The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  By ten o’clock in the evening these signs surrounded the thick oaken door, covered it, obscured it. By ten o’clock in the evening it took keen skills of observation, or foreknowledge, to even realize the door was there. Luckily, Rudolfo, crouched around a corner with Samson, saw his two freakish people walk through it. He waited a few minutes and then turned to the albino leopard.

  “Okay, I’m going to go in there.”

  Samson trotted out onto the sidewalk, only to be hauled back into the shadowy alley, Rudolfo yanking hard upon the makeshift tether. “You better wait here.” Samson looked instantly saddened, betrayed. Rudolfo felt his heart melting, but, really, Samson had no idea of how absurd he appeared, like the offspring of animals that should have been destroyed as monsters. It wasn’t just the disguise, which truthfully worked pretty well as long as the socks didn’t fall off his ears. It was Samson himself who queered the game, largely through his efforts to act like a dog. He would come upon a fire hydrant and eagerly raise a leg, sending out a steaming stream of pee. Usually, though, he threw himself off balance, the support leg buckling, sending the cat to the sidewalk with a thud. So it would be best for him to remain outside, rather than have him attempt to beg food with a ludicrously dangling tongue, or whatever else he might have in mind.

  “No, Sammy,” he whispered. “Wait out here.” And Rudolfo hurried away before he could be swayed by doleful pink eyes.

  He pushed at the door and his ears were stung by the piercing howl of the hinges. He slipped through and stepped to the side, pressing his back against the wall. This is how he’d been taught to enter the cages of dangerous animals. He looked around the shadows—there were figures there, probably human, roiling in the darkness—but his attention was caught by the man trapped in the shaft of light.

  In those days, it should be mentioned, Jurgen modelled his hairstyle after his hero, Preston the Magnificent. The curls were rolled and worried into geometric shapes and balanced upon one another. The creation was then virtually shellacked. Jurgen’s face was sternly set too, the dark unruly eyelids tamed by the trick of pulling them up into his vast brow. He looked like a frightened man, or a man about to sneeze, or a man who might somehow shoot his eyes from his head as though they were peas. And yet Rudolfo thought him extremely handsome, that Jurgen’s face was one that God might make for a hero doomed to a tragic end.

  The man up on the stage raised empty hands into the air, rubbed them together briefly and, suddenly, silk handkerchiefs began to materialize, many of them, variously coloured and knotted. When he had produced perhaps ten linear feet, the man suddenly bunched them all together into one hand and made an exaggerated throwing motion toward the tables in front. Nothing there. Rudolfo brought his hands together, but his was the only applause—so unaccompanied that it startled several people, including the magician. Jurgen turned his head sharply toward the source of the sound, knocking his hairdo askew. The entire assemblage started sliding and he was forced to abruptly jerk his head the other way. The balls and wedges shifted, and then settled into a brand-new hairstyle, no less ornate. Jurgen found Rudolfo with his eyes—although Rudolfo wondered if he could see anything, given the bright spotlight—and smiled. The magician lifted his own hands and brought them together. The sound was loud and cut easily through the other noise, a soup of mulches and moans. When he pulled his hands apart, two doves flew away. Although the white doves were not quite white, and obviously suffered from great dietary deficiencies, Rudolfo found this overwhelmingly beautiful.

  After Jurgen fled the stage, three rather dissolute gentlemen mounted it. One carried a guitar, one a bass fiddle, the last a soprano saxophone. They looked at each other and mumbled song titles, each running through a long list, and they did this until by chance they all said the same song title at the same time. This was the song—“No Greater Love”—that they began to play. Rudolfo remembers this, but when he replays his first conversation with Jurgen in his mind, he chooses other background music. Ravel’s “Pavane for a Dead Princess,” often, even though it is achingly sad; or sometimes the slow movement from Brahms’ First Piano Concerto, which sounds no less melancholy, but rings with Johannes’ love for the lovely Clara Schumann. Both of these pieces Rudolfo imagines as performed by Sturm and Drang.

  And the first words that passed between them? They were Rudolfo’s, of course. Rudolfo had spoken first words before, to men in small towns, to boys in acrid locker rooms. He knew to choose first words with care. It was important not to alarm the other; it was also important to announce, even in a very muted fashion, one’s desires. So Rudolfo moved through the tables—noting that there were pale backsides moving in the gloom like moonlit waves—and said to the magician, “Know any more tricks?”

