The Spirit Cabinet (30 page)

The nightclub was encased in glass on the roof, so that the night sky surrounded the patrons. When that sky was cloudless, the stars seemed to bump up against the glass like confused little birds. Sometimes, though, the mere presence of The Oasis, substance in the middle of nothingness, caused puffy little thunderheads to form, and rain and lightning banged the glass rumbustiously and demanded entry. Quite often—and such was the case on the evening that Jurgen and Rudolfo chose to visit—both climes occurred together, the storms lasting about half an hour, followed by short periods of fineness.

Jurgen and Rudolfo doubled the size of the audience.

“Ja,”
said Rudolfo, “I am having green chartreuse.”

Rudolfo addressed this comment to the strange person standing beside their table, who, despite nurse’s shoes and a white frock with the name “Flora” stitched above the breast pocket, looked for all the world like Bertie Vogts, one of Jurgen’s football heroes. Suddenly nostalgic, Jurgen ordered a beer, even though beer was on the “Forbidden Foods” list that Rudolfo maintained. The list was not written down anywhere, but no less tangible for that; it was so familiar to Jurgen that he fancied he knew which position beer occupied—three, just underneath
bratwurst
(one) and
zabaglione
.

“Ladies and gentlemen …” A husky voice sounded in the room, an accent shading all of the words, which, oddly, made them easier for Jurgen to comprehend. “It is our privilege to introduce the Master of the Black Art, Emile Zsosz.” Jurgen and Rudolfo applauded politely. Music began abruptly, the phonograph needle bumping off the first note and clearing three full bars before settling again. It was Ravel’s “Boléro,” realized Rudolfo. It had been one of the favourites at his mother’s Salon. The recording, he recalled, consisted of four thick plastic plates. In the middle of the long crescendo, the music would suddenly stop and everyone—all of the artistes and all of the models—would hurry to replace the disc. Even those most somnambulant with drugs would somehow launch themselves toward the antique machine.

In the middle of that memory, someone turned off the house lights, plunging everything into a faintly starlit darkness. The night sky pressed upon the glass all around. The moon was shaped like a scimitar, the stars scattered like seeds of light.

The stage before them was shrouded in shadow. A point of light appeared some six feet above the ground, then shot suddenly down, the point elongating until it met the ground and revealed itself as a long, gleaming zipper. Then the zipper came apart, starting at the top. A tiny metallic razoring sound filled
The Oasis. When the zipper was fully opened, hands appeared between the parted teeth and pushed the two sides apart. Through this rent in the air stepped Emile Zsosz.

He would have been a spectacularly handsome man, thought Rudolfo, when he was young. This would have been, oh, around the time of the French Revolution. No, no, that was just a joke; Zsosz wasn’t that old, only a hundred and ten or so, but he seemed more ancient due to his bizarre efforts to appear otherwise. For example, his hair was dyed jet-black, and where there was no hair Zsosz’s scalp itself was japanned. He had drawn black eyebrows over his dull grey eyes with a trembling hand so that his expression was all things all at once: terror, surprise, jollity. Zsosz’s most prominent facial feature was his moustache, which blew from the sides of his mouth like the wings of an small airplane. It, too, had been painted black, and where it met the philtrum the connection had been filled with ink. His nose was still fine, although it was spiderwebbed with veins and leaked white stuff. The rest of Zsosz’s face had been dulled by time, just as stones are smoothed by the sea.

Emile Zsosz wore a robe, an ornate silk affair that featured intricate stitching and brocade. He raised and spread his arms—the silk of the sleeves forming two perfect semicircles—and doves appeared on his palms; no, not doves, Rudolfo saw suddenly, but cloud pigeons from Madagascar, extremely rare, the name derived from the fluffy immature down which the birds retained into adulthood. The cloud pigeons flew away and in their stead were two crows—actually, Rudolfo saw, Icelandic ravens—birds as black as soot. They bounced up and down on Zsosz’s pale palms like heavyweight contenders aching to get a poke at the other guy. Then these birds, too, were gone.

