Millroy the Magician

by Paul Theroux

  ‘And Millroy could go on Larry King Live and say it was all a mistake.’

  ‘Why give them the satisfaction?’ he said.

  ‘But Alex is a problem.’

  ‘Alex has done nothing wrong,’ he said. ‘Alex has been loyal. Alex was with Millroy from the beginning.’

  There were now two Alexes and two Millroys, instead of one each.

  ‘And what harm has Millroy done?’ he went on. ‘Millroy has transformed the country, offered it hope and truth and pure food. Millroy put salvation on a plate and served it to the whole of America.’

  Walking along these Boston streets at lunchtime, what strengthened Millroy, he said, was the healthy skin and bright eyes, the rush of energy, the confident sense of well-being that he saw. It was as though he was responsible for it, had made it all, looking at Boston like God looking at the world in the week of creation. It was all new, it was Day One.

  ‘It’s unmistakable,’ he said. ‘Notice that surge? You get a sense that they eat right, that their bowels are open.’

  He raised his hands seeming to praise and bless them, and he wagged his Day One finger.

  ‘I like it,’ he said. ‘It’s spunk. It wasn’t like this before. And Millroy doesn’t want credit for it. He’s just grateful that it’s happening. This food culture, for example.’

  He meant the restaurants we were walking past, ‘Wally Wok,’ ‘Lawrence of Oregano,’ ‘Dunkin Donuts,’ ‘The Old Union Oyster House,’ ‘Pizzo Uno,’ ‘Turkish Delight,’ ‘Al Bustan,’ and ‘Zorba’s.’ And there were ice-cream stands, shish kebab stalls, people making crêpes and working popcorn machines.

  ‘Millroy was able to put this food mania to spiritual use. He got them eating wheaten loaves and the husks of fibrous seeds and grains.’

  Then he frowned and ducked, shortening his neck, and he squinted into the distance.

  ‘Yet some of them attack Millroy!’

  ‘They must be afraid,’ I said, because I was.

  ‘Of his power and influence, sure. So if he doesn’t have a massive stroke, they will try to destroy him, make him out to be just another holy hypocrite from TV.’

  ‘People say I am your secret weakness.’

  ‘You are Millroy’s strength, sugar.’

  ‘You seen these magazines, Big Guy?’ Jaleen said. She was shaking a pile of them. I saw Preacher and Young Boy and Secret Life of Diet Guru.

  ‘I don’t need to see them,’ Millroy said. ‘That’s been going on for a long time.’

  ‘They are dissing you, Big Guy,’ Willie said.

  ‘It was meant to be,’ Millroy said.

  Yet the Sons and Daughters were blaming me for being ‘Young Boy,’ and I was weakened and demoralized when, after a program-taping or a walk, we returned to the diner and saw the Sons and Daughters, still there, still hating me.

  They were thinking: Alex is bringing the Big Guy down – making life hard for him – attracting bad publicity – detracting from Day One.

  They did not know me, but so what? They wanted terrible things to happen to me. And they resented Millroy’s protecting me – the nights alone with me in the back of the diner, the Day One Programs that only I was allowed to watch from the control room, the walks through Boston with him, Millroy calling out to heckling strangers, Keep your bowels open –

  And standing with Millroy at the harbor, while he gazed out to sea.

  ‘I could never leave this country,’ Millroy said.

  Planes were landing at Logan, boats were churning the black water, and gulls were clawing the posts at the edge of the docks.

  ‘That’s why I worked so hard to get this country regular,’ he said. ‘I want America to be right, because I could never live anywhere else. I know. I tried it. Didn’t work out.’

  He was still watching the sea, smiling a little and thinking, Never.

  ‘Be happy,’ he said.

  ‘I am happy, out here with you,’ I said.

  ‘And the Day One – that’s home, where your friends are.’

  He nodded at me while he spoke, and smiled, as though encouraging me to agree.

  ‘Maybe we should go back,’ I said.

  But just as we turned to go, we saw Willie Webb approaching, with Dedrick, from the direction of Quincy Market.

