The Spirit Cabinet (24 page)

It was a bit unfair, really, to bait the trap that way. It was one thing to play on a serious vice or addiction, it was another to ensnare a fellow because of his affection for caffeine. It was likewise a bit underhanded for Rudolfo to claim that he lived nearby, which was true only in an astronomical sense. Indeed, his squalid apartment was no less than four miles distant. He considered raising an arm and flagging a taxicab, but he felt that that would make Jurgen suspicious and put him on the defensive. At the same time, he half-suspected, half-hoped, that Jurgen knew what was going on. He was sorely tempted to simply state out loud, “The thing of it is, we’re both queers. Right?” But he couldn’t quite predict Jurgen’s response. He would either a) make a tiny grunt of agreement or b) punch Rudolfo until his eyeballs popped out of his skull.

The dawn came, leaking through the bricks, bleeding into
the skies. But the dawn only seemed to come so far; the light ascended and then was stopped dead by a curtain of black. Thunderheads approached the city, the bottom of the formation smooth, as if cut by a heated knife, the upper portions in constant motion, as restless as pitted vipers. Jurgen, much more of an outdoorsman than Rudolfo, nodded toward the clouds and muttered something about bad weather. After his forecast, he smiled slightly, perhaps the first true smile that Rudolfo had ever witnessed. Rudolfo was now even more smitten. “What?” he asked quietly.

“I like storms,” answered Jurgen.

“Oh, you do, do you?”

“Sure.”

It wasn’t much of a conversation, Rudolfo thought, but it was something. They walked in silence and felt the first few raindrops fall.

Then, astoundingly, Jurgen began to speak. “One time, I was hiking, and I got caught out in a storm. A big storm, a terrible storm. I was near the top of a mountain, well I guess it was just a big hill, but it was like a mountain. I was near the top, and lightning was shooting all over. The rain was falling very hard, just pounding down. And in a few seconds my clothes were soaking wet, and very heavy, so I took them off. Then I was naked, on top of the mountain, and the trees were shaking and the ground was rumbling, and all around me was lightning.”

“Wasn’t that dangerous?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“You might have been hit by lightning.”

“Exactly.” Jurgen smiled again, and Rudolfo, even though he felt more at sea than ever, made his move. He slipped his hand into Jurgen’s, then moved quickly to press his body against the other, knowing that his only chance lay in Jurgen’s sensing the urgency and magnitude of his need. He then knew that he’d
made a large miscalculation; Jurgen wrested his hand away and stepped back, bracing for a fight. Rudolfo knew of no other way to react other than as with a big cat, so he continued to press physically, advancing with all the confidence he could muster. He tried soothing words, “Just calm down,” but they didn’t work; suddenly his nose was popped and bleeding. Rudolfo hadn’t even seen Jurgen’s fist move.

Neither had Jurgen, mind you, because he hadn’t hit him. As far as he could tell, a rock had fallen from the sky and bounced off Rudolfo’s face. Jurgen craned his neck to look skyward and was alarmed to see a turbid black cloud filling the sky, as rough and boiling as an ocean hungry for ships, spitting stones. The one that had smacked Rudolfo was merely the vanguard; in its wake came thousands, millions, more, many of them not much smaller. They landed upon the two men with the power and enthusiasm of crazed football hooligans, pummelling them to the ground. Jurgen was the first to right himself, drawing up onto his hands and knees so that his broad back received most of the damage and pain, although it was impossible to tuck his head completely out of the way. Rudolfo was folded over onto his side, desperately trying to protect vulnerable parts of his anatomy. Jurgen placed a hand on Rudolfo’s shoulder and pushed with all his might, righting him. The two began to crawl into the darkness, searching for shelter, searching blindly because they could not raise their heads. Stones continued to fall from the heavens.