  Jurgen was occupied with trying to retrieve his doves. They had roosted on some rusty water pipes, their tiny heads buried beneath wings, and Jurgen was bouncing into the air, increasing the force so that each leap brought him closer, swiping his hand, opening and closing his fingers. But with these words he settled onto the earth and stared at Rudolfo.

  Rudolfo instantly reddened, sickened, because he’d given no thought to how he himself looked. The watch cap covered most of his head, but what of those ghastly barren inches between his ears and the wool? His eyes were burdened with huge blue pouches of sleeplessness; worse, he had no eyebrows. In better times he would have drawn some on with a makeup stick, but he’d abandoned this since becoming a beggar. His clothes had been filched out of refuse bins, bought from the cheapest of second-hand stores. He could not blame the magician for widening his eyes with what seemed to be terror.

  It was out of the purest, most burning embarrassment, then, that Rudolfo raised his eyes toward the water pipes. He lifted a hand into the air and extended his index finger. A simple whistle, a chubby musical note that bounced into the air, and suddenly the doves were fluttering down. They lit upon the finger, covered their heads, went back to sleep. Rudolfo held them out toward the magician, who nodded curtly. He took them—hardly gently, Rudolfo noted, each bird encircled by thick fingers—and placed them somewhere behind his back.

  When the magician’s hand reappeared, he was holding a deck of cards. “Perfectly ordinary playing cards,” he noted.

  Rudolfo reached for them. “May I see?”

  “I shall demonstrate,” said the magician and held out the deck and riffled the edges with his slightly calloused thumb. Rudolfo watched the faces fly by, a random ordering. “I will do this once again,” said the magician. “You must stop the procedure via the sudden intrusion of a digit.”

  “Stick my finger in?”

  “Indeed.”

  Rudolfo didn’t watch the cards this time. He stared into the magician’s eyes. The magician stared back, and their eyes remained locked until the magician’s left eyelid came crashing down like the curtain on a dying act. As it struggled back upwards, the other eyelid, dark as blood sausage, descended, but only halfway, bouncing there ever so slightly.

  Rudolfo placed his finger into the deck, silencing the small whirring sound.

  “Ja,” said Jurgen. “Deplace the ducat upon which your finger presently resides.”

  “Why do you talk like that?” wondered Rudolfo, although he was surprised that he had spoken aloud.

  “Deplace the ducat upon which your finger presently resides. I shall determine its value and suit via psychic empathy.”

  Rudolfo slid the card out, shielded it carefully with both of his hands and peeked at the face.

  “Concentrate!” sang out the magician sonorously. “For just as Science has just declaimed the Wave Theory of Light, so now do we conjecture a similiarity of Thought processes. So concentrate, my friend, emit great pulses of ratiocination.”

  Rudolfo smiled at this man. He had decided that the magician was crazy, so his basic plan was to keep smiling and move away quietly. The magician raised a hand and pinched his square brow between thick fingers. “Emanate,” the magician whispered. “Emanate pure cognit
ion.”

  Rudolfo took a step backwards. The magician’s head jerked up sharply, pinning Rudolfo with dark eyes. “The two of hearts,” he growled.

  Rudolfo looked at his card again, not that he couldn’t remember it, more to add to the effect. He handed the card back to Jurgen and winked. He whispered, “Good trick.”

  The chimes sound, and Rudolfo finds himself singing along. “Bella come un’aurora,” he chants. The words are flattened because his cheek is mashed up against the Panamanian tiling. He raises his head enough to perceive that he is lying on the ground. His bones are chilled because he no longer has much substance covering them. His penis and testicles are shrivelled, almost gone from sight.

  He staggers to his feet, still singing, “Se lo rammento …” and he sees the front door looming before him. He stumbles forward and wraps his hands around the doorknob, pulls the door open—and sees fiends, devilkins and familiars, gnomes, trolls and wraiths. Rudolfo raises his arms and clacks his ulnae together, thereby fashioning a crude cross. It is protection against the horde on the doorstep, kelpies and bogies and loups-garous. The pack sends up a hideous yowling, “Trick or—” and then silence falls suddenly.

