The Souvenir Museum

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “It’s so good to see you,” she said to him. She’d learned through the years that saying made it so, at least sometimes. “Really, Jone.”

  “This is going to be the greatest year of my life,” said Jonas, and she said, “Yes, it will, I know it.”

  Not blond but ginger ale. Not ginger ale but champagne.

  Later, in the Irishwoman’s bed, she heard a clunk against the roof and realized it was fallout from the night’s barrage. Ordinarily she would have stayed awake, waiting for the inevitable smell of disaster. Now she thought, Icarus, Newton’s apple, David Bowie, impossible beautiful falling things. A rocket set off hours earlier by the boy in the middle of the street, flown so high it had gone into orbit, circumnavigated the globe, and—like so many flying things—gotten homesick, decided to plummet back.

  Should she throw something to the kitchen tabletop, to give her brother the same exhilaration on his bedroll beneath? Would it work?

  The table was still scattered with empty hot dog cans. In the Netherlands, they were called knaks.

  Twelve hours later, Mistress Mickle—her name was Jenny Early, though forty-nine seemed to her too old to be Jenny and too late to be Early—boarded a ferry at the Hook of Holland, headed for Harwich, where her car was parked. She’d lived in England for twenty years, working as an actress, more or less, all that time: in an experimental theater company (“experimental” meant foodstuff and nudity); as a stilt walker in a new-wave circus; as a minor recurring character on Coronation Street; as the slowest member of an improv troupe; as a reader to the blind; as a voice-over artist in cartoons and, later, video games; and finally as Mistress Mickle, which involved stilts and a multicolored Victorian dress and yelling, week after week, at an audience of children, from which six players were plucked and protected by a young hero named Micah. (The eponymous Barnaby—actual surname O’Malley—had been fired for sleeping with seventeen-year-olds, which he told the papers was unfair, as there were no seventeen-year-olds in his audience.) Mistress Mickle would attempt to kidnap the children, and even when she managed to land one in jail—on stilts! In a hoopskirt!—Micah would always be waiting with the unconvincing cardboard key, which was the size of a leg of lamb. The children would boo her.

  Micah was the beautiful child of a Danish mother and a Nigerian father, as genial off camera as on, though in real life guileless, dumb, incapable of outwitting anyone, never mind a woman so many years his senior. He reminded Mistress Mickle of an alternate Jonas, one whose every slapdash decision raised him up instead of knocking him down. She hated Micah for his good luck (though neither Micah nor Jonas believed in luck: they believed in breezily accepting the day), and for his consistent love of the children, for his youth, for the way the game itself was stacked against her.

  No children waited for Mistress Mickle on the other side of her journey, nor husband, nor (at the moment) paramour, and that was fine. She liked sex and she liked privacy, and she’d reached her mid-thirties before realizing life could offer her both. The time that living with another person took up! The small talk! The politeness! Life alone was banal, too, but at least the banality wasn’t narrated.

  It was bad for you to say aloud the minor grievances of the day, the rude bank teller and the gum on the bottom of your shoe. It was terrible to alter your diet to what another person liked or didn’t: The last man she’d lived with had hated capers. And so she’d given up capers, until she gave up the man. His name was Philip. He was a theater director who had made fun of her accent, the way she dropped ts in the middle of English expressions and words: Bee’root. Wai’rose. Whi’bait. Qui’right.

  All her life she’d felt foreign; landing abroad, she was relieved to assume it as an official diagnosis.

  This was a day crossing, but she’d taken an outside cabin, one with a double bed and a single bed and a surprisingly large bathroom with a toilet, shower, sink, and three thick, white towels, more than Jonas had to his name. (What had happened to him, that he lived like that? Shit happens, Jonas would say. Life happens, Micah would say, while you’re making other plans.) A free minibar. She ate both chocolates and the bag of potato chips while the boat was still in port. The strange elation of the previous evening was still in her: she felt calmer than she had in ages. The Irishwoman was pregnant. Their family would continue after all! Aunty Mickle! Still stoned, she thought, though she wasn’t sure that was true, and she lay down on the single bed, because it was on the right side of the cabin, and the homing device in Mistress Mickle’s brain always went right: on busses, on trains, in restaurants. There was a little wall-mounted television; she tuned it to the closed-circuit cameras in the belowdecks kennels. Empty. Empty. Empty. The channel suited her.

