The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  And though Jurgen still wore his robe, it had been brushed and de-linted and some resourceful person had managed to throw in a hem. So all in all, Rudolfo decided, Jurgen didn’t look too bad.

  At that moment, a strange half-sob almost strangled Rudolfo and a tear popped from his eye. He decided that he’d go wait in the wings.

  When Barry Reno shouted “Jurgen and Rudolfo!” Rudolfo’s head snapped and he was momentarily confused. Surely he could not have drifted away while standing in the shadows thrown by the velvet curtains. Still, his brain was full of that cloudy residue, the ash of dreams. Then Jurgen was beside him, peculiarly animated. He opened his mouth and hollered “Ja!”—the war cry they had made so long ago for moments like this. Rudolfo tried to shout “Ja!” but his throat produced only a small sound. He placed his hands on the huge silver ball and took a deep breath, preparatory to the physical labour required to roll the damn thing. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Jurgen waving his hands, the long whorling fingernails trembling slightly. Suddenly the ball was in motion, and Rudolfo’s hands slipped uselessly from it.

  “Let’s go,” muttered Jurgen. “It’s showtime.”

  They pranced onto the stage—the audience broke into hugely enthusiastic applause—and began the Silver Ball routine, at least, the version they used for television appearances. Rudolfo’s own part required very little in the way of talent or concentration; he had merely to flip latches and make certain that the ball was rolled into the right position to move the false panel. But the ball was not behaving exactly as it should; it quivered and bucked and if Rudolfo leaned on it even slightly it would move away as though coy. Together they opened up the huge silver ball and Jurgen climbed inside, although he didn’t jump in like the squat ex-footballer he was, but slipped in like a priestess easing into a milkbath. And as Rudolfo closed the latches the silver ball suddenly rose sharply off the ground and Rudolfo had to pull it back down. But again, he hardly noticed, because, of course, if he did notice then he would undoubtedly be reduced to tears, he would collapse upon the stage and sob and demand to know what was wrong with everything, was zum Teufel ist hier los?

  “Hoo boy!” he sang out desperately, tunelessly.

  Rudolfo undid the latches and Samson leapt out as though springing from behind a veil of jungle greenery. He even let out a roar of formidable volume, a deep hollow death cry that stirred all the bowels in the house. Then he sank his head and vomited all over the stage.

  “Oh ho!” said Barry Reno. He was a florid man with white hair that shot straight upwards from a rumpled scalp, making him seem perpetually startled. He wore spectacles with heavy, raven-black frames. Audiences liked him because, unaccountably, it had not occurred to them that he was a hateful, twisted man. “Come on, guys!” he shouted. “Come on over here and take a load off.”

  Rudolfo bristled, suspicious of this phrase. It seemed vaguely sexual; perhaps Reno was making some allusion to their relationship. Their gayness was hardly a secret, but a vast percentage of the public was blithely unaware of it, preferring to conceive of them as flamboyant. Reno was actually forbidden to mention or hint at their sexuality—it said so in the contract. So when Rudolfo heard take a load off he pushed himself into an exaggerated, manly strut, pitching his pelvis forward so that his Schwanz pressed against the leather of his pants.

  Jurgen, Rudolfo noted out of the corner of his eye, didn’t seem to be walking toward the couch so much as floating, the burlap robes billowing out behind him as though he stood in the centre of a great storm. “Barry Reno!” shouted Jurgen. “Greetings!”

  It was now Barry Reno’s turn to look confused, because guests never hailed him with such directness.

  “I am very pleased to be seeing you!” continued Jurgen.

  “Sit down, fellas,” said Barry Reno, ignoring this appalling politeness. “Hey, your pussy is a little under the weather, huh?” The audience roared at this. Rudolfo found himself saying, as he set his tiny bottom upon the sofa, “Is not pussy. Is leopard.”

  “Ha!” brayed Barry Reno. “I thought it was a great big pussy!”

  “Then,” pronounced Jurgen with some gravity, “you are an idiot.” He gathered his robes prissily and sat down on the sofa.

  “Hoo boy!”

  The audience, after a momentary silence, sputtered with applause.

