The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  Indeed, he wouldn’t have brought it up at all except that suddenly he added two and two together.

  Because Bale had split them up that afternoon and because of what happened at the Haunted Mansion, they had had to return to the hotel early.

  They had lost Mary Cottle. Moorhead and the Carp woman had not come back yet with the girls. Colin Bible had no key to Tony’s room, and the children hadn’t been entrusted with one. They’d come all the way up to their floor before anyone realized there was a problem. When Colin told them they had to go back down again, they groaned. “Can’t be helped,” Colin said. “You’re going to have to shower, then I want you all in bed. You can’t stay by yourselves. We’ll have to go back and get a key to Miss Cottle’s room.”

  “That’s the adjoining room,” Benny said. “I bet it’s unlocked.”

  “You’re on, sport. I’ll give you odds.”

  “What’s the odds then?” He hadn’t even peed yet.

  “You say.”

  Benny considered. “No bet, Colin,” he said. “It’s that Miss Carp’s room too.”

  “You’re learning.”

  “But I can watch them,” Benny said. “There’s nothing to it.”

  “Where am I?” Mudd-Gaddis asked.

  “Ta, mate,” Benny said, and went off to the W.C. to relieve himself.

  Which was just as well, because while Colin was explaining the situation to the room clerk at one end of the long counter, Benny thought he spotted Mary Cottle accepting a key from one of the registration clerks at the other.

  He couldn’t be sure. A bus had discharged a load of holiday makers who were just now registering and who literally surrounded her. If it was her.

  “Come on, then,” Colin had said, “we can go up now. I’ve got it.” He never got a second look, but twenty minutes later she still hadn’t come back.

  “Let’s find out what she’s up to,” he said now to Rena, making a mystery where even he wouldn’t have taken the heaviest odds there was one.

  “Miss Mary Cottle’s room, please?” he asked the room clerk.

  “You’ll have to use a house phone.”

  “Benny,” Rena Morgan said.

  “A house phone?”

  The clerk told him where to find one.

  “Benny?”

  “I have to use a house phone,” Benny Maxine explained.

  “May I please have Miss Mary Cottle’s room number?” he asked the operator.

  “Benny.”

  “Just a minute,” he said, “she’s getting it for me.”

  “Benny, look at the time. I was supposed to be back half an hour ago.”

  “No, not six twenty-nine, the other one,” he said.

  “I’m going back,” she said.

  He covered the mouthpiece. “Wait, will you!” he almost hissed.

  Because he was beginning to believe now. In the mystery, the adventure.

  Rena Morgan was crying.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Benny said. “All right! Oh, Jesus!” he said, and replaced the telephone.

  And was still trying to calm her down when Lamar Kenny spotted them.

  “Is something wrong?” he asked with a concern that was almost soothing and put his suitcase down before the open elevator door. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No,” Benny said, “my friend just has this truly disastrous allergy is all there’s to it. That’s why her eyes is all funny. She’ll be fine once she gets back to her room and can take her pill.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Rena managed, sobbing and already pulling lengths of rolled handkerchief from her rigged magician’s person. She was all over herself, tapping and pulling and patting, conducting herself like an orchestra, playing herself like a shell game. If her left hand shot forward, a handkerchief might suddenly appear in her right. If her right hand moved, her left might already have disposed of the handkerchief Lamar Kenny had not yet even seen there. Her fingers, quick as a pickpocket’s, moved across her body like a loom. She made lightning passes across her face and seemed to dab, to pluck at the corners of her eyes, drawing the juices away from her nose as one might tap a tree. One couldn’t tell what she did with her hankies, whether they went into the big purse she carried or back up her sleeves.

  And she’s working me close up, Lamar Kenny thought.

