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Shortly after Houdini's disappointing visit to Africa, I contracted a mania for spiritualism. Although he had, during our tour of Mombasa mediums, regretfully exposed them one and all as fakes, I was by no means convinced of the impossibility of "piercing the veil."
 You might well conclude that my ability to resuscitate the dead ought to settle the matter ipso facto; however, Pennington -- with whom, it is true, I spoke posthumously although with reluctance on his part -- may not have been dead in the strict definition of the word, but rather an example of that living dead certain East African tribes are alleged to command. The old Kikuyu who instructed me in the dubious art of revival did not bother to clarify this -- to my mind -- significant point.
I resolved, therefore, to discover if contact with the Beyond could be made by other, less questionable means. I studied the literature, which is abundant if not always free of extravagant claims; took a correspondence course in mesmerism from the Society of Psychical Research; and built a special, windowless room whose purpose was to "entrap, induce, and oblige spiritual annunciations," according to the back issue of William Stainton Moses' Light in which I found plans for a "spirit room."
*
I had been in the spirit room all morning, alternately dozing and mesmerizing myself in a shaving mirror, and had succeeded in conjuring only a small cloud. I was unhappy with the results although the cloud
appeared quite content in its new abode -- so much so I would not have been
surprised if it had mooed.
Suddenly, there was a knocking at the door. In hopes that it was an instance of "spirit-rapping," I opened the door at once but was disappointed to find Florenz Ziegfeld instead of a ghostly visitor standing outside.
"Do you know where I can find exotic women?" the Broadway impresario asked, taking off his hat (not in deference to the sensitive precincts he had entered but rather in consideration of the ceiling whose height, for reasons known only to Mr. Moses, was specified at 5 foot, 3 inches exactly). "I'm looking for something different for this year's Follies," he said. "Frankly, I'm sick of 'glorifying the American Woman.'"
"Africa is filled with exotic women," I said, barely concealing my anger at his untimely intrusion. (In Africa more than anyplace else on earth, people have a habit of dropping in unannounced. I don't know why this is.)
"I would pay well to find them," he said meaningfully.
I was on the point of remarking that I was no one's procurer when he asked:
"Does this cloud belong to you?"
I told him it did, for who had a better claim?
"It would be fantastic on the stage of the New Amsterdam! The girls could wear it!"
I gave him a look he interpreted as puzzlement.
"To hide their pinkness in." He winked at me. "Just enough to
escape a charge of indecency. It would be like a" -- he felt around in the air a moment before finding the word he wanted -- "shimmering organdy nightgown! I swear it would be a sensation."
I was offended, and perhaps it was to justify himself that he added:
"Teddy Roosevelt attended my first Follies in '07 and pronounced it,
'Bully!'"
"The cloud," I said haughtily, "is not for sale."
*
"I am not the pantywaist you take me for," said Ziegfeld as we rode through a forest of strange trees. "My life has been a rough-and-tumble one. I grew up in Chicago. I was a trick-shooter in Wyoming with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. I managed the world's strongest man. I have been shoved around and have shoved in my turn. Now that I am middle-aged and successful, I prefer the company of women."
"You've interrupted me at a crucial moment in my research!" I shouted in frustration.
"What research?"
"Spiritualism! I was trembling on the brink! I was close to it -- to the chink in the wall through which I have only to put my hand to touch the dead!"
He laughed so hard he fell off his horse.
My face burned with shame!
*
"You know what the Secret of Life is?" asked Ziegfeld. "Sex."
"I'm not interested in life," I told him.
"An hour with one of my girls would change your mind."
He then did something appalling with his cigar.
I ran into the hills -- desperate to get away from his lasciviousness. I am not, as any reader of these notes will confirm, prudish or misogynistic. I have loved women passionately. Sexual desire is as strong in me as in any other man. But the images Ziegfeld excited in me caused great perturbation
and threatened to rout reason itself. The mere presence of the man was
enough to make my head spin with fancies -- never mind his "pinknesses"
and "shimmering organdy nightgowns"! I had come to Africa, in part, to escape all that was lewd and dishonorable. (Yes, yes, I admit to fantasizing about Anna. And Mrs. Willoughby. But only in a way that does all of us credit.)