  Ordinarily she wanted to watch television but couldn’t bear to watch. She might see, for instance, an actor in a movie whom she’d met fifteen years ago on a soap: Now how did he get that break? She might see young, talentless, gleaming people. It appalled her, the jealousy of her middle age, though it flared up only occasionally, a trick knee. Lumbago, whatever lumbago was. Spiritual arthritis. As a young woman she was (she believed) mostly generous, entirely sane, and the acting jobs she got, the soaps and reenactment shows and cartoon voice-overs, had seemed like good fortune. Now everything was a conspiracy, mean and purposeful, designed to hurt her, and while she knew there were people who saw her in the piebald, pirate-y Mistress Mickle costume on Barnaby Grudge and were filled with jealousy themselves, this knowledge didn’t comfort her: indeed, when she stopped to contemplate it, she felt demeaned.

  Knock it off, she told herself. New year. She plumped the pillow. It was a real pillow. It was a good ship. She checked her heart. Beating.

  No dogs, still.

  She never quite fell asleep, but she observed, as though from a distance, obscure, outlandish thoughts as they alighted: Would Jonas take the Irishwoman’s bed, or would he keep obediently to his mat beneath the kitchen table? Why beneath the table? Oh, to avoid being stepped on. A baby in a hat might crawl by, too—now, what did that mean? she asked herself in an Irish accent. The sea grew rough: every now and then a wave lifted the boat up and set it down with a minor clunk, and the back room of her brain thought, Ah, the plane has landed.

  She sat up after thinking this for the third time. Not plane, boat. The television showed its series of empty kennels. It looked like a prison break: I don’t know, Sarge, the cells were all full half an hour ago.

  Between the beds a large, lozenge-shaped window. A porthole. A window that would allow nobody to spy on you. She regarded the polished green sea cut through with unpolished white foam. She heard an ululating child run down the corridor outside: toddler Doppler effect. Other than that, the cabin was the most complete privacy one could imagine while still surrounded by hundreds of people, and superb. There was nothing she didn’t like. How to fully enjoy it? She had an urge to transgress, to drink the pygmy minibar red wine, then the white, then the two cans of Heineken, to strip and press her nakedness against the porthole.

  Who would know? Some unseen sailor with a telescope. Satellites. Aliens. Nobody. Fish.

  She didn’t drink anymore. Hours to go before Harwich. She needed to get out.

  The public areas were on deck nine. She’d been on shitty ferries, but this was a nice one. Coffee bars, wine bars, a cafeteria, even a fancy restaurant with a three-course prix fixe menu. Most of the passengers (there weren’t many) seemed to be Middle Eastern Muslims, the women in chadors and head scarves, a pair of tiny girls hidden in floor-length dresses, the men in blue jeans. Of course, thought Mistress Mickle: everyone else was too hungover on New Year’s Day to chance a ferry. You had to be from a nondrinking people to survive. Or naval: she had navy on both sides of the family; she never got sick. Still, the roughness of the sea was a low-level prank beneath her feet: three steps fine, and then the deck rose up quick. At the far end of the cafeteria a white-haired man pulled a clattering child’s toy, a dragon that smacked its jaws as it rolled along. The ma
n wore a round embroidered Chinese hat and pants that showed his ankles, and he tweaked balloons into dogs and handed them to children. She supposed she and he were members of the same tribe, or the same theoretical union. Keep your distance, she thought at him.

  Where was Jonas now? He’d ridden the bus with her to the central train station, used her credit card to buy her ticket to the port. He was going to be a father. (She resolved to believe it.) Fathers should not sleep beneath kitchen tables. He needed money. She would send it happily, without negotiation or expectation.

  She walked through a door out onto an open deck at the end of the boat. Not end. Stern. She walked to the stern of the boat past the smokers and stared sternly out. The sharp salt air did her some good, though the smokers all looked fucked off with the cold. Why she’d quit: after the ban in restaurants and pubs, smoking had become a standing endeavor, and she had no interest in smoking upright. She stood at the rail and looked at the water.

