The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

“Oh, say, look who has come! Long see, no time.” Rudolfo stepped back into the foyer and allowed Dr. Merdam to enter. He had to move back quite a bit because Merdam weighed over four hundred pounds.

  Despite the fact that the audience at the Abraxas had an average weight of well over two hundred pounds, Rudolfo disliked fat people, generally. But Dr. Merdam was different, because in some peculiar way, he didn’t seem fat. He gave the illusion of daintiness, in this instance executing a little half-turn so he could fit through the doorway and then shuffling through with tiny balletic minces. He wore a dark suit, as ever, a plain white shirt and a florid bow tie. All remarkably clean; Dr. Merdam appeared always to be dressed in new clothes. He was a very handsome man, despite the roundness of his face, an olive-skinned beauty with large dark eyes and full lips.

  “Hello, Rudolfo,” he said. “You seem surprised to see me. I thought we had an appointment.”

  Rudolfo’s eyes widened briefly; he closed his mouth so tightly his thin lips blanched.

  “You know,” Dr. Merdam said, “you don’t look at all well.” Another remarkable thing about the doctor was that despite carting around all that extra weight under the heartless Nevadan sun, he didn’t sweat. He often—as he did now—removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket to pat daintily at his upper lip, but this seemed to be more emotionally palliative than anything else, as though the handkerchief were laced with his mother’s own perfume.

  “Doc,” said Rudolfo with soft urgency, “keep a button on the yapper.”

  The doctor, a little alarmed, turned and waltzed daintily toward the sunken living room, tiny animals nipping at his polished heels.

  “Jurgen!” Rudolfo bellowed. “Guess what? Today is an appointment to be medically examined which we have made many weeks ago and completely all forgotten about!”

  Merdam executed a nimble glissade down the short flight of stairs. The animals, far less graceful in comparison, tumbled off the top riser.

  Rudolfo actually had quite a bit to do with Dr. Merdam’s gracefulness, although he’d forgotten this. When they’d first met, years ago, Merdam had been merely chunky, a perspiring man who couldn’t keep his shirt tucked in properly. Rudolfo had gone to visit his office complaining about a strange pain in his left shoulder, a snarling bite that chewed at the muscle and sinew whenever he executed the military press.

  These were the days before the Abraxas Hotel. These were the days when Jurgen and Rudolfo did only ten minutes between bare-breasted bubble-bottomed showgirls at the hotels and motels on the fringes of Vegas, for which they received exactly one hundred dollars per night. These circumstances embittered the duo, because just a few months previously they had been a huge sensation in Paris, so much so that when something truly weird occurred, your average Parisian was likely to comment, “Mais, c’est trés Jurgen et Rudolfo!” In Las Vegas they rented a single room in a motel that had the very strange name of Tophet—it was actually “Top of the Town,” but several of the neon bulbs were blown—where they lived with Samson, three vermilion flycatchers, a snowy egret, a crimson stilt and an overweight rabbit.

  Jurgen spent his days sitting on the edge of the bed, his hands folded in a genteel manner, staring forlornly at the ghostly images produced by the antique television set in their room. He watched American football and American baseball, even though he found it all very baffling. Occasionally he would pick up a deck of cards or a stack of coins and practise, but his enthusiasm was gone. He would lay the stuff aside and refocus his fuzzy attention on the television screen. When the crowds cheered, Jurgen would produce a small, hollow grunt.

  Rudolfo rather desperately cooked up a surfeit of ambition and enthusiasm, simply to battle the ennui that threatened to devour them. He first found an affordable gymnasium. It was called Shecky’s Olympus and was buried at the intersection of Paradise Road and Sahara Avenue. You pushed through a door at street level and then descended an almost endless staircase. With each step the temperature went up a degree, the miasma of sweat becoming more acrid and stinging. At the bottom was a huge room full of medieval torture devices. The people working them were stripped down to the barest of ribbons, worn more to bind potential hernias than to cover body parts. These people were extremely serious. General Bosco had been single-minded and industrious, but compared to these people he was a dabbler. Bosco would hunker under the bar and do squats, and he would howl and scream and when he finished his face would be slick with tears and his thighs and hams would be quivering. These people didn’t howl, as a rule, which meant that one could hear the muscle tissue ripping apart. Sets were stopped, most often, not because they were done, but because the lifter had passed out, vomited or ruptured an internal organ.

