Night Magic (34 page)

“Yes.”

The master’s eyes flicked downward. “Your feet are wet. Is it raining?”

“A little.”

“Well, it’s that time of year.”

Michael stared. “Yes, it is…” he mumbled, watching the master, but getting nothing from him. This might well have been an exchange between parent and son, only Wurlitzer was not Michael’s father. No, he was a man—
was
that what he was?—who Michael had just witnessed give life to someone who was dead. That
was
what he’d seen, wasn’t it?

He glanced at Lena, and when he looked back, Wurlitzer had lowered his shade. He saw the eye swivel upward for an instant, briefly green. “You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that Emily called.”

“Okay. Thanks. I’ll call her tomorrow.”

Michael started for the doorway, yanking his handkerchief from his pocket to sneeze.

“Gesundheit!”
the master said.

Lena looked up. “You must be careful you don’t catch cold with those wet feet.” Were there traces of humor in her tone? Before he could reply, she had looked back at the flickering screen.

How was it possible? Surely he’d seen the master in the funeral parlor, had followed him there, yet here he was, back home, warm as toast, and as dry, without a sign of having left the room. Michael decided he had to know the truth, had to confront him. He waited in the doorway for the master to look up again, and when at last he did, Michael said, “May I speak to you for a moment?”

“Certainly, my boy. I was just thinking about retiring.”

When they were halfway down the hall, Michael stopped abruptly and said, “Why did you ask me if it was raining?”

“One likes to know something of the weather.”

“But you know it was raining. You were out in it.”

“I? Hardly. As I told you, earlier in the evening I felt extremely weary. Later I revived somewhat, Lena and I enjoyed some amount of conversation, she watched the television, I worked a bit. The time passed quickly and quite uneventfully. Nocturnal excursions in the rain are for the young and vigorous, not the moribund.”

He smiled crazily, turned his eye on Michael and made him feel its full force, but Michael stubbornly refused to accept the denial. “I saw you. At the funeral parlor. With the dead man.”

The master shook his head in mild amusement, his smile became passive. “I never stirred. You must be imagining things.” They returned each other's gaze evenly. “Still,” he hastened to add, “that’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

“What is?”

“To use your imagination. Even if it wished to put a man in two places at the same time. In any case”—he was shuffling away by now, and the words came over his shoulder—“one would have to be extremely clever to manage such a thing, wouldn’t he?” He continued on, rubbing his hollow eye socket. Then he stopped and turned, looking directly at Michael. “Very clever indeed. And what one saw, or imagined he saw, might never have happened at all, or might not have happened as he saw it, if indeed he saw it at all. You young people are always looking for miracles, looking for new ways to cure the ill, even to raise the dead. Well, my son, you have a vivid imagination, and that is good. But perhaps it is too vivid. I never left this apartment tonight, so you could not have seen me. And whatever else you imagined you saw was only what you imagined you saw. And now you must excuse me. I am old and I am tired. Good night.”

Michael stood watching him as his halting steps carried him down the hall and through the door to his room. Then Michael walked back past the living room, said good night to Lena, who didn’t hear him, and left the Wurlitzers’ apartment.

At the foot of the stairs that led up to his quarters, he stood still for several minutes, lost in thought. He should, he knew, take things in order, starting with what he had seen, with the evidence of his senses. And what had he seen? A funeral parlor, where a heterogeneous group of people, apparently led by the master, had engaged in some kind of communion with a corpse. The gathering had been joyless, the people curiously aloof from one another; the master, their leader but not their friend, had like each of them seemed isolated, separated from the living and drawn to the dead. And so he is, Michael thought; lately he showed contempt for everything alive, his conversation was filled with death…But then what had happened tonight? The ritual, for that’s what it was, had gone on for what seemed an eternity. There had been no high point, no epiphany—or if there had been, then Michael had not been aware of it. Yet when it ended, if that’s what had happened, a dead man was a corpse no more, but lay there in…what? A state of sleep? Whatever it was, his part in the ghoulish ritual over, the master had left, and now claimed absolute ignorance of all that Michael had witnessed. Why? Could the whole thing have been an illusion? Michael thought of the gray, naked corpse, the ghastly moaning of its adorers, the waxy, powdery smells in the room—all unmistakably, unforgettably real, as real as the master, with his ostentatiously dry shoes and umbrella, his questions about the weather, his coy allusions to bilocation.

