The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  A dark little man, his skin the shade of eggplant, squatted there in a ridiculously squashed way, knees parallel with his rounded eyes, his bum just a fraction of an inch from the floor. His hands held stones, round and pale as Jurgen’s eyes. He tossed these onto the ground, allowed them to roll to a stop, then scooped them up again. Rudolfo stared down at the man’s scalp, where designs had been cut and razored into the short black curls. He cleared his throat.

  The man leapt up, not from alarm so much as a kind of elasticity, his legs snapping and propelling him skyward. He displayed a set of blindingly white teeth and hooked a palm over his eyes, a hasty and sloppy salute. Then he produced his cap and spent many long moments putting it on, even though it was nothing more than a brim with a few tatters of material miraculously attached.

  Rudolfo was momentarily too stunned to fire him. By the time he had his finger lifted and poised, by the time he’d prepared his throat for the appropriate volume and tone, the black man had turned around and was skipping for the limousine. He pulled open the rear door and gestured madly at the leather interior. There was something in his smile, an almost insane desire to please and be helpful, that weakened Rudolfo, so he shrugged and said, “You are taking me to the George Theater.”

  The man shrugged, compliantly, philosophically, arrogantly, Rudolfo couldn’t tell. “The George Theater,” he repeated and climbed into the huge stretch limo.

  Rudolfo was wearing his nylon anorak, the hood pulled up and cinched tightly under his chin. He also had on large wraparound sunglasses that effectively hid half his face. And he assumed his hunch, the stooped posture that obscured his lovely physique. So he was very surprised to hear, as he hobbled toward the George Theater, a voice calling, “Oh! Hi, Rudolfo!”

  He spun around and saw a man beside him, also headed for the George. He gazed upon the man with utter bafflement.

  “Sam Rochester,” the stranger explained. “The Amazing Romo. I work the Byzantine.”

  “Ja,” said Rudolfo, picking through the man’s words with some distaste.

  “Come to see Preston’s new show, huh?”

  “Preston is very good friend of mine,” Rudolfo announced grandly. This was the tack he had decided to take if cornered by bloodthirsty journalists—that he, Jurgen and Preston were good friends, that the transference of Miranda was more along the lines of a trade or a loan than a heartless defection.

  “He’s a great guy, isn’t he?” said this Sam Rochester, this Amazing Romo of whom, of course, Rudolfo had never heard.

  “He is,” repeated Rudolfo, “good friend.”

  Suddenly it was his turn to purchase a ticket. Behind the glass sat a woman with huge hair and enormous glasses that rose and cut into the air like wings. She did not possess a nose, but rather a beak, and her mouth, crudely outlined in thick black lipstick, moved constantly, as if waiting for worms to be dropped inside. “How many?” she screamed at Rudolfo.

  Rudolfo thought about that for a moment, certainly not a long moment, but long enough for the woman to raise her voice until it rattled the glass booth. “How many?”

  “One!” shouted Rudolfo.

  “Fifteen smackeroos,” said the woman. Rudolfo began to dig around in his little waist-purse, silently praying that this odd phrase had something to do with money. He fished out a hundred-dollar bill and, not noticing the mouse hole through which business was customarily conducted, reached up and tossed the bill over top of the glass. It floated down like a leaf and settled on Mrs. Antoinette Kingsley’s head. Rudolfo didn’t wait for change.

  He clung to the shadowed wall at the back, not even claiming one of the old, worn, velveteen seats, but people continued to spot and recognize him. What was infuriating was that there was no excitement attached to the recognition; his presence sent no bristling ripples throughout the dusty room. Instead he got a lot of nods and mumbled pleasantries: “Hey, Rudolfo, how’s it going?” “Ciao, Rudolfo.” Who were these people who knew who he was but didn’t fully comprehend who he was?

  Miranda walked onto the stage, dressed in a man’s tuxedo jacket. Underneath, she wore a t-shirt heralding the Swift Current Broncos, faded blue jeans and cowboy boots. So piebald, faded and time-chewed were the boots that Rudolfo guessed that she’d pulled them from the feet of a dying cowboy. There was applause, enthusiastic even; Rudolfo began to suspect that strange things were going on, when Miranda could get applause without showing her breasts or perfect buttocks. He even spanked his own hands together listlessly.

