The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  The men hugged each other, and in doing so it became clear that both had erections. There was a kind of laudable defiance in this, an act of affirmation, a final indulgence of the senses, because it seemed almost certain that the world was ending. Rudolfo was the first to move his hand downwards, forcing it through the clamped wet bodies. He began to work Jurgen’s penis through the material of his trousers, not at all gently, not at all for Jurgen’s benefit. Jurgen’s hand then made its descent. He managed to find Rudolfo’s zipper; Rudolfo’s penis found its own way out. Jurgen took hold like a helicopter pilot takes hold of a joystick, tilting the lever of flesh backwards as though he could get lift and thereby escape the storm.

  Hailstones continued to bounce and whiz inside the refuge; many rolled to rest there and soon the two men were knee-deep in ice.

  Rudolfo slid his hand down the waist of Jurgen’s pants; at the same time his mouth searched out Jurgen’s lips. Jurgen resisted this—he pulled his own mouth away and cranked upon Rudolfo’s penis brutally, as though exacting punishment. Rudolfo remembered that his mouth was leaking blood, so rested his head on Jurgen’s shoulder and spat repeatedly. The blood stained the brick wall. Rudolfo tried to kiss Jurgen again, but Jurgen was having none of it. Rudolfo didn’t really care at that moment; it was something he could work on over time, provided he had any time left.

  The screaming roar and hiss stopped abruptly—then came snaps and crackles from deep in the ground, as though all the corpses in all the coffins in Münich had decided to pop their old knuckles. The silence that followed seemed almost absolute; the only sound in the world was that of two men breathing heavily, grunting with inarticulate pleasure.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Rudolfo awoke, sometime deep in the heart of the desert night, and saw to his surprise that Jurgen was for once in the circular bed with him. Jurgen had his back to him and had thrown the bedclothes aside, perhaps in troubled slumber. He was naked.

  This was good news, Rudolfo thought, because das Glied was as hard as concrete. Not only that, it was in a mood, twitching like a dowsing rod. This coincidence, Jurgen’s naked presence and Rudolfo’s snarling tumescence, was almost too good to be true. Rudolfo suddenly cautioned himself, perhaps this was a dream, although Rudolfo didn’t dream, as far as he knew.

  Rudolfo bounced himself across two feet of empty mattress. His penis nudged and burrowed its way between Jurgen’s muscled cheeks.

  Jurgen stirred slightly; Rudolfo curled his fingers around Jurgen’s shoulders, both to steady and to reassure him. It was as he did this, just as he squeezed ever so slightly upon the cool flesh, that Jurgen lit up like an electric bulb. There was a brief but undeniable diffusion of light, spreading throughout the whole of Jurgen’s naked body. For a moment, he seemed to be made of glass, and from within came a glowing, a luminescence.

  Rudolfo was instantly many inches away. His fingertips were numb. He rolled over onto his back, sighing deeply—because weariness was much easier to cope with than terror—and found himself staring up through the skylight. The heavens above were laced with lightning; a storm raged up in the welkin, gods sporting with each other without affect or influence on the puny mortals lying below. It must have been the lightning that flashed and lit up Jurgen’s body, Rudolfo thought. He closed his eyes and tried to return to slumber, vaguely dissatisfied with the explanation.

  It would be hard to say at what point Miss Joe and Rudolfo became friends; maybe it would be inaccurate to claim that they ever did. They never exchanged pleasantries, certainly not histories, never feelings, but after a time they assumed great importance in each other’s life. Rudolfo became Miss Joe’s righthand man; he would orchestrate the evening’s talent, coralling the performers toward the stage, he would take the squawking microphone in his hand and make glib, unctuous introductions, and he would make the frantic slashing motions across his throat when the act started to go stale. Rudolfo the Go-Go Boy continued to be very popular, taming invisible cats in his zircon-encrusted G-string. He alone knew that he was snapping an unseen whip at the corners of the room, grimacing to display dominance and courage. The patrons at Miss Joe’s were mystified but mesmerized; as he puffed out his chest and paraded around the perimeter of the room, the audience would stir restively; they would hang their heads and turn doleful eyes upwards, silently asking how they could please their new master.

