The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  “Legs.”

  “No. Not what you do today, what you do every day?”

  “Like for a job?”

  Rudolfo grinned and nodded.

  “I’m a thaumaturgical assistant,” Miranda said, at which point Jurgen tore himself off the machine with an extended yodel of excruciation. He assumed a half-crouch in the middle of the floor and looked for some other machine with which to flay the few remaining muscles in his abdomen.

  “Which is to say,” said Miranda, responding to a new cloudiness in Rudolfo’s eyes, “I’m a magician’s assistant.”

  “Hey, Jurg,” said Rudolfo, attempting to truncate his friend’s name in an American, palsy-walsy way, “this woman is assistant to magician.”

  This news almost engaged Jurgen’s attention. “Sehr gut,” he said, and marched off to an incline bench in a corner of the room. He hooked his toes under the roller at the high end and began to struggle upwards.

  “We are magicians!” exclaimed Rudolfo.

  “No fooling around?”

  Rudolfo thought about that for a few moments before repeating, “We are magicians.”

  “So, where are you working?”

  He shrugged. His English was not up to hiding the truth in a tiny pile of half-truths. Moreover, he wasn’t inclined to. “We no work,” he said. “In Münich and Paris, we are big stars. But here we are nothing.”

  “Most people here are nothing,” said Miranda, unfolding her body, rising to her full height.

  Rudolfo stared at this monstrously beautiful woman. He sucked on his lips as though doing a mathematical calculation, trying to total tall columns of long numbers. Inwardly, he was resolving not to be nothing, to cease being nothing, to be nothing never again.

  Jurgen came to stand beside him; his breath was uneven and halting, undercoated with moans.

  “If you’re not working,” said Miranda, adding, “this week …”

  That was such an act of kindness that Rudolfo briefly considered falling in love with this woman.

  “… you should maybe come out and see Emile Zsosz’s show.”

  Of course, Rudolfo misunderstood. He misunderstood to such an extent that he failed to realize Miranda was actually enunciating words—it sounded as though this woman’s teeth had suddenly fallen from her gums and were stuck down her throat. Miranda was used to this. “The show,” she said evenly, “of Monsieur Emile Zsosz.”

  Jurgen’s head had been aimed skyward, his throat distended and his Adam’s apple bobbing. But at the mention of this name his head snapped downwards and steadied itself at Miranda. “Emile Zsosz?” he repeated. “But is not he dead?”

  “Well,” said Miranda, “not technically.”

  The Oasis was an aptly named establishment, being as it stood, virtually alone, in the middle of the desert. Two highways intersected nearby, and gas stations studded each corner. These way stations had taken the concept of “gas wars” to new extremes. They’d not only lowered prices until they were virtually giving the stuff away, the owner/managers had grown murderously antagonistic toward each other, and from time to time the wasteland rang with gunfire. The Oasis flowered from the sand, a column six stories high, each floor indicated by a different-coloured balcony.

  The nightclub was encased in glass on the roof, so that the night sky surrounded the patrons. When that sky was cloudless, the stars seemed to bump up against the glass like confused little birds. Sometimes, though, the mere presence of The Oasis, substance in the middle of nothingness, caused puffy little thunderheads to form, and rain and lightning banged the glass rumbustiously and demanded entry. Quite often—and such was the case on the evening that Jurgen and Rudolfo chose to visit—both climes occurred together, the storms lasting about half an hour, followed by short periods of fineness.

  Jurgen and Rudolfo doubled the size of the audience.

  “Ja,” said Rudolfo, “I am having green chartreuse.”

  Rudolfo addressed this comment to the strange person standing beside their table, who, despite nurse’s shoes and a white frock with the name “Flora” stitched above the breast pocket, looked for all the world like Bertie Vogts, one of Jurgen’s football heroes. Suddenly nostalgic, Jurgen ordered a beer, even though beer was on the “Forbidden Foods” list that Rudolfo maintained. The list was not written down anywhere, but no less tangible for that; it was so familiar to Jurgen that he fancied he knew which position beer occupied—three, just underneath bratwurst (one) and zabaglione.