"What are you afraid of?" he shouted through a megaphone.
"Go back where you came from!" I screamed from the hilltop. "Africa has no need of you!"
"But the women -- the auditions -- the Follies! Why won't you help me?"
I squeezed myself into a hollowed-out tree and bit my tongue.
*
I left my hiding place and returned to the tents. I was hungry and thirsty -- I am no saint, no desert ascetic crunching on locusts and licking up the morning dew!
"Spiritualism is a displacement of normal sexual desire," said Ziegfeld. "Instead of a living human being, you want to be possessed by a dead one, which, of course, is impossible -- at least under ordinary circumstances."
I was about to object when he said (a little too smugly):
"Dr. Freud is of the same opinion. I had the pleasure of an exchange of views in Mademoiselle Lillian's dressing-room during his visit to New York. You see, like Africa, everyone sooner or later comes to the
Follies."
"I assure you I am normal in every way," I said after swallowing a morsel of roasted elephant heart.
I locked myself in the spirit room.
Ziegfeld slid erotic playing-cards under the door.
I concentrated my attention on the cloud.
"Such a nice cloud," I said.
The cloud nuzzled me gratefully.
Ziegfeld played "Jardin de Paris" through the door on the safari Victrola.
I stuffed my ears with bits of fleecy cloud and mesmerized myself. Then I unlocked the door and left the room.
Ziegfeld unstoppered my left ear and whispered something into it. Its power of suggestion was stronger than the hypnotic suggestion I had given myself, and I woke.
"Come with me," he said, taking me gently by the arm.
*
The girls stood under the trembling African sun, each wearing the blue blouse of a porter. Their skin was the color of burnished chestnuts, or amber, or ivory. Their hair -- ebony, gold, or copper -- astonished me with its radiance as if each strand were a light-bearing filament. They carried damascene cushions and silk umbrellas. They looked at me and smiled the secret smile of seduction.
"What do you say now?" asked Ziegfeld without the slightest trace of malice.
I said nothing, but already I felt myself in danger.
"Aren't they beautiful?" he said happily. "Aren't they better than anything the afterlife has to offer? And you don't have to die for them -- you have only to want them."
"I'm looking at a mirage," I said, shaking my head hard to dispel it.
But it was not a mirage; it was an effect of the cloud that floated
behind the girls, an immaterial backdrop for their shimmering.
My cloud!
Ziegfeld turned to them and nodded.
The girls lifted their dainty feet and began to kick to a music whose source I could not determine. With their pretty legs, they kicked at the supports of a structure which rose up in my mind like a shining city. The music played, and they kicked until the city wobbled and fell into a heap of broken images -- each a mirror reflecting sun and sky and the green hills and the warm possibilities of flesh.
Ziegfeld saw in my eyes how I began to want the girls, and he laughed in pleasure and triumph. He saw in my mind how I picked up a brick and laid it in the chink between this world and the next, and he offered me a cigar.
"Pleasure is good," he said. "Desire is good. Life is meant to be lived on earth, not in some other place. The 'Beyond' is only the next minute you draw breath."
I thought, then, that I had misjudged him.
*
That night we set fire to the spirit room and watched it burn. The erotic playing-cards and my back issues of Light were all consumed -- transformed into a gorgeous shower of commingling, indistinguishable sparks.
Ziegfeld returned to America and his Follies. As for the girls, they vanished -- whether onto the stage of the New Amsterdam Theatre or into the jungle to this day I do not know.
Africa is now a memory. As I spill gin on the board, inquiring of my Ouija whether tomorrow will be the day I meet someone who will lessen my
loneliness -- I wonder if those girls might not have been a mirage after all.
Ziegfeld laughs -- from a stage in heaven or hell he is laughing at the follies of men, scattering his cigar ash like a largesse.
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