The old man remained with his arms outstretched, motionless except for a trembling of the fingertips, tiny in amplitude but of such frequency that it likely produced a pitch that dogs
could hear. The silken robe began to move to the side, although the head remained where it was, and after a few seconds the two parts of Zsosz’s body were separated by a good five feet. The head, floating in the air, didn’t seem to care about this situation, particularly; it spun like a moon and wore an expression of stale melancholy. Across the stage, the hands rose up; between the fingers of one was a cigarette, and upon the palm of the other a tiny ball of blue flame. The hands brought these two together, so that the cigarette’s end glowed and smouldered and mare’s tails of grey smoke ribboned through the darkness. Then one of the hands threw the cigarette toward the head. Emile Zsosz opened his mouth slightly to receive it and the ancient man was soon puffing away happily.

Clouds had been bumping up against the tower in the desert, clinging to the dirty windows; The Oasis was now yoked by a dark cumulus ring. Suddenly a wheel of lightning spun about the glass and brickwork like the rotor on a child’s toy. It lit the innards of the nightclub with the power of a battery of kliegs, and there was no mystery now. Emile Zsosz stood, humbled as though naked, which of course he was not; he was wrapped from the neck down in a black leotard, the bulge of his hernia disquietingly visible. And the “body” did indeed have a head, although it was sheathed in an eyeless hood.

The lightning completed its journey to heaven—lightning bolts drive upwards, not down—and the stage was once more darkened. Zsosz’s head was again disembodied, but a change had come over it. His eyes were gone, leaving little nests of wrinkles in their stead. The tip of his tongue stuck out from between his lips. And what little colour there’d been in the head abruptly disappeared, leaving behind a paleness that cut the shadows like a beacon.

The head plummeted and met the stage with a dull thud.

The body in the silken robe was suddenly animated. An arm
lifted, the fingers groped about in the emptiness above and Miranda’s face appeared. She fell to her knees and gathered in the old man’s head; she bent over and covered the withered mouth with her own. She huffed and puffed into the head as though she could inflate the rest of Emile Zsosz. But it soon became clear that she could not, and she broke her lips away, lifted her head and said, very quietly, “Someone want to get the lights?”

The overheads flickered and filled the room with purple fluorescence.

Jurgen and Rudolfo rose from their seats and moved closer, seemingly to help, although neither knew the first thing about first aid, and both knew that Emile Zsosz was a long way past aid of any kind. All that they could think to do—and they thought of it at pretty much the same time—was to look at the beautiful weeping woman and ask, “Do you want new job?”

The young woman Tiu had not been cleaning
das Haus
with the zeal and discipline for which she was renowned. Why, she had not been cleaning at all; in fact, she not been spotted by Rudolfo for many, many days.

(Tiu had gone to live in Yellowknife, where, she believed, the arctic air would kill airborne germs and mites. This move was financed by a strange and mysterious man who had given her a lot of money, more money than she could have made in seven years of featherdusting. Tiu did not intend to give up feather-dusting, of course; it was more passion than occupation. In exchange for all this money, Tiu had drawn a crude map of
das eindrucksvollste Haus im Universum
. She had scratched a circle around the lopsided representation of the Grotto, had drawn a thick
X
through the window that was most proximate. The strange man had rolled up the piece of paper between his thin, bony hands. He had laughed in an unseemly manner, and Tiu suddenly smelled death and decay.)

Rudolfo considered placing a phone call and hiring a new maid, but he couldn’t see himself allowing a stranger into
das Haus
. So he elected to clean up the place himself. He had some notion of how this sort of thing was accomplished, although he’d never really done it. Since he’d become world-famous there were servants to do that sort of thing. Before he’d become world-famous, he’d had nothing, and nothing rarely needed straightening up. Before that he’d lived at the circus, and you don’t clean up circuses. Before that, he’d lived in stainless-steel institutions. Before that, he’d lived in a walk-up at Kramgasse 49, and his mother didn’t care about order, and besides, one of the previous residents had written all over the walls, so why bother?

But Rudolfo intuited that cleaning was a simple matter of methodical disposition. So look, here is a magazine on the floor, when it should be instead on the coffee table, or what would be a coffee table if anybody in the gloomy
Haus
ever drank coffee. Rudolfo bent over and plucked it up. It was a
Personality
magazine. He recognized the distinctive lettering before he recognized that he himself was pictured on the cover. Jurgen and Rudolfo. Curtis Sweetchurch must have brought, or sent, the issue over. Curtis had mentioned that the Reno show had raised their recognition factor significantly. Rudolfo considered the show a complete debacle, of course, a disaster from Samson’s listless puking, through Jurgen’s adolescent hand-holding, to the very undramatic mangling of Reno’s thick spectacles.