The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  “Leave eleven dollars,” Mary Cottle said.

  Mudd-Gaddis smiled up at the waitress. “Thank you, my dear,” he said, and turned back to the doctor. “I really haven’t. I’ve never felt special, I’ve never felt marked. Singled out, I mean. What I’ve lived was just”—and here the little geriatric paused, struggled for the exact words—“a life.”

  “Just a life, my dear fellow? Just a life?”

  “Oh, you mean my symptoms,” Mudd-Gaddis said. “You’re a physician. Symptoms make a difference to you. I’ve my fingerprints, of course, and my eyes are probably their own shade of blue. And I sit on a different bum than the rest, my own special customized behind, but so does everyone.”

  “Charles!” Nedra Carp scolded.

  But his hearing was bad. He was a little deaf and went on as if there’d been no interruption. “I mean we all know that bit about no two snowflakes, and when we first hear it it’s news of a sort. Of a sort, it is. We think, we think, ‘All this stuff in the world and no two leaves exactly alike? No two thumbs or signatures?’ Make-work for the handwriting experts, the forgery detectives. But what difference does a difference make? A fine distinction? All right.” He sighed. “Those three or four months back when I was a kid, I admit it, I do rather remember imagining I was wrapped in some mantle of the special. But all kids think that. It’s a snare and a delusion.”

  He’s wise, Eddy Bale thought. He’s a wise old nipper. Like whoosis, Sam Jaffe, in Lost Horizon. One day I’ll get him alone. I’ll pour out my soul. I’ll ask about Liam, I’ll ask about Ginny.

  “What’s Her Royal Highness’s given name?” Moorhead asked suddenly.

  “Her Royal Highness?”

  “Her Royal Highness. The Queen. What’s the Queen’s given name?”

  Mudd-Gaddis seemed confused. There was cloud cover in his eyes. “Wait,” he said, “it’s on the tip of my…on the tip of my…the tip of my…”

  “I’ll give odds he don’t get it,” Benny Maxine said.

  Moorhead nodded encouragement, but the little pensioner could only look helplessly back at the physician.

  It was Goofy and Pluto who broke the tension. They came up to the table clutching a brace of balloons in vaguely articulated paws, a cross, it seemed to Eddy, somewhere on the evolutionary scale between mittens and hands. Goofy grinned at the children behind his amiable overbite. Pluto, his long red tongue lolling like an oversize shoehorn, stared at them in perpetual pant, his tremendous, lidless eyes fixed in agreeable astonishment. Ears hung from the sides of their heads like narrow neckties.

  “Hi, there,” Rena Morgan said.

  Goofy nodded.

  “Ta,” said Noah Cloth, choosing a purple balloon from the bunch like a great grape and taking it in his own modified mitt.

  Janet Order patted the crouching Pluto, soft boluses of orange-brown nape in her blue hand. “Does that feel good? Does it? Do you like that, Pluto? Do you, boy?” The doggish creature turned its head, silently offering luxurious swatches of bright coat to her cyanotic nails. “Can you beg? Can you growl for me? Pluto? Can you beg?”

  “They’re not allowed to speak,” Nedra Carp said. “It’s a strict rule. I read it in the brochure.”

  “What? Like in the Guards, you mean?” Tony Word said.

  “Outside Buckingham Palace?” Lydia Conscience said.

  “That’s right,” Nedra Carp said. “They’re trained.”

  “Ooh,” said Benny Maxine, “there’s a bet. I’ll provoke them!”

  “Benny!” Eddy Bale warned.

  But it was too late. Maxine had stood up and was already holding Goofy’s nose, round and black as a handball. “Bugger off,” he said. “Go on, beat it.”

  The manlike animal—Goofy wore a kind of clothes, a bunting of vest, a signal of trousers, a streamer of shoes, over his body—just stood there. Perhaps he inclined his head a few degrees to the side, but if he had he still stood in a sort of plaintive, lockjaw serenity, his dim good humor stamped on his face, broad, deep and mute as a crocodile’s.

  “Think you’re a hard case, do you? All right, all right, but I haven’t shown you my best stuff yet. You ready, dogface?”

  The creature brought its head to attention.

  “Benny,” Eddy Bale said, “don’t.”

  “What’s this then,” Benny Maxine said, and placed his hands on the spiky bristles stuck like splinters along the cusps of its jowls. “What’s this then, quills? Call yourself a dog? You’re a bleedin’ porcupine.”

