The Spirit Cabinet
Page 25
But it was a mistake, Rudolfo knew that almost immediately. Eighteen was simply too few years for Rhonda to have achieved any effective onstage management skills, and the stage needed rigorous and stern management. Jurgen seemed to have forgotten that there ever was a plan, a pacing and a rhythm for the Show. He was as likely to open with Up Close and Personal as the Silver Ball. One evening he walked to the foot of the stage (his hem floating gently around his naked feet) and stared into the blackness. “I want to get up close and personal!” he shouted. Rudolfo rolled the silver ball toward his partner, hoping to bowl him over into the laps of the fucking people. Rhonda Byng appeared and threw her body in front of it as a kind of human shield. Rhonda, Rudolfo realized, had a teenager’s heart, howling and heavy, and she had already fallen in love with Jurgen.
But the worst insult, the most evil transgression, was Jurgen’s sudden introduction of half-learned, poorly planned effects. A case in point was the Hindu goddamn Rope Trick. Jurgen would come onstage dragging his length of rope behind him as though it were a slaughtered snake. Rhonda Byng would circle around him, executing muted balletic leaps. Rudolfo would stand off in the wings and scowl. The trick differed each time out. But even Rudolfo would have to admit that the effect progressed and transformed and was now nearing a point where they could consider rehearsing the fucking thing.
One show—ten o’clock Saturday, the busiest night, one or two extra people crammed into the already packed house—Jurgen dragged the rope to centre stage and allowed it to drop unceremoniously. “Ja, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “is much ballyhooed Hindu Rope Trick. I alone in accident um capable of unrivelling the arcanada.”
Rudolfo, standing in the shadows, snapped his fingers and made a mental note to hire a writer to punch up that introduction.
Jurgen bent over, picked up the end of his rope and threw it upwards. With very little apparent effort, it rose in the air and stayed there. The end of the rope slowly bent back and forth, responding to an ethereal breeze.
“Ja, dat’s good!” said Jurgen, and the audience broke into applause. Rhonda Byng stood beside the rope and clapped with the enthusiasm of a three-year-old. Rudolfo made a mental note to fire her ass—which, he noticed, wasn’t big enough to excite the old farts from Pasadena.
Jurgen held both hands in front of his face, palms turned inwards, and summoned spit from deep pockets inside his mouth. He then horked twice, depositing bullets of saliva and sputum into the centre of each hand. He rubbed them together rapidly and his hands began to glow, as though the rubbing excited some phosphor that powdered the skin. Then he slapped his hands across his butt; his hands seemed to cool and turn greyish.
Taking hold of the rope, he pushed and pulled, like he was checking the trueness of a knot. Grunting with satisfaction, he leapt aboard the trembling, standing strand. He wrapped his legs around it and shinnied up with surprising speed. The flimsy erection teetered and wobbled. At one point, the thick twist went wowing way out toward the audience, threatening to toss Jurgen onto the laps of a young honeymooning couple in the front row. “Whoa!” Jurgen shouted musically, and as he neared the couple he flicked his eyebrows quickly, almost lecherously, as though, in the moment that he was proximate to them, he had been able to understand and characterize their situation—that they had been married that afternoon and were impatient and bristling with hormones.
Jurgen never achieved the top of the rope. As he neared it, the rope abruptly collapsed, lifeless, collecting sloppily upon itself on the floor of the stage. Jurgen landed on his ass with a very loud thump. Rhonda Byng appeared beside him and cocked her arms, throwing one hip out sideways. People began to applaud hesitantly. It took a moment or two to get going, but before long the audience members were clapping with brutish enthusiasm. Some even screamed and whistled like football hooligans. Jurgen stood up and rubbed his butt vigorously. Rudolfo ventured out onto the stage, acknowledging the roar only curtly. Jurgen reached out and took Rudolfo’s hand into his own. Tugging hard, Jurgen drew his partner forward to accept the ovation.
Chapter Twenty-two
“So,” announced Preston, although it was said in the middle of the night, and there was much about the word that was a sigh, “enough about me. What about you?”
Miranda rolled over in the bed. “I don’t mind talking about me,” she said, “but I’d just like to make a point of clarification. We don’t talk about you.”
