The Spirit Cabinet

by Paul Quarrington

  But then something in Preston the Magnificent’s manner changed. He stiffened, his vertebrae crackling audibly, and peered at his chubby son. “At this point I will require the assistance of an auxiliary,” he said quietly. “And being as it is the natal anniversary of my only begotten offspring, who would be more appropriate?” He extended one of his hands, the nails milky and carved into perfect little shields. Preston eagerly pushed his chair away from the table, sending it toppling over. The edge of the tablecloth was caught in one of the folds of his corduroy trousers, and he hauled down a plate and two empty glasses. His friends laughed cruelly, but then again, they were not his friends, they were by way of being business acquaintances, Preston being far and away the most successful collector of marbles in the area.

  “Yes,” Preston the Magnificent intoned, “he is exceedingly graceless. Perhaps he is not the right boy or girl—”

  “Please, Pop,” said Preston. “Let me do it.”

  He had no idea what he was expected to do, but he desperately wanted to be part of his father’s act.

  “Very well.” The Magnificent shook his hand and a small velvet bag appeared. He patted at it, kneading it with his fingers, showing it to be empty. “I hold the satchel of the ancient magi Therebes, who practiced his venerable arcana beside the banks of the mythical White Nile. In those days gone by, many times would the land be a’visited by pestilence and famine. Locusts would raze the crops, the sun would scorch the fields, rendering them barren and devoid of animation. Then would Therebes produce the magic satchel.”

  Preston the Magnificent shook the velvet bag and a few children snapped out of their monologue-induced reveries and applauded madly. The man’s eyes began to smoulder like coals. “Reach into the satchel of Therebes,” he commanded no one in particular, although his son was canny enough to intuit that this was his cue, “and withdraw sustenance!”

  Preston shoved his hand into the velvet. His fingertips came to rest on something smooth, hard and vaguely round. He gingerly extracted an egg.

  “See before you a continuation of vitality, but for an individual only! But witness again the magical satchel of Therebes! Thrust away, boy.”

  Preston bit on his lower lip and reached in again. Once more his fingers came to rest upon the coolness of eggshell. He pulled it out and exhibited the egg eagerly.

  “Aw, it’s a trick,” muttered someone. (In his adulthood, Preston decided it was most likely Billy Hirschberg, whose father was a snarling and withered divorce lawyer. The larger question was why Preston as a grown man spent so much time wondering just who had heckled the old man.) “I betcha it’s not even a real egg.”

  “Oh, miscreant!” snapped his father viciously. “I counsel only patience. We shall see what we shall see. Note once again that the sack is empty.” Preston the Magnificent tilted the bag and pulled it open roughly, like he was checking the gums of a nag destined for the glue factory. Then he held the bag toward his son. “Go, boy.”

  Preston the Younger produced yet another egg.

  “Yet again.”

  The boy transferred the third egg into his left hand, where it nestled comfortably with the previous two. He reached into the velvet bag and pulled out another egg. “Go, boy.” There was no room for the fourth egg in his left hand, so he folded his forearm across his belly and positioned the eggs along this new ridge. “Go, boy.” The fifth and sixth egg fit there nicely, too, but then Preston again ran out of room. He spread his left hand and began to form a pile of eggs in the hollow of his palm.

  Around about the tenth or eleventh egg, he began to get panicky. He had a sudden inspiration and began to stand them upright on their larger end, so they took up less room and were a little more stable. But this only eased the situation temporarily, and then the boy was completely stymied. The other children began to laugh and hoot, their voices sharpened by barbarity. “And again, boy,” said Preston the Magnificent. “Reach into the miraculous satchel of Therebes.”

  “I don’t have any more room for eggs, sir,” whispered Preston. He turned to look at his father pleadingly; his attention was arrested by a rippling of his father’s sleeve, the black material of the morning suit briefly wavy with reflected light. And then an egg popped out and fell into Preston the Magnificent’s fingers, the three digits that were hidden behind the black pouch whilst it was held twixt thumb and forefinger. The three fingers seemed to comprise an independent entity, and they nimbly shifted the egg until it stood upright, hiked it and sent it quietly over the lip of the velvet bag. “Reach away,” commanded Preston the Magnificent.