  “I told you they were trained,” Nedra Carp said. “Well done, young man!”

  “Cut it out, Benny,” Eddy Bale said.

  But the animal stood still, quite as the guardsmen he’d been compared to, his cheerfulness like an indifference.

  “Oh, I ain’t done wif you yet, young porcupine,” Benny Maxine said, and laid hands on the tall bent-stovepipe hat pinned to its costume. “Ooh, ’ere’s a doggy bone. What you want to put it on your head for? You hidin’ it from the mutt? Suppose I throw it. Suppose you fetch.”

  “I mean it, Benny,” Eddy Bale said. “If you expect to eat with us again, if you don’t want to take the rest of your meals in the room…”

  Benny Maxine carefully removed the first pin. “Steady, fellow, this could smart,” he said, withdrawing a long second pin from Goofy’s scalp.

  “Benny,” Rena shouted, “if you’re going to be wicked I won’t be your friend.” She began to cry, her fluids and phlegms spilling from their reservoirs.

  “’Ere now, ’ere now,” Benny Maxine said, “me and the Goof was only ’avin’ a bit of fun. ’E enjoys it. Don’t you enjoy it, Goof?” Though its expression of stony contentment hadn’t at all changed, the animal seemed to shrink before its tormentor, its amusement subtly bruised, its bearing and demeanor at odds with the gorgeousness of its trusting smile, the Cheshire risibilities of its pleased teeth, almost as if its doggy expectations and hopes were frozen forever two and three beats behind its more clever limbs and more knowing body. Rena Morgan was pulling Kleenex and handkerchiefs from all their cunning places of concealment. “All right,” Benny said, chastened. Carefully he replaced the first hatpin, weaving it through the hat and loose folds of Goofy’s fabric scalp. Rena continued to sniffle and Benny handed over the second dangerous-looking pin to the contented, oddly dignified Goofy, who, though it was his own, bowed, stood to his full height, accepted it as if it were a surrender sword, and withdrew.

  “Tongue,” Mudd-Gaddis cried triumphantly. “Tip of my tongue!”

  “What is, Charles?” Moorhead asked. “What’s on the tip of your tongue?”

  The withered little youth seemed to collapse under the weight of his sweaters. He seemed shawled and slippered.

  Benny Maxine looked accusingly at Eddy Bale and Nedra Carp. With Rena Morgan he seemed at once both apologetic and the injured party. “Why’d you want to go and make me lose my bet? What for? Why?”

  “You didn’t have a bet,” Mary Cottle said. “No one took you up on one. You had no bet.”

  “Sure I did,” he said. “With myself.” And turned from them. And raising his voice, called after the retreating orange figures. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey! I bet we don’t die! Not one of us. I bet you. I bet we don’t die!”

  Embarrassed, all the adults and children except for Charles, Benny, and Rena, who was tamping at her now tapering mucus as if it were the last drippings about an ice-cream cone, watched Goofy and Pluto distribute their balloons at a far table. They seemed restored, recovered, bright and tawny as mint lions.

  “What’s their relationship to each other, do you suppose?” Noah Cloth asked speculatively. “Is Pluto Goofy’s son?”

  “Is he its brother?” Tony Word said.

  “I think he’s its nephew,” said Lydia Conscience.

  “Maybe he’s its dog,” muttered Benny Maxine.

