The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  “Don’t grumble,” Colin said. “That shows it’s working.”

  “Isn’t he too big to take medicine from a bottle?” Noah Cloth asked.

  “It’s nasty,” Colin explained. “A spoonful of titty makes the medicine go down. Don’t ask me why.”

  Noah Cloth ran off laughing to tell the others what Bible had said.

  Mr. Moorhead was making a sort of Grand Rounds in the departure lounge, almost abstractedly checking pulses, touching foreheads with the back of his hand, peering down throats and looking into eyes and ears, making jokes, soothing parents and children both with his big, complicated presence.

  An airlines agent cleared his throat into a live microphone. “Well,” Ginny said, holding her hand out for her husband to shake, “happy landings.”

  “Turn and turn about,” Eddy Bale said, taking it.

  “Good trip, Colin,” she said, acknowledging her dead son’s nurse. Bible nodded, and Ginny went off with her lover.

  Parents were hugging their own, each other’s kids. Colin Bible’s roommate, who’d shown up just as the children and their caretakers were about to board, reached out and patted his friend’s cheek and handed him what looked to be a brand-new Polaroid camera. Mary Cottle smiled dreamily as Lydia Conscience began to recite. “Now I lay me down to sleep,” she recited, “and pray the Lord my soul to keep. And if I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

  “It’s just like they say,” Benny Maxine said. “There ain’t no atheists in foxholes.” And Eddy Bale, boarding the airplane, wondered what he thought he was doing and, oddly, and not for the first time either, just what the hell went on behind that yellow curtain.

  4

  Mr. Moorhead needn’t have worried. He’d been unable to sleep during the long flight across the Atlantic. Though he hadn’t paid for a headset, he sat in the dark and watched a film he’d already seen, trying, with the aid of his memory and intense concentration, to read the actors’ lips, even to bring back the theme music, grand and vaguely classical, to see if he could match his memory of the story to the mood of the weak and watery silent scene projected before him on a screen the size of a desk top. For some reason the exercise reminded him of his days as a medical student, when he’d spent entire nights getting up an exam. A close-up of the heroine brought back the obscure pathology of a wasting disease, a master shot of a city street the sharp, deserted, shut-down memory of epidemic, an overview of a crowd scene the metallic taste and texture of plague. He rarely took his eyes from the screen—once to adjust the volume on Tony Word’s headset and again to find an additional blanket for Lydia Conscience—and when the film was over Mr. Moorhead had both a complicated sense of the film’s mildly melodramatic plot and the sour etiologies of a hundred diseases in his head.

  What had upset him, however obscurely, what had forced him to his strange effort to bring back an entire motion picture he hadn’t enjoyed when he’d seen it the first time, was the fear that he might have to room with Colin Bible.

  I’m not a bad man, Mr. Moorhead thought. I do no evil. And, wondering whether he was a good doctor, he began soundlessly to cry.

  In the seat next to him Benny Maxine stirred, whimpered in his sleep. The doctor carefully removed the shoes from the boy’s swollen feet and loosened the small airline blanket from where it had become tangled, caught beneath his hips. He adjusted the pillow to a more comfortable angle and frowned in the dim light at the Jew’s oddly slacked jaw, the puffy, almost flexible bone structure that gave Benny’s head a queer mashed quality. If he could he would have remolded the kid’s face, tamping, patting, massaging the bad bones back into phase, packing the distended skin about them as he would have trimmed wet sand about the pylons and fretwork of a beach castle.

  Mr. Moorhead had a vagrant impulse toward the chiropractic, an urge like some Pygmalion of the medical, a desire to extract health, to grow it like a culture in a petri dish, to adjust, as he’d adjusted Benny’s blanket and pillow, drawing off all the gnarled strings and matted clumps of illness and disease. At university he had led his classes in anatomy, a wizard of parts, an almost sculptor’s instinct for muscle and bone, an almost geologist’s or diviner’s one for the shales and fluids of form. He could tell at a glance the distortions on an anatomical chart and all the split ends of an internal organ badly drawn. He had an artist’s eye for the human body and, in museums, would actually diagnose statues, excitedly explaining to astonished friends, even to strangers, which statues and pictures were modeled from life, which were only the sculptor’s or painter’s Platonic ideal. Michelangelo he thought a fraud. “If there’d been an actual model for David,” he’d once told his professor, “he’d probably still be alive.” And had a theory that her incipient goiter would, were she real, almost certainly have killed off the Mona Lisa before her thirtieth year.

