The Spirit Cabinet (34 page)

But the worst insult, the most evil transgression, was
Jurgen’s sudden introduction of half-learned, poorly planned effects. A case in point was the Hindu goddamn Rope Trick. Jurgen would come onstage dragging his length of rope behind him as though it were a slaughtered snake. Rhonda Byng would circle around him, executing muted balletic leaps. Rudolfo would stand off in the wings and scowl. The trick differed each time out. But even Rudolfo would have to admit that the effect progressed and transformed and was now nearing a point where they could consider
rehearsing
the fucking thing.

One show—ten o’clock Saturday, the busiest night, one or two extra people crammed into the already packed house—Jurgen dragged the rope to centre stage and allowed it to drop unceremoniously. “
Ja
, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “is much ballyhooed Hindu Rope Trick. I alone in accident um capable of unrivelling the arcanada.”

Rudolfo, standing in the shadows, snapped his fingers and made a mental note to hire a writer to punch up that introduction.

Jurgen bent over, picked up the end of his rope and threw it upwards. With very little apparent effort, it rose in the air and stayed there. The end of the rope slowly bent back and forth, responding to an ethereal breeze.

“
Ja
, dat’s good!” said Jurgen, and the audience broke into applause. Rhonda Byng stood beside the rope and clapped with the enthusiasm of a three-year-old. Rudolfo made a mental note to fire her ass—which, he noticed, wasn’t big enough to excite the old farts from Pasadena.

Jurgen held both hands in front of his face, palms turned inwards, and summoned spit from deep pockets inside his mouth. He then horked twice, depositing bullets of saliva and sputum into the centre of each hand. He rubbed them together rapidly and his hands began to glow, as though the rubbing excited some phosphor that powdered the skin. Then he slapped his hands across his butt; his hands seemed to cool and turn greyish.

Taking hold of the rope, he pushed and pulled, like he was checking the trueness of a knot. Grunting with satisfaction, he leapt aboard the trembling, standing strand. He wrapped his legs around it and shinnied up with surprising speed. The flimsy erection teetered and wobbled. At one point, the thick twist went wowing way out toward the audience, threatening to toss Jurgen onto the laps of a young honeymooning couple in the front row. “Whoa!” Jurgen shouted musically, and as he neared the couple he flicked his eyebrows quickly, almost lecherously, as though, in the moment that he was proximate to them, he had been able to understand and characterize their situation—that they had been married that afternoon and were impatient and bristling with hormones.

Jurgen never achieved the top of the rope. As he neared it, the rope abruptly collapsed, lifeless, collecting sloppily upon itself on the floor of the stage. Jurgen landed on his ass with a very loud thump. Rhonda Byng appeared beside him and cocked her arms, throwing one hip out sideways. People began to applaud hesitantly. It took a moment or two to get going, but before long the audience members were clapping with brutish enthusiasm. Some even screamed and whistled like football hooligans. Jurgen stood up and rubbed his butt vigorously. Rudolfo ventured out onto the stage, acknowledging the roar only curtly. Jurgen reached out and took Rudolfo’s hand into his own. Tugging hard, Jurgen drew his partner forward to accept the ovation.

“So,” announced Preston, although it was said in the middle of the night, and there was much about the word that was a sigh, “enough about me. What about you?”

Miranda rolled over in the bed. “I don’t mind talking about me,” she said, “but I’d just like to make a point of clarification. We don’t talk about you.”

“We don’t?”

“We do not.” She locked her fingers and made a cradle for the back of her head. “Mostly we talk about your father.”

Preston grunted.

“You know, you hold the grunt in too high esteem as a conveyance of meaning and/or emotion.”

“I just didn’t realize I talked about the old man that much, that’s all.”