Michael gripped his hair in two handfuls and pulled from sheer frustration. What could it mean? That the power he sought was somehow linked with death, that night magic entailed the clasping of cadavers as well as the performance of miracles? Well, if it came to that, Michael admitted with a shiver of horrified recognition, he would probably be willing to embrace any number of dead strangers.

T
HE DAY AFTER THE
strange, almost surreal visit to the funeral parlor, Michael was restless, moody, unable to concentrate on his work, even peevish with Lena and sullen when the master inquired, with his usual edge of irony, if anything was bothering him. That afternoon he called Emily to apologize for running off so abruptly the day before. He got her answering machine, however, so he limited his remarks to a brief apology. He had really wanted to talk to her—he needed to discuss the events of the previous evening with somebody.

In the evening he went to his room and sat alone, awake in the gathering dark, listening to the dim voices from Lena’s television, the sound of the master moving through his dreary apartment, closing and opening doors. I’m above it all, he thought, and this made him smile, although he wasn’t sure why. He stayed there, his back against the wall, listening and waiting until the whole building was quiet and still. Later he woke up; he was listing sideways, about to hit the floor. He was stiff from sitting. Unable to stand, he crawled to his bed and pulled the blanket over his face, as he had done as a child, gratefully.

In the morning, he found Wurlitzer in the theater, crouched over the wind machine for the Tempest Illusion, his head tilted at an angle so that he could scrutinize the control panel with his one good eye. As Michael approached, he unfolded himself creakily, dusting off his inevitable black jacket with impatient flicks of his arthritic fingers. “You don’t look well,” he said, with such sincerity that Michael felt a moment of alarm for himself. “You haven’t slept.”

“I slept,” Michael said coldly. Then, because the master continued to survey him with an expression of concern, he looked away, toward the empty theater, this narrow, overwrought world which seemed to him at the moment perfectly devoid of magic, and added, “I’m just restless.”

“As well you might be,” the master agreed. “You’ve been working too hard. I’ve been working too hard. Let’s take the day off and go find something really interesting.”

“I don’t know,” Michael said. His thoughts turned to the grim scene at the funeral parlor. What would it be today, the city morgue? Perhaps a dissection at the medical school?

“Nothing morbid,” the master said, reading his thoughts, as usual. “I want to go to the Cloisters and see the unicorn tapestries one more time. Have you ever been there?”

“No,” Michael admitted.

“A fascinating place, a park, a castle, full of artistic wonders. The sun is shining today, the trip will do us good.”

Michael agreed, though somewhat warily, and after breakfast at the coffee shop they boarded the IND at the Forty-second Street station. The master sat hunched over in the crowded subway car, his long hands dangling between his spread knees, his head lolling loosely on its long neck, his lips moving silently as though reciting some prayer or incantation. Today he had foregone the black patch in favor of the glass eye, and his pate was covered with an incongruous plaid cap.

Hanging on to the strap, Michael tried to imagine the master’s body unclothed; without his rumpled black suit, his tieless white shirt, he would appear somehow obscene. These items were as essential to him as the vestments of a priest, the uniform of a policeman, an English barrister’s robes and wig: emblems of office.

They got off at 190th Street, and followed along behind a group descending the long incline toward the Cloisters, the part Italian, part Spanish monastery that Rockefeller money had brought from Europe and reassembled stone by stone in that part of Manhattan. The structure seemed nevertheless entirely indigenous to the promontory on which it sat, overlooking the Hudson River. A tree-lined esplanade led past dozens of benches, where city dwellers, hungry for sunlight, fresh air, and the sight of grass and trees, sat squeezed together shoulder to shoulder, four or five to a bench; Michael and the master walked past them, eventually reaching the steps that led into the museum.