  2

  It was awkward. Even for Mary Cottle, flexible as a flag, practiced and accommodate to prevailing conditions
as a windsock, it was awkward. Accustomed to quirk and anomaly as an old shoe—the expression “hand-in-glove” occurred to her, the expressions “square peg in a round hole,” “finger in the pie” did—to all the oddball contingencies and weird one-in-a- million circumstances. And never caught out, never, not once in all the doomtime she’d put in since her second abortion, since her blood tests came back all stained, the workups and medical reports and dire prophecies which she’d accepted like a knowledgeable Oedipus, a more clever Macbeth, her eyes neither blinded to loopholes nor shut to them—“loophole” occurred to her—since she’d seen them at once, she had, even before the doctor had had a chance to outline her options: tubal ligation, even a hysterectomy. (“Listen,” the surgeon said, “that’s asking over the odds, a hysterectomy is. There isn’t a useful doctor or doctorine in the Kingdom who’d hold the baby on this one. Why, your glory garden’s all sweetness and light, untouched by tare, vetch, or pesky vermin. There ain’t a mite, louse, or flea to trouble it. No earwig or locust, no beetle or bedbug. There are only very delightful faeries at the bottom of your garden, Miss Cottle. Your little polluted eggies aside, the carton is fit as a fiddle. So who would touch you, who would tamper? It’s all ‘Doctor Livingstone, I presume’ with these wowser castor-oil artists and Tory flesh tailors.” “Thank you, doctor, for your professional candor.” “Hold the job,” the surgeon said. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t perform it.” “No, thank you.” “Besides, it’s preventive medicine. It takes down the odds on cancer.” “No, thank you,” she said, and blew thick fog from her cheap cigarettes in the doctor’s direction. “It’s like having your appendix out. You don’t actually ne—” “No. Thank you.” “So,” the doctor said, “you’re a tough customer. All right, luv, you’re the doctor. If you prefer I tie granny knots in your strings, then granny knots it shall be. Hell, dearie, I’ll do you braids and corn rows, bows and reef knots. I’ll—” “No, thank you.” Which was when he really let loose with his candor. “Go ahead, then,” the physician said, “go get your second opinions. It won’t make any difference. You carry chemistries so rancid you could poison wells. I do assure you, Miss Cottle, any child you have the misfortune to bear could have you up on charges. You can only bear monsters. Your kids would be kraken, children chimeras, and basilisk babes. Mummy to wyvern, to snark, and to sphinx. Generations of vipers, Miss Cottle.” “Is that your professional opinion?” “The pill’s no guarantee against conception. You’re on the pill and have already had a couple of miscarriages, a pair of abortions. We don’t yet understand why some women are less susceptible than others to its effects, but that’s the way it is. I’m afraid you’re one of those who can’t afford to rely on the usual methods of birth control.” “I shan’t.” “If you intend to live the life,” he continued, without hearing her, “of a normal, healthy young woman, you’ll almost certainly have to undergo one of the mildly radical procedures I’ve outlined.” “No, thank, you.” “Oh, there are other surgeons. If you don’t trust me, I’d be happy to put you on to one of them. I should think I might even be able to locate a quite upright man willing to perform the hysterectomy. I mean, once he knows the circumstances.…” “There’ll be no hysterectomy, there’ll be no procedures.” “You know,” he said, “I was having you on with that bit about those knots I was going to tie. It’s a simple thing, really. I was teasing to cheer you up.” “I know that.” “So then,” he said, “what’s your decision? I don’t mean to rush you, but the sooner we do something about all this the sooner you’ll be able to resume your normal sexual activities.” “I told you,” she said, “there will be no procedures.” The surgeon studied her. “Then I’m afraid I shall certainly have to inform the authorities,” he said quietly. “It’s a crime in this country willfully to bring a child into the world when it’s known long enough in advance of its birth that it would suffer multiple and severe physical and mental disorders.”) And the other loophole too. The one the surgeon hadn’t mentioned. That she could have it off with men who were sterile. With men with vasectomies, even with men who were impotent, men with implants, with little rubber bulbs they squeezed in their palms to fill up their spurious erections with fluids, actually coming, ejaculating, shooting fluids, douche water, perfume, actual champagne, up her parts. She would have none of it. Hating arrangements, she would make none. Men lied. If you held out, if you told them you couldn’t have children, if you explained, they could do you a song and dance, admit to sterility, vasectomy, even to impotence, even to implants, excusing themselves to show up next time with a syringe, the makeshift rubber tubing broken off from enema bags, bicycle pumps, doucheworks, sphygmomanometers, machineries from the chemist. She hated subterfuge, she hated being courted. The burdensome, elaborate, social choreographies embarrassed and depressed her. Gifts, flowers, love letters, telephone calls taken in bed late at night, home from a date, even the engagement ring her fiancé had given her. (And had agreed to marry him, to move in with him, and even been the one to suggest this, if only to get him to call off the courtship.) Because she was modest, refined, lustrate, nice. Because she was natty, spruce, spic-and-span. Because she was always morally well turned out. Pure, discreet, demure. Because she was picky, discriminating, dainty, shocked. Even squeamish, even shy. Because she had this honed sense of occasion, of nuance and nicety. Because she drew the line and split the hair. Because she was puritanical. Because she was tasteful. Because she was good. Because, finally, she was fastidious. This fastidious whack-off artist.