Jurgen received a blow to the crown that made him nauseous with pain and was in fact on the verge of passing out when he saw that they were not ten feet from a doorway, a deep bricked alcove. He shouted to Rudolfo. The other man was close by, their shoulders butted, but Jurgen suspected that his words were never heard. The roar of hail filled the air, sharp
twoks
as the stones smote the earth, snakelike hissings as they immediately began to melt, dying like so many tiny kamikaze pilots. Rudolfo,
fortunately, had spotted the same doorway. He sped up, although this made him less stable. He was put down by a sudden concentration of hailstones, so quickly that his chin cracked on the ground. He bit the end of his tongue off in that moment; his mouth filled with blood. And then he had a very difficult time regaining purchase. Ice-cold balls were everywhere, and the palms of his hand would slip away, his knees would skid and buckle and lay him out once more. But Jurgen managed to turn himself around, aiming his backside at the doorway, and he took hold of Rudolfo, wrapping his fingers around the soaking wet denim of his jacket, pulling the other man in his wake. The two slowly covered the distance, and when they were in the doorway they sprang upwards, trying to push each other into the corner. Both men looked frightful. Jurgen’s hairdo had been destroyed utterly. Rudolfo was neater, in that his hat had been knocked off to display his perfect baldness, but blood poured from his mouth and he’d received a black eye, when and how he couldn’t remember.

The men hugged each other, and in doing so it became clear that both had erections. There was a kind of laudable defiance in this, an act of affirmation, a final indulgence of the senses, because it seemed almost certain that the world was ending. Rudolfo was the first to move his hand downwards, forcing it through the clamped wet bodies. He began to work Jurgen’s penis through the material of his trousers, not at all gently, not at all for Jurgen’s benefit. Jurgen’s hand then made its descent. He managed to find Rudolfo’s zipper; Rudolfo’s penis found its own way out. Jurgen took hold like a helicopter pilot takes hold of a joystick, tilting the lever of flesh backwards as though he could get lift and thereby escape the storm.

Hailstones continued to bounce and whiz inside the refuge; many rolled to rest there and soon the two men were knee-deep in ice.

Rudolfo slid his hand down the waist of Jurgen’s pants; at the same time his mouth searched out Jurgen’s lips. Jurgen resisted this—he pulled his own mouth away and cranked upon Rudolfo’s penis brutally, as though exacting punishment. Rudolfo remembered that his mouth was leaking blood, so rested his head on Jurgen’s shoulder and spat repeatedly. The blood stained the brick wall. Rudolfo tried to kiss Jurgen again, but Jurgen was having none of it. Rudolfo didn’t really care at that moment; it was something he could work on over time, provided he had any time left.

The screaming roar and hiss stopped abruptly—then came snaps and crackles from deep in the ground, as though all the corpses in all the coffins in Münich had decided to pop their old knuckles. The silence that followed seemed almost absolute; the only sound in the world was that of two men breathing heavily, grunting with inarticulate pleasure.

Rudolfo awoke, sometime deep in the heart of the desert night, and saw to his surprise that Jurgen was for once in the circular bed with him. Jurgen had his back to him and had thrown the bedclothes aside, perhaps in troubled slumber. He was naked.

This was good news, Rudolfo thought, because
das Glied
was as hard as concrete. Not only that, it was in a mood, twitching like a dowsing rod. This coincidence, Jurgen’s naked presence and Rudolfo’s snarling tumescence, was almost too good to be true. Rudolfo suddenly cautioned himself, perhaps this was a dream, although Rudolfo didn’t dream, as far as he knew.

Rudolfo bounced himself across two feet of empty mattress. His penis nudged and burrowed its way between Jurgen’s muscled cheeks.

Jurgen stirred slightly; Rudolfo curled his fingers around Jurgen’s shoulders, both to steady and to reassure him. It was as he did this, just as he squeezed ever so slightly upon the cool flesh, that Jurgen lit up like an electric bulb. There was a brief but undeniable diffusion of light, spreading throughout the
whole of Jurgen’s naked body. For a moment, he seemed to be made of glass, and from within came a glowing, a luminescence.

Rudolfo was instantly many inches away. His fingertips were numb. He rolled over onto his back, sighing deeply—because weariness was much easier to cope with than terror—and found himself staring up through the skylight. The heavens above were laced with lightning; a storm raged up in the welkin, gods sporting with each other without affect or influence on the puny mortals lying below. It must have been the lightning that flashed and lit up Jurgen’s body, Rudolfo thought. He closed his eyes and tried to return to slumber, vaguely dissatisfied with the explanation.

