two began to crawl into the darkness, searching for shelter, searching blindly because they could not raise their heads. Stones continued to fall from the heavens.

  Jurgen received a blow to the crown that made him nauseous with pain and was in fact on the verge of passing out when he saw that they were not ten feet from a doorway, a deep bricked alcove. He shouted to Rudolfo. The other man was close by, their shoulders butted, but Jurgen suspected that his words were never heard. The roar of hail filled the air, sharp twoks as the stones smote the earth, snakelike hissings as they immediately began to melt, dying like so many tiny kamikaze pilots. Rudolfo, fortunately, had spotted the same doorway. He sped up, although this made him less stable. He was put down by a sudden concentration of hailstones, so quickly that his chin cracked on the ground. He bit the end of his tongue off in that moment; his mouth filled with blood. And then he had a very difficult time regaining purchase. Ice-cold balls were everywhere, and the palms of his hand would slip away, his knees would skid and buckle and lay him out once more. But Jurgen managed to turn himself around, aiming his backside at the doorway, and he took hold of Rudolfo, wrapping his fingers around the soaking wet denim of his jacket, pulling the other man in his wake. The two slowly covered the distance, and when they were in the doorway they sprang upwards, trying to push each other into the corner. Both men looked frightful. Jurgen’s hairdo had been destroyed utterly. Rudolfo was neater, in that his hat had been knocked off to display his perfect baldness, but blood poured from his mouth and he’d received a black eye, when and how he couldn’t remember.