  So of course it was awkward. Because she needed her relief—the strongest nicotines and harshest blends were almost useless to her now—and would, had she known she was to have been assigned three roommates—Moorhead had put her in 629 with Nedra Carp, Lydia, and Rena—willingly have paid for a single. (Of course her cigarettes were useless. With Rena Morgan around she didn’t dare light one. The cystic fibrotic was even more sensitive to smoke, however mild, than Janet Order and was sent off into spasms of respiratory seizure if someone so much as struck a match within ten feet of her. Even now she toyed with the idea of taking a room of her own, on a different floor perhaps, a place where she could go off by herself if the strain became too great. And hesitated only because that would have been an arrangement.) Or brought along the three little steel balls she’d purchased at the sex shop on Shaftesbury Avenue. (Though she hadn’t used them—a most hideous arrangement—except that one time, she still had them about somewhere, probably in her closet with the gifts her fiancé had given her. She had fit them between her legs, inserting them, deep, high up—the instructions had indicated that for best results she consult her gynecologist, but of course she’d been too discreet to do anything like that, and, though she played with the notion of going back to the smart-ass surgeon to teach him a thing or two about radical procedures, in the end, expert as she was, familiar as she was with her own sweet, rich territories, she decided to do it herself—and went about her apartment in a state of unrelieved ecstasy, her orgasms triggered by her own footsteps. Seven paces across the lounge to the geraniums in the flower pot on the window ledge and wow, oh God, oh, oh, oh Christ, oh, o, o, ooh! A few steps to the fridge in the kitchen to get out some veggies for supper and ooh, ooh, ahh, ahh, ah, mnn, mnnnn, ahhh, ah, ah, mnnnnnhnhuhh! A short walk to the W.C. to wash her hands before dinner and she had to stuff her fists into her mouth to modulate her cries and yelps. No way for a nice, modest, refined, pure, natty, demure and dainty, spruce and lustrate lady like herself to behave.) So she’d left them at home. Along with the vibrator, neutrally enough shaped except for its roundish, bluntish tip, but covered in a tight, almost fleshlike plastic a little like the electrical wire on her stereo—on the whole Mary rather disapproved of music, it being itself something of an arrangement—and picked up in that same sex shop on that same day on Shaftesbury Avenue when she’d purchased the little stainless steel perpetual orgasm machine, ignoring the glances of the men—there were no other lone women in the shop—and genuinely indifferent to
the clerk’s sly leer, his callous, unprofessional remark—“Will madam be wanting these wrapped?”—handling him with that same brash refinement with which she’d almost undone the surgeon, still controlled, still prim even after his next remark, telling him, “If I were as ballsy as you seem to think I am, I wouldn’t really need this shit, would I?” Used once and abandoned, leaving it home, perhaps in that same closet with the fiancé’s porcelain presents (because shame, though she felt no shame, would be an arrangement too and lead to other arrangements—doing away with the “evidence,” disguising it, dismantling it, burying it a piece at a time in the rubbish so even the dustman wouldn’t recognize it). Her reasons this time having nothing to do with unrelieved ecstasy, the propriety of a bounded pleasure, or even the slight uneasiness she felt about the possibility of becoming wet enough and thrusting it deep enough actually to electrocute herself. No. It was that little arrangement of the manufacturer, that deference to fantasy. It was the lifelike skin. She needed relief, not fantasy. (She thought of nothing when she masturbated, nothing, her attention only on the mechanics of the thing or, in a tight spot like this one now, of strategies, planning ahead, arrangements.) Because, finally, she was high-strung and, like anyone who drills deportment like intaglio into her character, was subject to nerves, spells, jitters, all the gooseflesh of the hair, all the alarmist knee-knock of scene, flap and disorder. Valium only made her sleepy. Music she disapproved of. Reading took too long to get into and, in any event, was impractical on the wards. Needlepoint, cooking, and the crafts had their own built- in liabilities. Only orgasm calmed her, lined up the iron filings—this is how she thought of it, as tiny, piercing shrapnel—of her scattered spirit like a powerful magnet, restored her, and, wonderfully, could hold her for hours. So flexible Mary Cottle found herself climbing the walls who, in emergency, could bring herself off in under two minutes. (Because it wasn’t fulfillment she needed any more than fantasy. Duration meant nothing to her, multiple orgasms didn’t, and were incapable of extending her self-induced relief by as much as five minutes. This by empirical evidence. She’d needed to know. She’d experimented. Withdrawal had been an experiment, the occasional, deliberately willed fantasy, and other clever white noises of deflection and deferral. The steel balls were an experiment, the vibrator was.)