  “Mister,” says a naiad, streamers of green tinsel threaded through her golden hair, “you got no clothes on.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The explanation for Jurgen’s odd behaviour was of such a charming simplicity that Rudolfo immediately heaved a great sigh and felt good for the first time in days. Sleep deprivation. Rather than getting the eight-and-one-half hours that he himself claimed were necessary, Jurgen had been slipping into bed late and rising early. In fact, some mornings Rudolfo was fairly certain that he’d spent the entire night all alone in the huge circular bed. So of course Jurgen was acting very oddly, grousing about the Show and behaving like an idiot. Of course his hair was turning white, because sleep is what holds age at bay.

  It was actually humorous, in a way, because usually it was Rudolfo who cheated Slumber. He felt comfortable in the mansion late at night, when all the animals were asleep (except of course for the bushbabies, the round moons of their eyes cutting through the darkness), and he would often stay up until three or four in the morning. He would load up the CD tray with discs of various operas, hitting the random button so that the stories became intermingled and confused—Cio-Cio-San pursued by a strapping, hormone-addled Tristan. The Music Room had speakers mounted everywhere and Rudolfo would sit in the middle of it and exalt in the melody, splendour and infinite sadness.

  Jurgen would caution him that no good could come of this. Jurgen dispensed advice and wisdom like a balloon-breasted dowager, speaking in cretinous aphorisms and tapping his listener on the chest. “For every hour we don’t sleep,” he might say, “comes closer the appointment we all must keep.” Now here he was, with his black puffy eyes, and it was really very funny, in a way.

  So it was Rudolfo’s idea that in order to encourage Jurgen to bed earlier, he would try to rush through the customary Post-Show Photo Op.

  The Post-Show Photo Op was one of Miss Joe’s innovations, put into place years and years ago when Jurgen and Rudolfo were just starting out as a duo, doing five minutes of magic between naked people. They would finish, Rudolfo remembered, holding hands and bathed in sweat. The applause would be deafening, even though there were but seventy or eighty people on the most crowded night at Miss Joe’s. Jurgen and Rudolfo would bow—the young Samson gingerly folding his forelegs, inclining his upper half elegantly to receive the ovation—and then the stage would be plunged into total darkness. Moments later a single spot would light the stage and Miss Joe would be standing there, usually caught in the act of balancing her towering hairdo, because it was she who cut the lights from the back of the room and then bolted forward at full tilt.

  “Okay, kiddies,” Miss Joe would say, devouring the mesh head of an ancient microphone. “We all know our memories aren’t what they should be. I mean, I sweep up more brain cells than dust, right? So, why not have your picture taken with the boys?”

  It seemed a very peculiar idea and, indeed, very few people took advantage of the offer. But Miss Joe’s showbiz adage was: “Act like stars and then become stars.” Over time, people began to gather backstage, and soon there were great big jostling crowds. Now, at the Abraxas Hotel there was a long lineup in front of a single door where two giants dressed in genii garb screened the potential subjects and allowed only the rich and famous into the inner lair.

  These people would shake the duo’s hands, make an effusive statement concerning their wonderment, place one arm across Jurgen’s shoulder, the other across Rudolfo’s, and pose for a Polaroid.

  These photographs, of which there must be tens of thousands, have a sameness about them. Rudolfo’s smile is wide but not enthusiastic, as though his teeth acted as some kind of force field to deflect the camera’s evil. And Jurgen adopted the mien of Preston the Magnificent, fashioning his features until they asked darkly imponderable questions.

  So, on this night, Rudolfo tried to rush things. Following the Show (which had not gone particularly well), he went to the dressing room door, opened it slightly and stuck the tip of his nose through. Maurice, one of the giants, grunted interrogatively.

  “Okay, chief,” said Rudolfo. “Only be letting in maybe ten peoples.”

  “But,” returned the giant, “there are perhaps two hundred and fifty people waiting on line.”

  “Ja. So what?”

  The giant shrugged. When Rudolfo shut the door, Maurice began walking the length of the lineup, ruthlessly shoving people toward the exit signs.

