The Spirit Cabinet (12 page)

Rudolfo never dreamt, as far as he knew, but he often awoke distressed, a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. As a wet sidewalk might indicate that it had rained the night before, so his mind glistened with emotion and hinted at nightmares.

So when Rudolfo woke up, he popped his eyes open with such force that they almost produced sound. He did not, however, peel back the covers and bolt from the huge circular bed. Instead he lay perfectly still, this being some defence mechanism put into use by his limbic brain, that part of his consciousness that was prehistoric and inchoate.

Beside him, Rudolfo could see, resting atop an unreasonably firm pillow, the back of Jurgen’s head. It was remarkable that a night of slumber had done nothing to muss or ruffle Jurgen’s coiffure. Then again, Jurgen didn’t move while he slept, lying perfectly still on his side, his breath even and not quite loud enough to be called a snore. Rudolfo, on the other hand, stirred, budged and thrashed. This he knew because he often woke himself up. More precisely, he woke the animals on the bed, and they in turn screamed him into wakefulness.

Sharing the bed, at that particular time, were Samson, three Japanese bobtails, a muntjac, a mute swan, and two Flemish giant rabbits. The smaller creatures were moulded into the folds of Rudolfo’s naked body. Samson lay sprawled across the lower half of the round mattress, his mouth hanging open, his tongue dangling over the side and halfway to the plush mauve carpeting.

Rudolfo thought about what he must do that day (give the animals their breakfast, work with the panther, animal lunch and recreation, personal training—today was legs—animal dinner and baths,
die Schau
at ten o’clock that evening, fifteen hours away) and decided he must get going. He tensed then, preparatory to pushing off into the day, when his attention was caught by something most strange.

A hair.

The hair sat in the geometric centre of the back of Jurgen’s head—and such was the nature of Jurgen’s head that the geometric centre was unequivocal—and glowed. Because this hair was not merely grey (actually, Rudolfo knew there was no such thing; all grey hairs are actually bone-white), it was luminous and dazzling. Little of the dawn was able to enter the bedroom, but what little there was seemed to be trapped and reflected by this single hair, the kinky little strand that grew out of Jurgen’s head.

Rudolfo reached forward and plucked the hair from Jurgen’s scalp. He did this without thinking, but even if he
had
thought about it, he certainly couldn’t have predicted the anguished howl that came from Jurgen. The animals on the bed became a maelstrom of feathers and fur, the swan beating its wing upon Samson’s head, the rabbits finding no purchase on the satin sheets for their panicky hind legs. Jurgen flung himself out of bed, one thick hand grasping the site of the plucked hair with knuckle-whitening force, as though fearful that his brains would squirt out the tiny fissure.

Jurgen spun around to confront Rudolfo. “Vot in the hell you are doing?” he demanded in English, his voice a thick, dripping porridge of diphthongs and grunts.

Rudolfo slowly raised his hand, the hair between his fingers glowing in the shadows. “Look, Jurgen,” he said softly, “look what it is.”

Jurgen focused his eyes, his lids tensing and setting like football players on the line of scrimmage. “What?”

“A grey hair,” whispered Rudolfo.

“So what?” raged Jurgen. “I’m old enough to have a few grey hairs.”

“If I had a grey hair, I hope you would pull it out for me.”

Jurgen grimaced, and then allowed his eyelids to relax. They fell and then lumbered back up, and the anger seemed to be gone from his eyes. He said nothing, an act of kindness. He glanced down and seemed to realize then that he was naked. He pulled a bathrobe across his shoulders and disappeared.

Rudolfo remained in the bed, biting at the tip of the tongue that had said such a foolish thing. Rudolfo Thielmann could never have a grey hair, having no hair whatsoever.

He’d had hair up until his tenth year, and then it had vanished. Rudolfo remembered it disappearing overnight, although many doctors and specialists had since advised him that this was unlikely;
alopecia universalis
, they said, usually takes three or four weeks to render the body utterly without hair.