  Miranda raised a hand (the applause died away quickly, obediently) and snapped her fingers. A deck of blue-backed Bees appeared there. She fanned these, imperceptibly coaxing the cards into a perfect half-circle. She then tossed them into the air, where they hovered momentarily, and during that moment a fat hand appeared from nowhere, swiped the air greedily and grabbed one of the cards. The remainder of the deck fluttered to the ground. Then Preston stepped out of the shadows and approached the apron of the stage. “Hey, buddy,” he said, stabbing his finger at a young man. “Name a card.”

  “Um …” said this fellow, “the seven of hearts.”

  Preston snapped the card out from where it sat upon his palm. It was the seven of hearts.

  Rudolfo knew how that was done, of course. The kid was a stick, a plant, a student from UNLV who picked up a few bucks nightly by saying the words “seven of hearts.” (The “um,” Rudolfo calculated, was improvised; the kid was probably a drama major.)

  More card tricks followed. Miranda pulled a seemingly endless supply of blue-backed Bees from thin air. Preston would then perform illusions, all of which Rudolfo put down to the presence of sticks until about an hour into Preston’s act, at which point it dawned on him that half the audience seemed to be sticks and that Preston couldn’t afford so many, not with his measly fifteen-dollar ticket price. Even he and Jurgen could hardly afford so many. Indeed, they only had the one, the chubby woman pulled from the audience during the intimate, heart-to-heart Up Close and Personal section. Rudolfo tried to recall the woman’s name. He thought it might be Anna, but that was wrong—that name belonged to his mother.

  Rudolfo was startled by applause, caused by the execution of another minor miracle by the fat, ugly man standing on the stage. He shook his head, clearing it, and fled to the lobby.

  Some time later, applause blossomed again inside the stale and dusty hall. It went on for quite a while. Rudolfo imagined Preston and Miranda taking their calls, the fat man stiff-backed and formal, Miranda fluid and touched by grace. Then the double doors blew apart and the audience emerged, their faces uniformly flushed and grinning.

  It didn’t take long for the hall to clear, because the hall only held perhaps eighty people. Eighty people at fifteen dollars a pop. Rudolfo no doubt made more as a beggar back in Münich. His insides were momentarily twisted by the memory of happiness. He realized that this was foolish; there was no logical reason why he should have been happier as a penniless fugitive from the law than as a world-famous, infinitely wealthy, Las Vegas show business legend. He swiped at his clothes, certain that the exiting crowd had raised a cloud of dust that was now settling down upon him. Then he turned and wheeled into the theatre.

  “Tell me what is in books!” he shouted.

  Preston looked up from where he was crawling on hands and knees, gathering up playing cards. Rudolfo momentarily felt very sorry for this unsightly ill-complexioned man who must gather up his own cards, painstakingly reorder them and stuff them back into their boxes.

  “Hi, Rudolfo,” he said. “I thought you’d come sometime.”

  “Jurgen is not himself. He is acting very strange. You see how he dresses. He doesn’t weigh enough. He glows in the dark. What is in books?”

  Preston scrambled to his feet, throwing a shrug through his lumpy, fluid body as he did so. “Just information,” he mumbled quietly.

  “Help me,” said Rudolfo.

  “I’d like to help you,” said Preston the Adequate. “I really, re
ally would. But I can’t tell you what’s in the books. You wouldn’t understand.”

  Rudolfo was so far from understanding that this statement held no sting. “Help me,” he repeated.

  Preston clutched a stack of blue-backed Bees. He stared at them for a second, fanned them to make sure he held something resembling a deck. Then he pointed to the velvet-topped table centre stage. “Go sit down there.”

  Rudolfo sprang up onto the stage and threw himself into the chair—not the stiff-backed wooden chair reserved for the audience participant, but the big stuffed easy chair where Preston sat. Preston approached with the cards spread so that Rudolfo could see the dissimilar faces. Then he flipped and stacked them, gave them a couple of riffle shuffles. “Right,” he said, squaring up and aiming the deck at Rudolfo. “Here’s what I want you to do. Take a card. Don’t look at it. Put it face down on the table and cover it up with your hand.”

  “I don’t have time for tricks.”