  Rudolfo noticed that all of these people had strange black boxes strapped to their sides; a thin cord led from there to plugs, little foam-covered stones that they popped into their ears. They were tape players, not nearly so common back then. Everyone would listen with intense concentration and were very hard to distract, which meant that Rudolfo found it difficult to find anyone to spot him.

  There was one non-maniacal member, a very tall and beautiful woman who would descend into the sweat-bowels for the purposes of toning only. This woman would straddle a preacher’s bench, curl her fingers around the steel bar and begin to lift. One could actually watch the biceps enlarge, inflated as though by a foot pump. The skin would begin to glisten, light and dark would play in the newly formed hollows. This woman would work a few major groups and then, having barely raised a sweat, would nod vaguely in the direction of the lifters and disappear.

  This woman did not wear a headset; she seemed to prefer to accompany her exercise with her own humming, sometimes quietly but mournfully lowing out words. Rudolfo had a hunch this was country-and-western music, because the few words he recognized were all the names of animals. Anyway, one afternoon their activities brought them into proximity, Rudolfo standing patiently near the incline bench as this woman puffed up her pectorals. By this time the two had smiled at each other on a handful of occasions. When she straightened out, Rudolfo touched the brim of his hat—he wore a California Angels baseball cap to keep his hairpiece in place—and said, “Hi, baby.”

  The woman jumped off the bench. “How are you doing?”

  “Abdominals.”

  “No,” said this woman, pulling at her leotard, “that’s what are you doing? How are you doing is like fine and that.”

  “Oh, ja. Dunky-hoary.”

  “Me, too.” The woman gesticulated at the incline bench. She had a lovely manner of gesticulation. “Need a spot?” she asked.

  Rudolfo nodded and eagerly added plates to the bar. He lay down, hooking his feet under the rollers so as not to slide away. He did his set and, before the final two repetitions, jerked his head ever so slightly. The woman wrapped her hand around the bar, whispering, “Upsadaisy.” When he was done, Rudolfo sat up, wiped away a little bead of sweat and asked, “You know all these people with little machines on their heads?”

  “Sure.”

  “Vot are they listen to?”

  “Oh, right. What’s his name, Tony Anthony or something. You know, The Power of One.” The woman pointed at her own head. “How to overcome adversity and—”

  Rudolfo interrupted here. “Ad-ver-sity?” he pronounced carefully.

  “Shit, basically,” the woman said, motioning for Rudolfo to clear the incline bench and lying down herself. “How to shovel shit without getting your hands dirty.” She curled her fingers around the bar and pushed.

  “Whoa, baby,” said Rudolfo, although not by way of encouragement. “You didn’t take off plates.” The woman was pressing sixty more pounds than she’d done previously.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” she answered, her voice just slightly strained. “The Bod can handle it.”

  Rudolfo actually cut his routine short, passing over much-needed work on his calf and thigh muscles, in order to go and buy a little tape player and Tony Anthony’s tape. Actually, t
here were about forty Tony Anthony tapes, but after purchasing the cassette player, Rudolfo could only afford one. He selected the first, and apparently the best-selling, which was called only YOU! On the cover of the little box, Tony Anthony pointed his finger with alarming directness. His mouth was curled into the little circle that would come with saying “You!”

  Anyway, it was three weeks later that the pain came to Rudolfo’s shoulder. He got Dr. Merdam’s name from the woman at the gymnasium. The woman had no professional relationship with this doctor—the Bod, she maintained, simply never broke down—but she lived in the building where he kept offices. So that was how Rudolfo met both Miranda and Dr. Merdam—Merdam, by the way, has for the last half hour been in the Grotto, poking at a naked Jurgen Schubert—and at his first appointment Rudolfo had unplugged his ears and offered the little foam stones to the chubby man. “Dig this, Doc,” he muttered.

