The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin

  The rash still hadn’t gone away even after he had begun to carry the carefully folded brassard about with him in his pockets. (Moving it about even then, each day relocating the dark cloth, positioning it first in this pocket, then in that, carrying it in his back pocket, in the pockets where he carried his handkerchief, his room key, his change.) The rash didn’t itch. It was adiabatíc, neutral to the touch as the circle of cloth itself. It didn’t bother him at all, really, and each morning when he shaved, when he showered, it always came to him as a surprise to see that it was still there at all. The rash itself was of a piece—no tiny blossoms erupted there; the skin neither bubbled with texture nor tingled with impression the way a head sometimes recalls a hat one has already removed—smooth as the hairless space it occupied on his upper arm, the discoloration of the lingering wide red ring like some healed graft of complexion. He would have asked Colin Bible to take a look except that he assumed the nurse assumed they were on the outs. He might have asked Moorhead, but mere was usually something or other to take care of when they were together and he forgot. Or had second thoughts, at the last minute more protective than otherwise of his ruby garter of grief, insensitive as idle genitals, undisturbed private parts. (Knowing that the other one, the black, already frayed and fraying mourner’s band, of which the bloodshot rash was only the raddled ghost, would dissolve, decompose, return as broken fiber, a ball of dark fragmented lint, the uncremated ash of Liam’s memory that would stick to his pants and shirt pockets, lining his clothes like a stain that would not come out.)

  He missed him. He missed the Liam of those last and awful weeks when he and Ginny knew it was all up with their dying and now plainly suffering child, when they could hear his medication on his tongue, smell it on his breath, the drying, parched relief of his only mitigated pain. He missed that Liam because he had almost forgotten the other. (Because what you remember, Eddy Bale thought, what sticks to the ribs and drives everything else out, as the tune you’re hearing drives out all other tunes or the taste of your food all other taste, is neither pleasure nor pain but only the heavy saliency of things. Liam’s condition had come upon him and been diagnosed when the boy was eight years old. He died when he was twelve. Two thirds of his boy’s life was lived in the remission of ordinary childhood, yet Bale found it almost impossible to remember those things. They must have happened, they had to have happened; Liam himself, recalling his own happy salience, had reminded him, dozens of times, of occasions they had gone on outings, of movies they’d seen together, trips to museums, treats they had taken in restaurants, picture books they’d read to him when he was small, stories Eddy told him at bedtime, the afternoon which, oddly, Bale has no memory of at all, when Liam claims Eddy had taught him to fly a kite on Hampstead Heath—total recall for the father/son sports—and, at this remove, can’t even be sure what, when healthy, his kid’s character had been like.) Knowing only—it’s certainly not memory, it isn’t actually knowledge, perhaps it isn’t even love but only some shadow in the blood, or maybe the bones of his weighted, sunken heart—Liam’s negative presence.

  Indeed, it may have been for grief of Liam that Eddy felt the dream holiday was not going as it should. The children hadn’t complained, none of the adults had said anything, but Bale had the feeling he’d made mistakes, that decorum had broken down, that something militated against honor here. Ginny wouldn’t have approved, but that wasn’t it. (And wasn’t it odd that Eddy gave almost no thought at all to Ginny’s own negative presence?) Perhaps, by splitting them into two groups that first day, it had been possible for Bale to think of Liam as being with the other group, the children who’d gone off with Colin and Mary Cottle to the Haunted Mansion. It was even possible to think of him as being in one of the other rooms, assigned, say, to Moorhead’s contingent or to Mary and Nedra’s. (It wasn’t as if he wished to be reminded. He’d deliberately left Liam’s scrapbook at home. Or perhaps Ginny had taken it with her when she left him. He hadn’t looked for it. The photos were chiefly of the ill Liam, clipped from newspapers, most of them. He well enough remembered the ill Liam. That was the head- bandaged boy he vaguely thought of as being in those other rooms, the negative presence, as available to him as his rash.

  Idle minds, he thought, devil’s workshop.