  It was only because he was trained as an actor and accustomed to quick bursts of sudden but misleading dexterity that he could tell not how she did it (or even what she did) but that she was doing anything out of the ordinary at all. To someone else she might simply have seemed nervous, fidgety, even flighty. But he was in the business. (And understood he had a name like a lounge act. It was no news to him. Few people believed it, but Lamar Kenny was his real name. Even his agent had tried to get him to change it. “It’s my name,” Lamar told him, “I won’t change it. Maybe I’ll switch it around, call myself Kenny Lamar. Then you can get me gigs introducing strippers, make me an M.C. at industrial shows.” But he wouldn’t have done that either. It was the name, he felt, which pointed him toward show business in the first place, the glamorous name which had become his fate.)

  “You’re pretty good,” he told the girl.

  “That’s right,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “No, no. That stuff you do.”

  “I get this way,” she told him. “I’m fluidal.”

  “Fluidal. Christ, yes. Fluidal,” he said. “Like the burning Ganges, like old man river, like Victoria Falls. Christ, yes, fluidal.”

  “Hey,” Benny Maxine said, stepping forward, almost tripping over the man’s suitcase. They did not understand each other.

  Kenny was referring to her moves with the handkerchiefs and didn’t know about her fluids, could tell only that she was upset: her tears, her puffy red eyes.

  “Please, Benny,” she said and started around Lamar Kenny toward the elevator.

  “I’m coming,” he said.

  The moves were from his old sheep-dog routine and, like the girl’s, were based upon principles of misdirection and distraction. Soon the wise-guy kid was stumbling all over himself as Lamar imperceptibly shifted the suitcase with the merest touch of his shoe or by seeming to brush against it with a trouser leg or by picking it up and, with the aid of his body’s exact compensatory movements, apparently replacing it again in its original and identical position—caviar for the general, thought the trained actor—although it was actually in an entirely new relation to the wise-guy kid or, conversely, though it seemed to have been set down inches or even feet from where he’d picked it up, was really in the same spot. (He didn’t even need the suitcase. It was an impediment, circus, athletics, mere footwork, and added nothing to the routine, maybe even detracted from it, necessary only as a sort of grace note or drum roll, as superfluous and minor, finally, as the inspection of an escape artist’s locks and chains. Even Lamar Kenny’s extended helping hand an exquisite mockery, as blind and stammered as a fall, a plunge to balance. Even his bitten, embittered “Sorry”s and “Excuse me”s.)

  Lamar Kenny’s flexible face—all this would have been beyond any Kenny Lamar—mirrored Benny’s own. “Timing” was too simple a term; what Lamar did was a sort of reverse ventriloquy, carefully monitoring Benny Maxine’s face and body, picking up signals the boy was not even aware he was sending (almost literally putting himself in the other’s place). It demanded incredible concentration. It was high and subtle art, but go tell that to the yahoos who thought they were seeing only the familiar clumsy choreography of two people stuck in each other’s way, slapstick, ordinary doorway-and-sidewalk contretemps, when what it actually was was one man dueling for two, parrying all the wise-guy kid’s progressively embarrassed, astonished, and finally terrified smiles. Mimicry so high and subtle it was no longer mimicry but an actual act of possession.

  They might have stayed there forever, feinting and lunging and parrying, in eternal stand-off and locked as stars in each other’s gravity and orbit. Because Lamar Kenny knew that the only
way the victim/volunteer from his audiences could ever get away was actually to turn and flee. Indeed, it was that that he watched and waited for, not just for the moment when an adversary would do it but, looking in his eyes, watching and concentrating, thinking ahead—thinking ahead, that was the secret—examining him until the precise moment not when he would do it but when it first occurred to him that he would do it, when Lamar Kenny would break it off himself, when he would turn and flee, running the five or six steps to the side of the small stages where he used to work, to turn and bow to the stunned and generally silent audience.

  “Come on, Robin,” Lamar Kenny said, “see can you get past Friar Tuck.”

  Could Kenny Lamar do this stuff? Lamar Kenny wondered, and gave the suitcase a violent, peremptory kick, clearing the ground between them, himself and the wise-guy kid, as if defying him, upping the ante of his mockery now, as if to say, “There. That’s gone. You won’t have to worry about that anymore, about tripping or stumbling over it. Now all you’ve got to worry about is me.” And looked up at the wise-guy kid to resume their impositioned parity and stalemate, dead-heat dance. Only he was staring at the grip, the wise-guy kid, seeing it for the first time perhaps, noticing its smooth unscathed leather, its unused, untagged, oddly mileless condition.