  One night, Rudolfo dismounted the stage and found Miss Joe standing behind the bar with her bony arms criss-crossed lazily, her painted lips pursed with consternation. “It’s not quite there, is it, Rudolfo?” Miss Joe muttered.

  Jurgen sat at the bar with his hands wrapped around a beer glass. Rudolfo sat down beside him, touched his knee gently. Sometimes he did that just to watch Jurgen bristle, which he did almost audibly, his body vibrating with irritation and embarrassment.

  “What do you mean?” Rudolfo demanded of Miss Joe.

  “Don’t get testy with me, young man,” she said. “Look, your act is good, god knows it’s got no competition around this joint. All I’m saying is, you got a goulash but you’ve left out an ingredient.”

  “It’s like Stuttgart,” posited Jurgen, raising his beer and drawing off three or four inches. “They’ve got a good team, but they need a top-notch striker if they want to really go places.”

  “Thanks, Magic Man,” said Miss Joe. “That’s the very analogy I was grappling for.”

  “I don’t know what else I can do,” Rudolfo protested. “I can only get so naked.”

  “True,” nodded Miss Joe. “But it’s not that. It’s …” Miss Joe raised a hand and snapped her fingers, making them clack woodenly. “It’s that music. That dreary disco shit. You dance well, but that beat, I don’t know, it makes your cock flap in a kind of unseemly way.”

  Rudolfo shrugged. The music was B4 on the huge Wurlitzer jukebox that hulked in the corner, that’s as much as he knew. He didn’t know it was entitled “Goulash” and he certainly didn’t know that it had been composed and performed by two young men who, after this small success, would dabble in soft drugs, become addicted to heroin and arrive in America years later calling themselves “Sturm and Drang.”

  “You like music, don’t you?” asked Miss Joe.

  “I like music, sure.”

  “Give me a for instance.”

  “Of something I like?”

  “Yeah.”

  Rudolfo exhaled heavily and allowed himself to drift briefly in memory. He remembered his mother, whatever his mother had been, careering through the Salon, her hands locked and twisted across her heart. He remembers her best, most vividly, as Lucy Ashton, Lucia di Lammermoor, mad and murderous. “Grand opera,” he whispered.

  Jurgen said nothing. He raised a thumb and chewed at the nail.

  Miss Joe whistled lightly. “La-di-fucking-da,” she said. “Still, if it works for you.”

  She produced an old turntable from one of the back rooms—her place had a seemingly endless number of backrooms, all of them filled with refuse and junk—and Rudolfo bought some records from a second-hand shop: Gounod’s Faust; Wagner’s Götterdämmerung; lots by Puccini, his favourite composer, La Bohème, Turandot, Madama Butterfly. He also bought some pure music, the first piano concerto by Brahms, all the Beethoven he could find, and the Gymnopédies of Satie, which were, after all, written specifically for naked athletes.

  Miss Joe liked the effect. She eventually had all of the old records removed from the Wurlitzer and Rudolfo’s classical albums put in their stead. Now if one pressed the button “B4,” the shadowy room echoed with Rodolfo’s lament for the consumptive Mimi.

  Miss Joe’s establishment began to acquire a reputation; no wait, that’s ill-put—the place always had a reputation, but it began to acquire a favourable one. Miss Joe’s became known as a place of genuine (if slightly peculiar) entertainment. The only downside, Rudolfo often reflected bitterly, was his friend and lover, The Great Schuberto. Jurgen simply never changed his act, never refined or augmented. He
didn’t seem to notice, for example, that the Scarf Production was capable of inducing slumber, even paralysis. Rudolfo tried to suggest a few times that Jurgen replace that portion of the act, but Jurgen would usually turn defensively haughty. “Hey,” he’d say, “I’m the Chaser.”

