by Paul Theroux
But the Sons and Daughters made excuses and stayed on, and they talked about gathering like this every two or three months, just to reaffirm their commitment. Be strong and happy together, they said.
‘You will live in health for two centuries,’ Millroy said, praising them.
‘And so will you, if you let us protect you,’ Willie said.
‘I have all the protection I need,’ Millroy said.
From his expression you could see that Willie did not believe him.
I could not understand this delay. The Sons and Daughters should have left by now, at the peak of their happiness. They could have walked across Park Square to the Greyhound terminal, the way they had come, and caught buses back to their diners. Yet they hesitated. Were they afraid?
‘Aren’t you going back?’ I asked Willie Webb after a few days.
‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’
He was ladling soup, and as he turned away from me he seemed to bump the tureen with his elbow, and it tottered and fell, splashing hot soup all over. If I had not jumped away I would have been scalded to death.
And then Willie turned and stared at me with cold eyes, as though disappointed that I was still there.
I was too terrified to say, I could have been killed.
Two days later I was down the hatchway, getting some scoops of beans, when the trap-door closed on me. I tried it, but it was locked. Then there were footsteps on the trap-door, but no one opened it. I sat on a rung of the ladder in the dark, and cried, until Millroy heard me with his miraculous ears.
I guess I accidentally locked it, someone muttered. And no one said sorry.
‘You okay, buddy?’
I said yes, because I felt that if I said anything else the Sons and Daughters would think I was accusing them of doing it on purpose.
Willie was unfriendly in the same smiling mocking way that he had been with the handbill men. I could not say anything to him for fear I would cry, and if I cried in front of him he would know – something in the way I sobbed – that I was a girl.
‘I think I will just hang out here,’ he said. ‘How about you, Tuppy?’
‘What it’s down to is,’ Tuppy said, over my head, meaning to slight me, ‘I ain’t going nowhere.’
It had never happened before. We had always been friends – more than friends – family.
Feeling sad, I tried a Day One remedy for depression and got some sugar into my system, with Horeb Honey Squares and Mosaic Melon Spheres, and Carmel Carob Cookies, and with Wine Jar First Press Grape Drink. When that did not work, I went for a walk, down Boylston to Copley Square. I sat in front of the library in the sunshine, wondering what to say to Millroy, and wishing that I was someone else. I envied these people walking by, looking busy and preoccupied, heading home to their families, paying no attention to me. I want to be her, I thought, I want to be him. And I looked closely at them.
One man I saw going by was Morrie Arkle of Bub City Crabshack and Carmina Burrito – the man whom Millroy had liquidized into two quarts of gray fatty chicken soup and drunk down. It was the same pink face, the same suit, a different shirt and tie but the same shoes.
I spoke up. I said, ‘Um, excuse me –’
But he did not hear me. He walked into the Copley T-Station and was gone.
Shocked by the sight of that man I hurried back to the diner – I had forgotten why I had left it in the first place – and looked for Millroy.
‘Isn’t he usually in your back passage?’ Stacy said.
Someone laughed out loud at this.
Then I remembered the reason I had left the diner that day to go for a walk Why were they treating me that way?
Millroy hurried through the door and went into the back without saying a word. I followed him.
‘I just saw that Crabshack man Arkle walking into the T-station at Copley Square.’
‘So?’
‘But you turned him into juice and drank him. You even got sick doing it.’
‘Right, buddy. So obviously the man you saw was not the same. I dealt with him.’
What did that mean?
‘He passed through my body,’ Millroy said. ‘Stands to reason.’
There was a knocking at the door, and it was so loud it sounded to me like someone was trying to smash the planks.
‘I am not a murderer,’ Millroy said to me, and he pulled the door open. ‘I am not a molester.’
Willie Webb stood in the doorway with Stacy, and six or seven Sons and Daughters were standing behind him.
‘You see this, Big Guy?’ Willie said.
It was another supermarket tabloid, the Examiner, with the headline, TV Preacher’s Live-In Boy Lover.
‘Didn’t I tell you there was more stuff going down?’
So that was why they had all come back from their Day Ones to Boston. They knew this was coming – but they did not have Millroy’s power of foresight. Never mind what they had heard. What had they said?
Millroy did not utter a word. He simply raised his hand at the paper and before he completed the gesture the pages began to smoke. Just as Willie dropped it the newspaper burst into flames.
That was not the end of the business. There were more articles, there were anonymous phone calls, and this time no one in the diner said, It’s all trash.
Millroy got phone calls from concerned eaters. ‘Is this true, Doctor?’
No one except Millroy spoke to me. I was faced all day by those silent Sons and Daughters – little Millroys, with shaven heads, naked ears, staring at me like bug-eyed crickets. I could smell hatred on their breath.
Jaleen said to me one night as we were closing, ‘He should lose you.’
‘Are you talking to me?’
She was staring poisonously at me. ‘You’re out of here.’
‘You heard Jaleen,’ Willie said. ‘Take a hike, Little Guy.’
I did not move. It was not bravery – I was too frightened to take a step. When Willie came closer I put my hands on my body, less for protection than to cover myself. Willie, so strong these days from his diligence with Day One, seemed to smell my fear.