Although it occurred to him that the last story he had told Miranda—the tale that occupied the spell between their love-making and this new, rather awkward silence—had had to do with Preston the Magnificent, and the time his father had gone to Africa as part of a contingent of do-gooders and well-wishers
from the United Nations. Preston couldn’t imagine what had persuaded his father that this was a sound career move and suspected that one of the organizers was a comely young woman. Preston the Magnificent was always getting his head twisted by comely young women. He would become hopelessly and helplessly fuck-foundered and could be made to do most anything. So that is likely why he boarded a small airplane along with Martha Raye and Shecky Greene. The entertainers landed in Timbuktu; from there they were piloted up the Niger River, finally arriving at the junction with the Bani, and the city of Mopti. Then they went by jeep and donkey to the village of Sangha. The people there were the Dogons, which signified nothing to Preston the Magnificent, although he should have done a little research, because the Dogon people were magicratic, governed by wizards. They were not especially grand or powerful wizards, just men who shared a few secrets and knew a few basic moves. They could pull beetles from their ears, they could make stones fly, invisibly, from one hand to the other. So the people were not at all impressed with Preston the Magnificent when he performed the same illusions (producing a bouquet of flowers from a gleaming pan, translocating silver coins), thinking him simply some bureaucrat visiting from afar. They watched his act with heavy lids and stifled yawns. Even Shecky Greene, who, not surprisingly, spoke not a word of the Dogon dialect, did better, repeating his punchlines at greater and greater volume until the audience laughed in an effort to quiet him. Preston the Magnificent seethed inwardly and redoubled his efforts. He performed tricks he’d never attempted in public (including a multiple card production shown to him by his plump and splay-footed teenaged son, a knucklebuster that the boy did with infuriating ease) but the Dogon remained unimpressed. Preston the Magnificent likely knew more magic tricks than anyone in the world, but he soon ran out. The people stared at him. He
stared back. He stared at the faces, at the frowns, the mouths slack and displaying varying degrees of toothlessness. He was on the verge of giving up, on the verge of bowing curtly and backing away, on the verge of finding a bottle to consume and a woman to shag mercilessly, when a thought occurred. He righted himself (he’d been slouching, despite his own admonition “bearing betrays breeding”) and took a step forward. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he intoned grandly, “I hereby present the greatest wonder of my confraternity.” And with that, Preston the Magnificent reached up and removed his false teeth.

The Dogon gasped, their eyes popped wide. They erupted with applause, with loud whistles and cheers. Preston the Magnificent always held that as his finest moment, and immediately amended his resumé to indicate that he was an honorary leader, an elder, of the Dogon people.

“Okay then,” said his son, Preston the Adequate, “enough about the old man. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well, you’re in kind of an odd line of work. How’d you end up being a box-jumper?”

“Thaumaturgical assistant.”

“Yeah.”

Miranda bit her lip and considered her answer, weighing certain sorts of honesty. For example, she could easily answer, “Coincidence” or, more portentously, “Fate,” and then list the chain of events that brought her from Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, to Las Vegas, Nevada. She’d awoken one morning, at the age of eighteen, looked out the window and seen, across her father’s endless fields, the huge tents and metal wheels of the Hickey and Winchester Circus and Fair. She didn’t throw her belongings into a gunnysack and leave that day. She waited until the late afternoon before venturing near, and even then she just hung on the periphery, her hands driven deep into the pockets of
her Levis, her back humped bashfully. Young carnies grinned and whistled at her, handsome young men decorated with tattoos. Miranda appreciated this; at least, minded it a lot less than the sputtering, crimson-faced leering that the menfolk of Maple Creek seemed to feel was discreet. She ventured nearer. Arranged around the big top were several small tents—“blow-offs,” in the argot of the trade—and these attracted her the most. It’s hard to say why. An easy answer would be that each tent could only accommodate fifteen or twenty people, and Miranda felt she could cope with fifteen or twenty people. She also liked the signs that were erected outside, signs with garish illustrations and bold lettering. One showed a woman, dancing, turned away, her naked body draped with transparent veils. “
SALOME
” announced letters that curved and bulged in an attempt to look foreign. Another sign heralded the The Amazing Leonidas and showed him to be a gaunt man, his face made even longer by the spiked goatee that descended from his chin. Both these tents were to have special significance for Miranda. Her first job was to dance as Salome, to parade about a tiny stage dropping uneven squares of nylon. Even though the last veil revealed nothing close to nakedness (she kept on a beaded bra and diaphanous diaper arrangement that somebody thought appropriate), the Bod’s portrayal of Salome brought with it arrests and show closures. This is how Miranda ended up assisting the Amazing Leonidas, who did indeed own a goatee. That was all he had in common with the likeness painted outside. The flesh and blood Leonidas was too much of the former (he weighed three hundred if he weighed a pound) and too little of the latter (he was pale and doughy).

