Rudolfo pulled open the front door and allowed Dr. Merdam entry.
Dr. Merdam seemed to have gained a few pounds in the weeks since he’d last paid a Haus call. It was as though he’d finally crossed some critical line, tipped the scales so that gravity might become his complete and utter master. The extra fat on his cheeks, for example, tugged down over his starched white collar, dragging much of his face with it. The weight of his cheeks pulled at the skin under Merdam’s beautiful almond eyes so they appeared sad, even forlorn. His eyebrows were yanked at the outer corners and cocked upwards interrogatively. His belly, a bulge of prodigious proportion, now plummeted toward the earth as though leaden, contained desperately by the buttons of his finely tailored vestments. Still, picturing himself an elfin man, Dr. Merdam danced into the hallway daintily and shook hands with Rudolfo.
“How is he?” he asked, removing a handkerchief and lightly dabbing at his lips.
“How so?”
“His skin …” Rudolfo reached forward and raked his fingers through the air, searching for words.
“Is he pale?”
Rudolfo found himself laughing and unable to contain it. He laughed until tears welled up in his eyes. Then he blinked as furiously as he could, but his eyes, lacking lashes, couldn’t do much to staunch the flow. The tears spilled over.
The boulder was rolled back and the hole to the Grotto gaped. Jurgen was in the bedroom, busy with Dr. Merdam. It was the middle of the afternoon. Rudolfo ducked into the Grotto before he could talk himself out of it. He stopped just inside and caught his breath, which was roaring in and out of his mouth, making his chest shudder.
Jurgen usually lit the place with candles and lanterns, balanced on stacks of books and contrivances rendered from ancient wood. Now the Grotto was lit only by the wash from the corridor. Rudolfo stood motionless and allowed the shadows to take shape. Slowly he saw the columns of volumes, the books balanced off-kilter so that each stack had a distinct list, all inclining toward the centre. He was then very alarmed to see, at the circle’s centre, the outline of a human take form. The figure had both hands raised, the fingers spread wide, the hopeless gesture of a hold-up victim. Rudolfo let out a small moan, a mouthful of fear. Then he noticed the tall domed shape of the creature’s head, and he realized that he’d forgotten about the wooden automaton Moon.
Moon was rather crudely carved, his face a collection of ridged bulges, but he had been carefully painted, with fine arched eyebrows and rouged cheeks. It was impossible to tell whether the mechanical doll had been designed to represent an old or a young man. There was a simplicity to his features that suggested childhood, but the varnish had been cracked by time and temperature, giving him the aspect of great age. The figure was costumed in a bizarre fashion, wrapped in silvery pantaloons, a satin smoking jacket and slippers with toes that curled like snail shells. A turban, made out of sackcloth or at least, Rudolfo thought, something very scratchy, balanced on top of the automaton’s head. He sat, cross-legged, upon his pedestal of thick, clouded glass.
As Rudolfo stared at Moon, the Grotto filled suddenly with the sound of fine gears turning and meshing. It was, Rudolfo thought, a lifeless version of the small noises the bushbabies made, in the middle of the night, when the tiny furry creatures paired up to copulate. Occupied as he was with this idle thought, Rudolfo did not notice, for a moment, that one of Moon’s hands was jerking back and forth, the fingertips twitching. When he did notice, he leapt backwards. His left foot landed on a silver ball that one of the first magicians, Katterfelto, had used in one of the earliest cup and ball routines. Rudolfo’s leg kicked out and he flew back. He wrenched his arms behind his back in order to break his fall and was sufficiently nimble and athletic that he was able to somersault as his butt hit the ground, ending up in a pose of twisted supplication.
The hums now amplified in volume, and the mechanical man began to bounce up and down, a studied and mathematical rendition of shaking with mirth. Moon’s mouth popped open with a loud clacking sound and the jaw and bottom lip, a separate articulated piece of wood, began to jiggle and jounce. Rudolfo realized that the automaton was laughing at him, and he could not prevent volts of anger from colouring his hairless body.
He flipped over onto his hands and knees and in doing so brought his eyes within a foot of the Grotto wall. There was just light enough to illuminate the marks and scratches there. This time his shock was so great that he could not help speaking aloud. “Fuck shit,” he said—for inches away were the cyphers and runes that had troubled him so as a toddler, those made by Albert Einstein upon the walls of the walk-up at Kramgasse 49.
Rudolfo was up on his feet in a trice. He’d already persuaded himself that what he’d just seen was a trick of the imagination. He was so determined to rid his mind of the image (which floated eerily across his field of vision, like the afterimage left by a flashbulb) that he crossed over to the mechanical man, made a kind of bow and said, “Hi, baby.”
The automaton’s hand again began to jerk back and forth. It was, Rudolfo realized, waving. Rudolfo raised his own hand, spreading the fingers, and moved it back and forth like the baton of a broken metronome.
Moon’s other hand suddenly appeared before Rudolfo. Clutched between the wooden fingers was a deck of cards. They were odd cards, longer and more slender than those that Rudolfo was used to. The design on the back was a simplistic representation of the night sky, a black background adorned with six-pointed stars and a large sliver of moon. As Rudolfo looked at the cards, the machine’s hand snapped, and instantly the deck was spread and fanned into a perfect semicircle. Then the hand raised the deck and then lowered it slowly, and Rudolfo understood that he was to pick a card, any card.
He reached forward, placed his fingertips on a card and then cannily moved them to the right, digging out a card from within a denser grouping. He was smugly pleased with himself, until he flipped over the card and saw that he’d drawn the two of hearts.
