The Spirit Cabinet (36 page)

He was startled to feel, suddenly, Jurgen’s hand on the small of his back, the fingertips slipping just underneath the elastic of his tiny trunks. The hand dove in, cupping first one pumping buttock, then the other, over and over again, as if maddened by choice. Rudolfo’s penis sprouted, pushing easily out the front. Fingertips brushed the base of his scrotum, and Rudolfo shivered and the motion of his cycling was for an instant all confused, then he found the rhythm, and settled into it, and matched his breathing to it. He folded his arms across the handlebars and laid his head upon them. The fingers slowly climbed his shaft, and then they encircled the head, and as Rudolfo came he threw himself bolt upright and saw flashes of light, so intense he was nearly blinded. And that is why, many minutes later, he mistrusted, and discounted, his impression that he had been the only man reflected in the mirror.

It was to Searchlight—a tiny town clinging to the edge of the Mojave Desert—that Edgar Biggs McGehee (Eddie’s grandfather) first repaired with the Collection, after making his bargain with Harry Houdini. Edgar lived in a small hut, not much bigger and certainly no better constructed than the Spirit Cabinet. Eddie, out of homage to his forefather, left this structure standing, although he himself lived in a huge mansion a hundred yards away.

And it was to Searchlight—a tiny mote on the Nevada road map—that Rudolfo came.

He was driven by Bob, that being the name of the mysterious dark chauffeur. At least “Bob” was what Rudolfo called him, although the driver himself, stabbing a thumb into the middle of
his chest, produced a sound that was bracketed on each end by plosion and plosive, the middle a long, drawn-out sheep’s yodel.

Bob had driven to Searchlight with unerring steadiness. Indeed, he was turning out to be quite the best chauffeur Rudolfo had ever employed. He was respectfully silent, communicating mostly with humble nods and half-bows. He understood his employer and his desires. So, for instance, when Rudolfo handed Bob a piece of paper with the word “Searchlight” scrawled upon it (in Curtis Sweetchurch’s loopy and hasty handwriting), the driver merely stared at it for a long moment and then nodded. His one fault was an unnecessary musicality. He whistled much of the time, a fluttering sound that rode high in the air. Sometimes he added percussion, slapping at his own body with his ink-black, creamy-palmed hands. And occasionally he would alarm his passenger by pumping at the gas and brakes in funky rhythm.

Bob stopped the limo at the end of a long driveway. He leapt out, threw open the rear door and stepped back in order to allow Rudolfo grand and ceremonial egress from the car. Rudolfo stepped out and immediately wilted. “Fuck …” he moaned. “Is hot like hell.”

“Hot,” agreed Bob. Or at least, he echoed it, grinning widely, as if he found the very voicing of the word amusing.

Rudolfo began to perspire, the heat sucking moisture out of his body. Because he lacked hair, the sweat ran freely from underneath his wig and baseball cap and flooded his eyes, blinding him. He held out his hand and Bob lifted his elbow and offered to guide. Rudolfo held the black man’s arm and they began a halting march toward the mansion.

“Is like one hundred and twenty fucking degrees,” muttered Rudolfo. It was the middle of August, the dog days, so-called because some people feel that in August the planet is influenced, even governed, by the dog star, Sirius. Sirius is worshipped by the Dogon tribe of Mali. (Bob is of Dogon ancestry.)

The doorbell was answered by a dark woman in a crisp white uniform. She pulled the door open and waved them in. The woman and Bob exchanged whispered words and then they disappeared, leaving Rudolfo standing alone in the marbled foyer.

“Hello!” A man, presumably Eddie McGehee, rounded the corner into the foyer. He was a very tall man, slender to the point of emaciation. He wore a fluffy bathrobe; the sleeves were too short, and where the pale arms emerged was plywood flatness knobbed with wristbone and knuckle. Below the robe were long lengths of twiggy leg, the knees ballooning like boles.

“You are Rudolfo,” he pointed out. McGehee wore a golden fez and oversized wraparound sunglasses, mirrored so as to reflect Rudolfo’s image back into his own eyes. His face was decorated with daubs of sunscreen, but it was an obvious case of too little, too late. The tip of his nose, the rims of his ears, his brow and cheeks, were as burned and flaky as discarded snakeskin. Where it wasn’t crisp and lobster-pink, the skin had the shade and texture of copy paper.

“I am Rudolfo. You are Eddie McGehee.”

“Let’s go out by the pool.” McGehee turned and wheeled away. His toes, long, crooked and naked, gripped the tiles with lazy prehensility. “Preston said you’d be coming today.”

“How would Preston know?” wondered Rudolfo—aloud or to himself, he couldn’t say. He was no longer making much distinction between the two. But speaking of that, why hadn’t Preston reminded Rudolfo that Eddie McGehee stood closest to the heart of the mystery?

“Preston is a very clever man. Guess what?”

“What?”

“He’s fucking Miranda!” McGehee announced this with bubbling glee. Rudolfo shuddered; his skin would likely have become goosebumpy, except goosebumps blossom around hair
follicles, so all that happened was that he became a little clammy and damp.