  “Come on,” Lamar Kenny said. “Come on, let’s go.”

  But Kenny was distracted too. Something had broken his concentration. It wasn’t the banging of the elevator door, its timed attempts to close, its short mechanical temper as the grace periods when it retracted itself once its long rubber safety plate had been touched became shorter and shorter until it literally whined and ground itself against the resisting arm or thigh of whoever pressed the plate—he’d allowed for that, he’d picked the spot for his performance and allowed for that—nor even the strident, outright claims of the little girl, her insistent, importunate, and even terrified “Benny! Benny!”—he’d allowed for that too—but the sight he had of her out of the corner of his eye. She had stopped the business with the handkerchiefs and was staring at him, her face enormous, enlarged, magnified to him behind the clear mask of her mucus.

  “Is she all right?”

  Benny rushed the door.

  “Hey, listen,” Lamar Kenny said, leaning all his weight against the elevator door, “we were only fooling around, right? Hey,” he said, “listen.”

  Benny Maxine plunged his hands past the wet and crumpled handkerchiefs in her bag and found Kleenex. He wiped her face, grooming her, picking away long strands of the jellied flow, bruising her, doing clumsily all the delicate currycomb frictions for the penalized child.

  They never talked about it. He didn’t even know what cystic fibrosis was. Noah Cloth was her buddy, the osteosarcoma.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Benny said.

  “I’m so embarrassed,” she wheezed.

  “Rena, what should I do?”

  “What’s wrong? What’s she got?” Kenny asked.

  Her breathing was labored, rasped, catching and coming out of her like the cry of stripped gears, like a knock in an engine.

  “We’re broken,” Benny cried.

  “Please,” she whispered, “can we go up now?”

  “We have to go up,” Benny Maxine said.

  “Hey,” the actor said, “I’m off,” and left the elevator and picked up the unmarked bag, the light luggage with his Pluto suit in it.

  Moorhead said her system hadn’t sustained a real “insult.” That it hadn’t been an “event.” Only, he’d said, a minor “episode.” Doctors always said stuff like that, using words about what happened to their bodies that could almost have been dispatches from the front.

  Benny was relieved, of course. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to any of them, particularly not on his watch. Dying kids don’t need any more responsibility than they already had. Which was why Benny had misgivings about this buddy-system business. He hadn’t signed on as anybody’s nurse. And, for his part, he hoped it wouldn’t be Lydia Conscience’s eyes he looked into when his time came. Hoped, that is, he wouldn’t be caught short by death, amongst amateurs; that ambulances would be standing by, doctors and nurses and all the close relations shaved and dressed and saying their farewells on full stomachs; that his emergency would come during proper business hours, after lunch, say, the weather and the day auspicious. That he’d have time to make a few phone calls.

  Though he didn’t really believe in the possibility of a terribly premature death. Not really. Benny was a gambler, wise to the ways—at least he thought so—of house odds. Certainly fifteen-year-olds died. They died in car and plane wrecks, they were picked off by snipers, battered about by crazies in the streets, and some of them, he supposed, succumbed to Gauch- er’s disease. Ashkenazi Jews. But what even was an Ashkenazi Jew? Other than somebody who came from central or eastern Europe, he wasn’t sure. His family had been in the U.K. for almost two hundred years. Benny wasn’t even bar mitzvah. Whatever Ashkenazi acts, whatever Ashkenazi practices, whatever indigenous Ashkenazi dyes in the clothing and prayer shawls or Ashkenazi nutrients hung about in the Ashkenazi diet ought surely to have bleached out by now. Which was, Benny figured, where the house odds came in. Because after almost two hundred years surely it would have boiled down to half-life. What, hoist by some already rare, already attenuated and degraded and deflated gene? Snagged on some pathetic scrag of theological, geographical one? Not, for all his symptoms, for all his great liver and burgeoning spleen, not, for all the high sugar content in his cells, the sweet deposits there lining his blood like dessert, not, for all his bruised and brittle bones, bloody likely!