But Rudolfo recalled it this way:

He came home from school. By this point he had proven himself to be a spectacularly poor student. This was largely due to his constant exhaustion, for he managed to sleep only an hour or so per night, kept awake by the desperate merriment of his mother’s friends. He had been held back in class many times, and now his classmates were six and seven years of age. Rudolfo
towered above them, but, even so, he was the object of much bullying. Many of his tormentors adopted a morally superior stance, causing him pain on the grounds that his mother was a drug addict and a whore. Rudolfo had long ago given up trying to argue with them. For one thing, the children had no idea what any of it meant. Rudolfo, who did, conceded that it was to some degree true—his mother at least had some
connection
to these things—and so suffered his beatings in silence.

It was his daily habit to pass by the bear pits. The name
Bern
, of course, comes from
Bären, bears
. Bear was the first animal successfully hunted by the town founder, Berchtold V of Zähringen. Since the twelfth century, the creatures have been posted at the gates of the town, and the tradition of keeping this ursine sentry has continued. Today they abide in the heart of the grown city, in a square excavation at the end of a bridge spanning the River Aare. When Rudolfo was a boy the bears numbered four, two adults, two cubs. Each time he stopped by the bear pit, he would clutch the bars, pressing his face between them, and stare down at the rock ledges. He would purse his lips and make little sucking noises, which drew the attention of all the bears, the mother in particular. She would cant her head upwards and search him out, squinting. The mother always looked as if she half-remembered him, found something familiar about him but could not put her claw on it. Once or twice, she whined pitiably.

“Hallo, Mama,”
Rudolfo would call.
“Wie geht’s?”

On that day, the mother seemed distracted. She reacted to the noises, but only to execute what could well have been a yawn, opening her mouth and exhibiting her huge greyish maw for nearly thirty seconds. Then she rolled into the waterhole, because it was a hot day in August.

Rudolfo continued on his way, underneath the tower that marked the limit of the old city. It was nearly four o’clock, so he
paused to watch the exhibition of the clockworks, automatons scurrying along the miniature parapets. Then he set off toward Kramgasse 49.

The silence surrounded him when he was still well away from the apartment, before he had set foot on the sidewalk or passed under the stone archway that canopied the front door. While it was quite true that he could, ordinarily, hear nothing from the street, Rudolfo was disturbed by this profound quiet. He pushed open the door at street level and his cheek was brushed by a tiny, cold wind. He considered running to get someone at that point, an adult who would take him by the hand and lead him away with kind and consoling words, but he knew no adults. None who cared for him, anyway. So he climbed the stairs slowly. It occurred to him that the silence was no such thing; it was sound that had always been masked by the furiously merry laughter of his mother and her friends. Like wind stirring in the belly of the piano or causing the curtain chains to knock against the wall. Rudolfo took the stairs two at a time, not out of haste, but because it was what suited his too-long legs. Sometimes he would step up and his legs would wobble, as unsound as those of a newborn colt.

The apartment door was slightly ajar, which spoke volumes to Rudolfo. He pictured his mother’s friends leaving in a panic, the whole opiated gang of them stampeding through the doorway at once. He looked through the centre pane of the door, trying to see past the edges of the small curtain. He saw a foot, his mother’s huge foot, pressed into a fuzzy slipper. This seemed unreasonable to him, that he should only spy a foot, not enough to turn around and run. He pressed his fingertips against the glass and pushed. The door sighed open. Then he saw enough. Even so, he descended the staircase with admirable calm.

Which is more than can be said for the local police, who with undisguised panic received the report that a boy was trapped
in the bear pit. They flew about the station gathering up anything that might be used in the rescue: rifles, ropes, poles and billy clubs.

There was a crowd gathered around the iron railings, a curiously sedate gathering. They murmured, but in a very, very, sober-sided way, as though commenting on a scientific lecture. The reason for the orderliness of the mob, the police soon determined, was the domestic scene being enacted in the bear pit below. The cubs, almost fully grown at this point but still playful, were pushing each other into the waterhole. The father had situated himself in a corner, squeezing his furry fanny into a crevice so that he might sit upright. He held his forelegs in a curious manner; they seemed suspended in front of him as though by guywires, and this made their emptiness all the more apparent. These were paws waiting for a newspaper and pipe. And over on a small ledge, the mother was curled up and applying all of her maternal affection to a human child.

The police fired tranquilizer darts into the beasts. The crowd bristled; one or two even booed softly. After perhaps a minute the bears went down, the youngsters half-in, half-out of the stagnant water, the father with his jaw hanging open. The mother rolled onto her back, revealing that the human boy was naked and chewing contentedly on a piece of raw meat.

