by Paul Theroux
‘A fat dusky family,’ Millroy said, back on the path. ‘They had webbed feet. They had chunky thighs and bad skin. They were feeding on a jumbo bag of Cheez Doodles and swigging Cokes. They badly need this program.’
But he was also annoyed, because he had expressly forbidden any re-runs or re-broadcasts of Day One.
‘Someone’s making a pile of money out of this. And I can feel in my bones that he’s not an eater – not righteous at all.’
At the next house, jumping blue glare on the walls and the same Millroy the Messenger voice coming from the TV, Millroy went stooping to the side window. He came back to the path where I stood, and he was muttering. First he said that he had seen four islanders in the room watching the show. And then he began to shout.
‘I have been betrayed,’ he said. ‘There was a commercial break! I never had a commercial break in all the months I did that show. They were selling so-called high-fiber breakfast cereal, but you know that all processed food has been stepped on. That’s treachery.’
He was furious that Day One was on television here. His success had been stolen from him – there he was on TV, grinning and eating, and he watched this with a stony face. Most of the houses on the beach or on the cliffs here had the show on, though two or three howlie families were watching Wheel of Fortune.
That night in the dark I heard Millroy insisting, I don’t want a TV set.
These re-runs explained why people squinted at him at times on the beach – why they sometimes said hello and aloha, and lingered near the house.
And after that Day One night I noticed that there were many of them, always lurking, as though they wanted something but were too shy to ask.
‘There’s someone out there,’ I said.
‘A dozen of them,’ Millroy said, without looking up.
‘Those people freak me out,’ I said.
Millroy was not even thinking about them. He looked at me sadly and said, ‘I love you.’
That was my biggest reason to leave. At night I planned my escape – the flight to Honolulu, then back to Boston, the bus to the Cape, the walk from Falmouth, the road to Dada’s trailer or Gaga’s house. But at some point on that trip, usually in one of the weedy driveways, I found myself hesitating, looking back, not sure what I should do next.
I sensed these dark and heavy island people watching me. I love you was a challenge that made me feel helpless. Millroy kept on insisting he did not want a TV set, and he listened to the wind and said, I can hear them talking about me. And he was right.
It was our old experience of seeing strangers circling and gathering and mounting up, and getting attentive, like chickens following a feed bucket. I had seen it before at Millroy’s show at the Barnstable County Fair, the people frisking under the sign, Belteshazzar – Master of the Magicians. And they had done it again after the show in the studio parking lot of Paradise Park, and more recently at the Day One Diner in Boston, when that crowd of people clamored for Millroy on the sidewalk and blocked traffic and gave out handbills claiming Millroy was the Devil.
Millroy attracted crowds. It was happening again, here on the Big Island, people in front of the house, trying to look inside.
‘Why should I mind?’ Millroy said.
They were both shy and nosy, bobbing around our bushes, fat boys mostly, in faded baseball hats.
‘They don’t worry me at all,’ he said.
Trying to be quiet they made a racket, and their loud whispers made them seem panicky and deaf.
‘They’re the ones who should be worried,’ he said.
Millroy was not watching them, he was watching me, and on the verge of telling me again that he loved me.
‘You’re not scared, are you?’
I folded my arms so that he could not see me tremble, and I forced myself to tell him.
‘I’m wicked scared.’
He made a little laughing noise that rattled behind his face. He said, ‘I’ll be right back.’
The next sound I heard was breaking glass, Millroy in the kitchen smashing a bottle into smaller pieces as though he was whacking a cake of ice with a hatchet.
‘Come with me,’ he said, hurrying past me, and out the front door, carrying a tray of broken glass.
I followed him into the sunny yard where ten or fifteen island people were milling around as usual, looking sheepish. When they saw Millroy they backed up, but Millroy motioned them nearer.
‘Don’t rush off,’ he said, and he went up to one man. ‘Tell me, friend, what are people saying about me?’
‘Some people talking stink,’ the man said. His tee-shirt was lettered Vote Spark Matsunaga.
‘About me?’
The man’s blinking eyes meant yes, yes.
‘What are they saying?’
‘That you’re the guy from TV. Does magic chricks. Can turn the Devil into a glass of djuice and then pick the glass up and djrink it all.’
Another man said, ‘And da police lookeen for you on da mainland. And talkeen udda stink.’
The rest of the people stepped back when that reckless man spoke, as though Millroy was going to howl at them.
‘I wonder how strong those policemen are,’ Millroy said. But his smile meant it was not a question.
He buried his face in the broken glass, holding the tray up and roaring into it. Then he put the tray down and brushed glass splinters off his face, unscrewed the bulb from the light fixture on the porch and bit on it, shattered it, crunched it in his teeth. He spat this out – the watching people moaned as he did it – and swallowed four razor blades, and finally vomited them onto the lawn, where they gleamed.
‘I wonder what those cops eat for breakfast,’ he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
He had always been a showman.
Someone said, ‘He so shtrong.’
‘Is anudda chrick.’