‘So the Big Man is your stepfather?’
‘Yes.’
‘He marry your Ma, something like that?’
I said nothing, and Willie knew I was cornered.
‘Where is your Ma, Little Guy?’
Willie began poking and plucking at me, and I was terrified that touching me like this he would discover my secret.
‘Mumma died,’ I said.
That rattled him and made him step back, and the others watching us looked hesitant, since death was like a sin, the real proof that a person was not Day One.
‘Mumma must have been a burger,’ he said. ‘Mumma must not have been regular.’
I hated those words of Millroy’s applied to my poor mother. But thinking of Mumma, her death, how she had slipped away and left me, I was so overwhelmed by the sadness I forgot my other miseries. By comparison to Mumma’s passing on, all the rest of it was nothing – the secret of being a girl, and being rejected, and being bullied. I sorrowed for her, not for myself. That must have made me look strong.
There were tears on my face, but I did not dare cry, because if I had sobbed they would have known I was a girl.
And when Willie touched me again I batted his hand away, and though I was more surprised by my strength than he was, he realized he had gone too far, and he faltered again.
There was a sudden noise against the wall, a yawn from Millroy’s cupboard, but it was like a lion’s growl, the kind of roar I had heard from the starved and confused animal long ago at the Barnstable County Fair. That harsh distant sound seemed to grind against Willie’s face, and it disturbed the Sons and Daughters. That growl put an end to this confrontation and saved me.
After that, there was silence again. But Millroy’s silences were l
ike speeches to me, and in the darkness they penetrated my brain. He did not discuss the Sons’ and Daughters’ attitude towards me, or that I had seemed to make him look like a molester. After I returned from the Cape he had embarrassed me, trying to feed me and saying You are my soul. He said nothing about the way I was opposed, or the way he was being slandered by the cheap newspapers – how he might have to choose between the whole of Day One, and me. He did not open his mouth at all.
But I knew him so well now that when he was saying nothing he was speaking to me, and even in the dark I knew when he was awake, lying there with his mind racing so fast you could hear the wind thrashing in the spokes.
That was why I had felt safe so far. He would not send me away. He said nothing, yet still I could guess, from the pulses in the air, how he felt about me. But I was no one, I had nothing to lose. Millroy’s reputation, his whole career – everything he had made – was in danger, because of the misunderstandings.
‘Maybe I should go,’ I said, thinking of the Sons and Daughters.
And not only of them but of myself, when I sat on the steps of the Boston Public Library, feeling small and pointless, the day I watched people going home and got a glimpse of Morrie Arkle. I had wanted to be one of those big busy people, going home myself. Nothing made me lonelier or sadder than being in this strange city and watching people hurrying home at the end of the day – abandoning the city, reminding me that I had nowhere to go.
Soon after in the darkness I heard Millroy – one word.
‘Never,’ he said.
37
‘Millroy is now bigger than his movement,’ Millroy said, ‘thanks to his detractors.’
And I was a wreck, and sick, his secret, his weakness, his sin, trying to make myself small, because I was responsible. I was so nervous I started sucking my thumb again when I was alone, although it tasted awful. Millroy fed me apricots and melons and honeycombs to cheer me up, a sugar infusion, but it did not cure me. No matter how he protested about needing me or You are my soul, muffin, I suffered for him – most of all because he refused to show his hurt. You never saw his pain. Millroy the Magician could make stress vanish and fat disappear. Only I knew his wretchedness, and that was misery for me.
His neck shortened whenever a helicopter went overhead.
‘I know who that is,’ he said, without glancing up. ‘They want me to know they’re after me.’
‘But why?’
‘Some Judas dropped a dime on me.’
He paced at the window of the diner, looking at the pedestrians heading across Park Square.
‘There is a fat man, frowning at me. He has the breasts of a mature woman, his name is probably Walter Gasset, his diet is crippling him, he believes in UFOs, and in a perverse way he is convinced that doing away with me will relieve his own constipation.’
Willie Webb was passing behind us and hearing this he laughed. This grunt made Millroy pause.
‘Ain’t you worried about them tax people?’ Willie said.
‘Which tax people?’
‘That want to look at your books,’ Willie said.
‘But that’s just a pretext. Know what I’m saying? They want to probe me.’
I stared at Willie. I wanted him to look at me so that I could smile, as a way of saying there were no hard feelings.
‘They are trying to give me the evil eye,’ Millroy said.
His eyes bulged and discolored as he gave it back. All along he had foreseen this, he said, that it was inevitable. The thing to do was regard it with cold eyes. Why panic? Part of his magic was his skill in looking unconcerned, ‘hiding the elephant,’ as he called it – his greatest illusion as a county fair magician.
‘And Millroy will not be probed,’ he said.
‘Yo.’
And then Millroy began working the phones himself – shouting back at his accusers.
‘We do not pray in the toilet, miss –’
‘No donations are solicited, sir – watch my program –’
‘This is not a religion – it is a movement –’
‘My people are free to leave at any time –’
‘The next sound you hear will be me putting down the phone, and then you will be all alone with your spastic colon –’
Big Guy’s on a roll, the Sons and Daughters said.