“We don’t?”
“We do not.” She locked her fingers and made a cradle for the back of her head. “Mostly we talk about your father.”
Preston grunted.
“You know, you hold the grunt in too high esteem as a conveyance of meaning and/or emotion.”
“I just didn’t realize I talked about the old man that much, that’s all.”
Although it occurred to him that the last story he had told Miranda—the tale that occupied the spell between their love-making and this new, rather awkward silence—had had to do with Preston the Magnificent, and the time his father had gone to Africa as part of a contingent of do-gooders and well-wishers from the United Nations. Preston couldn’t imagine what had persuaded his father that this was a sound career move and suspected that one of the organizers was a comely young woman. Preston the Magnificent was always getting his head twisted by comely young women. He would become hopelessly and helplessly fuck-foundered and could be made to do most anything. So that is likely why he boarded a small airplane along with Martha Raye and Shecky Greene. The entertainers landed in Timbuktu; from there they were piloted up the Niger River, finally arriving at the junction with the Bani, and the city of Mopti. Then they went by jeep and donkey to the village of Sangha. The people there were the Dogons, which signified nothing to Preston the Magnificent, although he should have done a little research, because the Dogon people were magicratic, governed by wizards. They were not especially grand or powerful wizards, just men who shared a few secrets and knew a few basic moves. They could pull beetles from their ears, they could make stones fly, invisibly, from one hand to the other. So the people were not at all impressed with Preston the Magnificent when he performed the same illusions (producing a bouquet of flowers from a gleaming pan, translocating silver coins), thinking him simply some bureaucrat visiting from afar. They watched his act with heavy lids and stifled yawns. Even Shecky Greene, who, not surprisingly, spoke not a word of the Dogon dialect, did better, repeating his punchlines at greater and greater volume until the audience laughed in an effort to quiet him. Preston the Magnificent seethed inwardly and redoubled his efforts. He performed tricks he’d never attempted in public (including a multiple card production shown to him by his plump and splay-footed teenaged son, a knucklebuster that the boy did with infuriating ease) but the Dogon remained unimpressed. Preston the Magnificent likely knew more magic tricks than anyone in the world, but he soon ran out. The people stared at him. He stared back. He stared at the faces, at the frowns, the mouths slack and displaying varying degrees of toothlessness. He was on the verge of giving up, on the verge of bowing curtly and backing away, on the verge of finding a bottle to consume and a woman to shag mercilessly, when a thought occurred. He righted himself (he’d been slouching, despite his own admonition “bearing betrays breeding”) and took a step forward. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned grandly, “I hereby present the greatest wonder of my confraternity.” And with that, Preston the Magnificent reached up and removed his false teeth.
The Dogon gasped, their eyes popped wide. They erupted with applause, with loud whistles and cheers. Preston the Magnificent always held that as his finest moment, and immediately amended his resumé to indicate that he was an honorary leader, an elder, of the Dogon people.
“Okay then,” said his son, Preston the Adequate, “enough about the old man. What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Well, you’re in kind of an odd line of work. How’d you end up being a box-jumper?”
“Thaumaturgical assista
nt.”
“Yeah.”