Meanwhile, Millroy was unrolling a small tight ring of rubber into a wrinkly white balloon.
The men and boys in the crowd laughed and covered their faces when they saw it.
‘A rubber johnny,’ Millroy said, and snorted it through his nose. He stuck out his tongue and eased the rubber thing out of his mouth. Then he reversed the process – into his mouth, out his nose, the thin rubber rippling out of one nostril.
They laughed hard with goggling eyes, the laughter that is the worst kind of horrified.
‘Punch me in the stomach!’
When no one did it he turned his back on the fearful people.
‘You have nothing to worry about, sugar.’
He did not know that it was his magic that worried me most of all.
Millroy’s magic had kept me safe but it had never calmed me. It had first startled me, then amazed me, and finally terrified me – all of it, ever since he changed that girl into milk and drank her. The rats of Floyd Fewox were worse, and I was a trembling witness when Millroy had said, His name is Sidney Perkus. He is a twisted old fruit, and destroyed him. He had grown in power, from conjuring with flags to making a jumbo jet shudder in the sky. And Millroy’s power had made him dangerously visible.
‘I never wanted to be famous,’ he had said.
I believed that. No one else had. He loved me for it.
But Millroy’s magic was so unusual on the Big Island that it had the opposite effect from the one he intended. The magic that was supposed to scare these people off only made them nosier. They kept their distance, but they did not go away. They told their friends. That was the strangest part of Millroy’s magic – even when it was shocking, you wanted to go on watching, and it was at its most dazzling when it was dangerous. Millroy’s magic made people want more.
He progressed from being famous on the beach to famous in Puna District, and at last he roused the whole island.
They knew he was not just the man who chewed lightbulbs and ate razor blades, nor just the healer who
withered trees and raised the woman Momi from the dead, nor even the big kahoona who bewitched wild dogs and diverted lava flows.
He was Millroy, he was Uncle Dick, the doctor, the wise messenger of The Day One Program, wanted by the police on the mainland on various charges, because of the misunderstandings.
I had already told him how worried I was, and that I froze stiff whenever I saw a white police car on the coast road. But he could easily vanish, as he had before, so what did he care?
‘I could live the rest of my life like this,’ he said. ‘Two hundred years!’
That worried me very much.
‘I love you,’ Millroy said.
You heard something like that and you just wanted to take off.
So I knew what I had to do, and I decided to tell him early one evening, while there was still time to pack my things and catch the early-morning plane out of Hilo. Home was awful, but home was simple. I remembered my old daydream of getting a waitressing job in Hyannis or Falmouth and going to work in my second-hand car. I would save up, move out of Vera’s trailer, and maybe later I would meet someone – not a magician but a normal man – and raise some children. One day when I trusted them enough not to be freaked I would tell them of my amazing time with Millroy. I pictured myself at my own kitchen table saying, Whatever happened to Millroy the Magician?
They would all look at me differently after they realized what I had been through.
That little guy Alex on the show and that’s mentioned in his book? I would say. That was me.
Twilight was not just a shadowy sky, it was also a certain perfume in the air, the cooing of a pair of speckled doves, the twitter of a bird settling on a branch, the hoarse cough-like bark of a dog out on the road, the dusky day winding down, the world filling with night that was like thickening dust. And it was how I felt about my life with Millroy, that it was ending like that, in a quiet departure.
Millroy was cooking again tonight. Just seeing his efficient fussing in the kitchen made me nervous these days, as though he was making a potion, preparing to cast a spell on me.
And it was his happiness, too, that bothered me, because I could not share it, any more than I could return his love.
I was staring at him from the door, bracing myself to tell him my decision.
‘Pottage,’ he said, batting the pot with his wooden spoon.
Did he remember that it was one of the first meals he had ever made for me?
He had not switched the light on. He moved in the kitchen like a dark sorcerer without a shadow.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he said, stepping outside.
He looked young, smoother in the fading light, stronger than ever, more wizardy. But I was so afraid of his power that everything he said to me sounded as though it had hidden meanings.
‘I don’t trust these people,’ I said.
‘They can’t hurt us.’
‘There are police here, too.’
‘You’ve seen me deal with the law, angel.’
I kept my mind a blank so that he would not be able to read it. When he walked towards me I stepped back.
We were in the small secluded garden behind the kitchen, where the green leaves the shape and size of elephant ears trembled over my head. There were long-stemmed ferns, and pink and yellow flowers, and smudges of jasmine in the air.
I could just make out Millroy looking at me in a certain way, as though straining his eyes to see me. He dropped his voice, talking so softly I barely heard what he was saying.
Night fell fast on this windward coast of the Big Island – sunset was on the other side. No sooner had you decided that it would be night in a little while than it was pitch dark, the sea blackening from the horizon, the darkness rushing in with the waves, faster than a rising tide.
Millroy was talking harmlessly about eating, and what he said made no sense to me, but his gesturing fingers stilled my eyes.
‘Yes,’ I said, and felt my tongue grow fatter in my mouth and a buzzing in my brain. Even in this poor light I was aware of Millroy’s eyes changing color.