  “Ladies and gentlemen …” A husky voice sounded in the room, an accent shading all of the words, which, oddly, made them easier for Jurgen to comprehend. “It is our privilege to introduce the Master of the Black Art, Emile Zsosz.” Jurgen and Rudolfo applauded politely. Music began abruptly, the phonograph needle bumping off the first note and clearing three full bars before settling again. It was Ravel’s “Boléro,” realized Rudolfo. It had been one of the favourites at his mother’s Salon. The recording, he recalled, consisted of four thick plastic plates. In the middle of the long crescendo, the music would suddenly stop and everyone—all of the artistes and all of the models—would hurry to replace the disc. Even those most somnambulant with drugs would somehow launch themselves toward the antique machine.

  In the middle of that memory, someone turned off the house lights, plunging everything into a faintly starlit darkness. The night sky pressed upon the glass all around. The moon was shaped like a scimitar, the stars scattered like seeds of light.

  The stage before them was shrouded in shadow. A point of light appeared some six feet above the ground, then shot suddenly down, the point elongating until it met the ground and revealed itself as a long, gleaming zipper. Then the zipper came apart, starting at the top. A tiny metallic razoring sound filled The Oasis. When the zipper was fully opened, hands appeared between the parted teeth and pushed the two sides apart. Through this rent in the air stepped Emile Zsosz.

  He would have been a spectacularly handsome man, thought Rudolfo, when he was young. This would have been, oh, around the time of the French Revolution. No, no, that was just a joke; Zsosz wasn’t that old, only a hundred and ten or so, but he seemed more ancient due to his bizarre efforts to appear otherwise. For example, his hair was dyed jet-black, and where there was no hair Zsosz’s scalp itself was japanned. He had drawn black eyebrows over his dull grey eyes with a trembling hand so that his expression was all things all at once: terror, surprise, jollity. Zsosz’s most prominent facial feature was his moustache, which blew from the sides of his mouth like the wings of an small airplane. It, too, had been painted black, and where it met the philtrum the connection had been filled with ink. His nose was still fine, although it was spiderwebbed with veins and leaked white stuff. The rest of Zsosz’s face had been dulled by time, just as stones are smoothed by the sea.

  Emile Zsosz wore a robe, an ornate silk affair that featured intricate stitching and brocade. He raised and spread his arms—the silk of the sleeves forming two perfect semicircles—and doves appeared on his palms; no, not doves, Rudolfo saw suddenly, but cloud pigeons from Madagascar, extremely rare, the name derived from the fluffy immature down which the birds retained into adulthood. The cloud pigeons flew away and in their stead were two crows—actually, Rudolfo saw, Icelandic ravens—birds as black as soot. They bounced up and down on Zsosz’s pale palms like heavyweight contenders aching to get a poke at the other guy. Then these birds, too, were gone.

  The old man remained with his arms outstretched, motionless except for a trembling of the fingertips, tiny in amplitude but of such frequency that it likely produced a pitch that dogs could hear. The silken robe began to move to the side, although the head remained where it was, and after a few seconds the two parts of Zsosz’s body were separated by a good five feet. The head, floating in the air, didn’t seem to care about this situation, particularly; it spun like a moon and wore an expression of stale melancholy. Across the stage, the hands rose up; between the fingers of one was a cigarette, and upon the palm
of the other a tiny ball of blue flame. The hands brought these two together, so that the cigarette’s end glowed and smouldered and mare’s tails of grey smoke ribboned through the darkness. Then one of the hands threw the cigarette toward the head. Emile Zsosz opened his mouth slightly to receive it and the ancient man was soon puffing away happily.

  Clouds had been bumping up against the tower in the desert, clinging to the dirty windows; The Oasis was now yoked by a dark cumulus ring. Suddenly a wheel of lightning spun about the glass and brickwork like the rotor on a child’s toy. It lit the innards of the nightclub with the power of a battery of kliegs, and there was no mystery now. Emile Zsosz stood, humbled as though naked, which of course he was not; he was wrapped from the neck down in a black leotard, the bulge of his hernia disquietingly visible. And the “body” did indeed have a head, although it was sheathed in an eyeless hood.