  Barry Reno’s eyes, behind his spectacles, had been redesigned into thin slits. He placed his elbows on the table in front of him and leant forward. Rudolfo became very uneasy, sensing that Reno was now out for blood. “So,” Reno hissed, very slowly, “how long have you guys been together, anyway?”

  Hoping to defuse the situation, Rudolfo grinned so hugely that his cheeks ached and the tendons in his neck tightened like banjo strings. “Long time!” he shouted, praying that the loathsome Reno would move on and ask them, as he always did, to relate stories about their animals defecating on stage. He trusted that Jurgen was grinning, too, but when he turned he saw that this was not the case. Jurgen was decidedly not smiling. He had spent the last few weeks grinning like an idiot and now, when grinning like an idiot was the thing to do, he was affecting a thoughtful, even philosophic, air. “We’ve known each other for a long time,” he said, and then he reached over with his hand and gathered in Rudolfo’s fingers. Rudolfo didn’t panic, because panicking would be deadly. Such behaviour, he thought quickly, could be excused on account of their being European. Americans thought that all European people were very free physically, Americans thought that all Europeans went to nude beaches and shared saunas and kissed each other repeatedly whenever they got within striking distance, so he thought they might let this pass, but Jurgen showed no indication of letting go. Indeed, he repositioned himself until they were more properly holding hands, and that was how he seemed intent on carrying out the interview, he and Rudolfo connected like an ancient couple sharing lemonade on an old porch swing.

  Even Barry Reno was a bit stupefied by this. He flapped his gums a few times, adjusted his heavy ebony eyeglasses and asked, “So … is animal puke and caca a big problem for you guys?”

  Jurgen ignored this question, intent on answering the previous. “I was young Zauberer,” he recalled. “Aber not really. I just knew some little tricks. And Rudolfo, he was famous lion tamer with circus.”

  Rudolfo blanched emphatically. “N-no I wasn’t,” he stammered. Rudolfo was still fearful of being arrested for the murder of General Bosco. That’s what he told himself, at any rate, to explain the icy ball of guilt and shame that came to sit in his belly whenever he thought of that day, perhaps the worst of his life. “I was never lion tamer with circus.”

  “Hey, guys,” chortled Barry Reno. “Get your story straight.”

  “Hey, Barry Reno,” said Jurgen suddenly. “Give me your eyeglasses.”

  “Oh! A little trickeroony, huh?” Reno pulled the heavy spectacles from his face and held them out toward Jurgen. Jurgen gently pulled his hand away from Rudolfo’s so that he could clutch the glasses between two thick paws. He twisted the ends in opposite directions; the plastic warped and bulged and spit out the lenses. Jurgen trod on them with his ancient leather sandals. There was a sound of small crunching. When Jurgen removed his feet there was nothing left but circles of cloudy dust. He then continued to mangle the frame, rendering the plastic almost formless. He tossed this away and then began a small game of here’s the church, here’s the steeple.

  Barry Reno grinned appreciatively. “Okay, man,” he said. “Do it.”

  Jurgen suddenly flipped his fists and opened the doors. He waggled all his finger-people under Reno’s nose. “Do what?” he asked quietly.

  “You know. Make my glasses come back.”

  “But Barry Reno,” said Jurgen. “You don’t need glasses.”

  “What?”

  “Take a look around everywhere.” Jurgen gesticulated at the vast television studio. “You can see hunky-fine.”

  Barry Reno’s head jerked up. He lowered his eyelids against
the glare of the lights and peered into the recesses of the room. “Hmmm.” He turned to his left and then his right, then sought out his producer and raised his eyebrows in nervous bewilderment. “Huh,” said Barry Reno, repeating the sequence in reverse, this time ending up gazing at the far wall, some three hundred feet away. “Well, this is the damnedest thing.” He cleared his throat and spoke to the studio audience. “I can see, I mean, everything is very clear and … how the hell did you do that?”

  “Oh,” said Jurgen, “is just little trick.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Curtis Sweetchurch, sitting in the green room, wasn’t paying much attention to the little monitor, concentrating instead on one of the young production assistants, an overly healthy boy whose skin almost exuded a miasma of vitamins and vegetable juices. But the actress in the rubber underwear said, “Wow, did he really fix his eyes?” and Curtis shrieked, “Oh, yes, he did, baby! He’s the miracle man!”