Moon’s jaw clacked open and the machine began its soundless laughing. Rudolfo yanked the cards out of the wooden hand and flipped them over, sure that every one would be a two of hearts, that this was some elaborate trick rigged by the increasingly odd Jurgen Schubert. But the cards were different and randomly ordered. Moon continued to laugh with silent clockwork glee.
“Shut up, facefuck,” whispered Rudolfo, and then he spun about, alarmed at a rustling at his back.
A huge patch of shadow floated toward him. “We have to find his secret,” whispered Dr. Merdam, the whiteness of his eyes gleaming brightly. He tore the top book from the first pile he came to. He threw back the leather cover and took the ends of some brittle pages between his fingers. There was a little poof and a small mushroom cloud and then his fingertips were covered with dust.
“What secret?” demanded Rudolfo.
“The secret of dissubstantiation. The secret of corporeal evaporation.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He only weighs fifty-eight pounds,” whispered Dr. Merdam.
“You don’t want that secret, Doc.”
“Yes, I do. It is what I dream about. Weightlessness.”
“Doc, Doc. Don’t say this.”
“I’m a massive blob of protoplasm that’s gone out of control. I’m huge and heavy and the Tony Anthony mental exercises are exhausting. I suffer headaches. I’m addicted to no end of prescription drugs. I long for nothingness.”
“You’re not fat, Doc. You just got big bones.”
Dr. Merdam picked up the next book, held it at arm’s length and focused on the gilt letters on the cover. “La Magie assyrienne.” Merdam lifted his sad eyes and translated quietly. “Assyrian Magic. Sounds hopeful.”
“Besides,” said Rudolfo, “is just trick.”
There was a buzz and a click and Moon swivelled about, one of his wooden hands bumping into Rudolfo’s shoulder. Rudolfo was not really surprised to see that the whittled fingers held a new deck of cards, blue-backed Bees. He obediently withdrew a card, flipped it over to note that it was, in fact, the two of hearts, and tossed it away.
“Trick?” echoed Dr. Merdam. “It’s no trick, my friend. My scales are accurate to within a hundredth of a pound.”
“Yeah, yeah. But magic is making assumes.”
“Assumptions?”
“Sure. Your scales say fifty-eight, you assume that Jurgen losing weight.”
“He must indeed be.”
“No, no, Doc,” said Rudolfo, waving a finger in the air. “He just not being affected by gravity.” As he spoke these words, it occurred to him—in a burst that left him flushed with adrenalin—that if Jurgen were no longer with Dr. Merdam, he was very likely on his way back to the Grotto. “Erps,” gasped Rudolfo, and he took hold of Merdam’s soft elbow and tried to spin him about. “We got to get out of here.”
But it was too late. The light from the corridor—which spilt in through the huge irregular circle left by the remote-controlled boulder—was filled suddenly by a silhouette. Jurgen folded his hands upon his hips and turned his head slowly back and forth.
“So, Jurgen,” said Rudolfo, surveying the Grotto with an air of idleness. “Have you ever thought about renovation?”
Jurgen remained silent, causing the other men to stir uneasily on their feet. He was dressed in his robe, filthy and soiled, indistinct in the gloom; all Rudolfo and Merdam could make out was his dark outline. They watched him raise his arms; the material from the robe rolled down to collect at his elbows. His forearms glowed like neon.
“Uh-oh,” came a small voice. Rudolfo turned to look at Dr. Merdam—Merdam turned to look at Rudolfo. They realized that neither of them had uttered “uh-oh,” and both glanced then at Moon. The automaton had raised both its wooden hands to cover glass eyes.
There came a long whine, like the sound of a crone keening at the funeral of a child. The papers strewn about the Grotto—pieces of parchment, broadsheets advertising Ehrich Weiss, the “world’s greatest mystifier and self-liberator”—stirred and rustled on the floor. Then they lifted into the air, borne by the wind—for it was a wind that was howling—and began to whirl above the heads of Rudolfo and Dr. Merdam. The towers of books shook, trembled and toppled. The leather covers flew open and the pages flipped from front to back and made little drum rolls.
Jurgen remained in the doorway, blocking the one avenue of escape, moving his arms like a symphony conductor.
“Okay, Doc,” Rudolfo said quietly, “we better be going now.”
Dr. Merdam exploded toward the doorway, his four hundred pounds accelerating so quickly that he’d achieved maximum velocity by the time he hit Jurgen. Rudolfo never saw, quite, what happened, because Merdam’s bulk plugged the opening as tightly as the remote-controlled boulder. Then, with a long sucking sound and a clownish pop, the doctor was through. He executed an elegant pirouette, trying to decide which way to go, then disappeared.
Rudolfo moved toward the doorway.
“Don’t go.”
Rudolfo turned around slowly. He was actually hoping that the words had come from the fucking wooden doll, even though that was a fairly horrifying prospect. But he’d recognized the voice.
Jurgen sat behind the small schoolboy’s desk, his square brow propped on a luminous hand. His eyes pored over the pages of an ancient tome while his fingers deftly and rhythmically turned the pages. “Don’t go,” he repeated. “Stay a while. Read a book.”
“I can’t read,” sighed Rudolfo. “You know I can’t read. If I could read, I don’t know if I would read. Maybe I would. Sometimes I want to. But the fact is, I can’t read.”
Jurgen looked up then, and smiled gently. For a moment his aspect changed. The glowing abated, briefly, and flesh tones, mottled by fever and spackled with illness, returned. His dark eyes suddenly filled with emotion, at least, Rudolfo was fairly confident he could see emotion back there, trapped and restless, like a big cat in an iron cage. “Rudy,” said Jurgen quietly, and then his eyes deadened and his skin became incandescent and he looked down at the book once more.