The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  Who now waited for others to turn to her. Assuming, on those rare occasions when they did, the very same poses and attitudes her own nannies had assumed. Vaguely abstracted, detached, as if she wore imaginary shawls about her shoulders and had been come upon knitting, an aura of an old-aunty love clinging to her like some musty, foolish dignity.

  Rena Morgan looked up from the television set, turned low so as not to disturb Lydia Conscience’s sleep.

  “Was Prince Andrew brave?” she asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “Prince Andrew. Was he brave?”

  “Oh, very brave, dear.”

  “Even when he was small?”

  “A little hero.”

  “So you weren’t surprised when he went off to fight the Argies?”

  “I expected it.”

  “You did?”

  “I was only surprised it took him so long.”

  “Bravery is important, isn’t it, Nanny?”

  “Quite important, dear. Valor is the sine qua non of gentlemen.”

  “Of ladies too. Anyway, I should have thought so.”

  “Bravery in men, patience in ladies.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “Women, well-brought-up women, don’t have the upper- body strength for true bravery.”

  “When push comes to shove, do you mean?”

  “What a clever way to put it! What a very bright little girl you are!”

  “Thank you, Nanny, but there are many things I don’t understand.”

  “If something’s troubling you, Rena dear, perhaps I can be of some help. Has that Janet Order been bothering you?”

  “Janet Order?”

  “She seems quite cheeky to me, and, though I shouldn’t be the one to say it, her blue color does put one off so. I noticed that you just picked at your food today. Your four basic food groups are extremely important, you know. If it’s Janet who’s putting you off your feed, I think I can arrange with Mister Moorhead and Mister Bale for you and Lydia to take your meals separately.”

  “I like Janet.”

  “What a charitable girl as well!”

  “As a matter of fact, Nanny, it’s something you said just now.”

  “What? Something I said? I don’t know what it could have been then, dear, I’m sure.”

  “That bit about bravery in men, patience in ladies.”

  “Calm endurance, dear. Tolerant imperturbability. Forebearance, resignation, and submission.”

  “Janet isn’t in the least submissive, and I shouldn’t have thought to have called her resigned.”

  “Ah, but I was talking about ladies.”

  “Yes. Bravery in men, patience in ladies.”

  “Just so.”

  “I think Janet Order is brave,” Rena said. “If I’d her complexion I think I should have it whitewashed, hide it away as I do my handkerchiefs.”

  “Show consideration for the feelings of others, yes.”

  “For myself, rather. People stare. She takes no notice.”

  “Cheeky.”

  “Courage.”

  “If you say so, dear,” Nedra Carp said, returning to her imaginary knitting.

  “I wonder if I could go down to the game room,” Rena said after a while.

  “What, the game room? At this time of night? It’s almost gone nine. That Miss Cottle’s nowhere about. Lydia’s sleeping, but what if she should wake up? Of course I could leave a note.”

  “No,” Rena said, “she might not find it.”

  “Oh, don’t fear on that score. Nanny would leave it somewhere she’d be certain to find it.”

  “She’s in a new place. She could panic. There might be something she needs.”

  “Mister Moorhead’s just ’cross the hall. Mister Bale and that nurse are the next room over.”

  “Do you suppose she’d think of all that in those first moments of terror?”

  “And thoughtful too! I like that in my girls.”

  “Nanny, I’m not thoughtful or considerate either. Nor charitable nor even all that clever.”

  “And modest!”

  “When I asked you that about Prince Andrew before, about his being brave—well, you know that’s a quality I very much admire.”

  “What very lovely values you have, dear,” Nedra Carp said.

  “It’s a quality I very much aspire to, Nanny,” the child said.

  “That’s very noble.”

  “That’s why I want to go down to the game room by myself.”

  “By yourself? By yourself? But you’re dying, dear. It’s quite out of the question.”

  “It’s because I’m dying that I have to be brave. I’ve this awful cystic fibrosis which the doctors can’t seem to control, and I go about with all this linen folded up my sleeves. I haven’t the courage to be seen blowing my nose, Nanny. I just thought if I went down to the game room by myself for an hour or so and let people stare—they know us here, you know, they see us traveling with our caretakers like this clan of the doomed, and after that scene in the restaurant this morning, and whatever it was that happened to the boys at the Haunted Mansion—healthy kids, kids my own age: well, I just thought they might think better of us, and of me—of me, I admit it—if they saw us one at a time once in a while. Please, Nanny. Please.”

  “You’d play those arcade games?”

  “Yes,” Rena said.

  “They’re very stimulating. You could become overexcited.”

  “I’ll just have to learn to control it.”

  “What if someone teases you? Children can be quite cruel. It could bring on an attack.”

  Rena opened her purse, showed Nedra a single white handkerchief. “This will have to serve then, won’t it?”

