The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  Old. So old, so old, so old, so old. (Sold, sold, sold.)

  “I say, do you have many guests then, Charles?”

  “Oh. Beg pardon, dear, the hearing isn’t what it used to be,” Mudd-Gaddis tells her. (Because they can’t commit you for deafness. He’s thrown them a bone. It’s the compos thing to do. And because he’s canny now whom great age, subtracting faculties piecemeal, has managed to add only this, his almost volitionless cunning, to a character that always before had been strong enough to despise cunning. Just as, when he’d offered what’s-his-name a confection, he’d taken none himself and automatically implied his dentures. Let them have deafness, let them have dentures. Let them see how far those will get them in Her Majesty’s Courts!)

  “I say, do you have many visitors?” repeats Lydia Conscience, raising her voice.

  “Now and then. The odd male, the odd female.”

  “Benny Maxine?”

  “Benny?”

  “Maxine. The lumpy-faced Jewish boy.”

  He does recall a lad with a puffy face and thinks he recollects the voice, persistent, wheedling. He acknowledges Maxine’s visits. But Jewish? Has he Jewish cousins?

  “Janet Order?”

  “Ye-es, I think so,” Mudd-Gaddis says. “Dark girl.”

  “Dark?” Tony Word chimes in. “She’s all over blue as a bruise.”

  “Well, my eyes,” says Mudd-Gaddis, anteing his vision, throwing that in with his ears and his teeth.

  “Does Noah Cloth come? Does Rena Morgan?”

  “Noah’s this finger amputee,” Tony Word reminds. “Has a digit missing on his left hand. And Rena’s nose runs. She’s this phlegm faucet.”

  “My goodness,” Mudd-Gaddis says and wonders about his time-informed, incremented, evolutionated family. A lump-faced Jew, a female bruise, a hand-gimp, and a Niagara nose. Plus these two. A wimp, a wimp’s trollop. (And remembers now, has them sorted out. By their afflictions. And canny or no, believes he understands the real reason he keeps the box of sweets for them. It may be for no better reason than to please them.)

  “Well, I must say,” Lydia Conscience says. “It’s no wonder to me.”

  “What’s that, dear?”

  “Why they’re not here today.”

  “Yes. We thought we’d see them,” Tony Word says.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You didn’t?”

  “Of course not. And you wouldn’t either if you’d been paying attention.”

  “I pay attention.”

  “Oh, yes,” Lydia Conscience says.

  “I pay attention, I do.”

  “To your diet.”

  “I have to. You know that.”

  Charles Mudd-Gaddis, who can’t bear to witness lovers’ quarrels, attempts to bring her back on track. “Why is it you’re not surprised they’re not here today, dear?”

  Lydia Conscience looks from one to the other. Baffles seem to be hung about each of them in their common dream like curtains, like shunts and chutes, like traps in games, like all walled-off, buffered interveniency. They are discrete as people beneath earphones. None knows what the other is thinking. It’s like one of those round robin petitions where signature is arranged in a circle to confuse the order of signing. How can Tony feign surprise, how can Charles stage ignorance?

  “Well, the buddy system,” she says. “They’re never buddies. Whatever happened to the buddy system?” she demands anxiously.

  “The buddy system,” Mudd-Gaddis says.

  “Boy/girl, boy/girl. It never had anything to do with rooms,” she says.

  “Rooms.”

  “Janet Order is off with Noah Cloth. Benny Maxine’s off with Rena Morgan.”

  “I don’t think I quite…”

  “Tony heard Noah and Janet plotting. And I knew Rena was up to no good. All that taffy and rose water on the nanny. The poor bitch is quite barmy. The ‘game room’ indeed! I can quite imagine what games those two are up to. Anyway, Benny Maxine is my buddy. I know his condition as well as I know my own. I was prepared for any contingency. Any contingency. Tony’s Janet’s buddy, Rena Morgan was supposed to be Noah’s. We were assigned. It never had anything to do with rooms.”

  “Who’s mine?” Mudd-Gaddis asks.

  “Oh, Charles,” she says brokenly, “you never had one. You couldn’t remember the symptoms.”

