Millroy the Magician

by Paul Theroux

  ‘The main problem at Christmas is going – I am talking restroom time,’ Dedrick said. ‘Where to go and how to go. I am talking high-volume residue here, guys.’

  Several of the children laughed out loud, and I could hear Dedrick’s deep-throated haw.

  ‘If you eat this good clean-burning food we have here, and drink plenty of liquid, you’ll want to go real quick. But at Christmas there are always lots of people at the table. So first of all, check out the restroom and make sure you can get there when you want to. Examine the lock at that juncture and verify that it works okay. That way, you’re not stressing.’

  Now the children were settling down and laughing a little less, so that they could hear what Dedrick was saying.

  ‘The main thing is timing,’ he said. ‘Don’t hurry. Lock the door so that no one can bother you. And it’s a good idea to loosen all your clothes. Maybe you pushed your pants down, but – hey – that can be bad. That quite often locks your ankles together. You get stressed, plus that may make your deposit real difficult.’

  ‘Yo. So what’s the best way, Dedrick?’ Willie said, and when someone whooped he added, ‘Chill, guys. Listen up.’

  ‘The best way is to get naked, no matter what anyone says. Always take your shoes off. Yo, even a shirt or a sweater can seriously inhibit your freedom of movement.’

  ‘Hear that?’ Willie said.

  But all I heard just then was an adult voice squawking out of a camera’s earphones.

  We’ve got a problem.

  ‘Whether you are male or female, always sit down on the seat. Don’t even think of doing it standing up. Hey, guys, it’s not a test of marksmanship! And like I say, don’t rush it. It’s better to sit and wait than to force it and risk muscle strain, cramps, piles or whatever. If you’re relaxed, you’re ready. Then you just wait and you’ll be real amazed at how much freedom of action you have.’

  ‘You’ll be real surprised at the results, too,’ Willie said. ‘You’ll get control over your bodily functions.’

  I just do not believe this.

  ‘You’ll have power.’

  But I thought to myself: It is too late. This has already happened. This is the future.

  ‘And why not bring a book to read? Never read when you eat, guys, but always read when you go make a deposit,’ Dedrick said, and he was holding a thick book. ‘Your folks might say no, but listen, the restroom is a great place to read. Everyone remembers what they read in the function room.’

  ‘Amen.’

  That sounded like Millroy’s voice, but where was he?

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ Dedrick said, though he was still smiling. ‘You could read this in there. It would be a real neat seasonal touch.’

  He held up the book – the Book.

  Millroy’s mustache appeared on the screen, just this huge hairy mouth, starting to open.

  ‘Fidem scit,’ Millroy’s mouth said.

  That’s it – we’re off the air.

  PART THREE

  Day One

  22

  ‘We’re not fleeing,’ Millroy said in his Remember this voice. ‘We are waiting.’

  We had come straight back to the trailer park in Wompatuck after the show without saying a word to anyone – just slipped out of Boston and hurried down the road and into the Airstream, and the program was off the air again.

  Millroy’s eyes said I told you so but he kept his mouth shut, and when his picture appeared in the paper his face looked harmless and out of place under big black headlines: HIT CHILDREN’S SHOW CANCELLED – ‘TASTE’ FURORE CITED – STATION DELUGED WITH CALLS – MANY IN SUPPORT.

  ‘I am well pleased,’ Millroy said. But when he glanced in my direction his eyes were not focussed on me: no light came out of them.

  He was listening. He went very quiet – he knew something that I didn’t. His concentration was entirely inside his head and there was no telling from the outside what he was thinking about. They were the pale penetrating eyes he gazed with when he told his audience I can see through walls. I hear everything.

  Still he was listening, his eyes fixed and staring, his nose and ears twitching, but the rest of him motionless and alert, like a squirrel on a branch just before it explodes up the tree.

  That was the first day, when he said, ‘I have to be in contact with food,’ and started sorting chickpeas, looking for stones before he soaked them.