  It was a part of Tony Anthony’s weight-loss regimen that one ideate oneself as a slim person. Create the person within, was part of the litany, then without. This aspect appealed immensely to Melwood Merdam, much more so than the actual restrictions of caloric intake. He abandoned those after a few days, although he continued to ideate himself as a slim person. More than slim, he pictured himself as tiny, elfin, a creature so insubstantial he could be knocked over by a strong wind. Over the next few years he put on weight at an alarming rate, but he never lost this internal picture of himself, and that is why he now came reeling out of the Grotto with the nimble peppiness of a song-and-dance man.

  “Yes, well,” said Dr. Merdam. “He is, er, healthy.”

  “Ur-healthy. What does this mean?”

  “He is healthy. He is fine.”

  Rudolfo was both relieved and disquieted, because the mystery was back, sitting in the corner like a mooncalf. “Okay. A bunch of thanks, Doc.”

  “There is one thing that is a little odd,” mentioned Dr. Merdam. He picked up an animal from the carpet—it was a civet but the doctor evidently thought it was a cat, chucking the creature under the chin, rubbing the pointed skull between the ears. “He is somewhat underweight.”

  “Jurgen?” Rudolfo’s eyebrows—etched carefully with makeup pencil—crawled up his forehead. “But I keep telling him he’s getting poodgy.”

  “How much would you say he weighs?”

  “One seventy, one seventy-five?”

  Dr. Merdam nodded. “That would have been my guess, too.” He set the civet back on the ground and spoke as he straightened up. “One forty-seven.”

  “Was?”

  “I checked the scales. Twice. He weighs one hundred and forty-seven pounds. Very odd. But aside from that, he seems right as rain.”

  Rudolfo had heard that expression before, and always found it baffling. It seemed to make sense, now, right as rain, right as water falling from heaven and making everything earthbound wet and shivering cold.

  Preston had never worked with an assistant. Well, once he had, as a very young man of seventeen. He’d gotten work at a convention, and the contractor had implied that it might be nice if he had an assistant. “These people,” the man explained, “like diversion.”

  Preston telephoned his father—they lived in the same house, but Preston the Magnificent maintained a separate apartment in the basement, handy to the wine cellar.

  “Hello, sir. I need an assistant,” said Preston, who back then still billed himself as The Amazing Presto.

  “Why?” demanded his father. “Whatever are you doing up there?”

  “I’m doing a convention next week,” he explained, sullenly. Preston was sullen because he knew his father was befuddled and confused, more befuddled than could be explained by his constant imbibition of Chablis.

  “An assemblage,” said Preston the Magnificent. “A congregation.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Say no more,” commanded Preston’s father, hanging up abruptly.

  It was a Convention of Rendering House Operators. These people, having no real business to discuss, having attended a few brief seminars relating to new methods of disposing of animal carcasses, all got blind drunk. They had a huge banquet dinner where they handed out awards to each other, prizes for cleanliness and efficiency. Then the Master of Ceremonies introduced The Amazing Presto and he walked onstage to a chorus of jeers and catcalls.

  The Amazing Presto did a few tricks, pulling playing cards out of thin air, making perfect-circle fans, and then beating these lightly until a brilliant white dove materialized. The Rendering House Operators booed, as if they’d seen this all done better. Which they hadn’t, of course, because Preston was already the best. He was an awkward, hulking teenager, splay-footed and pear-shaped, and his face was rippled with acne, but he was already the finest mechanic in the business. Even the old guard acknowledged this, everyone except his father, who had never come to see him perform.