  He has to think about, then alter, whatever it is that’s amiss—that busted decorum which was maybe only the weals, flaws, blots, and smears of their maculate, tarnished lives. The riot that festered in all despair. That flourished in Bale’s manipulative, arranged fun. Because already order has broken down. He has caught reports—not even reports, hints and high signs, the excited, febrile signals of their encoded deceits. There have been goings-on in the lifts, scenes and sprees. He is embarrassed for his dying charges. The children are uninhibited in the restaurants, flaunting their illnesses, boasting their extremis. (And now a sort of rivalry has sprung up. Disney World has become a sort of Mecca for such children, a kind of reverse Lourdes. Each day Eddy, the kids, see other damaged children: Americans, of course, but there is a family from Spain, a contingent from South America. There are African kids with devastating tropical diseases. He’s heard that a leper or two is in the park. It’s a sort of Death’s Invitational here. Eddy isn’t the only one to have had the idea. Organizations have sprung up. The new style is to grant the wishes of terminally ill children, to deal reality the blows of fantasy.) Nedra Carp thinks Benny Maxine may be spying on the girls. At fifteen he’s the oldest of the children—unless Mudd- Gaddis is—and annoys her with his needs. She wants the door connecting their adjoining rooms kept locked.

  “We can’t do that. Suppose Colin Bible has to get in there?”

  “He’s beastly. He’s a nasty, beastly boy. He tells them smutty stories.”

  “He’s a pubescent kid. He’s showing off. What’s the harm? He probably has a crush on them.”

  “His conversation is all double entendre. He teases my girls. He milks his zits and tells them there’s sperm in his pores. That they could become pregnant if he touched them.”

  “He’s flirting. Don’t you think they need someone to flirt with them?”

  “Those little girls are dying, Mister Bale.”

  “What would you like me to do, Miss Carp?”

  “We’re responsible for these children. Surely you could speak to him.”

  “And tell him what? That he not only has to accept his death but his virginity too?”

  (And remembers that Liam had begun to masturbate two months before he died.)

  “You think I’m an old maid.”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “You do. Yes. You think I’m picturesque. You think I’m this quaint, picturesque spinster. That’s why you invited me.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Not at all? You believe you smell cedar chest on me. Sachet, laundry soap, and an old hygiene.”

  “I’ll say something to Benny.”

  “I know about bodies,” Nedra Carp said.

  “About bodies.”

  “I know about bodies!” she said.

  He did say something to Benny. It was embarrassing for him, but it was hardly a man-to-man talk. He didn’t give him the birds and the bees. Benny would already have the birds and the bees. He didn’t make Nedra Carp’s crisp case for the unseemliness of the boy’s position. He didn’t even warn Benny off, lay down the law, or try to appeal to the kid’s sense of the special vulnerability of doomed girls. What he did in effect was to tell Benny what he hadn’t dared to tell Liam. What he did in effect, to forestall anxiety and allay fear, and out of neither makeshift bonhomie nor Dutch-uncle, scout-master love, was to apologize to Benny Maxine on behalf of everyone who would be surviving him.

  “You’ll be missing out.”

  “So it’s all it’s cracked up to be, is it?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Eddy Bale admitted.

  “I thought it might be,” Benny Maxine said. “Where there’s smoke there’s fire.”

  “Five-
alarm.”

  “Fantastic,” Benny Maxine said.

  When the child tried to draw him out about which parts of a woman’s anatomy Eddy preferred, the breasts, the behind, or the quim, Bale blushed and said he supposed it was a matter of individual taste.

  Benny smiled and nudged Bale in the side with his elbow.

  “You know what gets me?” he said.

  “Perhaps I oughtn’t to be talking to you like this.”

  “Their pelt.”

  “Perhaps these things might more properly be discussed in the home environme—”

  “Their pelt, their fleece, their fell, their fur,” Benny went on happily. “Their miniver, their feathers.”

  “Yes, well,” Eddy said.

  “Ask you a question?”

  Bale stared at the boy.

  “It’s personal, but you’re the one brung it up.”

  “In for a penny, in for a pound,” Bale said ruefully.

  “Well,” Benny Maxine said, “what it is then is…it’s just only it’s a bit awkward, me putting it, like.”

  “Look,” Eddy said, “not on my account. I mean, if you’re at all uncomfortable about this, you don’t have to—”

  “In for a penny, in for a pound,” the child reminded him.

  “Right,” said Eddy.

  “I’m still pretty much virgo intacta and all,” Benny told him. “Well,” he said, “you must know that or we wouldn’t be having this conversation, would we?”

  “Hey,” Eddy reassured him, “at your age I was pretty virgo intacta myself. You make too much of it.”