  Preston did nothing.

  “Reach in and grab the egg,” whispered his dad, “or I’ll take a brush to your fat backside.”

  Had he truly believed that his father was causing eggs to materialize inside the satchel of Therebes? (This was a question that had been posed by many analysts, in those years when Preston felt that analysts might be of some assistance.) Of course not. He had long understood that his father was not a magician in the sense that, say, Merlin was a magician. Preston the Magnificent was involved in Show Business, his son knew that. His son even knew that from time to time his father’s magic didn’t work, that audiences booed and men from newspapers wrote disparaging things.

  But he had supposed that his father was up to a more unaccountable order of trickery than merely hiding things up his sleeve.

  At any rate, what happened that day was that Preston released the eggs he had stacked and cradled. They exploded upon the floor, a riot of yolk and albumen. The other children hooted and howled and banged ice cream spoons upon the tabletop. Preston the Magnificent pointed at the mess and declared, “Behold! Fakery or deceit? I think not!”

  The chubby little boy began to weep. He was embarrassed about the eggs, true, but, really, the little act was designed so that some schmuck kid would drop them all over the floor, that was pretty much the point of the gag. Preston the Magnificent, noting his son’s tears, dealt him a look of stern admonition and then abruptly turned and stormed away.

  Preston continued to cry; he alone was aware that what had been broken was not a dozen eggs but a sense of wonder.

  It struck him with force that Miranda was packing away her paints with some fury. He hadn’t been speaking aloud, he hadn’t actually related this memory, although part of Preston was very disappointed to realize this.

  “Don’t fix what ain’t broke,” Miranda was saying. “I don’t know why you worry about us all the time.”

  “I don’t know why, either,” muttered the Adequate.

  “What, exactly, do you think I’m doing here, then?”

  Preston sighed, and said words that he knew weren’t true so much as easy to speak and difficult to deny. “Because of the Collection.”

  Over the course of the next couple of hours—when they weren’t arguing with varying degrees of ferocity—Preston related the handful of facts he possessed about the Collection’s history. Some of the information was scholarly, reflecting his former position of curator. He knew, for example, how Ehrich Weiss had managed to get his hands on the Davenport Spirit Cabinet—he’d gotten it from Ira and William D. themselves. Houdini, thirty-five years of age and the most famous man on the planet, tracked the brothers down to an old folks’ home in Sprucefield, New Jersey. There he found them, withered and pale, unrecognizable except for their trademark long moustaches, although the moustaches were white and wispy and contained only a few hairs. The Davenport brothers had never heard of Houdini. Their fellow inmates had—they pestered him for autographs and even pilfered a restraint jacket from supplies and persuaded Houdini to don it and then escape from it. He gave a thrilling exhibition of writhing and bone-bending, although the old folks hadn’t really been able to fasten the straps with much conviction. But Ira and William still didn’t know who Houdini was. They were friendly enough—they seemed to have been expecting someone to show up—and they answered all of his questions as best they could. Houdini gave them some money, a li
ttle money, and a few days later added the huge, hideous cabinet to his burgeoning amassment of magical books and curios.

  Preston related all this in a voice flat and uninflected. He was aware that he was infuriating Miranda; he was aware that both her tone and her colour were raised. “Now, many people wonder why, if it were such a prize, Houdini would include the Spirit Cabinet with the stuff he sold to Edgar Biggs McGehee.”

  Miranda protested that she was not, in fact, one of those people.

  Preston smiled slightly and continued nonetheless. “I think it was part of the deal with the Davenport brothers. Yeah. Part of the deal with the Spirit Cabinet is that you have to get rid of it. It has to be passed on.”

  Miranda gathered up more things, the small things she had brought to make the ancient room seem more like a home. She had ceased to yell, but had taken up instead an incessant, boiling mutter. The word asshole cropped up often.