  “Do it.”

  Rudolfo reluctantly slipped out a single card, laying it on the table, covering it with his hand, which was as smooth and cold as china.

  “If you want me to help you,” said Preston, lowering his voice now so that it was barely more than a thick, wet whisper, “you’re going to have to make a little effort. Take a leap, kind of. So this is the thing. Do you believe that when you lift up your hand, that card is going to be there?”

  “Yes,” said Rudolfo, because that was his firm belief.

  “Okay, okay, sure,” nodded the fat man emphatically, scattering hair grease and sweat-beads. “But can you believe that when you lift your hand, that card is going to be gone?”

  The syntax was baffling; Rudolfo stared ahead without making a response.

  “It’s like this step you have to take or nothing I can say will make any sense,” Preston said. “Okay? You have to believe that there’s a chance, even the slimmest of chances, that when you take your hand away, that card is going to be gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Gone where?” persisted Rudolfo, because that did seem to be the point. He needed to know the nature of the emptiness.

  But Preston shook his head gently. “When you take your hand away,” he asked, “is that card going to be there?”

  Rudolfo nodded in a small but violent way. “Of course it is,” he said cruelly, lifting his hand from the table. The card lay there crookedly. Rudolfo scowled and rose from the seat. “Thanks for the nothings,” he said.

  “Hey,” said Preston. “Don’t you want to know what card it is?”

  Rudolfo stabbed his long fingers at the table, digging the manicured nails under the pasteboard and flipping it over: the two of hearts.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Years ago in Münich, after sharing their first night in their first proper bed, Rudolfo rose and began to prowl. Samson lumbered to his feet and did likewise, driven by love and instinct, but it was obvious from his cloudy, half-lidded eyes that the albino leopard had no idea what they were supposed to be looking for. He watched muzzily as Rudolfo flipped open the lid of Jurgen’s velvet production table and sifted through the silver wands and dove pans.

  The bed Jurgen and Rudolfo shared—an old wooden bed pilfered from atop a mountain of Münich refuse—was situated in a back upper room at Miss Joe’s establishment. Their love-making had been hitherto confined to dark alleys or the Englischer Garten. Rudolfo knew that this suited Jurgen, in a way. He preferred that their fucking have this athletic, outdoorsy nature; then it was not so much deviant, degenerate sex as a kind of wrestling, a physical manifestation of dominance and control. Jurgen had yet to kiss him, to allow a kiss, other than a kind of cousinly cheek-bussing. All this would change in a bed, Rudolfo knew. The mattress would put them on equal footing. The mattress, puffy with dustmite dung, would bring romance.

  So they moved in, Rudolfo hauling a single duffle bag, Jurgen producing countless battered cardboard suitcases. Jurgen covered the walls with posters featuring footballers and professional swimmers. He also brought proper exercise equipment, albeit a small collection: a few dumbbells, a wobbly preacher’s bench, a chest expander. Jurgen finally moved his magical props and impedimenta from the broom closet below, and it was this stuff that interested Rudolfo. He was most interested in the “two of hearts” routine, the first trick that Jurgen had performed for him and him alone. And a trick that Jurgen repeated now, often, as if it were as close as he could bring himself to an avowal of affection. He often thrust the deck at Rudolfo almost brutally, snarling out the magician’s imperative, “Pick a card.” Jurgen would riffle the edges gently. Rudolfo would poke in a finger, draw out a card, and then he’d overturn it slowly, his heart thumping, scared to death that the card would not be the two of hearts. But it always was the two of hearts. No matter how Rudolfo tempted fate and the gods—he might stick his finger in without hesitation, he might wait until the last possible instant, stopping the riffle with only a card or two left to fall—the card was always the two of hearts. Rudolfo thought this was so lovely that he might die of happiness.

  But he could not stop himself from wondering how the thing was done.

  So he rose while his lover snored and began to prowl about the room, looking for the special deck. He’d noticed that the backs were different from the cards Jurgen usually preferred, red cards with a diamond design, woven tiny and tight. These special cards featured concentric circles of various sizes, overlapping like rings on a puddle in a hailstorm.

