The Spirit Cabinet (28 page)

Curtis found a door and rapped upon it, not at all sure that this was an effective strategy, because he had no way of telling, based on the otherworldly architecture, if this was a front or side door or some out-of-the-way service entrance, but as he rapped
and fretted the door opened and there stood Jurgen Schubert. “Hello,” he smiled, “Curtis Sweetchurch.”

“Yes, okay, let’s scurry, hi, go grab your outfit.”

But Jurgen wandered out the door without valise or garment bag. He seemed startled by the sunlight; his head twitched and jerked like that of a small animal catching the scent of something much larger.

“Jurgen,” chimed Curtis. “Aren’t we forgetting something?”

Jurgen spun around, sending his long white robe into a swirl near the bottom; it rose up and for a moment his naked, pale legs were visible. “Forgetting something?” he asked.

Rudolfo flew into sight, attempting to do up fly-buttons on a ridiculously tight pair of leather pants without stopping or even slowing down. On his upper half Rudolfo wore a white satin shirt; those buttons he’d neglected, so the shirt gaped open and displayed his smooth musculature. Curtis Sweetchurch chuckled under his breath, realizing that Rudolfo had dressed in a Kaz-like manner, and in so doing showed up Kaz for the scrawny ill-begotten pinhead he was. Curtis hated Kaz, although if Kaz ever considered changing agencies …

“Rudy!” shouted Sweetchurch. “What the
what
is your partner wearing?”

“Is robe,” pointed out Rudolfo calmly, giving no evidence of the extremely vicious argument he’d just had over that very topic. He hadn’t objected to the white robe itself—he half-admired Jurgen for making such a bold statement—but to the crudeness of the thing. It was rendered out of sackcloth and poorly tailored, the arms too long, the neck hole uneven and gaping. And someone—Jurgen himself, presumably—had attempted to embellish it with representations of the sun and moon, executed with all the talent of a four-year-old about to be advised by his kindergarten teacher to abandon art and find other pastimes.

“Well, yes, I can see that, but, you know,
hmmm?
”

Jurgen was proceeding toward the helicopter; Sweetchurch realized that time was running out, so he shrugged and scampered along. Rudolfo turned back toward the doorway and gave forth a whistle; Samson appeared almost immediately, even though moments before he’d been very deep in slumber.

Rudolfo stared at the back of the helicopter pilot’s shoulders and head. It was very odd. The man’s cap was ruined; all that remained was a visor and a thin elastic strap. Vestigial bits of serge clung to this strap, but there was nothing to cover the man’s skull. The pilot was a
Schwarze
, and his hair, tight tiny curls, had been mowed and rutted so that patterns emerged. Rudolfo stared at these and tried to make some sense of them. He gazed into the designs and was reminded of the strange jottings and scribblings back at Kramgasse 49, the faint pencilled notions of Albert Einstein.

Samson sat near Rudolfo’s feet, curled into a painful little ball between his master’s and the pilot’s seat, as if the people who’d designed the helicopter had never considered the possibility of a noble albino leopard travelling aboard. He was breathing heavily, hyperventilating, because he was scared. True, he was scared much of the time, vaguely possessed of an unlicked and amorphous fear. But helicopters made no sense to Samson. Airplanes had a birdlike logic; besides which, they were roomy and contained flight attendants. Helicopters blasted straight up toward the clouds, unexampled in the jungle or, more to the point, on any nature show on any of the four hundred and ten channels that the huge Japanese television received.

The helicopter landed atop the television studio. The entire production team clustered there, even the makeup people, so Jurgen and Rudolfo were set upon as soon as their feet touched the tarred and pebbly rooftop.

“Your big ball came,” announced the producer, whose name
was Clair. Another woman flitted about, asking what they’d like in the way of beverages and pre-taping snacks. Rudolfo tried to think of things that would be hard to locate, because he was always very impressed by the cunning and resourcefulness of television people. “Toasted zweiback,” he said, “and sweet-potato juice.”

Someone screamed, silencing the little crowd for a brief moment. A woman rushed forward and fell to her knees before Jurgen. “Oh, sweet mercy,” she whimpered, taking Jurgen’s left hand gingerly into her own, raising it upwards as though she might lay her lips to it tenderly. This woman looked around at her co-staff and shrieked, “Can you fucking believe it?”

