by Paul Theroux
Millroy said, ‘Lots of things don’t sound like magic. “Chicken” doesn’t sound like magic. But if you say it a certain way and really mean it – chicken,’ he said in an intense whisper of pleasure and celebration.
In that same instant Boobie was sitting on the back of his hand, clucking in the direction of Mister Phyllis.
‘I don’t know about you youngsters, but I am real hungry,’ Millroy said, and began conjuring vegetables out of his sleeve and his ear – carrots, potatoes, celery stalks and onions, and ripe tomatoes out of the tips of his fingers. ‘It’s natural magic.’
I was watching intently, trying to decide whether Millroy was working magic or performing tricks. It seemed to me that on this first television appearance he was working real magic. Millroy’s magic made the world seem amazing and unfamiliar and a little frightening, because there was always a hint of danger in it, as though he had reached down deeply and stuck his hand into another darker world in order to produce these wonders. It was the sort of magic that exhausted him, and afterwards he would sleep, lying flat like a dead person.
There was no other explanation but magic for the way he scribbled a note and shoved it into his pocket and then asked everyone to look into his or her pockets. ‘I’ve got it,’ a small boy shouted, and held up the message with Millroy’s writing on it. Millroy had done it without touching the boy, and although anyone watching could have said it was a set-up, that he had planted the note, I knew it was nothing of the kind.
He was soon juggling torches and eating fire, and while I watched, a person next to me breathed hard in a kind of cat-like hiss and said, ‘Want to hold Tinky?’
It was Mister Phyllis who had crept over to sit next to me, but I had not been aware of it until he spoke. He had a powerful perfumey aroma of powder and flowers that stung my eyes.
‘Sounds good,’ I said, because I did not know what else to say.
Mister Phyllis saw that my watery eyes were on Millroy.
‘He’s got his own chicken. You can be my chicken.’ Mister Phyllis’s breath was sweet and dangerous-smelling, with a cover-up aroma of candy.
I was suddenly very fearful from the foody smell of his breath, and the nearness of his body, that surge of heat.
‘He’s not really your dad, is he?’
I wanted to cry as Mister Phyllis leaned over, pushing his vicious lips at me.
‘No,’ I said, and heard him sigh with pleasure.
There was just then a clang and I looked up. Millroy had dropped a silver ball he had been juggling.
Mister Phyllis was smiling at me, as though he wanted me to repeat what I already regretted saying. I hated him for asking me that, I hated myself for answering. I was glad that Otis Godberry had not heard what I had said. He was watching Millroy’s magic, ‘the sacrifice of the vegetables,’ making meals out of them and talking about health and strength.
‘Now you’re not going to tell me that you’ve got a girlfriend,’ Mister Phyllis said.
I shook my head and said no, glad that I could tell the truth.
‘That’s a clever chap,’ he said. ‘They spill things. They smell. They always pretend they’re so helpless.’
I hated him again and wanted to say to him, I am a girl.
‘Like that one.’
Millroy was helping a little girl named Kimberly into his Indian basket. She was giggling nervously, sucking on one hand and tugging her sock with the other.
‘I saw her before the show. She was with her silly friends. She has filthy knickers. She doesn’t brush her teeth.’
Mister Phyllis leaned towards me again and I could feel the rising temperature of his breath.
‘Do I hate a dirty mouth?’ he said. ‘Not half!’
Millroy was tapping the basket and fixing the hasp and reassuring Kimberly that everything was going to be fine.
‘You’ve got precious little lips,’ Mister Phyllis said. He spoke to the cat on his lap. ‘Doesn’t he, Tinkum? Yes, he most assuredly does.’
Kimberly vanished from the basket and reappeared blinking and saying ‘Gosh!’ in a mirror that turned into a window – magic.
‘So, who is he then?’ Mister Phyllis said. ‘Some kind of special friend?’
At that moment Millroy was talking about butter and honey, and making more food, peeling fruit and slicing it and serving it to the children in the audience. Millroy was active, manipulating a silver platter, passing the fruit segments around, and yet he never took his eyes off me.