“Preston’s rather a lovely man,” McGehee put in. “He has beautiful eyes.”

Rudolfo remembered his eyes as puffy and bloodshot, the centres dark as pitch.

The pool was a huge lopsided circle. The water it held was crystal clear; on the bottom and sides were odd designs rendered with bright red and yellow paints. There was a small patio table, shaded by a huge polka-dotted parasol. McGehee gestured to one of the wicker seats and claimed another. Rudolfo sat down and came right to the point.

“Why you auction Collection?”

“Hmm.” It was a
hmm
to suggest that McGehee had never thought about it before. “Well, you know, I am the end of the McGehee line. I have left no offspring. There’s no one for me to bequeath the Collection to. So there.”

“Charity.”

“Sorry?”

“You could leave it to charity. Or a library. Or a university.”

“Yes, good point. Okay. Here’s answer number two. I needed the money. It’s not like I have a job or a profession. I don’t generate income. And let’s face it, I have an expensive lifestyle. So I needed the money.”

There was something peculiar in McGehee’s manner, some kind of teasing mockery. Rudolfo reached across the table and gathered together the lapels of the terry cloth robe, pulling McGehee halfway across the table. Rudolfo watched his own twisted face zoom and loom, reflected in McGehee’s mirrored sunglasses.

“Listen, bubby-boy,” he began—although Rudolfo was suddenly distracted,
very
distracted. Over Eddie McGehee’s head he saw Bob in satyric pursuit of the housemaid. Both were naked,
both had bodies that had been pricked with design; raised welts and scars formed moons, stars and lightning bolts upon the gleaming blue-black surface of their skin. Both Bob and the maid were laughing, the maid with a measure of breathlessness, Bob with rhythmic concentration.

They ran across the lawn and disappeared. Rudolfo shook his head and recommenced his bullying.

“I am desperate man,” he said, keeping his voice low, barely audible. “I don’t know what is going on but is going on terrible. Jurgen, every day he changes. Every day I wake up and I must think to myself,
oh no, today something else will be different
. Every day I think,
today there will be something new that I will not understand, Jurgen will be a little farther away from me, he will be more lost to me, and what can I do about it?
” Rudolfo took a few deep breaths. He stared at his reflection in McGehee’s sunglasses. “Nothing.” He tightened his grip on the terry cloth lapels. “So tell me what I need to know or I will make you hurt.”

“Okay,” said Eddie cheerily. “Here’s the scoop. My grandfather, Edgar Biggs McGehee, he left quite a complicated will. It’s full of riders and codicils. And one of those codicils has to do with the Collection. Basically, Rudolfo, I
had
to auction it off. That’s what my grandfather wanted.”

Rudolfo released McGehee and sat back in his chair. “It was in will …?”

“Oh yeah. Detailed instructions. Gramps was really quite specific. The Collection had to be put up for auction on April the sixth.”

“Why? What is April six?”

McGehee rose and turned to face the swimming pool. “Do you mean, what is the significance of April the sixth?”

“
Ja
,” snarled Rudolfo.

McGehee’s long crooked fingers worked at the knot in the cord that kept the bathrobe together. He peeled the garment off
and revealed a lactescent body, its nakedness hidden by a loincloth, at least, a soiled length of sacking that clung to the man’s jagged hipbones like brush clings to a scarp. The openings for the legs were many times larger than they needed to be; wrinkled bits and pieces dangled below. McGehee reached up and removed his fez. A gossamer topknot was uncovered, curled up as though sleeping. Released, it tumbled down the length of the man’s back, bouncing along the ridge of vertebrae.

“Among other things,” McGehee answered, “April the sixth is Harry Houdini’s birthday.”

He then removed his sunglasses, tossing them nonchalantly onto a nearby chaise longue. He raised his hands above his head, bent his knees and prepared to execute a dive of antiquated fussiness. Just before he did, he turned and stabbed Rudolfo with his silver eyes.

Rudolfo held a jar of cream, expensive cream, cream that was made in a small factory in Luxembourg, cream that was kept in an exquisite china jar adorned with etchings of linked flowers. Rudolfo held the jar in the palm of one hand and with the other he applied the cream to his partner’s body. Jurgen sat, very still and patient. He glowed like a low-wattage light bulb much of the time now, and this is why, an hour before Showtime, Rudolfo had appeared with the jar, to cover the colourless radiance with cream.

Rudolfo also surreptitiously prodded him, under the pretense of cream application, gauging the progress of the sickness that had claimed his lover.

Jurgen didn’t perceive himself as being sick, of course. Curtis Sweetchurch didn’t think of Jurgen as sick either; indeed, he seemed to think that Jurgen was as healthy as could be. Curtis was talking about adding shows. The box office turned away hundreds of people daily who’d traversed continents and oceans in order to get there. But Curtis, thought Rudolfo bitterly, didn’t
know how bad things were. For instance, once, as Rudolfo rubbed cream onto his left shoulder, Jurgen’s hams slid off the leather of the chair. But instead of plummeting to the ground, Jurgen just hovered there. Rudolfo placed a single finger upon his shoulder and pulled lightly, drawing him back to his perch.