On a list of unsettling oddities, Jurgen’s fingernails were well near the bottom. They were just long, that’s all, and uncared for. Rudolfo sighed, shrugged, and waved an exasperated hand in the direction of his friend’s hands. Still, Jurgen was rushed away by four or five flushed young people, as though there were an emergency makeup room and time was of the essence. Rudolfo didn’t see his partner again until the sounding of the brassy fanfare heralding the commencement of the Barry Reno Show.

The green room was packed—a young actress wearing what looked like rubber underwear, an elderly man who had trained his nasal flutings so that he could produce melody, Curtis Sweetchurch talking on a variety of tiny telephones, producing them from every pocket, not to mention scores of Reno Show production assistants—and in the middle of it all sat Jurgen. He had not, apparently, resisted the ministrations of the makeup people. They had shampooed his hair, and sculpted it. Curls and ringlets coiled on top of Jurgen’s head, as oddly complicated as the coifs he had given himself as a young man headlining at Miss Joe’s. But the makeup people had failed in their attempts to deal with the nails. The one on the left index finger was chipped, but
Rudolfo imagined that the rasp had suffered more damage. He imagined it shattering like a champagne glass upon contact with the thick yellowing chitin. The makeup people had also applied fleshy goo to Jurgen’s bruised eyes, the thick cosmetic forcing his lids down so that he looked dreamy, ready to fall asleep.

And though Jurgen still wore his robe, it had been brushed and de-linted and some resourceful person had managed to throw in a hem. So all in all, Rudolfo decided, Jurgen didn’t look too bad.

At that moment, a strange half-sob almost strangled Rudolfo and a tear popped from his eye. He decided that he’d go wait in the wings.

When Barry Reno shouted “Jurgen and Rudolfo!” Rudolfo’s head snapped and he was momentarily confused. Surely he could not have drifted away while standing in the shadows thrown by the velvet curtains. Still, his brain was full of that cloudy residue, the ash of dreams. Then Jurgen was beside him, peculiarly animated. He opened his mouth and hollered
“Ja!”
—the war cry they had made so long ago for moments like this. Rudolfo tried to shout
“Ja!”
but his throat produced only a small sound. He placed his hands on the huge silver ball and took a deep breath, preparatory to the physical labour required to roll the damn thing. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed Jurgen waving his hands, the long whorling fingernails trembling slightly. Suddenly the ball was in motion, and Rudolfo’s hands slipped uselessly from it.

“Let’s go,” muttered Jurgen. “It’s showtime.”

They pranced onto the stage—the audience broke into hugely enthusiastic applause—and began the Silver Ball routine, at least, the version they used for television appearances. Rudolfo’s own part required very little in the way of talent or concentration; he had merely to flip latches and make certain
that the ball was rolled into the right position to move the false panel. But the ball was not behaving exactly as it should; it quivered and bucked and if Rudolfo leaned on it even slightly it would move away as though coy. Together they opened up the huge silver ball and Jurgen climbed inside, although he didn’t jump in like the squat ex-footballer he was, but slipped in like a priestess easing into a milkbath. And as Rudolfo closed the latches the silver ball suddenly rose sharply off the ground and Rudolfo had to pull it back down. But again, he hardly noticed, because, of course, if he
did
notice then he would undoubtedly be reduced to tears, he would collapse upon the stage and sob and demand to know what was wrong with everything,
was zum Teufel ist hier los?

“Hoo boy!” he sang out desperately, tunelessly.

Rudolfo undid the latches and Samson leapt out as though springing from behind a veil of jungle greenery. He even let out a roar of formidable volume, a deep hollow death cry that stirred all the bowels in the house. Then he sank his head and vomited all over the stage.

“Oh ho!” said Barry Reno. He was a florid man with white hair that shot straight upwards from a rumpled scalp, making him seem perpetually startled. He wore spectacles with heavy, raven-black frames. Audiences liked him because, unaccountably, it had not occurred to them that he was a hateful, twisted man. “Come on, guys!” he shouted. “Come on over here and take a load off.”

Rudolfo bristled, suspicious of this phrase. It seemed vaguely sexual; perhaps Reno was making some allusion to their relationship. Their gayness was hardly a secret, but a vast percentage of the public was blithely unaware of it, preferring to conceive of them as
flamboyant
. Reno was actually forbidden to mention or hint at their sexuality—it said so in the contract. So when Rudolfo
heard
take a load off
he pushed himself into an exaggerated, manly strut, pitching his pelvis forward so that his
Schwanz
pressed against the leather of his pants.