  ‘Don’t go back to the diner, Big Guy,’ Willie said. ‘There’s some dudes there waiting for you, and I know they want to arrest you.’

  Millroy thought a moment. I expected him to laugh and walk right back and face the men and humiliate and defeat them with magic.

  But he said, ‘What do they look like?’

  ‘Wicked.’

  ‘I think a spell in the trailer would do me good,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some home movies there for a program. I’ve been meaning to dig them out.’

  Meanwhile, Willie and Dedrick were making horrible faces at me from behind Millroy’s back and making me feel desperate.

  We went back to Wompatuck, where the trailer was still parked, and the Sons and Daughters who had been living in it moved into the diner.

  ‘I like this old Airstream,’ Millroy said. ‘It reminds me of my days in the wilderness.’

  ‘Those men who came to the diner,’ I said. ‘You’re not afraid of them.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You could have liquidized them and drank them,’ I said. ‘You’re a magician.’

  ‘Millroy is human,’ he said. ‘I don’t want people to fear me for my magic. I want them to trust in my humanity.’

  The word ‘trust’ reminded me of how little I was trusted.

  ‘The Sons and Daughters hate me,’ I said.

  ‘Use that negative energy.’

  ‘And now I know they came back to Boston because they knew you were going to be attacked in the newspapers and magazines,’ I said. ‘Those lies about me.’

  ‘I guessed as much.’

  Millroy was smiling, and because he had no fear he never looked at any one thing very closely.

  ‘But how did they know about the lies?’

  ‘I am way ahead of you,’ Millroy said, and I had the feeling that he was just then working it all out. ‘Someone started the lies. It is possible that we have a traitor among us.’

  He kept his smile but the light behind it flickered out and darkened it with sadness.

  ‘I wish I knew who it was.’

  ‘It is someone who wants me to die.’

  ‘That’s kind of melodramatic, muffin.’

  ‘I almost did die,’ I said.

  ‘Be serious.’

  ‘Twice,’ I said.

  Choking with fright at the memory of it, I told Millroy the story of how I had been with Willie near the soup tureen, and the thing had tipped over and would have scalded me to death if I had not jumped out of the way. I began to lose my voice as I talked about it, and then, gulping even more, I struggled to tell him about the hatchway incident.

  ‘I remember that. Accidentally locked.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident,’ I said, and told him how I had been suffocating in the darkness of the hatchway with the dusty bean sacks, no one paying any attention to my yelling and pleading, until Millroy heard me. When I finished telling him these stories, I began to cry and I knew my face was a mess.

  Millroy was shocked. He said, ‘Angel.’

  ‘I’m glad we’re in this trailer,’ I said, with snot and tears shining on my face.

  Looking at his hands, as though he expected to see something stuck to his fingers, Millroy said, ‘I don’t care what the world thinks. But I do worry about my own people.’

  ‘I mean, what good is eating food that helps you live for two hundred years if people kill you when you’re a teenager.’

  I was still sobbing and upset from telling about my close-calls.

  ‘When they warned me about you, I began worrying about them,’ Millroy said. �
�But I didn’t think it would come to this.’

  ‘They really do hate me.’

  ‘I put it down to pride. Or envy. Blockage of some kind.’

  ‘They want me to die.’

  He put his face in his hands and made a sorrowing noise, which meant, How could people who eat this good food be so nasty?

  He believed me. He could see that I was afraid. He did not want to lose me.

  ‘Millroy is not happy about this,’ he said.

  He went to bed silent, and he brooded all the next day, sitting in the trailer.

  At dinner, which was broiled fish and a honeycomb, bread and barley cakes, he said, ‘Two hundred loaves of bread, a hundred bunches of raisins, a hundred of summer fruit, five measures of parched corn. That would sustain us in the wilderness.’

  He hardly looked at me, and it was as though he had resigned himself to setting out and leaving everything behind.

  ‘Maybe I didn’t get them early enough.’

  I did not know what to say.