In any case, by then I had recovered.
‘He’s my dad,’ I said.
After the show, everyone congratulated Millroy on his performance. He seemed appreciative but deaf, simply nodding but keeping his eyes on Mister Phyllis. When the little man approached him and made monkey-cheeks and began to speak, Millroy said, ‘Be very careful.’
‘I can look after myself.’
With an electric jolt, Millroy magnetized the man, and half pushed, half steered Mister Phyllis to the side of the studio where no one could hear.
‘Your name is Sidney Perkus and you come from abroad.’
‘England, in point of fact.’
‘All those places are the same,’ Millroy said. ‘And what’s this?’
Millroy reached beneath the candy-striped sweater that Mister Phyllis was wearing and lifted out a black greasy rat that squirmed in his hand as he showed it. Mister Phyllis gasped, and the cat Tinky screeched and leapt to the ground.
‘I hear everything,’ Millroy said, and passed the rat back. The creature twitched, became a splash, solid to liquid, and dissolved on the little man’s arm, leaving a damp stain on the sweater. Mister Phyllis looked disgusted and frightened.
‘This is my show,’ he said, clawing at the stain on his sweater. ‘Remember that.’
15
I was thinking, Why did he –?
This was in the trailer, at Pilgrim Pines, four shows later, towards the end of that first week, just after we hurried back for our food and facilities.
Millroy had decided that eating elsewhere or sleeping in another bed or using any restroom except his own was unacceptable, even ‘an abomination.’ But I had been wondering about something else.
‘Anything wrong?’ Millroy said, sizing me up and seeing me with my thumb in my mouth, thinking hard. Millroy was confident and jaunty, always trying to think up new angles for his Mealtime Magic appearance on the show, at which he had become a success. Already he was getting phone calls, and the first letters from watchers had begun to arrive.
I pulled out my thumb.
‘No, Dad’ – to get myself into the habit.
But several things were wrong, as I had been thinking when he interrupted me. One, why did he claim he could hear what people were saying fifty yards away, and that he actually heard what Mister Phyllis had said in the studio? And two, I knew that what had happened was that he had read Mister Phyllis’s lips.
He was great at that. He could watch TV with the sound turned off – reading lips. He said it was more convincing if you could not hear their voices. Lip-reading had been one of his tricks at the Barnstable County Fair, but he did not admit it.
‘It’s these ears of mine,’ he said.
Why claim to have superhuman hearing when what you really have is good eyesight and a superhuman ability to read lips?
I wanted to tell him the sort of thing he was always telling me: The truth is always more interesting than you think. Be proud of what you are good at.
All right, then, why call yourself Uncle Dick and shave your head if your name is Max Millroy and you have an excellent head of hair?
I felt he did not want people to know him, and I understood that. ‘It’s so restful to be anonymous.’ But didn’t he realize that I knew him, much more than he guessed, various secrets – never mind that they were small – that he was hiding? And it was hard not being able to say how wo
nderful he was – maddening that he was brilliant at something he could not admit to. Or maybe it was all different, that I was supposed to know everything, even these secrets, because he had told me enough times that he wanted me to know everything: that I was doing exactly what he wanted me to do.
Mister Phyllis believed that Millroy had magic powers of hearing, but went on whispering, and perhaps the lie did not matter at all, because Millroy knew exactly what the man was saying – he read his lips.
Anyway, with all this stress I was back to sucking my thumb, which was what I was doing in the front seat of the Ford early this dark September morning as we drove to Boston.
Dressed as a boy I looked different, but so did Millroy, dressed as Uncle Dick. And sometimes when he bought gas and was heading back from the office having paid for it I would look up at this man hurrying to the car and think, Who’s that?
It was him, mustache, skinhead, muscles and all, though these days he had taken to wearing sunglasses, no matter what the weather. But even in his dark glasses I knew he was happy. It was the audience, he said – he liked working with young people.
‘They’re – what? – eight, nine, ten years old. Young pre-teens. You can shape their lives. You can show them the right way to eat and drink and play. You can determine what the whole next generation of Americans will be like. You can shape the world.’