  And that was the rub. A pal to whom he’d explained his David idea was a student at the Royal Academy of Art. “But look here, Moorhead,” his friend told him, “there really was. A model. Some kosher boy Michelangelo was sweet on. Genuine McCoy right down to his high holy circumcised pecker. There are life casts in the R.A. basement.”

  “Life casts.”

  His friend winked. “High times in sunny Italy. Signor Buonarroti liked them dripping in plaster, ooh la la.”

  Because he was smitten by an ideal of health and life, some full-moon notion of the hale and hearty. Of soundness, bloom, the body filled to its sunny, f-stop conditions of solstitial, absolute ripeness like a ship floating in water precisely between its measured load lines. Flowers in their brief perfection broke his heart. Healthy beasts did. All perfect specimens, male and female. All heedless vitality, all organisms generally unconscious of pain, unmindful of death. It was why he had become a doctor in the first place and chosen pediatrics as his specialty. It was what both appalled and fascinated him about Jews.

  He was already a resident when he saw the photographs. Of the survivors. From the camps. Not men but devastated, stick- figured blueprints for men. The declined, obscene inversions of all those anatomical paradigms of the human he’d studied at university. And that overturned for him forever the near-flawless portraits of the sound and scatheless, the immaculately unblemished, all those slick, transparent graphics and overlays that had, almost without his thinking about it, instilled in him an idea of centrifugal man, the notion of health as a radiation outward from some fixed center, of the organs and glands, the gristles and guts, impacting their neighbors, transmitting actual electric life from some unseen, unseeable omphalos—pith? gist? soul?—as if body, body itself, were only a kind of archaeology, some careful pile of palimpsest arrangement, sequential as arithmetic. The photographs had been a revelation to him, astonishing not for what they revealed to him about what men were capable of doing to each other but for what they taught him about his trade. He had to revise all his old theories. Disease, not health, was at the core of things; his idea of pith and gist and soul obsolete for him now, revised downward to flaw, nubbin, rift; incipient sickness the seed which sent forth its contaged shoots raging through the poisoned circuits of being. He stuck a jeweler’s loupe in his eye and examined, pored over, scrutinized, their busted constitutions. From loose and sunken skeletons, from hollows and craters beneath baggy skin ill-fitting as badly hung wallpaper, he dared spectacular diagnoses, astonishing prognoses. He must have seemed like some scholarly counterfeiter, double-, even triple-checking his plates, searching them for error and balls-up. Learning more from those terrible photographs than ever he had from the perfect meat in those idealized medical texts. He must have seemed crazy to his Jewish registrar, who caught him out, the loupe in his eye like a pawnbroker’s and the pictures spread out before him like pornography.

  But Colin Bible was a different story.

  Colin Bible was a perfect specimen and Mr. Moorhead was flustered by him. He hadn’t bargained for any Colin Bible. Most likely the male nurse was a fag and, already in love with the man’s visible h
ealth, Moorhead bit his nails and worried that he’d have to share a room with him. He wished now he’d argued more persuasively with his wife, a comfortable, not unattractive woman, made safe to Moorhead’s consciousness by the varicose veins in her calves, that she accompany him. Moorhead, who wished to be a good man, missed her. He was crying again, not soundlessly this time but openly sobbing.

  Benny Maxine stirred and murmured in his sleep, and Moorhead leaned over to listen.

  “If you can’t afford to lose, don’t gamble,” Benny mumbled.

  Lydia Conscience giggled. Of all the children on the plane—indeed, of all the sleeping children in the world at that moment, those in their beds for the night as well as those merely napping—she was the only one who happened to be dreaming of the Magic Kingdom. She knew this because there was no busy signal, no distracting burr to flatten and compromise the call. And, though she was a generous child, it was pleasant to have the dream to herself, not, as in hospital, to have always to share—the attentions of the nurses, treats, visitors, the ward’s big telly—with the other patients.

  The big park was not empty of visitors—that would have frightened her—but there were no long lines for the rides and shows and restaurants, no one in the clean rest rooms. There were a nurse and a doctor on duty in the cool, comfortable emergency tent but no one was there to cry out for first aid, not even a lost child to rumple a cot or mess the place up with candy wrappers, soft-drink bottles, an ice-cream cone, smashed and melting on the pavement. Except for the cheerful, efficient crew, Lydia had Captain Nemo’s plush, handsomely appointed submarine practically to herself, a fine view through the big portholes of the fleet’s other craft disporting like dolphins in the dark clear water—water, Lydia imagined, crisp and quenching in the throat as the ice in the packs that brought down her fevers and cooled her sleep.