  “Of virginity?”

  He recalled Benny’s list. The miniver, the feathers. “Of birds,” Bale said.

  “Well, it ain’t the birds exactly.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Mister Moorhead,” Eddy said quickly. “He’s the physician on board. He could advise you on these things better than I. If this is anything at all to do with the effects of self-abuse on your condition, I’m sure he can fill you in on what’s what.”

  “Nah, if I die, I die,” Benny said and glared at Bale, accusing him with the full force of his doom. “Are you in for a pound?” he asked at last. “Are you even in for a penny even?”

  “Sure,” Eddy said. “I told you.”

  “Why won’t you let me get it out then?”

  “What is it?” Eddy asked.

  “You sure it’s okay?”

  “Yes,” he said, “certainly.”

  “All right,” Benny said, “so so far I’m this yid vestal, this kid monk. I’m this fifteen-year-old virgin with this fifteen-year- old virgin maidenhead. Fifteen years, and it ain’t any sure-thing, lead-pipe, dead-cert cinch I’ll ever make sweet sixteen. So what I need to know is how long.”

  “How long?”

  “It lasts. How long it lasts. That the chemicals work. That a chap can do it. That given the clean bill of health, the normal drives, and what the actuaries say, how long a party can keep his pecker up, Mister Bale.”

  Eddy was confused. “Sustain an orgasm?”

  “Sustain an orgasm?” Benny said. “No, of course not. I know how long a chap can come off. It’s the other I’m not sure of. How long the power’s there for, I mean. How long he has till his knackers go off on him.”

  “How long? How old he is?”

  “Yeah,” Benny said. “How old he is.”

  “Oh, well,” Bale said, “that all depends, I should think. They say we’re sexual until the day we die.”

  “Right,” Benny said.

  “Oh, Benny,” Eddy said.

  “What? Oh,” he said, “is that what you’re thinking? Forget it,” he said, “that ain’t in it. I mean I can subtract fifteen or sixteen from three score and ten and get the difference. I can take away the subtrahend from the whoosihend well enough. That’s not what bothers me. So I miss out on whatever it is, the fifty- four or fifty-five years of what you haul me in here to tell me the shouting’s all about. No big deal, no Commonwealth case. Nah,” Benny Maxine said, “that don’t bother Benny Maxine.”

  “What does bother you?”

  “That slyboots. That old son of a bitch,” Benny says, almost to himself.

  “What?”

  “The crafty old bastard.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Mudd-Gaddis. Here I schlepp him from room to room giving him gazes, giving him ganders, and at his age the little geezer has probably nineteen dozen times my own experience. Pushed his wheelchair, I did. Took him for a ride. Showed him the sights. And him under his shawls and lap robes with his hand in the heather. Ooh, he’s the sly one!”

  “Benny,” Eddy Bale says quietly, “it’s not what the shouting’s all about. Benny, it isn’t.”

  “Yeah, well,” Benny Maxine says, “thanks for the grand bloke-to-bloke chat.”

  And, when Maxine has gone, Eddy Bale wondering aloud, and not for the first time, “Am I mad? Am I mad?”

  (Because he was bursting with it: his discovery. Because, if his hunch was right, he figured he’d found the real Magic Kingdom. And, should they be caught, the ancient kid making such a good front and all. And because he thought the old boy was past it anyway. Wouldn’t remember. Certainly not where he’d taken him. Not where they’d been.

  (And his hunch had been right.

  (And Benny blessing his god-given, gambler’s gifts: his luck, his attention to detail, all his boon instincts.

  (So the unlikely pair, the one, dying from some Old Testament curse which, since he wasn’t bar mitzvah, he couldn’t even begin to understand, pushing the chair down the hotel corridor, and the other, riding in it, dying of all his squeezed and heaped natural causes, nattering away from the depths of his old-age-pensioner’s, unpredictable, golden-aged, senior citizen’s cumulative heart. “Ahh,” Mudd-Gaddis had said from his congested chest, taking the air, “I do love a stroll about the decks of a morning. Thank you so very much for inviting me, Maxine.

  (“What’s a shipmate for?” Benny had said.

  (“The stabilizers these days, you’d hardly suspect there’s a sea under you.”

  (“Steady as she goes.”

  (Mudd-Gaddis had chuckled. “Quite good, that. ‘Steady as she goes.’ Not like the old days,” he added wistfully.

