The Spirit Cabinet (18 page)

Jurgen Schubert was buying a new suit because he had just gotten his first engagement at a nightclub. He was a veteran of birthday parties, corporate luncheons and county fairs, but this was his first proper job, a full month contracted with more promised. So he was using his savings to buy himself a suit, a fine and expensive suit, even though he was going to tear out the lining and bulk up the sleeves with hidden pockets. A small pouch would be sewn into the back vent, a place to keep the doves, which wouldn’t do much for his broadbeamed silhouette. The trousers would be eviscerated too, so that he could put his hands into his pockets and gain immediate access to a modified machinist’s apron full of little rigs, gags and decks of cards. The legs would be too long, and he’d turn the cuffs up once only; he needed very deep cuffs because many things came from, or ended up, there. People might think Jurgen had found his suit in a trash heap, though at least he’d selected a nice colour, a gun-metal grey that rippled light with every movement.

A few days later, he went down to the club with his gear—two
huge suitcases, a birdcage, a small rabbit pen and a collapsible presentation table—to prepare for his debut. The door was locked—not that he’d expected the club to be open so early—so he knocked. There was no response. He began to wonder if perhaps he wasn’t
too
early. It was, after all, only eight-thirty in the morning. Still, he was buoyed by the fact that pedestrians were scurrying around behind him.

He raised his knuckles and then paused, making certain that he was at the right address. There was nothing to distinguish it from the other houses on the street except for a small sign, very crudely painted, that read “
MISS JOE
’
S
.”

He pounded on the door. “Hello?” he called. There was nothing but a deep and still silence from within. He considered going back to the crowded apartment, returning later in the afternoon. But the sun was up and Münich was singing. “Hello!” he shouted once more.

At last there came a muffled response. “Who is it?”

“It is I,” Jurgen answered uncertainly. “The Great Schuberto.”

“The magician?”

“The magician.”

“Do me a big favour, okay, Mr. Magic?”

“Yes?”

“Go fuck yourself.”

Jurgen smiled stupidly at the door and saw that there was a small peephole drilled into the middle of it. Not knowing what else to do, he took a step to his right so that his face would be framed within the circle. “It is I,” he repeated quietly, “the Great Schuberto.” His eyelids were flickering.

“Why don’t you come back in a few hours?” demanded the voice. It occurred to Jurgen that he couldn’t determine whether the voice belonged to a man or a woman. “The nurse hasn’t even made her morning rounds,” the voice continued. “She hasn’t given us our medication or emptied the pisspots. It’s too fucking
depressing in here. This is no place for a strapping young, um,
youth
, such as yourself. So please go away and come back in a little while. Okay?”

The Great Schuberto pulled back his eyelids and stared into the peephole. He could understand that he’d come too early, been too anxious, but he could not stem the anger. He disliked being turned away. He hated being counted as third-rate, even if he himself suspected that’s what he was. “I have to prepare,” he said firmly. “Let me in.”

Tumblers fell and latches loosened. The door creaked open with a horrible sound. Jurgen peered into the shadows and could see nothing. “Okay, Mr. Magic. Come in.” Using the voice as a guide, Jurgen finally found, some six feet in the air, a face. That is, he recognized it after a moment as a face, although originally he’d thought it was just a nose. A huge nose, crooked and hooked. Then he noticed two small eyes attached on either side, dark irises floating in stagnant yellow pools, and he was able to infer the existence of a mouth, because there was a smoking cigarette suspended up there.

The creature withdrew and Jurgen stepped over the threshold, dragging the presentation table and the heavier of the two suitcases with him. “It is necessary for me to prepare the stage,” he said once again. “That is why I have come.”

“What the fuck is
this
?” The creature was staring at the ground a few feet away. There were no clues as to gender. It was impossible to say whether the hair was long or short, because it was contained in a stocking, a black nylon that clung to a bullet-shaped skull. Emaciated and draped in a housecoat, a drab checked thing with a feathery fringe, the body gave no clues. The hand and forearm that poked out one of the sleeves were nothing but skin and bone, and precious little skin at that, thought Jurgen. The hand and forearm pointed toward the ground and trembled with disease or fury. “What is
that?
I’ll tell you what
that is, my young Magic Man. Someone has puked up an internal organ. You tell these people to go easy on the sauce, but will they listen?”