Inside, the exhibits were set out in lofty, uncluttered spaces. As he and Michael moved from one to the other, there was little that did not attract the master’s roving eye. They had purchased a catalogue, and he read aloud snatches of descriptions, pointing items out to Michael, and adding bits of his own polymath knowledge. Then he led the way into a room on whose walls hung enormous tapestries, marvels of splendid design and workmanship, featuring fantastic unicorns, fanciful snow-white beasts with delicate equine features and noble carriage, proudly displaying their long, spiral horns. The old man gazed at them for a long time; Michael was impressed by his frank, unfeigned admiration.

At last the master turned to him with a look of unwonted serenity. Nor was that the only distinction; when he spoke, his voice seemed to have taken on a kind of noble gravity, without any trace of his habitual irony or cynicism. “Unicorns are truly magical animals,” he said. “They show the imagination working at its purest and most delightful. No one ever saw one, yet everyone believed they existed; faith in them produced nothing but pleasure, and they inspired such charming works as these. Our own magic is rough and crude in comparison,” he concluded, shaking his head regretfully.

When they had seen all the rooms, and the master showed signs of fatigue, they went down to the lower level and out into the Trias courtyard. As they opened the small wooden door and stepped outside, Michael thought they had suddenly moved backward in time. A quadrilateral arcade with carved pillars supporting graceful arches surrounded a well-proportioned fountain, where colorful spring plantings had been set out between gravel walkways. There was bright light, and dark shadows, and a sudden air of tranquility. The fountain splashed softly into its basin, music could be heard from concealed speakers, a quartet of clear, harmonizing voices raised in Gregorian chant, and it was not difficult to imagine monks at their prayers, or a brother walking the arcade with a breviary in his hands, murmuring glories to God.

They moved from the courtyard into the adjoining garden, which faced southwest to the river. Two elderly ladies with sequined glasses and blue hair marveled over a statue in the center of the quadrangle, while beyond the surrounding wall, amid books and papers, a group of students was gathered on a grassy slope within the enclosure formed by a small orchard of dwarf apple trees with bright new leaves. One of the students pointed a camera at the George Washington Bridge, which could be seen through the branches. Out on the Hudson, with the Jersey Palisades for a backdrop, a solitary sloop beat its way upriver, the wind filling its sails and setting it spanking.

Michael turned to discover that the master, in order to get out of the freshening wind, had gone to sit on a stone bench in a protected corner of the garden. With evident enjoyment he sat quietly absorbing the chanting voices, his fingers laced over a crossed knee, his lips forming the O shape that was habitual with him when he was thinking. The pair of women drifted over to the wall, nodding and pointing, but the master’s eye remained on the statue they had been viewing.

The figure was life size, rough hewn from gray stone, and encrusted with spots of dark, moist-looking mold. The bearded face was mantled in a heavy cowl, the form draped in loose-fitting robes whose voluminous folds lent grace to the bulkiness of the work. One hand clasped a tome to the chest, the other held the ends of a cord serving as a belt from which depended a simple crucifix. Under the beetling forehead, with its heavy, patriarchal brows, the eyes stared blankly, the head turned to one side as if the statue were looking out to the river.

Michael took a seat on the bench beside the master, and they sat wordlessly for a time. Then, abruptly, the old man began to speak, recalling a monastery in Greece where, while traveling with his friend and colleague, the roguish Christatos, he had seen a similar statue in an equally inviting garden. “The monks invited us to dine and spend the night. After a midday meal that seemed anything but ascetic, we went into the garden, a place not unlike this one: colonnades, fountains, and several carved statues, one, in fact, something of a brother to the one you’re looking at now.” He nodded toward the statue and paused to light his pipe. “The pride of the monastery, however, was a small gold ikon of the Virgin, specially revered because of its miraculous powers. Christatos expressed a pious interest in this ikon, and we were edified by an account of the various occasions on which it had wept real tears. Interesting, is it not? You see how little new there is under the sun. An ikon—a Rembrandt—it is all the same, is it not?”