  Jurgen sputtered over on the bed. A foot jerked spasmodically, booting away the sheets and leaving him naked and pale. Rudolfo squinted so that he could see his lover through the gloom. Jurgen’s arms were bent in front of him, both hands slapped together as though in prayer and slipped under his squared head. When his eyes were closed they were simply two patches of bruised dinginess. Rudolfo sighed and got back to work.

  The doves cooed lightly upon his approach. One began jumping up and down slightly, bending and snapping its twiglike legs. Rudolfo fashioned his mouth into a tiny puckered thing and made a few light noises of affection. Samson, fully woken now by the sting of jealousy, opened his mouth, spreading his teeth wide, showing the little birds just how big and spacious death could be. They shut up immediately.

  Rudolfo came upon a pile of ropes. He yanked a segment upwards, and the rope snapped in half cleanly. He stooped to pick up the discarded half and, as his two hands neared each other, the ends of the rope seemed to come together of their own volition. The rope was now miraculously restored. Rudolfo grunted quietly in the gloom and once more snapped the rope apart. Each broken end was studded with a tiny plate of metal. Magnets, he realized. He chuckled, pretending to be amused, but in reality rather ashamed and embarrassed on his lover’s behalf. The Cut and Restored Rope—an effect Jurgen executed with dour sobriety—was suddenly a baldfaced bit of cozenage. It made both of Rudolfo’s artistic pursuits (begging and nude dancing) seem exalted by comparison.

  Rudolfo came upon Jurgen’s show pants abandoned on the floor and realized that this was the most likely hiding place for the magic deck. Jurgen usually produced them from somewhere behind him, a hand pushing aside the ends of his jacket and snaking back. Rudolfo picked up the pants so that the backside—the rather too large backside, he thought, noting how the material shone where it was stretched across the seat—faced him. A little pouch was sewn into the waistband, and in the pouch were three decks of cards. One box was decorated with the concentric circles. Rudolfo pulled it out, snapped open the lid, slipped out the cards. Drawing a deep breath, Rudolfo turned the cards so that they faced him and managed an awkward fan.

  Every other card was the two of hearts. Rudolfo bit his lip and pushed the deck back together. He was blushing slightly, as though he’d pushed open a door and discovered someone hunkered in der Klos. It occurred to him that he now knew the secret without understanding how the thing worked, so he reluctantly re-fanned the deck. />
  It took a few minutes to comprehend. Every other card was the two of hearts; that was the obvious and distressing truth. But each two of hearts was also, Rudolfo discovered, slightly smaller than the other cards. If one squared the deck and thumbed the edge, the tip would catch only the larger cards, showing their faces to the stooge. When the stooge inserted his finger, it would fall automatically atop a smaller card—always the two of hearts.

  He walked back to the bed, sitting upon it heavily enough to bounce the mattress, spraying the gloom with silvery dust. Jurgen’s eyes opened laboriously. “What’s the matter?” he muttered, sensing, even in that first moment, that Rudolfo was angry and vengeful.

  “Pick a card,” snarled Rudolfo, “any fucking card.” Rudolfo squeezed the cards between his fingers, spreading them unevenly, bending and warping them.

  “It’s called a Svengali deck,” Jurgen confessed.

  “Cheap trick,” spat Rudolfo.

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you.” Jurgen propped himself up on one elbow. “They’re all cheap tricks. But one day …”

  Rudolfo grabbed Jurgen’s chin, which afforded him quite a handhold. Then Rudolfo bent over and kissed his lover, ungently.

  Following Miranda’s departure, chaos began to infect the Show. Chaos—Wirrwarr—there was no other word for it. They had to find a replacement for Miranda; a tiny ad in the showbiz trades drew countless beautiful girls and women out of the desert. Rudolfo auditioned them with a surliness that he hoped masked his distraction. He saw scores of applicants—he dispassionately bade them smile, turn around, display their breasts—but Rudolfo simply had nothing upon which to base a decision. Smiles meant little to him, all of the women could manage the most graceful of pirouettes, and tits were tits. So at one point during the process Rudolfo stood up, aimed a forefinger and pronounced, “She is good.” He’d selected an eighteen-year-old from Flint, Michigan, named Rhonda Byng. He fled the dance studio before his decision could be questioned by Curtis Sweetchurch or his menacing assistant Bren.