  This was vexing, as vexing as Jurgen’s refusal to be kissed on the lips. Jurgen seemed to think that as long as he never kissed Rudolfo he wasn’t really homosexual, despite all sorts of evidence to the contrary. They would release each other from the most intimate of embraces, and Rudolfo would fold his lips together and search for Jurgen’s, but the man would be out of the bed, stalking about the room, scratching his ass and searching for his smokes.

  Which was vexing, maddening, finally infuriating. One night, sitting in the small room they shared in the back of Miss Joe’s, Rudolfo snapped at him, “You’re too small.”

  Jurgen finished lighting his cigarette. The smoke curled into his lashes and made his bruised eyelids blink rapidly. Jurgen shook out the match, tossed it into an ashtray, pulled a shred of tobacco from his lower lip and then grunted interrogatively.

  “Your act,” explained Rudolfo. “Your act is too small.”

  “Hey,” announced Jurgen, “I’m the Chaser.”

  “Do you know what a Chaser is?” retorted Rudolfo angrily. He leapt out of the bed—it wasn’t a bed, actually, it was an old spring-poked sofa, the back flattened to accommodate the two men. “A Chaser is …” Rudolfo used some approximate synonyms: rausschmeiber, lückenfüller. “It’s someone with a shitty little act,” he explained. “He comes on between marquee attractions so that he chases people out of the theatre. Then they can get more paying customers in and after they get their money, it’s on with the fucking Chaser.”

  “That’s what a Chaser is?” asked a dumbfounded Jurgen. He butted out his smoke and sat down on the bed. Rudolfo touched him on the shoulder. Jurgen raised a fist. “Leave me alone.”

  “I can’t help what words mean.”

  “I’m thinking. I’m thinking bigger.”

  “Okay.”

  “Well,” said Jurgen uncertainly. “I could escape from a big paper bag.”

  “Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah, that might work.”

  Jurgen said no more about it, but the next day he put on his raincoat, even though the day was fine, and headed off to make a tour of second-hand bookshops. He didn’t find what he was looking for in the first, or the second, but in the third store he located—by purest chance—a copy of the cursed book, Houdini on Magic.

  Jurgen took it back to Miss Joe’s and showed it to his lover, saying nothing, merely exhibiting the parchment cover with the gaudy gold lettering. Rudolfo nodded. “I see,” he said.

  “Think big,” said Jurgen. “Think like Houdini.”

  “Right.”

  Jurgen thumbed through the book until he came to a crude line drawing showing a Production Box, a broken line showing how one of the sides pushed in from the bottom. “You see,” he said, showing the page to Rudolfo. “I push the box onstage. You come in behind it, hiding. I can open the top, tilt it forward, show how it’s empty. Then you push here and crawl in. Now when I open it, you jump out.”

  Rudolfo nodded, but already had other ideas.

  “We need lumber,” said Jurgen. “And some paint and velvet cloth.”

  “Okay.” Rudolfo removed his wig and fixed the old blue watch cap over his gleaming skull.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to beg. Then I’ll come back with the supplies.”

  “You’d go begging for me?”

  “I’d go begging for us.”

  Some nights later, Miss Joe made this introduction: “Ladies and gentlemen—and if someone doesn’t stop what he’s doing right now, I’m taking that ‘gentlemen’ back—we the management are proud to present the hottest act in Europe …” (Miss Joe giggled in an unseemly manner here, flapping the back of her hand against her crimson lips; she was silenced from the darkened wings, where four eyes glared like headlights, where two mouths clenched in grim rebuke) “… all right, all right, here they are are, ladies and gentlemen, the hottest act in Europe, Jurgen and Rudolfo!” The names were shrieked at such a high pitch that several of the patrons clapped without thinking. They stopped when they saw the figure step up onto the stage, his back toward them. They recognized the satin cape; they recognized the top hat—it was that magician fellow, the dull guy. The magician stood motionless for a long moment, apparently intent on sending the notion of dullness right up to the top floors. He slowly raised his arms above his head—there was an accompanying cymbal crash, which was kind of alarming and caused people to inch forward on their cheap wooden seats—and then slowly brought his hands down to his shoulders, lifting away his cape and allowing it to fall to the floor. The magician was revealed to be naked. Actually (the magician spun around quickly), he wasn’t quite naked, he was wearing a G-string, a little sequined pouch for his privates. The audience, those that liked that kind of thing, applauded in a desultory fashion.