  Narrowing his eyes, he said, ‘The real trauma of travel is having to employ strange toilets.’

  Darkness fell without our switching on the lights and, just a lumpy shadow, Millroy spoke again in the darkness.

  ‘How long have we been together, angel?’

  It was now the end of September. Last September Millroy was appearing on Paradise Park.

  ‘More than a year,’ I said.

  Millroy seldom looked back except to search the distant past. He took pride in looking ahead. But here he was, adding up the months.

  Before he went to sleep he said, ‘But this had to happen.’

  We were eating breakfast in the trailer the next morning with the television on, and a group of Olympic athletes were discussing nutrition on one of the news shows.

  I don’t think I would have focussed on this competition if I hadn’t done the Day One program, one of the men said, and the others agreed. We’re all into Day One, yeah.

  ‘Ironic, isn’t it?’ Millroy said.

  He had been up since four-thirty, moving furniture, baking bread, mashing lentils, peeling fruit, juicing vegetables, and, from time to time, hopping to the floor and doing knee-bends and push-ups, and you didn’t know whether he was genuflecting or exercising.

  ‘For some people the movement is still the important thing. Bless them.’

  Every American eats forty pounds of sugar a year, a long-haired actress was now saying in a commercial for artificial sweetener.

  Millroy was alert to his name being mentioned, to items in the papers about Day One, even though he pretended not to be. It mattered to him, because it was proof that the program was established and growing, that the work was being carried on by unknown eaters.

  ‘Now I want to know the truth,’ he said, and he became very thoughtful and still, as though he had stopped breathing.

  That night, after dark, we drove into Boston, Millroy and I, and surprised the Sons and Daughters, who were closing down the diner for the day. They had locked the front doors and were cleaning the bread ovens and mopping and fussing. There were so many of them, all looking so bald and well-fed, with scowling faces and gleaming heads, they scared me. I wanted to go back to Wompatuck. It looked as though they had completely taken over, and that it was their diner now.

  Seeing Millroy enter they fell silent.

  Willie Webb and Dedrick were up front, Willie holding a rolled-up newspaper, which unrolled and smoothed onto the counter.

  ‘That’s cool,’ Willie said. ‘Now how do you aim to kick this, Big Guy?’

  It was another newspaper from the supermarket, making me think of Millroy so pleased at being ‘supermarket famous.’ There was a full-page color picture of Elvis in a space-suit, something about Hitler being still alive, a story about Siamese twins, Carrots Are Great For Your Love-Life, Scientists Say, and Shameful Sex Secret of TV Holy Food Preacher – ‘It’s Not His Son.’

  ‘Ignore it,’ Millroy said. ‘That takes more strength than fighting lies. I’ve been in the headlines before, as you fellows know very well.’

  ‘Yo. Are these here lies, Big Guy?’

  ‘They dissing you, is that right?’

  Hearing these defiant questions, the other Sons and Daughters crowded around, squeezing me in their hatefulness, which was like a bad smell rising in the room. I wanted to shrink and then vanish, and only Millroy’s presence sustained me. He could have helped me disappear, but no.

  ‘Don’t you know these rumors are an insult to us all?’ Millroy said, sounding reasonable.

  ‘There is a big bust coming,’ Dedrick said. ‘And it is down to him.’

  Meaning me, and I was terrified.

  ‘He is jeopardizing the movement,’ Stacy said.

  ‘I think you’re forgetting something,’ Millroy said. ‘Like who started the movement.’

  Millroy looked at all of them with hot searching eyes, and he twitched his mustache a fraction to show his teeth.

  ‘Millroy wants you to trust him and accept his good friend, Alex,’ he said.

  But someone laughed in the back – too loud – and it sounded like a challenge. The way the rest of them stared at Millroy after that sound seemed like more defiance.

  ‘Threats from outside can make us strong, by uniting us,’ Millroy said, looking sad and pityingly at them all. ‘But this kind of talk is dangerous when it comes from inside the movement. It is a betrayal.’