  ‘I need the consolation of cooking. My fingers, my nose, my tastebuds, this tongue, these eyes. I would love to be feeding the multitudes and stirring a huge tureen. If I had a loaf of bread I would be tearing great hunks out of it.’

  Saying that, he began to mix flour and water in an earthenware crock with beans, millet, barley, and he was soon slapping big pale cheeks and jowls of dough with floury fingers for a batch of Ezekiel bread.

  ‘I am convinced that this is how bread came into being,’ Millroy said. ‘Someone in the remote past needing to lay hands on pliant dough – a yearning to hold it and work with it. Someone waiting and giving thanks.’

  Although his eyes were bright and eager they were fixed on a distant object, or idea, and not on me.

  ‘A kind of offering.’

  He was still breathless, pinching and squeezing the fat little lumps of loaves.

  ‘Showbread.’

  He liked the word, and he swallowed when he said it, gulping and saying it again, another mouthful of it.

  ‘They’re looking for me.’

  At last he seemed very confident, with that air of inattention and carelessness, seeming casual, just before he performed a wonderful trick. The whole technique of working magic, he said, was to look the other way, turn your back on the business, gesture sideways, smile at the wall, and then as though a trap had been sprung the magic happened and everyone said, ‘Ah.’

  ‘Waiting for the call,’ he said, and he seemed to be finishing a sentence he had started a while ago.

  There was no telephone here at Wompatuck, no delivery of mail, nor telegrams even. The trailer office had a private phone but refused to take messages. Trailer and RV owners sometimes complained, but Millroy said, ‘It suits me fine. And I have been in the wilderness before, so I know this isn’t the wilderness.’

  There was no way that Millroy, or I, could be reached at the Wompatuck Trailer Park.

  ‘I know my attitude must seem overwhelmingly olympian to you,’ he said.

  He was wearing his Mealtime Magic tee-shirt and a floury apron and trampled slippers, and there were flecks of wholewheat flour in his mustache and eyelashes, smears of butter and flour on his fingers, pellets of barley stuck to the backs of his hands. He was walking up and down the Airstream, making it sway with each jouncing step. He was happy.

  ‘The very embodiment of splendid isolation,’ he said. ‘Because I happen to know that I never look hungry.’

  This happiness of his made him seem brighter and freer than anyone I had ever known. I did not know what olympian meant, but Millroy seemed to me weightless and wonderful.

  ‘When you get your name in the paper they’re sending you a message,’ he said. ‘Your picture in the paper? That’s Special Delivery, your name writ large.’

  ‘Like sky-writing,’ I said, and seemed to see dribbles and puffs of cloud spelling Millroy in a blue sky.

  ‘Exactly that,’ he said. ‘The whole world witnesses your being summoned. Sky-writing!’

  He liked that, he took me aside and showed me his name picked out in the clouds in the sky. He was always kind to me but I was especially grateful to have his approval, the sun shining on me. He was my safety.

  But I also felt that, with all his fame from the disgrace of his canceled program, he was in danger – the whole of Boston and beyond looking for him in his hideout.

  ‘Listen, angel,’ he said, ‘it’s all the better when people can’t find you. Then they value you more and realize y
our ultimate importance. They don’t take you for granted. Am I in anyone’s pocket?’

  Even two days later he was still smiling his flat satisfied smile under his jerked-up mustache, as though he knew they were talking about him – as though he could actually hear what they were saying. This made him calmer than ever.

  ‘Are we ever going up to Boston again?’

  ‘I’m there,’ he said, and winked, and looked the other way.

  He said it again, I’m there, his exact words as he pushed a shopping cart through Purity Supreme Foodland in the Hingham Mall with his I never look hungry face, turning his stern attention onto the vegetables. And the vegetables seemed to stare sternly back at him.

  ‘In spirit.’

  He scrutinized the fruit, sized it up without touching it.

  ‘I’m conspicuously absent. Bigger than I would ever be if I were there in the flesh.’