Jurgen, Rudolfo noted out of the corner of his eye, didn’t seem to be walking toward the couch so much as floating, the burlap robes billowing out behind him as though he stood in the centre of a great storm. “Barry Reno!” shouted Jurgen. “Greetings!”

It was now Barry Reno’s turn to look confused, because guests never hailed him with such directness.

“I am very pleased to be seeing you!” continued Jurgen.

“Sit down, fellas,” said Barry Reno, ignoring this appalling politeness. “Hey, your pussy is a little under the weather, huh?” The audience roared at this. Rudolfo found himself saying, as he set his tiny bottom upon the sofa, “Is not pussy. Is leopard.”

“Ha!” brayed Barry Reno. “I thought it was a great big pussy!”

“Then,” pronounced Jurgen with some gravity, “you are an idiot.” He gathered his robes prissily and sat down on the sofa.

“Hoo boy!”

The audience, after a momentary silence, sputtered with applause.

Barry Reno’s eyes, behind his spectacles, had been redesigned into thin slits. He placed his elbows on the table in front of him and leant forward. Rudolfo became very uneasy, sensing that Reno was now out for blood. “So,” Reno hissed, very slowly, “how long have you guys been together, anyway?”

Hoping to defuse the situation, Rudolfo grinned so hugely that his cheeks ached and the tendons in his neck tightened like banjo strings. “Long time!” he shouted, praying that the loathsome Reno would move on and ask them, as he always did, to relate stories about their animals defecating on stage. He trusted that Jurgen was grinning, too, but when he turned he saw that
this was not the case. Jurgen was decidedly not smiling. He had spent the last few weeks grinning like an idiot and now, when grinning like an idiot was the thing to do, he was affecting a thoughtful, even philosophic, air. “We’ve known each other for a long time,” he said, and then he reached over with his hand and gathered in Rudolfo’s fingers. Rudolfo didn’t panic, because panicking would be deadly. Such behaviour, he thought quickly, could be excused on account of their being European. Americans thought that all European people were very free physically, Americans thought that all Europeans went to nude beaches and shared saunas and kissed each other repeatedly whenever they got within striking distance, so he thought they might let this pass, but Jurgen showed no indication of letting go. Indeed, he repositioned himself until they were more properly
holding hands
, and that was how he seemed intent on carrying out the interview, he and Rudolfo connected like an ancient couple sharing lemonade on an old porch swing.

Even Barry Reno was a bit stupefied by this. He flapped his gums a few times, adjusted his heavy ebony eyeglasses and asked, “So … is animal puke and caca a big problem for you guys?”

Jurgen ignored this question, intent on answering the previous. “I was young
Zauberer
,” he recalled. “
Aber
not really. I just knew some little tricks. And Rudolfo, he was famous lion tamer with circus.”

Rudolfo blanched emphatically. “N-no I wasn’t,” he stammered. Rudolfo was still fearful of being arrested for the murder of General Bosco. That’s what he told himself, at any rate, to explain the icy ball of guilt and shame that came to sit in his belly whenever he thought of that day, perhaps the worst of his life. “I was never lion tamer with circus.”

“Hey, guys,” chortled Barry Reno. “Get your story straight.”

“Hey, Barry Reno,” said Jurgen suddenly. “Give me your eyeglasses.”

“Oh! A little trickeroony, huh?” Reno pulled the heavy spectacles from his face and held them out toward Jurgen. Jurgen gently pulled his hand away from Rudolfo’s so that he could clutch the glasses between two thick paws. He twisted the ends in opposite directions; the plastic warped and bulged and spit out the lenses. Jurgen trod on them with his ancient leather sandals. There was a sound of small crunching. When Jurgen removed his feet there was nothing left but circles of cloudy dust. He then continued to mangle the frame, rendering the plastic almost formless. He tossed this away and then began a small game of
here’s the church, here’s the steeple
.

Barry Reno grinned appreciatively. “Okay, man,” he said. “Do it.”

Jurgen suddenly flipped his fists and opened the doors. He waggled all his finger-people under Reno’s nose. “Do what?” he asked quietly.

“You know. Make my glasses come back.”

“But Barry Reno,” said Jurgen. “You don’t need glasses.”