The Spirit Cabinet (29 page)

“What?”

“Take a look around everywhere.” Jurgen gesticulated at the vast television studio. “You can see hunky-fine.”

Barry Reno’s head jerked up. He lowered his eyelids against the glare of the lights and peered into the recesses of the room. “Hmmm.” He turned to his left and then his right, then sought out his producer and raised his eyebrows in nervous bewilderment. “Huh,” said Barry Reno, repeating the sequence in reverse, this time ending up gazing at the far wall, some three hundred feet away. “Well, this is the damnedest thing.” He cleared his throat and spoke to the studio audience. “I can see, I mean, everything is very clear and … how the hell did you do that?”

“Oh,” said Jurgen, “is just little trick.”

Curtis Sweetchurch, sitting in the green room, wasn’t paying much attention to the little monitor, concentrating instead on one of the young production assistants, an overly healthy boy whose skin almost exuded a miasma of vitamins and vegetable juices. But the actress in the rubber underwear said, “Wow, did he really fix his eyes?” and Curtis shrieked, “Oh, yes, he did, baby! He’s the miracle man!”

“I wish he would do that for me,” said the actress, pulling out the front of her gear to give her breasts a little breathing space. “I’m just about blind.”

The old man with the whistling nose (who annoyed Curtis quite a bit, because the wrinkled old bogue actually couldn’t
stop
his damn nose from whistling) announced, “I don’t buy any of it. Reno was just pretending. It’s all a fake.”

“Oh yeah,” agreed the actress sadly.

That’s what most people would think, thought Curtis. Pausing to reflect, Curtis realized that’s what
he
thought. He then had a good idea, one of a handful that had visited him during his
lifetime. He pulled a telephone out of his pocket and stabbed at buttons, connecting with Information.

So it was that, as the television show waned following a nasally fluted performance of Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” Barry Reno glanced at his producer, looked briefly confused and then announced, “Oh, hey. I guess there’s an optometrist or something here gonna check my eyes and see if old Jurgen and Rudolfo really did pull off a little bit of magic.”

Dr. Kenneth Beaver came onto the stage awkwardly, a lettered chart held in front of him like a shield. Dr. Beaver was an unsightly looking man and a poor dresser. The suit he’d thrown on—having received the frantic phone call from Curtis Sweetchurch—was threadbare and flecked with old, dried soup. As the credits rolled, Dr. Beaver pointed to lines of type, the letters ranging variously from huge to minuscule. Barry Reno rhymed off their names without hesitation and only toward the end, when the figures ran together in a grey smear, did he squint and grimace. In the show’s last moments, Dr. Beaver said, “Excellent. Better than excellent. In fact, Mr. Reno’s vision seems to be about thirty/twenty, which puts him in a range of sightedness shared by approximately only three per cent of the adult population.” Mind you, much of that statement went unheard by the television audience because the producers, having heard the word “excellent,” went to commercial.

And at the George Theater, in an old dressing room with velvet curtains and an ornate daybed, Miranda said “Huh!” and wiggled her long toes. Her toes were framing the portable black-and-white television set, at least they were from Miranda’s point of view, because she had her feet propped up on a huge puffy ottoman. She herself was pushed back in an easy chair, surrounded by luxuriant, if ancient, cushions.

Preston was pacing around the dressing room, agitated by
the lust he’d been accumulating since his teenaged years. He lit a cigarette with trembling hands, although another burned in an ashtray in the corner.

Both Miranda and Preston were stark naked, having just coupled with sweat-popping fervour. Which is to say, Preston’s large and amorphous form was studded with milky droplets that rose out of his grey skin and beaded at the end of his body hair. Miranda was not so damp, merely suffused by a vaguely skunky radiance. “Now how in hell did the boys do that?” she wondered aloud.

Preston threw a slope-shouldered shrug. “First off,” he said, “Rudolfo did nothing. Second of all, you’ve got to examine your assumptions.”

“Right,” said Miranda. “Because all magic, all illusion, is predicated on the fact that human beings make assumptions.”

“Hey! Who’s the pedantic asshole around here?”

“You. Sorry.”

“So in this particular case, the assumption is made long before Jurgen ever shows up onstage.”

“Which is?”

“Well, we assume that because Barry Reno is wearing glasses that he
needs
them.”

“Hey. That’s right.”

“Reno just thinks he looks more intelligent with glasses on.”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“Yeah, yeah. Everybody knows that.”

“Really?”

“Okay, maybe I don’t
know
, but it seems highly probable.”

“
Highly probable
don’t get to cut the cake, Presto.”