  She thought—as she often did when she saw an opportunity—of doing away with herself. Wait till the deck cleared so nobody would witness her. Jump in. Drown. How long would it take till she was noticed missing? She might be an enduring mystery, like Judge Crater (US) or Lord Lucan (UK). You waited to disappear till nobody watched you go. Otherwise you’d be only a dull suicide.

  This was a lifelong habit. It didn’t feel suicidal but the opposite, a satisfying of a not-quite-urge. Whenever she moved to a new place, for instance, she looked for the support she’d hang herself from. In her current house, a barn conversion, there were beams everywhere, though the best was in the kitchen, with an iron hook. Finding the spot calmed her. She didn’t want to kill herself, but she did want to think about it. After all, she wasn’t afraid of death.

  She decided to live forever or as long as possible. She would learn to be a better person, for her niece’s sake. (Why niece? She couldn’t imagine Jonas as the father of a son, was all.) Today it felt entirely possible. Was this optimism? Was this what Micah and Jonas felt?

  The water behind a boat is the deepest wishing well in the world: It has drag and intention. Throw your dreams into it. If they don’t pull you in and drown you, perhaps they’ll come true.

  On a table inside she found a flyer. CHILDREN’S ENTERTAIMENT, it said, 2:30 IN THE KID ZONE! MAGIC, BALLOONS! Well, she thought. Why not. The boat appeared so empty she imagined nobody else might show up, the sea sufficiently turbulent that any children were lying flat and sipping warm water. Professional courtesy, one children’s performer to another. She would be his audience.

  But the KID ZONE!, a glassed-in space just beyond the cafeteria, was full. With palpable delight, a young white woman (English, Mistress Mickle was pretty sure) watched her two-year-old daughter waddle up to the man in the Chinese hat: how lucky, the mother clearly thought, that the world had the chance to experience her child! A plump redheaded boy clutched a model of the very boat they were on, purchased from the gift shop. Two-thirds of the audience seemed to be one large Muslim family, or several families traveling together: kids in the front row, a couple of men leaning against the far wall, four young women in matching robin’s-egg-blue head scarves who could have been mothers to the audience, or older sisters. Not all the teenage girls wore head coverings, so probably they weren’t all related. They were different strains. Denominations. The God of one allowed you to show your neck, and the God of another allowed you to wear slacks.

  Where were they from? Somewhere in the Middle East. Even if she heard them speak, she wouldn’t know. She had a bum ear: probably why the height of her acting career was a villain on a children’s game show. Dutch sounded like German to her, and Portuguese like Russian. Were they Iraqi, Yemeni? Then one of the teenage boys sighed and said to a teenage girl, in a voice of dread and Birmingham, “This is taking forever. I wish we’d flown.”

  “Fly, then,” said his sister. “Go ahead.”

  Returning home. At sea with the English, as per usual.

  One elderly woman, tucked in a porthole frame, clapped impatiently at a small boy who’d stood up and started to wander. (She was from elsewhere, surely, the original cutting on the family tree.) (They were at sea, they were all from elsewhere.) The boy was little, in elasticized jeans with prominent belt loops. Mistress Mickle wanted to set him in her own lap, whisper in his ear, Shh, let’s watch the show, lay her cheek against his hot head. She did feel inclined toward some children, little ones, those not yet taught by television to hate her. The boy’s older sister, a girl of six, knit her already comically serious eyebrows and grabbed him by the waist and gave him a good slug on the arm. Then, as though overcome with love, she seized and kissed him.

  Mistress Mickle sat on the floor by the door.

  The man in the Chinese hat turned to the audience. He held up to the light three balls filled with glittery fluid. Wordlessly he began juggling. Three balls was relatively easy, Mistress Mickle knew from her years with Circus a Go-Go, and then thought: but hard on a pitching boat. With a military hup, he popped the third ball, then again, again, till all the children were watching.

  “Hello,” he said. “I am the Magnificent Jimmy.” He had a London accent, despite the Chinese hat and Moroccan slippers. Then he said, more firmly, “Hello!”