  “You see,” explained Preston, spreading his hands didactically, “the reason that Eddie McGehee put the Collection up for auction is … he had to. It was in his grandfather’s will. The Collection had …” A part of Preston’s mind registered the fact that Miranda was vanished. Here, then, was an illusion that Preston could pull off every bit as well as the old man. Preston the Magnificent had done it more often, true, making all of his ditzy lovers disappear, capping his career with the vanishing of his wife, making her materialize days later in a wooden box, her wrists stitched and the seams hidden by cosmetics. “It was in Edgar Biggs’ will,” he repeated quietly. “The terms were really quite specific. Within a certain time frame—and really, there was only latitude of a week or so—the Collection had to put up for auction. It is part of a plan …” Preston began moving around the empty room. He enunciated clearly and drew large sweeping arcs in the air, as though trying to illustrate arcana to people sitting far away. “It is part of a plan put in place a long, long time ago. That is really about as much as I know. I myself …”

  The easel rose up in his path. Preston, drawing a deep breath, rounded it to take a look at the abandoned portrait.

  “I myself,” he finished, “did not look at any of the books.”

  In the painting, much of Preston was cloudlike and amorphous. His belly, for example, was simply a large suggestion rendered out of flesh tones, the edges vague and ill-defined. It was hard to tell where Preston began and shadows ended. Bits of him, though, were finished with photographic precision. His eyes, for example. They were darkened by the overhang of a large, furrowed brow, but Miranda had carefully added tiny slivers of light. Miranda had also finished the mouth, which was lifelike without being particularly realistic, because Miranda had fashioned a smile. More than a smile, really, a grin, a real shit-eater. Preston scowled, as if to show his portrait what it ought to be doing.

  And Miranda had completed the hands, the hands that lay open in the naked, fuzzy lap. Sitting safely in the cup of the hands was an egg.

  “Preston,” says Miranda, “is damaged goods.” She lies on the huge circular bed beside Rudolfo and stretches, because the Bod is bored and needs a tiny bit of activity.

  Rudolfo never used to dream at all, and now everything is a dream. Miranda’s story seems to him like a fairy tale, the sort of thing a mother might tell a child, so he searches for meaning and moral. “Everybody,” he says, “is damaged goods.”

  “I don’t consider myself damaged goods.”

  “Hoo boy,” sings out Rudolfo. “You got it bad.”

  “Plus there was this thing,” says Miranda with a touch of urgency, “this thing that looked like it was always going to be there, this thing about the Collection.”

  “Ja?”

  “See, when we did the Sub Box in the Show, Jurgen and me, something would happen. I mean, I did what I was supposed to do, I jumped down, slipped in the false back, up into the sack, I did all that—hey, I’m the best box-jumper in the city—but something else was going on. Something I can’t really talk about. And it made me think, you know, that maybe … maybe there was …”

  “Magic.”

  “Sure. But Preston says it’s no good if there is magic. Preston says that what’s special about human beings is that they make magic.”

  “Good point.”

  “I wanted to know. Preston always hated me a little bit for that. And he wouldn’t tell me. So I guess I always hated him a little bit. So we split.”

  Rudolfo notices a bird struggle out of one of the small holes in the door of the Spirit Cabinet, a bird he does not recognize. He suspects it has not been seen before.

  “Yeah, but now you go do a nudie show.”

  “Topless.”

  “So is not like you make big step forward in life. Is like you go backwards because you feel like shit so you treat yourself like shit.”

  “When did you become insightful?”

  Rudolfo laughs lightly. “Everybody is damaged goods. Everybody got bumps and dents, ja? But sometimes two people fit together, and the bumps go into the dents, and you have a whole thing like a potato.”

  “Okay, listen, maybe I didn’t have the best motives when I first went to Preston, maybe I just wanted to get close to the magic … if it was really there, he would know … but, I mean, I got involved. Okay? I got connected. But Preston … like I say, damaged goods. Sometimes it’s not just bumps and dents, right? Sometimes it’s like the heart gets squeezed smaller and smaller. Maybe Preston just doesn’t have any room in there for anybody else.”