He was silent a minute, staring at the road ahead.
‘When I say “you” I mean me.’
Even the people who produced the program were young – not young enough but still all right.
The problem was Mister Phyllis. What he had said was true – Paradise Park was his show, and Millroy’s slot on the program was no larger than the Frawlies or the Mumbling Humptulips. The two men had disliked each other on sight. Mister Phyllis had not liked the changes – the children in the audience – and Millroy said that he knew that Mister Phyllis was trying to find ways of getting rid of him.
‘People always put on perfume to cover up a bad smell. Whenever I come across someone wearing perfume I know it’s a disguise. That’s why perfume always smells horrible to me. Perfume stinks.’
That was Millroy’s thinking about Mister Phyllis, and I agreed, because Mister Phyllis reminded me of the kind of peppermint disinfectant that always made me think of toilet germs.
‘I physically can’t bear to be near him.’
In this first week, Millroy was anxious on the way to the studio, knowing that he was going to have to see Mister Phyllis, and talk to him, and perform with him.
‘He’s afraid of me, but so what? Most older people are afraid of me. Most of them hate me because I’m happy. It’s only the kids who are on my side. Mister Phyllis is afraid of what I’ll do. He thinks he knows what I am capable of, a certain amount of magic. If only he knew, he would really be scared.’
I had the feeling that Millroy was mentally doing battle with him as he drove up to the show.
‘There is so much wrong with him,’ Millroy said.
He squinted at the road ahead, calling up an image of Mr Phyllis’s face.
‘He’s got Smoker’s Face,’ Millroy said. ‘It’s gray. It’s stale and dry. Like uncooked pastry that’s been handled too much. Like crunched up paper, dead at the edges. I’m talking about troubled circulation. Smoker’s Face is a horrible revealing mask.’
There was Smoker’s Hand and Smoker’s Fingers – Mister Phyllis had those too, Millroy said, and further proof of his bad circulation was his bald spot, covered by his brittle scraped-down hair.
‘Don’t be fooled by his teeth. He’s had them capped, but underneath they’re bad – yellow and bony. The gums spongey. They’re not pink, they’re purple. My guess is that they’re inflamed.’
Millroy tapped his own front teeth.
‘It’s not necessarily diet. You can destroy your teeth by saying certain stupid things over and over.’
He swallowed and made a face.
‘And I don’t want to think about his diet.’
Then Millroy winced, as though recalling something that disgusted him.
‘Muffin, I have an instinctive distrust of people with bad breath.’ He shook his head and sniffed. ‘Mister Phyllis’s breath reeks. There is something rotten inside him.’ He turned to me frowning and said, ‘He’s foreign, he has night sweats, he’s got blockage.’
The traffic had been building as we drove north on Route 3, and by the time we got to the expressway the traffic was so heavy that Millroy said nothing more, just steered and braked and accelerated, in the mass of cars packed together and moving fast in three lanes.
‘And not only that,’ Millroy said, when we were nearer our exit – he had a knack for picking up an interrupted conversation. ‘It is incontestable that they are unclean and unhealthy, but I also think that people with bad breath are lazy, they’re cheap, they’re sneaky, they tell lies. That’s why their breath smells.’
Mister Phyllis’s breath was thick and foul, it stung your eyes, it made you turn away, it came from deep inside him – so Millroy said.
‘Listen, a smell is invisible but it tells all. It is everything the person has ever eaten, everything he has ever thought or done. It is a powerful glimpse of your insides, and yet no one knows what he or she smells like.’
He was scowling now, looking like a wizard with dark glasses.
‘I would like to make his smell visible,’ Millroy said.
His face was lighted golden by sun-up, a flash, and in that light the cluster of tall Boston buildings slid onto the lenses of Millroy’s glasses.
‘Or audible.’
Now we were on the Chinatown ramp, and now turning, and now it was hospitals on the left and Chinese restaurants on the right.
‘As you know –’
He often said that, and I never knew.