  “You’re out of my will!” Mudd-Gaddis roars at them suddenly.

  “Oh, Charles,” Tony Word says kindly, “were we in your will? That’s awfully sweet of you, old man, but don’t you think that’s a wee foolish? I mean, I’ve this nasty case of leukemia to deal with. I haven’t a chance of surviving you.”

  “Oh, Charles,” Lydia Conscience says, “you’ve no will. You’re a pauper. What could be in it? You’re this charity boy, Charley. You’re stony broke.”

  “I’m not rich?”

  “Poor as a pebble,” Lydia Conscience says.

  “How do you explain all this, then?” He indicates the well- appointed public room.

  “What, the hotel lobby?”

  “It’s a hotel lobby?”

  “What’d you think it was, old-timer, the Albert Hall?” Tony Word asks, winking at Lydia.

  “Why do you come then? Why do you all come every Sunday?”

  “Oh, that was foolish,” Lydia says. “Pique, I suppose. When I found out about the others, that they went off by themselves, I thought the three of us might try to do something about it. That maybe we could ally ourselves against them.”

  So it is love, Charles thinks. “We will,” he declares. “All for one and one for all! The Three Musketeers!”

  “Mouseketeers,” Tony Word says cheerfully.

  “We’ll see,” Lydia says.

  So it is love. A kind of love. Love of a sort. At least friendship, the seesaw, shifting allegiance of mates.

  Because everything has a reasonable explanation. Everything. They are dying. They sleep fitfully, tossing and turning on their symptoms, waking to the slightest disturbance, even to Nedra Carp’s, Eddy Bale’s, and Mr. Moorhead’s light permissions.

  III

  1

  By the end of the third day they’d been to all six of the lands in the Magic Kingdom. They’d been to Main Street, U.S.A. They’d been to Liberty Square, Adventureland, and Fantasyland. They’d been to Tomorrowland and to Frontierland and by now were tired of Benny’s dark joke. “‘From whose bourne no traveler returns,’” he would say whenever the last two sections of the theme park were mentioned.

  Moorhead permitted them to go on the tame rides only—the aerial tram, the little one-eighth-scale railroad, the trolleys, jitneys, and double-deck buses, the Jungle Cruise and Cinderella’s Carousel, the paddle-wheelers and WEDway People- Mover. The Grand Prix Raceway, Big Thunder Mountain, Starjets, and Space Mountain were off-limits to them. So were the Mad Tea Party, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, Mission to Mars, and Peter Pan’s Flight. “Thrills and chills,” Benny would warn the others, sizing up a ride from its description in his guidebook and shaking his head, anticipating Moorhead’s decision. Thus a good part of their days was taken up in being shuttled from one part of the park to the other, simple sightseers. Even at that, four of the children—Lydia, Charles, and Tony Word were exceptions—had balked at riding the double-deckers. Again, Maxine had been their spokesman. “We’re Brits,” he called up to the driver and argued with Bale, “and didn’t cross the sea to the New World to ride no double-deck bus, which besides what it ain’t authentic in the first place it don’t even have no wog for a conductor in the second!”

  They spent a lot of their time watching shows and riding in cars that ran along tracks past special effects of one sort or another. It was all rather like being in a kind of passive museum. Only Colin still seemed fascinated by the audio- animatronics, and when some of the children (by this time a little embarrassed at being always moved to the head of the line—as a precaution Moorhead had ordered Tony Word and Janet Order into wheelchairs—but unable to sta
nd for more than fifteen or twenty minutes at a time) objected to the queues, it was Bible who volunteered to stand in for them. Mudd-Gaddis, Lydia Conscience, and Noah waited on benches or on chairs under awnings at outdoor cafés—usually at these times Moorhead went off to scout other attractions for them while Eddy Bale and Mary Cottle pushed Tony and Janet in the wheelchairs and Benny and Rena, still eager to take advantage of their invalid status, accompanied them—and Nedra Carp shuffled back and forth between Colin and the children, alerting them to the status of the queue.

  “How was it, Benny?” Noah asked when Maxine and the others came out of It’s A Small World.