  The Amazing Presto turned to the wings and extended his hand, silently beckoning the assistant his father had sent. Viv, for that was her name, rushed onstage with admirable alacrity. Suddenly the crowd was applauding as eagerly as they’d booed. Their enthusiasm was caused by an apparent plethora of body parts and a comparative absence of costume. As she walked toward Preston she turned her upper body and extended her arms, which pulled her breasts out of the little sequined cups. The Amazing Presto blushed deeply on her behalf, but Viv herself didn’t mind, even grinned at the ensuing roar of approval. She spun around then and waggled her bottom, which was costumed with a piece of ribbon. Viv even stopped in order to give her keester a licentious rotation. The Rendering House Operators cheered until they choked, several of them fainting, a couple of the older ones actually succumbing to heart attacks. Viv continued on her way then, and when she reached The Amazing Presto she beamed widely and stuffed her breasts back into the cups. Preston stared at her, which Viv assumed had to do with the breast-stuffing, so she winked and stuck out her tongue playfully. Truly, though, Preston was wondering how she could have failed to do the simple task assigned to her. For walking onstage was not the point, no matter with what ecdysiastic grace it had been accomplished; no, Viv was supposed to fetch the production table. Without it, the act would grind to a halt, which it did. The boos and jeers flew up like a flock of pigeons alarmed by a car-honk. The Amazing Presto stormed offstage then, to get the damned apparatus himself, but Viv interpreted this as handing over the entertainment baton and quickly peeled off what little costume she wore. Preston returned with the production table but Viv was already lying on her back with her feet stuck up in the air. The Rendering House Operators were stupified and reverential.

  The Amazing Presto resolved never to have an assistant again, although as Miranda stood beside him on the stage he wondered idly if he shouldn’t rethink that. Preston was shuffling cards, explaining what was about to happen, but part of his mind was observing that Miranda was contributing a lot of, what would be the word, intangibles. For example, just a slight incline of her head evidenced a keen but polite interest that the audience could share in, perhaps even emulate. “So, I’m going to show you these cards,” said Preston. “Look at them and pick one. Just think of it, don’t say it out loud.”

  Preston pointed the faces toward Miranda and pushed the cards from one hand to another. He gazed into her eyes, which made his fingers tremble slightly, and he watched the tiny flickering of her irises, which were as blue as the sky above a frozen prairie. Miranda said, “Okay,” and Preston the Adequate feared that for the first time in his professional life, he’d fucked up big time, because he didn’t know if Miranda’s eyes had lingered on the right card or not. He had no choice but to continue. He stuffed the cards back into their case and then said, “Okay. Name your card.”

  “Queen of hearts.”

  “Yeah.” Preston the Adequate bit his bottom lip and tried to think of what to do next. Because the cardcase in his hand was rigged to eject—with considerable force and dramatic impact—the four of diamonds.

  “Hey!” said
Miranda, her eyes widening with surprise. “You sneak!” she chided, pulling the elasticized waistband of her sweatpants away from her body. Preston the Adequate snuck a quick peek. He spied athletic-looking undergarments. Miranda slipped her hand into them. “What gives?” wondered Miranda aloud, pulling her hand back out with the queen of hearts held gingerly between two long and flawless fingers. She handed the card to Preston and touched his elbow gently but significantly, making him turn so that he might acknowledge the audience’s applause.

  They both made deep bows.

  Clothes.

  Rudolfo floats into his bedroom, pulling open the huge closet door with the elaborate “R” carved into the oak.

  Across the room is another door, this one bearing a rococo “J.”

  Between the two sits the huge and hideous cabinet. Rudolfo chooses not to look at it, ignoring it as though it were an old, crazy woman.

  He rushes into his walk-in closet and picks an outfit, in this case a jumpsuit the colour of bruised fruit. He slips it on.

  The jumpsuit seems to have been made for someone else, and, of course, it was. It was made for a man with an inflated upper body, and a lower half mortified into insect-like tininess. Now the suit flaps over his chest and shoulders; Rudolfo’s arms are lost in the sleeves. The rest is like ground meat in sausage casing.

  There are animals hiding in the closet. Rudolfo sees them—a couple of bushbabies, an Egyptian mongoose—and begins to whistle, to put them at their ease. But his lips are dry and the lullaby amounts to nothing more than a couple of dusty puffs.

  And then he drifts down hallways, staring straight ahead.

  When the doorbell chimes once more—“Aiutavo il destino …”—Rudolfo launches himself toward the kitchen. He has figured out that it is Hallowe’en and, even though the realization sickens him, actually studs his skin with foul-smelling beads of sweat, he is willing to play along. He locates what he can in the kitchen and then heads for the front door. “E cerca, cerca,” sound the chimes insistently.