“Look. Jurgen is in the right position to look through Reno’s glasses. He sees that the lenses are just plain glass, so he decides to pull the stunt. Remember what he said?
But Barry Reno
, he said,
you don’t need glasses
. Right on. So then the doctor
comes, he does the little eye test, Reno has great vision, and no one ever thinks to ask Barry if he ever needed the spectacles in the first damn place.”

“I dunno,” mused Miranda. “That seems awfully intelligent for the boys.”

“I guess you have to give them notice, huh?” demanded Preston.

“Say what?”

“You have to give the boys notice. Right? You can’t just quit, you know, you can’t leave them in the lurch.”

Miranda seemed not to have thought about this. “I guess so,” she shrugged. The ensuing ripple effect made Preston weak-kneed. “Yeah,” continued Miranda. “I’ll give them plenty of notice so that they have time to replace me. Mind you I’m the best there is.”

Miranda actually experienced a little pang of guilt, because she felt she owed the boys something. After all, at a time when things looked very bleak, they’d offered her employment. Of course, they’d had their own selfish motives—they knew she’d learnt a few things from Emile Zsosz, Master of the Black Art.

They, the boys and Miranda, had become acquaintances, in a strange manner, following the conversation at Shecky’s Olympus in which Miranda informed Rudolfo about the existence of Tony Anthony. Rudolfo took the audio cassette entitled “YOU!” back to the Tophet and played it for Jurgen, who had not reacted to begin with. There was a soccer game on the antique television set, the screen blizzarding with electronic snow, but Jurgen stared at it with his stained eyes pried apart.

“Listen,” said Rudolfo, plugging in the tape. He pressed the play button. After many, many empty moments, a spit-polished voice hollered,
“You!!”

Jurgen didn’t budge, didn’t even blink, he merely continued
to watch the soccer players swimming in the static. Rudolfo, on the other hand, jumped two feet in the air. “
You
are nothing!” screamed the man on the machine. “
You
are insignificant!
You
are nothing!”

Jurgen rose suddenly, crossed over to the television and poked at it with a thick forefinger, silencing the storm. “
You
are but a germ infesting the body of society,” continued Tony Anthony. Jurgen cocked his head in order to be more attentive, a strange half-smile playing upon his face. It was unlikely that he comprehended anything other than the frantically shouted
you
’s. Rudolfo understood more, but was unclear as to what precise point Tony Anthony was making. Surely he didn’t think he was telling Jurgen and Rudolfo anything they didn’t know. Here they were, lost in a desert, their haven a stable rendered out of clapboard and flypaper. “
You
are nothing,” Tony Anthony repeated, and Rudolfo actually snorted. “Tell me about it,” he thought sardonically, he who had been a blind bald beggar on the storm-buffeted streets of Münich.

Still, it wasn’t long before Tony Anthony’s voice began to raise their spirits. Jurgen and Rudolfo started to breathe heavily, drawing in great draughts of dry desert air. They began to rock back and forth on the balls of their feet to flex their muscles and by the end of Side A, they were both ballooned with hormones, the pasty smoothness of their skin marbled with ropey vein. At the end of Side B they shouted “
Ja!
” in frenzied unison, and then they raced out of the Tophet and began to put their lives in order.

Among their first stops was Shecky’s Olympus, where Jurgen joined merrily in the mortification, trying to shed the sad dimpled fat hanging over his belt, American fat he’d acquired in an American way, motionless with his eyes glued to a television set. Jurgen had never worked out with much frequency, but he was a much more gifted athlete than Rudolfo. Having descended the long stairs into the sweaty gymnasium, he lay down on a
crunch board and immediately cranked out a rapid series of sets, thirty crunches each, ten seconds rest. When he was through, sweat had collected on the ridges of his forehead. He next arched his body across a bench and began to launch a fifty-pound dumbbell from the ground to the emptiness above him. When he was done that, the sweat spilled over and filled his eyes.
“Ja!!”
he screamed, exultant with pain.

“Jurgen, this is Miranda,” said Rudolfo, pointing to the woman who lay on a mat in the middle of the room, her body fashioned into an enormous pretzel.

“Guten Tag,”
said Jurgen, but he didn’t pay her any further attention. He leapt up, took hold of the chin-up bar and raised his legs, the resultant angle having a mathematical precision, ninety perfect degrees. His stomach was, for the time being, cowed into submission and merely ached dully. Once he stopped, the muscles would flame up and probably disintegrate, so he didn’t allow himself any respite. Rudolfo felt Jurgen was being very rude. He was, it’s true; then again, Jurgen was unintentionally rude to most people. Manners were not highly prized in the Schubert household, where brute bullying was the only force that conferred any advantage. Rudolfo, tsking his tongue in his partner’s direction, decided to make amends. He was forgetting, for some reason, that he was a rude person himself, his rudeness arising out of a surly haughtiness. “So,” he asked, “what you do?”

“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.