  Throughout the Magic Kingdom there was the same comfortable traffic, the thin, perfect crowds there only for scale, to set off the fantastic buildings and marvelous attractions, appearing, or so it seemed to Lydia, as they must have appeared in the original architectural sketches, well-groomed adults and their kempt, healthy children taking their ease on the wide benches and strolling at leisure through the park’s beautiful pavilions, the cunning vistas and landscapes, the visitors—Lydia was the exception—like line drawings, attractive figures in a brochure, well-behaved as guests at a garden party. Lydia was delighted by her unobstructed views, by her keen sense of privilege and status. On the river trip, for example, in the tiny steamer that vaguely replicated the African Queen with its chuffing, sputtering engine and its soiled and rumpled honorable mate, Lydia was comfortable enough during even the small boat’s most treacherous passages down the winding jungle river to load her camera, get exactly the right light reading, focus carefully, and shoot only after she was satisfied with her composition. When a fierce-looking hippopotamus submerged itself in the muddy waters alongside the ship, Lydia had sufficient presence of mind to ask the mate to turn off the engines so that she might get an even better picture when he reemerged into the air.

  “She,” the mate said.

  “Sir?” Lydia Conscience said quizzically.

  “That hippo’s a female, miss,” the man informed her. “She does that for her babies. It ain’t playfulness, mademoiselle. The fact is, hips hate water about as much as cats do. It’s a hygiene thing. She’s setting an example for her cubs. They must be fairly close by or she wouldn’t have bothered. She’ll come up two more times, then make that noise they’re so famous for, that special- call noise that the cubs, no matter where they are and no matter what they’re doing, have to come running when they hear it. That’s the picture you want, ma’am. I’ll steer the boat over to where the water’s a bit clearer. You can get a shot of the cubs sucking her teats.”

  “Really, Mister Bale!” Lydia said.

  “It’s how they breathe, Fräulein,” the grizzled mate explained. “They get their air out of the cow’s milk. Something terrible is a hippopotamus’s breath, but them little ones’ lungs is so tiny they’d drown otherwise.”

  “Nature is amazing,” Lydia Conscience said.

  “It’s alarming, comrade. Me, I never went to no school,” the man told her. “I learned all my lore here on the river.” With a broad sweep of his arm he indicated the rubber duckies floating on the surface of the water, the mechanically driven, wind- up sharks, the needlework palm fronds along the banks.

  Before the ride was finished and the conductor collected her ticket, Lydia had several other opportunities for fine photographs. She got a rare close-up of Tarzan pruning his treehouse and an absolute stunner of a cannibal picnic. Once again the mate silenced the engine and, putting his fingers to his lips, indicated that Lydia be quiet. Together they listened to the cheery campfire songs the cannibals were singing.

  “I like this,” Lydia said when they were again under way. “Not being from a Third World country myself, it gives a London girl a grand opportunity to find out what really goes on.”

  The hoary mate with the sad, steely eyes nodded judiciously.

  “Wait till you meet Mickey,” he said.

  “Mickey?”

  “Mouse.”

  “Oh, will I actually get to meet Mickey Mouse?”

  “A private audience, memsahib.”

  “A private audience!”

  The mate lowered his voice. “Because you’re the only one who really wanted to come on the dream holiday.” It was true. Lydia Conscience had wanted to visit the Magic Kingdom for donkey’s years. For fear of hurting his feelings, she couldn’t tell the mate that Donald Duck and Goofy and Dumbo or even the 101 Dalmatians were her real favorites, but the shrewd old tramp, suspecting something of the sort, turned aside whatever objection she might have made. “He’s very kind, really. Not at all as standoffish as his critics make out. And he has wonderful powers. If he takes a liking to a kid there ain’t anything he wouldn’t—” But before he could finish, busy signals had begun to interfere with the dream. They were coming in from Holland, they were coming in from Spain. They were coming in from a hundred countries where little children were being set down for their naps.

  Lydia was a generous child and ordinarily wouldn’t have minded. Disney World was a big enough place. It had been pleasant not to have to stand in line or deal with the crowds and, from a strictly practical standpoint, safer not to run the risk of bumping into people with her bloated, swollen belly, painful on sudden contact as a sore toe jammed in a door. And shameful, too. She was perfectly aware of how she must appear to strangers (P-R-E-G-G-E-R-S). And had long ago taken to wearing a cheap engagement and wedding ring so people wouldn’t get the wrong idea (or so they would, she giggled). But it was too spooky-making just now to have to run into that little blue girl. What was her name? Oh, yes—Janet. Janet Order. Who was just now being handed aboard. So Lydia Conscience ran and hid, her big tumor painfully sloshing in the amnion that had grown up around it.