  (“No,” Benny had said.

  (“No. Not at all like the old days.”

  (“No.”

  (“Not like any HMS I ever sailed aboard.”

  (“I’ll be bound,” Benny had said.

  (“Not like the East India Company days. Not like the tubs H.M. sent us out in to encounter the Spanish Armada.”

  (“Really.”

  (“’Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves,‘” Charles Mudd- Gaddis had sung in his high, reedy voice.

  (“You could probably have used stabilizers like these on the Titanic,” Benny had said, “or when you went off with Captain Cook to discover the Hawaiian Islands.”

  (Mudd-Gaddis gave Benny Maxine a sharp look. “I never sailed with Jim Cook,” he told him quietly.

  (“No, of course not. After your time,” Benny mumbled, wondering if the little petrified man was having him on.

  (“Still,” Mudd-Gaddis said, “it’s not all progress. The sea air, for example. The sea air doesn’t seem quite as bracing as it used to.” Through his thick glasses Mudd-Gaddis stared at the corridor’s blue walls. “Indeed, it seems rather close out here. Even a little stuffy, in fact.”

  (“Not like the old days.”

  (“No. Not at all.”

  (“It is stuffy,” Benny Maxine said suddenly. “Say, why don’t we duck into this lounge for a bit? It’s probably air-conditioned.” They had come to room 822. Benny knocked forcefully on the door and, hearing no answer, folded Mudd-Gaddis’s chair and hid it beyond the fire doors at the end of the corridor. Returning to 822 and working with one of the cunning tools on his Swiss Army knife, Benny had made short, clever work of jimmying the door.

  (“Quick,” he said, “in back of the
drapes.”

  (“Behind the arras?”

  (Benny glanced at his little wizened buddy. “Ri-i-ight,” he said.

  (“It’s stuffy here too,” his old friend complained.

  (Though, as it turned out, they didn’t have long to wait. Hardly any time at all. But something as outside the range of ordinary luck—though Benny recognized a roll when he saw one—as the two boys were beyond the range of ordinary children. His gambler’s gift for pattern, design. His feel for all the low and high tides of special circumstance, his adaptive, compensatory fortune. All opportune juncture’s auspicious luck levers, its favorable, propitious, sweet nick-of- and all-due-time sweepstakes: its bust-the-bank, godsend mercies and jackpot bonanza obligations. No fluke, Benny had thought, only what’s coming, only what’s owed. And Benny blessing his money-where- his-mouth-was heart.

  (And when Benny Maxine heard Mary Cottle at the door he didn’t even have to shush Mudd-Gaddis. Who’d evidently been, to judge from his transformed eyes, beyond an arras or two himself in his time.

  (She came into her hotel room—she seemed nervous, she seemed irritable—shut the door behind her, and dropped her purse on a chair.

  (It wasn’t stripping. It wasn’t even undressing. It was divestment, divestiture. Orderly and compelled as the speeded- up toilet of some fireman in reverse, or the practiced discipline of sailors whistled to battle stations, say. There was nothing of panic in it, nothing even of haste, just that same compelled, rehearsed efficiency of all mastered routine, just that workmanlike, functional competency, know-how, tact, skill, grace, and craft of adroit forte. Just that same shipshape, green-thumbed, known- rope knack and aptitude of all veteran prowess. She might have been pouring her morning tea or buttering her morning toast or returning home along a route she’d taken years.

  (And Benny, both children, amazed who’d only meant to spy on her, astonished who at the outside could only have hoped to trap her in—again, at the outside—some only stiff and formal tryst, some only stilted, silly dalliance with Colin Bible or Eddy Bale or Mr. Moorhead; or, more like it, to catch her smoking what she oughtn’t, in privacy; phoning a boyfriend in England or ordering liquor from room service or bingeing on ice cream, on sweets, and on biscuits; stunned who all along could have hoped only to gather the familiar gossip of their imaginations or, behind the closed bathroom door, to have heard her tinkle, heard her poop. Who hadn’t expected, who, counting only on the auspicious and favorable, the opportune and propitious, even could have expected, this gusher of bonanza, this ship-come- in, sweet-sweep-staked, bank-broke, jackpot boon. They were flies on the very walls of mystery, and this went beyond what was coming, beyond what was owed. This was out-and-out hallmark fluke!