  Their first visitor was a famous athlete, a huge man with a tree trunk for a neck. His head was shaved so close there was only a light nap, no heavier than a day’s growth, and he was dressed in a ridiculous short-sleeved suit, his arms blasted into obscenity by steroids. He had a tiny woman by his side. Jurgen greeted this man as though he were a relative, grinning and pumping the puffy hand. Mind you, Jurgen did know many athletes, maintaining his enthusiasm about sports, especially soccer and hockey. So Rudolfo was willing to dismiss this display of friendliness. He himself posed beside the tiny woman, slipped a hand around her minuscule waist and was surprised to feel her trembling ever so slightly. Miranda worked the button on the Polaroid; a flashbulb popped.

  Next up, a television actor. Rudolfo knew he was a television actor because Samson greeted the approach of television stars with excitement, pulling forward and straining his bejewelled lead. The television actors often found this disquieting, as this one did, stopping dead in his tracks and flinching spastically, his hands flying like little birds in a hurricane, trying to protect all vital organs, body parts and hair. “No worries,” Rudolfo said. “Samson won’t bite.” Which, indeed, he wouldn’t. Samson had only bitten a human being once. Since that day he had been gentle and civilized, or so he fancied, although Samson knew at the bottom of his pale heart that he was simply cowardly and pitiful.

  The television actor—who had no one with him, which was a little odd; most of these boys usually came equipped with a woman so as to throw particularly stupid Personality magazine reporters off the trail—came forward and shook first Rudolfo’s hand, then Jurgen’s. “I’m still shaking,” the television actor whispered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Jurgen kissed the boy on the cheek. This kiss was alarming, of course, but still not as unsettling as the grin Jurgen was dealing out. Surely this would have been a good moment for his Sorceror’s look, where he set his jaw firmly, affecting the whole of his head, squaring up the corners. The flashbulb popped and the television actor withdrew.

  It was at this point, as a Supreme Court judge and his wife drew near, that Rudolfo noticed the odd man lurking in the corner. Security surely wouldn’t have let such a bizarre creature into the dressing room. Jurgen and Rudolfo often received death threats or menacing statements, invariably cryptic because they’d been written by idiots. DIE, SPONG OF STAN was one that had puzzled them for we
eks. Miranda had solved that one, suggesting that the message meant “spawn” (“spong” because that’s what the moron thought the word was) “of Satan” (the dimwit forgetting that important “a” in the passion of the moment).

  When the aged Supreme Court judge took his hand and made it tremble in consort with his own, Rudolfo merely muttered, “Danke, ja,” keeping his eye on the odd creature who was suddenly drawing nearer. He was wrapped in tulle and muslin; his arms popped free of the diaphanous material naked and pale, tinged with newborn blueness. His head was bald, almost blindingly so, except for a topknot, a plume of pure white in the centre of his pate.

  The politician’s wife kissed Rudolfo on the cheek, pleading for the return of his attention. She clutched his hand between hers and moved it absentmindedly across her body. “Tell me a secret, Rudolfo,” she whispered. The woman was far younger than her husband, but then again, everybody was far younger than her husband, who was wattled and melting, his only distinguishing feature being a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles. Rudolfo remembered that he had a stock response to this demand, tell me a secret, one he’d paid some young television writer four hundred dollars for, but it would not come to mind. The judge’s wife pressed the back of his hand to her breast. Rudolfo smiled and then gasped, because the odd man suddenly loomed not two feet away. The creature had three eyes.

  An explosion of light blinded Rudolfo. He heard the soft whirring sound of the Polaroid camera spitting out the image. Miranda handed it to the judge. “Here you go,” she said.

  Rudolfo blinked frantically until he could see again, and was alarmed to find Jurgen in conversation with the creature. Rudolfo saw now that the centre eye was unmoving, the colours not quite right. This third eye was a tattoo, although to Rudolfo this seemed odder than actually owning one. One of the creature’s thin arms suddenly disappeared within his folds and wraps. Rudolfo was suddenly filled with dread, at least, the dread that filled him always suddenly came to a boil. But the creature’s arm reappeared, not with a weapon but with a piece of paper. Parchment might be a better word; it was yellowed, the edges browned; it seemed as though one could see the individual wood chips that comprised it.