‘– I don’t believe in evil. I believe in right and wrong, and very often they are the same thing.’
I looked at him. How could right and wrong be the same thing?
‘What I did with you – taking you away,’ Millroy said. ‘That was both.’
That Friday morning, to celebrate the first full week of the new Paradise Park, the producers gave a little party in the green room before the program – sandwiches and a chocolate cake and ice cream. And Mister Phyllis, looking stinky, started off boasting.
‘I was ordained a Buddhist monk,’ Mister Phyllis was saying to Otis Godberry, as Millroy entered the room.
‘They cut off the crusts,’ he said, ignoring Mister Phyllis and looking at the plates of sandwiches. ‘Too bad they didn’t keep them – that’s the only part we eat.’
‘Have you just driven up from the Cape?’ Otis asked.
‘Buzzards Bay,’ Millroy said.
‘What in the world do you manage to do down there?’ Mister Phyllis asked.
‘Eat and sleep. The two most important human activities. I cook food. I make soups and breads. Bean soups. Unleavened breads.’
‘We’re at Pilgrim Pines Trailer Park,’ I said, though as soon as I said it I felt I had made a mistake and that Millroy disapproved of my giving out this information.
We sat at opposite ends of the room, Millroy in his magician’s cloak and boots, uninterested in the food, Mister Phyllis in his pink pants and white sneakers and peppermint jersey, telling Otis Godberry and the others how he had been a Buddhist monk.
He is unbearable, Millroy said, in his low ventriloquist’s voice. He is a nightmare.
‘This was years ago,’ Mister Phyllis said. He was nibbling a little white triangle of bread and wagging his head with satisfaction, the sandwich in one hand, a cigarette in the other.
He’d be better off eating the cigarette, Millroy said. Or smoking the sandwich.
Mister Phyllis said, ‘In Bangkok.’
‘Thighland,’ Otis said.
‘Exactly,’ Mister Phyllis said. ‘Th
is was long before it became a tourist trap. The Thais are so sweet – oh, bother, there isn’t a thing on this plate for Tinky. She’ll be absolutely furious.’ He cocked his head. ‘Listen. The monkeys are here. What a racket.’
The audience, he meant. The monkeys with no tails, he had started calling the children in the audience. He cringed when he heard the sound of their voices and feet, and a look of hatred tightened his wrinkled face.
If only they could smell him, Millroy said, staring across the room and not moving his lips. He took a slug from his glass of water and gulped it, talking all the while. If only they could hear him and see what he eats. I shouldn’t even call it eating. See what he sticks into his mouth.
‘Danny Kaye,’ Mister Phyllis said, licking his fingertips, ‘one of my oldest and dearest friends, introduced me to a Thai prince in Los Angeles. I was on the coast doing a benefit for Marge and Gower Champion, and Art Linkletter was begging me to be on his show –’
Millroy watched Mister Phyllis making horrible faces, fishing among his molars for a snagged scrap of food.
‘The prince embraced me. He said, “I believe we are brothers. I command you to come to my country and I will treat you as a prince.” One does not turn down an offer of that kind.’
He fed himself another sandwich, he tapped the ash from his cigarette, he smiled at Otis Godberry, as though challenging him to ask another question. But Otis was flummoxed. He was thinking, Buddhist monk?
‘He was wearing a fabulous saffron robe,’ Mister Phyllis said, stroking his peppermint sweater with his fingertips to show how the robe flowed. ‘I am entitled to wear a robe like that. Will you listen to that pandemonium in the studio? They should asphyxiate every last one of them. Put a sock in it, kids!’
‘You were actually ordained a preacher in that faith?’ Otis asked.
Millroy was so impatient a noise like hot steam shot from his nose and mouth.
‘Ordained, yes, but not to preach,’ Mister Phyllis said.
‘Doggone,’ Otis said.
‘There is no preaching in Buddhism.’
Buddha himself preached, Padmasambava preached, Guan Di did it too – ‘The way that can be told, is not the constant way’ – they all gabbed, or else how could they spread the word?