  The magician thrust his hands up again and suddenly there were two doves fluttering from them. The magician tossed them into the air (he doffed his top hat then and smiled grimly at the audience, his eyes bugged open) and the birds flew into the shadows, where they landed on the shoulders of yet another nearly naked young man. This man took a large step forward so that he now stood within the stage lights. Those in the audience that liked this kind of thing applauded with much more enthusiasm, because this was the Go-Go Boy, the young man with the unlikely body, sculpted and oiled so that he seemed somehow like a mannequin come to life.

  With Rudolfo’s appearance most of the members of the audience noticed the music for the first time. Some merely found it unsettling, some found it beautiful, one or two were able to name it, the “Adagietto” from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony Number Five.

  The magician again lifted his hands, and scarves began to materialize, long and brilliantly coloured. He tossed them into the air, where they described long, graceful arcs. His associate received them, with abounding grace, in preternaturally slow motion, all of his muscles rippling sequentially. The audience applauded heartily, somehow thinking, believing, that the act of catching tossed scarves constituted a feat of great difficulty.

  After all the scarves had been produced, tossed and caught, the two men stepped forward and took grand bows, like concert musicians who had just pulled off a notoriously tricky piece. The audience seemed to realize as one that this bit of stage business looked ridiculous unless they themselves were applauding with something that neared frenzy, so that is what they began to do.

  Suddenly the void between the two men was filled by a large wooden box. It had been painted a sky-blue, and someone had rendered puffy clouds upon it. The nearly naked men exchanged knowing glances and then both took hold of the box. They tilted it forward and the magician lifted the top, showing the velvet-lined interior to be empty. They rested the box back down. There was a long moment where nothing happened—but the performers managed to fill it with such profound nothingness (staring into the audience, their lips pulled away as though their sole intention was to display some recent dental work) that the effect was one of suspense. Many of the patrons couldn’t resist a little nibble at their fingernails. Then both men clapped their hands together with improbable synchronicity, and the magician lifted the top of the box once more.

  A huge white creature leapt out and bolted toward the audience with its fangs bared. It reared up on its hind legs, roaring operatically, and clawed the air with vicious whistling swipes, tearing it to shreds.

  Three people fainted. (Three became the minimum. Samson on subsequent nights managed as many as seven, although one teetered on her feet over by the bar, and Samson was forced to stalk over and growl at her from only a few feet away in order to force the topple.) Those who remained sentient threw up a cheer of enormous approval. Jurgen and Rudolfo joined hands, waved rather demurely, and then they themselves disappea
red.

  That was their act. It lasted about three minutes. There was no aspect to it that was mysterious to anyone with even a slight knowledge of illusion or stagecraft. The doves had been nestled under the shoulders of Jurgen’s dark cape; as he worked the clasp at the neck preparatory to throwing the cape away, he merely hooked the birds and scooped them into his palms. The scarves came from within false thumbs where they waited, folded and pounded to the size of peas. The most impressive bit of business was not the production of the roaring beast but the production of the Production Box itself, which seemed to move forward of its own volition. The secret there is that Samson himself pushed the box, hunkering low and placing his forehead against the wood. It fooled people because no one ever suspected a lion (there was much confusion as to Samson’s species) of being capable of it.

  Rudolfo leads Miranda through the house, das eindrucksvollste Haus im Universum. He is aware that Miranda is upset. There exists a state of decay inside the house that is filling her with misgiving. Animals are draped everywhere like furry opium addicts, as glassy-eyed as if they’d just come from the taxidermist.

  Miranda is carrying two bags of groceries, and Rudolfo understands now why food sometimes materializes in the kitchen.