  Benny was a true gambler. He lived with hope.

  So when Moorhead said no damage had been done, that was good enough for Benny Maxine. He had his plan. The following morning it was a simple thing to ditch the tour, return to his room, and complete the call that Rena with her troubles and scruples had interrupted the night before.

  He told a hotel operator that it was Mr. Maxine calling from 627 and said that though he’d written it down when she gave it to him he’d somehow managed to misplace Mary Cottle’s room number. Putting a low wink in his voice, he impressed the fact upon her that it wasn’t the 629 registration he was interested in but the other one. He’d hold while she looked it up. When she came back on the line and said she wasn’t permitted to give that one out, Benny chuckled. “What,” he said, taking his voice as deep as it would go, “an unpublished hotel room? What the devil, eh?” He said he thought he might just possibly have left it in his pants pocket and let it go out with the dry cleaning. Or, the more fool he, in the pocket of his pajama top, perhaps, and hinted at the great frantic pressures of dishevelment and abandon. “You know how it is, eh? You know how it is, I’ll be bound.”

  “I can connect you with laundry service,” the telephone operator told him coolly.

  Benny said that was damned decent but that now it seemed to him that that’s not what had happened at all. He rather remembered having scribbled it down on the financial pages of yesterday’s paper. Perhaps the girl who made the room up…?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “When a guest says that we can’t give a number out, we can’t give the number out.”

  “Oh, absolutely,” Benny Maxine said. “I quite understand; it goes back to the English common law,” and took the operator into the conspiracy. “Miss Cottle and I are engaged, actually. I wanted to surprise her with this great bouquet of flowers just. I’m holding them now. They should be popped into water at once, but without my fiancée’s room number, of course…”

  “Just pop over to six twenty-nine, why don’t you just?” she said.

  “Well, the thing of it is,” Benny explained, “she’s staying there with her great brute old Aunt Nedra, who doesn’t know about our engagement yet, and—” The line went dead.

  I’m smart, Benny thought, but I have to admit, there’s a lot I don’t know. He went over and over what he’d said to the woman, rememberin
g his gaffes like a good dealer recalling every card already played.

  Still, he knew now he was on to something, and before they left the hotel that morning he turned gumshoe and, at a discreet distance, tailed Mary Cottle everywhere she went. She went window shopping on the big concourse. She went to get sunglasses. She went to the newsstand for a paper.

  If he hadn’t gotten on an up elevator he thought was going down, he might not have found it. The car was crowded. And when Benny looked at the panel above the elevator doors he saw that it would be stopping at every floor. It was very crowded. People pressed against his enlarged liver, his vulnerable bones. “Sorry,” he said, “sorry,” and got off on eight. Maids were making the rooms up, their big carts unguarded in the wide corridors. He went up and was about to take some extra soaps and shoe cloths from one when the housekeeper suddenly emerged from 822. She was emptying trash: gray and black cigarette butts, yellow tobacco the color of sick dog shit loose in the bottoms of the ashtrays, even the ashes odd, not entirely consumed by fire, balled, thick as slag, the crumpled packet of those cheap, stinking second- and third-world cigarettes she smoked only the final proof.

  Bingo! thought the good and lucky gambler, Benny Maxine. I’ve found it! I’ve found her hidey-hole!

  2

  When the rash appeared on his arm, an even circle about two inches high that wrapped around his biceps like a red and gaudy garter, Eddy Bale removed the mourner’s band—to spare its sight from the children, he’d been wearing it under his left shirt sleeve like a blood pressure cuff—and, folding the cloth, put it into the pocket of his trousers. It was the third time he’d repositioned it, taking it in an inch or so when he’d transferred it that first time from his mackintosh to his suit coat on the day after the funeral, and taking it in again to place directly against his flesh. His shifting, meandering grief like an old river, his deferential hideout sorrow on the lam in his pants.