  “Thrills and chills,” Benny Maxine said.

  “Was it, Benny? Was it?”

  “Nah,” Benny said. “I guess it were all right, mate. There was all these little dolls from the U.N. singin’ an’ dancin’.”

  “Fascinating,” Colin said.

  “Cor,” Benny said, pointing to Janet and Tony in their chairs. “If we got to keep looking at this stuff it won’t be wheelchairs we’ll need, it’ll be glasses.”

  They went to Tropical Serenade; they went to Country Bear Jamboree. They spent time in theaters watching movies—something called Circle-Vision 360 wrapped them in the spanking, startling imagery of the world: Tivoli, New York, the Alps and Rome and the Valley of the Nile, Jerusalem’s old stones and India and more—and looking at the exhibits of big corporate sponsors: Kodak, Eastern Airlines, RCA, McDonnell-Douglas.

  And they were getting edgy.

  “Don’t you wish you had a wheelchair?” Lydia teased Noah.

  “Yeah, I wish I had one to roll you about in.”

  “Bitch!” Lydia Conscience hissed at him under her breath.

  “Pimp!” he breathed back.

  “Mister Moorhead,” said Lydia Conscience one afternoon, “may I have a new buddy for the buddy system? I don’t think Benny remembers my symptoms. I mean I think I’d feel better if I switched with Janet.”

  “If you switched with Janet it would throw everything off,” Moorhead objected.

  “What if I have an attack? I don’t think he’s responsible,” she whispered.

  “Those assignments were made with great care,” Moorhead said.

  “There ought to be a drill then,” she said, and, to calm her, Moorhead reluctantly agreed. He called Benny over to explain the situation.

  “Lydia’s upset,” he said. “She doesn’t think you’d know what to do in an emergency.”

  Lydia feigned an exacerbation and Benny Maxine moved to her side. He undid the buttons at her collar. He moistened a handkerchief and applied it to her forehead, her temples.

  “He hurt my stomach.”

  “I didn’t even touch it.”

  “He hurt my stomach, Mister Moorhead.”

  Because they were not only edgy but fragmented now as well. Some in wheelchairs, others out, the rides forbidden them, their staggered attendance at performances, the snacks they took at different times, and the separate memories of the world they’d seen projected, thrown up around them like a wall.

  Only Lydia still suffering an aftertaste of the dream; Charles, who’d shared it, musing only that life was a lot more interesting to him asleep than awake; and Tony Word recalling with not a little pride that he’d not come off badly at all, that in fact he’d acquitted himself pretty well, considering. (The others, who not only had not been in the dream but who hadn’t even been sleeping at the time, nevertheless went about for upwards of a day, a day and a half, with the queer conviction that someone—a person or persons unknown—had been talking about them behind their backs.)

  Because Eddy Bale had been right. Kids do love to explore hotels. They are in ecstasy in elevators, they do fancy pushing buttons.

  And it had begun just that innocently, Benny Maxine choosing Rena Morgan for no better reason than that she seemed game—a jolly good sort, a damned decent chap. (And, of all the children, quite frankly seemed the strongest, maybe the only one who could keep up with him.)

  And even suggested that she bring her passport along. Just in case.

  “Just in case what, Benny?”

  “Better safe than sorry, luv.” And showed her his, tapping the dark blue document as if it were a letter of credit, some official carte-blanche ace-in-the-hole talisman.

  He was a fifteen-year-old boy, still a child, still a kid, and for all his bluster, for all the pains he took to sound street-wise—“Street-wise and city-foolish” he would admit later, sheepishly—he had never done any of the things he had wanted to do. Only his sickness had ever happened to him, and he lived the realest of lives in a condition of hope and fantasy.

  For the first five or ten minutes they really did push buttons, taking turns, Rena up and Benny down, and politely asking “Floor, please?” in their most distinguished British accents of everyone who came into the elevator.

  “Oh, aren’t you kind?” a woman said. “Are you enjoying our country?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Benny said, “but we’re not tourists.”

  “You’re not?”