At the police station they placed Rudolfo inside a cell because they thought he might feel more comfortable, but also because everyone was a little afraid. The boy was, apparently, incapable of speech. He grunted and occasionally sent up howls of muddled outrage.

It was during that sleepless night—this is how he remembered it, with certainty and conviction, unswayed by the theories of professionals—that Rudolfo lost his hair. The dawn found him curled up in the centre of the cell, one eye closed, one eye warily opened, and all around him lay golden brown tufts. Every
hair on his body had come out, his eyelashes riding to the ground borne upon his tears.

In the newspapers the next day, competing with the story of
der wilde Junge
, were reports concerning Anna Thielmann. Not about her death or the manner of it (which was in truth a little suspect) but the revelation that Anna Thielmann was a man. This was not in any way ambiguous. She, rather
he
, was anatomically intact, nothing added or subtracted, except for a little hair. Above the knee and below the neck Anna’s body was covered with tiny dark curls. Authorities then remembered that he/she had had a child, but when they went to look, found no one. In the meantime,
der wilde Junge
had been sent to live in a huge grey building. It called itself a vocational school,
eine Berufsschule
, but truly it was an institution that dealt with society’s young oddities by hiding them from view and pretending they didn’t exist.

Rudolfo climbed out of bed, grabbed the hairpiece from its stand and fixed it carefully on his slippery head. The wig made him look like he needed a haircut, an effect that cost many thousands of dollars to achieve.

He found himself standing in the shadow of the hideous monstrosity, number 112 in Preston’s catalogue. Rudolfo did not know it was called the Davenport Spirit Cabinet, nor would he have cared.

The lefthand door was open. Rudolfo peered inside. The interior was rough unfinished wood, stained only by time. The single bench was cockeyed, tilted lamely toward the middle.

The albino leopard joined him, laying his pale snout upon the bench. He pulled back sharply, having gotten a whiff of something foul and decayed. The skin on the beast’s neck wrinkled up like an old dirty sweatsock.

Rudolfo left the bedroom and began to prowl around the mansion, Samson at his side.

He was reaching a few decisions. One, he and Jurgen needed some time apart. This display of petulance and irritability was only the latest in a series of similar outbursts. Actually, the series was one of disdainful glances and hard, dark silences, but it made Rudolfo marvel to think that all it took was a tiny little thing like a plucked hair to escalate one of these into a maniacal rage.

A lemur scurried underfoot, and squealed pitiably as Samson mashed it into the tiles. Rudolfo, lost in a thought, didn’t notice.

His thought was this: Jurgen was not without justification. Rudolfo was willing to shoulder a certain small amount of the responsibility. For example, he
was
reluctant to change the Show. Mind you, that was because it was damn near perfect, as any idiot could see, but perhaps there was some tiny tinkering that could be done—

And then Rudolfo had an idea. He wasn’t sure if he got the idea and then started whistling, or if some nether region of his psyche, the font of creativity, had caused his lips to purse and emit a tuneful flutter, which in turn gave him this wonderful idea.

The music. He could, he would, change the music. And he knew exactly what to do.

He rushed off to find Jurgen, and such was his excitement that he checked several of the other rooms—the Music Room (essentially, a large speaker with a sofa in it), the Trophy Room (where the three silver cups sat, laden with dust, the stands o’ermounted with tiny, naked swimming boys)—before reluctantly admitting that Jurgen was likely in the Grotto, his nose stuck inside the old and dusty books. So he descended the staircase—Samson heeling like a bulldog, although Rudolfo’s abrupt about-turns caused the leopard to go skidding into the occasional wall—and ran down the hallway.

The stone, the remote-controlled boulder, was rolled into place, blocking the entranceway to the Grotto. Jurgen had
replaced the batteries, Rudolfo realized, which irritated him. It seemed like a great deal of trouble to go to, locating batteries in their huge house. Jurgen must have sent Jimmy out to purchase them, or demanded the same of Tiu, the housekeeper. But Jurgen had obviously found it important enough to block off the doorway that he was willing to undergo this battery-changing hell. Rudolfo snorted, and because his nostrils lacked cilia and filament, they produced a loud whistle that brought half a dozen animals running. Rudolfo knelt down to receive them.