  “Hello,” the audience answered, the way you might greet a friendly lunatic in the park.

  “That’s rubbish, that is,” said the Magnificent Jimmy. “Hello!”

  “Hello!” the children said, loudly this time. He gave a satisfied nod.

  At juggling he was fine, he was acceptable, he was delightful: she had forgotten what a good audience member she was. How she liked looking at people who wanted only to entertain, no matter how talented—or untalented—they might be. That was why she’d begun acting in the first place, to be regarded by strangers in the way she did them, with a kind of open narrative love that made up stories. Had he done this all his life? Did he live on board? No: he lived in a bedsit in Harwich. He’d hoped to be a famous magician but had never thrown that first leg over the gate of success. His elderly mother was still alive. He took care of her.

  The toddler girl threatened the Magnificent Jimmy’s knees as her mother looked on in admiration; the redheaded boy kept trying to go back of him, as though the Magnificent Jimmy himself were a trick to get to the bottom of.

  “Here we go,” said the Magnificent Jimmy, “keep your eye on the blue ball,” and then the blue ball got away from him. It rolled toward the antsy little boy, who caught it. “Thank you, mate,” said the Magnificent Jimmy, “toss ’er here,” and the boy did. “You’re a very naughty blue ball,” the Magnificent Jimmy told the blue ball. “Don’t ever leave me again.”

  His balloon-animal skills were terrific, balloons inside balloons, all blown up by his own lungs, no tacky hand pump. “I’ll do this in one go,” he said, and he filled a green balloon with one long breath. “I like to do it to annoy the smokers. Not bad for sixty-seven, eh?” An alien in a helmet. A dachshund who’d swallowed a meatball. A red Jelly Baby. “All my dogs are green poodles,” he said. “Reason being: when I was eleven, I painted the neighbor lady’s poodle green, and my father laughed. First good response I ever got from the man. Therefore, green poodles.”

  She hoped he’d make balloons for everyone; she felt nervous for the children who didn’t have one yet. When you were a child you believed yourself special, deserving, and every piece of evidence to the contrary broke your heart. As an adult, the same was true. She hated when magicians asked for child volunteers, as the Magnificent Jimmy did: she felt swamped by the longing that rose up. Little kids put up their hands, eighteen-month-olds: they didn’t know they didn’t have a chance.

  And yet Mistress Mickle loved the Magnificent Jimmy. It was a condescending love, she knew; she was Mistress Mickle, on television: you could buy a doll of her; he was the Magnificent Jimmy, sixty-seven and performing on a ferry. Perhaps she could get him an appearance on Barnaby Grudge. Or some other CBeebies program: she would tal
k to them. She would change his luck. He had the melancholy edge of a man acquainted with the dark thoughts of the back of the boat, someone whose life had not quite panned out. Maybe she would invite him to the excellent privacy of her cabin. Her heart scuttled, a sign she was actually considering it. Today she might do anything.

  “All right,” said the Magnificent Jimmy, “this doesn’t work for everyone, but it does for some.” He pulled out a large, black-and-white disc on a stick, set it spinning. “Stare at the center. The very center. Keep staring.”

  Was he hypnotizing them? She hoped so. She wanted to be changed. She would stand and do anything the Magnificent Jimmy commanded. For once she would be susceptible. So she concentrated, the good student, on the gyre of the disc. It seemed to go on for hours.

  “Stare. Stare. Stare—now look at me!”

  Gasps. Laughter. A teenage girl said, “Oh! Look at his head!”

  For Mistress Mickle, nothing.

  “Now, some people might have seen my head getting bigger,” said the Magnificent Jimmy, and she was stabbed with jealousy: she wanted to snatch that vision straight out of the heads of the underserving children. “Did you see it?” he asked the girl with the serious eyebrows. The girl nodded, looked thoughtful, and opened her mouth—to vomit, it turned out.

  She was only the first. The sea had grown furious, but nobody had quite noticed. You could tell the mothers from the sisters then: the sisters giggled and flinched, the mothers leapt forward, hands open—for what?

  “Oh, sweethearts,” said the Magnificent Jimmy. “Poor things. There’s your mother, darling. All right, all right, she’ll take care of you.”