  The lightning completed its journey to heaven—lightning bolts drive upwards, not down—and the stage was once more darkened. Zsosz’s head was again disembodied, but a change had come over it. His eyes were gone, leaving little nests of wrinkles in their stead. The tip of his tongue stuck out from between his lips. And what little colour there’d been in the head abruptly disappeared, leaving behind a paleness that cut the shadows like a beacon.

  The head plummeted and met the stage with a dull thud.

  The body in the silken robe was suddenly animated. An arm lifted, the fingers groped about in the emptiness above and Miranda’s face appeared. She fell to her knees and gathered in the old man’s head; she bent over and covered the withered mouth with her own. She huffed and puffed into the head as though she could inflate the rest of Emile Zsosz. But it soon became clear that she could not, and she broke her lips away, lifted her head and said, very quietly, “Someone want to get the lights?”

  The overheads flickered and filled the room with purple fluorescence.

  Jurgen and Rudolfo rose from their seats and moved closer, seemingly to help, although neither knew the first thing about first aid, and both knew that Emile Zsosz was a long way past aid of any kind. All that they could think to do—and they thought of it at pretty much the same time—was to look at the beautiful weeping woman and ask, “Do you want new job?”

  When Samson lashes his face with a long pale tongue, Rudolfo opens his eyes and crosses back into consciousness. We cannot really say that he awakens. He sits up on the bench and gathers his few thoughts. Miranda was here, he remembers. Miranda came back and now she is gone again.

  Samson makes an odd kind of noise, stepping backwards and puckering his old white maw, emitting a startling woof. “Was?” demands Rudolfo, and Samson, by way of answer, turns suddenly and paces purposefully for the door of the Gymnasium. Then Samson heels about and makes another of the woofing sounds, and Rudolfo realizes that Samson is imitating Lassie. Rudolfo is willing to play along. “What is it, boy?” he asks, rising to his feet. His legs wobble, his tiny shrivelled stomach sends up a mouthful of bile, which he spits onto the floor. “Is one of the animals in trouble?” Rudolfo has been negligent in the care of his charges. He is aware (although he has not really acknowledged it until just now) that there are tiny feathered and furred corpses littering the house. So now he will be able to save something. Perhaps one of the moon-eyed bushbabies has gotten into some mischief and is dangling from a chandelier, or perhaps one of the birds of paradise, which are beautiful but as stupid as mud, has his head stuck down the toilet.

  Samson disappears through the door and Rudolfo follows behind. They do not bear right, which is the way to the staircase that will guide one to upper levels and light. To bear left is to invite ectopia and shadow. There is no place to go there, there is no destination, other than the Grotto. So Rudolfo takes only a step or two in that direction and then he swings about—if an animal is dying down there, then the animal must die. But after he has turned, Rudolfo registers what he has seen. There was a hole of light in the wall, gaping and irregular, the kind of hole that would be made if someone had rolled back the giant boulder that stopped the entrance to the Grotto. He sneaks a look over his shoulder. His stomach throws up a thimbleful of vomit. The boulder has indeed been rolled back. Rudolfo inhales deeply and wonders what to do next.

  He doesn’t wonder for long, although he comes nowhere near decision or resolve. Someone brings an old-fashioned wooden cudgel down upon his perfectly naked head, propelling him brutally over the cliff and back into the void again.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The young woman Tiu had not been cleaning das Haus with the zeal and discipline for which she was renowned. Why, she had not been cleaning at all; in fact, she not been spotted by Rudolfo for many, many days.

  (Tiu had gone to live in Yellowknife, where, she believed, the arctic air would kill airborne germs and mites. This move was financed by a strange and mysterious man who had given her a lot of money, more money than she could have made in seven years of featherdusting. Tiu did not intend to give up feather-dusting, of course; it was more passion than occupation. In exchange for all this money, Tiu had drawn a crude map of das eindrucksvollste Haus im Universum. She had scratched a circle around the lopsided representation of the Grotto, had drawn a thick X through the window that was most proximate. The strange man had rolled up the piece of paper between his thin, bony hands. He had laughed in an unseemly manner, and Tiu suddenly smelled death and decay.)