‘Millroy gives America an enema and look what happens,’ he said, glancing up. ‘That was Larry King Live.’
Because of the rumors, the gossip about Millroy’s private life, lurkers were outside the diner most of the day – no law against staring, the Boston Police said – hoping to get a glimpse of Millroy, the famous Christian, leader of the eaters, with his beans and his pulses and his figs, who was living openly in the Day One Diner with a fifteen-year-old boy, never mind that it was not true.
Inside or out he was now so well known that strangers came up to him, said Hello, or Where’s your friend?, or Do a trick.
He frightened these people with his laughter, and they did not know, as I did, that all his pain was in that laugh.
‘Hey, what’s your message today, Doctor Millroy?’ a man shouted at him in the Public Gardens.
‘Keep your bowels open, is my message.’
His laughter flashed like magic too, with his startling teeth. I hate hearing grown people laugh, he once said to me. To me it is one of the most sinister sounds in the world. When I first heard his sudden whinny I knew why. It had nothing to do with funniness, it was all nerves, it was electric, his tongue stuck out when he laughed hard.
As for the talk about me, he refused to deny it, he would not comment at all. He clammed up and was so silent he seemed to be asking for trouble, either enjoying the danger or else daring them to hurt him, the way he often said to a stranger, Go on, punch me in the stomach.
‘What have I done to make them doubt me?’ he asked in general. ‘I offered to extend their lives. Yes, I suppose some people find the prospect of all that extra time terrifying. But that’s because human longevity has not been observed on earth since biblical times. Readers are scared by the monkey people in Gulliver’s Travels and the old crones in that Aldous Huxley novel, After Many a Summer Something-something. The real thing is so different.’
He was looking directly at people passing by, thinking, Smoker’s Face, Smoker’s Limp, Fat Voice, Water Retention, Carnivore’s Hump.
‘They think dying is a way of killing time.’
‘You’re giving them something to look at,’ Willie Webb said, when Millroy was at the window of the diner.
He meant me, because the people outside might have been hoping to catch Millroy and me together, the big man and the small boy.
‘They’re not going to stop at looking,’ Willie said, nodding at Dedrick, who agreed. ‘What they’re down to is totally destroying the Big Guy.’
Millroy’s yelp was a laugh that meant Destroy me? and Willie backed off, embarrassed for suggesting that Millroy might be weak.
But it was not Millroy they were after, it was me, and when they spoke up they made me feel conspicuous and unhelpful. I wanted to creep away.
‘There is nowhere to hide,’ Millroy said, reading my mind.
Most days, Millroy winked at me and we slipped out to take a walk. I gladly went with him, relieved to be away from the diner and the curious eaters and spectators, the whisperers, and the Sons and Daughters.
There were too many Sons and Daughters, fifteen altogether, and even though they worked in shifts, the diner was always full of them, often more Sons and Daughters than eaters.
‘You’re the problem,’ Dedrick said to me.
I looked to Stacy for support.
‘Dedrick’s right,’ Stacy said, folding her arms. ‘Because we’re tight.’
I was a threat to them, Willie said, speaking for everyone. As soon as my existence was proved, Millroy was finished – they would hassle him on taxes, liquo
r, labor, insurance and health regulations. They would find underpayments, lead paint, and coliform bacteria.
They muttered these things to me and I tried not to cry when I repeated them to Millroy.
‘What do they know?’ Millroy said. ‘Sometimes people get close to you only to hurt you.’
I felt such misery being with him, knowing that I was one of the main reasons he was being attacked. And as we walked away I felt that he was pretending to be brave and cheerful for my sake. That I was not propping him up, as he had claimed. That he was suffering. People watched him. They knew who he was. What were they thinking?
‘A lot of people would love to see Millroy have a massive stroke,’ Millroy said. ‘When Jim Fixx died jogging all of fat America cheered. Fixx was not a righteous eater, but the fatties didn’t know that. They are even more eager to see Millroy croak. A Millroy myocardial infarction would validate their own existence. Or what if Millroy was caught joy-riding in a car with an under-age girl?’
‘That’s me.’
‘No, Alex.’
He smiled and raised a Day One finger.
‘Most of them are just curious,’ he said. ‘“It’s that bald guy from the TV show.” ’
I wondered why he did not wear a hat, or make any effort to disguise his appearance. You could see he was Millroy from a mile away, his good health making his head glow pink.
All the public attention tired me out, and I thought that the worst part of being famous was the fatigue you got from people staring the whole time, their eyes fastened on you. It wore me down, I wanted to disappear, but this visibility often seemed to energize Millroy.
On our walks we usually left the diner, crossed the Common to Tremont Street and when we got to Government Center, went down the steps to Quincy Market and the Boston Harbor. Millroy held his head up the whole time, as though challenging anyone to accuse him of living with a young boy.
That only made me more nervous.
I said, ‘Alex could just go off and disappear, couldn’t he?’
I felt so strange talking about myself that way, as though there were someone with me, a friend of the man Millroy, that Millroy was always talking about.