  “Preston? Preston got heart like a fucking ham hock. He got room for everybody. He got plenty of room for you.”

  “What do you know about Preston?”

  Rudolfo closes his eyes and tries to remember. “He tried to show me something once. I put my hand over the card, and he said that I had to believe, some little thing in me had to believe, that when I take my hand away …”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “Remove my hand, I mean.”

  “No, listen.” Miranda sits up on the bed, wraps one of her hands behind an ear. “What’s that?”

  “Oh,” says Rudolfo, because he hears it always, “is the doorbell. I made it to play La Bohème.”

  “No, no, no. Listen.”

  Rudolfo does listen, then, and realizes that the chimes are silent. But then he hears a distant roar, full of hiss and cackle.

  Miranda’s nose twitches, and in an instant she is off the bed, racing for the door. “Fire,” she whispers. “I’ll go see where it is. You stay here. I’ll be right back.” Miranda disappears.

  Rudolfo pulls himself off the bed languidly. He is not surprised at the pronouncement; indeed, he realizes vaguely that he has spent a year turning das Haus into a tinderbox. He has not attended to the pumps and sumps; the moats, goldfish ponds and swimming pool have all dried up. The desert has claimed the land that the mansion sits upon; dry winds have wrapped around the brickwork like tendrils of ivy.

  Rudolfo pauses before the Spirit Cabinet. Light leaks from the cracks in the woodwork, a light so strong and pure that even these tiny slivers of it cause him to squint.

  He cocks his head, because he can hear music. Not La Bohème, something else, something he has not heard for a very long time. Perhaps it is simply an illusion, perhaps there are whistles and rhythms wrapped within the fiery roar, but Rudolfo thinks he can recognize a German folk song, “Du, du liegst mir am Herzen.” Jurgen always loved that song. Rudolfo always hated it, of course, and hates it even more at this instant, because it forces tears from his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The last public performance ever given by Jurgen and Rudolfo proceeded like this.

  The crowd was ushered into the showroom at the Abraxas Hotel, and although ushers and usherettes tried to corral them toward the little seats and flip-top tables, almost everyone save the very elderly ignored these, preferring to press as close as possible to the stage. They crammed their bodies together without fear or embarrassment, haunches to buttocks, breasts to backs.
It was therefore possible to get far more people into the showroom than was legal.

  The showroom soon grew unbearably hot. People shed jackets and sweaters; they loosened buttons; one or two stripped down to fairly presentable undergarments.

  The Show began abruptly, without fanfare. The house lights neither dimmed nor brightened, they simply remained on, casting an industrial glare over the goings-on. Music leaked quietly from the speakers. It was nothing by Sturm and Drang.

  The night previous, Jurgen had appeared suddenly by the huge, circular bed. Rudolfo had been sleeping, although none too soundly, and with Jurgen’s arrival he rolled over and his eyes fluttered open. Jurgen was naked and glowed. Rudolfo could hear little hisses and spitting noises, beads of sweat exploding upon the surface of Jurgen’s white skin. Jurgen, though motionless, was not still; his outline in the darkened room quivered. Rudolfo saw that his penis had all but disappeared. It was as small as a three-year-old’s, and his testicles were nowhere to be seen.

  “Hi,” said Rudolfo, too tired to be surprised or terrified, tired enough to be enormously and endlessly sad.

  “Hi,” said Jurgen. “I want you to change the music for the Show.”

  “Oh.” Rudolfo folded himself up until he was ready again for slumber. “All right.” He closed his eyes.

  The air around him suddenly grew chilled, and charged somehow, as though the heavens intended to open momentarily and drop huge rocks of ice upon them. Rudolfo opened his eyes and saw Jurgen floating down upon the mattress. “I’m very tired,” Jurgen said. His eyes were open, empty and silver.

  “Ja, you go to sleep now.” Rudolfo reached out and placed a hand on Jurgen’s chest, except it fell through and came to rest on the sheets. He withdrew the hand, snugged it up against his own breast. “Good night,” he whispered.