  “Well.” Nedra considered. “This is a situation. For my part I think you’re already very brave. Thoughtful, charitable, considerate, clever. Lovely values, just lovely. You’re doing this as much for the others as you are for yourself. You are, aren’t you, Rena? You’re showing the flag, aren’t you, dear?”

  “Yes, Nanny,” the child said, looking down.

  “It isn’t an easy decision. I have to parse this,” Nedra Carp said. “You’re dangerously ill with a condition that makes you subject to devastating attacks. You mean deliberately to put yourself in harm’s way. Knowing full well that people recognize you, you mean to encourage one of your attacks by going to a place which would tax the resistance of even a normal child. Moreover, rather than provide yourself with your usual aids—I didn’t see your inhalator when you opened your purse just now, did I?—you mean to go down to that game room with a single handkerchief, one or two less than a child might carry who merely suffers from a common cold. Is that about it?”

  “Yes, Nanny.”

  “It’s a dangerous game you’re playing, dear, a dangerous game indeed.”

  “But that’s just the point of it, Nanny.”

  “Oh, I understand the point of it, child.”

  “Yes, Nanny.”

  “But do you understand that Nanny is responsible for you? Do you understand that if anything…well, untoward should happen to you during the course of this…adventure, Nanny could, and quite properly, be brought up on charges, and that almost certainly it would mean the end of the dream holiday?”

  “Yes, Nanny.”

  “Yet you’re still willing to put your friends’ pleasure and your nanny in jeopardy—and yourself, yourself too—just to prove some quite abstract point that no one is ever likely to understand? I do not make exception of your dear parents. Do you see the ramifications of all this, Rena?”

  “Yes, Nanny.”

  “Cause all that trouble all for the sake of a vague principle?”

  “Yes, Nanny.”

  “An hour is out of the question. If you’re not back in the room within forty-five minutes I shall have hotel security bring you back,” Nedra Carp said.

  “Thank you, Nanny.”

  “Well, spit-spot, child! Spit-spot! The clock is ticking,” Ned
ra Carp said, and Rena Morgan, her inhalator banging against the pocket in her skirt and the rolled handkerchiefs she kept like magician’s silks along the sleeves of her dress absorbing her perspiration, ran off to meet Benny Maxine, who was already waiting for her outside Spirit World, the liquor store where by prearrangement they had agreed to meet at nine.

  Colin Bible lurked—lurked was the word for it—in the health club of the Contemporary Resort Hotel. He loitered by the urinals, skulked near the stalls, slunk along the washstands, and insinuated himself at the electric hand-dry machines. He looked, he supposed, like a madman, like someone, all dignity drained, in throes, the rapturous fits of a not entirely undivided abandon, as if, by avoiding eye contact, he preserved some last-minute, merely technical remnant of sanity. He knew his type, he thought uneasily, had often enough recognized it in the Gents’ at the great Piccadilly and Baker Street, Knightsbridge and Oxford Circus underground stations. He did not even lack the obligatory newspaper, the peculiar faraway cast—put on, assumed as a disguise—to his expression. Nor did he bother to make a show of busying himself, heartily pretending to shake free the last drops of urine from his dick or noisily opening and slamming the stall doors as if he were all preoccupied urge and dither. Neither had he rolled up his shirt sleeves, his hands and forearms thickly lathered as a surgeon’s. Or stood by the electric hand-dry machines, waving off excess water with all the brio of a symphony conductor imposing a downbeat. He was not happy to hide, didn’t enjoy his stealthy camouflage, took no pleasure from his furtive tiptoe masquerade. It was only that he didn’t have the nerve to make an overture of his own—unless turning himself into something coy and clandestine was itself an overture—and didn’t believe the guy would recognize him. He thought, that is, that he would have to be picked up all over again, winked at again, his hand brushed a second time. This was the reason he made himself so suspicious looking, why he kept himself under wraps in his best suit among the men in their gym shorts and jogging outfits, posing in it as if it were a raincoat, why he leaned like a flirt beside the stationary bicycle, why he prowled surreptitiously between the Nautilus machines and pussyfooted along the treadmill and gym’s small track. It was the reason he snuck back and forth by the weight bench, why he snooped in the sauna and inferred himself past the rowing machine. It was because he didn’t think he’d be recognized that he so ostentatiously lay in ambush—lost and shrouded, a burrowed lay-low, a smoke screen, anonymous, covert, sequestered, disguised and reticenced and secluded, an inference, a stowaway.

  He didn’t even hear him when he came in.

  “Hi, toots,” the fellow said, “been waiting long?”