  He began choosing melons, rattling them, squeezing them, pressing his thumbs into avocados, shaking bunches of grapes, taking hold of bananas, poking plums, gripping apples, sniffing lemons – testing for ripeness.

  ‘I know they are looking for me.’

  Raising a pale honeydew melon as though holding the planet Earth in his hand he pressed his fleshy nose against it and said, ‘No one but you has the slightest idea of who I am.’

  And slowly bowled the melon into the corner of the shopping cart.

  ‘This is a tremendous moment of anonymity,’ he said, ‘because to be truly anonymous you need to have once been well known. If no one ever knew you, what difference does it make? But if everyone knows you and no one sees you – ah, then you are truly walking through walls.’

  We were still walking through Purity Supreme Foodland, the aisles jammed with shoppers pushing full and piled-up carts, stocking up for the Christmas holidays.

  ‘If only they knew.’

  He was triumphant among the fruits and vegetables, more pleased with himself now than when he had been doing magic at the Barnstable County Fair, or as Uncle Dick in Paradise Park. He had been like this at rehearsals – happy, hopeful, confident, working magic with no hands.

  ‘You don’t just call someone up and expect him to jump.’

  Still choosing fruit – squeezing, sniffing, weighing, bowling – he seemed jaunty.

  ‘The person you’re pestering might be food shopping. Or eating. Or sleeping. Or praying. Listen, he might be in the restroom – on the hopper even. A call at that specific juncture could be traumatic.’

  The shelves of beans and pulses were nearby. Millroy clutched the little sacks and sort of throttled them with his thumbs, and then brought them to his nose, as though venerating them as he smelled them.

  ‘It’s a question of your being in a state of readiness – and that’s as much a spiritual thing as it is physical. You wait until the summoning occurs, when you get the call,’ he said. ‘And when I say “you” I mean me.’

  That was all the shopping done, but why had he bought so many sacks of flour?

  ‘An experience of humility,’ he said.

  He baked Ezekiel bread, thirty loaves or more, and we stacked them in the back seat of the Ford and drove from street to street in small towns on the South Shore, places like Egypt, Greenbush and Marshfield, on two rainy December days in Christmas week, selling bread, and Millroy quoted the recipe in Ezekiel four-nine.

  ‘I am that bread of life,’ he said. ‘These loaves have no price. I am simply asking for a donation – anything they wish to share for this showbread.’

  He insisted that I went with him to the door to meet the bewildered people, half of whom would not even open their storm door to look at the bread, but just put their blurred fearful faces against the pane of glass, while someone in another room screamed Who is it? He said that because I was with him they would not turn us away, and they would be more careful how they treated him, seeing an evangelist with his small son, braving the winter weather to bring his message of hope. Yet he seemed almost pleased by their indifference, and he was delighted that he was not recognized as Uncle Dick.

  ‘Do we need the money?’

  ‘No, angel. But these people need the experience of encountering a messenger.’

  ‘How much did you collect?’

  ‘Four dollars, and change.’

  When the bread was gone at the end of that day we stopped this tiring door-to-door bread business.

  The next day, over lunch, Millroy hardly eating, but with his listening face, mouth pressed shut, head tilted so that the sounds would drain into it like a plug-hole – he said, ‘Angel, I hear something.’

  He called Norman Fredette from the public phone in the entrance lobby of Purity Supreme.

  ‘They’re looking for you,’ Fredette said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Guys wearing suits.’

  They had come to Norm’s Diner to find Millroy because they had heard that was where he sometimes went to cook his food after the show. Some of the people were journalists, some were fans, or parents with their kids, and the ones wearing suits were television executives.

  ‘They were asking a lot of questions,’ Fredette said.

  Millroy smiled, because of course Fredette did not have any answers. And he seemed particularly pleased that all this interest in finding him had centered around the pale, blinking figure of Norman Fredette.

  ‘I told them I’d keep my eyes open,’ Fredette said, being important. ‘So it was a good thing you called.’

  ‘I knew it. I heard it.’

  Fredette made his silence into a nagging question.