Miranda bit her lip and considered her answer, weighing certain sorts of honesty. For example, she could easily answer, “Coincidence” or, more portentously, “Fate,” and then list the chain of events that brought her from Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, to Las Vegas, Nevada. She’d awoken one morning, at the age of eighteen, looked out the window and seen, across her father’s endless fields, the huge tents and metal wheels of the Hickey and Winchester Circus and Fair. She didn’t throw her belongings into a gunnysack and leave that day. She waited until the late afternoon before venturing near, and even then she just hung on the periphery, her hands driven deep into the pockets of her Levis, her back humped bashfully. Young carnies grinned and whistled at her, handsome young men decorated with tattoos. Miranda appreciated this; at least, minded it a lot less than the sputtering, crimson-faced leering that the menfolk of Maple Creek seemed to feel was discreet. She ventured nearer. Arranged around the big top were several small tents—“blow-offs,” in the argot of the trade—and these attracted her the most. It’s hard to say why. An easy answer would be that each tent could only accommodate fifteen or twenty people, and Miranda felt she could cope with fifteen or twenty people. She also liked the signs that were erected outside, signs with garish illustrations and bold lettering. One showed a woman, dancing, turned away, her naked body draped with transparent veils. “SALOME” announced letters that curved and bulged in an attempt to look foreign. Another sign heralded the The Amazing Leonidas and showed him to be a gaunt man, his face made even longer by the spiked goatee that descended from his chin. Both these tents were to have special significance for Miranda. Her first job was to dance as Salome, to parade about a tiny stage dropping uneven squares of nylon. Even though the last veil revealed nothing close to nakedness (she kept on a beaded bra and diaphanous diaper arrangement that somebody thought appropriate), the Bod’s portrayal of Salome brought with it arrests and show closures. This is how Miranda ended up assisting the Amazing Leonidas, who did indeed own a goatee. That was all he had in common with the likeness painted outside. The flesh and blood Leonidas was too much of the former (he weighed three hundred if he weighed a pound) and too little of the latter (he was pale and doughy).
But it was neither of these tents that made Miranda steal out of the farmhouse at three-thirty in the morning with a small collection of underwear and sweats. The tent that got her sat apart from even the blow-offs. The canvas was painted light blue and festooned with puffs of white, so that from certain low angles it disappeared into the sky. A sign erected beside it read: THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL WONDERS.
Miranda moved toward the tent. After all, she herself was by way of being a natural wonder. She pulled the canvas apart at the opening and slipped into the shadows.
There were a number of wooden tables arranged haphazardly. The nearest supported a large glass bottle, a carboy stopped with a thick cork. Inside the bottle, swimming in a cloudy little sea, was a tiny dead calf with two heads. Miranda shrugged and blew a little raspberry. After all, she’d seen that sort of thing before. Monsters come each birthing season on a farm, one or two anyway. There was a sheet of paper, covered with uneven typewriting, Scotch-taped onto the table. Miranda took a step closer: ANOMALIES OF EMBRYONIC CONSTRUCTION AND IMPERFECTIONS IN THE GENETIC ENCODING CREATE THE HIDEOUSITY THAT YOU SEE BEFORE YOU. She moved away.
The next table held a model of a cathedral, a tall magnificent cathedral, rendered out of long, thin pieces of what she guessed was alabaster. Again, there was a piece of paper taped to the table. Miranda read: OLIVER HARWIN GREER, OF KNOXVILLE, TENNESSEE, RENDERED THIS PERFECT COPY OF KING’S CHAPEL, OXFORD, EMPLOYING ONLY THE BONES OF ABORTED FETUSES.
“Nice hobby,” said Miranda and turned around, because it was her intention to leave the tent which had definitely become creepy. Then she saw the horn.
Miranda didn’t know it was a horn, she knew only that something very strange stood upon a table some feet away. It was perhaps a foot high, and curled like soft ice cream settled into a cone. The thing was covered with hair, short, hard bristles of dark hues. The paper (a much whiter sheet than the others, covered with typewriting made with a newer, more tractable machine) said, THIS HUMAN HORN WAS CUT FROM THE FOREHEAD OF ANTOINETTE KINGSLEY of LAS VEGAS, NEVADA.
Miranda reached out a long forefinger and ran it down the horn’s length. She was, she supposed, trying to determine its authenticity; at least, that was the best and only reason she could give for touching the thing. She ran her finger down and then ran it back up again, disturbing and exciting all the tiny bristles, which were much, much softer than they appeared.
It occurred to Miranda that beauty and monstrosity could live next door to each other. What set her into motion was the corollary: where beauty and monstrosity co-exist, all things must be possible.
So she ran away with the circus.
Not only had Preston had very few relationships in his lifetime, he’d had very few conversations. This one now ranked as the oddest. He took out a deck of blue-backed Bees and sought grounding in the familiar. He ran some cards, threw off, ran some cards, threw off, his mind silently chanting a mathematical equation that would set up the ducats for Dai Vernon’s Poker Display, which, he hoped, he had never shown Miranda.
But she was having none of it. “I guess you figure I’m kind of weird, huh?”