  “I wish he would do that for me,” said the actress, pulling out the front of her gear to give her breasts a little breathing space. “I’m just about blind.”

  The old man with the whistling nose (who annoyed Curtis quite a bit, because the wrinkled old bogue actually couldn’t stop his damn nose from whistling) announced, “I don’t buy any of it. Reno was just pretending. It’s all a fake.”

  “Oh yeah,” agreed the actress sadly.

  That’s what most people would think, thought Curtis. Pausing to reflect, Curtis realized that’s what he thought. He then had a good idea, one of a handful that had visited him during his lifetime. He pulled a telephone out of his pocket and stabbed at buttons, connecting with Information.

  So it was that, as the television show waned following a nasally fluted performance of Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” Barry Reno glanced at his producer, looked briefly confused and then announced, “Oh, hey. I guess there’s an optometrist or something here gonna check my eyes and see if old Jurgen and Rudolfo really did pull off a little bit of magic.”

  Dr. Kenneth Beaver came onto the stage awkwardly, a lettered chart held in front of him like a shield. Dr. Beaver was an unsightly looking man and a poor dresser. The suit he’d thrown on—having received the frantic phone call from Curtis Sweetchurch—was threadbare and flecked with old, dried soup. As the credits rolled, Dr. Beaver pointed to lines of type, the letters ranging variously from huge to minuscule. Barry Reno rhymed off their names without hesitation and only toward the end, when the figures ran together in a grey smear, did he squint and grimace. In the show’s last moments, Dr. Beaver said, “Excellent. Better than excellent. In fact, Mr. Reno’s vision seems to be about thirty/twenty, which puts him in a range of sightedness shared by approximately only three per cent of the adult population.” Mind you, much of that statement went unheard by the television audience because the producers, having heard the word “excellent,” went to commercial.

  And at the George Theater, in an old dressing room with velvet curtains and an ornate daybed, Miranda said “Huh!” and wiggled her long toes. Her toes were framing the portable black-and-white television set, at least they were from Miranda’s point of view, because she had her feet propped up on a huge puffy ottoman. She herself was pushed back in an easy chair, surrounded by luxuriant, if ancient, cushions.

  Preston was pacing around the dressing room, agitated by the lust he’d been accumulating since his teenaged years. He lit a cigarette with trembling hands, although another burned in an ashtray in the corner.

  Both Miranda and Preston were stark naked, having just coupled with sweat-popping fervour. Which is to say, Preston’s large and amorphous form was studded with milky droplets that rose out of his grey skin and beaded at the end of his body hair. Miranda was not so damp, merely suffused by a vaguely skunky radiance. “Now how in hell did the boys do that?” she wondered aloud.

  Preston threw a slope-shouldered shrug. “First off,” he said, “Rudolfo did nothing. Second of all, you’ve got to examine your assumptions.”

  “Right,” said Miranda. “Because all magic, all illusion, is predicated on the fact that human beings make assumptions.”

  “Hey! Who’s the pedantic asshole around here?”

  “You. Sorry.”

  “So in this particular case, the assumption is made long before Jurgen ever shows up onstage.”

  “Which is?”

  “Well, we assume that because Barry Reno is wearing glasses that he needs them.”

  “Hey. That’s right.”

  “Reno just thinks he looks more intelligent with glasses on.”

  “Do you know that for sure?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Everybody knows that.”

  “Really?”

  “Okay, maybe I don’t know, but it seems highly probable.”

  “Highly probable don’t get to cut the cake, Presto.”

  “Look. Jurgen is in the right position to look through Reno’s glasses. He sees that the lenses are just plain glass, so he decides to pull the stunt. Remember what he said? But Barry Reno, he said, you don’t need glasses. Right on. So then the doctor comes, he does the little eye test, Reno has great vision, and no one ever thinks to ask Barry if he ever needed the spectacles in the first damn place.”

  “I dunno,” mused Miranda. “That seems awfully intelligent for the boys.”

  “I guess you have to give them notice, huh?” demanded Preston.

  “Say what?”

  “You have to give the boys notice. Right? You can’t just quit, you know, you can’t leave them in the lurch.”