  ‘The kid’s a liability,’ Willie said, pointing at me.

  Millroy’s eyes went black. I thought he was going to explode.

  ‘He is out of here,’ Dedrick said.

  ‘It’s time to eat.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘Millroy says.’ And when he told them where and when they hardly believed him.

  38

  The next night, with wild staring eyes Millroy drove to Boston in the Ford and pulled the Airstream level with the Day One Diner and called out in his voice that penetrated brick walls.

  ‘Get in.’

  While the Sons and Daughters piled into the trailer, Millroy changed places with Berry – ‘You’re driving, son’ – and joined us in the back.

  Millroy had introduced us to some strange meals, but this was the strangest one we had ever eaten – midnight, sixteen of us going whoopsie in the trailer as we shoved tables together, everything tipping on the turns in the Boston streets, and then speeding down the Mass Pike. That was just before we sat down to eat, but we never stopped rolling, and the trailer swayed like a boat in a breeze.

  ‘This is one of those dinner events that is so odd it’s bound to be distorted later on when people talk about it,’ Millroy said.

  His feet were planted squarely on the jogging floor – he was the only one with sea legs. The rest of us staggered and tried to balance with the motion of the creaking trailer. We felt better when we sat down, but it was still like being at sea.

  The Sons and Daughters were watching him, as though he was steering us through a storm.

  ‘I am not a nut-bag.’

  But they looked at him as though he was.

  ‘I am a fugitive.’

  He was sad, yet there was something defiant in his sadness, as though all his anger had burned away, leaving him alone and misunderstood, but refusing to give up. In this isolation he had summoned all his strength.

  ‘Which unhappy person did that to me?’

  Willie said, ‘We’re on your side, Big Guy.’

  Millroy just smiled, and his body tipped slightly as a truck noisily passed us, its canvas covers flapping like sheets on a line, and we were sucked sideways by the sudden wind of its slipstream.

  ‘You ought to know that although I can make magic,’ Millroy said, ‘I am human, like you.’

  Repeating human, he swept the flat of his hand along the three pushed-together tables, and thick blue bowls appeare
d, brimming with reddish pottage, and platters of wheaten loaves, honey wafers, melons and grapes, fig cakes, swatches of herbs, and the leafy green stalks he called ‘cruciform vegetables.’

  ‘I hate sermons,’ he said, not even looking at the food that had just miraculously been tangibilized. ‘I don’t address crowds.’

  The moving trailer gave him a trembly voice and made the crockery clink, and added to the creak of the straining metal shell of the Airstream. The windows were shut but we heard whup-whup-whup as we passed posts by the roadside.

  ‘We have no congregation – the Book is our church,’ Millroy said. And in a more precise gesture, stabbing his fingers downward, he added goblets to the table, one in front of each person. ‘When I preached to a multitude I did it on television.’

  At that moment, his voice deepening, he seemed to be speaking again to America.

  ‘The great thing about the prospect of living for two hundred years is that there’s time for everything,’ he said. ‘You can be calm.’

  Standing among us at the table in the trailer, he was calmer than I had ever seen him, with his hot breath, that whisper of passionate certainty that made him seem so strong.

  ‘We never had services,’ he said. ‘No music, no pictures, no graven images, no gold.’

  He held up his index finger, his Day One finger. We looked at this finger.

  ‘That’s the beauty of Day One,’ he said. ‘Its intimacy. It is just a meal. But –’

  He smiled as he smoothed the table, and in a glittering miracle under his hand a crystal platter seemed to rise out of the cloth.

  ‘– the Lord appears at mealtimes,’ he said. ‘I am that bread of life.’

  Lifting the platter he raised it shoulder high and it shone like a mirror, lighting his face.

  ‘You are my children,’ he said and looked uneasy. ‘And my life is in your hands.’

  Was he talking about death? Maybe not, but they were the tones of someone about to set off on a long journey.

  If you go, please take me with you, I thought.

  The booming of the wind rocked the trailer and made me think of this trip in the Airstream as a meal on a stormy sea.