  In the smoking section toward the back of the plane, Janet Order had finally slipped into sleep. Janet was a child who welcomed sleep. It was the dreams. Janet Order looked forward to her dreams. In these dreams she’d found an infinite number of ways in which she was able to take on a sort of protective coloration. Sometimes she was an ancient Briton, one of that old Celtic tribe who painted themselves blue, or she dreamed of Mardi Gras, fabulous celebrations, the holiday makers behind incredible disguises, her own blue skin almost ordinary among the brilliant hues and shades of the gaudy, garish celebrators. Or was a huntress, a warrior, the bright blue cosmetics of her pigmentation there for war paint and terror, the honorable, acceptable hues of murder. Or at court at masquerades, or gloved at beaux arts balls behind soft veils or holding a lorgnette against her eyes like a stiff, slim flag. And sometimes the actual blue flag at the ceremonies and state occasions of imaginary nations. Or even—this was tricky, thrilling—as she marched past a reviewing stand, waving a large, heavy Union Jack in front of her in such a way
that the flag’s staves and superimposed crosses hid her face while her body was protected behind the livid, rippling triangles of the blue field. She felt at these times quite like a fan dancer, quite like a tease. There were thousands of ways to protect herself. She dreamed of blue populations in blue towns and blue cities. She dreamed of herself cold and at peace in water, her lips and face blue in the temperature. Or exposed on a beach, blue and drowned.

  At the precise moment that Lydia Conscience was hiding from the blue girl, Janet Order entered the dream. Lydia was nowhere about, nor did Janet know that Lydia—she was that neat—had ever occupied it. But noticed the water first off and dove into the stinging river downstream of the African Queen, the rumpled mate blowing warning whistles at her, cupping his hands and shouting directions she couldn’t hear but perfectly understood when he threw a line to her. Which she wouldn’t take. Preferring instead to wait until the water became chilly enough to justify her appearance. Only when she saw the hippo did she realize that it was a jungle river.

  “Grab it,” the mate shouted when the tiny steamer came abreast of the girl. “Grab the life preserver, kid.” Blushing—the rosiness of her modesty added to her natural color and turned her a deep shade of purple—Janet Order dove under the dark, muddy water and swam away from the boat. There, along the warm bottom of the jungle river, in the soft medium of a swirling, rising mud, in broken earth’s cloudy dissolution, through all erosion’s rich rots and deltic rusts, Janet Order, her eyes adjusting to the decomposing silts and sediments and lees, all the fermenting dregs of all drenched dirt’s loamy planetary brew, swam. The badly hearted child—she’d seen her x-rays, her blunt, boot-shaped heart, the mismanaged arteries and ventriculars like faulty wiring or badly tied shoelace—relieved of gravity, flew through the water, her breathing easy as a fish’s, as the heavy hippo’s or the two dreamy cubs, oblivious, abstracted, stuck at their mother’s teats as at soda straws. She swam past the stalled propellers of the little steamer and came into an area not so much clearer as less perturbed than the one she had just come through. Here the mud and motes of the river bottom no longer swirled but lay fixed in the strata of water—she perceived that water was subtly stratified as rock or sky—as in aspic. Indeed, when she stuck out her finger to lick a particularly delicious-looking piece of mud-studded water, she seemed somehow to compromise the delicately balanced layers of the river. The water trembled, entire panes and levels of it smashing around her like so much glass. “Oh, my,” Janet said, seeing too late the DO NOT MOIL signs posted all about the warm jungle river. Everywhere fabulous creatures, their sleep disturbed if not by the intruder herself than by her thoughtless liberties, came out to see what had happened to upset the balance of nature. And although nothing was said, she sensed herself scolded by the coral, scorned and disparaged by the haughty sea horse, upright and stately as an initial on a towel. Microorganisms abused her: plankton and a tiny grain of sand which one day would irritate itself into a pearl and was just now slipping into the shell of an oyster. She was snubbed by great whales and silently upbraided by sharks. Reproach glittered like tears in the eyes of sirens and mermaids. Drowned sailors speechlessly gave her the rough side of their tongues.