Jurgen nodded and went back outside for the the rest of his stuff.

“Oh, little fuzzies!” The creature—Jurgen guessed this was Miss Joe—bent over to peer into the birdcage, and Jurgen noticed the residue of makeup, patches of powder, lipstick packed into the crevices of chapped lips. “What do you do?” the creature wondered. “Bite their heads off?”

“Oh, no,” responded Jurgen earnestly. “I make them appear and disappear.”

“Hmmm! Well, aren’t we all looking forward to that!” Miss Joe spun around and marched off into the shadows, this time with a very exaggerated sashay. “Let there be light,” Miss Joe intoned, reaching out a bony finger and stabbing at a control box mounted on the wall. Light bulbs flickered, for some reason accompanied by the sound of groaning pipes. There were flashes of great illumination, as though lightning forked from the ceiling, but when the lights finally burst into being they barely sliced through the gloom. Jurgen could make out a small stage, several round tables, a few disparate chairs and countless articles of discarded clothing.

By Jurgen’s foot there did indeed appear to be an internal organ. Miss Joe returned with a dustpan and broom, hunkering down to sweep the thing away. The housecoat fell away from the bony knees; Jurgen stared but could see nothing. “That’s cheating,” said Miss Joe, without looking up from her labour. (The broom was not equal to the task; Miss Joe now scraped at the thing with the blade of the dustpan.) “You’re going to have to find out the hard way.”

Jurgen spun around, took a few steps away. “The stage,” he called over his shoulder, “is inadequate.”

“Hmmm?” Miss Joe finally picked the thing up with her hands, throwing it onto the galvanized scoop, then came to stand beside him. Like the rest of the nightclub, the stage was littered with discarded clothing, but these were smaller pieces, items that Jurgen was able to classify as “underwear” in a very broad sense.

“The stage is too small.”

“Hey, Mr. Magic, I’ve had forty-one people on that stage doing the African Cluster Fuck. There’s plenty enough room for you.”

“We could take away these tables; I could use all this space here at the front.”

“Look, Schuberto. I don’t like to burst your little bubble, but you are the
Chaser
.”

“Chaser?”
The word sounded like English. Jurgen had only a smattering of the language, perhaps nine or ten words. This wasn’t one of them.

“Yeah, right.” Miss Joe lit a cigarette, then spit out a puff of smoke that drifted over top of the little stage and loomed there like a rain cloud.

“What does this mean?”

Miss Joe spun around and stared at Jurgen for what seemed like a full minute. “Oh, well,” she said quietly. “The Chaser is the big star.”

“So I must have more room.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Miss Joe glanced around the nightclub. “I guess I don’t need all these fucking tables.”

Rudolfo meanwhile had staked his claim on Bayerstrasse. His career as a blind beggar was going exceptionally well, although he couldn’t have said exactly why. Every day he made refinements that added Deutschmarks to the battered tin cup he clutched between his fingers (tilting his head at an angle, pointing his toes inward, hunching over even more). But as to why he
was successful and not Peter Bloch, the sightless man three storefronts away, Rudolfo couldn’t say. He didn’t realize that in large part it was his hairlessness, which lent him an unearthly sheen. And he didn’t know, because his head was always snapped forward, that Samson, hanging back and adopting the posture of an old hound dog, would often glance up at the pedestrians and pull the corners of his mouth back sharply, exhibiting, for a brief moment, a furious snarl. The passersby would quickly dig into their pockets and hurl coins into the tin cup.

“Danke, mein Herr,”
Rudolfo would intone.

As successful as the disguise seemed to be, Rudolfo still expected to be arrested at any moment, taken away and charged with the murder of General Bosco. Sometimes the fear was so intense that his skin spotted with sickly sweat. He’d rented a tiny squalid room—he could afford better, but few innkeepers wanted his bizarre dog—but his nights were as sleepless as his days. So certain was he of arrest (and then what, probably execution) that he didn’t even bother making idle plans. He stood on the corner and, despite the wheel of weather, wind to warmth to wind once more, existed in a state of timelessness.

Until the day he recognized some people.

That statement warrants some clarification. Rudolfo didn’t
know
these people; he was certain that he had never seen or met them. But he knew, instantly,
what
they were.