But it was neither of these tents that made Miranda steal out of the farmhouse at three-thirty in the morning with a small collection of underwear and sweats. The tent that got her sat apart from even the blow-offs. The canvas was painted light blue and festooned with puffs of white, so that from certain low angles
it disappeared into the sky. A sign erected beside it read:
THE MUSEUM OF NATURAL WONDERS
.

Miranda moved toward the tent. After all, she herself was by way of being a natural wonder. She pulled the canvas apart at the opening and slipped into the shadows.

There were a number of wooden tables arranged haphazardly. The nearest supported a large glass bottle, a carboy stopped with a thick cork. Inside the bottle, swimming in a cloudy little sea, was a tiny dead calf with two heads. Miranda shrugged and blew a little raspberry. After all, she’d seen that sort of thing before. Monsters come each birthing season on a farm, one or two anyway. There was a sheet of paper, covered with uneven typewriting, Scotch-taped onto the table. Miranda took a step closer:
ANOMALIES OF
EMBRYONIC
CONSTRUCTION AND
IMPERFECTIONS
IN THE
GENETIC
ENCODING CREATE THE
HIDEOUSITY
THAT YOU SEE BEFORE YOU
. She moved away.

The next table held a model of a cathedral, a tall magnificent cathedral, rendered out of long, thin pieces of what she guessed was alabaster. Again, there was a piece of paper taped to the table. Miranda read: OLIVER HARWIN GREER,
OF KNOXVILLE
, T
ENNESSEE
,
RENDERED THIS
PERFECT
COPY OF KING
’
S CHAPEL
,
OXFORD
,
EMPLOYING ONLY THE
BONES
OF
ABORTED
FETUSES
.

“Nice hobby,” said Miranda and turned around, because it was her intention to leave the tent which had definitely become creepy. Then she saw the horn.

Miranda didn’t know it was a horn, she knew only that something very strange stood upon a table some feet away. It was perhaps a foot high, and curled like soft ice cream settled into a cone. The thing was covered with hair, short, hard bristles of dark hues. The paper (a much whiter sheet than the others, covered with typewriting made with a newer, more tractable machine) said,
THIS
HUMAN HORN
WAS CUT FROM THE
FOREHEAD
OF ANTOINETTE KINGSLEY
of LAS VEGAS,
NEVADA
.

Miranda reached out a long forefinger and ran it down the horn’s length. She was, she supposed, trying to determine its authenticity; at least, that was the best and only reason she could give for touching the thing. She ran her finger down and then ran it back up again, disturbing and exciting all the tiny bristles, which were much, much softer than they appeared.

It occurred to Miranda that beauty and monstrosity could live next door to each other. What set her into motion was the corollary: where beauty and monstrosity co-exist, all things must be possible.

So she ran away with the circus.

Not only had Preston had very few relationships in his lifetime, he’d had very few conversations. This one now ranked as the oddest. He took out a deck of blue-backed Bees and sought grounding in the familiar. He ran some cards, threw off, ran some cards, threw off, his mind silently chanting a mathematical equation that would set up the ducats for Dai Vernon’s Poker Display, which, he hoped, he had never shown Miranda.