“Well …” Preston drew a breath. “Being flawless, as you are, you were probably very attracted to the horn as a kind of symbol …”
“I travelled with the fair for about two years. I learned how to assist the magician. I learned how to cover the angles, how to block sightlines to the shifts and sleights. I learned how to turn in the sword box, how to suck in my stomach so that in the middle I took up a space three inches wide.”
Miranda pulled hard on the conversational wheel, changing subjects like a hot-rodder changes lanes on a freeway. “What did Rudolfo want?”
“Oh,” said Preston the Adequate, who could not stop a note of sadness from singing in his throat. “You know what he wanted. He wanted to ask questions about the books. Same as you want to ask questions about the books.”
The Hickey and Winchester Circus and Fair burned to the ground in Albany, New York. There was no loss of life, no loss of human life, anyway, although an ancient Indian elephant succumbed to smoke inhalation, charging through the flames without harm but then teetering and timbering dead on the grey grass outside.
After that, Miranda spent three years traversing the country, spending much of her time seeking out the little museums that dot the countryside like pimples on a puberty-twisted face. The state of Ohio alone took her four months to get through, because every mile or so there would be another little edifice dedicated to some trivial or bizarre aspect of human behaviour. There was the Hoover Museum of Vacuum Cleaners, for example. The Zane Grey Museum in Zanesville. The Museum of Power and Water, dedicated to the history and glorification of the Enema. Miranda went to them all, looking at the oddities, searching for possibilities.
Eventually she achieved the desert, and on the outskirts of Las Vegas she found The Oasis, and on the top floor she found Emile Zsosz. Her timing was impeccable. As she stepped off the elevator, Zsosz’s assistant stepped on. The woman’s fury was hugely apparent. Her black bodysuit was disarranged, the material covered with paw prints. Emile Zsosz himself wobbled nearby, still reeling from a blow to the face, but too drunk to actually fall over. The elevator doors closed on the assistant, Miranda took her place, and there is reason to believe that it never registered in Zsosz’s soggy brain that a change had occurred. “It’s showtime,” he whispered, extending his hand toward Miranda.
Miranda rose from the bed and started dressing, even though dawn was still hours away.
“Where are you going?” asked Preston the Adequate.
“The damned Abraxas.”
“How come?”
“I just don’t like the direction this conversation is headed.”
“Hey, dorkus. I was with the guy who’s got the books. Remember? I left him to be with the guy who no longer has the books.”
Preston found something in that statement that quieted him, although one couldn’t tell from his expression whether it was sense and reason or a deeper, bluer mystery. After a very long moment’s silence, Preston lit up a cigarette and said, “Hey, want to hear a joke?”
Miranda smiled, nodded, peeled off the clothes she’d thrown on and climbed back into bed. A large and clumsy man, Preston received her as gingerly as he could.
“Okay, here goes,” he said. “There was this magician, this cheap, untalented magician who only knew a few old, tired tricks. And one day this genie appears, you know, poof, this big genie appears and the genie says, ‘You get one wish.’ ”
“Only one?”
“Yeah, only one. And this magician says, ‘For one night, just one night, I want your powers. I want to be capable of doing real, true magic.’ ”
“Yeah.”
“So the genie says okay. And he waves his hand and the magician goes and does his show and he’s a huge success. And the next day the genie reappears and says, ‘How did it go?’ And the magician says, ‘Great. I pulled a rabbit out a hat, I made some coins disappear into thin air …’ ” Preston the Adequate allowed his voice to fall away into silence.
“It’s a good joke,” noted Miranda. “It’s not very funny, but it’s a good joke.”
It had seemed to Samson as though he might escape his long life without having to confront danger. He has become comfortable in his cowardice. A case could be made that Samson was in fact addicted to his cowardice, because people become addicted to anything that limits their choices and makes life even a smidgen easier. The fact that Samson is a big albino cat doesn’t really change the nickel-ante psychology. His life has been easier, because all he has had to do is turn away from danger and the unknown, tuck in his tail and start licking his ghost balls. True, there is always an awful moment when shame explodes within him, because he knows deep down that his birthright is courage, that he should roar wildly in the face of death.