There were two, a man and a woman. Or so it seemed. The man was fat, with a tiny pointed head, so that his silhouette was that of a huge teardrop. He sported a goatee. A fringe of wispy hair encircled the point of his skull, shaven like a monk’s tonsure. He wore sunglasses and a scarf; the rest of his habit was less easy to classify—maybe drapery and carpets hacked apart with a dull knife and placed willy-nilly on the fat body. Great grey billows of smoke exploded from him, more than could be accounted for by the thin black cheroot in the ebony holder.

The woman, too ridiculously feminine to really
be
a woman, pranced down the street as though she were the front half of a clown-horse and didn’t realize that she lacked both the costume and her partner. Her mission in life seemed to be relocating her outlandishly large breasts from one place to another. Everything else—the flaming red hair, the glistening purple lips—seemed as inconsequential as the mudflaps on a transport truck.

These were the people, Rudolfo realized, who had come to his mother’s Salon. The freakish and the misfit. The people who lived in the shadows. And these particular people moved, if not with determination, at least with purpose. Rudolfo understood suddenly that they had a harbour and a haven.

He whistled sharply. Young Samson uncoiled himself from his sitting position and caught himself short halfway through a tight, feline circling. The beast wet its lips—the tongue showing up dazzling white against the sooted fur—and let loose a passable
arf. “Ja
, Rover,” said Rudolfo. “Come, boy.” The two fell in behind the strange couple.

At night, Miss Joe’s was more conspicuous. Signs had appeared throughout the day, hastily written, the characters childlike and awkward. These were stuck to the edifice with masking tape, most at eye level, some higher, some so low they seemed designed to attract only the attention of people lounging in the gutters,
JOACHIM
’
S GOING TO DO HIS THING
,
IF YOU THOUGHT LAST NIGHT WAS BAD
,
JUST WAIT
,
COME ON IN
,
BOYS AND GIRLS
. One of the signs—better lettered than most, as if the creator had laboured at it with a touch more care—read
THE GREAT SCHUBERTO
,
THE MAGIC MAN
,
PERFORMS NIGHTLY
.

By ten o’clock in the evening these signs surrounded the thick oaken door, covered it, obscured it. By ten o’clock in the evening it took keen skills of observation, or foreknowledge, to even realize the door was there. Luckily, Rudolfo, crouched
around a corner with Samson, saw his two freakish people walk through it. He waited a few minutes and then turned to the albino leopard.

“Okay, I’m going to go in there.”

Samson trotted out onto the sidewalk, only to be hauled back into the shadowy alley, Rudolfo yanking hard upon the makeshift tether. “You better wait here.” Samson looked instantly saddened, betrayed. Rudolfo felt his heart melting, but, really, Samson had no idea of how absurd he appeared, like the offspring of animals that should have been destroyed as monsters. It wasn’t just the disguise, which truthfully worked pretty well as long as the socks didn’t fall off his ears. It was Samson himself who queered the game, largely through his efforts to act like a dog. He would come upon a fire hydrant and eagerly raise a leg, sending out a steaming stream of pee. Usually, though, he threw himself off balance, the support leg buckling, sending the cat to the sidewalk with a thud. So it would be best for him to remain outside, rather than have him attempt to beg food with a ludicrously dangling tongue, or whatever else he might have in mind.

“No, Sammy,” he whispered. “Wait out here.” And Rudolfo hurried away before he could be swayed by doleful pink eyes.

He pushed at the door and his ears were stung by the piercing howl of the hinges. He slipped through and stepped to the side, pressing his back against the wall. This is how he’d been taught to enter the cages of dangerous animals. He looked around the shadows—there were figures there, probably human, roiling in the darkness—but his attention was caught by the man trapped in the shaft of light.

In those days, it should be mentioned, Jurgen modelled his hairstyle after his hero, Preston the Magnificent. The curls were rolled and worried into geometric shapes and balanced upon one another. The creation was then virtually shellacked. Jurgen’s face was sternly set too, the dark unruly eyelids tamed by the trick of
pulling them up into his vast brow. He looked like a frightened man, or a man about to sneeze, or a man who might somehow shoot his eyes from his head as though they were peas. And yet Rudolfo thought him extremely handsome, that Jurgen’s face was one that God might make for a hero doomed to a tragic end.