  “My partner and I”—here he indicated Rena, who had all she could do to keep a straight face and was desperately trying to suppress laughter and the vast reservoirs of mucus that she held in check by sheer will (because a giggle could trigger horrors)—“are with the Disney organization, actually.”

  “You are?”

  “We were the two little children in the film version of Mary Poppins. Did you happen to see that particular film? Would you like our autographs?”

  “But that was years back,” the woman said. “You’d have to be close to thirty.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Benny said, “we’re small for our age. The Disney organization is giving us a chance to make a comeback on the lift.”

  “This is my floor,” the woman said.

  “Yes, ma’am, they’re good people. They take care of their own.”

  “Oh, Benny,” Rena said when the woman got off, “what a thing to say! She never believed you.”

  “She did.”

  “No.”

  “Absolutely. On the Queen’s life. I swear it.”

  “Would you swear on your own?”

  “Sure,” Benny said, “I swear on my life.”

  “Oh, your life,” Rena said.

  And on the way up—Rena was working the elevator—Benny deliberately cut a great noisy fart. The crowd—there were perhaps a half dozen people on board—pretended to ignore it.

  “I say,” Benny said, “bad gas.”

  Which they also ignored.

  “P.U.!” Benny said. “Jolly stinko bad gas, that. Jolly bad!”

  That innocent. Still amused by the jokes hiding in smells and by all the body’s punch lines.

  And explorers. Finding the banquet and meeting rooms and special hospitality suites, bumping through the great maze of the hotel, through its guts, taking service elevators whenever they could, penetrating its laundry and maintenance plant, where they were shooed away by a guard to whom Benny insisted on showing his U.K. passport.

  “We get ’em from all over,” the guard said. “We get ’em from Tulsa, we get ’em from Indiana.”

  Through its restaurants and cocktail bars—outside one of which Benny invited Rena to dance—its swimming pools, looking in on the game room, the caricaturist there offering to do them together—“Please, Benny? Just to keep us honest,” Rena had said, and Benny, air in his cheeks, all his lumpish, lopsided, potholed face puckering, “Yeah, too right,” he said—and then returning to one of the restaurants, where Benny told the hostess that friends were waiting and, taking Rena’s arm, strode businesslike—they were that innocent, innocent enough to believe they had to carry themselves in some special way—past her and on into the kitchen.

  “Our compliments to the chef!” Benny announced grandly.

  Three men in tall hats looked up.

  “To all of you,” he said.

  “Yes, everything was delicious,” Rena sai
d.

  “Except the ice,” Benny said.

  They stared at the two children.

  “The ice was tasteless. Tasteless ice. Didn’t you think so, my darling?”

  “Get outa here,” one of the men said.

  And stopped outside the Spa, the health club where at that very moment the chap from the Haunted Mansion was ambling up to Colin Bible.

  “It’s not open to the ladies at this hour,” Benny said, reading the notice on the door.

  “You go, Benny, I’ll wait. You can tell me about it.”

  “What, go into a health spa? Me? Not bloody likely. I could be sued.”

  “Oh, Benny,” Rena Morgan said.

  It wasn’t until they’d been gone nearly an hour that he remembered Mary Cottle. Even then, even as he introduced the idea to Rena, even then he was playing.

  He said he thought he’d seen her that very afternoon at the hotel’s monorail station.

  “Crouching behind the automatic doors, she was.”

  He hadn’t said anything. Not because Colin and the boys—not Mudd-Gaddis; Mudd-Gaddis was still out of it, lost in whatever private nightmare had set him off—hadn’t noticed her absence or expressed concern, but because, even if it wasn’t calculated on his part, information was information, fed edge, and gave a punter like Benny—and this wasn’t calculated either, merely that same combination of hope, fantasy, and the real which drove his life—the whip hand should anyone go the gamble with him. Besides, he wasn’t sure it was she. And he’d had to pee, was moving along full lick at the time.

  And he didn’t say anything now, only that bit about the doors. (Because he was that innocent as well, on his best behavior with his new pal, striding past his own misgivings as he’d stridden past the hostess in the restaurant. He had to be wrong not to have mentioned a thing like that. And that calculating. Even though he never suspected it. He wasn’t giving anything away.)