  Miranda seemed not to have thought about this. “I guess so,” she shrugged. The ensuing ripple effect made Preston weak-kneed. “Yeah,” continued Miranda. “I’ll give them plenty of notice so that they have time to replace me. Mind you I’m the best there is.”

  Miranda actually experienced a little pang of guilt, because she felt she owed the boys something. After all, at a time when things looked very bleak, they’d offered her employment. Of course, they’d had their own selfish motives—they knew she’d learnt a few things from Emile Zsosz, Master of the Black Art.

  They, the boys and Miranda, had become acquaintances, in a strange manner, following the conversation at Shecky’s Olympus in which Miranda informed Rudolfo about the existence of Tony Anthony. Rudolfo took the audio cassette entitled “YOU!” back to the Tophet and played it for Jurgen, who had not reacted to begin with. There was a soccer game on the antique television set, the screen blizzarding with electronic snow, but Jurgen stared at it with his stained eyes pried apart.

  “Listen,” said Rudolfo, plugging in the tape. He pressed the play button. After many, many empty moments, a spit-polished voice hollered, “You!!”

  Jurgen didn’t budge, didn’t even blink, he merely continued to watch the soccer players swimming in the static. Rudolfo, on the other hand, jumped two feet in the air. “You are nothing!” screamed the man on the machine. “You are insignificant! You are nothing!”

  Jurgen rose suddenly, crossed over to the television and poked at it with a thick forefinger, silencing the storm. “You are but a germ infesting the body of society,” continued Tony Anthony. Jurgen cocked his head in order to be more attentive, a strange half-smile playing upon his face. It was unlikely that he comprehended anything other than the frantically shouted you’s. Rudolfo understood more, but was unclear as to what precise point Tony Anthony was making. Surely he didn’t think he was telling Jurgen and Rudolfo anything they didn’t know. Here they were, lost in a desert, their haven a stable rendered out of clapboard and flypaper. “You are nothing,” Tony Anthony repeated, and Rudolfo actually snorted. “Tell me about it,” he thought sardonically, he who had been a blind bald beggar on the storm-buffeted streets of Münich.

  Still, it wasn’t long before Tony Anthony’s voice began to raise their spirits. Jurgen and Rudolfo started to breathe heavily, drawing in great draughts of dry desert air. They began to rock back and forth on the balls of their feet to flex their muscles and
by the end of Side A, they were both ballooned with hormones, the pasty smoothness of their skin marbled with ropey vein. At the end of Side B they shouted “Ja!” in frenzied unison, and then they raced out of the Tophet and began to put their lives in order.

  Among their first stops was Shecky’s Olympus, where Jurgen joined merrily in the mortification, trying to shed the sad dimpled fat hanging over his belt, American fat he’d acquired in an American way, motionless with his eyes glued to a television set. Jurgen had never worked out with much frequency, but he was a much more gifted athlete than Rudolfo. Having descended the long stairs into the sweaty gymnasium, he lay down on a crunch board and immediately cranked out a rapid series of sets, thirty crunches each, ten seconds rest. When he was through, sweat had collected on the ridges of his forehead. He next arched his body across a bench and began to launch a fifty-pound dumbbell from the ground to the emptiness above him. When he was done that, the sweat spilled over and filled his eyes. “Ja!!” he screamed, exultant with pain.

  “Jurgen, this is Miranda,” said Rudolfo, pointing to the woman who lay on a mat in the middle of the room, her body fashioned into an enormous pretzel.

  “Guten Tag,” said Jurgen, but he didn’t pay her any further attention. He leapt up, took hold of the chin-up bar and raised his legs, the resultant angle having a mathematical precision, ninety perfect degrees. His stomach was, for the time being, cowed into submission and merely ached dully. Once he stopped, the muscles would flame up and probably disintegrate, so he didn’t allow himself any respite. Rudolfo felt Jurgen was being very rude. He was, it’s true; then again, Jurgen was unintentionally rude to most people. Manners were not highly prized in the Schubert household, where brute bullying was the only force that conferred any advantage. Rudolfo, tsking his tongue in his partner’s direction, decided to make amends. He was forgetting, for some reason, that he was a rude person himself, his rudeness arising out of a surly haughtiness. “So,” he asked, “what you do?”