  ‘Vibrations,’ was Millroy’s answer.

  ‘So what else did the guys in suits say to me?’ Fredette asked, trying to be jokey but really challenging Millroy.

  ‘They stressed the urgency of the matter. They tried to deputize you. They urged you to go looking for me – said they’d make it worth your while if you did. And, of course you looked, because business is not so good at the diner.’

  ‘That’s putting it mild.’

  ‘You’re thinking of selling,’ Millroy said.

  ‘I haven’t put it into words.’

  ‘Until now.’

  ‘I guess not,’ Fredette said.

  Millroy said, ‘Can you be at this number tomorrow at noon?’

  Fredette said yes, and Millroy hung up. But Millroy did not call back. He paid a visit in person instead. If I had told him I was coming he might have spread it around. We drove up in the Ford, Millroy intimidating in a black leather biker’s jacket and sunglasses, his mustache shaggy, and I was a boy in boots, two inches taller than I really was.

  Fredette was startled to see us but Millroy just kept on marching into the back office, and Fredette followed.

  ‘This is my assistant Rusty.’

  ‘New assistant?’

  ‘Same assistant, new name,’ Millroy said. ‘Mind if I use your facilities?’

  Toilet, he meant, and not use but look at, because he would never use anyone else’s restroom. It was his way of seeing what kind of person Fredette was, and his state of mind, which the condition of the fixtures and especially the hopper often revealed, Millroy said.

  ‘Those guys were after him like you would not believe,’ Fredette was saying to me. ‘I wish someone wanted me that bad.’

  When a grown-up spoke to me I could never think of an answer. I just hummed, I did not reply. After a while Millroy entered the office. He had heard Fredette from two rooms away, he said, not the words but the sounds twanging in the air, he said, which he decoded.

  ‘Maybe if they really knew you,’ Millroy said, ‘they would be after you too.’

  ‘Every day.’ It was a Boston expression meaning never.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘I could get used to it,’ Fredette said, still a little gloomy. ‘When people want you that bad there’s always good money in
volved.’

  Millroy was peering at the room and beyond the room, looking through the walls. It was a cramped office with a fine layer of grease on the plaster, an adding machine on the desk, bills stuck on a rusty upright spike, telephone numbers scribbled on the blotter and business cards tacked everywhere. It was cluttered with papers and magazines and cooking utensil catalogues and cut-out pictures and a few thumbtacked postcards and a calendar picture showing a woman in a bathing-suit leaning against an industrial dishwasher.

  I knew that Millroy was holding his nose. He hated rooms like this – the clutter, the grease, the dirt, the unswept floor. And his disgusted face told me that he had also just had an experience in the bathroom.

  ‘You find the john?’

  ‘I found it. But you’d never be able to pray in there, or even use it without extensive renovation. Norman, it needs work.’

  ‘It’s for employees.’

  ‘That’s very much in its favor,’ Millroy said. ‘But let’s talk about you.’

  Dishes were clinking and cutlery clanking in the diner on the other side of the wall, and someone said, Dog with everything – and a side of fries, and Millroy winced.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Fredette said. ‘I’m supposed to find you for these guys in suits, and here you are, and you go, “Let’s talk about you.” ’

  ‘Did you say you’d deliver me?’

  ‘I said I’d try.’

  ‘That shows a little humility, Norman. Now can we talk about you?’

  ‘Business is lousy. There’s nothing to talk about.’

  ‘Maybe you’re in the wrong business.’

  ‘Cooking is all I know.’ Fredette was tugging on his ears. ‘Food and beverage. Catering. Short-order stuff. You know – you done a little cooking in here.’

  ‘But you’re also pretty good at communicating on the lower frequencies.’

  ‘What – mind-reading and that?’

  ‘Vibrations have to be sent before they can be received,’ Millroy said. ‘I got your message, Norman.’

  This pleased Fredette, who began to touch his own face like a blind person touching an old friend, running his fingertips over all the contours of his cheeks, for the sheer joy of it.