He was saying, ‘You love me.’
But I jerked my head and looked up. In places between smoky twilight clouds the sky was still blue.
‘What are you doing?’ I said.
He was never at a loss for words, and yet he had no answer to this, and his silence perplexed me, as though I had dropped something and it had not clunked.
‘You love me,’ he said after that pause, and that woke me up more.
‘Hey, are you trying to hypnotize me?’
He looked guilty, on the verge of denying it.
‘How could you do a crappy thing like that to me, you turkey!’
I began to cry, and ran so that he would not see me, and when I was away from him I got angry and was glad I had called him a turkey, knowing how much he would have hated it. I locked myself in my room and did not reply to him when he called to me – making promises, begging me to listen, telling me how much he loved me.
I was packing my bag. I was sad when I saw that I owned so few things, and all of it boys’ clothes. All night I repeated like a prayer, I am Jilly Farina from Marston’s Mills, to remind myself of who I really was and where I belonged.
Millroy was outside my door the next morning, kneeling on the creaking boards. Had he been there all night? Sleeplessness and kneeling made him look sorry. Whenever he was tired he did not look like a magician. He saw me holding my small bag and spoke to me in a weary gentle voice.
‘Angel?’
‘I’m going home.’
‘This is your home.’
‘Not anymore.’
He was suddenly ugly, with a frantic twisted face.
‘I’ll do anything.’ That was a different and desperate voice. I could tell he was about to say I love you but he saw me cringe and he held back.
‘By the way, I’m not hungry.’
Again I had the idea that he might try to bewitch me with one of his marvelous meals and then recite, If you feed someone they belong to you.
I set off, walked past him, reached the door. I was surprised that he made no move, did not follow me, simply watched me foundering in the doorway, where beyond the black cliff the sunrise was blazing on the ocean and in the air.
Breathing hard, he got my attention – all those gasps.
‘I know what you need me to do.’
He stepped back from me and seemed to draw me towards him, yet I resisted.
‘What?’
‘Break my rod,’ he said.
I stared hard at nothing at all on the floor because I had not expected that word.
‘Didn’t even know you had a rod.’
‘Just an expression,’ Millroy said.
43
I know what you need me to do.
When Millroy sprang that on me I felt fuzzy around the edges, and hopeful, but then I looked hard at him and my feet bumped back onto the ground. I could not imagine Millroy any other way, because magic – the thing he did most these days – made him a stranger to me, and to everyone. Ever since we had come to the Big Island I felt we were living in a dream and now I wanted to wake up and go home. Yet this man had saved my life and kept me alive and happy most of the time, so I was willing to listen.
But, Break my rod?
‘Give me a little time.’
At least he hadn’t said, Give Millroy a little time – he had gotten over talking like that.
Yet it was so odd, his bargaining with me. He was frantic but he was also firm – desperate in a determined way, with stony eyes. He never shed a tear. Even when he woke up worried after a crab fright or death nightmare he never wept.
‘And then what’s supposed to happen?’
‘You’ll know. You won’t be afraid.’
‘Anyway’ – but I hated asking him this – ‘what does “break my rod” mean?�
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He did not ask me to guess – he knew my head was empty.
‘This rough magic of mine I here abjure,’ he said, with a strange smile, knowing I still had no idea. He added, ‘Renounce my magic. Drown it.’
I could not picture it at all, Millroy without it.
‘Then the whole thing will be my fault,’ I said.
He smiled at me, his shoulders lopsided, one up, one down, holding his hands out, one in a clenched fist, the other with his palm open. I knew this crippled weighing gesture expressed his feeling that one side of him would be relieved to be rid of the magic, and the other side of him sorry it would be gone. But if it was gone, what then?
‘Then I’ll need you more than ever,’ he said, mind-reading my question.
‘Why would you give your magic up? You have everything.’
‘Except you.’
‘Here I am.’
‘Your love,’ he said.
Even though that was true it did not make me feel important, and I wanted to cry, I felt terrible. I prayed to myself, I am Jilly Farina from Marston’s Mills, I am nobody, I am nothing.
‘Other people won’t like it.’
‘They put me in the wrong. Most of them don’t deserve me. The rest are after me.’
‘I am nobody.’
‘My whole life is about you,’ Millroy said.
Millroy the Magician! Not only tricks – the disappearing elephant, the Indian basket, the television stunts, flushing Perkus – but the miracles of Millroy the Messenger. He could whip up storms in the sky, raise the dead, see through walls, hear distant whispers, send jets of fire out of his fingertips. He knew the insides of things, he had fathomed the human body, had control over nine bodily functions. It might have been awful for him at times (I never wanted to be famous) but it was amazing for everyone else.
‘Angel, you don’t know how powerful you are,’ he said. He looked out of the window at the sound of a chirp – a tiny bird alighting on the thick velvet petal of a pink blossom. ‘Or how weak I am.’
‘You’re not weak,’ I said.
‘I am helpless,’ he said, and that was how he looked, sort of narrow, ‘without your love.’