It would be hard to say at what point Miss Joe and Rudolfo became friends; maybe it would be inaccurate to claim that they ever did. They never exchanged pleasantries, certainly not histories, never feelings, but after a time they assumed great importance in each other’s life. Rudolfo became Miss Joe’s righthand man; he would orchestrate the evening’s talent, coralling the performers toward the stage, he would take the squawking microphone in his hand and make glib, unctuous introductions, and he would make the frantic slashing motions across his throat when the act started to go stale. Rudolfo the Go-Go Boy continued to be very popular, taming invisible cats in his zircon-encrusted G-string. He alone knew that he was snapping an unseen whip at the corners of the room, grimacing to display dominance and courage. The patrons at Miss Joe’s were mystified but mesmerized; as he puffed out his chest and paraded around the perimeter of the room, the audience would stir restively; they would hang their heads and turn doleful eyes upwards, silently asking how they could please their new master.

One night, Rudolfo dismounted the stage and found Miss Joe standing behind the bar with her bony arms criss-crossed
lazily, her painted lips pursed with consternation. “It’s not quite there, is it, Rudolfo?” Miss Joe muttered.

Jurgen sat at the bar with his hands wrapped around a beer glass. Rudolfo sat down beside him, touched his knee gently. Sometimes he did that just to watch Jurgen bristle, which he did almost audibly, his body vibrating with irritation and embarrassment.

“What do you mean?” Rudolfo demanded of Miss Joe.

“Don’t get testy with me, young man,” she said. “Look, your act is good, god knows it’s got no competition around this joint. All I’m saying is, you got a goulash but you’ve left out an ingredient.”

“It’s like Stuttgart,” posited Jurgen, raising his beer and drawing off three or four inches. “They’ve got a good team, but they need a top-notch striker if they want to really go places.”

“Thanks, Magic Man,” said Miss Joe. “That’s the very analogy I was grappling for.”

“I don’t know what else I can do,” Rudolfo protested. “I can only get
so
naked.”

“True,” nodded Miss Joe. “But it’s not that. It’s …” Miss Joe raised a hand and snapped her fingers, making them clack woodenly. “It’s that music. That dreary disco shit. You dance well, but that beat, I don’t know, it makes your cock flap in a kind of unseemly way.”

Rudolfo shrugged. The music was B4 on the huge Wurlitzer jukebox that hulked in the corner, that’s as much as he knew. He didn’t know it was entitled “Goulash” and he certainly didn’t know that it had been composed and performed by two young men who, after this small success, would dabble in soft drugs, become addicted to heroin and arrive in America years later calling themselves “Sturm and Drang.”

“You like music, don’t you?” asked Miss Joe.

“I like music, sure.”

“Give me a for instance.”

“Of something I like?”

“Yeah.”

Rudolfo exhaled heavily and allowed himself to drift briefly in memory. He remembered his mother, whatever his mother had been, careering through the Salon, her hands locked and twisted across her heart. He remembers her best, most vividly, as Lucy Ashton, Lucia di Lammermoor, mad and murderous. “Grand opera,” he whispered.

Jurgen said nothing. He raised a thumb and chewed at the nail.

Miss Joe whistled lightly. “La-di-fucking-da,” she said. “Still, if it works for you.”

She produced an old turntable from one of the back rooms—her place had a seemingly endless number of backrooms, all of them filled with refuse and junk—and Rudolfo bought some records from a second-hand shop: Gounod’s
Faust
; Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
; lots by Puccini, his favourite composer,
La Bohème, Turandot, Madama Butterfly
. He also bought some pure music, the first piano concerto by Brahms, all the Beethoven he could find, and the
Gymnopédies
of Satie, which were, after all, written specifically for naked athletes.

Miss Joe liked the effect. She eventually had all of the old records removed from the Wurlitzer and Rudolfo’s classical albums put in their stead. Now if one pressed the button “B4,” the shadowy room echoed with Rodolfo’s lament for the consumptive Mimi.