  Rudolfo considered placing a phone call and hiring a new maid, but he couldn’t see himself allowing a stranger into das Haus. So he elected to clean up the place himself. He had some notion of how this sort of thing was accomplished, although he’d never really done it. Since he’d become world-famous there were servants to do that sort of thing. Before he’d become world-famous, he’d had nothing, and nothing rarely needed straightening up. Before that he’d lived at the circus, and you don’t clean up circuses. Before that, he’d lived in stainless-steel institutions. Before that, he’d lived in a walk-up at Kramgasse 49, and his mother didn’t care about order, and besides, one of the previous residents had written all over the walls, so why bother?

  But Rudolfo intuited that cleaning was a simple matter of methodical disposition. So look, here is a magazine on the floor, when it should be instead on the coffee table, or what would be a coffee table if anybody in the gloomy Haus ever drank coffee. Rudolfo bent over and plucked it up. It was a Personality magazine. He recognized the distinctive lettering before he recognized that he himself was pictured on the cover. Jurgen and Rudolfo. Curtis Sweetchurch must have brought, or sent, the issue over. Curtis had mentioned that the Reno show had raised their recognition factor significantly. Rudolfo considered the show a complete debacle, of course, a disaster from Samson’s listless puking, through Jurgen’s adolescent hand-holding, to the very undramatic mangling of Reno’s thick spectacles.

  Rudolfo flipped through the magazine, searching for the accompanying article. He found it, four pages crowded with photographs. Most prominent was a picture that occupied the whole of one page. It showed Jurgen standing atop the hideous old Houdini Substitution Box. The photograph caught the instant of Jurgen’s sudden and startling arrival, his improbable replacement of Miranda. Rudolfo stood off to one side with a sleek silver microphone held up to his mouth. This photograph interested Rudolfo very much. He stared at the image of his own face and attempted to decode the expression frozen there. His nostrils were pinched, flattened by a sudden inhalation of air. Rudolfo did this often, and for a variety of reasons—to convey superiority, ennui or disapproval of airborne pungency. Or horror.

  Samson, meanwhile, was watching a television show because the two were in the Television Room, the huge machine surrounded by a mini-moat full of carp. The hungry fish kissed at the water, puckering the surface. Samson ignored them. He sat with his brow furrowed with feline concentration, his tongue lolling over the pale gums. Samson was, in truth, not so engrossed in the broadcast fare as he made himself out to be; it was a cooking show, and cooking shows m
ade little sense to a creature whose custom was to inhale raw, blood-spurting victuals. But through concentration Samson could ignore, or pretend to ignore, the presence of the black-clad human beyond the oval windows. Samson had spotted the prowler many minutes ago, had been alarmed to see a shape materialize on the other side of a nearby pane of glass. The creature peeked into the room, made eye contact with Samson, and then disappeared in a twinkling. So Samson yawned and stretched and watched the schoolmarmish woman on the televison prepare a ballottine. He was struck, as he often was while watching such shows, by the fact that the woman herself, soft-skinned and nicely fatted, would probably taste much better than the meal she laboured over.

  Rudolfo flipped to a photograph taken on the day of the auction. It pictured Jurgen, Rudolfo, Miranda and Samson standing in a corner with the world-famous asshole, Kaz. It was recent, only a few weeks old. Jurgen still possessed his rather bottom-heavy muscular substance. His hair was curled heroically. His eyes twinkled; well, that is not entirely accurate, Jurgen’s eyes never twinkled, but they emitted a light of some low wattage. They evidenced life. Staring at this photograph, Rudolfo was forced to admit to himself how much had changed in just weeks, days. Because Jurgen’s eyes now possessed a kind of turbidity. They were very still, as though not functioning as eyes should.

  Samson stuck out his tongue and lassoed the remote control, dragging it back and into his mouth. He jerked his head, tossing the box lightly between his teeth, until his left fang came to rest on the Δ button. He began to chomp lightly, travelling through the frequencies. He watched out of the corner of his eye until he saw something interesting. It was so interesting that Samson coughed out the remote like so much phlegm.

  It was so interesting that Rudolfo, wandering around the Television Room staring at the photographs in Personality, dropped the magazine. It landed with a splash in the carp-filled water.