  If you tried to guess what annoyed Noah Cloth most about having to die, in all likelihood you’d have been wrong. His parents, trying to guess what went on in their little boy’s head, trying to poke past his terminally ill child’s view of things, suspected it was pain or the flat-out fear of death itself, sensibly reading the fierce denial of his condition as simple terror but, with it, some sense of ideal justice insulted, sullied, outraged, his shortchanged, short-circuited life a smear on his values, some ultimate slur of the ought, an aspersion on the otherwise. They saw him, that is, as noble, reading his reluctance to acknowledge symptoms or admit to pain as the reaction of a gentleman to that which was grossly one-sided and indefensibly unfair. They prized this in him, and though by keeping his complaints to himself for as long as he could he probably stymied their own and the doctor’s best efforts to help him extend his life, they cherished this aspect of their child’s character and doubled up on their losses, grieving an ever-escalated, ever-escalating grief, although they determined that when the time came they would try to be, must try to be, as good as their son, his match, for his sake his match. They would not be the sort of parents who turned their home into a shrine, preserving his pathetic bits and relics, his clothes, his pictures, his toys and braces and canes. It was their pledge to him—what they whispered in his ear when he boarded the plane at Heathrow—that they’d try to survive him with style, with tact and honor and class and grace, assuring him too that he’d not been wrong, that his fate was a quirk, almost apologizing, almost begging his pardon if it looked otherwise (indicating to Noah the line of wheelchairs, the special boarding procedures the airline insisted upon), assuring him that most children grew up to be adults, that most adults had children of their own and, after a reasonably long and happy life, did not survive them. Seeing his need and trying to comfort him. “It’s a blot, Noah,” his father said. “It’s a slip-up, son.” Noah, looking up at them from the wheelchair the airline would not allow them to push, trying to grasp his father’s words as he walked along beside the boy being rolled down the jetway. “Dad’s right, Noah,” his mum said. “What’s happened to you is a crook go, but in the long run, in the long run…” “Things average out, she’s trying to say,” his father finished. “They do, Noah,” his mum said, “so you mustn’t think it’s not a democratic business. Because it is, ain’t it, Dad?” “Oh, aye,” the father said, “turn and turn about. It really is. You’re the exception that proves the rule.”

  In some ways they were right about their son: the pain, the fear, the outrage. But it was more complicated than that.

  In a real way it came down to the fact that he would not live to make money.

  He was almost unschooled (the woman at the hospice, who was good, not a psychiatrist or even a psychologist but a grand listener, a genuine death expert, interested in all the messages of death, would have been able to explain it even to unschooled Noah, would have been able to give back his reasons to him, not to reconcile him, never to reconcile him, but to sharpen his rage); even for an eleven-year-old—so much time in hospital, so much time blasted by radiation and smothered by chemotherapy, so much time sedated, so much confused by painkillers—he was unschooled. He didn’t read right, could barely follow the plot when people read stories to him, and looked for diversion in newspapers and their colored Sunday supplements, in the advertisements in magazines and on television shows, in the fat illustrations of picture books. It was this which had set him to drawing in the first place. He was not a natural artist or even a very dedicated one. He traced his drawings or copied them with a care that was literally painstaking, the crayons and drawing pens squeezed against his wounded joints, putting pressure on his decomposing wrist. Had he been more mobile he would have taken snapshots of the toasters and estate cars he drew, of the houses and cameras and lounge furniture, of the stocked shelves in the supermarkets, of the gas ranges, fridges, and central heating systems, of the coats, shirts, dresses, ties, and television sets, of the stereos, flatirons, cosmetics jars, of the boxes of candy and bottles of gin, of the computers and shoes, of the packets of cigarettes and tubes of toothpaste and all the other consumer goods that so fascinated him. Because what he could follow who could not follow a simple story line was the news on television, the bleak steady theme of growing unemployment, redundancies, angry men laid off, entire shipyards shut down, assembly lines, factories shut, services reduced and the people who supplied them sent home, and feared first for his father’s job, then for his father, because he was mortal too—gravestones he drew, monuments, wreaths—and then, because he was unschooled, couldn’t read well, do his maths, wasn’t getting the technical training so important to the current generation of workers and so, as the news reader told him almost every evening, absolutely indispensable to his own. Because where would he get money who couldn’t read, do his maths, had no skills? Because where would he get money for the foodstuffs he traced, for the fridge and cabinets which stored them, for the range on which they were prepared? Because where would he get money for the luxuries, the big-ticket items of consolation? So he drew them, copied them down from advertisements. By magic homeopathy to have that which he would never live to earn. “So,” the lady in the hospice—who really was good—would have comforted, “it isn’t really death you fear. It’s getting well.” “No,” unschooled Noah, the e
asing cosmetics of morphine withheld during these times when they spoke, would have answered, all the acuity of his stiff, unblurred pain on him like solid facts lined up and marshaled as the packages and canned goods on those stocked supermarket shelves he used to draw. “Not anymore. I hurt too much. The stitches from my first operations, that finger they cut off, my bones and my buttons, the stuff drying in my handkerchief. The light that falls across my sheet from the bed lamp, the shadows. All, all of it hurts me. I’m not afraid,” he would have said, “I’m not. May I please have my morphine now please?”